Brutal South

Every December, my friend the sportswriter Michael Baumann joins me for a festive exchange of Wikipedia articles we gathered through the year. We’ve been exchanging them informally for well over a decade now, but in recent years we decided to make a podcast out of it.Mike covers baseball for FanGraphs.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @MichaelBaumann. If you’d like to follow along, here are Baumann’s picks:* Southern Victory* Corinne Diacre* Quebec Biker War* Goncharov* List of -gate scandals and controversiesHere are mine:* Dave Matthews Band Chicago River incident* The Truman Show delusion* Loukanikos* Devil Eyes* Ghost Army This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

My guests today are Amber Campbell-Moore and Dr. Matt Cressler with the Charleston Area Justice Ministry, a good, radically inclusive organization working for social and economic justice in Charleston, S.C., and the greater Charleston area. As we speak today, the ministry is gearing up for its biggest public-facing event of the year, the Nehemiah Action.Every year at the Nehemiah Action, members of religious communities bring their protests and demands to local politicians. It’s exciting, it’s strange, it’s genuinely a lot of fun to be part of — and it gets the goods. Year after year I’ve seen the group behind it, the Charleston Area Justice Ministry, push for successful changes in our city, county, and school district governments. They make some enemies along the way — including the mayor of North Charleston, who threw a hissy fit one year — but when they get in trouble, it’s always good trouble, as the saying goes.The 2022 Nehemiah Action will take place on Monday, April 4th from 7-9 p.m. at the Charleston County School District 4 Regional Stadium (3659 West Montague Ave., North Charleston, SC). Here is the link to register and add it to your calendar: https://charlestonareajusticeministry.org/event/2022-nehemiah-action/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

We're gathered here today to speak of the ivory-billed woodpecker, a tremendous beautiful bird that is gone forever ... or so some people think.Hey. Welcome to Episode 29 of the Brutal South Podcast. The ivory-billed woodpecker has been on my mind again since late September when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed moving it and 22 other species from the endangered species list forever, effectively declaring the bird extinct.It's been called the Lord God Bird, supposedly because of the things people would exclaim when they encountered this big, elusive bird in the American wild. The last universally accepted sighting was in 1944 in northeast Louisiana. Hobbyists and professionals alike kept searching, though, keeping the faith that it was out there, but hiding, like a cryptid. This bird has been the subject of songs, novels, endless speculation, and long expeditions in the swamps and forests of the Southeastern United States.My guest this week is Matt Drury, who's currently working as a resource management coordinator for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. In the course of his career he's done all kinds of fascinating and vital work in the woods in this part of the country, including a stint leading the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker in old-growth swamplands across South Carolina. I don't want to give too much away, but I learned so much from him. There's a lot to mourn, but a lot we can still save, too.To learn more and support Matt’s work, visit appalachiantrail.org and southernspruce.org.If you liked the podcast, please leave a nice review wherever you do that or just share it with your friends. Also, if haven't yet, check out the Brutal South newsletter at brutalsouth.substack.com. I've been publishing at least one interesting thing a week for more than 2 years on labor, ecology, parenting, art, and just about everything else from my little perch here in South Carolina. I think you might find something you like. One piece you might appreciate is this one from June 23 on camping in fragile places with young children during the Anthropocene:The episode art is an engraving of ivory-billed woodpeckers, Campephilus principalis, by John J. Audubon. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

Welcome back to the Brutal South podcast, Episode 27.I guess this was inevitable: We're going to talk about critical race theory, both as an actual framework for understanding the world and as a mostly unrelated buzzword that conservatives have been screeching about nonstop since this summer.It's been more than 3 months since I put out an episode, and customarily this is where I as a podcast host would apologize or make some retroactive announcement that this is actually season 2 or whatever. Honestly I was just busy and tired. But I'm glad to be back at it, and this was a banger of a topic to jump back in on. I wrapped up recording with my guests the other night and I remembered what a joy this was — learning, talking to people, expanding my horizons.My guests today are AJ Davis (@Anjene1976) and Dr. Davíd G. Martínez (@FromFireToTable). AJ is an educator and community education advocate here in Charleston County, and Davíd is an assistant professor in the College of Education at my alma mater, the University of South Carolina, where he studies education funding and policy. I brought them on because they each had a unique perspective on this latest right-wing freakout from their vantage points in K-12 and higher education, respectively. I also knew them a little bit from my previous work as an education reporter in South Carolina, and they're the kind of people I would interview and think, "Man, I wish everybody could hear this entire conversation."One piece of reporting I did during my podcast hiatus was an August 25 piece in the newsletter called “Blueprint for a race panic." Basically, I was trying to figure out why and how South Carolina's superintendent of education, Molly Spearman, put out a blanket condemnation of "critical race theory" earlier this year, so I put in a Freedom of Information request for her emails on the subject, fought back against some petty price gouging for public records, raised the money to pay for the records, and put them all out there for anyone to read. Here's one of the truly unhinged constituent emails she received on May 22:Critical race theory is already in our schools. It is absurd that it even exist … It’s time to stand and do what we are paying you to do. LETS DO IT TOGETHER AND RALLY PARENTS UP TO BACK US ON IT!!!!!! FIRE ALL PRINCIPALS AND TEACHERS THAT BELIEVE IN ALL THIS CRAP!! FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE THEM ALL FIRE THEM ALL NOW MAKE THEM WORK IN A BLUE STATE FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE FIRE THEM ALL!!!!! NOW!!!!!!So, these are the kind of philosopher kings we're dealing with right now, and that's the tenor of the public debate we are trying to intervene in today.One bill I'll be keeping an eye on come January 2022 is South Carolina House Bill 4325, which states that public schools may not "direct or otherwise compel students to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere to the tenets of critical race theory." This slapdash reactionary bill was introduced this May and is sitting in the Education and Public Works Committee right now waiting for the General Assembly to come back. Its sponsors include Rep. Rita Allison, the chairwoman of the Education and Public Works Committee.Folks, I don't love it, and I'd love it if you joined me in raising holy hell about this obvious attempted censorship.***The episode art is “Three Woman Figures” (1930) by Kazimir Malevich. The theme music for the podcast is “Crooked Cross” from the album Words Are Fragile Vessels by my band, The Camellias, which you can stream or purchase at camellias.bandcamp.com.Brutal South is an independent podcast and newsletter recorded, written, and produced by me, Paul Bowers, at home in lovely North Charleston, South Carolina. If you would like to support this work and get access to some exclusive content as well as some cool vinyl stickers that I'll send you in the mail, subscriptions are $5 a month at brutalsouth.substack.com/subscribe. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

Quick note in case you missed it: I’m trying to decide on a T-shirt design for Brutal South, and my friend CJ Bones came up with three metal-inspired logos to choose from. Click here to check them out and let me know which one you like the best.***Brood X is upon us. I'm talking about a brood of cicadas that emerges mature from the earth just once every 17 years. They scream, they mate, and they die in a matter of weeks, leaving the next generation to arise from the earth in another 17 years. You may have heard them from your porch.My guest on the podcast is Eddie Newman, whose one-man black metal project Prosperity Gospel put out a compelling album earlier this year featuring field recordings of cicadas. You can see cicadas in the logo, too, which is just a classic, gnarly, root-inspired metal logo by the artist Vojtech Doubek.There is something distinctly metal about cicadas. I was reading about Brood X this week and I found this early description of the same 17-year brood written in 1766 by the Quaker naturalist Moses Bartram:“Viewed through a microscope the moment they are hatched, they appear in every respect as perfect as at the time of their last transformation, when they rise out of the earth, put off their scaly covering, expand their wings, display their gaudy colours, dart forth their eggs, and after a few days existence, to fulfil the wise purposes of their maker, close the period of their lives by an early death. How astonishing therefore and inscrutable is the design of providence in the production of this insect, that is brought into life, according to our apprehension, only to sink into the depths of the earth, there to remain in darkness, till the appointed time comes when it ascends again into light by a wonderful resurrection!"Eddie doesn't use such religious language to describe his awe and horror at a swarm of cicadas, but he has an appreciation like I do, and I think it comes through on this album.The album is called "Violently Pulled from Bliss," and it feels like summer does here in South Carolina: oppressively hot and murky with the occasional breeze that feels like a triumph. I listen to it often while I'm writing or running or doing chores. It rips.You can find his album on streaming platforms or buy it on Bandcamp. You'll also hear clips from the album throughout this episode.We are all shedding our exoskeletons in a way this summer, emerging from the earth after a deadly pandemic. We all feel like screaming about it sometimes. This album is a perfect catharsis for me, and I loved talking to Eddie about how and why he made it.If you haven't already, go to brutalsouth.substack.com to subscribe to the newsletter. It's free every Wednesday, or you can chip in 5 bucks a month to get some exclusive newsletter issues and podcast episodes and some sweet Brutal South stickers that I'll send you in the mail.Twitter // Apple Podcasts // Spotify Podcasts // Bookshop // Bandcamp This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

My guest is Gardnsound, an Atlanta-based electronic music composer who is also one of my oldest and truest friends.I know him as Gardner. As long as I’ve known him, he has been a restless experimenter, from his classical training on the bass to his hard-partying dubstep phase to that time he wrote a song a day for an entire year.Along the way, he taught me a few things about music theory and kept the rhythm in a string band we started called The Camellias. We played shows at our neighborhood bar and recorded a few albums together.While we were playing straightforward Americana at our weekly living-room jam sessions, he was delving into trap music production and avant-garde modernist composition techniques. In the last two years, in the basement studio he built from scratch, he has gone all-in on ambient electronic music, composed and recorded the hard way with a jumble of synthesizers and patch cables.I’ve watched him pull off live electronic performances on YouTube and Twitch this past year and come away stunned by the preparation and focus required. It’s a far cry from a dude in a nightclub hitting the play button on a Macbook and then waving his hands in the air (not that there’s anything wrong with that! he can do that move too).Today on the podcast we’re discussing his new ambient electronic album Atmospheres, out April 20 on all major streaming platforms. It’s a followup to his 2019 album Ambiences, which has become one of my go-to writing jams. That last album referenced Philip Glass, John Adams, Brian Eno, and Tim Hecker in the liner notes, and you can hear those influences again on Atmospheres, with some new boundary-pushing experiments thrown in.I’ve included samples from the new album throughout this episode, along with a short clip from Iannis Xenakis’ “La Legende d'Eer,” which Gardner cites as a major influence on his development as a musician. I encourage you to listen to Gardnsound’s whole album on Spotify, Bandcamp, or wherever you get music.Thanks for listening. If you haven’t yet, please consider buying a subscription to the Brutal South newsletter at brutalsouth.substack.com/subscribe. $5 a month gets you access to exclusive newsletter issues and podcasts, and it helps me keep writing and making podcasts.The episode art is from a page of Iannis Xenakis’ notebook from 1951. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

My guest is Pastor Jim Conrad of Towne View Baptist Church in Kennesaw, Georgia. His church was, until recently, one of the only Southern Baptist churches that openly accepted and affirmed lesbian, gay, and transgender people. His church has been in the news since February because the Southern Baptist Convention, or SBC, voted to remove his church and another from Louisville, Kentucky, for taking their stand.I read about the convention’s decision in a New York Times story by Ruth Graham last month, and it struck me that on the same day, the convention also disfellowshipped two churches for hiring pastors with a history of sexual assault. These four churches were all lumped in together and given equal weight in a statement by J.D. Greear, president of the convention, who bemoaned “fissures and failures and fleshly idolatries.”This is grotesque and heartbreaking and completely unsurprising behavior by the Southern Baptist Convention, which was founded to defend human slavery and has been on the wrong side of nearly every battle since. What did surprise me was the testimony of Pastor Conrad.I grew up in a Southern Baptist Church in South Carolina. I led Vacation Bible School groups, went on mission trips, and played electric guitar in the youth group praise band. I met some of my best friends and role models there.But it’s also a place I had to leave behind as an adult because I found some of its teachings abhorrent. I still live in South Carolina, so I am always in the shadow of some Southern Baptist Church or another. The church is a community center, a cultural anchor, and it’s caused a lot of suffering for a lot of my friends over the years.I’m part of a church that marches in the Pride Parade now. Growing up, I never thought I’d see this day. I never imagined I’d meet someone like Pastor Conrad either. As we’ll discuss in the interview, he didn’t think this was a fight he’d have to fight, until one day late in his career when he did. He made me think of that old hymn that goes, “If you tarry ‘til you’re better, you will never come at all.”***The episode art is “Baptism of Christ” (1931) by Vimos Aba-Novak.Twitter // Bookshop // Bandcamp // Apple Podcasts // Spotify Podcasts This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

My podcast guest is Chuck Johnson, a musician who composes meditative songs on the pedal steel guitar.Chuck grew up in North Carolina, where he heard pedal steel in the context of country music. After building a career playing fingerpicked acoustic guitar in the style of Elizabeth Cotten and John Fahey, he picked up the pedal steel and took it in a new direction, using its vocal quality and unlimited sustain to create mournful soundscapes.On his new album The Cinder Grove, Chuck recreates lost performance spaces through a technique called convolution reverb. We spent some time discussing the sensory memory of places that have either been destroyed or become inaccessible, and I thought that theme dovetailed nicely with what I’ve been reading about the architect Paul Rudolph’s “psychology of space.”Here’s something beautiful he said during our conversation:“I think that when a space is lost and exists only in memory, it’s sort of like what happens when people are lost. I guess depending on how they’re lost and how you’re able to process the loss, they can linger in our memory like ghosts. With the spaces that I’m working with or thinking about in The Cinder Grove — which are these urban community spaces but also forests and wild areas that have been lost in fires — just because I’m a musician and I have sonic experiences of places … it’s useful for me to try to work with my memories of these places and process the loss that way, using sound.”I used a few snippets from The Cinder Grove in the episode, but I would encourage you to spend some time with the entire album if you get the chance. You can stream and buy Chuck’s music at chuckjohnson.bandcamp.com.Friend-of-the-newsletter Eddie Newman had Chuck as a guest on his own podcast last year, and he graciously introduced us. You can check out Comfort Monk Episode 46 if you want to hear more of the story.Grayson Haver Currin also wrote a moving profile that ran in the New York Times on Feb. 10 titled “Chuck Johnson’s Ode to What’s Been Lost in California’s Fires.”The episode art is “Fire evening” (1929) by Paul Klee. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

Halfway through John Warner’s new book about higher education, it dawned on me that I was reading a manifesto.The book is called Sustainable. Resilient. Free. The Future of Public Higher Education (2020, Belt Publishing). It’s a sweeping diagnosis of what ails higher education in the United States, written from a place of deep frustration.John spent 20 years teaching in colleges and universities, including Clemson and the College of Charleston. He’s a talented educator and an incisive writer, and I’ve admired his work for years. I jumped at the opportunity to bring him on the podcast.In the book, he argues for canceling student debt and making all public colleges free for students. He rails against student surveillance and the insipid utopianism of the edu-tech TED Talk circuit. John worked as an adjunct, not a tenure-track professor, so he writes from experience about the ways the industry grinds down its frontline workers.One concept that I connected with was the idea of “vocational awe,” originally coined by the librarian Fobazi Ettarh to describe “the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good, sacred notions, and therefore beyond critique.” While the term originally applied to librarians, it could just as easily describe the mindset of college instructors, K-12 teachers, nurses, and journalists.“To the person operating with a sense of vocational awe, the institution is so important that self-immiseration is a worthwhile tradeoff,” Warner writes.Like any good manifesto, Sustainable. Resilient. Free. opens the imagination. It’s a book for disenchanted voters, workers saddled with lifelong college loan debt, and professors on the verge of burnout. I read it in two sittings, growing angrier and more hopeful with every page.If you enjoyed today’s podcast and want to hear more from John, you can order a copy of his book from your local independent bookstore or via the Brutal South Bookshop page. He’s on Twitter (@biblioracle), and you can find links to his writing at johnwarnerwriter.com.***For $5 a month, paying Brutal South subscribers get access to exclusive newsletter issues and podcasts episodes, plus some rad vinyl stickers. To sign up, visit brutalsouth.substack.com/subscribe.Twitter // Bookshop // Bandcamp // Apple Podcasts // Spotify Podcasts This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

I convened this emergency podcast shortly after the release of Taylor Swift’s evermore, the out-of-nowhere follow-up to folklore. Joining me on the panel are my colleagues Michael Majchrowicz (@mjmajchrowicz) and Ari Pérez-Mejía.Subjects of interest for this episode include Myspace, parasocial relationships, Shakespeare, Cats, Zardulu the Mythmaker, eucatastrophe, Noah Baumbach divorce movies, depression, cognitive behavioral therapy, Sufjan Stevens, and Bravo reality TV. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

My guest is the Rev. Dr. Jeremy Rutledge, the minister at Circular Congregational Church in Charleston, South Carolina.Jeremy and I have crossed paths several times over the years. He’s involved with social justice work in Charleston, we have a lot of friends in common, and I’m pretty sure I interviewed him a few times when I worked at the newspaper. I always loved talking with him, and recording this podcast was just an excuse to talk to him again — mostly about dad stuff, actually.I want to give a quick word of warning: We discuss death and disease and the loss of a child on this episode. If those topics are triggering for you, you might want to skip it.Also, I’ve got a little song I recorded for the advent season, and I’ve tacked it onto the end of the show just because I can.The Eugene Debs biography we mentioned at the top of the show is The Bending Cross by Ray Ginger, and it’s available to order via the Brutal South Bookshop page along with a lot of other radical, strange, and beautiful books I’ve mentioned in the newsletter and on the podcast this year. If you want to do some holiday shopping and throw a portion of your purchase my way while supporting independent bookstores and sticking it to Jeff Bezos, check it out at bookshop.org/shop/BrutalSouth. The episode art is “Winter Landscape” (1909) by Wassily Kandinsky.Apple Podcasts // Spotify Podcasts // Twitter // Bookshop // Bandcamp This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

This one’s a subscriber-only episode. Paying subscribers to the Brutal South newsletter get today’s full episode and access to all of the archives at brutalsouth.substack.com/archive. It’s $5 a month. Think about it.My guest is Ian Nix, lead vocalist and songwriter for the South Carolina metal band WVRM.If you follow heavy music, WVRM probably falls into genre labels like grindcore and death metal. If you don't follow heavy metal, well, it's extreme. It's guttural music played over blast beats. I'll be using clips throughout the show from their latest album Colony Collapse, which came out earlier this year.Ian is a native of the South Carolina Upstate, which is probably the most culturally conservative part of the state, and he brought a fresh perspective on the history and culture of this place we call home. Also, the album just rips. I'm a fan, y'all. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com