Paul Bowers, Writer

[paulmbowers]

Welcome to the Brutal South

I launched a free email newsletter called Brutal South to write about the following subjects:

* Education policy!

* Brutalist architecture!

* Class politics and labor!

* Parenting!

* Mental health and depression!

* Christian spirituality and practice!

* Journalism industry stuff!

* Heavy metal!

* Existentialism!

If two or more of those things interest you, should check it out. Click here to read and subscribe.

[paulmbowers]

On Minimal Adequacy

I am my mother and father’s son; I am my own man. I live at a particular confluence of race, class and history, but I am more than the sum of those parts. I am a product of South Carolina public schools, and yet I’m not entirely a product of South Carolina public schools.

At my day job covering education for The Post and Courier, Charleston’s daily newspaper, I just spent the last eight months or so working with a team to assemble as comprehensive a view as possible of why the schools in our state are such a persistent source of failure and embarrassment. The result, available online this month, is a five-part series we’re calling “Minimally Adequate.”

The future of our schools is a subject that matters to me deeply: I went to the public schools here from fourth grade through college, and now my children go to the public schools here as well.

I remember the day I realized something was broken. I was in fourth grade. My family had just moved from the suburbs of Houston to the suburbs of Charleston, and as I adjusted to new friends and surroundings at my new elementary school, I realized we were learning things that my teachers in Texas had covered in third or second grade. I was fortunate to attend a relatively good school district with some excellent teachers and support from my highly involved parents. But I still absorbed the stigma of a South Carolina education, and I feel it to this day.

I don’t know when it dawns on most people. By the time you are in high school in South Carolina, surely you are aware of the grim statistics on education here. Year after year, our students rank dead last or close to it on college entrance exams, grade-school standardized tests, and other indicators of education and social mobility.

Tony Goodloe knew it well before he graduated this year from Allendale-Fairfax High School, the only high school in a district along the Georgia border whose name has become a byword for failure. In his junior year, he and the other top-ranking students in his class began to fret about college applications. Beyond the universal stress of adolescence and young adulthood, they had one more thing to worry about: The Allendale County School District was at risk of having its accreditation yanked amid a state takeover. The students feared their high school diplomas might be worth nothing at all once they crossed the county line.

As I crisscrossed the backroads of our state this year, visiting towns I’d never seen before and meeting people whose circumstances I had not often considered, I met dozens of students like Tony in districts big and small who were doing the best they could -- but found themselves trapped and hobbled by the system they were born into. I chose to feature Tony’s story on the first day of our project because it illustrates how a South Carolina education can be an impediment, rather than an engine of progress.

I would never reduce the arc of a person’s life and ambitions to any one factor or limitation. But when I came to this newspaper three years ago, I chose to cover the school beat because I believed quality education could improve and enrich us all. I still believe that. For me, this project is a prayer for change.

You can read the entire series here. Please share it with your elected state lawmakers.

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They let me write a parenting column

Solely by virtue of the quantity of children in my household, the newspaper has begun publishing my unsolicited advice on parenting. After a few years of this, the South Carolina Press Association recognized me as the No. 1 newspaper columnist in the state in 2018. I’ve compiled my columns below.

Six tips for camping with toddlers (without feeding them to the wolves)

Death is a fact of life. How do I tell my children about it?

How I learned to stop worrying and love the Disney princess

I’m a parent of twins. Please stop asking me these 8 questions

So you’re having a boy. Here’s what you need to know about infant circumcision

How to go to bars in Charleston when you have small kids

Checking out public schools in South Carolina? Here’s how to do your homework

Why some parents choose bilingual education for their children

Don’t let your children grow up to be bullies: A scientific approach

What to do when parents bully LGBT kids

My children will speak Southern, and y’all can deal with it

A parent’s ode to Spongebob Squarepants, the right kind of children’s TV show

Consider the grody secrets of birthday candles, popcorn buckets and the ‘5-second rule’

South Carolina has a lot of Montessori schools. Are they a good idea for your kid?

What should you pay a Charleston baby sitter? We crunched the data so you don’t have to.

On despair and dirty laundry: An existentialist’s guide to housework

Raising good kids won’t save the world. We should do it anyway.

When sex education falls short, these churches step up

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Would-Be Woodwards, etc.

It's disconcerting when people write about you. I try not to lose sight of that uncanny feeling in the course of writing about people every day. I came across this grim little story yesterday, “The Would-Be Woodwards Are Opting Out of Journalism,” and realized it was about me and my profession. An excerpt:

Of the past 11 winners for the National Society of Newspaper Columnists’ College Columnist Award, bestowed annually upon the country’s top university newspaper opinion writer, fewer than half entered journalism professionally. Only five did. Six did not.

I'm one of the five College Columnist Award winners still pursuing journalism. So is the author of this piece. Most of the others found better-paying jobs with prospects for growth. Bummer, right?

I take comfort in nitpicking this story, which is what you do when someone writes about you and it doesn't feel quite true to life. I pointed out to the author on twitter that investigative journalism, à la Woodward, is a lot different than cranking out opinions in your college paper. In fact, as a guy who wrote columns once a week for two years as an undergrad, I question the value of releasing 19-year-olds' half-formed opinions into the wild. My time might have been better spent covering City Council meetings and sifting through police reports.

The broader problem the author is trying to illustrate is valid, though. Good reporters quit or get laid off all the time. If you follow the inside-baseball journalism blogs, every month brings another story of a paper folding, laying off half its newsroom, or firing all of its photographers and telling reporters to take 1A photos on their cell phones (that happened at the Chicago Sun-Times four years ago). Far more depressing than the list of award-winning college columnists who quit is the list of Pulitzer winners who quit.

I'm reminded of a day last month when I sent some words of encouragement to a colleague who'd just survived his fourth round of layoffs and is now part of a skeleton crew where everyone covers multiple beats in multiple cities. All he had to say in response was, "Yeah. It's the life we chose. There are way more good days than bad ones."

The truth is it was always a meat-grinder of a job, from what I can tell. It was never not stressful, and it never paid what you could make writing ad copy or press releases. It always attracted malcontents. I don't fault anyone for leaving, whether it's for money or mental health. Some of us will be here until the whole business collapses. And we won't stay because it's noble — we'll stay because we don't know what else to do.

Anyway, here’s me being a little ray of sunshine while simultaneously bad-mouthing my entire generation at the award ceremony in 2009:

[s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s]

There is a film screening of the “Carrie & Lowell Live” concert at Charleston Music Hall tomorrow night (the show was filmed in Charleston two years ago). It’s free. I know y’all can watch it on YouTube but might be cool too see it in a real theater. I can’t make it but my manager Lisa (and co-producer of the film) will be there for a Q&A with Paul Bowers, who wrote a piece on the light and stage production from that tour for Paste Magazine. Ask them anything! Stay Positive! http://www.charlestonmusichall.com/event/1496693-sufjan-stevens-carrie-charleston/

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I am working full-time and fathering three kids, so I don’t take on freelance work unless it’s something I care deeply about. “Carrie & Lowell” and Sufjan’s music in general mean quite a lot to me. I wrote this piece about his last tour, and now I’ll be hosting a little Q&A after a free concert film screening Thursday night. Come hang out!

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New album out today from my band, The Camellias. Here’s a song I wrote about a train wreck. Below are some reflections on a photo of the event, which we ended up using for the album cover.

The train engines kissed. A hundred yards away in the middle of Texas nowhere, Jervis C. Deane clicked the shutter and captured the definitive image from the moment of impact.

And then the boilers exploded, and all hell broke loose.

The staged-but-real train crash at Crush, Texas, was a sordid spectacle worthy of Barnum and Bailey – indeed, its mastermind, Katy Railroad vice president's assistant Willie Crush, was reportedly a friend of P.T. Barnum's. It was, above all, a stupid and reckless publicity stunt.

At the time, the Missouri, Kansas, & Texas Railway Company (M.K.T., or “Katy” Railroad for short) was looking to retire some old steam locomotives, but was having a hard time finding buyers amid the economic depression that followed the Panic of 1893. Looking to offload some engines and drum up some business, Crush had made a proposal: Let's crash two of them together and sell tickets to watch.

With a few notable dissenters, train engineers had assured Willie Crush's bosses that this was a fabulous idea and no one would be hurt. Sycophancy, it seems, is a timeless career path.

After weeks of saturated advertising and the sort of overheated media coverage today reserved for iPhone releases or the Yeezus tour, on September 15, 1896, an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 people rode the Katy Line out to the makeshift town of Crush, Texas, erected 15 miles north of Waco with bandstands and pulpits and a real working jail. The sun beat down on the curious Texans with customary mercilessness.

After a festive day full of sauerkraut and side shows and preaching, Crush rode out on a horse – a white or a black one, depending whose account you believe – and did the dance that showmen do. It was begun.

So: Two 35-ton steam engines, each pulling six cars, traveling in opposite directions at 58 miles per hour. I don't know, you do the math.

When the trains met, they telescoped and merged into a sort of singularity, which promptly detonated with the force of two overworked boilers. The brimstone of the industrial age rained down hot and deadly as the assembled Texans tried, and mostly failed, to run away. The shrapnel killed three people and injured dozens.

Among the injured: Jervis C. Deane, the photographer with the impeccable timing. A bolt tore out his right eye. With hot metal embedded in his brain, Deane reportedly stood, dusted himself off, and gave his two brothers “minute directions about the finishing of the pictures he had taken.”

For his trouble, Deane received a $10,000 settlement and a lifelong pass to ride the Katy Line. He went right back to work and bought a newspaper ad: “Having gotten all the loose screws and other hardware out of my head, am now ready for all photographic business.” He shot photos until 1901.

Facing a passel of lawsuits, the Katy Railroad fired Crush, then quietly rehired him. Ridership on the Katy picked up, thanks in part to the publicity. Nobody learned a damn thing from any of this.

A romantic gloss can make historical carnage seem quaint or even necessary. The price we pay for a good show, or arrogance, or freedom. Firebombs over Dresden, atom bombs over Japan, smart bombs over Afghan hospitals and Iraqi wedding parties. “Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands!”

But none of the bloodshed was ever inevitable. Crush's bosses could have heeded the honest engineers in the room, the ones warning them that they were about to sacrifice fellow men on the altar of commerce.

In all of this, the character of Jervis Deane strikes me as the most sympathetic. Maybe it's because I'm a journalist by trade, but I see some nobility in the man standing up there on the press platform, using all the cunning and technology at his disposal to capture the most enduring image of the day's news.

Was he complicit in the machinery of hype that ground down human bodies that day in the Texas sun? Maybe. But if he was, he paid the price for it almost immediately with an eye – a twist of fate that would seem like a bit of maudlin storytelling were it not a matter of historic record. I want to imagine Jervis happy during the remaining years of his career, as Camus imagined Sisyphus.

As an Americana-inflected songwriter with a pathetic tendency toward nostalgia, I suppose I would have given in to the temptation to write a song about a train sooner or later. Let “Crush, TX,” be my train song. Let this album be our meager entry in the long canon of songs about death, love, and the possibility of renewal of the spirit.

Truth is not beauty, nor beauty truth. Jervis Deane and his camera did not fold all that wreckage into an origami flower. They told the story: The impact, the momentum, the implication that someone set all this in motion and is guilty of what happened next. There were other photographers on the scene, including one who was knocked unconscious by a piece of flying wood. Their photographs showed the two trains sidling up to one another for a photo opp; they showed the moment of incoherent combustion; they showed the crowd of onlookers surging toward the wreckage once the smoke had cleared to grab souvenir bits of scalding scrap. But none of them captured the damning moment quite like Deane. Hats off to the man.

A final volley of questions, and then I'm going to bed: Is it possible that all those old murder ballads weren't romanticizing their subject matter? Or if they were, is it possible to sand the varnish off and sing the truth more plainly? Does the blood in the soil still cry out for justice?

--Paul Bowers, North Charleston, South Carolina, September 2016

(If you want to read more about the Crash at Crush, I recommend this Historynet article by J.R. Sanders and the book  Blowback: An Anecdotal Look at Pressure Equipment and Other Harmless Devices That Can Kill You! by Paul Brennan. They were immensely helpful in writing this song.)

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The Education Beat

I made the jump to The Post and Courier in September 2015 for a number of reasons (probably warranting a blog post of their own), but a major one was my desire to focus on a single topic, preferably one with a broad social impact. So now I’m on the education beat, and it feels like home.

Here are a few highlights from my first six months on the job:

Parents of dyslexic students fight for the right to learn

South Carolina education leaders and lawmakers continue to drag their feet on making some basic provisions for dyslexic kids. I spent some time sitting at a kitchen table with one family that is suffering the consequences.

The Citadel crawls into the modern era

Plagued by hazing and a legacy of troubled race relations, an iconic Southern military college now contends with critics from within its own ranks. This story elicited more hate mail than any in recent memory.

Parents want a rebuild, not a renovation, at decrepit Stono Park Elementary

A tour of a crumbling elementary school. Parents and teachers say the school district is breaking a promise of a total rebuild.

Budget crisis could put small schools on the chopping block

A dispatch from Edisto Island, where residents have feared for years that the school district would shut down their one remaining public school to save money.

From art class to pre-engineering, tech rules at Laing Middle School

Teachers take a unique approach to STEM (science, technology, engineering, & math) education.

One photography teacher’s four-year quest to tear down a wall

A classic tale of Man vs. Wall.

Private group could take the reins at struggling Burns Elementary

A first look at a controversial plan to hand over control of a high-poverty North Charleston school to a private organization.

CofC professor suspended after fight over syllabus takes a philosophical turn

In which a quirky biologist defends what he sees as the last vestiges of liberal arts education against an advancing horde of educrats.

[postandcourier]

“I’ll put on my waders, and we’ll do what we need to do, but we need to respect that,” said Pastor Wayne Reeves of New Life Ministries in Summerville, pointing out toward the caskets resting at a treeline across perhaps 100 yards of waist-deep floodwater. As he sloshed out to the caskets, church members gawked and pulled out cellphones to shoot video, yelling warnings about copperhead snakes and alligators that had been spotted in the floodwater earlier in the day.

“He’s got on regular clothes, regular shoes,” one onlooker said. “He’s a good man.” Read more: http://bit.ly/1OgS6vs.

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About the flag

Michael Allen, a community partnership specialist with the National Park Service, was one of the first people I interviewed for the City Paper. He's still one of the people I admire most in Charleston. Back in 2010, when the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the NAACP were up in arms over the Secession Ball, Michael managed to get leaders from both groups to sit down in a classroom at the Charles Pinckney National Historic Site and talk it out face to face. They didn't reach an agreement, but they did walk away with a better understanding of each other's points of view.

I had a long interview with him yesterday that I think sheds a lot of light on the legacy of plantation culture, secession, and Reconstruction in South Carolina. He also presents some of the most compelling arguments I've heard for why the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia doesn't belong in front of the Statehouse. Here’s the story.

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After Walter Scott

Al Jazeera America asked me to write a follow-up piece on what has happened in North Charleston since the April 4 police shooting of Walter L. Scott. Here’s what has been happening since the national media left town:

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — Six weeks after a police officer shot and killed Walter L. Scott, an unarmed black man, protesters are demanding changes in the city’s police department. Although officials initially acted quickly to arrest the officer, progress on some residents’ demands — including greater civilian oversight of law enforcement — has slowed to a slog worthy of the low-country wetlands.

Click here to read the full story.

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Cap-Feathering Time

The South Carolina Press Association recently named me Weekly Journalist of the Year for the second year in a row. The only other person to receive that honor is Corey Hutchins, formerly of the Free Times in Columbia, a dude whom I admire greatly. I suspect my chances improved significantly when Corey moved to Colorado last year.

Here are a few other laurels that the SCPA tossed my way for 2014:

1st Place, Enterprise Reporting (Weekly Division), for The View from Bridgeview

1st Place, Education Reporting (Weekly), for these stories: The long defeat: Sen. Mike Fair's fight against evolution in S.C. schools Last-minute rejection of Common Core leaves U.S. History classrooms without textbooks District: AMHS football team’s watermelon ritual included ‘monkey sounds,’ ‘caricature’  CCSD Board: Superintendent McGinley will resign Johns Island parents ask district to replace 38-year-old Angel Oak Elementary

2nd Place, Faith Beat Reporting (Weekly), for these stories: Bully Pulpit: At Nehemiah Action, pastors demand policy change with confrontational techniques Meet Derek Snook, temp agency president and poverty crusader Why So Many Bahá'í?

Thanks for reading.

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Of course they should rename Tillman Hall

In case you haven't heard, Clemson University is considering whether to take the name of violent white supremacist "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman off of its most iconic campus building.

Let's talk history. Tillman Hall was built in 1893, and it was originally known as either Main Building or Old Main. It wasn't renamed in Tillman's honor until 1946, seventeen years before an NAACP lawsuit forced Clemson to admit its first African-American student. As the Greenville News notes, the name change came "after a push from Tillman’s son, William, who was also a trustee, to name a building after his father because his legacy was being forgotten."

It's true, South Carolinians would do well to remember Tillman's legacy. But we shouldn't honor it, which is exactly what we're doing by keeping his name on a building at a public university.

The Greenville News, like a lot of other news outlets reporting on this topic, has said the controversy centers around Tillman's "racist, white supremacist rhetoric." I'm here to tell you that it wasn't just rhetoric.

It would be one thing if the building was named, say, Maurice Bessinger Hall. It's another thing entirely for it to be named after Tillman, a progenitor and perpetuator of American apartheid who led lynch mobs during Reconstruction and boasted about it until his dying day.

Every time I hear Ben Tillman's name — or see his larger-than-life statue on the Statehouse grounds — I am reminded of a haunting passage from The Palmetto State, Jack Bass and Scott Poole's indispensable history of South Carolina. It takes place a few months after the 1876 Hamburg Massacre, when Tillman and other members of white terrorist groups known as the Redshirts murdered black National Guardsmen in an attempt to suppress the black vote. Here is the passage, from page 59:

One of the Redshirt units present at Hamburg, the forty-man Sweetwater Sabre Company, was led by twenty-eight-year-old Benjamin Ryan Tillman. This future governor participated actively in the violence. As violence against blacks in the Edgefield District intensified, Tillman's unit was selected to execute black state legislator Simon Coker of Barnwell. On September 19, informed he had only a few minutes to live, Coker replied, "Here is my cotton house key; I wish you would please send it to my wife and tell her to have our cotton ginned and pay our landlord rent just as she can." Asked if there was anything else, Coker said he would like to pray and dropped to his knees in prayer.

Tillman described what happened next: After a few moments one of his men said, "You are too long … The order 'aim, fire,' was given with the negro still kneeling." In writing about this incident, Tillman continued, "It will appear a ruthless and cruel thing to those unacquainted with the environments … The struggle in which we were engaged meant more than life or death. It involved everything we held dear, Anglo-Saxon civilization included."

Tillman would brag about his role in the slaughter of African Americans for decades, even after he was elected governor in 1890. Using an all-too-familiar political formula, Tillman made populist appeals to lower-class and rural whites while stoking their fear of African Americans. Once in office, he labored against Reconstruction and worked to cement inequality along racial lines.

Gov. Tillman pushed through measures to centralize power in state government, allowing him to remove black officials in majority-black counties. The 1895 Constitution, Tillman's brainchild, outlawed interracial marriage and disenfranchised black voters through the introduction of poll taxes and literacy tests, effectively paving the way for Jim Crow.

Perhaps the only sign that Tillman softened his views was that, as governor, he sometimes used his power to prevent lynchings. On most matters of race, he remained unrepentant. Addressing the U.S. Senate in 1900, he said:

"We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him. I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores."

Tillman's legacy begins with ruthless bloodshed and ends with institutional racism. In keeping with his agrarian-populist campaign, he pushed the General Assembly to create Clemson University, a military and agricultural school that he worked to keep all-white as a lifetime board trustee. Again, from The Palmetto State (p. 64):

Although Governor John P. Richardson Jr. in 1889 signed the bill establishing Clemson, credit for Clemson went largely to Tillman and his movement, especially after Governor Tillman rejected federal funds from the Morrill Act that encouraged the building of agricultural colleges throughout the nation. Given the racial demographics of South Carolina, accepting the funds would have required that two-thirds of the money go to black students at Claflin College. Tillman expressed concern that black South Carolinians would forget who their friends were if educational funds came to them from outside sources.

hager.angie via Wikimedia Commons

In the end, Tillman Hall is only a name — just like the monument to Saddam Hussein that once stood in Baghdad's Firdos Square was only a statue. No, Twitter warriors, no one is arguing that a name on a building is actually oppressing people. But the symbolism cannot be ignored, especially when African Americans make up 28 percent of the state population but only 6 percent of the Clemson student body.

It's fitting that a bill up for consideration in the Statehouse this year would prohibit the naming of any state road, interchange, or bridge after a person who hasn’t been dead for at least 10 years. The logic, as I understand it, is that you don't want to name something after a person until you have a pretty good idea what his or her legacy will be.

The problem with Tillman Hall is that South Carolinians (and, presumably, Clemson's Board of Trustees) were well aware of Ben Tillman's legacy in 1946 when the building got its new name — probably far more aware than South Carolinians today. And yet the name passed.

A decision to drop Tillman's name would not be without precedent. Duke University used to have a dormitory named after North Carolina's own racist former governor, Charles B. Aycock. The school changed the dorm's name to East Residence Hall last year.

I realize that renaming Tillman Hall will take an act of the General Assembly. I realize it will set off a chain reaction of re-naming campaigns, and I welcome it. Winthrop University has its own Tillman Hall, so named in 1962 in the midst of the Civil Rights era, and two former students asked the school last year to change the building's name. It's also worth considering that the University of South Carolina has a women's dormitory named after J. Marion Sims, a man often called the father of modern gynecology, who made his groundbreaking discoveries by repeatedly conducting experimental procedures on enslaved women before the widespread advent of surgical anesthesia (although, unlike Tillman's reign, there is room for debate about the ethics of Sims' experiments).

Yes, today's Clemson students will always think of their campus's most iconic building as Tillman Hall. But within a generation after Tillman's name has been removed, a new tradition will have been born, and the name Tillman Hall will be all but forgotten. We'd do well to teach that next generation who Ben Tillman really was.

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Roald Dahl: Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

I barely read any of Roald Dahl's books as a child, but now, as an adult, I'm a devotee of his more grown-up short stories. Here's an excerpt from a piece I wrote for Paste about morbid curiosity and the horrific beauty of Dahl's work.

Dahl’s adult stories are, above all, wicked. The protagonists are often demented sadists, and the endings favor unexpected twists. Read a couple and you’ll start to feel like a dirty old man. Read a few more and you’ll begin to ponder where our wicked urges come from in the first place.

This, I believe, is the point of reading stories like Dahl’s: to stare into the void in ourselves, to recognize our own capacity for destruction and to come away a better person for it. Or maybe it’s just morbid curiosity.

Maybe that’s the same thing.

Read on.

(The painting at the top is Francis Bacon's "Study for Head of Lucian Freud." Dahl bought the painting in 1967 because he thought Bacon was a genius. I think they were both geniuses.)

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MDMA for PTSD?

From a recent cover story:

While James Hardin was on MDMA at his therapist's office, he closed his eyes and saw open books scattered around the room. Each one contained images and stories almost too horrible to tell: bodies blown apart, near misses from improvised explosive devices, a barrage of mortar fire from unseen insurgents in the Iraqi desert.

Hardin thumbed through the books and read a few passages. Then he closed them one at a time and put them on a shelf.

This one is about a local veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for years before finding a psychotherapist with an unusual technique: Before each therapy session, he doses the patient with MDMA (a.k.a. Molly, a.k.a. ecstasy). It's part of an experimental study, and it's showing promising results for Hardin and other survivors of trauma, including victims of sexual assault.

Read on.

P.S. Here's a drawing by Stanislav Grof, a pioneering psychiatrist in the fields of transpersonal psychology and psychedelic therapy. It was a gift from Grof to the psychiatrist I interviewed, and it hangs above the desk in his office:

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My manifesto on work

Ever since I read Miya Tokumitsu’s trenchant critique of the "Do What You Love" ethos in Jacobin at the start of the year, I've been trying to hammer out my own labor manifesto. I think I've written it. The title is "The Chastened Baritone and the Worth of Labor," and you can read it in Patrol.

If nothing else comes of this, I hope it encourages people to listen to my dad's favorite songwriter, the late great Harry Chapin.

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Spoleto Roundup

My city hosts a world-class arts festival called Spoleto every spring, which means I get to play art critic for a few weeks. Here are a few of my favorite pieces from this year's festival:

Håkon Kornstad plays complex one-man jazz — with fits of opera

This Norwegian jazz cat's set had to be seen to be believed. He used a saxophone, flute, loop pedal, and opera tenor vocals to create a one-man show.

T. Wrecks: George Singleton plumbs the Upstate for bleak, comedic fiction

"George Singleton writes rip-roaring funny stories with achingly sad twist endings. You usually know from the start that the circumstances are grim — the alcoholism, the threat of family dissolution, the struggling barbed-wire business — but the light touch of his storytelling keeps you in stitches until the closing paragraphs stun you into silence."

(photo credit: Forrest Clonts)

Talking sexual politics and botany with poet Ed Madden

On how the personal is instantly political when you're a gay man in South Carolina. My favorite quote from Madden: "One theme is domesticity, finding a home and making a home. The other thing is a kind of scrappiness, pulling bits and pieces together to do that. There's a way in which it's very much about finding a place in the world, but also about the ways in which you decide what to keep and what to throw away as you do that."

Kate & Sam's young star delivers terrifying command performance

My review of Kate & Sam Are Not Breaking Up, which featured a positively wicked take on the lead role by 15-year-old actress Eden Teichman.

[paulmbowers]

Tooting my own horn

I'm a finalist for a national award in the category of Public Service Journalism from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia!

The series of stories that earned me the nomination was about how South Carolina Education Superintendent Mick Zais was seeking to do away with limits on classroom sizes for all public schools, among other regulations. To my knowledge, nobody else had reported on this matter when my first story went online.

Outraged teachers and parents started calling members of the state Board of Education, and after a near-unanimous vote in favor of the measure in September, the proposal faced near-unanimous rejection in November. The superintendent dropped the proposal and accused his critics of "pure, partisan politics."

Click here for the full list of AAN finalists.