AUGUST 9, FRIDAY

SOURWOOD FESTIVAL

On Saturday morning Susie and I went to the Sourwood Festival in Black Mountain just down the road. The center of town was blocked off and there were white tents by vendors up and down the Main Street and some side streets. The town was filled with summer tourists. Unfortunately it was a hot morning and while children were chipper everyone else was wilting.

But slowly I became aware that while the shops in Black Mountain were full of people buying things, that the rest of the fair, the hundreds of white tented booths, were probably out of towners. In fact, the Sourwood Festival wasn’t a celebration of Black Mountain at all, it was a celebration of commercialism, and I guessed that the people selling at the fair probably went from fair to fair, every weekend in a new town, sometimes in Asheville, sometimes in small towns like Black Mountain and that these fairs were a way to attract huge crowds with little overhead and that people were making a good living going from fair to fair.

And what they sold was often home made but not made by artists. Bright slick photographs of forests and flowers were mass printed and framed somewhere and sold week after week at fairs. And much of the stuff was simply kitsch, hastily produced and fooling people into thinking that they were getting art.

But in any case it was fun to walk through Black Mountain on a hot August day and watch the people walking by and to be watched. I took a lot of photographs.