Taking photographs is not magic. It just requires light. You can’t take a decent picture of a band on the way up or on the way down without a little light. Really, that’s all it takes…

STUPIDVILLE, ALABAMALAND — Whatever you do, DO NOT frequent the bars of downtown Bomingham! Not that most people in the metro area need that advice or excuse anyway.

In addition to being the epicenter of the worst financial crisis in the country, the budding new bars trying to get something going on in an otherwise small time, small town city in the most conservative, uneducated state in the country, allow morons who make $75 a night running the lights for never was bands to run things.

I took time out to go check out one of those new bars, The Rogue Tavern, in downtown Birmingham Thursday night to see my friends at the Blackwarrior Riverkeeper and my old friend Rick Carter with Rolling in the Hay to give them some publicity for their fund raiser. I ran into David Whiteside, one of the founders of the group, who showed me his photos of his relative Edward Kennedy, just buried in Arlington Cemetary, on his iPhone.

But when I asked the guy running the lights to turn the lights up so I could get some decent pictures, the fat, stupid moron had me thrown out of the fucking club. I kid you not!

For asking him to hit the lights so I could potentially get some shots to promote the band that was paying him, the new club paying the band, and downtown Birmingham in general, the management of this pathetic establishment went along with this fit of egotism.

I don’t waste my time going downtown normally, like most people in the metro area, for good reason: Republican Governor Bob Riley’s brilliant strategy to prevent a couple of highway deaths a year — and raise a bunch of money for the state — with the infamous “Take Back the Highways” campaign.

Instead of kicking the press out of their pathetic little gatherings for asking to have the lights brought up a little, perhaps the bar owners should be lobbying the Alabama Restaurant Association to protest the Take Back the Highways campaign. But NOOOOOOOO!

Instead, they presume to promote their new venues by hiring morons who have no clue how to run lights for a rock band, with egos the size of professional basketball players, who have no business in the entertainment business in any position?

So see ya later Birmingham. There is no apology humble enough to get me to ever frequent or recommend to readers ever again that they frequent any of your businesses. In fact, this incident just reinforces my long-held opinion that I am ashamed to say I am from Birmingham, Alabama. It truly is Stupidville, Alabamaland.

I am out of here ASAP. I brush the dust from my shoulder, and say: Fuck off morons. There is a recession on, and this is no way to pull out if it…!

© 2009 – 2016, Glynn Wilson. All rights reserved.