Note: I drafted this post in 2011 but I guess I never finished it and I definitely never published it. In 2025, when Typepad shut down and I moved these posts to a new domain, I discovered this old post sitting here drafted. I am publishing it now as-is (backdated to 2011) to capture my thoughts, but please be aware that it is unpolished, both in the writing itself (e.g. grammar) and in the tone (e.g. maybe I said something offensive that I would have edited out later). It looks like I only got through writing up my first three years at Eyedrum, when I was actually there for nearly a decade; being from 2011, this was meant to be a retrospective, as I’d officially left in December 2010. My later years at Eyedrum got more and more “interesting”, so perhaps it’s for the best that they aren’t documented, lest I say something regrettable. Ha, everything in this blog is regrettable 🙂 That said, here I go, pushing the publish button …
I got involved with Eyedrum in late 2001. Hormuz Minina, an old friend from Georgia Tech and WREK, was on the board of directors at Eyedrum and had been his usual extremely active self in getting things done at Eyedrum. They needed a bigger and better space, for art and performances, and Hormuz had found an old warehouse off Memorial Drive. They moved in in September 2001, and quickly found that the acoustics were pretty rotten for performances. Hormuz knew I was still pretty involved with WREK (that’s another long story), which naturally involves a lot of sound system engineering, and so he asked me if I knew anything about controlling room acoustics.
I started looking into acoustics and ended up getting pretty deep into it. I talked to a consultant, who provided some guidance, and within a couple months I had a proposed design for 16 panels that would hang from the ceiling as sound absorbing baffles. I built one of these panels and presented it at a board meeting, and everyone seemed happy with the idea, although they had no budget for doing it. Literally, zero dollars. So I scraped together the money and assembled and hung the 16 panels in the space in January 2002.
Hormuz invited me to join the board, but I was just about to start a new job, and told him I’d consider it after a few months. By May 2002 I was feeling comfortable with the new job and so decided to start putting some time into Eyedrum.
Starting with simply attending monthly board meetings and working events. Art shows and performance events are the core of Eyedrum activities, and everyone on the board needs to show up and “work” those events. That means opening up the place, stocking the bar, setting up the stage, collecting money at the door, cleaing up afterwards (well, sometimes) and locking up the place.
I found that nothing had been documented about how to do any of this. Coming from WREK and the long tradition there of documented procedures and references for future staff, I saw this as a huge hole that needed filling.
Shortly after I joined the board, Sunni McGarrity moved away from Atlanta. She had been the one person who had been taking care of keeping Eyedrum stocked with drinks and other supplies, and from my long experience at WREK I knew that when someone was leaving an organization, you needed to interview them and document what they knew about doing whatever job they had been responsible for. So I literally sat down with Sunni after a board meeting one day and interviewed her about how to stock Eyedrum. Where to go to buy bottled water (cheap!), where to get cups (cheap!), how much of each kind of drink to get, and on and on. There are always subtle things to be learned about any job, and I needed to write them down. That document became the very first procedure that I wrote for Eyedrum.
With my experience at WREK, I knew that this kind of information needed to be online — not just on paper, and certainly not in MS Word files that get emailed around. The internet was increasingly ubiquitous and I needed to get an Eyedrum documentation system going online somehow. The public website ( www.eyedrum.org ) wasn’t the right place for it, and anyway that site wouldn’t have allowed for easy remote editing (like a wiki, but this was before wikis existed). I did some research and found that “Zope” was a popular software system for doing this kind of online documentation, and then found a free Zope serving site called … FreeZope!
Now, understand that documenting processes is like heroin to me. I can’t stop it once I get started. I wrote about 200 pages of this stuff for WREK (still used today) and I could easily see a dozen or so processes at Eyedrum that needed that treatment pronto. How exactly do you open up the place for a show? What do we do with donations? How do we check the voicemail? Oh my freaking god, what are everybody’s phone numbers?! They didn’t even have a phone list. All of this stuff got wrriten up and documented by me within a couple months of my arrival at Eyedrum. Over time this then also evolved into a place to store files, like letterhead, high-res logo images, etc. Having this resource allowed people to work so much faster, because they could get what they needed right away, without waiting for a reply to an email or a phone call.
The next big thing was electrical stuff. I’m an electrical engineer and could easily take care any electrical needs. Gallery lighting, stage lighting, stage power, etc. Kevin Haller had been their lighting guy, and so I talked to him about what they had, designed some cheap but robust wiring solutions, and got to work. I spent about 2 months up at the top of a tall ladder, running electrical wiring all over the ceiling of that new space, creating proper circuits for stage lighting and creating “dimmer zones” for the gallery lighting. At some point we received a donation of some nice house speakers (JBL Eon 15’s) and I got those integrated into the stage area.
So, between big facility things like the above, little things like fixing doors and servicing air conditioning units, taking care of some organizational admin things like membership and mailing list management, and occasionally actually working a show, I stayed pretty damn busy with Eyedrum. We had a board of about a dozen people and everybody was running around doing their thing, although I was the only one who really dealt with the facility itself.
In late 2004, the Eyedrum board decided to take advantage of an offer from the landlord and expanded into the adjacent space. This doubled Eyedrum’s square footage, and gave us the luxury of being able to physically separate the visual art (e.g. static artwork) and performance art (e.g. stage events) parts of Eyedrum’s programming. However the new “back space” was completely raw: it was a big empty warehouse space, with no heat and little electricity.
So 2005 became the year that I plowed all of my free time into building out the back space. After a couple design meetings, we decided to frame out a big doorway to the back space, put a semicircular stage in the back corner, put a little hallway and a doorway along the wall to the left of the stage for equipment staging and staf access to the back area, and set up a smaller gallery space in the rear. The stage would be a major undertaking, and a big improvement from what we had in the front space, which was really just a big rug in the corner. I built nearly every inch of the new stage by hand, from the structure underneath, to the stage power circuits embedded in the floor, to the high-power lighting circuits overhead, to the neat finish trim along the front of the stage. The only parts I didn’t do myself was painting the walls behind the stage, done by a volunteer, and laying down the top layer of flooring oak, donated by a friend of Eyedrum (Sean McCormick) who ran a small flooring business. It took my nine months of constant work (weekenights, weekends) but by late September of that year we were able to have our first event back there and finally make proper use of all the space we were paying rent for.
board = just the volunteers. In 2000-2001, Eyedrum filed the papers to properly become a 501c3 non-profit, which has a variety of benefits including the ability to accept donations and not pay taxes on that “revenue”. One of the requirements of a 501c3 is that there be some minimum organizational structure, defined by the “bylaws”, and that defined a “board of directors”. Anybody who got significantly involved in Eyedrum activities was usually invited to “join the board” and usually accepted.
http://clatl.com/atlanta/back-pockets-brouhaha-at-eyedrum/Content?oid=2570315
http://clatl.com/cribnotes/archives/2011/01/01/end-of-an-era-eyedrum-closed-mlk-locale-with-an-epic-last-stand
The performance space had pretty much been stripped clean of everything a few days prior, so those videos aren’t really representative of what the space looked like for the 5 years that we operated in that back room.
click … dialtone …
I took delivery of my Chevy Volt (one of the first in the country!) on December 22nd, and it’s been performing beautifully ever since. It really is amazing that GM pulled this off and one of these is sitting in my driveway. I’m doing demo drives for friends and coworkers nearly every day, spreading the word and dispelling myths.
when I thought it was safe enough to drive but didn’t want to risk it with my brand new Volt. Otherwise the only time I’ve driven the Audi was on two days to take it to and from the repair shop, where I had a few things fixed to get it ready for sale.