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CL has launched a new blog called Sideshow that exists merely so happy party-goers can see their happy faces the day after. We want to help people remember exactly how much fun they had before they were hungover. And we need a couple awesome photographers to do that.

We’ll be giving you the access to the coolest shows, parties and festivals. You’ll be posting wicked photos to our website. And we’ll pay you. It’s an exceedingly symbiotic relationship.

If you think you’re down for the task or know someone who is, contact me at taralynne.pixley@cln.com. Send me some shots you’ve taken that pass for “nightlife photos” (i.e. you and your friends at a party, drinking in your backyard or wreaking havoc elsewhere) and you just might get picked to be CL’s photo ambassador to the nightcrawlers of Atlanta.

Email me with any questions but check out the Sideshow photo galleries first to get an idea of what we’re looking for. Don’t send me photos of your dog, your grandma or that artsy shot of a fire hydrant. Party pics, people.

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You’ll have to forgive me if I wax a little nostalgic after watching the True Colors Tour’s opener of a two-night stand last night at Chastain Park. We all have our B-52’s stories to tell around here, so I’m sure hearing one from someone who didn’t live in Atlanta until that last two years probably won’t dazzle anyone. But they’re fun to tell anyway. But first, about last night … well, before that, here’s the True Colors credo, as pulled from its site …

The goal of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) equality is at the heart of True Colors. From day one, the tour has sought to raise awareness about the discrimination the GLBT community still faces and raise significant funds for the organizations that work everyday on their behalf. This year, the True Colors Fund of Stonewall Community Foundation has been created to enable increased and efficient fundraising for the tour’s national non-profit partners through various revenue sources.

The brainchild of the Human Rights Campaign and the tour’s headliner, Cyndi Lauper, the True Colors is an entertaining mix of music, comedy and wee bit of get-out-the-boat speechifying. And what was most impressive about the proceedings was how little pontificating was done, even considering comedian Rosie O’Donnell’s sour-grapes rant on her tenure on “The View.” Actually, Rosie was quite funny and more than a little melancholic as she recalled her late mother, and how the more things change, the more they stay the same. Her point: Teach your children well. Point taken, Rosie, who’s got four kids and brought at least some of them along for the ride. But she was at her funniest when she grabbed a chunk of her own flab in a righteous display of healthy body self-image and yelled to an absent Donald Trump: “I’m gonna rub some of this on his orange, bald head. Here, ya prick!” And if the crowd still didn’t dig her plus-size sexiness, she recalled how, when in Mexico, she was all the rage with the menfolk, one of whom explained to her, “Bone is for the meek; meat is for the man!” Good stuff.

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1) Lighting the Sun by Donna Mintz continues at Sandler Hudson Gallery.

2) Craig Seymour discusses and signs It Was All I Could Bare: My Life in the Strip Clubs of Gay Washington, D.C. at Outwrite Bookstore & Coffeehouse.

3) Harvey Milk performs at the Earl with Pride Parade.

4) Young Blood Gallery presents Samuel Parker’s The Road to Excess.

5) The Spill Canvas visits Masquerade.

(Image by Donna Mintz)

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So how did you spend your Creative Loafing Beer Fest? Did you pass by me on your way from the MARTA station, trying to figure out what the hell was up with the closed sidewalk for the last two blocks and why you had to cross the street twice just to get in? If I had a dollar for every person who gave me a screwy look as I played “Sidewalk Monitor,” I could have afforded a ticket to get in. The funny thing was, once I finished my shift and went inside Woodruff, I ran into several Fest-goers who seemed like it was totally worth the re-routing.

I’m not sure if anyone totally got into the “Beer’lympics” theme beyond our scrappy CL staff and volunteers, but it is nevertheless fun to watch our Copy Editor Russell McLendon wear a John McEnroe-like sweatband and a moustache that defies description (and gravity). All I know is we had a helluva turnout despite a persistent early-afternoon threat of rain. The range of brews, from domestic to important, major label to micro-brew, was jaw-dropping. And while most guys of a hetero persuasion must have loved all that tanned skin courtesy the ladies of Pink Pony and Cheetah, I couldn’t help but wonder if there is a chance to provide more beefcake for the other demographic next year. (Stay tuned; we love the cakes.) More than anything I was pleasantly stunned at how many people participated in the “cornhole” games. I mean, it was like watching shuffleboard in Boca Raton. Amazing!

But thanks for everyone who came out, all those who volunteered, and particularly Marketing Director Shana Langfur, who’s been in her new position for like, what time is it?!

For tons more photos from this year’s Beer Fest, visit www.SideshowAtlanta.com.

[Show as slideshow]

(Photos by David Lee Simmons)

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(EDITOR’S NOTE: LOTS MORE PICTURES AFTER THE JUMP!) 

The Gallery at East Atlanta Tattoo’s group art shows continue to draw fans of the lowbrow style, the Monster Mayhem opening on Friday night proved. This show struck a particular chord, not only with the huge crowd that jammed the narrow gallery hallway and back-side patio but also shop/gallery owner Dirk Hays. “I’ve loved monsters since I was a kid,” says Hays, who poured over copies of Creepy and Eerie magazines growing up in Opelika, Ala. This is the fourth show at the gallery, which opened last September. Ideally, Hays would like to have four big seasonal shows with four smaller ones dropped in between. But considering attendance at these events have gone from 300 to more than 500 (at April’s Damn Dirty Ape show), don’t be surprised if they do more. “More and more people are coming to check out these shows,” Hays says.
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The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the 40th anniversary of which is remembered today, was the first historical moment that had any kind of resonance with me. There remain only fragments of it: plopped on my family’s living-room floor while my family, including my Massachusetts-born father, watched the news coverage. I knew something bad had happened, and I think I remember it being Kennedy’s murder, but mostly something bad. But the more vivid memory came days later, on our way down to South Florida for a summer vacation, when my dad lost it and yelled at us in the back seat while we were playing with each other. His anger and grief had overcome him. That emotion resonates and stays with a person over the years.

That’s history for you, especially when you’re young. Sometimes you only remember swatches of moments, and images. Four decades on, RFK seems to live on in a variety of those swatches. Like his speeches, whether on the campaign trail or after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, in which he did his level best to tamp down on the violence sure to come …

Kennedy, like his brother John, has endured a rather spotty interpretation on film (but for the excellent “American Experience” documentary). He was portrayed with surprising timidity by Linus Roache in the 2002 TV movie, RFK, which failed to capture but a lick of his charisma and depth of feeling. My favorite portrayal comes from Martin Sheen, who at various times has portrayed both brothers but was brilliant in the 1974 TV movie The Missiles of October, about the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. (I can barely remember how Steven Culp portrayed him in Thirteen Days, which was more a vehicle for Kevin Costner as a presidential aide than anything else.) Last year brought us RFK Must Die! The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy, which raises new questions about whether Sirhan B. Sirhan (still serving a life sentence in a California prison) actually pulled the trigger.
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So much of Screen on the Green on Thursday night, with its showing of Jaws, felt familiar. There was the huge signature banner covering the monster screen. There was the crowd of picnickers camping out on the sloping grass, this time Centennial Olympic Park. There was the sort-of entertaining pre-screening music act, this time in the form of Athens’ Blue Flashing Light. There was, ultimately, a really cool community vibe that makes Screen on the Green one of my favorite Atlanta experiences.

But there were plenty of differences, some perfectly understandable, others irksome, others a little of both. For starters (and I should have known this given the persistent warnings), there was no outside alcohol permitted, which meant I had to trudge back to my car to drop off that awesome $6 bottle of Cabernet. I loved the cops’ response to my questioning why we could do this at Piedmont but not here: “This is a different park.” Indeed. Centennial Olympic Park is different in a lot of ways. For starters, the lovely view of Midtown is replaced by an almost equally lovely view of downtown. I’m no fan of Atlanta’s bizarro modern aesthetic — where the motif seems to be “20th Century Hodgepodge” — but almost anything looks good at sundown, including the skyline. But still, being forced to pony up $6 for crappy, plastic-bottled Budweiser seemed a ripoff from the get-go. Even more annoying was reliance on the CNN Center for on-the-go food. Am I the only one who misses access to places like Silver Grill? (Added travel note: I decided to use the MARTA train for the first time since moving here, and while I was bummed I wasn’t accosted by Soulja Girl, I LOVED the perspective it gives on the city. Lesson learned.)

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This week’s Time and Place photograph comes from a shoot I did at the dress rehearsal for the Atlanta Opera’s Cobb Energy Center performance of The Marriage of Figaro. This series was inspired by New Yorker magazine, which does a similar column to Time and Place to lead off its “Goings About Town” section. I have been admiring some of the backstage images of New York theater that they run and waiting for an opportunity to try my own.

I really like this series because they present a reality a theater-goer never gets to see — the harp-tuner tuning up a harp in an empty theater, the characters getting transformed into peeps from the 18th century. My favorite pictures from this series are the images of the chorus warming up. To me, these images are humorous and force you to contemplate what is going on. They remind me of Lee Friedlander, one of my photographic heroes. He did a series titled “At Work” that featured people in the 1980’s working at computers. Friedlander shot the portraits so that the computer screens could not be seen by the viewer and all one sees is the subject’s head, which forces the viewer to puzzle over what is going on. Those photos had the effect of showing the dehumanization of people as they work in front of computers, with their bland expressions and bored looks. To me, the chorus images have the opposite effect. Their animated expressions show the utter joy and focus these great artists bring to their work.

I owe a big thank you to Cristina Herrera and the Atlanta Opera for letting me photograph them in their most vulnerable state.

(Photos by Joeff Davis / slideshow produced by Tara-Lynne Pixley)

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