Rusty's Blog

Amber and me on the Beltline

If the weather stayed like this forever I’d sleep in a tent in my yard. It makes even the most mundane errands a pleasure. I drove over to our storage unit to drop off an extra interior door we had sitting around with the windows down, iPod on shuffle… Rolling Stones, Amy Winehouse, Mountain Goats, Hank Williams, Radiohead, various Motown, whatever …everything that came on sounded like I hadn’t heard it in years.

Sometimes in high school and college, when gas was cheap, I’d drive around aimlessly with the windows down for hours on end playing music too loud, getting lost, finding my way back. The first hint of springtime weather always reminds me of this.

Yesterday we walked a stretch of the Beltline between Glenwood Park and Boulevard. We saw a cold storage building with what looked like effigies hung outside, walked across the cool arched bridge over Ormewood, and took lots of photos. By the end of it my shoes were full of sand and we were planning our next walk. I hope we can see most of it before the kudzu grows too thick. Walking it makes me see what a fucking tragedy it will be if it never gets built. Many parts of this city are as beautiful as anywhere I’ve been in their own backwards way, and are fascinating to watch change (or not change) through the seasons.

Grilled mushroom burgers

There was also a lot of good eating, with trips to Highland Bakery (order the Country Fried Steak Benedict), The Pecan in College Park (delicious but overpriced Southern cooking), and to my back yard to fire up the grill for the first time this year (grilled mushrooms are going to go in almost everything I make for myself for the foreseeable future).

It may sound like some hippy shit, but I’m trying to just appreciate life and tune out all the bullshit that doesn’t matter. I find myself stopping in all sorts of places to take in the air or the sounds or the sights or the company and commit them to memory. Like Amber dancing to cheesy 80s songs from her old box of 45s we were playing an hour or so ago.

That’s what I want to spend my energy on, and fuck the rest of it.

Advanced Google Analytics and WordPress integration presentation from WordCamp Atlanta from Rusty Tanton on Vimeo.

This is a video of the presentation I gave at WordCamp Atlanta on January 9, 2009 about integrating Google Analytics with WordPress. I’ve made a few updates to the slides and code samples since I found out afterward it’s against Google’s terms of service to track visitors by name.

I didn’t get to attend the opening sessions of WordCamp Atlanta because the weather was horrible and we didn’t want to drive home in it in the dark last night, but I’ll be there today.

Due to aforementioned weather, the schedule has been pushed back an hour today, which means my presentation on advanced Google Analytics-Wordpress integration starts at 11 a.m. instead of 10 a.m. now. Here is the Google Doc I’ll be referencing, which also links to some code samples in case you’re having trouble deciding which session you want to attend in that time slot.

If you didn’t buy a ticket, the good news is due to the weather the organizers will now accept walk-up registrations when they hadn’t planned to before. You’ll need exact change though (the registration page says they’re $55, so I’m presuming that’s how much they still cost).

Looking forward to seeing you there!

My mom is on furlough from her job this week, which isn’t great on one level, but it did mean we got to eat lunch together today at Carolyn’s in Midtown. Last night I explained on the phone to her that it’s close to the corner of 14th and West Peachtree.

“You take 75 South to the 14th Street exit and hang a left,” I said.

“I know. I did grow up there, you know,” she said with a hint of exasperation.

She lives in Marietta now, but grew up in the same house on Calhoun Street near the Georgia Tech campus that her father grew up in.

As we ate today, she discussed a vacation she took recently with my dad to Oregon where they were given a private tour of the Spruce Goose. Then I told her about the trip to St. Augustine Amber and I are planning for next month, mentioning that we were going to go on a ghost tour.

“Mostly, I think ghost tours are a good excuse for people who are into history to talk about history without other people realizing they’re hearing about history,” I said.

We discussed other explanations of supernatural occurrences: materials absorbing sounds, hallucinations caused by poisonous chemicals, the Theory of Relativity.

Then my mom asked, “did I ever tell you about the Ghost of Calhoun Street?”

When my grandfather was a teenager, both his parents were killed in a car accident. They were severely burned and died about 24 hours after the fact. My Great Aunt Jane, who is my grandfather’s little sister, gave an account of this story when the Medical College of Georgia interviewed her a few months ago. I also have a video of her telling the story I will publish eventually.

Some years later after they died, a screen door on the house at Calhoun Street would slam open and shut over and over again at night. My mom and her brothers and sister heard it too. They would get up to look at the door sometimes, but there was no indication it had been jarred loose from its frame.

My mom said they figured it was just blown by the wind. My grandfather took it down one day, but the sound of a screen door slamming open and shut never stopped as long as they lived in that house.

I have not been writing much about mundane things in my life recently because for a while I wanted to just sit back and enjoy them and not think about them. I’m sick with the tail end of a cold right now and not enjoying my life as much as usual this week, so this is a good time to take note of a few things since the week is otherwise shot to shit.

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• Ever wondered how many historic markers are in Georgia, and how many of those are Civil War-related? Downhome Traces has you covered:

  Keep watching to see a neat idea for a cell phone application.

• The white boy with the black press has a new e-zine. Boyd Lewis, an excellent journalist from 1969 through 1997 in Atlanta, will send out his Tales of Old Atlanta e-zine once per week as a Powerpoint. I’ve converted the first edition, about Piedmont Park, to a PDF for easier downloading. If you’d like to subscribe, drop him an email at boydlewis90@yahoo.com and be sure to visit his website. You can also check out the interview I did with him on Mostly ITP back in 2007 if you’ve got 22 minutes and 1 second burning a hole in your work day.

• Learn about the origin of the Junkman’s Daughter sign. It’s a cool story written up on the AJC Insider blog by Jamie Gumbrecht. Also, related to the recent Paul McCartney concert in Piedmont park, she pointed to a great story about how an Atlanta hifi store pioneered a sound engineering technique in the mid-60s that is widely-used today. I dump on the AJC (Perimeter Journal Constitution? PJC?) frequently, but I love when they do features like those.

Great Aunt Jane in 1945

Like the headline says, turn to page 38 of the Summer 2009 MCG Today Magazine and you’ll find an article about my Great Aunt Jane. MCG Today is the magazine published by the Medical College of Georgia.

Jane had a lot of tragedy and sadness in her early years, some of which is documented in the article. But she persevered through it, and it’s been exciting to see her receive recognition for the interesting life she’s led. And if you’re looking for a new media success story, MCG Today found out about Jane’s story after watching this video I posted to Youtube:

(I’m still a little embarrassed I forgot to stuff the microphone cable in my shirt)

I have a video of her telling the story of when she found out her parents died, which is one of the topics discussed in the article. I’ve been debating whether I should post it or not, as it’s intense and personal. Maybe I will since the story is public now.

As you may have read elsewhere (Amani, Buzz, Doug, Grayson, BfD and BfD again and BfD again again, any more?), CBS 46 invited a group of about 25 Atlanta bloggers for what it described as a summit.

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You should read Doug Monroe’s piece from 2005 if you aren’t familiar with Paul Hemphill’s life and work.

I’ll just share scans of autographed copies of Paul’s books I’m blessed to own.

The first two were given to me by a friend and former DeKalb Neighbor colleague, who comments here as Blue sometimes. He’s responsible for turning me on to Paul’s work, for letting me tag along on a Government in Exile night at Manuel’s where I got to meet him, and for arranging to have these two copies autographed.

Long Gone by Paul Hemphill, autographed inside cover

Nobody's Hero by Paul Hemphill, autographed inside cover

The third is a copy I bought and stood in line to have autographed at his big signing party at Manuel’s a couple of years later.

Lovesick Blues by Paul Hemphill, autographed inside cover

I will always keep these.

God, Family & Country

A couple of months ago in an antiques store in Chamblee, I stumbled upon this LP titled God, Family & Country, recorded by the “irrepressible” former Georgia Governor Lester Maddox in 1971:

Album cover: Lester Maddox - God, Family & Country

This was the same store where I saw Malcom X air fresheners, and where we bought a turn-of-the-century bookshelf. It’s probably about time to take another trip over there to see if there’s any other neat furniture or unintentionally hilarious artifacts.

I don’t have a record player (I am about to remedy that), so this just sat on my shelf for a couple of months unplayed. Last night, I found out psychedelicatessen posted an MP3 archive of God, Family, & Country back in April, along with scans of the front and back album covers.

The back cover is chock full of pearls of wisdom from the former governor. Here are a couple of my favorites:

I never took a trip on drugs and got turned on for crime, anarchy, alcohol, drugs and immorality because I took a trip down the aisle of my church in 1932 and got turned on for God.

I will avoid obvious jokes. Next:

Not until recent years have I learned that I lived in twenty-five years of poverty, underprivileged and disadvantaged and didn’t know it. I just thought I was poor… And knew that I was privileged to be born an American… Under the private enterprise system where regardless of my material or social environment that I could make it.

Yes, the guy who shooed a black restaurant patron away by waving a gun at him and didn’t go to jail for it because he was a white man wrote that anybody can make it in the private enterprise system regardless of social environment.

So, how is the album itself? Here’s a sample track called Common Man which best encapsulates the rest of the record (from the psychedelicatessen rip, click over to his site to listen to the rest):

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The content is about what you’d expect: vague opining about the Yew-Ess-Uv-Ay’s plummeting morality and how the path to salvation is through God, Family and the Free Enterprise System. Unsurprisingly, the governor doesn’t have much of a singing voice. He was, however, a hell of a whistler and did at least have a passable backing band. Some of it borders on surreal in its unbridled earnestness, like overhearing a group of middle class teenage white boys talk amongst themselves after they read their first Ayn Rand novel.

Paul Wilson 45: Hippie Invasion and Poison Gas

Paul Wilson was a guy who did not take too kindly to the hippies I mentioned in my last post invading Byron, Georgia for the second edition of the Atlanta International Pop Festival in 1970. He was so mad he put out a record called “Hippie Invasion”:

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Rips of these songs from the original 45 were posted earlier today by Greg at the “irrepressible” Atlanta Time Machine. As a bonus treat, it had a B-side called Poison Gas which has an equally interesting story behind it that even includes a Lester Maddox tie-in. Click over to the Atlanta Time Machine for the full scoop.

Perhaps I only called Lester Maddox’s backing band passable on God, Family & Country because I had listened to Hippie Invasion a few moments earlier.