Pic(k) of the Week: Wasted Potential @Porchfest

The trombonist for Wasted Potential brass band performs during Oakhurst Porchfest, in Decatur, Georgia, USA. 14 October 2023.

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What is Porchfest?

In 2007, Lesley Greene and Gretchen Hildreth had an idea in Ithaca, New York: What if we had an afternoon when porches all over the neighborhood became stages and everyone just meandered from yard to yard, listening, hanging out, and connecting/reconnecting with their neighbors? Porchfest, the ultimate grassroots music festival, was born. 100% resident owned and operated, it’s been going and growing every year since. And in that time, other neighborhoods all around the country have taken the model and run with it.

The Oakhurst neighborhood in the city of Decatur, Georgia, launched its own Porchfest in October, 2015. The success that materialized that year — more than 130 performances in four hours — took us all by surprise and culminated in what Georgia's music tourism bureau called 'very likely the most diverse lineup of any festival' in the state. And, now, on Saturday, October 14, 2023. from noon to 7pm, we'll do it all again: 210 performances on porches and lawns, all around Oakhurst.

— Oakhust Porchfest

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Who are Wasted Potential?

Wasted Potential Brass Band is Atlanta's pop up party starter. Powered by tuba goodness, this brass band got their start playing on the streets of Decatur, Georgia. WPBB features a second line street beat, southern horn section, blues vocals and sousaphone as bass. Find them in Atlanta, Georgia, playing festivals and bars. They're what fun sounds like.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Into the Privet Woodland

The gentle gloom of a dense thicket, in a 120-acre suburban Piedmont forest, during an end-of-summer's light rain.

Mason Mill Park: DeKalb County, Georgia, USA. 14 September 2023.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Tree at summit of Arabia Mountain

Amidst a yellow riot of autumnal, native Porter's sunflowers, a wizened tree stands alone on the craggy summit of Arabia Mountain.

DeKalb County (Stonecrest), Georgia, USA. 29 September 2023.

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Pic(k) of the Week: The Final Out

Let me sit in the ball park

cap turned backwards and

praying for a rally. I need

the sun and sweat to remind

me how much I love the game,

how each year it comes down,

to the last inning, the final out.

 — Baseball

E. Ethelbert Miller

If God Invented Baseball: Poems

(Simon and Schuster, 2018)

Baseball's playoffs began this week; the World Series championship is to be played later in the month. It's autumn. The wait-for-tomorrows of spring and summer are no more. All that remains is the "final out."

No baseballs were harmed —or staged— during the shoot.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Arabia Mountain 'daisy'

"We call them yellow daisies."
— Arabia Mountain park ranger

A native 'Porter's sunflower' wildflower —one among thousands blooming in early autumn on Arabia Mountain— in DeKalb County, Georgia, USA. 25 September 2023.

Every year in September, an explosion of yellow flowers covers granite outcrops such as Arabia and Panola Mountains. These are yellow daisies (Helianthus porteri). Related to sunflowers, they are one of the fall wonders within the Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area. Found in only 4 states —Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and South Carolina— the flowers are most common on the granite outcrops of the Georgia Piedmont region, thriving in fragile solution pits —often dry, sandy vernal pools— found on bare rock faces.

— Arabia Mountain Heritage Area Alliance.

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Literally growing from the granite outcrops of Arabia Mountain, the blossoms are a riot of yellow, a marker of autumn's arrival in Georgia. But...are they true daisies?

Helianthus porteri is a species of sunflower (Helianthus) —commonly known as Porter's sunflower, Stone Mountain daisy, and Confederate daisy— native to the southeastern United States, particularly Georgia and Alabama.

Helianthus porteri grows on thin soils on and around flat rock granite and gneiss outcrops. It grows up to 40 inches tall (100 cm). One plant usually produces 5 or more small flower heads, each containing 7 or 8 yellow ray florets surrounding a central disk of 30 or more yellow florets. A summer annual that blooms in the fall, Helianthus porteri drops seeds that grow the following year.

The term 'daisy' is imprecise because the species is a sunflower rather than a daisy (Bellis and related genera). Likewise, although the plant grows on Stone Mountain, in Georgia, its range extends beyond. The connection to the Confederacy is through Stone Mountain which contains a confederate monument, although the connection is tenuous as the species was named before the Civil War, in 1849, in honor of Thomas Conrad Porter, a Pennsylvanian minister and botanist who collected the plant in Georgia.

— Wikipedia.

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