JUNE 24, SATURDAY

TOURIST SATURDAY

Saturday Susie and I went to town to look at the Black Mountain College Museum exhibit on the connection between Black Mountain College and Mexico organized by Eric Baden who has just retired from teaching photography at Warren Wilson College. Black Mountain College was an experimental college only ten miles from Warren Wilson. It was founded in 1933 and closed in 1957. It was based on John Dewey principles of holistic learning, learning and doing at the same time, and attracted a staff of very creative people, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Josef Albers and many more, none of them traditional academics. A number of them traveled to Mexico and some Mexican artists were influenced by Black Mountain College.

Following our visit to the exhibit we decided to look at The Restoration, a new luxury hotel in downtown Asheville. The hotel is built on the refurbished Bank of America building and is part of the transformation of the downtown from business to a tourist center.

Rooms are $250 to $600 depending on the day and on Saturday, with streets of Asheville jammed with summer tourists, I’m guessing that the rooms were $600. Elegance was everywhere. The staff we met were all wide eyed and very cheerful Asheville natives, the guests, who we didn’t meet were dressed in freshly pressed linens with elegant straw hats.

In the Black Mountain College Museum even the exhibit was mounted in an inexpensive way with magnets holding prints on the wall. And the art objects were often made of simple materials, often just found objects displayed in new ways. Anni Albers and Josef Albers were part of the Bauhaus movement in Germany. They left Germany with the rise of Hitler and spent a number of years at Black Mountain College. They also traveled to Mexico more than a dozen times. Anni had a number of textiles in the exhibit but what struck us most was her jewelry made out of corks and paper clips and bobby pins. In their simplicity they were beautiful.

It is the contrast between this luxury museum with all its elegance minimalism and the simple life of Black Mountain College where the whole community lived art and music and poetry in simple communal living that struck me.

And then in the evening Susie had been told that one of their renters in their Asheville apartment house was playing in a band in Marshall. Did I want to come along. We were going to go for ten minutes have a beer and then go home.

The evening at the Old Marshall Jail Hotel and Bar in the actual old Marshall jail, which had rooms in the old jail cells and the mesh metal beds the outdoor restaurant table tops was great fun. The band, Pleasure Chest, was playing. Every seat was taken. The band plays on Thursdays in Asheville at 5 Walnut Wine Bar and Thursday regulars were out in Marshall dancing and singing. It was a community evening of jokes and singing and dancing with the French Broad River in the background. The dancers were mostly middle aged or older and were there not to show off but to have a rip roaring good time.

Eric, who works at the Madison County Arts Council and does a local radio show, who was going to come to India with us in February and then decided not to, was playing electric guitar and in his getup was unrecognizable but a force to behold. We stayed from 6:30 to 9:00. At our table was Rob Amberg, photographer, who is having his 75 birthday party in Taormina, Sicily in October which I am going to attend along with friends of his, at the table, who are also going.

Tomorrow I am going to wonder about The Restoration Hotel and the glitz that earns Taormina the name of Sicily’s St. Tropez. It was here that White Lotus, season two, was filmed.