Month: February 2004

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Pointy-Headed

Readers should not blame themselves if they’re confused about the current state of affairs regarding The Pyramid, a facility paid for through a bond issue that will obligate the city and county for years to come but which may, for all intent and purpose, be useless and lie fallow for much of that time.

That’s the reality after the decision of the University of Memphis to remove Tiger basketball games from The Pyramid to the newer and shinier FedExForum — a move which will itself be paid for in part by city and county funds.

We’re troubled that this deal was reached by the city and county mayors, by officials of HOOPS (the NBA Grizzlies’ controlling group), and by university officials without input from the Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission.

And we’re even more alarmed that nobody yet has a plan for making good public use of The Pyramid while we’re paying it out. Talk about pointy-headed!

Categories
News The Fly-By

If at First You Don’t Succeed

He’s back! The art thief who tried to scam several Memphis galleries out of thousands of dollars in paintings last summer has reappeared and is back to his old ways.

Earlier this month, the man showed up at Etched Art gallery, 505 S. Main, attempting his latest scam. As in past incidents, he fabricated a story about purchasing art for his business office as well as a piece for his personal use.

“He wanted his company logo etched on a large piece of glass,” said business owner Ryan Hamlin. “He said his interior designer had been in and selected pieces for his review.” The man then picked out two pieces costing about $1,800 and a third piece for his beach house. When the total came to $4,750, the man offered to pay for the pieces in cash but requested an additional $425 granite piece be released to him in good faith. He promised to return for the remaining three pieces.

“I asked him for his ID, but he refused to give it to me,” said Hamlin. “When I told him no [about leaving with the granite piece], he got a temper, started walking out, and said, ‘This is the same Memphis bullshit.'” During the transaction, the suspect also told Hamlin he was employed by British Petroleum but never produced a business card. Hamlin followed the man outside and was able to record a partial license plate number.

Sgt. Denise Jones with the MPD Economic Crimes Bureau, who has covered the art thefts since August 2003, said the Etched Art incident is the fourth in a series by the same suspect. While no culprit has been identified, the police have released a description. Police are searching for a white male, 35 to 40 years old, weighing 180 to 215 pounds, with short blond/gray hair. In some instances, the man has used a British or Australian accent. He has also been known to drive a 1990s four-door Jeep Cherokee with Tennessee plates.

The suspect made off with a painting valued at $1,500 from the DCI Gallery in East Memphis last year. In that case, the man claimed to be a new doctor in town decorating his Germantown home. He used the name Greg Michaels and claimed to be a member of the DeBeers diamond family. Unlike the Etched Art incident, where he never provided a name, the suspect also gave a phony address and phone number for future contact from DCI. He attempted similar scams at Fountain Gallery, also in East Memphis, and at Rivertown Gallery downtown.

“We thought this was the guy from a similar case years ago, but that guy is deceased,” said Jones. Unfortunately, the partial plate number provided by Hamlin does not do much to narrow the search. According to Jones, that partial number matches as many as 2,000 cars.

E-mail: jdavis@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

A Wilder Moment

Lt. Governor John Wilder, avowing that he was “not on an ego trip” and was ready to “do another deal” if the state Senate chose in the near future to elect someone else as speaker, on Saturday defended his “nonpartisan” conduct of the presiding position which the octogenarian and nominal Democrat has held since 1971 and delivered himself of some unusually straightforward opinions.

Addressing attendees at the monthly Dutch Treat luncheon at the Piccadilly restaurant in southeast Memphis, the Somerville lawmaker cautioned at one point that “I’m going to turn some of you off.” There was no indication, however, that he did so with Saturday’s conservative-oriented audience — even when he expressed himself bluntly on issues relating to the courts.

“Our United States Supreme Court says separate was unequal,” he mused. “It took them 75 years to find out separate wasn’t equal. They said it had to be identical. Identical! What did they do? They went to preferential treatment.” Wilder segued from the issue of “women and blacks going against white men for jobs” to that of abortion, concerning which the lieutenant governor said, “They discriminated against all men. What about the husband? Ought not it be a unanimous decision to kill the baby? Or does just one of them have the right to kill the baby?”

Wilder was equally adamant about what he considered judicial presumption on the issue of a state income tax — the controversial and polarizing issue on which the Senate speaker maintained an ambivalent position during the last stormy years of the administration of Republican governor Don Sundquist. Wilder was anything but ambivalent Saturday, though.

“It’s unconstitutional!” the speaker thundered at one point, going on to say, “When the court rewrites a constitution, they violate their oath to uphold the constitution. That’s an impeachable offense.” At another point, he characterized judicial overreaching as violating “an oath to Jesus Christ.”

Wilder was also critical of a ruling by the Internal Revenue Service which prevented him from preparing legislation that would redefine the sales tax as a “privilege” tax, thereby making it subject to deduction from one’s federal income tax. The lieutenant governor has crusaded for years to achieve such a result on the ground, as he normally puts it, that “Uncle Sam taxes taxes.”

During a Q&A session, audience member Jim Jamieson complained of unnamed Senate committee chairmen who were “embarrassing” to the state and Shelby County and were guilty of “political arrogance and unethical behavior.” He later identified the main subject of his scorn as state Senator John Ford.

Meanwhile, Wilder evidently divined as much. “We probably don’t see eyeball to eyeball. I think I know who you’re talking about,” he responded, “and he has a lot of ability you don’t know about, and he has a lot of honesty and integrity you don’t know about. And he knows health care pretty well.”

The speaker had devoted much of his prepared remarks to a demonstration that TennCare had proved to be an almost ruinously costly program and was crowding out spending on other state programs. “Our cash flow has been good, but our problem has been TennCare. It has eaten us alive,” he said.

Wilder’s remarks on the subject were consistent with recent ones on the same subject from Democratic governor Phil Bredesen, a former HMO executive who has promised to unveil plans — perhaps as early as this week — to scale back the state-run health-care system for the uninsured and uninsurable.”We have a good governor,” Wilder said. “I believe he’s the best CEO we’ve had. He knows health care.”

On other issues, Wilder suggested that tax reform was a proper subject for the constitutional-amendment process and defended the fairness of recent Senate redistricting. In response to criticism of the latter, the lieutenant governor noted that Sen. Jo Ann Graves of Lebanon had presided over the last effort but said the efforts of her committee had been “fair,” pointing out that the districts of Republicans Curtis Person and Mark Norris, both Shelby Countians, had been left independent.

At one point, said Wilder, a self-proclaimed “no-good Democrat” who almost bolted the party in 1986, he was forced to intervene. The Senate speaker, who boasted that “for 30 years, they [Senate redistricters] did what I told them to do,” said he took care of a complaint from Sen. Roy Herron (D-Dresden), who lamented that his district had been drastically changed while that of Wilder had been altered to put challenger Bob Schutt “way off in the bushes.” Said Wilder: “I told him, ‘I’ll leave you just exactly where you are and I’ll beat Bob Schutt,’ and that’s what I did.”

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Short Cuts

As the Eternal Cowboy

Against Me!

(Fat Wreck Chords)

I have no clue whether the band (or its fans) would appreciate or disdain the comparison, but Gainesville, Florida’s Against Me! (labeled a “Next Big Thing” in the current issue of Spin) reminds me a lot of Rancid. They don’t necessarily sound like Rancid (nor do they exactly sound like the Pogues or the Mekons, other bands they evoke), but I hear some of the same spirit in As the Eternal Cowboy, the band’s first album for venerable punk label Fat Wreck Chords, which was recorded locally at Ardent Studios. (I’ve never heard the band’s highly regarded debut, Reinventing Axl Rose, but you better believe I’ll be tracking it down soon.)

There’s the deeply felt if not always entirely coherent political bent in the band’s lyrics, for starters, and Tom Gabel’s end-of-the-evening vocals convey the same kind of hardscrabble bonhomie as Rancid’s Tim Armstrong. But mostly the connection comes from the warmth and interplay (especially vocal) that burns brightly in the cracks of this band’s furious punk-folk sound. I love that this band isn’t afraid of anthemic grandeur, that they don’t think old-style rock-and-roll musical verities are at odds with their punk principles.

This can be heard perhaps most clearly on “ClichÇ Guevara” (Against Me! seems to believe in the old Minutemen axiom that a song title is worth a thousand words; other faves: “You Look Like I Need a Drink” and “Turn Those Clapping Hands Into Angry Balled Fists”), where an echoey guitar chord (a guttersnipe’s take on “A Hard Day’s Night,” perhaps?) opens into an irony-free “1-2-3-4” count-off that blasts into a last-chance-power-drive surge that’s missing only a Clarence Clemons sax break. By the time the band reaches the end of the song’s frenetic 2:09 with a chant of “With plans of invasion and arms races racing/Yeah, we-rock-we-rock-we-rock to the new sensation!” it’s hard to tell whether to raise your angry, balled fists in defiant celebration or clap your hands with sardonic derision. And this neat little trick evokes yet another classic-rocker this band probably doesn’t care about –Neil Young, whose insistence on “rockin’ in a free world” during a different Bush administration was similarly disorienting. As Gabel sings on “Mutiny on the Electronic Bay,” “When an invasion can bring a country its freedom/Then unconsciousness is true happiness/No, I don’t know what to say.” A sane reaction, but it doesn’t mean he won’t keep on searching for the right words anyway. — Chris Herrington

Grade: A-

Against Me! is currently on tour with locals Lucero. Both bands perform Tuesday, February 24th, with the Grabass Charlestons at the Riot at 296 Monroe Avenue.

Mississippi to Mali

Corey Harris

(Rounder)

Corey Harris single-handedly redeems the entire “Year of the Blues” debacle with this graceful offering. The simple concept — tracing Mississippi blues back to African roots music — was muddied by the ineffectual storytelling of Martin Scorsese’s The Blues series that ran on PBS last fall. Luckily, Harris has stripped the project of unnecessary weight and allowed the tunes and traditions to speak for themselves. Boundaries are traversed again and again, allowing listeners to compare such tracks as Ali Farka Toure’s “Rokie” with Sharde Thomas’ “Back Atcha.” Rhythmically, at least, these songs are close cousins, even though an ocean and entire cultures separate the two.

It’s like one of those confounded SAT questions: “Senatobia is to Senegal as Skip James is to –.” Harris nimbly dances around the subject, presenting his case again and again as he lines up James’ “Special Rider Blues” for assessment alongside Toure’s “Tamalah” and his own original “Charlene.” And whether Harris & Co. were playing outdoors in Como, Mississippi, or in Toure’s hometown of Niafunke, Mali, the material sounds equally crisp, further blurring the distinctions between blues music and African drones. The 15-track Mississippi to Mali provides the most important — and by far, the most elegant — blues lesson that anthropologists will ever need. —Andria Lisle

Grade: A

The Diary of Alicia Keys

Alicia Keys

(J Records)

Alicia Keys’ appeal lies in her old-school approach to new soul music. She’s learned her chops from Aretha and Gladys, but the woman who famously proclaimed Chopin her “dawg” isn’t afraid to learn some new tricks. On “So Simple,” a standout track from her second album, the quaintly titled The Diary of Alicia Keys, she duets with a distorted, sped up tape loop of her own voice singing the chorus. The effect is eerie, and the song sheds its influences to become something much more memorable than your typical radio-ready diva ballad: “So Simple” is a meditation on loss and regret that is every bit as baring and personal as the album title promises.

Equally risky is the first single, the sublimely erotic “You Don’t Know My Name,” in which producer Kanye West wraps Keys’ dusky voice in candlelight and a descending piano glissando that sounds like a dress falling to the floor. But it’s the lyrics that really heat up the song: “I can hardly wait for the first time/My imagination’s running wild.” The song’s all the more captivating for being so understated, overshadowing more blatant come-ons like Tweet’s “Oops (Oh My)” and Kelis’ ludicrous “Milkshake.” When Keys stops midsong to call up the man of her daydreams, you might think you’ve got a date with her.

It’s when the balance between new and old teeters that Diary becomes something less than fabulous. “If I Was Your Woman/Walk on By” promises a Bacharach cover by way of Hot Buttered Soul, but it’s just Isaac Hayes’ insistent beat that gets used — obviously enough to justify the double song title. Nothing says soulful like legal obligation.

Keys wants it both ways — old and new school. And most of the time she has enough personality and imagination to get exactly what she wants. —Stephen Deusner

Grade: B+

E-mail: herrington@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Seeing Red

“The single most wonderful thing that ever happened to me was having my dad disown me after I decided to leave [college] as a freshman,” says Morgan Jon Fox, whose play Red Pain(t) closes this weekend at TheatreWorks. “Even though it hurt like hell, it gave me the wonderful gift of having to fight my own damn fight.”

And Fox is nothing if not a fighter. After his mother died and his father severed family ties, Fox went to Vermont to attend film school. But his financial aid never came through so he moved back to Memphis, bought his own equipment, and began teaching himself how to use it. He became a fixture on the coffee-shop circuit and started to organize readings of his scripts and screenplays. His recent film Blue Citrus Hearts won the award for best local feature at the IndieMemphis Film Festival in 2003. It also earned an honorable mention at the Berkeley Film and Video Festival and won for best feature at the 22nd Annual Chicago Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, where it was described as “the most honest, organic, and deeply touching film shown in the history of the festival.”

Jon Morgan Fox at

rehearsal for Red Pain(t)

Fox’s play Red Pain(t) was written as part of a cycle of stories that includes Blue Citrus Hearts and his first cinematic effort, Bi-Polar Sun. Like his previous efforts, it revolves around sexual identity, family, and the social politics of “the closet.”

There is one obvious question: Why would a young artist who is beginning to garner some acclaim as a filmmaker choose to express himself through the medium of theater? After all, theater as an art form is in a state of crisis. All across the country theater attendance is down, and there are fewer and fewer original scripts being produced. Thanks to digital technology, films have become so much easier to make. Nobody is writing plays anymore, but everyone, it seems, is working on a screenplay.

“It’s been completely amazing to create a film that I made out of a necessity to communicate something that was at one time so personal and aching that I couldn’t tell my best friend,” Fox says of Blue Citrus Hearts. So why didn’t he also put Red Pain(t) on film?

“The immediate and very honest reason was that I wrote a play,” Fox says. “And it’s a PLAY, and I’m not into leaving things behind these days. But the pure fact is, no form of art is more pure and present than the theater. It’s there: heartbeat, breath, rafters, and shitty sets.” Fox also wanted to experiment with acting techniques developed by the acclaimed acting instructor Sanford Meisner. Fox became interested in Meisner after encountering Amber Nicholson, a devoted Meisner acolyte, at a poetry reading at Java Cabana.

The late, great Meisner cut his teeth as a member of the Group Theater, an extremely influential troupe in the 1930s which attempted to put Stanislavsky’s method of acting into an American context. Like fellow actor and teacher Stella Adler, Meisner took notions of emotional realism as set down by the Russian master and gave them his own peculiar interpretation. Alternately praised as the greatest acting teacher of his generation and derided for his sometimes caustic approach to instruction, Meisner believed that there was no need for an actor to ever fake an emotion. He believed that once actors had learned the lines so well they were like an extension of the mind and body, they could work entirely on impulse to facilitate genuine emotions.

“Meisner is an amazing tool for a human to have, period,” Fox says, explaining that the various exercises are as applicable to the building of relationships as they are to the creation of theater. “It connects you [to your emotions].”

For Red Pain(t), Fox assembled a group of actors with relatively little experience on stage. In fact, only one actor, the 14-year-old Morgan Stewart who has grown up performing in Our Own Voice productions, has anything resembling a theatrical resume. For Fox, working with non-actors in the emotionally charged context of Meisner’s techniques is a bit of a no-brainer.

“Working with people who are new to acting makes complete sense to me,” Fox says. “I want a human being, not someone who’s decided they’re an actor. [It can be] frustrating, definitely, [but] worth it always. Anyone who is willing to take the risk of trying this new thing well, it seems they have a better chance at becoming truthful to their character simply because they aren’t trying to be someone else to become that character. They weren’t asked to play this part simply because they were once amazing as Roger in Noises Off. They were asked to be the character based on their personality.”

At TheatreWorks through February 22nd.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

I Love You Tomorrow

There are genres of films: comedy, drama, horror, romantic comedy, etc. There are also subgenres: legal dramas, buddy comedies, monster horror as opposed to stalker horror or suspense. And then there is the genre that tailors a film to personality. Examples: the Tom Cruise romantic drama, the Jim Carrey comedy, the Kevin Costner speculatively historical Western epic, and in this case, the Adam Sandler comedy and the Drew Barrymore romance. What makes the Sandler/Barrymore combo interesting is the mix of Sandler’s tart, broad comedy with Barrymore’s natural sweetness and vulnerability. It mixed well in 1998’s The Wedding Singer and it mixes well here in 50 First Dates. But that’s chemistry. And movies require more than chemistry alone.

Sandler is Henry Roth, a marine biologist at a Hawaiian sea park. We first see him in the act of breaking up with a week-long fling just as she’s about to board a plane home. Will they ever see each other again? No, because Harry insists he’s a secret agent, soon to be incommunicado. He jumps on a passing jet-ski and vanishes from her life forever.

This scene follows a montage of lovely women (and one man) who relate to friends a wonderful, sexy man they met while vacationing in Hawaii. All seem to have gotten a different story as to why he can never see them again. He has commitment issues. Got it? Good — because after the first 20 minutes, all of this establishing-character exposition is worthless. Harry’s player-dom is never revisited, and Harry is never faced with the consequences of his fear of intimacy. Nor does he learn a lesson. You with me?

Next, Harry meets a lovely woman in a diner. She makes houses out of her waffles and she’s pretty, so of course she inspires the interest of Harry. She’s Lucy (Barrymore), an art teacher waiting until lunchtime when she and her father will ritually pick a pineapple on his birthday. Breakfast is nice, and the two agree to meet again the next morning for another breakfast. Harry shows up, but Lucy doesn’t remember the day before. Lucy never remembers the day before because a car accident has wiped out her short-term memory. Her father Marlin (Blake Clark) and brother Doug (Sean Astin) meticulously reconstruct the circumstances of that next day (it’s always Dad’s birthday!) from her choice in clothing to reprints of that day’s newspaper to rewrapping Lucy’s birthday present. (It’s a video of The Sixth Sense, and Dad and brother act surprised at the end every time.)

Harry finds a way of integrating himself into Lucy’s life, starting his courtship over every day, gaining a little more insight, information, and success each day. Soon, he suspects that keeping Lucy in the dark is the wrong way to go, and he develops a video orientation for her that explains everything that happened the previous year. This works, and gradually Harry figures out how to reduce her freak-out time so that he’ll have more of the day to woo her honestly. Imagine, going to bed with someone only to have no idea who they are when you wake up with them the next day. I hate it when that happens! (Just kidding, Mom. Even at my most incorrigible, I always have, at least, an inkling.)

The idea for this movie is more satisfying than the execution. But unlike other recent lame-o romantic comedies like Along Came Polly, this one starts poorly and actually gets better. Instead of being a genuine hybrid of the Sandler/Barrymore genre, 50 First Dates seems to start off Sandler and end up Barrymore. That’s a good thing, because she does better films than he does. In this case, the movie starts off crass and gross and grows sweeter and more thoughtful as it progresses.

But like Polly, this film has no narrative or comedic compass. A smarter film would tie in Harry’s commitment issues to Lucy’s obviously parallel memory lapses. But 50 is schlock, employing not one but two gross sidekicks (Hawaiian hippie cad Rob Schneider and a lusty, vinegar-y androgyne played by Lusia Strus) along with a needlessly lisping Astin, deplorable reaction shots from marine life, the worst projectile vomiting this side of The Exorcist, and the least funny cameo (Dan Ackroyd) since Ted Danson in Saving Private Ryan. It’s as though neither writer nor director trusted this to be a sweet fantasy and so have saddled it with limp slapstick to enliven the proceedings. By the satisfying end, however, a lot of the early rabble is forgiven, but not by much, and one wonders what this would have been like if it were a Drew Barrymore movie that only featured Adam Sandler. Oh well, maybe tomorrow…

Categories
News The Fly-By

OMBUDSMAN

On Thursday, February 5th, the CA‘s Center City Appeal ran a 6-by-8-inch color photo of the Memphis Zoo’s new baby orangutan, along with a story titled “Baby Orangutan — sur prise — beats the odds to survive.” While we here at Fly on the Wall are just as excited as the next fella about this furry bundle of joy, we’ve been more than a little amazed at the amount of space the CA has devoted to the new arrival. We were even more surprised to see that the story in question was penned by Brian Carter, communications specialist for the Memphis Zoo. We can only assume that in the near future the CA will allow motion-picture companies to review their own films and Rickey Peete to cover the City Council.

Plante: How It Looks

Categories
News

Have No Fear

I had three hours to kill before my flight to Delhi, so I sat down on my duffel bag and got out some Mark Twain. I had read The Grapes of Wrath on the way to California (not such a great idea); Lord of the Flies on my way to a tropical island (worse idea); and Siddhartha while in Nepal (just right). So, about to leave Asia for the Middle East, with a stop in India first, I put down my own journal and picked up Twain’s journal from the Middle East, The Innocents Abroad.

I was in no particular hurry to get to India. About a month before, I had spent the worst 27 hours of my life there. I had been faced with insane heat, a more insane companion, and the special treatment that central Delhi grants to the Western traveler: a roaming throng of beggars, robbers, and hustlers of every sort, including a fortune teller who waited for me outside the post office for more than an hour while I was bargaining over the price of stamps.

I had, in fact, tried to rearrange my intinerary to avoid India. Alas, I would have to spend another 24 hours there, but this time I was heading in with a completely different attitude: “I’m not taking any crap from anybody.” And, being a 23-year-old male, I was utterly confident that the entire city of Delhi would sense my inner strength and leave me be.

It was in this serene state that I heard a sound which, in the lobby of the Bangkok airport, rang like a chorus of angels: female Americans! There were three of them, my age and cute, and the magic of their appearance in that place was enhanced by the fact that one of them was smiling at me. Rarely have I felt so blessed.

I was still shy in those days — India I could handle, but girls? — but the travel gods smiled on me, and one of the lovelies sauntered over and actually spoke to me.

“Excuse me,” she sang, “are you American?” I confirmed that I was — from Tennessee, I added, in my best Southern drawl — and she informed me that the three of them were headed to India and wondered if I had been there and could answer some questions about it.

I was happy to explain that, not only had I been to Delhi, I understood it, was prepared for it, and would like nothing more than to guide three nice young ladies through that maze of absurdity. So the deal was struck: They’d pay my share at the hotel, and I’d get to play the role of Macho Hero Travel Man.

When the plane landed and we got to the Delhi terminal — several hours late, at roughly 3 a.m. — we decided to arrange ahead of time for a hotel. One of the girls had a guidebook mentioning a place that was 60 rupees, or about five bucks. The nice man at the counter explained that all rooms in Delhi were at least 300 rupees — a blatant lie — but that included the 50-rupee commission to, lo and behold, him. I insisted that he call this particular hotel and get us a room, and a few rupees later he agreed to. He dialed the phone, waited a few seconds, said something in his language, then said, in English, “Oh, you are full?” and hung up. His smile said to me, “Hmmm, just a few rupees short.”

When we emerged from the terminal, it was as if all my friends were there waiting for me. One guy wanted to carry our luggage out of the terminal, another one to the bus, and a third onto the bus — the idea being that I would drop rupees at every point. It was like they were working in shifts. But none of them got a rupee from Macho Hero Travel Man. The girls, meanwhile, had been touched about four times each before we left the airport property.

We found a hotel at 5 a.m. and were told we could sleep for free in a small room until noon, then move into a big, 130-rupee room. I knew this was bull but put off the fight until later. Sure enough, when we woke up, the hotel employee said, “There has been a terrible mistake. The only room I have is 300 rupees, plus the 50 rupees for this morning.”

“This is not what you said,” replied Macho Hero Travel Man, “and it will not stand.” My defiance was, the employee and I both knew, the opening statement in a negotiation process which resulted in the four of us paying a total of 200 rupees. Of course, when I asked about the price of coffee, he said to me, “Four rupees. But you pay 10, because you pay so little for the room.”

The girls were mystified by this. Not so Macho Hero Travel Man. He knew when you come to a new country, they often send out their worst to greet you: the hustlers, the freaks, and the users. He knew the girls would have a wonderful experience after getting through this Wall of Insanity. And he took comfort in knowing that he would get to spend the next 24 hours protecting them from the dregs of Delhi, setting them safely on their way to savor India’s wonders.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Searching for a New Home

The interim dean of the University of Memphis law school thinks the old Customs House building downtown would be a perfect home for the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law.

“It has that sort of serious elegance to it,” said Rodney Smith. “That’s what the law aspires to have. It also has its roots in tradition and yet it is alive in the world.”

Members of the City Council agree it’s a wonderful building but are skeptical that the United States Postal Service — which currently inhabits the building at Front and Madison — would be willing to give it up.

Representatives from the law school came before a City Council committee this week to ask for their support in moving to the Customs House. Ultimately, the federal government would have to give it back to the city, which would then give it to the university.

After the law school’s accrediting bodies indicated the current facility is too small, among other things, the administration began seriously thinking about moving downtown. About a year and a half ago, they hired Askew Nixon Ferguson Architects to evaluate the school’s needs.

Then they turned their attention to the Customs House. “We did a walk through and an analysis,” said Smith. “It was nothing short of wonderful how well it fit.”

Whether they get the downtown building or not, Smith says the school will need a new facility within the next five years. Estimates put the cost of renovating and refitting the Customs House at about $35 million.

“We could build a new facility near the school with that, but we’re more likely to find funding for a project downtown,” said Smith. The school doesn’t foresee receiving classroom building funds from the state any time soon, but Smith thinks they could raise private and federal funds with a new facility downtown. “We’ve talked to students, alumni, and friends, and everyone is excited about a move downtown.”

In similar-sized cities, there’s been a recent trend to move law schools downtown, which would put law students closer to court houses, law firms, and governmental bodies. School representatives also see an opportunity in the downtown move to expand a program which helps low-income Memphians with their legal needs.

“Many lawyers are involved in financial transactions. It will put us closer to a lot of businesses downtown,” said Smith. “It’s very much a win-win situation.”

The City Council did not take any action on the proposal.

E-mail: cashiola@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Cover Feature News

How High Can They Fly?

It’s been exactly 20 years since Hubie Brown last prowled the sidelines of an NBA playoff game. Back then it was as head coach of the New York Knicks, a place where fans were so jaded that, as Brown has joked, he didn’t just have to win, he “had to cover.” Now he’s trying to get to the postseason again, but this time with a team that’s never won anything and a fanbase that’s never seen playoff basketball. With a troika of question-laden stars (“soft” Pau Gasol, “erratic” Jason Williams, and “hobbled” Mike Miller) leading the way and deploying a pet system no one believed in a year ago, Brown must ow guide his young team through a 30-game gauntlet on the road to hoops heaven.

Jason Williams

At 30-22 heading into last week’s All Star break, the Memphis Grizzlies stood 14 games ahead of last season’s pace and tied for sixth place in the Western Conference playoff race. Along the way, they’ve set a franchise record for wins in a season and notched the first winning month in franchise history with a 10-4 January. This success is a full year ahead of the schedule president of basketball operations Jerry West outlined last season, when he suggested playoff contention would be on the calendar during the team’s first season in the FedExForum.

That the Grizzlies have achieved this unexpected success despite several individual players underachieving and with many key questions still unanswered is a tribute to Brown, whose controversial hiring is still arguably the finest move West has made. And fans should appreciate the one-of-a-kind Brown while his tenure lasts, since the septuagenarian coach has made no promise about coming back next season.

Brown deserves the bulk of the credit because this team’s success is tied heavily to a system and style that many have questioned. With no established stars and one of the deepest benches in the league, Brown’s 10-man rotation (which no other coach uses as rigidly) has shaped a team where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, with five players averaging double figures. And Brown’s preferred style of play — up-tempo offense and pressure defense — suits not only the depth but the personnel, taking advantage of the open-court skills of core offensive players like point guard Jason Williams, who is perhaps second only to Jason Kidd in his ability to manage a fast-break, and front-court fixture Pau Gasol, whose fleet feet but thin frame make him a natural for the up-and-down game.

The style has also served to negate his team’s personnel deficiencies, principally a lack of bulk that makes the Grizzlies one of the league’s least effective rebounding teams. At the break, the Grizzlies ranked dead last in the league in allowing offensive rebounds, something that will come as no surprise to fans who have watched bulky opposing centers such as Utah’s Greg Ostertag and Golden State’s Erick Dampier dominate the glass against an overmatched Grizzlies front-line.

Pau Gasol

But what the Grizzlies give up on the offensive boards they get back with ball-hawking defense and an effective floor game, ranking third in the league in assists, third in turnovers forced, second in steals, and fifth in turnover differential. The result is that, even though the team is routinely pounded on the boards, the Grizzlies still average more field-goal attempts per game than their opponents.

And it’s the defensive turnaround that has perhaps been the biggest key of all. Last season, Brown inherited a sieve-like defensive unit that was probably the league’s worst. And though the team improved noticeably under Brown’s tutelage, the Grizzlies still finished last season 27th in points allowed and 28th in opponent field-goal percentage. There are only 29 teams in the NBA.

This season, led by defensive-oriented new additions James Posey (who has been fabulous at both ends of the court) and Bo Outlaw (who is often a pronounced liability on offense), Brown has fashioned a respectable defensive team, up to 16th in points allowed and 13th in opponent field-goal percentage. And this improvement from awful to decent seems to be the tipping point for a team that has been solid offensively all along.

This season, the defense has been reliable enough that whenever the offense has clicked, the Grizzlies have won: 17-1 when scoring 100 points; 8-0 when shooting 50 percent; 10-0 at home when shooting at least 45 percent. This is especially good news for Grizzlies fans, because the team’s offense has been improving all season. The team’s field-goal percentage has improved every month, and the team’s points per game has also been rising steadily, up to 99.2 so far in February, with a sizzling 20.6 of those coming on the break.

In a season preview a few months ago, I wondered whether the Grizzlies would be able to stop anyone. Though that question has been answered affirmatively, answers to the other key questions thrown out in that article — What is Gasol’s ceiling? What will the team get from Mike Miller? Who will man the middle? — remain muddled.

In the preseason, there seemed to be two options at center: Stromile Swift and Jake Tsakalidis. So, of course, Brown has ended up where he left off last season: with Lorenzen Wright. The oft-maligned Swift has actually given the team solid production relative to his minutes, giving the team an athletic front-court reserve who is active around the basket and on the break and has developed an increasingly reliable mid-range jumper that still makes fans tense up when he decides to shoot it. But Swift — at 6’9″ and 225 pounds undersized for a Western Conference power forward, much less a center — is simply too slight to play next to Gasol in the starting lineup and has even seen his minutes slip from the bench as Brown has used Outlaw more and more in the fourth quarter.

Preseason addition Tsakalidis, a 7’2″, 290-pound behemoth, has presented the opposite problem. His bulk is what the team needs, but he isn’t quite physical enough to offset the problem his lack of speed poses for the team’s up-tempo style.

Mike Miller

And so Wright it is. The team leader and fan favorite doesn’t have the physical skills to truly compete with the league’s best centers, but he brings grit and effort every night, and the team has gone an impressive 23-12 with him in the starting lineup. But, with the team in desperate need of a more brutish player to pair with the finesse-oriented Gasol, one still suspects Wright is merely keeping this spot warm for a future addition, one that could conceivably come by the time this story is published.

The lack of a true physical presence at center has only exacerbated Gasol’s growing pains at power forward, where 5- or 6-rebound games are becoming distressingly common. Despite the exploits of Posey, Gasol is the team’s best and most important player, but his comfort level with the intensely physical post play in American basketball continues to be an issue. Pairing him with a true banger will help, but much of the improvement still has to come from Gasol himself. His newfound willingness to get in the face of opposing players (recently, Nene, Rasheed Wallace, and Desmond Mason) is a good sign.

That said, Gasol’s relatively disappointing season hasn’t been as stagnant as some fans might think. Though Gasol’s numbers are virtually identical to last season’s, he’s doing it on four fewer minutes per game, so his production has actually increased slightly. And, after shooting under 50 percent for much of the season, Gasol has found his groove of late, shooting a Shaq-like 61 percent in February while averaging more than 20 points. With the team entering a playoff push and with Gasol eligible to negotiate a contract extension after the season, the next 30 games are crucial to both his future and that of the Grizzlies.

But if Gasol is the team’s best player, shooting guard Mike Miller may well be the team’s most important, and how he copes with his lingering back injury may be the ultimate determinant of whether The Pyramid ever hosts a playoff game. Miller has shot the ball seven points better from the floor (47 to 40) and nearly 20 points better from downtown (44-26) in the team’s wins. And it’s no coincidence that when he’s played his best basketball, so have the Grizzlies.

When the team went 8-2 without Williams in late November/early December, a lot of the credit went to backup Earl Watson, but it was Miller who was the key, proving a revelation as a part-time point guard, averaging 7.3 assists during that stretch to go with 12.7 points and 40 percent shooting from downtown. Later, Miller sparked the team’s eight-game winning streak in January, scoring 15 points a game and shooting 50 percent or better from the floor during the streak.

Miller is the team’s best outside shooter. His ability to stretch the floor gives Gasol more room to operate, and his triple-threat offense takes pressure off of Williams. Miller is also a heady, aggressive player who feeds into and off of the high-octane attack that the team plays best.

For the season, Miller is shooting a career high from the floor and is right at his average from beyond the arc, numbers particularly impressive considering he started the season in a shooting slump that took a turn for the horrid in late December, when Miller was routinely passing up open looks. Miller has found his stroke over the past month. The catch, of course, is that this has coincided with the reaggravation of a back injury that seems to have lingered from last season. With Miller hobbled and playing erratic minutes, fans must be experiencing an uncomfortable bout of dÇjÖ vu. When he’s right, Miller may be the team’s second-best player (and a better stylistic fit with the first team than potential replacement Bonzi Wells) and the key to a playoff run. But fans have a reason to be worried.

Ultimately, with the solid defensive effort unlikely to fluctuate much and the team’s rebounding troubles unlikely to go away, this Grizzlies team will probably go as far as its offensive big three take them. That would be Gasol, Miller, and point guard Williams, who is the subject of questions, as well. The old “better without him” argument got some minor reconsideration during Williams’ injury, when the team went on a win streak with understudy Watson at the helm.

But even with those potential doubts in place, the electric Williams is still the player who makes this team go, his clutch outside shooting and brilliant open-court skills standing in stark contrast to Watson’s struggles with both of these key facets of point-guard play.

When Miller, Gasol, and Williams are all on their game at the same time, the Grizzlies can field a deadly offensive unit. The starting five has upped its scoring each month, which means that the trio could well be peaking just in time for the playoff run.

What will the second half hold? There is a reason to be cautious. In addition to the questions already mentioned, this is still the third-youngest team in the league. And it’s still a fragile, streaky team: The Grizzlies are one of only two teams (the Detroit Pistons are the other) to experience four winning streaks and four losing streaks of three or more games so far this season. The Western Conference playoff race is tight enough that a five-game losing streak could be enough to knock the Griz out of the race.

But there’s reason to be optimistic, too. No one who knows anything about the NBA would compare the Grizzlies’ roster to that of its playoff competitors — Denver, Houston, Utah, Portland, and Seattle — and find a reason this team can’t make the playoffs. And there are impressive signs of maturity. Here are some numbers that speak well of this team’s chances to respond to the pressure of the playoff race: The Grizzlies this season hold a 4-0 record in overtime contests and are an astounding 20-1 when leading after the third quarter.

Those numbers are likely a testament to Brown’s unique system as well, which is designed to wear down opponents at the end of games. Few thought it would work when West coaxed Brown out of retirement last season. But come playoff time, Hubie Brown may well prove every doubter wrong.