400 LIFE
Paul Brach turns steel into beautiful knives Rice Restaurant and the art of making sushi
Captivating audiences MARCH 2019
Actor Billy Magnussen got his start in Forsyth County
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from the editor A warning: this may not be the kind of “arts issue” you are expecting. A sushi chef? A bladesmith? Yes, we decided it was time to stretch our notions of what can be considered art. Why can’t Paul Brach be an artist, forging knives and swords with both precision and brilliance? Why can’t Bobby Agi, the head chef at Rice Restaurant & Sushi Bar, be an artist, meticulously designing each of the restaurant’s sushi rolls? Certainly, we have stories about more conventional artists. Like Billy Magnussen, a local grad whose acting career has started to thrive with bigger and bigger roles in Hollywood productions. Or Guy Frazer, whose unique method of cutting and ripping pieces of colored paper he turns into captivating seascapes. Or Leigh Ann Cannady, whose Forsyth Academy of Performing Arts is helping to educate and encourage the next generation of performing artists from the county. They are all artists, and they are all reflective of yet another way Forsyth County can be such a vibrant place to live. — Brian Paglia
inside
contributors Publisher STEPHANIE WOODY Editor BRIAN PAGLIA Production Manager TRACIE PIKE Director Video Production BRADLEY WISEMAN Staff Writers ALEXANDER POPP KELLY WHITMIRE Advertising director NATHAN SCHUTTER
Behind the blade
Advertising DEBORAH DARNELL STEPHANIE MCCABE Photographer BEN HENDREN
Paul Brach turns steel into beautiful knives . PAGE 8 COVER STORY South grad’s acting career taking off. PAGE 4 UNIQUE Artist gets creative with paper. PAGE 14 400 EATS Rice Restaurant and the art of sushi. PAGE 18 400 FACES Leigh Ann Cannady and the success of FAPA. PAGE 22
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March 2019 | 400 LIFE | 3
‘You can’t turn your back on where you come from’ ‘When you have a community and a group of people surrounding you to help ... it’s the best gift in the world.’ Billy Magnussen — The South Forsyth grad’s acting career is taking off
Story by Brian Paglia | Photo submitted
R
enee Denney watched with equal parts admiration and horror. There went Billy Magnussen, a student at South Forsyth High School then in Denney’s theater class, scaling a 14-foot brick wall. It was the spring of 2003, when Denney allowed her senior students to direct a one-act play. She had just taught the class about the Theatre of the Absurd, a category of work that originated in Europe in the 1950s. Absurdist plays explore the notion that human existence is devoid of purpose, and they accordingly shun many of theater’s conventions. But pulling them off requires actors who are willing to also shun their own inhibitions; not exactly a high schooler’s strength. Except for Magnussen. From the time Magnussen entered Kenney’s class on a whim his senior year, she found him to be
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game for anything, and that has been reflective of the trajectory of Magnussen’s acting career that has started to reach notable heights in the last couple years. His big break in the business was the role of Casey Hughes in the soap opera “As the World Turns” from 2008 until it was canceled in 2010. His first acclaimed role was as Spike, the “boy toy” of a famous actress (played by Sigourney Weaver) in the Broadway show “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” for which Magnussen was nominated for a Tony Award. He has appeared in almost every genre of film and television, from action (“Birth of a Dragon”) to musicals (“Into The Woods”) to comedy (“Game Night”) to horror (CBS’s “Tell Me A Story”) and even political satire (“The Oath.”) Magnussen’s profile has ascended accordingly. His supporting role as Ryan, a shallow-but-likable friend of stars Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams, in “Game Night,” a black comedy thriller, drew rave reviews. So did his role in “Maniacs,” a Netflix miniseries featuring Jonah Hill and Emma Stone. And Magnussen’s profile only figures to be further amplified this year. He’s in the Netflix movie, “Velvet Buzzsaw,” with the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal, John Malkovich and Rene Russo that came out in late January, and he’s in the live-action “Aladdin,” starring Will Smith, that is due out in May. All of which makes for one heck of a whirlwind since Magnussen, now 33 years old, left Forsyth County to pursue acting. But when I reached Magnussen on the phone in early January, he was far away from his former home and his current one in New York and his rapidly-rising Hollywood career. Instead, he
was on a ranch in Wyoming. “I’m sitting on a mountain in Wyoming looking out the window in a cabin,” Magnussen says. Magnussen was born in Queens, N.Y., and he lived there until he was 10 years old, when, he said, the family decided it was “time to move on.” They canvassed the country. For a short time the Magnussen family lived in Miami, but on a trip back to New York, they stopped to visit friends who lived in Cumming. Here, they decided, was where they wanted to raise their family of three boys, and they’ve been in Forsyth County ever since. “I was just there around Christmas,” Magnussen says. This mix of upbringing in both suburbs and metropolitans alike has been an advantage, Magnussen says. “I got to taste all of it,” he says. Magnussen found acting growing up in Forsyth County. It was an accident, really. Magnussen was a self-described “big jock,” and he was particularly good at wrestling. It ran in the family. His younger brother, Dane, went on to win an individual state championship at West Forsyth High School. Before Magnussen’s senior year, he tore his hamstring. He couldn’t take gym class. On a whim, he decided to try theater. “I think what he tells people is he decided theater is where the girls are,” Denney says. Magnussen was captivated. He performed in several of South Forsyth’s shows that year, including “Rumor,” “Once Upon a Mattress,” and “A Piece of My Heart.” Denney found Magnussen an enthusiastic pupil. “He would commit 150 percent to anything I asked him to do,” Denney says, “and that was from the very beginning. In a funda-
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“He would commit 150 percent to anything I asked him to do and that was from the very beginning. In a fundamentals class, whatever; he kind of has that child-like spirit. He’s willing to play and have fun, which is what acting requires. It requires you to play around with so many aspects of yourself and delve into things.” Renee Denney, Magnussen’s theater teacher at South Forsyth High School
mentals class, whatever; he kind of has that child-like spirit. He’s willing to play and have fun, which is what acting requires. It requires you to play around with so many aspects of yourself and delve into things. He was so open and ready to do that. That’s why he was successful, even at our school.” Magnussen credits much of that to his family, particularly his parents, Daina and Greg, as well as Denney. In his parents, Magnussen found the ideal balance of guidance and encouragement “to explore and go on that adventure that is life,” he says. In Denney, Magnussen received the push he needed to pursue acting when he wavered about what to do after graduating from South Forsyth in 2003. “Me struggling as an individual is one thing,” Magnussen says, “but when you have a community and a group of people surrounding you to help, it’s the best gift in the world.” And so Magnussen went off and “started swinging for the fenc-
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es,” he says. He was accepted to the North Carolina School of the Arts. His first professional goal was to perform on Broadway, and it didn’t take long, making his debut right out of college in “The Ritz” in 2007. Then came “As the World Turns,” the Tony Award nomination, the ever-improving string of film and television roles, to where he is now. It’s forced Magnussen to reevaluate his own career ambitions. “I had to learn that you are always evolving, you’re always changing, you can’t fit in one place forever,” Magnussen said. Magnussen said this as he looked out at those Wyoming mountains, in a new place in his life in so many ways. But even there, it wasn’t hard for him to think back on Forsyth County, the place where it all began. “You can’t turn your back on where you come from,” Magnussen said. “I think I’m a better person because of the community that has surrounded me my whole life.”
Beauty on the anvil
Forsyth County’s Paul Brach finds freedom in the forge and hammer Story by Alexander Popp | Photos by Ben Hendren 8 | 400 LIFE
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N
early all his life, local resident Paul Brach has been deeply fascinated with the process of taking an idea on paper and forming it, through skill and hard work, into reality. In his well-worked garage workshop in northwest Forsyth County, Brach turns his ideas and quality steel into wickedlysharp, aesthetically-beautiful knives for fun, curiosity and profit, feeding the drive to create that has been with him since his teens. “It always was just something that clicked with me,” Brach said. “I guess if I wasn’t a maker, I would be a collector … I guess I have that gene.” From the moment he looked longingly into a glass case of knives at the hardware store as a child, Brach said that it was inevitable that they would be in his life one way or another.
Paul Brach, Forsyth County resident and Journeyman Bladesmith, basks in the heat of a forge, left, at his north Forsyth work shop. Over the last 10 years, Brach has dedicated his spare time to forging masterful knives. Above, with a hammer and cutting tool, Brach makes short work of a length of red hot iron, readying it to be shaped into a useful form.
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But he said the bug to create knives truly bit him as a teenager in California, after he made a knife from a kit and marveled at how he was able to choose what it looked like and make it his own. “It was just the coolest thing,” he said. “And I wore with my black powder buck skin outfit that I had at the time.” Now a Journeyman Bladesmith recognized nationally by the American Bladesmith Society, Brach said that the process gives him just as much excitement as it did to the buck-skin-clad teen. “You literally start with a blank sheet of paper, draw it out and you end up with that exact result or something pretty close to it,” he said. “And when I realized that you could actually take a bar of steel like this and a sketchbook … and end up with a finished product, that whole process just became my happy place. It’s what winds my watch.”
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‘When I realized that you could actually take a bar of steel like this and a sketchbook … and end up with a finished product, that whole process just became my happy place. It’s what winds my watch.’ Paul Brach, Journeyman Bladesmith
Although he has been seriously making knives since the early 1980s, Brach said that over the last 10 years he has been dedicated to honing his skill at forging, the technique typically associated with blacksmithing where heat is used to shape metal. Brach said he got serious about learning about the bladesmithing craft when he began to attend “hammer-ins” that were hosted by master knife makers in Texas. From going to their shops several years in a row and picking their brain on techniques, Brach said he began to diversify his skillset and develop his technique — skills and techniques that he uses and teaches to this day. After years of hard work learning and honing his skills, in 2016 Brach passed the tests to become a Journeyman Bladesmith, forging a set of knives to be judged on their appearance, construction and usefulness, testing one of them by slicing hemp ropes, chopping boards, shaving hairs and bending the blade to a 90-degree angle. In July 2017, Brach was featured on the History Channel’s “Forged in Fire” competition, a reality show where bladesmiths
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create historic weapons, coming in second place after making an elaborate West African executioner’s sword from the Congo. More recently, Brach said that just a few months ago he auditioned for and was accepted as an alternate for the History Channel’s “Knife or Death” competition, an offshoot of “Forged in Fire” that puts contestants through a series of obstacle courses with a variety of hand-forged weapons. Because he pursues bladesmithing as his craft rather than as a job, Brach said he has the time to take on TV projects like “Forged in Fire” or to create an interesting knife or sword simply for the pleasure of it. “There are friends of mine … that are full-time makers. They’re working every day, it’s what they have to do,” Brach said. “And for me, this is what I love to do. So you know, occasionally I might sell a knife or two, but I don’t have to. I like to keep it that way.” For now, Brach is satisfied with his Journeyman rank and his freedom, happy just to learn more, try new things and sate his curiosity. “I’m just trying to stretch myself a little bit as I go, and push myself forward into new techniques and new things,” he said.
Before finishing a pair of forged iron hooks, Brach brushes excess material off the red hot metal.
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Guy Frazer, of the Sawnee Association of the Arts, uses finely-cut pieces of paper to create colorful works of art.
‘The ultimate jigsaw puzzle’
Local artist details unique style of making art from pieces of paper Story and photos by Kelly Whitmire
Most works of art begin in a pencil or a paintbrush before making it to paper, but for Forsyth County’s Guy Frazer, the paper is the art. For about the last 15 years, Frazer, a member of the Sawnee Association of the Arts, has been creating his own unique art by cutting and ripping pieces of different colored paper to create scenes of nature and people.
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“I like Sudoku, and I like puzzles,” Frazer said. “This is like the ultimate jigsaw puzzle, just putting things together. Colors are funny because I’ll cut something out and put it on, and I will have a background color and it just doesn’t match, so I’ll have to put it aside.” Though his art now hangs in Cumming’s BrannonHeard House and has been featured in a number of competitions and galleries,
Frazer said he doesn’t have a lifelong background as an artist. Taking on some art as a student at the University of Florida, Frazer went on to a career with Sears Roebuck before returning to school at Florida’s then-Indian River Community College to earn a degree in interior design and technology, which includes architecture. But Frazer said art was “always in the back of my mind.” After taking on a new job as a sales manager with Havertys Furniture after graduation, Frazer began working with colored paper to build displays. Eventually, that led to him experimenting with turning the pieces of paper into a piece of art. “When I did retire, I took some of the skills that I was doing for the floor plans,” Frazer said. “I would take colored card stock, and when Frazer said he draws inspiration for his work from a variety of places, including the scen-
Continued, Page 16 ery he sees when he takes his dog for a walk.
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While many of his works deal with nature, Frazer also creates pieces with human subjects.
I did the floor plan where normally you’d see the bed, sofa, everything, I would use colored paper, kind of like the colors people were designing in their homes. I had a lot of scrap one day, so I put it together and made a seascape. That got me hooked. From then on, I’ve just been doing it.” The Florida native has made seascapes one of his most common themes but said anything can lead to inspiration. “When I start working, I get all of these ideas,” Frazer said. “I write some of them down. I take a piece of paper and draw some pictures so I can go back and remember those. If I go out at 6 a.m. to walk the dog and there’s a sunrise or a tree or something, I dash home and sketch it out and put it to the side. I’ve got a drawer full of ideas, so I’m never out of ideas. The thing is just getting motivated.” Frazer described himself as a critic of his own work and said he sometimes needs prodding to finish certain pieces, which can take weeks or months. “A lot goes in the trashcan,” he said. “My wife, she gets on to me and says, ‘Don’t throw that away. Don’t throw that away.’ So she’ll save it, and later on I will go back and work on it again.” Like any type of art, the method has its pros and cons. “In paint and acrylics, you have literally hundreds of thousands of colors you can mix,” Frazer said. “With color card stock, you only have maybe 25 or 30 colors and different types of paper, so your value is just distorted, you don’t have the variety, so you have to think a little harder. Sometimes I can take two pieces of paper and sand it down and get three colors out of it.” Sanding the paper is important as it gives more texture and allows for a greater variety of uses. “I started using sandpaper because the cuts were pretty rough, so I started sanding them down to see if I could blend them in, and that worked pretty good,” Frazer said. “Then I started doing
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the skies and even water, so it’s an evolving technique. To get the sunrise on, say, the Florida Keys, I would take a corner and rip it across so you can see the underlying colors.” Being limited to fewer colors means Frazer has to keep a lookout for how the pieces of paper play and contrast with the rest of the work. “You can take something with an orange background and take a gray piece of paper with it and maybe a blue piece of paper on the bottom,” he said. “You can swear that gray changes colors as it goes from one color to another color. Those values change, and that’s what keeps me intrigued.” Frazer said as an artist he wants to see his own skills increase and see others do the same and said having a group like SAA was a benefit to all artists in the community. “You’re looking through God’s eyes,” Frazer said. “When you finish a work of art, no matter what it’s got on it or anything. For that millisecond, that augenblick, for that brief moment of time after you finish it, you can glimpse paradise, and I think that’s the whole thing.”
Using tools like sandpaper and X-Acto knives, Frazer is able to give texture and depth to his works.
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Several of the sushi rolls and sashimi plates that Rice Restaurant & Sushi Bar in north Forsyth are most known for.
‘The rice and the sushi chef’
Rice Restaurant’s Bobby Agi explains the key to artful sushi and his team’s meteoric rise in Forsyth community Story by Alexander Popp | Photos by Bradley Wiseman
Patience, experience and freshness — these are the ingredients that Rice Restaurant & Sushi Bar Head Chef Bobby Agi say are crucial to making sushi that is as much art as food. Over the past decade, Agi and the Rice restaurant team have earned a tremendous following and reputation in the Forsyth County area for their artful food and ability to draw crowds nearly every night, and have been voted best sushi restaurant in the county for five consecutive years. On a typical weekend night, the tiny north Forsyth restaurant is packed with hungry patrons waiting for takeout and tables, while waiters weave through the crowded tables with their plates piled high with sushi, salads and other entrees.
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On a Friday night in February, local residents Michael and Kerry Carter sat down for a dinner at the restaurant, which they say has quickly become a favorite of theirs for its food and service. “It’s so fresh, we’ve eaten sushi all over Atlanta and to have this in our back yard is absolutely fantastic. It’s a gem,” Michael Carter said. “It’s an intimate setting, so it’s not too big and a lot of times we’ll get the same waiter every time who knows our order before we can even give it to them,” Kerry Carter said. The Carters say that they regularly come into the restaurant and treat themselves to a spread of courses, feasting on soups, salads, vegetable tempura, and a select assortment of sashimi (thin slices of fresh raw sushi meat.) “We don’t really go for the rolls a lot,” Michael Carter said. “We like the actual sashimi, the actual fish.” According to Agi, to keep sushi connoisseurs like the Carter family in yellow tail and tuna, the restaurant receives daily deliveries of fresh catches. Once it’s in the restaurant though, it’s up to Agi and his team to turn it into something edible and beautiful. As a veteran sushi chef with 14 years of experience, Agi said that he designs each of the sushi rolls that patrons eat in their restaurant, bouncing ideas and flavors off his fellow staff members.
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“I come up with the idea and we collaborate with everybody in here, so everything is perfect,” Agi said. “We always learn from each other, from Instagram.” He said that they have to pay close attention to what people are interested in, what they like and what they want to find the right combination of ingredients. “First of all, [for] good sushi, the rice must be perfect,” Agi said. “The next step is the sushi chef, you must be experienced, and you have to be patient. Then everything is going to combine and be perfect, the rice and the sushi chef.” He said that currently their Cassanova roll , shrimp tempura and crab salad topped with butter garlic seared scallops and serrano pepper is incredibly popular with guests, but for his money, the Red Samurai — spicy tuna topped with avocado, grape tomato, jalapeno, with sweet ponzu sauce — takes the cake. “Because sushi is always variation and different all the time,” he said. “Everything is balanced and perfect.” One of the perks of being able to exert some creativity through his food, is that Agi says he gets to see peoples’ happiness twice, once at seeing his creations and once after they’ve enjoyed the taste. “I consider myself an artist because I like what I do,” he said. “Everything people want, you name it, that’s the difference here.”
Rice Restaurant & Sushi Bars’ head chef Bobby Agi poses with part of his team. Together they have grown the restaurant to county-wide acclaim and have won the title of “Best Sushi” in Forsyth County for five years.
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400 faces
Leigh Ann Cannady
Founder and artistic director of Forsyth Academy of Performing Arts
Leigh Ann Cannady wasn’t sure what to do next. The Conyers native was raising a family and giving private piano and voice lessons out of her family’s Forsyth County home at the time, and her students kept asking where they could take performing arts classes or participate in a production. Everywhere Cannady knew to send them was outside Forsyth County. Cannady already had dreams of building her own educational theater company one day. She even had made a business plan but was waiting for the right time. But Cannady also had a job offer to go back into teaching. “It was like, ‘What do we do?’” Cannady said. Cannady decided to take a chance, and in August of 2013 she opened the Forsyth Academy of Performing Arts (FAPA). They started with just 35 kids that first season. By the next semester, they had 70, and FAPA has been growing ever since. FAPA now has 400-450 students every week who take various educational theater classes for acting, improv, sketch writing, musical theater and more. FAPA has also started hosting community productions. “Steel Magnolias,” which took place Feb. 22 and 23, was their third. Cannady talked with 400 Life about how she unwinds during her hectic schedule, her three chickens and what’s missing in the Forsyth County arts community. Who are your favorite actors or actresses? “I will always love Julia Roberts. I just can’t help it. I like Holly Hunter too. We are on the same plaque at my high school (Rockdale County High School in Conyers). We both won drama awards. So yeah, I gotta support the hometown girl. But Julia Roberts is probably the top of my list. I’m a chickflick kinda girl.” Do you have a favorite vacation spot? “My husband and I take a vacation every year, just the two of us. And we discovered that we really love Mexico. Last year, we went to Cancun. “And my style of vacation is putting my behind in a lounge chair with a book and not doing anything but that for as many hours of the day as possible, because I’m constantly going in real life.” You have any pets? “We have two dogs, Daisy and Gurley. And then my cat’s name 22 | 400 LIFE
| March 2019
is Roquan. We’re big Georgia Bulldogs fans. And then Hazel, Ethel and Edna are our chickens.” What is your go-to Netflix show? “We love ‘Ozark.’ We love ‘Dead Man Walking,’ and we watched ‘The Ted Bundy Tapes.’ They’re really good. It’s supercreepy. “Fun fact: we watch The Bachelor, because if you’ve ever seen that show Mystery Science 3000, where it has the heads of the little guys — that’s what we do with The Bachelor. We tape it and watch it after the kids go to bed and we substitute our own dialogue.” What’s the last book you read and enjoyed? “Totally not a pick-me-up, but ‘Dead Man Walking,’ which was really interesting. The Atlanta opera is running right now the opera, and I had never read the book.” How do you unwind after a long day at FAPA? “I do like to read, and I love to bake. Little known fact, but I started FAPA, I had a custom-cake business where I did birthday cakes and cookies when I was kind of in between a stay-at-home mom and back in the workforce. So I’m a baker.” Do you have a specialty? “I love cookies. They’re a lot of bang for your buck. Buy my favorite thing is to just constantly try new things. So I almost never make the same thing twice. I’m constantly saving recipes. I’m a hoarder of cookbooks and magazine (recipes) and blogs. My Pinterest is all baking.” What’s the big issue in arts in Forsyth County right now? “What I see is a real lack of space. The high schools all have performing arts centers. The Board of Education is about to build this massive, massive performing arts centers, which I’m sure if going to be amazing. “But for people like me, people like local dance schools, private studios who are teaching voice, piano, those kinds of things, there’s just a real lack of space. “So, we’re working on that. In fact, I just left a meeting today with a builder who we’re working with to hopefully within the next month or so launch or own homegrown Kickstarter to create a space.” — Story and photo by Brian Paglia
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