On Sunday, May 18, 2008, Birmingham AIDS Outreach will host its annual Arty Party fund raiser at B&A Warehouse from 3-6 p.m. Nearly two dozen hats made by members of the Mystic Krewe of Apollo Birmingham will serve as centerpieces at the annual celebration. Go to www.bradbrad.com to check out a slideshow of the hats being modeled by former Birminghamian Amy Cleckler.

Arty Party will also include live and silent auctions featuring more than 200 works of art donated to BAO by local and regional artists. This year’s featured artist is Veronique Vanblaere of Naked Art Gallery. The honorary chair of this year’s Arty Party is Patty McDonald.

Popularity: 1% [?]

In terms of participating in internet commerce, I’m something of a Luddite. I have only purchased four items on Amazon ever and I’ve never participated in a single eBay auction. But my life as an online consumer is about to change dramatically now that I know about Etsy.com. The website is a showcase for handmade goods of every sort — paintings, paper goods, clothing, candles, crochet and knitted items, jewelry housewares and all manner of useful eye-candy. Etsy’s explicit mission is “to enable people to make a living making things, and to reconnect makers with buyers.” The point, they say, is to build a new economy and make it possible to “Buy, Live and Sell Handmade.”

Perhaps the most dazzling feature of Etsy’s super-intuitive site design is the Geolocator, which lets you shop for local handmade goods. At present, there are a total of 66 Birminghamians hawking their wares, including Veronique Vanblaere, Kate Merritt Davis and Weekly contributing artist Daisy Winfrey (Bonus! here’s an awesome song titled “I’m Callin’ Daisy” by the blues legend Brownie McGhee!).

A lot of the local artists on Etsy are also on the awesome local artist marketplace run by the Cultural Alliance of Greater Birmingham. The purpose of Ask Artie is to create connections between individual artists and arts professionals, arts/cultural organizations, venues and galleries plus a wide variety of resources and services of interest to the cultural sector.

Popularity: 44% [?]

On Tuesday, the state House passed HB196, the Gourmet Beer Bill, which would raise Alabama’s allowable Alcohol-by-Volume (ABV) in a beer from 6.0 percent to 13.9 percent.

For more than a year, a grassroots organization of craft-beer enthusiasts known as Free the Hops has been lobbying to change Alabama’s current ABV limit. Under the current law, beer distributors in Alabama cannot sell 98 of the world’s top 100 beers (as rated by BeerAdvocate.com) due to the ABV restrictions.

There has been some resistance to the bill from large-scale beer distributors who fear reduced market share if Alabama’s antiquated laws are changed, but recently many Birmingham-area distributors have agreed to support craft beer in Alabama.

The bill goes to the state Senate, where it must be brought to the Senate floor by the Tourism & Marketing Committee. If the bill passes in the Senate, Governor Riley can then sign it into law.

— Madison Underwood

Popularity: 35% [?]

It’s a cold, gray Monday morning.

I’m on the tenth floor of UAB’s Faculty Office Tower at 5th Avenue South and 20^th Street.

I’m standing at the window, drinking bad coffee from the break room and looking down, across 5^th Avenue, at the pile of rubble that used to constitute — until about 7:10 a.m. on Sunday — the decaying body of the once-grand Parliament House hotel, Birmingham’s monument to 60s kitsch.

I watched the implosion, along with about 20 other people, from the seventh floor of the Kirklin Clinic parking deck at 5^th Avenue South and Arrington Boulevard. I wouldn’t have missed it.

After all, I’m an experience junkie, and I had never witnessed an implosion up close and personal. I was living in Seattle in the late 90s when they brought down the Kingdome, but I missed it, for some stupid reason.

The most striking part of the demolition of the Parliament House for me was the percussive effect of the explosive charges. I didn’t count them, but I have the vague impression that I heard maybe five or six waves or volleys.

At any rate, I felt the explosions in my gut and, just for a few seconds, was overcome by a kind of sad, sick feeling that I was witnessing a hostile act, that something was being killed that didn’t want to die. It’s almost impossible to put into words.

The hotel crumbled and fell quickly, like a condemned prisoner shot by a firing squad, and threw up an enormous dirty-white cloud of dust against a threatening, gray-black sky.

The whole thing was over in a matter of seconds.

There was much hooting and hollering from spectators, and a wave of applause.

“Jesus,” exclaimed a young woman a few feet to my left, expressing a kind of shock and awe.

“That’s awesome,” said a twenty-something guy to my right, expressing the sheer exhilaration that so many guys — including me — often experience when they have the opportunity to watch something get blown up or shot down.

The dust cloud moved quickly to engulf the surrounding buildings, including the Kirklin Clinic and Liberty National, but it virtually disappeared by 7:15 a.m., barely five minutes after the implosion.

And that, my friends, was that, after 44 years, after all the parties and proms and banquets, after Bear Bryant and Broadway Joe and Bob Hope and Tricky Dick Nixon.

Somebody should post a videotape of the implosion on YouTube with a special music cue — a few verses from Parliament House investor Doris Day’s biggest hit, “Que Sera, Sera.” You know the one. “Whatever will be will be, the future’s not ours to see,” and all that shit.

I must admit that I had no personal connection to the Parliament House, but I was still sad to see it go. The same building, had it been located in New York or L.A. or Miami Beach, would have been renovated by somebody like Ian Schrager or Andre Balaz and turned into a retro-cool Rat Pack pleasure pit, something along the lines of The Standard hotels.

Of course, this is Birmingham, a city that virtually no one visits if they don’t absolutely have to, a sad, broken town where, all too often, we don’t build or renovate, we destroy.

Popularity: 38% [?]

For some time the man who helped bring Birmingham’s park plan into fruition was unknown, his letters lost in the many collections of the Library of Congress. But now, The Birmingham Historical Society is celebrating the publication of Hand Down Unharmed, a collection of letters and materials that explain the genesis of the Birmingham park system in the words of those who did it. Tonight the Historical Society will have their annual meeting, which is open to the public. The meeting will feature a short talk by co-editors of Hand Down Unharmed, Katie Tipton and Marjorie White, on “The Man Who Brought Olmsted to Birmingham.” Tipton and White’s talk will explain how timber trader and Maryland native M. P. Phillips recruited the most talented and successful park designers in America to design Birmingham’s park system. The Olmsted Brother’s firm was responsible for the beautiful park systems of major cities like Boston, Baltimore, Seattle and Chicago. In addition to his work with the parks, Phillips arranged to donate his fortune to Birmingham-Southern College before his death in 1925.
To find out more about one of Birmingham’s first open spaces advocates come out the Birmingham Botanical Gardens Auditorium tonight, February 19th, at 7:30 p.m.

Popularity: 36% [?]

Or: A few of my favorite things

By J’Mel Davidson

Geez, is it that time of year again? Time flies when you’re trying to avoid the one day a year where it’s actually encouraged for people to force their public displays of affection upon the Eleanor Rigbys of the world.

As much as I want to complain about this big-business sham of a greeting-card-company-manufactured holiday, I guess I really can’t.

It is the American way to celebrate openly and with much vigor the fact that you have something that others may not. While I may have to put up with Valentine’s Day once a year other people have Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Functioning Liver Day to suffer through.
Read the full story

Popularity: 19% [?]

Or: how to win friends and avoid being punched

By J’Mel Davidson

Here we are again, at the beginning of the shortest month of the year — Black History Month! It’s a leap year this year so let’s leap past the formalities and discuss a few things. There may be a few topics covered here that I have covered in the past but what’s important is that you clip and save this article. It may spare you a mattress-spring shanking in the near future.

As you read these simple tips and facts, you may occasionally look up at the silly little picture of me and think to yourself “Oh, that J’Mel! Ha ha!”

Ha ha, hell. I’m not joking.

Let’s start with Barack Obama. Read the full story

Popularity: 27% [?]

It’s time to (get taken for a) ride!

It was standing room only last week at Mayor Larry Langford’s first State of the City address. Each year the Kiwanis Club hosts the event at the Harbert Center, but this year’s speech promised something exciting. Not only was Leapin’ Larry making his debut, but, post-hip surgery, he was possibly on painkillers to boot.

There was no telling what that self-professed crazy man might say, and the lure of uncertainty had packed the place. The Harbert Center management set up more and more tables in the capacious but crowded hall until there was nowhere else to squeeze another seat.

“I’m sorry, but we have to ask you to move,” the Harbert manager said to us at the media table. She expropriated our seats, and the Fourth Estate was pushed against the walls or into the atrium, where I wound up sitting on a comfortable couch and listening to Langford’s speech through the building’s ubiquitous loudspeakers. Sitting across a coffee table from me was another person used to being left outside of things — David Hill, the executive director of the Birmingham Jefferson Transit Authority.

Inside the hall, the mayor’s office played a short video highlighting the new administration’s accomplishments (often taking credit for things not yet accomplished). Chief of Staff Deborah Vance narrated the video. She spoke about giving laptops and scholarships to Birmingham students, building a domed
stadium and allocating $9 million for improvements in mass transit.

That last line jolted my attention. Even before the city council passed Mayor Langford’s tax hike, I had been trying to pin that figure down. Numbers in this administration are moving targets.

When Langford first proposed a hike in the business license fee, he told the city council that the increase would raise $36 million in new money. Of that, $19 million per year would pay for a domed stadium and $17 million would fund overdue improvements in mass transit. The councilors were all but elated.

But something was wrong in the numbers. The administration hadn’t accounted for a state statute that prevented them from hiking the license fees of insurance companies. As a result, there was only $26 million in new money. Quietly and almost beyond the council’s notice, the administration adjusted the numbers in the ordinance. The domed stadium would still get $19 million, but transit was reduced to $9 million per year in new money.

Only Councilor Valerie Abbott seemed to notice or care. As Langford ramrodded the ordinance through the council, Abbott asked the mayor about the differing numbers. Langford said that the $9 million number was a mistake and he asked the city clerk to write the $17 million figure back into the ordinance.

A few weeks later, the administration submitted several amendments to the Economic and Community Revitalization Ordinance. One of those amendments changed the new transit funding from $17 million back to $9 million. This time, no one on the council made a sound.

After one council meeting, I asked Langford about the changing numbers. He talked a lot, but he couldn’t give a straight answer. According to Langford, the tax increase would provide $9 million, because the insurance companies pay only $8 million a year, which could not be doubled. So the city, he said, would take that $8 million from the insurance companies, add it to the $9 million from the license fee increase, and voila — $17 million a year in new money.

Only, $8 million of it isn’t new. It’s the same old revenue that’s being spent on something else, right? But once print media began asking questions, Langford quickly escaped to his office.

So at the Harbert Center, when I heard the chief of staff’s video say there would be $9 million of new money for transit, I wondered whether the administration had blundered into the truth.

If they had, then it didn’t seem to bother the transit director. When that number came across the atrium speakers, Hill was undeterred from his lunch.
The video concluded and Langford hobbled to the podium. There were few big announcements in the State of the City address: Birmingham would put 50 more cops on the streets, Langford said, and Bo Jackson was coming to Birmingham to invest in a grocery store. The rest was Leapin’ Larry boilerplate. Who needs facts or firm figures? If it’s numbers you want, then Bo knows low prices. That’s all the public needs to know and that’s all that the dutiful TV media reported later that evening.

But before he was done, Langford let one real number slip: $9 million in new funding for mass transit. This time it was from his own mouth.

And still, the transit director ate at his lunch. If that was less money than Hill expected, it didn’t bother his appetite.

What’s troublesome about this is that Hill has indicated in board meetings, in other media and in PowerPoint presentations that the BJCTA will receive $17 million in new money from the City of Birmingham. And Hill has big plans for that money. He wants the BJCTA to replace its entire fleet of buses. He wants to build a streetcar system downtown with vintage trolleys. He wants to finish the decade-old plan for a true inter-modal facility on Morris Avenue.

And keeping with Langford’s style of leadership, Hill has made it clear that anyone who isn’t on board will be thrown overboard. These things can be done and will be done immediately, he has said — with the $17 million in new funding from the city.

After Langford’s speech, as the retreating crowd bottlenecked at the escalator, I asked Hill the same questions.

Is it $17 million or $9 million?

It is $17 million, he said.

Where is the other $8 million coming from?

According to Hill, Langford told him that the city would take the $8 million from things that will receive new funding from the increase in sales taxes. If Hill is truthful and Langford was truthful with him, that means the city plans to cut things like police and fire protection, education, infrastructure improvements or economic development.

In the end, the BJCTA might or might not get all that money. Either way, someone is being taken for a ride.

Popularity: 35% [?]

The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus is in the midst of its annual visit to Birmingham. Ringling presents “Over the Top,” one of its two current touring shows, starring ringmaster Chuck Wagner and “clown eccentric” Tom Dougherty, at the BJCC Arena through Sunday, Jan. 27.

The show is big, bold, bright, loud, utterly excessive and unabashedly corny, and I loved almost every frigging minute of it.

After all, what’s not to like about a show that offers a live band, smoke machines, video projections, pyrotechnics, goats riding on the backs of ponies, porcupines, clowns, Chinese acrobats, scantily-clad showgirls shaking their booties, elephants, tigers, aerialists, tumblers, trick riders on horseback, dogs catching Frisbees, people bouncing up and down on what look like huge inner tubes, etc., etc., etc. I mean, if you ain’t seen it, you won’t believe how much stuff they throw at you.

In case you’re wondering, Dear Reader, no, I’m not a hired flack, even though I must admit (“full disclosure,” as they say on MSNBC) that I took advantage of free press passes to attend Tuesday night’s performance.

I also attended a private media reception in the BJCC Arena Club before the show, where I mingled with showgirls, watched David Neal from Fox 6 put on a clown nose and do a live remote, and — in the great tradition of the American press corps — stuffed my face with as much food as I possibly could.

I had four hot dogs (two of them ladled with chili), two medium-sized containers of popcorn, and two cokes. Oh, and I took a bottled water into the Arena.

However, I must stress – in defense of my journalistic virtue – that I attended a performance of “Bellobration,” the other current Ringling show, at the BJCC in January 2007 on my own dime, and would have done so gladly this year for reasons I will make clear shortly.

Anybody who knows me will tell you that my tastes are not exactly mainstream (my favorite movie of the last decade or so is David Lynch’s Lost Highway, if that gives you an idea), and I generally hate anything that seems to pander to established tastes or values.

But to all of my fellow angel-headed hipsters cruising the angry streets at dawn in search of an angry fix, I would tell you that you avoid the circus at your peril. Aesthetics are one thing, but Ringling takes aesthetics and pounds them to the ground, then offers them David Neal’s clown nose and a bag of cotton candy. The circus is a true American spectacle, sort of like a moon landing mixed with a Super Bowl halftime show, and it comes to town every year. Dude, you can’t go wrong.

As strange as it may seem, I never attended a circus until the fall of 2006, when I saw two smaller shows at Fair Park, the Barnes (yes, “Barnes”) & Bailey Circus, who performed in tents set up on the grounds, and the Stars of the Moscow State Circus, who performed in the basketball arena.

Both of these troupes had some great performers – some probably as good as the ones who tour with Ringling – but when I saw “Bellobration” last January, I realized that they don’t call Ringling the “Greatest Show on Earth” for nothing.

The circus touches every primal emotion.

Clowns make us laugh.

Acrobats and trapeze artists scare the crap out of us, playing with our fear of heights or, more specifically, our fear of falling from great heights.

The showgirls titillate us.

The animal trainers allow us a glimpse of such fierce creatures as Bengal tigers. We know these animals could rip us apart in about 10 seconds flat, but they are kept at a safe distance from us and our kids and our light swords and our cotton candy, inside a cage with steel bars, so we can be excited without having to really be fearful.

The contortionists give us just a taste of the freak shows that were, until the middle of the 20^th century, a staple of many traveling carnivals.

The huge production numbers with their lush music and, at times, hundreds of performers on the arena floor, transport us from our present quotidian reality into another dimension. Before movies, TV, and radio, circuses were the only vehicle for this fantasy generation available to millions of Americans, especially in hundreds of smaller towns linked by the railroads on which Ringling still travels, in a mile-long passenger train, the longest in America.

If you haven’t seen the circus is a number of years, you may notice some changes. Ringling has broken out of the traditional three-ring circus form and introduced narrative threads into the shows. In “Bellobration,” the clown and acrobat Bello has a crush on a beautiful female aerialist and pursues her, with little success, throughout the performance.

In “Over the Top,” the classically trained, conventionally handsome Wagner portrays a traditional ringmaster who competes with clown Doughty (a sort of tall, crazed Pee Wee Herman-meets-Jerry Lewis in the body of John Malkovich) for possession of the ringmaster’s hat. He who possesses the hat gets to run the show.

Robin Oliver of Big Communications, Ringling’s publicist in Birmingham, told me that the ringmaster is supposed to represent all the adults in the audience who want things to go as planned and to get on to the next act, and the clown represents the children in the audience who like to see anarchy and crazy things happen. It seems that Ringling is using these characters to embody in one show the competing forces of tradition and innovation that shape it a new century, as it competes with such entertainment options as Cirque de Soleil and “The Lion King.”

By the way, a shout-out to Robin for allowing me to accompany her on Tuesday afternoon when the elephants and horses when taken off the train in a rail yard on Vanderbilt Road and walked to the BJCC. She and I walked for nearly the entire four-mile route in the rain and cold, watching as scores of people came out of their places of business along the route and marveled at this once-a-year spectacle, taking pictures with their cell phones. It was one of those corny, traditional news reporter-type gigs that I would not have missed, and we both managed to avoid catching pneumonia.

Show times for Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circus are 7:30 p.m. tonight; 11:30 a.m., 3:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 26, and 1 and 5 p.m. on Sunday, Jan. 27. Tickets range from $10-$49 and are available through Ticketmaster.

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Read the full story

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