A football issue would not be complete unless our sports “experts” made a few predictions for our local college and pro favorites. Of course, by experts, we mean experts at drinking beer while watching over 20 hours of football every weekend; nevertheless, this is how we think the season will shake out.


SEC
Georgia Bulldogs
2015 Record: 10-3
Apparently winning 10 games was not enough to save the last head coach's job at UGA, despite his diving prowess. A new first-year head coach and the possibility of relying on a freshman quarterback makes our team very cautious to expect greatness. We predict the Bulldogs will go 7-5 in the regular season with the chance to win a bowl game.

South Carolina Gamecocks
2015 Record: 3-9
South Carolina’s 2015 season was a heartbreaker with The Old Ball Coach leaving mid-season and a loss to the Citadel. The only way to go is up so this year, we predict a decent 6-6 season with a chance for a bowl win.

​
ACC

Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets
2015 Record: 3-9
The 2015 roster was plagued with injuries as the ramblin’ wreck spit and sputtered its way to only 3 wins. However, many key role players for the triple option will return, including a 385 pound offensive guard. Better offensive line play and less competition from their conference gives us the feeling that Tech will be much improved. We predict a 7-5 record with a bowl game for the Yellow Jackets.

Clemson Tigers
2015 Record: 14-1
Clemson will return with some major role players and the momentum of a championship run that came up one game short. Couple that with a cupcake schedule out of the ACC and we think the Tigers will win most of their regular season games. However, they will slip up on one team and go 11-1 but still win the ACC.



NFL

Falcons
2015 Record: 8-8 (missed playoffs)
2015 was an emotional roller coaster for dirty bird fans. It proved that if the Falcons are anything, they are streaky. They also carry a history of mediocrity into the 2016 season, which should be better than usual thanks to some defensive acquisitions and more offensive line experience. We predict a 9-7 regular season with a chance to sneak into the playoffs as a wild card.

Panthers
2015 record: 15-1 (NFC Champions)

The Panthers are coming into 2016 fresh off a Super Bowl loss which was attributed to a very stiff Denver defense. Although the Panthers almost went undefeated in the regular season, many of those victories appeared to be eked out. Our experts are hesitant to think they will be that lucky this year. We predict a 10-6 regular season with an NFC South title and a playoff berth.

​Who are some artists that inspire what you do?

Ah hmm,  – John K. (Ren and Stimpy), Hieronymus Bosch (early Netherlandish), Maurice Sendak (wild things), Richard Williams (the thief and the cobbler), Salvador Dali, Jhonen Vasquez (Zim), Ralph Bakshi (Hobbit/wizards), Miyazaki (Ghibli), Theodor Geisel - any Adult Swim stuff 

Each piece I work on is inspired individually, but these are some artists I admired growing up and now draw from most often.

How do you distribute your art?

I function under the title, The Cosmic Palace, which is divided into an Arts side and a Wild Foraging side.  I sell online, in an etsy shop under the same title. 

I do a lot of guerrilla vending, setting up a table at all sorts of events, and parking lots of concerts all along the east coast. I have done a number of band posters. I live paint alongside local bands, sometimes selling art right off the easel. I enjoy live painting and getting to create during the energy of a show. I enjoy the local downtown scene and have been a part of it for as long as I can remember. I have painted on Joe’s pillars, and any day will start something in Iron Heights. Sometimes I contribute work to Free Art Fridays, or any day really, if I feel like dropping some art into the world. I do installations from time to time as well, dream catchers in the trees, or human nests - sometimes impromptu performances. 

I am a regular vendor at the Saturday Market on Riverwalk, The Veggie Truck Farmers Market on broad, First Fridays in shifting spots on broad, and the monthly market at That Place Coffee  -all of which are wonderful, and I recommend visiting. 

​What’s your experience with the Saturday Market as an artist?
 
I enjoy it. I split my booth between The Cosmic Palace, and fellow student, Ceramics by Alexandra. With both of our stuff you can find nearly anything you need. Our booth has a variety of art that I think is unique to the market, ceramics, paintings, prints, decorated clothing, as well as local wild foods, and my handpicked tea blends.

​What do you like most about it (the market)?

The people that come to the market get to have a personal experience with the pieces and the artists. We are there to answer any questions and ultimately see our hard work appreciated and given a home. I love talking to people and hearing their responses, and it exposes my work to a lot of people I may not have ever ran into otherwise.
​

Do you have any gallery plans?

I do. I have a space reserved in Artist’s Local 1155 for february. It will be a collaborative show between myself and local special effects artist Taylor Gary. We will be taking a macabre focus on the emergence of the figure, pulling out from a 2 dimensional into a 3 dimensional space. 

Other than that, I haven't made any plans. I am always open to being a part of group shows when i can find the time. At some point in the future I will have my obligatory senior show as a part of graduating from college, but that is infinitely far from now. 

How did you get started with your artwork, and how is it a part of your stories?

Actually, my brother is an artist, and my oldest brother is a musician, so when we grew up, that was our three areas, I was the writer.  My brother would make me collage covers to music tapes and I would make him some in return.  I’ve been writing stories since I was five, and doing the mix tapes was just an introduction of how you can take two different artistic areas and cross them over.  Then I started making them in conjunction with stories, just for social media.

​

Does the story itself create the collage, or the other way around?

​All of the above!
It’s hard to choose an image just looking at magazines, and I can print out a picture but that feels like cheating, and it feels best when I discover it by accident.  It’s hard to do something intentionally, like that.  Normally if I’m going to illustrate a story, [I think] what is some sort of visual to tie in with the story, can I find something in a magazine that fits with that and can I build around that.

I had one, that I was doing about a dead giant.  I really wanted to do an illustration for it, but if you think “let me find a dead giant” and that’s really hard to do, to intentionally find something that works.  I ended up doing jellyfish, for no really good reason than other on the gut level it seemed to really fit, and I don’t know why, and the more I try to explain it, the less magical it’s going to feel in my gut.

I do plenty collages that have nothing to do with stories, it’s just a daily activity I do with my hands.  My mom would make afgan all the times while watching Jeopardy.  So I started doing bird head collages, and I just became fascinated about the character within them, so I wrote a story about him.  That’s a rarer sort of thing. If there’s a character there that’s really compelling, I’ll follow through with that.
​

​So it’s more of a concept if you create a collage based on a story?
​
It’s more of a surrealist technique, a dislocation.  Meaning that you have two concrete images that don’t fit together.  If I go in consciously to find the perfect image that logically fits, that would be a block to accessing the subconscious that are working to give the story or art piece vitality.  If I try to find the irrational gut level that inspires interests, then it’s going to be more effective.  If it viscerally fits the story, it will have more vitality to it.  If something is too logical, it could be a flaw to this particular type of aesthetic.

Who has been your influences in your art work?

I identify as a fiction writer, but I’ve always had a great passion for visual arts. Max Ernst is probably my number one, he did a lot of collage, but he did pretty much everything.  He’s my favorite collage artist, but also my favorite artist of all other types of art because he so diverse and everything he did was ground-breaking and beautiful.  He did collage novels, they didn’t make sense as novels, he just called them novels, and he had a lot of bird-head characters in those too.  He was interested in how you can take existing materials and make something out of them.  He bridges the gap between the Dadaist and the Surrealist.  Surrealist are primarily the ones I’m most interested in, they tend to be my favorite.  Surrealism started as a literary movement, but became much more famous as an art movement and so that is a place that bridges the art/literature gap really effectively.
​

How would you describe your stories?

It’s hard for me to write really short stuff, and that’s an obstacle I’ve overcome in the past few years.  In the short form, they really basic magical realist stories.  I don’t really love genre names, but in the easiest way to describe them, in the short form, they’re magical realist stories. I’m interested in interconnectedness between stories and how you do that in a bigger format.  The way I think of them, are vast interconnections between nodes.  Especially in the short stories I’m interested in monsters.  Sorta like max Ernst, I’ll invent monsters, or I’ll use pre-existing monsters and different ways monsters come into existence.

I like the magical realist contrast between matter-of-fact tone and abnormal circumstance. The everyday treatment of abnormal things. I get that from Kafka, that would be my main literary influence on that level, more so than your traditional magical realists authors.

Like the dead giant story that I mentioned, it’s about a guy who buys a dead giant. It’s a very matter-of-fact treatment of this dead giant.  He buys him for his junk store, but he doesn’t know what to do with him, and the bird-head character, he finds a baby and he tries to run away from home with the baby.  He’s living in a community with people with flower head, so he doesn’t really know how to deal with people.  So he’s treated more monstrous, he’s the outsider.

You have an exhibit up at Buona Caffe at the moment?

Yeah, I’m with other people, I have one piece and there’s a lot of other pieces there too.  The theme is coffee, so you create art with coffee, or about coffee.  What I did I took some of these posters, and I spilled coffee on them or spilled water on them.  What happens with the poster, is that on the other side you get these color effects.  Really random sort of color effects.  The one I did for the coffee art show, it turned out mostly green, but the original poster was mostly blue.  I combined most of these color-bled scraps, I combined those all together, and found some nebula pictures and created this nebula shape, because it kind of looks like a nebula.  That was just improvised, I had noticed the posters doing this before, so I said “what if I can just do a whole picture, with the color-bled from these posters”.  When I started doing it,  when I noticed it looked like a nebula, let me find some nebula pictures.  In that case, it’s hard to say I need this particular pictures, but I knew I could find nebula pictures.  I’ve looked through them [science magazines] enough that I know basically the things I can commonly find.
​

What can people expect from you next?

I plan on self-publishing a novel in July.  It’s partly for my dad, as a gift.  I have this detective fiction trilogy, and the way that I share my fiction, I first-draft it on social media.  For whatever reason.  So this is on I was first-drafting on Facebook, and my dad started to read it.  It’s an impossible thing to keep up with a story with a plot on social media.  One of the reasons that I started this trilogy, was because I had gone really far into non-linear stories, and I started stripping away plots.  I love plots, when I started writing I had this addiction to plots, and I had to force myself to break away from them.  Then I found myself going too far in that direction, too non-linear.  So I started writing this trilogy, because what’s more linear than a murder mystery, and I love them anyways.  I started doing this on social media, the way it shows up as very non-linear on social media.  So my dad started reading it, and kept saying “why don’t you put it all together and I’ll read it for you”, and it takes a little work to put it all together.  That should be done in July.
​

​What’s the title of your novel?
​
“The Upholstery-man”, which sounds like a superhero story, but it is not.  It’s about a guy who sells upholstery and he dresses in this costume made of upholstery and his son is the detective.  So it has monsters and seeming monsters in the role of a murder mystery.  The upholstery-man character is slowly going crazy and starts to embody these characteristics of the costume.  The trilogy is called Slaughter Boxes.  I have a Facebook page, and if someone wants to like the page I’ll send out updates on this

​You can read stories by F. Simon Grant at the following places!  

Slaughter Boxes

Birdhead Father in Brightness : oR : Where They Had Arisen to Think at the Sun

Globules : oR : The Unidentified

The Living Needle : oR : Stories for Scarecrows

Be sure to follow the "Slaughter Boxes" page to keep hearing more from this exciting artist!​

We began our beer tour of Augusta five months ago with no real goal in mind, except to showcase the best places to drink brews in this fair city of ours. Whether their offerings were atmosphere, selection or staff, each place stood out as a reminder that shedding the four walls of home is that much easier when you live in (or are visiting) a place as diverse and increasingly lively as Augusta.

With the city’s flair for the artistic, the soil itself seeming to urge unique talent after talent, new artists springing up as soon as the old ones retire or shuttle off to new cities, the bar and foodie/drinking scene has always been a beneficiary.
 Since we began this journey, most things have stayed the same – but the beer scene in Augusta will never be the same. The reason for this is two words: Riverwatch Brewery.
​