The Return to the North and An Initial Recap (#4).

After two short/long weeks of wandering about the Southern states, I've returned to my Chicago apartment, complete with a chill cold enough to make a fellow long for days spent wandering through swampy fall forests and sitting in gulfport movie theaters. As such, this posting is meant to take up from where I left off (somewhere in South Carolina?) and arrive to the present, via a screening-by-screening overview. Fingers crossed.

#4: Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC
The upstairs space in the Halsey seemed quite lovely, and we arrived early enough from our long drive from our friend's double-wide trailer in Leicester (outside of Asheville) to have a sense of what the city might be like. By the way, I highly recommend waking up in the glorious mountains of North Carolina, walking up paths to feed wildish horses wild apples, and watching the sun cut a line across the reddening trees as it moves up into the sky...
The crowd at the Halsey was mostly college-aged, a similar feeling to the Cullowhee show, although this one suffered from a great number of walk-outs during the screening. Sigh. Free admission + long single takes of village life = a tough tonic for the youth of today. Having said as much, the room was full at the start and half-full at the end, and those who stayed seemed rapt and enthusiastic. Hypnotized, perhaps.
Questions about gun traps (and how to make them), cassava bread (and how to cook it), and ones that were tougher to translate into Saramaccan were directed at Benjen upon my urging, and he did a remarkably good job for a fellow who's not done a lot of public speaking in foreign countries. Totally great.
Afterwards, we took a nice tour through the gallery and then wandered out into the Charleston moonlight, somehow stumbling across the Old Part of Town in all its gloriously revived architectural stylings. The streets were ghostly, history hanging heavy in this part of the country.