After a hellish 12 days with no internet in my home, I’m back! It’s really difficult to blog at coffee shops, because there are too many distractions. Blogging is hard! We just make it look easy.
Here’s a vintage reminder for those of you sad about the tenuous fate of Atlanta’s pandas. We will always have Coca-Cola!
Archive | July, 2009
We’ll always have Coke
23 JulThe question that’s been on everyone’s mind
15 Jul
Someone wants to know:
Why doesn’t Atlanta feel like Gone With The Wind?
I went on a 4 day trip to Atlanta back in 2003. I enjoyed the city okay, but I didnt get that Old South feeling anywhere. I am from Richmond- so I am naturally used to a lot of Southern hospitality.
Anyways, I took a tour of the Margaret Mitchell home (its really a one level flat), and it was okay. The tour guide was nice. But I was dissapointed in how generic Atlanta seems to be. It seems like anyplace in the USA. I mean, I know its a big city.
But anyways, I was hoping for women in hoop skirts to say fiddle dee dee, and where was Rhett Butler? Stuck on the Marta?
Okay, just kidding.
But you know what I mean.
Atlanta felt like a cross between Washington DC and Chicago.
Anyways, Atlanta just didnt feel much like GWTW.
I hope maybe I can visit again and get that Gone With The Wind feelin’
Frankly, I think Gone With the Wind is kind of a snooze, but Mitchell has a point here that still holds true: “Scarlett had always liked Atlanta for the very same reasons that made Savannah, Augusta and Macon condemn it. Like herself, the town was a mixture of the old and new in Georgia, in which the old often came off second best in its conflicts with the self-willed and vigorous new.”
Also, to answer this tourist’s question, it stopped being legal for rich white men to buy and sell human beings to lace their daughters into their hoop skirts, and that’s when Atlanta stopped being like Gone With the Wind. Thank God.
Previously: “The story behind those fabulous Vera Bradley bags!”
Just a suggestion
10 Jul
This was only my first of many, many ballots I will forge for Creative Loafing‘s Best of Atlanta ’09, and look what I noticed:
Before I could even finish! Is the site prompting me to vote for him? Is it just a lucky prediction? Or has he garnered that many votes already? What does the smiley face mean? HOW DOES DEMOCRACY WORK?
(Sorry, Mark Davis, but we gotta stay tru to our roots and vote for T-Dubs. Bulldawgs 4 lyfe!)
We also want to encourage all our readers to vote for Miss Darrow’s vanity project, Burn Away, for best local arts website.
Pecanne Log won’t be campaigning for votes for any category because the shame of not winning after publicly admitting it’s important to us to have that kind of validation and recognition would be too crushing. We have dignity, you know! And last year we received some sort of consolation prize for making Thomas Wheatley a household name, and that’s enough, right? Here’s a photo of us at the award ceremony last year: (more…)
Drag and Atlanta: We go way back
10 JulHere’s something from the Atlanta Constitution in 1913 (from the book Gay and Lesbian Atlanta). The article was about Anthony Auriemma, “a professional female impersonator who contested Atlanta’s city ordinance banning cross-dressing.” Would that he were still around today, because Danni Lee Harris totally wouldn’t let “Chief Beavers” mess with him!
Auriemma was at at the top of his game back in these days as a vaudeville drag queen (primarily performing as Francis Renault after leaving Atlanta), traveling the country where he “enjoyed the attention of many bedazzled young men.”
(via)
Lots more on Francis Renault here at Queer Music Heritage with some fantastic photographs.
Summer reading
9 Jul
Boy, are you guys in for a treat! Guess what I just got in the mail? Highbrows, Hillbillies and Hellfire: Public Entertainment in Atlanta, 1880-1930, by Steve Goodson. I’m excited to get to the part about dime museums so maybe I can get some ideas for a little dime museum of my own. I think I am going to try to buy the Rose Mansion, that brick Victorian house on Peachtree across from Crawford Long, and open the dime museum there. Then I could also eat chicken, waffles, or game pie whenever I felt like it, on account of its proximity to Gladys Knight Chicken & Waffles and the Shakespeare Tavern.
Would you guys pay a dime to see my treasures and some sort of hastily assembled freak show, with acts like “The Terrifying Girl Who Loses Her Temper All Too Quickly” and “The Well-Mannered Gentleman With The Astounding Ability To Prepare Over One Hundred Delicious Dishes With Only Mexicorn And Mayonnaise” and “Thomas Wheatley”?
Wait, according to my calculations, 10 cents in 1869 (the heyday of Atlanta’s dime museum scene) is equal to $1.60 today. Well, there goes my business model.
Atlanta’s garden of Eden
8 Jul
Are we heartbroken about the demise of DeKalb’s plans for a tacky theme park? No? Well, you know, Atlanta did have its own amusement park, and I’m not talking about the place in Austell where you can buy Taz satin baseball jackets. It was Ponce de Leon Park, and it was the most beautiful place on earth, known as “the Coney Island of Atlanta.” That area is now known as “where the Whole Foods is in Midtown.”
Well, we all know the Atlanta Crackers used to play at that site, but before Ponce de Leon Park came along in the very early 20th century, that area had a spring and some little man-made lakes with summer houses.
(via Southern Spaces)
A summer house along Ponce; can you imagine? Everything you see covered in water in that photo is now covered in asphalt, for parking.
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News you can use
7 JulWeather.com now gives makeup tips along with their 10-day forecast. Now how about that?
As if every proper Southern lady hadn’t thought of that already!
Summer sweeps
7 Jul
It’s the summer doldrums in TV land – don’t even talk to me about NYC Prep, okay? If you need something to hold your attention and where the lead characters aren’t emotional cripples, I recommend digging through the archives of PBA 30′s This Is Atlanta with Alicia Steele website or YouTube page. The short episodes explore our city and its environs’ wonders and eccentricities, such as the Cotton States Cat Club, Burn Unit B-Boy Dance Crew, The Great Speckled Bird, the Pallookaville corn dog wagon, Legynds LARPers, &c., &c., &c.
How can you not love a show that plays Close to the Edge over merchant prince battle scenes?
Tag team Rascals
6 JulI only wish more of our readers would send in their Rascal gang sightings, like the one Thomas Wheatley helpfully submitted today.
However, we did receive a hot tip earlier this evening that, “I just saw a pidgeon [sic] eating a condom at whole foods.” That one, although unrelated to personal mobility devices, was also pretty good.
Previously: Your Rascal, your safety, and you
Happy 4th of July!
4 JulI did a Google image search of “Atlanta 4th of July” and this was my favorite find.
(via)
Happy Independence Day!
Husky, hairy, and homosexual
3 Jul
These three days are not just a long weekend devoted blowing off fingers in celebration of our nation’s independence from an oppressive empire; it’s ATLANTA BEAR FEST! Don’t worry, it’s nothing to be frightened of, according to this recent article in the AJC:
Bears are on the move in north Georgia. A number of bear-related incidents have been reported in the past few weeks and months, including two on Thursday.
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“We have a healthy, growing, really thriving bear population in Georgia and north Georgia in particular,” Hammond said. “We’re seeing bears in places where we haven’t seen them in some time.”
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Some simple precautions Hammond suggests individuals take include never feeding a bear, respecting bear cubs and minimizing the amount of garbage, pet food and bird food kept outside.
Did you get that? RESPECT THE CUBS.
(I know, I know – it’s difficult not to be redundant when we’re over on Twitter and here.)
Previously: Community calendar
New patterns for Summer 09
3 JulI can’t tell if Urban Outfitters had something to do with this street art or not. 
Poncey-Highland
Breaking news! Atlanta’s seedy past!
1 JulYou guys, let’s get real about our roots. Atlanta has not always been the wholesome, safe hometown we love and respect. There was once a tainted time in our genteel city before the Clermont Lounge, before the Ying-Yang Twins, before the basement dungeon at the Atlanta Eagle – this was a long, long time ago, but it existed nevertheless.
The other day I discovered (on what appears to be the blog of the Wigwam building) this excerpt from the 1889 tome History of Atlanta by Wallace P. Reed:
East Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia is the railroad company that in the very late 19th century became Southern Railway and eventually Norfolk Southern. These shops were later known as the Pegram Shops. Snake Nation is now Castleberry Hill, but lives on as the name of the neighborhood’s kickball team.
More on this area from the DeKalb Sheriff’s website:
By 1851, two sections of Atlanta, known as Murrel’s Row and Snake Nation, inhabited by the criminal element, had grown in size and reputation. The first Atlanta jail was not very suitable. Prisoners would either dig their way out, or wait until enough people had been incarcerated, at which time they would simply turn the structure over, and crawl out. It was in this year that law abiding citizens started their own war against crime, and completely destroyed Murrel’s Row and Snake Nation, scattering their inhabitants.
“Murrel’s Row?” (Also spelled Murrell’s Row.) “What’s that?” you ask. From Archival Atlanta:
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