Month: December 2009

Got Back

In advance of her December back surgery, Memphis City Council member
Janis Fullilove told Eyewitness News 24/30 that she abused alcohol and
pain pills.

“My problem was pain,” she said, blaming her recent run-ins with the
law on her doctor’s inability to make an exact diagnosis. In addition
to DUI-related misdemeanors, Fullilove is also accused of obtaining a
fake Tennessee driver’s license. In Fullilove’s defense, it can be a
real pain finding somebody to drive you to Tunica.

Verbatim

“Frankly, I don’t know why you wouldn’t charge more,” E.W. Scripps
senior vice president of newspapers Mark Contreras said about why the
larger, supplement-stuffed Thanksgiving issue of The Commercial
Appeal cost as much as a Sunday edition.

Season’s Beatings

According to a report by Fox 13 News, “Black Friday brought out the
rowdy side of a Memphis Toys ‘R’ Us crowd. … There were even
allegations of people in the crowd being armed with tasers and pepper
spray.”

Five paragraphs later, Fox reporter Jill Monier repeated, “Some say
people lined up shopping carts to keep the late arrivers at bay while
others were reportedly armed with tasers and pepper spray.” Later, it
was finally noted that police “could not corroborate reports of people
… armed with tasers and pepper spray.”

Elvis Claus

Sirius XM chief executive Mel Karmazin recently said that in spite
of the auto industry’s ongoing hardships, holiday sales of Sirius XM
Radio players are “on target.” Karmazin credits the company’s success
to an advertising campaign featuring a basketball legend, a dead
comedian, a dead rock-and-roller, and Howard Stern. When asked how much
it cost to bring Michael Jordan, Richard Pryor, and Elvis Presley
together, Karmazin answered, “a lot of millions of dollars.”

Developer William Adair was raised in Fayette County within 200
yards of the Wolf River.

“We ate fish out of the Wolf for the first 12 years of my life, and
I hunted up and down the river for many years,” Adair said. “That area
has a lot of sentimental value for me.”

That sentimental value is one of the reasons Adair agreed to sell
Norfolk Southern 500 acres of his land in Rossville for a massive new
facility. Earlier this year, the rail company planned to build an
intermodal facility — where trucks and trains drop off and pick
up cargo — in an area located just east of Rossville and a
quarter-mile from the banks of the Wolf.

Wolf River supporters worried that the location was too near the
river and could cause contamination of both the Wolf and the Memphis
Sands aquifer, where the city gets its drinking water.

“The original site would have run right up next to the river, and
there was no margin for error if there were spills or contamination
from oil and chemicals,” said Steve Fleegal, chief executive officer
for the Wolf River Conservancy. “The wetlands from the river ran right
up next to the [original proposed location].”

Adair’s property is located farther south of the river, and Norfolk
Southern spokesperson Susan Terpay has confirmed that the company has
chosen Adair’s land instead of the proposed location.

“As a result of meetings with residents opposed to the initial site,
we expanded our search,” Terpay said in an e-mail.

The new intermodal yard will be part of Norfolk Southern’s Crescent
Corridor, a 2,500-mile rail network that will provide an alternative to
highway transportation for domestic motor freight carriers between the
Northeast and the South.

Adair, a former insurance mogul who sold his Direct General
Insurance Co. for more than $600 million a few years ago, purchased
more than 3,000 acres of farmland in Fayette County in 2007. Though
Norfolk Southern will use some of that land for its operations, Adair
also plans to build Piperton Hills, a large residential-commercial
development, on the rest of the property.

“The way we’ve got the [intermodal yard] planned, we should be able
to control any sound and lighting issues that we think we might have,”
Adair said. “We think we’ve done a great job preserving the rest of our
development out here.”

Besides protecting the Wolf, the new location should also alleviate
some traffic concerns that residents of Rossville expressed with the
initial site. Norfolk Southern is predicting the facility will draw
about 2,000 trucks a day, or about 200 trucks per hour during a 10-hour
day. At the old location, trucks would have had to travel down a
two-lane highway. The new plan means trucks will drive down Highway 72,
which will eventually be widened to four lanes.

“As it’s proposed now, I think vehicle traffic will be much more
acceptable than it would have been in the former location,” said Buck
Clark, president of the South Fayette Alliance, a group formed to
protest the original proposed location.

Though he believes the new site is an improvement over the one east
of Rossville, Clark says he’d rather Norfolk Southern stay out of
Fayette County.

“It would be my preference … that the facility not locate in
Fayette County,” Clark said. “But the proposed location is the least
objectionable of the locations that have been considered.”

About “Memphis Tigers to Name Larry Porter Football Coach,” by
Frank Murtaugh:

“Great hire and I hope it works out. Instead of hiring some retread
head coach, we’ve got a young, up-and-coming assistant. I say we put
the program entirely in his hands and see what he can do.” —
TennesseeDrew

About “State Rep. Larry Turner, Who Served for a Quarter Century,
Dies,” by Jackson Baker:

“Rep. Turner was wise and compassionate, the likes of whom have been
elected to the General Assembly with less and less frequency in recent
years. He will be missed.” — smckay

About “The Duffel-Bag Class” and city residency requirements, by
Chris Davis:

“It appears to me that our society has become so detached from
itself that we are more concerned for money than the general welfare of
its people.” — mrnasty

About “The Gadfly: Phone THIS Home, Cellulistas” and Marty
Aussenberg’s rant against cell phones:

“Sometimes I feel like Dr. Miles Bennell, surrounded by pod people
encouraging me to just give in and accept it. To them, I say, yes,
laugh now, but who will be laughing when I am the last man on earth
whose head hasn’t exploded from the microwave radiation being beamed
through his brain? Huh? Huh?” — jeff

Comment of the Week:

About “The Rant” and Tim Sampson’s take on Sarah Palin:

“‘Palin’ and ‘facts’ are two words that should never be used in
the same sentence … and is it media bias to simply point out what a
load of crap her memoir is? Honestly, I’ve heard ghost stories told
around a campfire that were more truthful than her book.” — the
floyd

Last year, photographer Amie Vanderford explored — and shot
— different areas of Memphis each day for a year.

Eight months later, she found herself returning to a similar idea:
another daily project focused not on Memphis’ places but its
people.

“I get tired of the bad rap that Memphis gets. … Memphis does have
its problems, but beating it down is not going to help it be a better
place,” she says. “I’m focusing on people who are doing things to make
it a better place, and maybe that will inspire others.”

As part of Vanderford’s Portrait 365 project, she has made a
commitment to shoot one person each day for the next year, no matter if
the weather is bad or she’s sick or it’s the weekend. If she shoots two
people in one day, she’ll let herself take the next day off, but she’s
past the 100-day mark, and that’s only happened three times.

“As hard as last year’s project was, I knew scheduling people every
day would be challenging,” Vanderford says. “If I think about how many
more days I have, I kind of have a panic attack: How am I going to do
this?”

Vanderford started with interesting Memphians she already knew and
then got referrals from them.

She met pilot Barbara Standing through historian Jimmy Ogle.

“I think what she’s doing is really incredible,” Standing says.
“She’s found a way to show some real bright spots in Memphis.”

After her session with Vanderford, Standing was so inspired she gave
the photographer a three-page list of other people to shoot.

“I thought about people who weren’t CEOs or executive directors,”
Standing says. “I thought about people who were one or two levels below
that. A lot of times those are the people who do all the work behind
the scenes.”

Vanderford has photographed some Memphis notables for the project,
such as Mayor A C Wharton and WREG’s Marybeth Conley, but she’s also
photographed small-business owners or people from Standing’s list who
are perhaps less well-known than they could be.

Part of what she wants to do is give those people some of the glory
they deserve.

“You hear so many fascinating stories. It’s so inspiring,”
Vanderford says. “And, from a selfish perspective, meeting all these
people also helps me.”

Last April, Vanderford quit her day job with the Mississippi River
Corridor to focus on photography full-time. She’s been interested in
the medium since she was a girl but didn’t pursue it in college because
she thought it was impractical.

“Instead I majored in international relations, which is equally
impractical, by the way,” she says.

A self-described Air Force brat, Vanderford has lived in Spain,
Germany, Boston, Miami, Tucson, and San Francisco, among others.

She came to Memphis via trainwreck, both figuratively and literally.
After leaving a marriage and career behind in California, she visited
family in Nashville and Jackson, Mississippi, before deciding to move
to Memphis because her dad and other family members live here.

She was only on the train from Jackson to Memphis for 45 minutes
before it derailed near Yazoo City.

“The conductor was standing right next to me, and he said, ‘This is
the worst set of tracks on the entire City of New Orleans
route.’ As soon as he got done saying that, it derailed,” she says.
“Someone flew across the train and landed on top of me, and, by the
time the train stopped, we were in the luggage rack.”

Though she was traumatized for months by all forms of
transportation, she kept her wits and her sense of humor:

“I thought, I’ve taken millions of flights in my life. I take a
train in Mississippi and really? This is how I’m going to die?”

But she survived and says Memphis is exactly where she’s supposed to
be, a town full of artists and entrepreneurs.

Vanderford’s Portrait 365 project is online at http://www.flickr.com/photos/amiev/sets/72157622099336746/,
but ultimately she would like for it to become a book:

“In the five-and-a-half years I’ve lived here, I’ve encountered so
many people who have done so many awesome things. What better way to
pay tribute to a city than to photograph the amazing people here?”

When artist Suzy Hendrix envisioned two installations for Dalstrom
Park, she was thinking of a traditional meditation garden.

But then her garden grew.

“I just don’t think Americans can meditate the same way the Japanese
do,” she said. “It also struck me that in this part of town, it feels
like the country, but there’s also this urban thing going on, too.”

Set in raked concrete, each of the garden’s large stones are covered
in mosaic tiles, creating curvy vines and colorful flowers.

The UrbanArt Commission will host a dedication at the South Memphis
park Saturday, December 5th, at 11 a.m. Memphis mayor A C Wharton and
council member Edmund Ford Jr. are both scheduled to speak.

The project was part of Memphis’ Percent for Art program and was
sparked by a city park services plan to add other amenities, such as
playgrounds and picnic areas to the park.

“The sculptures are sentinels,” Hendrix said of the boulders, which
mark both ends of an approximately one-mile trail through the park.

“Initially, we were looking for a marker for the park,” said
Elizabeth Alley, director of public art at the UrbanArt Commission.

Because of the size of the trees and the intersection at Shelby
Drive and Weaver, the marker would need to be double the size of the
project’s largest boulder to be noticeable from the street.

“The largest one is about 6 feet tall, so they’re human scale,”
Alley said. “It makes more sense to have them where they can only be
experienced by walking up to them.”