Show Me Your Richmond

Love the pod. I will be having nightmares about Santa Claus for years to come, though.

i really loved this pod. everyone on here is so entertaining.. even stonewall jackson to an extent

the street of losers tour was my favorite...and the painting. gotta love the painting.

this is one of the best show me yours i've seen. just the fact that you're chilling with gwar is amazing.
the skull jacket is so sweet. just tell me you wear that thing to work at least once a week.

Perfection. It really seems appropriate that members of GWAR would live in Richmond, VA.

lovely

Nice moves JT!

I second Josh. The Skull vest is sweet. Why aren't you sporting it at work?

Tongen family salmon is going to take over the world. I too felt like a winner when I was presented with a can.

very good news give more

* JT * Tom * that was hilarious.

JT I wanna see you sporting that vest around the office more often.

Great job! They cut out the part about the Arthur Ashe statue though. That was fun! JT rox and is quite a good dancer!

Hey Dave, aka "Maggotmaster" we got the Arthur Ashe statue in all it's glory in the outtakes and deleted scenes.

Watch for it.

I still can't believe we got the cops called on us for climbing the Lee statue.

Thank you JT. I lived in Richmond from 1987-93. Many dear memories. Here's an excerpt about it from my memoirs about it, written in the 3rd person, as when I lived there, I was male (now female):

George’s new friends were a circle of artists, musicians and dancers. George loved them as dearly as family. They created and journeyed together, partying under the stars on their roofs and in backyards. They rented unheated, turn-of the-century hovels for as little as two hundred dollars monthly. George’s new life among friends was a paradisiacal island inexplicably afloat in an abyss:

The neighborhood where they lived was poor and white, cut off from the world outside by a cemetery, river, highway, and penitentiary. A gang of scowling nine-to-twelve-year-old boys thugged around breaking car windows and using chains and bags of rocks to beat up college students. Their older siblings were thieves and crackheads. The females among them were literally barefoot and pregnant, drinking Budweiser on porches. Their parents were cancerous, abusive and hard-drinking. On Memorial Day, throngs in rebel-gray military uniforms and hoop skirts paraded down George’s street to the cemetery to remember fallen, Confederate heroes.

Amy George

Ok, the Sparks bit is ridiculous. really, absolutely ridiculous. The painter dude should do a 1 minute daily painting tip video. JT, hook it up!

Here's the link to see the Arthur Ashe statue in Richmond, Virginia critiqued by GWAR's Dave Brockie.

http://current.com/items/88998800_gwar_s_dave_brockie_shows_us_richmond_public_a...

02.28, something never seen before; JT, speechless... the mini-gawp is genius.

The vest? Priceless.

Nice work guys. Can't wait for the next one.

sick

The Kollatzian Response: Part the First

JT, Leah and the "Show Me Your..." team, ranks of thanks for this irreverent and refreshing perspective on the Holy City. We don't appear as stodgy or provincial as some seek to portray us.

However, as a Richmond lifer and a sometime chronicler of its life, culture and history I want to toss in a couple of drachmas of my own.

First, well. Sigh. How to say this. I'm tired of the Confederacy. I realize that you almost can't talk about Richmond without talking around the dreadful event of "The Wah" but out of 400 years of European life here, the War of Southern Secession occupied but four.

Richmond was burned for the first time during the Revolution by Benedict Arnold. Not so the Evacuation Fire of 1865--we did that to ourselves, thank you very much.

Missing in action in this program in my view, is Edgar Allan Poe who, alongside Wes Freed and Noah Scalin and even GWAR, would've been exquisite and appropriate. JT and Dave Brockie stalking around Richmond poking about in the places that used to be Poe's haunts and houses, and the museum itself, would've been quite entertaining, too.

Poe spent more than half his foreshortened life, off-an-on, here. He considered Richmond enough of his hometown that he would tell people that if they should want to reach him, just write his name on an envelope addressed to "Richmond, Virginia" and the missive would find him.

(Poe was actually born in Boston--his parents were traveling actors. His departed mother left him a miniature keepsake portrait with an inscription on the back to visit Boston, because she'd been well treated there. When Poe did get there, he didn't like it much.)

He got his professional writing start in Richmond and here perhaps was at his happiest, (if Poe ever could have been said to be happy), during his time with the Southern Literary Messenger -- the site of which is now a portion of a strip club. But Richmond is also where his mother died, and she's buried in St. John Episcopal Church's graveyard. Many of the formative experiences of his life occurred here, like first love--and last loves.

Kollatzian Response: Part the Second

Baltimore has Poe's body. We have his soul.

Now, as to Dave Brockie's history tour--hilarious, even somewhat informative, but, I am compelled to make a few corrections. I offer the caveat that I realize Dave wasn't walking around with history book under his arm, but I also know he knows plenty about Richmond having engaged him in conversation a few times over the years.

Awful as Cold Harbor was, it is not the bloodiest battle in the annals of military history. Cold Harbor was, however, a terrible three-day slug-fest under brutal Virginia summer conditions. And Lee did to Grant at that battle what Meade had done to Lee at Gettysburg with Pickett's assault on the last day. The Federal troops attacked an entrenched position and died in droves, just as the Confederates had done in Pennsylvania. Old habits die hard.

The anticipation of death was so strong among Union soldiers prior to the third and final attack on June 3, 1864, that many pinned pieces of paper with their names written on them, to identify themselves when they fell. No dog tags, then, and they wanted their families to know where and how they died.

Grant wanted to go at the Confederates again, but his line commanders feared mutiny if he gave the order.

Lee scurried to Petersburg and prolonged the war for another gruesome year.

Now, you can make many criticisms about Jefferson Davis--he was an arrogant micro-manager who believed his way the best one and, at the war's end, delusional--but Dave is just wrong about Davis fleeing Richmond dressed as a woman. I think he was conflating that guy on the Titanic with Davis (and I can see how).

Davis got dressed in his best suit and left on a train with a collection cabinet members and gold from the treasury. They wended their way with an escort of 3,000 soldiers through the prostrate South until the wheels came off their effort outside Washington, Georgia.

By then, Lincoln was assassinated and Davis wanted as a traitor and conspirator with a bounty on his head. His entourage broke up and he was left alone with his family and a few soldiers. He was trying to make it to the Florida coast and a boat to escape.

Around dawn of May 10, 1865, however, their campsite was found by a Federal scouting party and a commotion ensued. Shots were fired and money laden saddle bags were lifted.

Davis ran from his wife's tent, grabbing what in the dark he believed was his coat, instead clutching Varina Davis's raglan cloak.

A mounted soldier saw Davis and raised his carbine to shoot him. Varina ran out of the tent and grabbed Jeff, preventing him from reaching his horse where he had holstered pistols.

Davis shouted, "The worst of all is that I should be captured by a band of thieves and scoundrels!"

There he stood, with his wife's shawl around him, a discombobulated wreck of a man in a ruined country. And propagandists repeated the story that he was dressed as a woman.

That Part of the Kollatzian Response That Would Be Called The Third Part

Alabama General Bernard E. Bee gave Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson his moniker during the Battle of First Bull Run/First Manassas.

There is some dispute among those who make it their purpose to dispute such points, but, Brockie could well be correct that Bee was not giving a compliment to Jackson, sitting astride his horse with the air full of death. Bee might've said: there is Jackson, standing there like a dumb post.

He then shouted, however, "Rally around the Virginians!" whereupon the soldiers rallied and carried the day for the Secessionists, and assured four horrible years of war. But Bee didn't live to see it; he died that day.

Dave got his campaigns confused, too, which is easy to do. Jackson was not killed during the Wilderness Campaign. That was the spring of 1864.

Jackson died near Chancellorsville after having been shot on May 2, 1863 by North Carolinians who, yes indeed, mistook him and his staff for a Federal scouting party. It was night, and Jackson far ahead of the lines. The same regiment also shot and wounded Confederate General James Longstreet a couple years later. Go figure.

Now, this remark: that Lee was a "fascist pig who fought to keep black people enslaved." OK, well he is collapsing a very complicated series of situations into one provocative statement. But, heck, this is Dave Brockie, and, to be expected. And it is easy to hold people of the past to the presumed more stringent and broad-minded views of the contemporary age. But to do so makes fools of both.

Lee could no more be a 21st century person than Brockie, or me, or anybody, could be a 19th century person. The past is a different country, and its inhabitants have their own customs. even those we might find repellent of loathsome.

The customs in the 19th century South included slavery, the post war civic religion of the Lost Cause and, yes, as Brockie said, the deification of Lee -- who would've been, well, gracious but uncomprehending of a huge statue built to him.

Dave probably knows that following the war, Lee, who was broke and homeless, refused huge amounts of money to represent Southern commercial interests in New York. Instead, he went to be president of little Washington College where he instructed the young men that the war was over, the South lost, and must lead the nation in other more productive ways.

Lee was no more and no less than a product of the mid-19th century South that rationalized the inferiority of blacks and instituted the system of chattel slavery. His views were not uncommon, indeed, even among the Virginia's 18th century revolutionaries--like Thomas Jefferson.

Patrick Henry responded to a Quaker acquaintance's letter who asked why he kept slaves by saying, basically, he didn't approve of slavery, but he was drawn along by the inconvenience of doing without his slaves.

This thinking led to four years of bloody war and the deaths of more than 600,000 people. Horrific as this was, Robert E. Lee was technically not a "fascist pig."

Fascism wasn't yet invented and Lee, anyway, believed in the principles of a Constitutional republic -- provided they were implemented and defended by white men. Maybe Dave was referring to Lee's eating habits. I'm not enough of a Lee scholar to know.

I do know that he inherited 63 slaves through marriage; that he may not have been worse, but perhaps not better, than other men in his position, and by the will of his father-in-law, Lee manumitted, or freed, those slaves in December 1862. For more than half the war, he did not own other people.

Part The Last

But Lee can't be blamed for his aging followers turning Monument Avenue into the street of losers. It is also a splendid boulevard (though, not The Boulevard). Monument began as a real estate scheme by a Confederate veteran, Otway Slaughter Allen, who, with this siblings owned a large swath of land in what was then Henrico County.

Southerners who'd given money to the Lee Monument movement were at the time annoyed that proposed memorial was getting plunked down in a field to help expand the Allen family land holdings.

The westward expanding city annexed, and then the development-in fits-and-starts--began of what we now call the Fan District. When the mid-1890s depression alleviated, upper class Richmonders began building their mansions facing the Lee Circle. And so it went; the South's mass post traumatic stress disorder was given three dimensional expression with those statues.

Though Monument gives all kinds of mixed messages to people who may visit, we can probably all agree that the avenue is one of the most splendid, anywhere, and I've traveled some.

I just wish something would've been said in this program about that quality instead of, well, just using it as a backdrop for a snarky remark. I guess the pictures show the vistas and architecture, and, obviously, I'm too literal.

And finally, I was gladdened to see the aluminum wrapped Markel Building. But I would've liked to have seen a crawl, something, to identify the place and the still-living architect, Haigh Jamgochian. Of his numerous plans, though, just two were constructed, and this is the only one remaining. Henrico County had the foresight to landmark the place a few years ago.

Again, multitudinous appreciations for your efforts, I have gone on far too long, probably, for most tastes. If I was technologically savvy or wired enough, I'd have videoed all this. But writing is the way I can go.

P.S. Two years ago I tried spending 24 hours on the Lee statue for a magazine article, but after midnight I got rousted off by police, along with several other people. I went back, but my mellow was harshed. Tired, I repaired to a nearby office within sight of the monument and while reading a Lee biography, dozed off.

very informative!