I wrote a piece for the January 2023 issue of Atlanta Magazine about Downtown Atlanta. It’s subscriber-only for the moment, so subscribe. It’s a great magazine despite them hiring me on occasion.
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Who is Downtown for? My latest for Atlanta Magazine
Artful, teasing snapshot my Atlanta Magazine story. -
Whoomp, it is everywhere
Whoomp, there it is. Uf, ahí está. Ouf, ça y est. Puh, da ist es. Boh, eccolo. Угу, вот оно. Uff, oto jest. Hoppsan, där är den. Whoomp, ibi est. Uau, iată. Уф, еве го. Ουφ, ορίστε. Whoomp, tá sé. Aupa, hor dago. Whoomp, na de i de. 우와, 저기 있네. 哎呀，就是这样。Whoomp, hiyo hapo. ، یہ وہاں ہے. Woomp. Kai, akwai shi. Whoop, itu dia. おっと、そこです。وهاووومب ، ها هو. İşte burada. Hum, jen ĝi. Yaitu Begitu.
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Curb alert
This is water runoff from overnight rains. If you remove the color from the photo, the black asphalt becomes white because the water reflects the light of the overcast sky. Removing information from the photograph, in this case the color, allows the viewer to see more.
It’s a phone photo with a VSCO filter that simulates Kodak T-Max P3200. I’ve shot photos with P3200. It was used for situations with low-light, or when you needed to use a fast shutter speed. I mainly used it because it was grainy.
I much prefer being able to conjure its charm without having to spend 4 hours alone in a dark bathroom-turned-darkroom.
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PHONY HONY
“I was excited to spend Christmas with my true love. When they got me a partridge and a pear tree I was disappointed, but I didn’t think much of it. Don’t complain about gifts, right? By day seven though I had 23 birds. Not just small ones. There were geese. My roommate was chill about the partridge and doves but she was not having swans. Don’t get me started on the lords-a-leaping. Eventually my landlord intervened.”
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Holiday music for you
Something to put on shuffle.
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WQXI Solid Gold Atlanta time capsule
I found this in my in-laws’ basement. It’s a 2-LP, genre-agnostic compilation released by WQXI 790AM radio (still on-air today as Atlanta Radio Korea). It used to be sports talk and way before that it was a hugely popular top 40 that put out compilation LPs. No year is printed on it, but the songs on it I know suggest to me it’s 1970 or so.
It’s a fun time capsule: of the Atlanta skyline, old top 40 radio’s catholic approach to playlists, hair cuts, white supremacy, and the city’s media culture.
Unlike 2022’s iconic Downtown view (typically taken from the east – think Walking Dead), this 1970 view is taken from the south (think driving to Downtown from the airport). The image appears to be taken from the air, just across the highway from Georgia State stadium (formerly Turner Field).
The back cover shows Atlanta Stadium (later called Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, now the apartments and parking next to Georgia State stadium). Tasked with finding an image for this LP that screamed “Atlanta” to 1970 record-buying Atlantans, it’s interesting they went with a stadium. It was a bigger deal to have a pro sports stadium then.
Inside the gatefold is a yearbook of the station’s DJs, and a collage of snapshots that includes photos of Tiny Tim and Donovan. I assume they’re from station promo visits. The Donovan station visit might have been to promote his October 1969 concert in Atlanta. Donovan was also promoting, though maybe not intentionally, the popularity of the name girl name Jennifer. One of his hits at the time was “Jennifer Juniper”. Jennifer began its 15 year reign as the most popular baby girl name in Georgia the year after Donovan’s visit. If you’re a Georgia Gen-Xer named Jennifer, this LP sleeves offers you a faint whiff of the soil from which our bumper crop of Gen-X Jennifers grew.
I don’t recognize any of the DJs, all of whom appear to be white except for maybe George Strait (it’s hard to tell in the sketch, and no he’s not that George Strait). The station played black artists. It just didn’t appear to employ very many black people.
Despite the station’s seeming willingness to play anything that was a hit, few of the songs here ended up being top tier oldies radio staples. “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” is the biggest song here by far, and Kenny Rogers is the only artist here who became/remained a big star. “The Letter” was sung by Alex Chilton, who later was in Big Star, but was never a big star.
WQXI is said to have been the inspiration for the WKRP In Cincinnati. Perhaps the helicopter they took the photos from is the one they dropped the turkeys from.
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Who is Viktor Bout?
The U.S. just got WNBA player Brittney Griner out of a Russian prison by trading imprisoned (in the U.S.) international arms dealer Viktor Bout. Bout has run guns for some of your favorite armies, including for the U.S. I wrote about him in 2007.
From August 2007:
Who is Victor Bout?
For several months, the White House and Pentagon have been telling the American public Iran is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American troops in Iraq.
According to the U.S. government, media reports and two Iraq war veterans I’ve spoken to, militants in Iraq frequently attack American vehicles with Iranian-made explosives specially formed to penetrate armor.
Asked earlier this year whether he thought the Iranian government was responsible for sending the weapons to Iraq, President Bush offered this sarcastic reply: “What’s worse? That the government knew — or that the government didn’t know?”
Aww, snap!
How will the Iranian Ministry of Snappy Comebacks ever top that?
Turns out it doesn’t need to.
Last month, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported the Pentagon lost 30 percent of the weapons it sent to Iraq between 2004 and 2007.
That’s 80,000 pistols and 110,000 AK-47 rifles purchased for Iraq’s military and police services gone missing.
What happened to these weapons? If the Pentagon knows, it isn’t saying.
They may be sitting in a warehouse somewhere. They may be in crates with checkered table cloths on top being used as dinner tables.
Or they may be in the hands of Iraqi insurgents and militia fighters, the people sending American soldiers and Marines home on stretchers and in coffins.
And the worst part: The Pentagon should have known its methods of funneling resources into Iraq were so insecure that a major security breach, such as 190,000 guns going missing, was inevitable.
The military doesn’t have enough transport capacity to move people, arms, equipment, food and fuel around on its own. It relies on private shippers. Among them is a man named Victor Bout (pronounced boot), thought to be one of the world’s pre-eminent black-market weapons merchants.
Born in Tajikistan of Russian parents, Bout came to prominence in the late 1990s for arming brutal civil wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Angola — the wars that introduced the phrase “blood diamond” into our vocabularies. He reportedly owns a large fleet of cargo aircraft and has a reputation for being able to get large amounts of almost every weapon imaginable to the remotest of locations. The United Nations and Human Rights Watch have been complaining about him for nearly a decade. A guest on an Aug. 4, 2001, CNN program called him “a kingpin in the illegal small-arms trade.”
For a while in the 1990s, Bout armed the anti-Taliban forces of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Then, in 1995, one of his planes was reportedly captured by Taliban forces.
What some people might have considered a problem, Bout’s organization considered an opportunity. Western intelligence agencies believe Bout used his group’s encounter with the Taliban to make an arms deal. He switched sides and reportedly sold some $50 million of weapons to the Taliban in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In other words, Bout was arming the people who sheltered the terrorists who executed 9/11.
After 9/11, the U.S. government went after Bout. The Treasury Department tried to shut him down by going after his money.
Apparently the Pentagon didn’t get the memo.
Pentagon contractors hired Bout’s planes to move equipment in and out of Baghdad. Among the cargo Bout’s planes were supposed to have shipped: guns for Iraqi military and police.
In other words, the Pentagon paid a well-known double-dealer who sold tanks and guns to the Taliban to fly weapons into Iraq — at the same time the Treasury Department was trying to shut him down.
How many of the missing 190,000 guns were shipped by Bout is unclear. What’s clear, however, is that the missing 190K is just the tip of an iceberg.
Washington Post reporter Douglas Farah and L.A. Times reporter Stephen Braun have just co-authored a book about Bout that claims the United States paid him to ship 200,000 AK-47s to Iraq from Bosnia in 1994. The GAO and Pentagon have no clue where those weapons are now.
Braun and Farah’s book is titled, appropriately, Merchant of Death.
