Scene & Herd - I think I blessed the rains
But don’t remember much else
On Saturday afternoon, I went to Centennial Olympic Park for the NBA Rhythm ‘n’ Rims festivities. I live close to downtown, but my MARTA ride there took nearly an hour, 25 minutes of which was spent standing on the platform waiting for a train at Vine City. The full-figured woman wearing a tight T-shirt with “Fat Stack” airbrushed on the front and two arrows pointing at her butt airbrushed on the back was my only amusement.
Rhythm ‘n’ Rims was (and since it’s touring the country, still is) a basketball and music carnival aimed at imprinting the NBA brand and the brands of co-sponsors into the not-yet-hardened skulls of Atlanta youth. Almost all of the “free” entertainment had some sort of brand name. You couldn’t just shoot a basketball, you had to take the Speed Stick 24/7 Challenge and score seven points in 24 seconds. Entrants who scored the seven points won a new T-shirt in which to perspire.
Most of the participants were pretty bad shooters, surprisingly so when you consider that they were mostly young, fit and obviously interested enough in basketball to be there. One of the better shooters was a guy in a wheelchair for whom everybody clapped when he made a lay up. I thought it was kinda patronizing to applaud a lay up, but the guy seemed to like it OK.
Huh?: I broke my “don’t get drunk on the job” rule (and subsequently, my “don’t write while hung over” rule) for the weekend’s East Atlanta bar crawl, held in honor of the 140th anniversary of the Civil War’s battle of Atlanta. I did my honest best to immerse myself in the spirit of the event by, well, immersing myself in the spirits of the event. My memories are hazy, but it went something like this:
Three rum and Cokes at Iris: I met some friends at the bar just past five. While I stood waiting for the bartender, the woman seated next to me said, “You can sit down, I don’t bite,” which I’ve chosen to interpret, perhaps incorrectly, as a pickup line. Nobody’s ever used such an old-fashioned, Mae Westy sort of line on me before. Come to think of it, nobody’s ever really used a line on me before, period.
Two bottles of Miller High Life at Joe’s Coffee Shop: Joe’s doesn’t serve beer. Artist R. Land was showing some of his work there and he had beer with him. He’s nice, so he offered me some. The evening starts to get blurry here. I kinda remember R. Land saying something about how images from his “Loss Cat” series depicting a fictional missing cat have been printed in Found magazine. I remember that the cat looks sorta broken.
Four shots of cold sake at Thai East Atlanta: A man at the restaurant named Moses brought me and my friends two large bottles of sake. When he brought the first one, he told me that he likes my work in CL. I was already 100 percent drunk, but I remember that very clearly.
Several vodkas with Red Bull at the EARL: I know I was there because I’ve got pictures. Lots of pictures, mostly of my friends hugging and leaning into one another the way drunk friends do when there’s a camera nearby. At some point, I handed my camera around because I’ve got lots of pictures of me as well. Legend of the Giant Squid played and I remember liking them a lot, although I’m not sure how much of their set I saw. Squid Tom Branch’s wife, Penny, told me to say hi to their new baby Max. I wrote that down.
More vodka at Mary’s, quantity unknown: There’s no photographic evidence of this, so I must have gone back to my car to drop off my camera. It was karaoke night and my friends Matt and Jen sang Toto’s “Africa.” I know that I sang the “I bless the rains” part along with them. If I grabbed the mic from one of them to do it, I apologize.
Other than Shermaning 25 percent of my brain cells, I’m now not sure what any of this had to do with the Civil War.
CNN: I can’t believe it took me three years to get around to writing about the CNN Tour, one of the city’s most popular attractions. I went on Sunday, eager for something air-conditioned and mentally unchallenging since I was still hung over and sweating vodka from the night before.
Usually tourist attractions are chipper and customer-friendly, almost to the point of annoyance, but the CNN Tour, at least when I went, was kinda brusque. I felt like members of the tour group were more an annoyance than welcome, money-spending guests. A metal-detector-manning guard, who was very snippy with a South Asian man who didn’t immediately understand the order to empty his pockets, was the most obvious example.
The tour begins with a ride on what’s supposedly the longest free-standing escalator in North America. Overhead are photos of CNN’s stars, including my favorite, Larry King. Larry also generously donated a pair of his trademark suspenders to the tour. If suspenders could talk, I could scarcely imagine the stories about royal watchers, former prosecutors and the great Doris Day that particular pair could tell.
The guide joins the group for a tour of a replica control room. He then takes everyone to a special-effects blue screen before leading the group through observation balconies from which we can see the sets. On the main CNN set, Fredrika Whitfield was reading the news while producers and news gatherers, some visible on air, worked or pretended to work behind her. Of two men seated closest to the tour balcony, one was eating a pizza at his desk while the other was busy with a crossword puzzle.
At the end of the tour, the guide asked us if we had any final questions. I asked him if he thinks that CNN news-hottie Rudi Bakhtiar might go out with me. “Probably not,” he replied. He then added, “A lot of people ask me that.”