A_Man_Who_Tries wrote: Fri May 31, 2024 3:27 pm

LuciousSandwich wrote: Fri May 31, 2024 2:38 pm I can imagine the good food I might get in Greece or Georgia, but I know nothing about what I might eat in Ohio. Is there some kind of transcendent Ohio-style breakfast or something?

The one time I had Cincinatti chilli, I unknowingly walked into a Skyline mid stick-up.

Disaffected bands are the best product of Ohio. There is one good amusement park also.

Otherwise “My City Was Gone” pretty much sums it up.

LuciousSandwich wrote: Fri May 31, 2024 2:38 pm I can imagine the good food I might get in Greece or Georgia, but I know nothing about what I might eat in Ohio. Is there some kind of transcendent Ohio-style breakfast or something?

Ohio's different regions make it hard to pin down definitive Ohio food. You won't find Polish Boys in Toledo, where I'm from. However, you'll for sure find Detroit-style pizza there before you find Ohio Valley-style pizza there.
Cincinnati Style chili honestly only started creeping up north to our parts about twenty years ago, right about when I left. (And after I got to Minneapolis, you better believe that everybody here thought all of Ohio was twelve square miles thus I must know everything about Ohio and I should have to answer for the cinnamon chili spaghetti. )
There are four major metropolitan areas and their regions... Well, it's like this: Cincinnati is basically in Kentucky and if Cincinnatians are mad at me for saying so, I can tell them all about how it feels to be basically in Michigan. (I can tell you all about the Toledo War in another thread.) Cleveland's kind of it's own thing since it's not really on the Pennsylvania border. Columbus is in the middle of the state. Can't think of a regional dish from there but it's a hundred percent legal for women to just be topless there.
Athens is in the southeast of the state, closer to West Virginia than Columbus and smack dab in the valley. The pizza there is described thusly...

Wikipedia wrote:The pizza is known for its distinctive cold toppings which are added after the pizza is cooked. It was nicknamed "The Poor Man's Cheesecake" in the 1940s. In 2018, DiCarlo said he did not remember why the pizza was originally prepared that way but speculated that it may have been to avoid burning the toppings. The style became a part of local cuisine in Ohio and West Virginia, and was replicated by several other chains. However, its method of preparation is polarizing, and it has been compared to Lunchables by aficionados of Lunchables.

Emphasis mine

Having been to all three, I would probably say that Athens Greece is the only one I'd be gunning to return to.

Charlie D wrote: Fri May 31, 2024 3:39 pm

LuciousSandwich wrote: Fri May 31, 2024 2:38 pm I can imagine the good food I might get in Greece or Georgia, but I know nothing about what I might eat in Ohio. Is there some kind of transcendent Ohio-style breakfast or something?

Ohio's different regions make it hard to pin down definitive Ohio food. You won't find Polish Boys in Toledo, where I'm from. However, you'll for sure find Detroit-style pizza there before you find Ohio Valley-style pizza there.
Cincinnati Style chili honestly only started creeping up north to our parts about twenty years ago, right about when I left. (And after I got to Minneapolis, you better believe that everybody here thought all of Ohio was twelve square miles thus I must know everything about Ohio and I should have to answer for the cinnamon chili spaghetti. )
There are four major metropolitan areas and their regions... Well, it's like this: Cincinnati is basically in Kentucky and if Cincinnatians are mad at me for saying so, I can tell them all about how it feels to be basically in Michigan. (I can tell you all about the Toledo War in another thread.) Cleveland's kind of it's own thing since it's not really on the Pennsylvania border. Columbus is in the middle of the state. Can't think of a regional dish from there but it's a hundred percent legal for women to just be topless there.
Athens is in the southeast of the state, closer to West Virginia than Columbus and smack dab in the valley. The pizza there is described thusly...

Wikipedia wrote:The pizza is known for its distinctive cold toppings which are added after the pizza is cooked. It was nicknamed "The Poor Man's Cheesecake" in the 1940s. In 2018, DiCarlo said he did not remember why the pizza was originally prepared that way but speculated that it may have been to avoid burning the toppings. The style became a part of local cuisine in Ohio and West Virginia, and was replicated by several other chains. However, its method of preparation is polarizing, and it has been compared to Lunchables by aficionados of Lunchables.

Emphasis mine

That's troubling.

The last time I was actually in Ohio (for a funeral in another part of the state), we were stuck in the kind of town where we ended up at McDonald's because the wait at Applebee's was over an hour. I guess I was hoping that Athens, OH residents were enjoying something better that I just didn't know about. Oh well.

it's a joke, right?

I’ve only been to the Ohio version, once, 20-some years ago for the purpose of playing a show. It was fun enough…show went well, saw a guy punch a window out of his pickup truck, slept on the floor of some hippies’ living room…fairly standard stuff. Athens is, afaik, a total college town and just about everything there is tangentially related to Ohio University somehow. I hear they have great Halloween parties though I never went to one myself.

Athens, GA: Used to be a cheap place to live. That affordability allowed for a population of young people to have the time to do copious bong hits, work 20hrs/wk at the Taco Stand and have 2 or more bands in the meantime, create a CDC-notable outbreak of genital warts, and generally extend their 20s into their late-50s. A place that had not one but THREE vegetarian restaurants at once. Twenty years ago there were more bands, more venues, more punk houses, and more cheap places to live than anywhere else in the South, maybe in the United States. Air BnB and three straight winning football seasons have basically eliminated the viability of long-term rentals, downtown rents have made it impossible for non-chain coffee shops and restaurants to thrive, and the cost of living has made it impossible for the Youngs not to be the Poors, even working 50 hours a week. All three vegetarian restaurants have closed. Athens, GA is over, except perhaps for the genital warts.

Athens, Greece: EU austerity, the IMF, and Neo-Liberalism have created a post-Capitalism doldrum that has squeezed all but the essentials to sustain human life out of the locals. In the meantime, Air BnB and tourism have priced apartments out of reach of anyone trying to relive the golden age of the hard-won European human-centered lifestyle. "What if we ran everything like a business?" asked the Captains of Industry at the dawn of the 21st Century. Now we know: the Investor Class puts a yacht inside their yacht. The rest of us riot for entertainment.

Athens, OH: Ah, fuck, who knows? My strong opinion of the last few years is that the Ohio music scenes have been vastly undervalued in the collective imagination by everyone except a few zine writers from Columbus, but overall, the offshoring of industry has swept the legs out of from under the prosperity that made it possible to start bands like Devo, Pere Ubu, The Isley Brothers, the O'Jays, The Ohio Players, Wild Cherry, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, The Moonglows, Booty's Rubber Band, Roger and Zapp, The Dazz Band, LeVert, The James Gang, The Dead Boys, Rocket from the Tombs, The Waitresses, the Cramps, Scrawl, Guided By Voices, Ass Ponies, the Afghan Whigs, Skeletonwitch, and Braniac, to name a few.

There's a sweet spot where a place is marginal enough or at the right arc of its decline where rent is cheap and life is easy enough that people have time to create art. I think that sweet spot is behind us until we drown some billionaires, but what do I know. It's Monday morning.

Athens, Ohio still has The Union and Smiling Skull in case you need to have a stop off somewhere as you route in/out of the mountains. I did not go to school there, but friends did, and the prodigious amount of drug use bled into the local scene with scrappy psych-punk bands (and premature overdoses - welcome to the Buckeye State). No bands to recommend y'all, but there was at least local support from the students and Peter Pan post-grads, which is a helluva lot more than I can say for my bullshit college town during the same timeframe.

Never heard about the pizza. They took me to a hot dog spot with specialty concoctions for different celebrities. Twas fine.


Athens, Greece is a motherfucker of a city when you dig into it. The modern punk scene is mostly manufactured following the commercialization of a much more politically serious era, but there are still anarchist owned cafes and bookstores all throughout the city. I imagine there are angry bands somewhere - this is still Greece - but their squats and bars are not as readily apparent as Portugal's or France's. There is surely a reason behind that. The Athens food scene is incredible, but I see my old stalwart in Seychelles has renovated, maybe abandoned its tavern feel. There will always be something worth talking about in the city, it is a capital in the traditional sense (something many of its neighbors cannot boast) and there will always be local music (both original and balkan folk). It is a shame Greece was sold up the river by the EU and not allowed to grow into the country that it deserves in the 21st century, but welcome to the stifling nature of global politics, I guess. It would be a mistake to focus on that when Athens is doing so much.


Athens, GA I've only been once. Cute place, 40 Watt, saw our friends in Lung play a show and win over the locals (as they always do). There was a good record store, I think. Incredibly hard to visualize the B-52's and REM and Vic Chesnutt there, but that may be to its credit? I defer to FM dontfeartheringo, my experience was too limited to say.

Athens, GA is very near and dear to my heart. I am from Gainesville, GA (poultry capital of the world) and used to travel to Athens for shows. It felt like a link to things I loved. I lived there for a few years after going to college at North Georgia.

dontfeartheringo mentioned three vegetarian restaurants, and the finest of them all was The Grit. I saw so many heroes of mine eat there before shows. Randy from Pylon painted the cup of coffee that hung on the wall. I took my children there every time I visited my family in GA, even during Lockdown. I took my wife there after we engaged each other at Jubilee. It feels wild to know it's gone.

I was last there last summer, and it definitely felt different. No longer as teeming. I hoped I was wrong and just older and less connected, and I still suspect that might be true.

Wuxtry is a great record shop. John Fernandes is the most beatific record store clerk ever. Bizarro Wuxtry is the greatest comic shop I've ever been in. It's so much more organized than it was during my youth. All the old shit I love I learned to love there. Krazy Kat, Barnaby, Little Nemo. I regret not buying all the Nancy and Prince Valiant volumes when I lived there, but I was a poor mail carrier. I feel like I've been to multiple iterations of Low Yo Yo stuff, and it feels tailor made for like, free jazz freaks and other sonic perverts. My favorite version was when it was in the little spot outside of the 40 watt, but that might have been a different store entirely.

I will always love Athens. I learned so much there, even arriving late.

dontfeartheringo wrote: Mon Jun 17, 2024 8:12 amThere's a sweet spot where a place is marginal enough or at the right arc of its decline where rent is cheap and life is easy enough that people have time to create art.

See also: Bowling Green, Ohio, circa two thousand five.