FOURTH FOUR COUNTRIES ARTICLE

by Bowen Craig

This is the fourth installment in Athens Uncharted’s Invitation to the Athens Art Scene series. We’re really just naming countries that seem pretty cool and inviting them to read our articles, but we’re doing it in a grand way, as showmen, as proud purveyors of local pride and information, as the prolific and preposterous alliterative peons we are.  

To review, the idea is to pick a country, invite them to join us and recommend a movie from a famous American actor, one we think they might appreciate. That’s all. Pretty simple.

1) Uruguay

Dear Uruguay,

Hey, long time no see. It’s Bo from Athens Uncharted, inviting you and your prairie lifestyle to check out the local Athens, Georgia art scene we cover on our website, and to enjoy the filmography of Philip Seymour Hoffman.  

We’re big fans of yours, so why not return the favor? We love it that you offer your citizens free (and compulsory) education. Well, the compulsion might not be as great as the free, but we’re Americans, and we kind of have the same thing going here, albeit admittedly more crazy because America is pretty freaking crazy these days, and our education system, never all that good, is now truly terrible. I digress, but still, I think most people would agree that free education is a great place to start a civilization. Your 97% literacy rate is damn impressive. Sure, I feel bad for those 3% of mumbling, illiterate ranchers, but I’m sure they console themselves in the traditional manner that lonely, uneducated cowboys prefer: campfire songs, cock fights and the occasional sheep-fucking on the down-low. We’re not making fun of you. We living in Georgia, a state known for Coca-Cola, the cotton gin and cousin-sex, so who are we to judge?

(aside: health alert)

Sugary drinks can contribute to many health conditions, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, and tooth decay. Research has shown that drinking a can of Coca-Cola can damage the body within an hour.

Medical News Today

You’re big on animals: fish, cattle, and sheep (be they defiled or not). You raise sugar and make textiles. So does Georgia. You process hides, make wool, and grow wheat and corn. Once again, we do that, too. Small world, right?

Like us, you’ve got packed, overcrowded cities and a lot of rural farmland. Huzzah!

Your not-too-distant history has been marked by warfare. Ours too. After you declared independence from your Colonial Overlord, in 1825, you had a lot of mini-civil wars, for around 75 years. That’s rough. And then you went through a peaceful period of growth and stability. Then your economy tanked (We’ve been there, too, guys. Hell, we’re there now.), and you had strikes and terrorism (sadly, we get this one, as well), and then military rule for 12 years, and then the year of 1985 settled things, your ex-pats returned home and you started to grow things again, using nature to guide your electricity, specifically hydro-electric power. Shit guys, you’re trend-setters. Hydro-electric power is about to be big again.

Since we love you guys so much, and since you’ve seen your share of war, we wanted to recommend to you the movie Charlie Wilson’s War, starring Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. It’s largely about how one man’s obsession can change the world for the better. And yeah, it’s kind of ironic in retrospect, what with our having occupied Afghanistan for a really long time for no apparent reason, but it’s still a good watch.

2) Macedonia

Dear Macedonians (Macedons? I’m pretty sure it’s Macedonians.).

Welcome to the world of Athens Uncharted. It may seem different to what you’re used to, for example we are in no way affiliated with that other, less prominent Athens, the one right down the road from you, the one in that rocky, coastal country you kind of hate. OK, I suppose we were named for that city, but since then our paths have diverged a good bit.

We’re big fans of your relatively-recent independence from Yugoslavia (if such a place really ever existed). You’ve only really been around, in your current form, since 1991. And people say America’s a young country. Before that, you were a whole bunch of other things, a progression of conglomerate countries: the Byzantine Empire, Bulgaria (They called themselves an empire, but were they really?), and Serbia. As a warlike nation ourselves, we can appreciate your ongoing neighborly territorial feud with Greece. 

Shit, those other, lesser Athenians even objected to your name. They thought they could tell you what to call yourselves, probably because of Alexander the Great, who came from their Macedonia (because of his father’s newly-created empire’s feeling wildly inferior to their more ancient neighbor), and went on to conquer the known world, naming cities after himself, killing people, but also spreading knowledge, creating the pre-cursor to The Silk Road and spearing a few elephants along the way. We feel your pain.

We also would like to understand your major economic engines. You say you mine coal, chromium, zinc, lead and ferronickel. I know what coal is. I take a zinc supplement, so I get that one. I’ve used pencils before, so I get lead. But I’m pretty sure you made up chromium and ferronickel to fool Grecians into buying the Macedonian equivalent of ocean-front property in Oklahoma. And you know what? I’m fine with that. Half the stuff we export these days is pretty fake, too. I’m looking your way, Facebook.

In the spirit of sharing the arts, and celebrating your 1990’s independence, we at Athens Uncharted would like to recommend the film Almost Famous, starring, among others, Phillip Seymour Hoffman. It’s a damn inspirational musicography of a fake band that I’m pretty sure was based on The Allman Brothers, a local(ish) Georgia band. You seem like “Ramblin’ Men” yourselves, what with the constant name changes and resulting confusing postal routes with each new empire. It’s a beautiful movie, where Hoffman plays a semi-fictionalized rock reporter, based on a real guy who was kind of a sad badass, who schools the main character and keeps him from tipping too far into rock ‘n’ roll fandom as he reports on the band’s rise to prominence. Hoffman is the canary in the coal mine, and the beacon of truth. You could use a little truth (Chromium? Really?). We all could.

3) That other Georgia 

Dear Georgians,

Even if we didn’t have the same name as you, we’d still love you guys. Any country bold enough to break away from the iron-grip of the Soviet Union and resist more recent Russian attempts at yanking you back in is a pretty bad-ass place. As fellow Georgians, we can relate. We’re constantly trying to keep Alabama from annexing us (or at least stealing our water).

One of your biggest exports is wine. We’re drunks, too.

You’re a primarily agricultural place. So are we. Hell, we’re called The Peach State, because we grow a lot of, you guessed it, peaches. Also, you make airplanes. We’ve got a really busy airport, the headquarters of Delta (a pretty big world-wide player in aero-technology), and Athens’ little local airport is named after Ben Epps, the first guy in our Georgia to build and fly a plane. Sure, it crashed a few times, but progress is a winding path and, honestly, who hasn’t crashed the occasional prop plane he built in his spare time?

We’d like to recommend the movie Scent of a Woman.  You love women, Philip smelled them.  Well, Al Pacino smelled them, because he was blind, and Philip played an American bad guy archetype, the prep school entitled asshole. Whatever, it’s a great film.

We love all of our fellow Georgians. Shit, we’re not big fans of Russia either.

4) Burundi 

Dear Burundites (Burundians? I should probably do more research before I write these.).

Howdy. We at Athens Uncharted want to tuck you neatly under our wing, as we’ve done with so many other cool countries we think would make great additions to the Athens Uncharted family. You’re such a small place, landlocked, war-torn, and you’ve proven that you can overcome really hard times. We in Georgia have had famines, racial violence, plagues of little insects eating our crops, and are way too into football. It’s kind of our religion. You’ve got multiple religions, like Catholicism as well as older Indigenous belief systems. We’ve got some of that, too. You threw off the shackles of your Colonial Overlords, Belgium. Then you had a raging civil war and a lot of righteous murdering in the name of tribalism. Holy crap, can we ever relate to that. We tried to kill each other in our own civil war, less than a hundred years after we threw off our own pretentious, greedy Euro-rulers ourselves. We get you guys. 

You grow a lot of cotton. We grow a lot of cotton. You’ve had a number of high-profile political assassinations. We’ve had a number of high-profile political assassinations. You make shoes and blankets. We wear shoes and sleep in blankets (not as clean an analogy as the first two, I’ll admit).

Your Tutsi-Hutu warfare and murder is a rough one, even compared with ours, but lately you seem like you’ve come out of it, or at least it’s not getting the press it once did. Hard to tell. The world press doesn’t cover Africa nearly enough. You’re sandwiched between Rwanda and The Democratic Republic of the Congo, not the most peaceful places around. We butt up against Mexico, which can be kind of violent, but is still a pretty awesome place, especially if you love Westerns.

Speaking of movies, can we humbly recommend Capote, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman(2) as one of America’s wonderfully weirdest and most tragic authors, Truman Capote.  It’s partially an exploration of violence, as Capote interviews two convicted murderers.  Burundi, I don’t want to pigeon-hole your entire country, but you have dealt with a lot of violence, and this is a good exploration of the topic. Maybe it’ll help.

So, those are today’s 4 countries we’d like to invite into the Athens Uncharted family. We freaking love all four of y’all. Please, check out our art scene. Hell, immigrate here if you want. We’re a pretty open, accepting kind of town. And we’d like to prove to you, and the rest of the world, how superior our football is to yours. Honestly, your football is what our young parents do to exhaust our five-year-olds so they’ll sleep at night. Ours is basically an organized fake war, and we know you can all relate to that. The world’s a pretty violent place, but surely we can all agree that fake wars are better than real ones. Welcome.