Tag: Creative Loafing

Tips for reporters who can’t get Taylor Swift tickets

Taylor Swift tickets are the most in-demand concert tickets in my social circle since 2001 when Radiohead played at Stone Mountain. I’m not comparing their commercial stature – I’m saying my social circle has changed. In 2001 it seemed like all of my friends wanted Radiohead tickets. In 2023 it seems like all of my friends and their kids want Taylor Swift tickets.

When Radiohead played Atlanta in 2001 I was writing Creative Loafing’s entertainment and nightlife column. It was a job that gave me easy access to concert tickets, but in this case demand was higher than supply.

It was still the biggest concert of the summer in the alt-weekly world and I had to cover it, with or without tickets. So I did what any resourceful young reporter in my position would have done, I found a man with the same name as Radiohead’s lead singer and invited him to the Toco Hills Caribou coffee for an interview.

From Creative Loafing, August 2001:

Thom York has no memory of recording Amnesiac. He doesn’t really have much to say about any of Radiohead‘s albums. He does, however, have an important message for fans of the band. He wants you to know that a 30-year mortgage with no prepay penalty is preferable to a 15-year mortgage. That’s because, you can pay a 30-year in 15 years, but you can’t pay a 15-year in 30.

The Thom I spoke to is Thom York, the real estate agent, not Thom Yorke, the singer of Radiohead. Although the band’s Stone Mountain Park concert Monday happened after this newspaper’s publishing deadline, it’s too important to ignore, so I called Thom after I saw one of his signs on someone’s lawn. Thom prefers country music over rock, but when the Radiohead song “High and Dry” played on the stereo of the coffeehouse where we spoke, he liked it.

If I were still a reporter I’d have spent the past couple weeks trying to interview a swift tailor, or perhaps I’d be meeting Conyers, Georgia resident Taylor Sweet at Yankee Candle, where I’d buy her a lavender candle.

Incidentally, Thom is still in real estate if you need a house.

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.

Wesley Willis at The EARL

I rescued some old hard drives today and found this photo I took of Wesley Willis at The EARL in East Atlanta. 2003 I think.

He was a completely unique artist, a kind man, and he put on a great rock show.

Don’t Write Drunk

Loss Cat seems like it’s been part of intown Atlanta’s iconography forever, but before it became an icon, someone had to make it and other people had to start noticing it. 

The someone who made it is artist R. Land. I first noticed Loss Cat 18 summers ago in East Atlanta. I wrote about in my Scene & Herd column from July 29, 2004. That column was an experiment of sorts — the event was a bar crawl and I decided to drink. A lot. Do the inhibition-lowering properties of alcohol make for cleverer or more incisive writing? I observed that the Loss Cat looks “sorta broken”. I think the answer is, therefore, no.

This column also documents my adult re-discovery of Toto’s Africa, a re-discovery that later raised thousands of dollars for CARE.

Scene & Herd July 29, 2004

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.

Many years later I ran into R. Land at Publix on Ponce. Next to the check out lanes he asked me how parenthood changes creativity. I think I had diapers in my cart. I don’t remember what I said, but if he asked me today I’d say it makes me more creative (because my perspective has broadened) and less creative (because I have less energy to do stuff).

I haven’t asked him, but I wonder if Tom Branch would agree. He still plays music and has subsequently become a successful video producer.

I wonder who took this photo.