Mind’s Eye

Nine-month-old Ansley Brane is strapped into a car seat in a silent booth. Except for a green screen on the wall behind her, the booth is all black, fitted with a handful of video cameras. Ansley, who is wearing a headband with a white bow, has nothing to look at but a blinking monitor two feet in front of her.

Virgin Harvest

On a soggy Autumn morning, Jason Shaw was standing in a sandy field and considering the irony of his new calling as a missionary of Southern olives. “The first olive I ever saw was in a martini,” he joked.
Yacht Rock

Confessions of a Cover Band: Yacht Rock Revue croons the hits you love to hate

Yacht Rock Revue is hard to define—they're part fandom, part joke, part self-promotion, and each element is infused with irony. But when they take the stage at Old Fourth Ward's Venkman’s, the band is fully in character, complete with gaudy shirts and sunglasses, playing music people hate. And everyone loves it.

Alex Cooley

After dropping out of college—first UGA, then Georgia State—and a stint in California, Cooley managed a pizza joint on Roswell Road. It wasn’t doing well, so he brought in doo-wop performers, but it still went bust. A few months later, driving to Miami, he heard a radio station announce the Miami Pop Festival. He went and was blown away. Back in Atlanta, he and seventeen partners started the first Atlanta International Pop Festival. Janis Joplin showed up and said to him, “I want a drink and a fuck. In that order.” In July of 1969, weeks before Woodstock, she, Chuck Berry, and Led Zeppelin performed for more than 100,000 at the Atlanta International Raceway. Cooley later launched the Electric Ballroom and the Roxy, started Music Midtown with partner Peter Conlon (now president of Live Nation Atlanta), and was instrumental in saving the Fox. Last year he consulted on the renovation of the Buckhead Theatre. “Music,” he says, “has been my life. Now rock is respectable, though, which takes a little something away from it.”
Bernice King

Bernice King on her family’s legacy: “What was once something I resented, I now feel honored to carry.”

When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, his youngest child was just five. She had spent little time with her father; he was so often on the road—jailed in Birmingham a few weeks after her birth, addressing 200,000 people on the National Mall when she was five months old, marching from Selma to Montgomery when she was a toddler.
What happened at the University Avenue Wendy’s Rayshard Brooks Atlanta

23 Days: Stories from the occupation of the Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks was killed

For more than three weeks, protestors occupied the Wendy’s where Rayshard Brooks was fatally shot by police. Here are the are the stories of four people who witnessed the occupation from four different perspectives.

Reginald Eaves

Eaves was controversial from day one, after his college classmate Mayor Maynard Jackson named him Atlanta’s top cop in 1974. He defiantly used public money to pay for extra options on his fully loaded city vehicle: “If I can’t ride in a little bit of comfort, to hell with it.” (He later reimbursed the city for the difference.) Jackson forced Eaves out in 1978 for helping officers cheat on promotions tests. Within a few years, after winning a seat on the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, he was pocketing payments to help a local businessman, prosecutors said later. A federal jury convicted Eaves of extortion in 1988 after he was caught selling his vote on two rezonings.

Tyler Perry

Whether you flock to Fandango to purchase advance tickets for the latest Madea movie or chortled along with last year’s lacerating parody on Adult Swim’s The Boondocks, one thing is certain: Atlanta filmmaker Perry is the only major Hollywood player dedicated to cranking out hits from his adopted hometown. Only five years after shooting his first film (for one scene, he took a chain saw to a couch inside his own house), he was directing Oscar winner Whoopi Goldberg and Grammy winner Janet Jackson in last year’s film adaptation of playwright Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf—partially shot at his sprawling thirty-acre Tyler Perry Studios in southwest Atlanta. At the TPS grand-opening party in 2008, Perry surprised mentors Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Cicely Tyson by dedicating soundstages in their honor as Will Smith beamed and Oprah Winfrey cried her eyelashes off. An awed Tyson said, “I never dreamed I would witness this in my lifetime. What I’ve achieved in my career is minuscule in comparison to this.”
Fulton County Jail

The real behind the wall: A look inside the infamous, deadly Fulton County Jail

Lashawn Thompson was the seventh person to die in custody of Fulton County last year, but his was the death that finally caught the world’s attention. It took a scene so squalid that the deputy who discovered it fled to retch: Thompson was found in a filthy cell on the medical wing of the Rice Street jail, covered in lice and his own waste, his head in a toilet. Just days before, the same deputy had voiced concerns over Thompson’s living conditions.

Robert Shaw

When he arrived as musical director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in 1967, Shaw set out to turn Atlanta’s part-time orchestra into a full-time one. He added thirty-three players and founded the symphony’s chamber and orchestra choruses. A micromanager, Shaw coaxed nuance from each syllable and, taking cues from his minister father, lectured his singers on the spiritual depths of text. His insistence on performances that mingled Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven with avant-garde twentieth-century composers rankled ASO board members, who tried to oust him in 1972. (An outcry from ticket holders, who said they’d subscribe only if Shaw conducted, changed their minds.) Shaw’s direction earned the orchestra six Grammy Awards before he retired in 1988—plus nine more Grammys for his subsequent recordings as music director emeritus and conductor laureate, a post he held until he died of a stroke while visiting his son at Yale.

Follow Us

69,386FansLike
144,836FollowersFollow
493,480FollowersFollow

NEWSLETTERS