Atlanta

Gobblefest: Give Thanks

Preface: Five years ago this past June, I completed my doctoral dissertation on the music scene in my hometown and the corresponding website CBLocals. On p. 15, I wrote…

CBLocals provides a more quotidian example of locality in music scenes not often found in current literature. Many recollections of music scenes from both scholars and the masses center on large urban centers…music communities stemming from or near Athens, Minneapolis, Boston and Washington are given prominence in music scene narrative due to the prolific number of nationally recognized bands that emerged from them (Azerrad, 2001).

Yet for every Athens, Georgia, there are hundreds of small communities such as industrial Cape Breton. Today, hundreds upon hundreds of bands play to small local audiences and will never be heard by a mass audience, Internet exposure notwithstanding. (This is actually as true of urban areas as well although these bands at least possess greater proximity to national media). These examples bear further analysis as there is much to learn from how people develop music scenes without the amenities granted by urban locations. This is especially important in how participants of music scenes articulate a sense of, alternately, pride and disappointment in the music scenes that they feel helps to define them.

…..

Where I was 20 years ago today is either fitting, ironic or a little bit of both when you consider where I was a couple of Saturdays ago.

I attended the second of three massively attended Outkast shows at Olympic Park here in Atlanta. For someone who moved here in August 2003, nothing could be more emblematic of re-living a zeitgeist. Because it wasn’t but for a few weeks after I moved here that The Love Below/Speakerboxx completely took over the earth (or at least it seemed that way). “Hey Ya!” was everywhere you could look and after a decade of hustling and five full length releases, Andre 3000 & Big Boi had officially staked their claim as the city’s newest “most famous sons.”

Normally, events like #ATLast are eschewed by the “I knew them back when they were next-to-nothing” crowd but quite frankly, the Outkast shows attracted everyone from the most casual to hardcore fan and with absolutely everyone loving it. For many of the over 60,000 people that attended one or more of the shows, the Outkast reunion represented nothing less than the ultimate homecoming. I noted that the song that produced the biggest reaction of the night was not anything from the aforementioned album, but rather Big Boi’s 2005 cut “Kryptonite” in which he triumphantly declares that on any given night, you can “find him in the A.” One fan told a newsreporter on Friday that the events was like a home game for the Braves, Hawks or Falcons. I would argue that would be selling it short: Atlanta’s known to be pretty transplant-friendly for road teams in sports. Outkast is as unanimous a home team as it gets for the ATL.

The Triumphant Return

In sum, there’s fewer things can make you feel more of Atlanta than seeing Outkast, all these years later, in Atlanta.

So where was I 20 years ago today, (I made) you ask? Over 3050km north of what wasn’t quite yet Olympic Park and certainly not among tens of thousands of people of multiple races, ages and creeds in an open air venue. Instead I was among maybe 250ish mostly teenagers (and mostly white teenagers at that) at what was then known as Steelworkers Hall for a Thanksgiving Sunday event called “Gobblefest.” And I’m pretty it sure it was mostly teenagers because I was one of them.

Were we ever so cute?

Some of that year’s Gobblefest strikes me as embarrasingly hokey in hindsight. There were still not a lot of original local bands to make up a 23-band show so some cover bands had to make up the space. I remember some band covering John Mellencamp’s “Wild Night” and me being one of three people in the room for it. Yet the room was packed when Saucy Jack covered Lenny Kravitz and had us all moshing (this is my secret shame).

But the 1994 Gobblefest was the first time I remember paying money to watch bands that were a) from my hometown and b) no more than a few years older than me and in a few cases, as old as me. The highlight for me was Smiling Uniks because two of the members of the band were high school seniors I’d been in the same classes with since Grade 7.

Only minimal damage to the case after all this time…

I’m treading into long-retold “wow, anyone can do it” punk rock clichés, I know. But here were actual honest-to-goodness teenagers writing their own stuff and playing it. Oh sure, I’m sure if an unsentimental distant spectator listened to it, s/he’d write a lot of it off as grunge posturing. But some of the music stuck with me– Try listening to a song in which the lyrics consist solely of “Bubblegum, bubblegum, I like bubblegum,” then try to get it out of your head. Come to think of it, it seems more subversive and clever at age 37 than it did then…

Gobblefest didn’t turn me into a musician (although I kept writing lousy poetry for a couple more years). But it did have a transformative effect on me. I knew now that there was something going on in my hometown that was fun, energetic, creative to which I could relate. And for the non-quotidian indie rock places, that’s pretty important. I have nothing against the fiddle music of Cape Breton, but at the time, none of it made me feel happy to be of Sydney like being at Gobblefest did.

SIDEBAR: I’m acutely aware that’s really silly given how amorphous indie rock is vs. Cape Breton fiddling. No need to point it out. 🙂

I stayed home for college and my sister cajoled me into going to the student org fair because college wasn’t going to be more high school: I had to get involved in something. So I made a beeline to the “college radio” table even though the “college radio station” had no frequency (literally) and 19 years later, it still doesn’t. But oh the work they do…

Gobblefest became a three-day event that year and it was the first of six that I’d volunteer for (a couple of which I co-organized). You can openly laugh at me finding that a profound weekend of my life because I didn’t utilize a single creative skill at the second Gobblefest. At least that I can remember.

I didn’t go on any poster runs, trusty staple-gun in hand, but I remember mixing cola and coffee together at the merch table on a dare. I didn’t design any posters or write any press releases, but I remember selling a shirt for a band (as in…the lead singer literally hen-scratched the band’s name on one single shirt and one single person bought it for…$10?). I didn’t network with anyone to make any band come to the show, but I remember talking to the members of Plumtree and harboring a typical college crush on them (gosh, they were so nice). I wasn’t in on the budget planning for the show, but I remember being told at the end of the night to “keep all the juice bags” (if you have to ask…).

There was always lugging stuff. That I remember. That and seeing a lot of cool bands.

…and everyone had a good time

I’m reveling in recalling minutiae because that was my first volunteer gig and before you knew it, I’d be finding bands for shows, plastering posters all over town(s) and lugging gear in my mom’s Cavalier because my cheap sorry college self still couldn’t afford a car. (Sorry Mom! I like to think the 37-point turns out of the back of MusicStop carrying amps the car wasn’t built for didn’t harm the car’s transmission, but it probably did).

I still find everything I did then cropping up in my work life: This will be the third year in a row I will do a panel at CMA/ACP on review writing. I have to write up press releases before and after events all the time. Organizing MMC requires a lot of the same networking skills. I talk about things running on “rock time” all the time (hint: a lot of things in my life run on “rock time”). Watching students get to the verge of disavowing each other for life on time-intensive assignments (I’m looking at you, newspapers…) and having to be the “voice of reason” when the project still needs to complete itself inside 48 hours.

I once attended a leadership retreat for GSU and when the last session concluded in what was essentially cafeteria space, I told the students in my group to clean up everything and pack it out because “you need to leave the venue better than you found it.” The co-owner of the location- a fairly religious individual- was impressed at my mantra.

“Yup. Y’know where I learned that? Indie rock shows.”

She seemed a bit surprised…I think she figured I’d learned it from my parents (not that they didn’t try…). But in Cape Breton, you often had to rely on church halls to supply the venue. They weren’t listening to your loud, raucous music…you sure as hell were going to leave the place much more spic-and-span than you found it.

So why’d I bother mentioning Outkast in the first place? Well, see, when the first Gobblefests were happening, over 1900 miles away in Atlanta, a college radio station with a 100,000 watt frequency was playing Outkast on the weekends. And as a grad student, I found myself repeating my “let’s go try out for the college radio station” ways for that outfit and witnessing the whole process of people finding their place repeat itself anew.

The truth is, none of the bands you’ll see at Gobblefest may ever “rule the earth” like Outkast did (and one could argue that in this age, no band will ever “rule the earth” period but that’s a whole other story). So I might see it as a tad pointless to go to see a band when they’re “just this small band.” Still, it might end up being a neat fringe bonus point and I like to think that somewhere in the crowd at Centennial a few weeks ago were the GSU students who were convinced they were the only ones on campus who knew who Andre & Big Boi were then. I hoped it made them smile.

So if getting to say “I saw X Band when they were just playing at New Dawn” ten years down the line is appropriate incentive for any Cape Breton kids to check out this year’s Gobblefest this weekend, then by all means, seize it. It can happen in Sydney too, maybe not as easily but just the same, heartwarming homecomings are fun when you get older.

But really, more importantly, Gobblefest for me was the beginning of making friendships with fellow organizers and volunteers. It was also getting a chance to watch current and future friends be rock stars at least for a few days. One of my friends got a whole crowd of teenagers to sing his song in an arena concourse. Another rose out of a coffin to start his band’s set. Another one did his show with his arm in a cast because he’d broken it during a show in his resident province…and he had shirts that told the tale of his injury and how he actually returned to the club on the same night to see his favourite rock band.

That’s just fun.

Back Pocket Material at Gobblefest, circa 2011

All of which is a long way of saying, I mostly linked this on my social networks for people I know who either have kids, or know people who do, in Sydney. Tell ’em there’s an all-ages Gobblefest on Sunday and tell them they should go. And tell them that they are going to see talented and creative people and they’re not from another planet and they’re not from “big town, Canada/USA,” they’re either your parents’ friends– and yes, those people can be cool too– but more importantly, they and the audience are just the friends in town they haven’t made yet.

During one of the Gobblefests (I’ve long forgotten which one), one of the logo designs simply reused the same expression we’re all told during Thanksgiving (Canadian or American): Give Thanks. Even though I’d heard the expression in a hundred different places and times, it never resonated with me as much as it did on a Gobblefest poster.

So I give you thanks, Gobblefest. Go break your turkey leg this weekend.

Public Property Filming and Public Building Funds

Well, I’m off to Peru!

That’s also my way of announcing not to expect any blog/Twitter activity in the next few weeks. For all of my attempts to fake “worldliness,” I’m not worldly at all– this trip will mark my first excursion outside of North American soil. Kind of nerve-wracking and exhilarating.

Between Machu Picchu and the Amazon, I’m going to learn all about backpacks, Camel Baks and water “potability” (it’s often tinted and not all that great-tasting). And that’s before we even get to the experiences distinct to Peru. If Anthony Bourdain has taught me anything, my tastebuds might need to do some serious acclimating.

Still, pretty exciting, hopefully the blogosphere won’t be too entertaining in my absence.

Not Dr. McNeil’s typical dinner…
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Filming the police is always a hot button subject. A couple of differing cases this week on that.

In Augusta, Matthew Haley was arrested while filming from a public sidewalk, then interrogated again while being interviewed by local news on the subject. A much more violent case occurred in Hawthorne, California where police arrested Leon Rosby as he was filming a crime scene. They then repeatedly shot his dog upon his escape from Rosby’s vehicle during his arrest.

Every case like this has its own individual considerations. The Augusta police argued that Haley was “drawing suspicion” by filming and not providing ID. The Hawthorne police argued that filming wasn’t the offense of which Rosby was guilty, but of obstructing police work with unnecessarily loud music blaring from his car. The shooting of the dog, they argued, was for the safety of the police as he was out to protect his owner.

I try not to revert to being instinctively unsympathetic to the police in cases such as these. Typically the first reports come from the aggrieved. As such, it’s easy to slant the story away from any legitimate concerns police may have (for e.g., if I was working on a crime scene with loud music blaring nearby, I would want that quieted as well). That said, it’s becoming alarming how often the official responses to situations such as these often begin with “the police found this annoying or suspicious” and then end with “once this person wouldn’t respond to the cops, it was therefore OK for them to arrest this person.”

I worry about cases like these when I think about my students and any time they’re out to cover a rally, arrest or any other public event. I was asked in court about whether my students are trained to obey police commands at all times. I found the question worrisome in its phrasing and replied that students are always trained to comply with the law, which led to a trying back-and-forth, to say the least.

This has become an exceedingly tricky issue in the past ten years as now just about everyone has a device with which they can film something. The right of the citizen is the most important thing in play– no one should be arrested for filming something in a public place. However, there’s also an important subconsideration: how realistic is it for police forces to approach to public filming in this manner in an era such as this?

This has been the new reality for awhile…but can law enforcement adjust?

It’s conceivable that if an arrest were happen on main street on AnyMajorCity, USA, dozens– nay, hundreds– will probably whip out their phones. Unless a person is standing directly in the way or path of a criminal or an officer, isn’t preoccupation with all of this incredibly unpragmatic? The sergeant in the Haley case argues that one safety consideration is planning out “escapes” for future crimes such as the Boston Marathon bombing. Yet every public place will probably eventually be well-known through filming in this era, it may just be that law enforcement have to get used to the assumption that most everyone knows the layout of most everything.

(Apropos of almost nothing, it reminds me of the infamous exchange between Tim Rafe and Pierre Trudeau during 1970’s October Crisis, in which Rafe argued Trudeau’s rationale for martial law was ultimately impractical even if morally justifiable. Oh to think of the cellphone footage Trudeaumania would have produced…)

The teachable moment for student press is: have your ID with you at all times. The sad part is: even if the law doesn’t necessitate you having it, trouble might still occur regardless. That is very, very worrisome indeed.

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If I asked you to guess where one of the most watched municipal governments in North America was…would you guess “Glendale, Arizona?” If you’re not a hockey fan, probably not. Yet it’s been the case in recent years due to the Phoenix Coyotes saga.

The Coyotes are “Exhibit A” in the “MADNESS” file of public-private relations in sports. It would take an entire month of blog entries to properly recap the team’s story but a nutshell version goes something like this (and I can’t emphasize enough how much this nutshell version leaves out):

More riveting than it looks, I assure you

The NHL team moved from Winnipeg to downtown Phoenix in 1996. Northern hockey fans greeted the market with suspicion and the arena was not built for hockey. The team was losing money every year so the owners sought a new arena and got one in the neighbouring city of Glendale (on the public dime, of course) as part of the consumerist experiment known as Westgate City Center. However, the team lost even more money there leaving the team owner to declare bankruptcy and throw the keys to the NHL. The NHL didn’t like that the owner tried to sell the team to a man that wanted to move it and ever since then, the city of Glendale has been forking over dollars to the NHL to “run the arena” (i.e. keep the Coyotes in town at a severe loss and to the detriment of Glendale’s bond rating).

The latest chapter came on late Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning as Glendale approved a deal that might take several business degrees to understand, in which the IceArizona investment group will receive a) a loan from the NHL, b) a loan from investment banks, and c) a “management fee” from Glendale…all to be the owners of the Phoenix Coyotes. Hockey fans watched anxiously to see if the council might go in the other direction, especially as a rejection would have certainly meant relocation.

A highly recommended website to learn about just how far city and state governments will go to appease pro sports teams is Field of Schemes, from the authors of book-of-same-name. It details the continuing saga of concessions– (mostly) financial and otherwise– that teams usually receive from cities and states fearful of losing status, businesses and/or revenue if their teams jump town.

Yet it’s debatable how much prestige, revenue or business the Phoenix Coyotes bring the city of Glendale. The only publicity the Coyotes seem to draw is negative, even in years where they’re winning, they bleed money and arguably every business supported by the Coyotes presence could realistically exist with a minor league team (which is not cheap but is certainly much cheaper to run). In a hilariously sublime moment, one of the first citizens to plead with the council Tuesday night to agree to the deal was a Phoenix sports store owner…whose businesses aren’t in Glendale. The city has attracted scorn for laying off public employees (no, not these brave folks, but the optics remain terrible regardless) and drowning itself in red ink to pursue the Coyotes project…all for fear that it’s all or nothing because abandoning it will lead to a white elephant.

The case is fraught with nationalistic tensions as well, creating an interesting fissure in the Canadian vision of American capitalism. The majority of northern hockey fans, but especially many Canadian hockey fans, have been calling for the relocation of the Yotes for a long while now. Quebec City, Markham, Hamilton and even Saskatoon all have businesspeople harbouring serious NHL aspirations and many fans are bitter that they haven’t been realized.

The negotiation of the Free Trade agreement coincided with the infamous Wayne Gretzky departure to Los Angeles and provided Canadians with a prism of which they felt business would operate– sentiment and tradition wouldn’t matter if dollars and cents dictated going south. Yet dollars and cents, Canadians argue, would support multiple NHL franchises in Canadian locations where there currently aren’t any. Former impediments such as a lack of revenue sharing or a low Canadian dollar are no longer present. Essentially, the grievance goes something like “we were told it was just business when it was a bunch of teams moving to the south…why can’t it be just business now?”

Which, of course, then comes right back around to proposals for public money for private stadiums. The league’s return to Winnipeg has those aggrieved cities sensing a change in the wind, although ironically enough, the rumoured top contender in this year’s “move the Yotes” sweepstakes was an American northwest city planning to fund its stadium with *gasp* private money– Seattle.

The Coyotes saga hit closer to residence for me in 2011 when the Glendale Council injected $25 million at the last minute to keep the Yotes skating on Arizona ice. That expedited the relocation of the Atlanta Thrashers to Winnipeg in lieu of the former Winnipeg Jets. Atlanta’s city government said and did very little in that instance but that hasn’t been the case with the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons. And thus creates a whole new potentially cautionary tale…

One conception of the ambitious Atlanta Falcons stadium project

It’s one thing to assess these investments from a civic perspective by gauging how many dollars and cents are gained back by having major sports teams. It’s another to assess it by how many years you get out of the investment. And by the standards of North American pro sports towns, Atlanta has a bad track record. The Omni stood for less than three decades and if a new Falcons stadium is constructed, the Georgia Dome will meet a similar fate. It’s not out of line for churches and citizens to be a little bit taken aback at this venture because business owners will tell us that this building will stand for a long time but history tells a different story. It’s also dubious as to whether or not the proposed $200 million of public money will stay at $200 million and come solely from a proposed hotel tax and not somewhere else. (Bless their cotton-woolen socks, the poor ol’ NFL has graciously loaned the Falcons an equivalent amount to help out).

It’s worth noting is that this project directly affects Georgia State, as it would constitute demolishing the Dome and taking the Panthers football team down the street with the Falcons

All of which raises the question: how necessary is it to have these palaces in your neighbourhood to be a thriving metropolis? Most cities with a population over 100,000 manage to have a major sporting facility to accommodate their growth, but the level of return on the investment without pro sports is difficult to assess. One can look to the Sprint Center in Kansas City for an example of a thriving arena without a team, but then, that arena too funnels most of its direct profits to the arena operator, not the city that built it.

Which makes me wonder if Coyotes fans have it right– you’re gonna pay and someone else will collect regardless, so maybe it doesn’t matter how much you spend to keep it busy. The Falcons already keep a building busy so it will take a lot to economically justify ripping it down and putting up a new one.

Sports Hurts (Why?), Cars Sell…and So Does Chicken

Living in the U.S. during the Summer Olympics is pretty weird.** Canada is historically pretty terrible at the Summer Olympics, unless communist countries are boycotting en masse. But the U.S., of course, is not.

You can always count on them placing in the top three in the overall medal count. So the stories that NBC latches onto are usually centered on inevitable victory…or at the very least, an inevitably decent chance at victory. Michael Phelps: just how many medals will he win? Missy Franklin: a bunch of gold medals or just a bunch of medals? The Fab Five gymnasts: awesome or merely great?****

**Well, statistically speaking, no it isn’t, since I haven’t lived in Canada during the Summer Olympics since 1996…when they were ironically enough happening right here in Atlanta.

****A refreshing counter to this is 11 Points’ detailing 11 nations that have never won an Olympic medal and why you should root for them.

So Monday’s women’s football/soccer semifinal between the U.S. and Canada was particularly interesting to me. For American viewers, it was just another chapter in their diverse book of inevitable medal opportunities. For Canadian viewers, it was a titanic David-vs.-Goliath struggle with our neighbours to the south, who’ve won three gold and one silver in the four previous Olympics.

The United States won 4-3 in a game filled with tension, drama and post-game bitterness. What struck me the most about all of it was just how much it genuinely hurt when Canada lost. I mean, here I am, a 35 year old man who never played an organized game of soccer in his life (does tennis court soccer at Churchill elementary count?) watching a bunch of people he will never meet playing a game that Canada was absolutely certainly destined to lose going in…and I was just FLOORED.

It reminded me of Bill Simmons’ excellent reflection of the emotional rollercoaster that is being a sports fan, told both through his fanship and his daughter’s. Simmons argues that watching his daughter sob over her favourite hockey team’s loss leaves him wondering why he introduced her to sports fandom in the first place, only to identify the merit of fandom in the in-between moments (the “suture,” if you would) that he argues sports makes possible.

I think I see the merit in what he’s saying although when you’re a Canadian watching the game in an American office by yourself, that explanation loses its lustre. It still *hurt* somehow; even though I couldn’t name more than three players on the team and 99% of the nation didn’t watch a single game of Canadian soccer before yesterday. (I can at least own having followed the team since its third game). It wasn’t like this game was a tremendous social lubricant.

There have been confirmations of positive relations between a fan’s favourite team’s outcomes and their self-esteem or moods. But I can’t help but wonder if the appreciation of the beautiful loss is overlooked in such research. Dating back to Barthes, those that have studied professional wrestling have usually returned the argument that fans identify with both the good AND bad wrestling presents: there HAS to be the unfair outcomes to make it all work because that’s how we understand life to work. So while we profess to be upset when the bad guys win, we often really aren’t because if they didn’t win more often than the good guys…well, THAT (more so than any “fakery”) would just look like a sham.

Comedian Louis C.K. appeared on Simmons’ podcast a few weeks ago and spoke something that is heresey for most sports fans: that there are losses from his favourite athletes and sports teams that he *gasp* enjoyed, because they made for a better story than a win might have. I suppose having taught a film class or three and having studied narratology should leave me more imminently curious to interrogate this narrative. Whether or not a loss was more interesting because of what it symbolized, like Rocky going the distance and just being happy about it.

In that regard, I appreciated Canada’s loss for its poetry. But all told, if I was to tell the truth, my brain sees the tragic drama, my heart just wants the damn handling the ball call back so I can see what would have happened…

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I said last week that Atlanta was locked, theoretically speaking, to cars being its mode of mobility no matter what happened in the big TSPLOST vote. Not that there was much suspense as to what would happen in said vote.

Well, surprise, surprise #1: the TSPLOST didn’t make it last week. And surprise, surprise #2: all of the post-TSPLOST talk is about roads, roads, roads.

One question that should perhaps be asked aloud more often is why this tax was up for a referendum, but a proposed hotel/motel tax that would build a new stadium for the Atlanta Falcons isn’t (at least yet). This stadium would replace a stadium that isn’t legally old enough to drink, even if plenty of drinks are served there. At least, one part of the puzzle is there: the vast majority don’t think taxes need to go towards a new stadium.

But never mind the trains, bikes or buses, let’s not lose sight of how Georgia runs itself and how Atlanta looks as a result.

Atlanta remains un-united
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One other story in the American south that fascinated me last week was the furor surrounding fast food chain Chick-Fil-A.

The short short version of the tale is this: Dan Cathy says gay marriage is “prideful” and bad. Internet revisits Chick-Fil-A’s donations to groups with various anti-gay initiatives. Potential boycotts are debated and bans in some cities are threatened. Christian right gets wind of this, organizes a counter-protest in the form of people forming lines around blocks to buy chicken sandwiches on August 1.

Now, there is the usual “culture wars” sniping I could get into dissecting. (Supporters that say it’s not about being anti-gay, it’s about freedom of speech because mayors threatened to ban businesses based on speech. Critics that say boycotts aren’t about what Cathy said, but the wilful organizations he’s funding to deny a human right.) However, there’s also that tired cliché that says more about the Western world than most clichés could: “you vote with your dollar.”

As the mode of mobility is the car in Atlanta, the primary mode of political expression continues to not be how one votes or what they do, but what they don’t buy or do buy (the latter of which Monroe Friedman describes as “buycotting”). It’s deemed effective because affecting finances is seen as incredibly uplifting or devastating. Slower political operatives such as the Occupy movement sputter perhaps in no small part they don’t speak the logic of capitialism. If no money was exchanged in the first meeting or no money was taken away from another business, how are we to tell whether this is working or not?

Either way, we’ve come to accept the rules of the game that these things matter much more than (or least as much as) actual legislation, to the point that deciding what we’re eating for dinner (much like whether or not we say “Merry Christmas” and how often) somehow equates to intense political activism.

Indeed, if Facebook and Twitter feeds are any indication, both buyers and non-buyers seem pretty convinced they’ve committed a real act of political intensity. This is pretty telling.

To bring it back around to being a sports fan, when the NHL moved from Atlanta last year, I was pretty mad at the company running Philips Arena about how it handled the whole thing. I decided I wasn’t going to pay to go to any event there. A friend of mine said this was pretty ridiculous since concerts would make Philips so much money, “it wouldn’t make a difference.” I was kind of flummoxed by the idea that he assumed that was the point, as though I was puffing my chest out about it. “I just don’t want to go, no more no less,” I replied. That I was having any “real” impact beyond that didn’t really occur to me.

While the “real” impact of the whole furor is seen to be whether or not Chick-Fil-A was helped or hurt by all this, the real question to be answered is “which way does this move, if at all, discussions on gay rights?” Might it have a psychological effect in November when people might actually vote with their…vote? Or will it instigate a further discussion on the concept of gay rights and whether rights are determined at the polls to begin with? Whatever the case, I have a feeling we’ll continue to prioritize our votes by dollar, rather than votes or civic activity otherwise.

TPLOST: Atlanta’s Traffic Drama Continues

I moved to Atlanta in August 2003 and like many wide-eyed small-town folk who first move to a big city, the first thing I did after grabbing my luggage was take the train. Perhaps even more telling, though, was that I took the train for about 50 minutes just to get to a friend who drove me to his apartment which the train couldn’t get to. My love-hate relationship with Atlanta public transit started right then and there: I, a non-motoring graduate student trying to live within his means. Atlanta, an area where the incorporated city’s population constitutes roughly 8% of its metro census population, but with a transit system with far less branches than that of Boston, New York, or Chicago.

Fast forward to tomorrow, the state of Georgia will cast its vote on the T-SPLOST initiative, a one-cent sales tax proposal for which the funds would be dedicated to a variety of transit initatives. Early numbers don’t bode well that the tax will be approved by metro Atlanta voters. And indeed, while the entire state will be affected by results regardless, for me, it’s really just another chapter in a troubled history of transit development in the city of Atlanta.

Fellow GSU doctoral alum Miriam Konrad navigated this turbulent history in her dissertation-turned-book Transporting Atlanta: The Mode of Mobility under Construction, which divides the historical discourse on Atlanta transit into three areas: growth, green and equity. I find it pretty telling that the green element is largely being downplayed in the public arena. It’s as though the TPLOST supporters merely accepted that this subject is wasted on detractors who presumably don’t care about the environment. But moreover, it’s perhaps taken for granted that potential supporters will simply accept that this would improve the environment on its face. Indeed, the city’s most visible advocates for public transit, CFPT, are all over the new map angle but their website is presently downplaying the “green” talk.

Most interesting of all, however, is how the other two arenas of discourse, growth and equity, seem to constantly run against each other during Atlanta’s entire history.

I view Atlanta as a microcosm for a schism in American circles between a socially conservative bent towards quiet rural life and the repeated result of the pursuit of neoliberal ends: the growth of the city. After all, isn’t it somewhat inevitable that corporate growth leads eventually to, well, a city? And in order for cities to run reasonably well, you can’t have EVERYONE on the road or else it takes forever to get to work.

This is also why not all of the opposition to T-SPLOST is conservative: the Sierra Club, for example, doesn’t share CFPT’s outlook and opposes this initative on the grounds that it’s weighted towards more roads instead of more buses and rails. The liberal critique of the current Atlanta commuter culture is that most people want a quicker ride to work, but not enough people are taking into consideration that less people ought to be driving to work to begin with.

An entirely separate issue surrounding T-SPLOST is the Atlanta’s racially charged history. It’s no secret that northern metro areas of Atlanta continually resist the expansion of MARTA, and this issue is continually charged by racial politics. Supporters of light rail transit allege that resistance to rail initatives are merely extensions of “white flight” designed to turn the city “too busy to hate” into the city “too busy moving to hate.” That would take an entirely different analysis in and of itself.

But what seems fait accompli is the mode of mobility, as discussed by Konrad. If you take Sierra’s opinion, it really doesn’t matter in the long-term whether or not T-SPLOST succeeds, that mode was, is and is destined to be the car (or at the very least, the road). I guess Atlanta’s future graduate students will still have that long tour of bloated traffic to look forward to.

Bryce J. McNeil