Month: May 2001

Categories
Art Art Feature

HAREM SCARUM

Scheherazade Goes West:

Different Cultures, Different Harems

By Fatema Mernissi

Washington Square Press, 220 pp., $25.95

Once upon a time there was a fairy tale that began, as any good fairy tale must, as a tale of tragedy, and it went like this:

Good King Shahzaman, the happy ruler of “The Land of Samarcand,” returns to his palace one day only to find his wife in the arms of a kitchen boy. Enraged, Shahzaman kills them both then sets out for the Persian kingdom of his older and wiser brother, good King Shahrayar. One morning, however, Shahzaman, with that habit of being in the right place at the wrong time, happens to look out onto Shahrayar’s harem garden only to look in on still more monkey business: Shahrayar’s lady of the house in cahoots with a slave freshly swung from a tree and her retinue of slave girls magically transformed into 10 swinging couples up to their own business. Shahrayar gets wind of it, kills the whole unfaithful lot, then goes several steps (and heads) further by marrying then decapitating in revenge every virgin in sight. Except for one: daughter of the king’s vizier, Scheherazade, who keeps her head by filling the king’s with some tales of her own, the body of which we know as The Thousand and One Nights.

This makes Scheherazade, in the mind of Fatema Mernissi in the pages of Scheherazade Goes West, the one thing not one Westerner, she’s convinced, wants Scheherazade in truth to be: a political hero and self-liberator and on the following three fronts: knowledge, which would mean she’s an intellectual; words, which would mean she’s a cunning strategist; and cold blood, which would mean she’s a cool cookie. The very opposite, in other words, of what Western ideas and art — from Kant to Ingres to Delacroix to Matisse to Picasso to Diaghilev to Hollywood — have taken harem insiders in general to be, which, Mernissi argues, is basically ready, willing, and able, dumb-struck before the “male gaze” and stark naked while we’re at it. Why the misunderstanding? First, some understanding, from the Islamic point of view and to wit:

Muslim men expect their women to be “highly aware of the inequality inherent in the harem system” and, by extension, aware of the inequities in conduct and dress prescribed by present-day and fundamentalist Islamic societies. Background insight: Muslim men fundamentally fear women. Reason: Muslim men are full of self-doubt. Why? Because Islam, as a legal and cultural system, “is imbued with the idea that the feminine is an uncontrollable power — and therefore the unknowable ‘other.’” Again because: It’s not the men who do the penetrating where it ultimately counts — the brain Ñ but the women, what with their capacity to outthink and outwit men, which is, to men, the “essence” of sexual attraction. A man in love risks slavery, therefore locking women up makes rejection impossible. The Muslim fantasy in art nonetheless: “self-assertive, strong-minded, uncontrollable, and mobile women.” Evidence: the story of Harun Ar-Rachid, “the sexy caliph,” born 766; the Muslim tradition in secular painting as propounded by Empress Nur-Jahan of India in the 16th century. Mernissi makes all these points and cases clear but only until she finds space to get to them and only after she dispenses a lot of chitchat, the ultimate mark reached when she discovers that she cannot fit into a size 6 skirt and blames Western mankind for it.

And what of the West’s historical response to Scheherazade? Kill her off, according to Edgar Allen Poe, who plainly feared her in his short story “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade.” Beauty plus brains? A philosophical contradiction, according to Kant. Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque? “By spending months painting a beautiful woman,” Mernissi confidently concludes, “Ingres was declaring daily to his wife that she was ugly!” Matisse? His passive odalisques “did not exist in the Orient!” And poor Hollywood? Maria Montez, Mernissi disposes of as a low-budget burlesque queen, and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra Mernissi cannot even bring herself to openly name as Montez’s high-end offspring. Muslim men at least have an inkling; Western men, we learn, haven’t a clue, until, that is, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu publicly put the stamp on the “symbolic violence” perpetrated on women’s bodies and Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth ran with the idea.

Other ideas in Scheherazade Goes West it’s up to you to run from. As in, in the author’s words: “Scheherazade’s passive submission to her own death [in Poe’s story] upset me so much that I could hardly carry on with the book promotion tour when I arrived in Paris.” Or: “I would have to see a doctor about my heart palpitations. It would be such a hassle to have a heart attack in France. É “

One idea, though, is way off the register. To talk herself down from the upset of a heart attack in France, Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist best known for her book Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, puts herself through what she calls “Arab psychotherapy,” which means “you keep talking nonstop about your obsessions, even if people don’t listen or care. One day, someone will give you a sensible observation or answer, and save you the trouble and expense of checking yourself into a psychiatric hospital. The only problem with this technique is that you lose a lot of friends.”

East may still be East; West, West. But on this centuries-tested and cross-cultural method of losing friends (never mind the attention of readers), there is no divide.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Postscript

Energy Joke

To the Editor:

The energy plan submitted for public scrutiny by the president last week was a joke. The president and vice president make it sound like the energy companies are suffering. Here is a little fact: Exxon posted the largest profit of any company in history in 2000 — $18 billion on $240 billion in revenues. Is that suffering? I can’t believe he expects the American people to drill holes everywhere for oil, even on pristine federal land in Alaska, when the problem is clearly one of conservation.

This plan is the wish list of the energy companies and it looks like they got exactly what they wanted. If you own stock in Alcoa, Haliburton, or any other oil or oil services companies, hold on to it like your first-born child because you will be wealthy before this president is through. I am ashamed to say I am an American with this most recent debacle.

Mike Hagan, Germantown

Silicone vs. Natural

To the Editor:

Rebekah Gleaves has her heart in the right place, I suppose (“Why I Left Nashville,” May 10th issue), but if she thinks Memphis is totally “natural” versus Nashville’s “silicone,” she must not get out of the downtown area much.

Trees are torn down everywhere in Shelby County to build strip malls which are half-filled. (And with the coming recession, many of them will go completely bust.) Chain stores and franchise restaurants abound. Traffic is insane.

We may not have cocaine mirrors in our club bathrooms, but we’ve got a level of political corruption in this city that must be seen to be believed. Most of this doesn’t touch me personally except for being sad to see the forest disappearing in the name of ostentatiously overpriced retail, but it still saddens me. I just spent nine months in Louisiana and frankly, with all its poverty, any small town in Cajun country has got a lot more soul than this city ever will, so long as we turn a blind eye to our flaws and do nothing about them.

It’s fitting that a dead rock star is our biggest draw. Like him, we are gaudy and way overrated.

Dana Seilhan, Memphis

An Opportunity?

To the Editor:

The United States has been given a remarkable opportunity — the chance to grow up and join the ranks of civilized nations by declining to execute Timothy McVeigh. His guilt is beyond question, but the clumsy handling of his sentence and its current postponement afford a means of opting for mercy rather than for vengeance. In choosing the latter we join a small group of ugly customers; in choosing the former a larger group of more advanced countries. If we execute McVeigh, his punishment is soon ended, but the bitterness it causes will last for years. If we commute his sentence to life imprisonment, his punishment will continue until the day he dies. Since he is only 33, that date may be a long time coming — time enough for him to repent his action. His deed cannot be undone but we need not choose vengeance.

George Martyn Finch, Memphis

Three Steps

To the Editor:

The financing for the proposed NBA arena is simplicity itself:

1) The taxpayers pay for a new state-of-the-art arena.

2) The billionaires and millionaires who own the team (which, unlike the arena, is a valuable and highly portable commodity) receive the revenues from parking, concessions, ticket/luxury box sales, naming rights, arena advertising, and sales taxes generated by all this.

3) In five to 10 years, when this facility is as obsolete as The Pyramid has suddenly become, repeat steps one and two.

Or as the song goes: They get the gold mine and we get the shaft.

Herbert E. Kook Jr., Germantown

Music Fest is the Best

To the Editor:

In a letter to the editor in the May 10th issue a reader states that he saw open drug use among teenagers at the Beale Street Music Fest. Since he was so upset by what he saw, why didn’t he report the incident to the authorities? I attended all three days of the festival and I saw dozens of police personnel. I’m sure they would have responded had they been aware of the offense.

The music festival is one of the best things this city has to offer the world. There is bound to be some freewheeling, unacceptable behavior in such massive crowds. However, the vast majority of festival-goers are responsible people having a great time in a pleasant fun-filled environment. Sloppy drunks and users of illegal drugs are definitely the exception, not the rule.

Randy Norwood, Memphis

Inconsistent

To the Editor:

Be consistent. If Jackson Baker is exercising his First Amendment rights to steal intellectual property (“Napster’s Second Coming,” May 10th issue), then remove the “Copyright 2001” from your masthead as well. Hypocrites.

Deb Parkinson, Memphis

The Memphis Flyer encourages reader response. Send mail to: Letters to the Editor, POB 1738, Memphis, TN 38101. Or call Back Talk at 575-9405. Or send us e-mail at letters@memphisflyer.com. All responses must include name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters should be no longer than 250 words.

Categories
News

Parks For Sale

It’s a spring afternoon in Overton Park and scores of Memphians are enjoying the beautiful weather. Dog owners, Frisbee players, and walkers are taking a relaxation and recreation break in one of the most popular of Memphis’ many parks.

From the downtown riverfront parks to the neighborhood parks out east, the Memphis park system is one of our city’s greatest resources. But recently some park land has been sacrificed to development, troubling many of the city’s environmentalists.

“There’s a trend recently in the city to treat park land like surplus property to be sold to the highest bidder,” says Scott Banbury, president of the Memphis Audubon Society. “This flies in the face of park tradition that says this land should be set aside.”

The boldest example came when Williams Petroleum was given the rights to develop seven acres of the Martin Luther King Jr. Park in southwest Memphis. Even though much of the surrounding neighborhood protested the decision, Park Services deputy director Bob Fouche says giving up the park land was worth it because the rental fees from Williams pay for a full-time staff and improvements to the park.

Glenn Cox, president of Park Friends, thinks giving up public space for profit is a bad idea. He says about a year ago Park Services even considered installing cell phone microwave-transmission towers disguised as trees to bring revenue into the park system. So far that hasn’t happened, Cox says.

Cox and Park Friends are constantly on the lookout for the city’s encroachment on park land. He says a year ago thousands of saplings were cut down to construct a cancer survivor park without proper public notification, and right now the group is fighting to keep Riverside Drive from expanding into Tom Lee Park.

Since the Memphis Park Commission was dissolved last year it’s become more difficult for citizens to have their opinions heard. The commission’s board used to meet once a month to hear citizens’ complaints and concerns, but now the city council has assumed that responsibility.

“The city council meets twice a month, where the park commission met only once a month, but park issues are just one of hundreds of things on the city council’s agenda. And sometimes it’s difficult to get the commissioner’s ear,” Cox says.

The future of the riverfront and its parks has been the subject of intense debate in a series of recent public meetings. The non-profit Riverfront Development Commission (RDC) has been given the responsibility to develop a plan to reconnect Memphis to the waterfront and in the process wants to develop some public and park space. Though the plan would result in a net increase in park land, many citizens at the last meeting were upset at the thought of losing Jefferson Davis Park and downtown’s library and fire station to development.

The library and fire station are part of the Overton Blocks, prime bluff-top property given to the city under the condition it be used only for the public interest. Benny Lindermon, president of the RDC, says the public services should be moved and the property developed for the good of the city. If necessary, Lindermon says, the RDC will go to court to proceed with its plan.

“The fire station and library create almost a barrier between downtown and the riverfront,” he says. “If we use it for retail or housing so it’s not a dead zone, we would lose public space, by definition, but we’d create something beneficial to the public.”

Lindermon says the property could maintain its public use definition by reserving the ground floor of the fire station for some sort of cultural attraction, while using the upper floors for commercial or residential use. Cox says many people feel we can’t have too much park space, but he says he doesn’t have a problem with losing some public space if it will lead to a net improvement of downtown open space.

Though the public interest served in developing the Overton Blocks and public space downtown remains to be seen, another public/corporate partnership concerning a downtown park has disappointed some Memphians.

Before Handy Park was renovated, it was a place where on any spring or summer afternoon blues bands would play for tourists and locals lounging on benches in the shade of mature hardwood trees. But the city agreed to a deal which allowed a private company to turn the park into an amphitheater on the condition a “park-like” feel would remain.

The wooden benches are gone, replaced by a scattering of faux-wood picnic tables, an amphitheater with a gift shop, a snack bar, and a brick edifice emblazoned with a Budweiser sign. There is more green space and new public bathrooms, but Wendell Cooper, manager of Alfred’s on Beale, says he liked the park better the way it was before.

“It used to be a place where people could come down and hang out and listen to music. But people don’t really hang out there anymore,” Cooper says. “It’s more of a corporate thing, where people can come down and drink so people can make money.”

Public/private collaborations are commonplace, Fouche says, and Parks Services remains open to more of these ventures. Even though he says their budget is sufficient at this point, his department could always do more with more money. Fouche adds that the loss of the park commission doesn’t affect citizens’ opportunity to speak their minds and he’s satisfied with the results of the Handy and MLK Park deals.

You can e-mail Andrew Wilkins at letters@memphisflyer.com.

Categories
News News Feature

Credit Card Nation

Good evening, my name is Dave, and I’ll be your cultural stereotype for the evening. Suburban, white, male, married, two teenagers, a dog, two cars. And several credit cards, which makes me a thoroughly dangerous guy. I am the reason why service charges, interest, and late fees are so high. I am undermining the Puritan work ethic and helping usher in a new era of idleness, sloth, and wasted effort.

But I am, I swear, working very hard on becoming a deadbeat. More about this in a second.

The truth is that I’m not a dangerous guy. The banks only pretend I am. In fact, they love people like me. Using the media as handmaidens — along with their own massive marketing campaigns — consumer credit providers like to paint scary pictures of people who binge on credit and get overextended. It makes for good copy, and (more important) it allows the banks to justify the fees and rate increases that they charge in spite of their record profits in recent years.

The people whom the banks really can’t stand are the ones who pay their bills in full every month or who use no credit cards at all. The banks call them “deadbeats,” not because they don’t make their payments, but because they don’t get sucked into the quicksand of consumer debt.

All of this comes via Robert D. Manning, a senior fellow of the Institute for Higher Education Governance and Law at the University of Houston Law Center (try getting all that on a business card) and the author of Credit Card Nation: The Consequences of America’s Addiction to Credit, which is about as scary a book as you’ll read this year.

Manning writes that people like me — the ones who charge such luxuries as stereos, TVs, golf clubs, and vacations — are easy scapegoats. Reporters like to paint us as spendthrifts with no regard for the connection between work and consumption. We are idlers, living on the money saved by the prudent folks who know how to squeeze a dollar and buy a savings bond. Many of us even use credit cards for such items as groceries, medicine, doctor bills, school clothes, retirement costs — anything to preserve, in short, a standard of living that we’ve fought hard to achieve.

And we’re the lucky ones. The folks in lower socioeconomic brackets must resort to such devices as “payday loans,” often at more than 500 percent annual interest. For them, consumer credit can be as poisonous, as addictive, and as ruinous as crack.

I’m lucky not to have faced this sort of usury. Although I have binged, I have paid for it many times over. Someday, I might just learn my lesson.

Lately, though, I charged a whole mess of tinwhistles — Celtic wind instruments that come in all manner of sizes, keys, tones, and price ranges. I love them, and I became determined to play them, but I soon found that there just aren’t very many tinwhistle merchants in Memphis.

So I had to order them, and to do that, I had to use a credit card. In all, I spent more than a few hundred bucks on tinwhistles — the hand-crafted ones can get right expensive. The hell of it is that I still can’t play them, but I nevertheless get great pleasure from sitting out back in the evening and trying make music come out of them, even though it does upset dogs for miles around and summon bats to come roost in our trees.

Ever since this tinwhistle binge, my wife has changed the numbers on all the credit cards and keeps them in a secret location. She trusts me, I’m sure, but she’s not taking chances.

Now I can show her this book and let her know that my behavior is downright normal — or at least it’s not too weird — and that there are a whole slew of suburbanites out here just like me, only more so.

While Manning offers copious insights and a boatload of anecdotes and statistics to document the hows and whys of our addiction to credit, he doesn’t provide much in the way of solutions. So, lacking credentials — other than all the years I’ve spent slaving away to make monthly payments to credit card providers — I’ll do so for him. I’ll even invoke some wisdom from Will Rogers in the bargain, who said that the quickest way to double your money is to fold it over and put it back in your pocket.

The same goes for credit cards, only the trick is to fold them hard enough — back and forth — to break them in half. Go ahead. Be a deadbeat. Word has it that it feels something akin to freedom. Let me know if you manage to pull it off. I need to join you.

You can e-mail David Dawson at letters@memphisflyer.com.

Categories
Book Features Books

Harem Scarum

Scheherazade Goes West:

Different Cultures, Different Harems

By Fatema Mernissi

Washington Square Press, 220 pp., $25.95

Once upon a time there was a fairy tale that began, as any good fairy tale must, as a tale of tragedy, and it went like this:

Good King Shahzaman, the happy ruler of “The Land of Samarcand,” returns to his palace one day only to find his wife in the arms of a kitchen boy. Enraged, Shahzaman kills them both then sets out for the Persian kingdom of his older and wiser brother, good King Shahrayar. One morning, however, Shahzaman, with that habit of being in the right place at the wrong time, happens to look out onto Shahrayar’s harem garden only to look in on still more monkey business: Shahrayar’s lady of the house in cahoots with a slave freshly swung from a tree and her retinue of slave girls magically transformed into 10 swinging couples up to their own business. Shahrayar gets wind of it, kills the whole unfaithful lot, then goes several steps (and heads) further by marrying then decapitating in revenge every virgin in sight. Except for one: daughter of the king’s vizier, Scheherazade, who keeps her head by filling the king’s with some tales of her own, the body of which we know as The Thousand and One Nights.

This makes Scheherazade, in the mind of Fatema Mernissi in the pages of Scheherazade Goes West, the one thing not one Westerner, she’s convinced, wants Scheherazade in truth to be: a political hero and self-liberator and on the following three fronts: knowledge, which would mean she’s an intellectual; words, which would mean she’s a cunning strategist; and cold blood, which would mean she’s a cool cookie. The very opposite, in other words, of what Western ideas and art — from Kant to Ingres to Delacroix to Matisse to Picasso to Diaghilev to Hollywood — have taken harem insiders in general to be, which, Mernissi argues, is basically ready, willing, and able, dumb-struck before the “male gaze” and stark naked while we’re at it. Why the misunderstanding? First, some understanding, from the Islamic point of view and to wit:

Muslim men expect their women to be “highly aware of the inequality inherent in the harem system” and, by extension, aware of the inequities in conduct and dress prescribed by present-day and fundamentalist Islamic societies. Background insight: Muslim men fundamentally fear women. Reason: Muslim men are full of self-doubt. Why? Because Islam, as a legal and cultural system, “is imbued with the idea that the feminine is an uncontrollable power — and therefore the unknowable ‘other.'” Again because: It’s not the men who do the penetrating where it ultimately counts — the brain — but the women, what with their capacity to outthink and outwit men, which is, to men, the “essence” of sexual attraction. A man in love risks slavery, therefore locking women up makes rejection impossible. The Muslim fantasy in art nonetheless: “self-assertive, strong-minded, uncontrollable, and mobile women.” Evidence: the story of Harun Ar-Rachid, “the sexy caliph,” born 766; the Muslim tradition in secular painting as propounded by Empress Nur-Jahan of India in the 16th century. Mernissi makes all these points and cases clear but only until she finds space to get to them and only after she dispenses a lot of chitchat, the ultimate mark reached when she discovers that she cannot fit into a size 6 skirt and blames Western mankind for it.

And what of the West’s historical response to Scheherazade? Kill her off, according to Edgar Allen Poe, who plainly feared her in his short story “The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade.” Beauty plus brains? A philosophical contradiction, according to Kant. Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque? “By spending months painting a beautiful woman,” Mernissi confidently concludes, “Ingres was declaring daily to his wife that she was ugly!” Matisse? His passive odalisques “did not exist in the Orient!” And poor Hollywood? Maria Montez, Mernissi disposes of as a low-budget burlesque queen, and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra Mernissi cannot even bring herself to openly name as Montez’s high-end offspring. Muslim men at least have an inkling; Western men, we learn, haven’t a clue, until, that is, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu publicly put the stamp on the “symbolic violence” perpetrated on women’s bodies and Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth ran with the idea.

Other ideas in Scheherazade Goes West it’s up to you to run from. As in, in the author’s words: “Scheherazade’s passive submission to her own death [in Poe’s story] upset me so much that I could hardly carry on with the book promotion tour when I arrived in Paris.” Or: “I would have to see a doctor about my heart palpitations. It would be such a hassle to have a heart attack in France. “

One idea, though, is way off the register. To talk herself down from the upset of a heart attack in France, Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist best known for her book Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood, puts herself through what she calls “Arab psychotherapy,” which means “you keep talking nonstop about your obsessions, even if people don’t listen or care. One day, someone will give you a sensible observation or answer, and save you the trouble and expense of checking yourself into a psychiatric hospital. The only problem with this technique is that you lose a lot of friends.”

East may still be East; West, West. But on this centuries-tested and cross-cultural method of losing friends (never mind the attention of readers), there is no divide.

Categories
News The Fly-By

A NEEDY GUY

Who says Grizzlies owner Michael Heisley doesn’t know basketball? After his team landed a number six seed in the upcoming NBA draft, Heisley commented: “We could use a small guy or a big guy. We’re pretty flexible.”Gee, thanks Mike, for clearing that up. We all have a much better sense of the team’s direction now.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

tuesday, may 22nd

Wesley Willis, Pezz, and The Country Teasers are at Last Place on Earth. And Eric Clapton is at The Pyramid.

Categories
News News Feature

WELL-KNOWN JUDGES SCORE LOW IN SURVEY

Some of the best-known judges in Memphis are also some of worst, according to a survey released Friday by the Memphis Bar Association.

U.S.District Judge Jon McCalla, in the news this month for a simmering feud with the Burch Porter Johnson law firm, scored by far the lowest of any federal judge and lowest overall of any judge in any court in Shelby County. On a 1-5 scale, McCalla scored an overall rating of 2.27.

Attorneys rated judges on a scoring scale of 5 for excellent, 3 for satisfactory, and 1 for unsatisfactory. Of the 2,907 lawyers who received the survey, 695 responded. Attorneys were asked to rate only judges before whom they have practiced. Responses were anonymous.

McCalla has been criticized for his temper and for berating lawyers. He is currently presiding over the Shelby County jail lawsuit. All other federal judges scored 3.78 or higher, with David S. Kennedy the highest at 4.79.

Former state lawmaker Karen Williams (3.13 overall), Kay Robilio (2.57) and D’Army Bailey (2.52) fared worst among the Circuit and Chancery Court judges. Williams was rapped for being slow on rulings, Robilio for knowledge of the law, and Bailey, a part-time actor and former mayoral candidate, for convening court punctually.

The lowest rating among the Memphis municipal court judges went to Earnestine Hunt Dorse(2.80). In Criminal Court, W.Fred Axley brought up the rear (2.70).

“One of the obligations of the bar is to educate the public about the judicial system,” said Linda Holmes, chairman of the Judicial Evaluation Committee. “This judicial evaluation is one way the bar association can give information to the public.”

Categories
Sports Sports Feature

Q & A WITH SIDNEY L0WE

Grizzlies coach Sidney Lowe was in Memphis this past weekend to meet the press, check out the Pyramid, and get his first look at Memphis. Below are his comments.

How has Memphis treated you so far?

LOWE: It’s been great. Got off the airplane and had a few fans there who were excited and came up to talk to us for a while. I actually got a good luck pen from a lady. She gave me an ink pen and said it was good luck for me. I had the opportunity to go to the [Redbirds] baseball game last night. It’s just great. It’s just tremendous. There’s a lot of energy.

Just to introduce everybody to the way you coach basketball, what is a Sidney Lowe basketball team?

LOWE: We try to put special emphasis on our defense. Hopefully, you’ll see a team that will get out there and put some pressure on the ball, guard the ball. Play good, aggressive defense. Early last year we tried to keep ourselves in the top field-goal percentage against. At one point we were right there at number 2, then we went to number 4 for a long time. Then we went down to 10 or 12. That’s just an area we try to concentrate on.

This year, offensively we are going to be a little different in that we are running the floor. Last year we ran more often on picking off misses. This year, we are going to concentrate on just running. Getting the ball out and pushing it down the floor. With the new rules coming in, zones and things like that, I think it’s important that we get the ball out and not allow other teams to set up their zones, if that is what they chose to do.

With the zones coming in, it seems that would favor a rebounding team, catching misses that come off the board. So far, rebounding has been a challenge for this team. What sort of things are you going to change to get better rebounding?

LOWE: Well, obviously we have to get bigger. We have to get bigger bodies in there. We are looking to get more athletic. Teams today are going to the lean, athletic, long, high-jumping guys as opposed to the physical players, especially at that power forward spot. They’re not big like Karl Malone. They’re more athletic. We have to get a little athleticism as well.

I think the other thing is that in playing a zone, you might allow yourself to be better on the boards. Now you have your big guys down there. When you are playing a man-to-man, you’re trapping a lot in the post. When you are guarding Shaq [L.A. Lakers Center Shaquille O’Neal], say, you can’t guard him one on one. Now, when you trap and they shoot, you’re at a disadvantage on the boards. Maybe, playing in a zone at times, it will help us to rebound a little better.

So you see the Grizzlies going to a zone?

LOWE I can see that. Absolutely. Absolutely. Any time you can change your defense to keep the other team off balance, I think it’s better. The players are too good, the coaches are too good. If you keep doing the same things over and over, they’ll make the adjustments. Now, being able to make that change from man-to-man where you are trapping a certain guy to all types of zones, and hopefully that will keep the other team off balance.

How is that going to change the outlook of the Western Conference?

LOWE: I don’t know. I don’t know how many teams will actually play zone. I don’t know how it will change the Western Conference. We had a team this year win 47 games, and it got the eighth spot. I don’t know. In the Eastern Conference that might put you at number 4 or 5 somewhere. It’s a tough conference. Maybe with the zone, it will neutralize things a little bit and give you an opportunity.

Will the zone affect the way you’re going into this draft.

LOWE No. I don’t think so. I can’t answer for sure. I don’t think it will. The draft pick is tomorrow and it’s more of [Grizzlies GM] Billy Knight’s area. He’s doing the draft thing. I do the coaching.

Do you even know what direction he’s going in? Does he want another big body in the paint or is he going for a guard? All the top picks seem to be power forwards and centers.

LOWE: I think some of that depends on our activity over the summer. On our own team that we have, we have some guys that are free agents. Some guys might opt out. Could be that someone might cause a great trade situation. I think from that, then, we will see where we are and I think we will see where we need to go.

Your top player, power forward Shareef Abdur-Rahim, has requested a trade. Has there been any word on that?

LOWE: I haven’t heard anything.

When you are talking about changes in the off-season, what are the strengths you want to keep emphasizing and what are the areas do you want to change for the better next season?

LOWE: I think first thing is that we want to stay constant with our defense. Whoever we bring in, we want him to be able to defend. Not just individually but also understanding team defense and helping, things like that. That means he needs to be able to learn different schemes.

I think the area I would like to improve is on the offensive end. We didn’t shoot the ball as well as I would have liked as a team. That probably hurt us more than anything because coming down to that last 3-4 minutes of the ballgame, when you get that open shot you have to knock it down. I think we can do that a little better than we did last year.

You’ll be playing at The Pyramid if this whole NBA deal goes through. What do you think of the facility?

LOWE: I think it’s going to be good. I had the chance to go over there this morning. I had a chance to speak with coach Cal [University of Memphis basketball coach, John Calipari] and they’ve been great over there, very supportive. They want to do everything they can to make us comfortable. I think it’s going to be great.

And you’ll be using the Finch training facility on the University of Memphis campus?

LOWE: That’s where we are looking right now. No decisions have been made but we’re looking at it. I didn’t chance to go over there. Billy saw it though and was very pleased with it. He’s been in the business for a long time so I trust him.

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There is an old saying among writers, that curious breed of human known for borrowing one another s intellectual property with relative impunity: If you are going to steal, steal from the best. It appears that The Commercial Appeal s marketing department has taken this old saw to heart. A recent ad on the back cover of the Memphis Air Show s program depicts a page from the CA cleverly folded into a paper airplane along with the caption, Cleared for landing at your house. Our hearty thanks to the CA for helping brand the Flyer s simple but easily recognized logo.