On Saturday, from 1 to 4 p.m., Grow Memphis will host the South Memphis Healthy Food Fair at LeMoyne-Owen College.
According to Josephine Williams, Grow Memphis coordinator, the event came about when she was contacted by Active Voice.
Active Voice, a group that uses media for social change, is sponsoring 30 screenings around the country of the documentary Food Inc. through a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Ingredients for Change campaign.
As far as landings go, the Riverfront Development Corporation (RDC) hasn’t exactly nailed the one at the foot of Beale Street.
The project is two years behind schedule and several million dollars over budget. The boat companies it was designed to serve are gone. And now, with the city facing a financial tight spot, the Wharton administration plans to allocate only $1 million for the Beale Street Landing in the upcoming fiscal year’s budget.
With funding from the city and some leftover operating money, the RDC should be able to complete improvements along Riverside Drive and a 10,000-square-foot building that will house a restaurant, gift shop, and restroom facilities. But they will need at least another $7 million for the final phase of a project, a park going down to the water’s edge.
“I wish it wasn’t as critical as it is,” says RDC president Benny Lendermon. He says they would have done everything differently if the project wasn’t going to include the park.
“The park feature was designed first. [It’s] the centerpiece,” Lendermon says. “If you don’t build that, you can dock boats there; you can have the building; but it’s not anything like what was originally envisioned. We’ll be directing everyone’s attention to a moonscape.”
The RDC was created in 2000 to connect the city to the Mississippi River and to create a world-class riverfront. But the public/private partnership also was created, in part, to leverage private funding for the area. If the city holds firm on its funding, the Beale Street Landing may be the test of how well the RDC meets that goal.
In years past, the main funding body of the RDC was the city of Memphis. In 2003, for instance, a time when the RDC got commitments of more than $500,000 from private grants and foundations, the city’s portion of operating costs was more than $3 million. The city also provided about $2.25 million for capital projects such as Martyr’s Park and the cobblestone walkway that year. Park operations netted the RDC about $1.3 million in revenue.
Lendermon says they’ve gotten about $5 million from private sources over the lifetime of the RDC. By comparison, the organization has received more than $32 million from the city for operating costs and about $20 million from government sources in capital funding.
Which might make it sound like raising $7 million for one project would be difficult, especially in a down economy. But Lendermon notes that though the RDC has received private grants and foundation money for operating costs, they’ve never tried to do a capital campaign.
“The things we’ve done, like improvements to Riverside Drive … who’s going to contribute to that? It’s a city function,” he says.
Lendermon says they’re exploring the idea of a capital campaign, but they need to see what direction the city wants to go.
The RDC has been controversial ever since it was created. Roughly half of its operating expenses each year go to salaries, wages, and benefits. In 2009, while professional services and landscaping cost $207,000 and maintenance, materials, and supplies came in at $538,000, personnel costs were $2.3 million. Though the RDC keeps the riverside parks in great condition, couldn’t the city’s parks division do just as good a job?
As the former director of public works for the city, Lendermon says the RDC’s advantage over the parks department is “believe it or not, speed.”
“When the traffic circle on Mud Island was done, the city came to us because they knew if they had to build it and construct it, it would take a year longer,” he says. “Part of it is the contractual requirements they have. If they want to buy a pick-up truck, it takes them nine months. It takes us two days.”
Despite what some people may think of the RDC, not finishing the Beale Street Landing as planned will leave a large and ugly reminder of local government’s failings. Wouldn’t it be better to finish the Beale Street Landing and then, if people still feel similarly, fire the RDC?
Under the best-case scenario, the Beale Street Landing should be completed by the end of 2011. The RDC’s second five-year contract with the city is also up in 2011.
Once the Beale Street Landing, ostensibly the crown jewel of the RDC’s plan for a world-class riverfront, is completed, there’s no reason for the city not to bring the riverfront parks back in-house. The city may not be able to do construction as quickly, but the parks department knows how to cut grass.
“This isn’t our project,” Lendermon says of the Beale Street Landing. “This is the city’s project. We’re managing it for them. We don’t own it. … We’re under contract with them.”
A refurbished sidewalk is one of the improvements residents hope to see on South Main.
In the late 1990s, the South Main neighborhood morphed from an abandoned warehouse district into a hip and thriving arts community. But while the empty buildings were converted into art galleries and gift shops, the sidewalks were largely ignored.
Today, the walkways near South Main and G.E. Patterson are crumbling. Trees planted along the street have outgrown their grates, rooting up bits of sidewalk. Few of the curbs in the area are compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
The South Main Arts District, along with the Main Street Mall and the Pinch District, is one of the highest priorities for the Center City Commission’s (CCC) plan to improve downtown streetscapes. Last week, landscape architects from Ritchie Smith and Associates shared their vision for South Main in a public meeting at Central Station.
Smith showed photographs of the neighborhood’s worst offenses. One photo, taken in front of American Apparel, showed a stretch of sidewalk resembling a patchwork of different colors and gradients of asphalt.
“It almost looks like an artist did this,” Smith said.
“Yeah, a bad artist,” replied a woman in the audience. According to Smith, much of the aging sidewalk would be replaced, but the neighborhood’s historic granite curbs would be retained. Curb cuts would be upgraded to ADA compliance, and additional planters and benches would be added to trolley stops.
In some areas of sidewalk, remnants of old driveways lead to buildings that are no longer there. Those would be filled in with sidewalk. Overgrown trees would be fitted with appropriate grating.
“Most trees downtown don’t have room to grow, and they’ll likely die in five to 10 years,” Smith said.
Some of the large storm drains located under the sidewalks aren’t covered with grating. Smith referred to the oversized drains as “child eaters.”
“Some are big enough to lose a dog or cat, and others are large enough to lose a person,” Smith said.
The improvements would cost about $1.8 million, which the CCC is hoping to attain through the Tennessee Department of Transportation and the city’s capital improvement budget. Neither of those funding sources have been approved.
Smith’s firm designed some of the South Main improvements seven years ago, but the funding never materialized for the project.
Andy Kitsinger, senior vice president of planning and development for the CCC, said it’s possible that funding could be delayed again, but he’s hoping that having the project “shovel-ready” will help.
“The areas south of Linden to G.E. Patterson are in some of the worst conditions of any street downtown,” Kitsinger said. “We need the city to make that a highest priority.”
It isn’t easy to get 13 people to agree about anything important. The Memphis City Council and the Shelby County Commission each have 13 members. They often split 7-6 when there is power or money at stake. Juries have 12 members, because it’s serious business to convict someone. Last week, a committee of seven people studying the future of the former Mid-South Fairgrounds couldn’t even agree on a new name for a small piece of it, let alone what to do with the whole thing.
But after a year-long investigation, a task force of financial watchdogs in 13 states including Tennessee agreed that Morgan Keegan should be put out of business.
“We are taking an unprecedented step against a major regional brokerage firm,” said Shonita Bossier, a financial industry regulator in Kentucky.
The states were joined by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Their recommendations include “full restitution” to investors who lost $2 billion in mutual funds — now there’s a stimulus plan — and revocation of Morgan Keegan’s registration in 13 states. Morgan Keegan, in their eyes, is not too big to fail.
The impact of the recommended punishment has not sunk in yet for a lot of reasons. It was a one-day story in The Commercial Appeal and on local television. It’s not like some basketball player bolting from the University of Memphis for the NBA or cheating on an SAT test. This is about billions, not banners, jobs, not jocks, and the survival of a company, not a coach. A letter from the mayor to Forbes magazine won’t do much good.
The charges were blunted somewhat, because they were made at a press conference in Jackson, Mississippi. The top cop is Joseph Borg, director of the Securities Commission in Alabama, home of Morgan Keegan’s parent company, Regions Financial. The alleged bad guy, mutual fund manager James Kelsoe Jr., is so low-profile that there wasn’t even a picture of him in local stories.
A fraud based on “tranches of structured collateralized debt instruments” is a tough sell for the news media, which is the way the bond business likes it. As Michael Lewis writes in The Big Short, his new book about subprime mortgages like the ones in the Kelsoe funds: “Bond market terminology was designed less to convey meaning than to bewilder outsiders.”
Morgan Keegan was founded in 1969 by Memphians Allen Morgan Jr. and James Keegan, making its mark in a city famous at that time as the home of unregulated “bond daddies.” The company has been a rainmaker for municipal bond deals and investment banking deals and hires top talent. Regions Morgan Keegan sponsors the local pro tennis tournament, and its headquarters has been the centerpiece of the downtown skyline since 1985.
At the heart of the allegations are Kelsoe and some well-placed colleagues who were supposed to be supervising him. Their words and e-mails could end his brokerage career.
In July 2007, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average close to its all-time high, a Morgan Keegan vice president, Kim Escue, complained that Kelsoe had been giving her the runaround for weeks. She was responsible for reports on Morgan Keegan mutual funds for customers and brokers.
“I have been stalled and put off since the get-go on this, and it is definitely in our best interest to drop coverage if we cannot do our regular due diligence,” she wrote in an e-mail.
She wasn’t the first employee to learn that Kelsoe got special treatment. In 2006, Carter Anthony, who was Kelsoe’s supervisor, was told by Morgan Keegan president Doug Edwards that Kelsoe was “to be left alone.” The funds were removed from Anthony’s oversight.
In May 2007, Gary Stringer, a senior vice president, wrote an e-mail to a colleague expressing his worries about a Kelsoe fund.
“Mr. and Mrs. Jones don’t expect that kind of risk from their bond funds. The bond exposure is not supposed to be where you take risks. I’d bet that most of the people who hold that fund have no idea what it’s actually invested in. I’m just as sure that most of our FAs [financial advisers] have no idea what’s in that fund either.”
Morgan Keegan issued a statement saying it intends to “vigorously refute these charges.” But how, where, and with what? The referees made the call. Morgan Keegan may negotiate its way to survival, but any lawyer who can’t win an arbitration claim against it now should be disbarred.
As the first installment of the election season heads toward the home stretch, with early voting for the May 4th county primaries beginning this week, the public is being treated to some flamboyant circumstances — and it’s a moot question as to whether and how much they bear on the issues.
Some matters seem open and shut. As is customary in any election year, there have by now been numerous candidate forums for various offices — some of them well attended, some not. The most unusual of them so far was probably that held by the Institute for Success Center of Greater Faith Tabernacle on Shelby Drive last week for county mayoral candidates.
JB
Lunati (no ‘c’) on the go.
The mayoral forum was the third in a sequence held by the center for candidates seeking various offices. All were conscientiously organized around the traditional formula of round-robin questions for various candidates, with some questions posed by local high school students and others solicited from the audience.
The nature of such proceedings is that, particularly in races where the candidates have had adequate time to develop their basic responses and reiterate them over and over, things have a tendency to gravitate toward the wonky.
That’s especially true when the questioners opt, as they do and should do, for the serious of purpose and seek the candidates’ attitudes toward chestnut issues like consolidation. The resultant answers, at this point of the campaign, are as well prepared, and perhaps as unavailing, as were the trenches and embedded firing stations of World War I.
Enter Ernest Lunati, the onetime felon (he served time on pornography charges) who materializes these days mainly as a perennial candidate in races he has no chance of winning. This time around, Lunati is the nominal opposition to Sheriff Mark Luttrell for the Republican nomination for Shelby County mayor.
Fringe candidates like Lunati are the bane of the come-one, come-all public forum. They are understood to have no chance of prevailing, and, indeed, they have no visible network of supporters, but somehow they scrounge up 25 signatures of certified voters on their petitions, and, voilà, candidates they are.
The epitome of this breed is Robert “Prince Mongo” Hodges, who has been running pointlessly (in every sense of the word) for decades, but, for reasons unknown, has not favored the electorate with his presence this time around. In recent years, Lunati has begun to crowd Hodges’ act, and for the last year or two, there has been yet another candidate of the extra-terrestrial sort — Leo Awgowhat, whose adopted name is literally a variation on the format of the knock-knock joke.
JB
Awgowhat on the move
Apparently, Awgowhat, who was on the ballot for Memphis mayor last year and is an independent candidate for county mayor this year, did not make timely application to appear in last week’s Institute for Success Center forum or, as a non-primary candidate, was ineligible.
In any case, he was there in the Greater Faith Tabernacle sanctuary, and he made his presence felt twice — once by yelling out, “And you lied!” when interim mayor Joe Ford was accounting for his change of mind about running for a full term as mayor, another time by attempting, unsuccessfully, to pose an antagonistic ad hominem question aimed at both Ford and Luttrell.
So it was largely up to Lunati to hold the fort for the utterly unorthodox. And he delivered — managing to respond to conventional political questioning with the most outré non sequiturs imaginable — at one point implying that the other candidates present (GOP opponent Luttrell and Democrats Ford and Otis Jackson) might be crack addicts and calling for them to be drug-tested, at another point suggesting that juvenile crime could best be curbed if girls having their hair pulled in the classroom would “snitch” by calling 911.
(For those interested, two of Lunati’s more eccentric answers are available in video form at “Political Beat” on the Flyer website.)
The moral of the story? None really, except that the usual plethora at election time of fringe and token candidates makes it difficult to stage truly inclusive forums (ask anyone who has ever attempted to organize one) and that (let’s admit it) the comic relief they provide can actually be a welcome break from the robotic repetitions of mainline candidates and even, once in a while, truly stimulating.
• The aforementioned mayoral candidate, Otis Jackson, who is now serving as General Sessions Court clerk, got a scare last week but one which, ironically, resulted in his getting a pass this week.
Commissioner Mike Ritz, something of a self-appointed fiscal watchdog on the county legislative body, pressed a relentless interrogation of Jackson last week, on the basis that the latest county audit had revealed the clerk’s books to have been seriously “unreconciled.” That word, and its variants, got a serious workout during a committee hearing which revealed mismatching account entries dating back several years.
In the end, it was decided that several of the problems were attributable to a dysfunctional computer system installed under the previous clerk, Chris Turner, who was defeated by Jackson in 2008. But the most serious shortcoming involved a matter of some $3 million directly traceable to Jackson’s administration that remained (that word again) “unreconciled.”
Jackson was not under suspicion of malfeasance, but, still, the discrepancy in his books, coupled with Ritz’s previous accusations that the clerk had spent prodigally on dining occasions for his staffers, threatened to put his mayoral campaign (already of the dark-horse variety) in crisis mode.
Two things occurred to, er, reconcile Jackson’s situation. One, he was able to submit a supplemental report adjudged by the county auditing team to have properly resolved the discrepancies. Two, in the meantime interim county commissioner John Pellicciotti, who was appointed last year to fill a vacancy in District 4, Position 3, levied a motion to censure three clerks — Jackson, Chancery Court clerk Dewun Settle, and Probate Court clerk Chris Thomas — for what county audits and “management letters” had revealed to be persistent problems in reconciling their books.
Inasmuch as Thomas is now a candidate for the commission’s District 4, Position 1 seat — the same seat being sought by Pellicciotti, who is switching tracks because he had promised, upon his appointment, not to seek reelection for the Position 3 seat — his colleagues were sufficiently diffident as not to offer him a second.
But his motion, with all its potential political volatility, returned to the full commission’s regular public meeting, and, when Commissioner J.W. Gibson, who hadn’t been at last week’s committee hearing, seconded the motion, Pellicciotti was given a platform to make his point against Thomas. Clerk Settle had meanwhile been excused from blame, and Jackson, too, having already undergone his ordeal, was now off the hook — at the behest of Ritz, no less, who, perhaps seeing a dilemma that cut both ways, partisan-wise, professed a desire to “get [it] behind us and move on.”
Thomas, speaking to the commission in his defense, offered an apology “that my opponent is doing this to y’all” and observed that, as several commissioners already had, “this is political.” He pointed out that he had corrected the indicated fault — a failure to resolve his ledger precisely on a monthly, as against an annual, basis — and lamented, “This is exactly why … y’all don’t want to appoint someone to fill out a term that says they are not going to run, and then they run.”
(He would pass out copies of his own charge — that Pellicciotti should return the county funds that paid for the interim commissioner’s recent public hearings on consolidation, on grounds that Pellicciotti had used the occasions for his own campaigning, something Pellicciotti would staunchly deny.)
In the end, votes were held on the Jackson and Thomas matters. Jackson was exonerated by a 13-0 vote, with Pellicciotti himself concurring, and Thomas, too, saw his censure charge defeated. That one went 12-0, with Pellicciotti recusing himself.
On the surface, then, it appeared that Thomas was victorious, but Pellicciotti, who probably entered the race as an underdog, got a bully pulpit to display himself as a self-declared and single-handed reformer. Speaking to reporters later on, he would condemn an “old boys’ network” that “the people who have been there too long are tied into.”
He went on, “Nobody is willing to call each other out. We have got to hold these people responsible. … We [meaning himself] will continue to hold people accountable. We will not put up with people not managing the people’s money appropriately. We are past the time of just ‘trusting’ politicians.”
And, finally: “We’ve got to get rid of these guys who have been in office forever.” [Thomas had boasted of his 16 prior years of service as clerk.]
“We need young people who can tell us that’s not right.”
The issue of federal health-care legislation — which, as we documented in last week’s Flyer cover story, has preoccupied members of the Tennessee legislature — is even now encountering further would-be obstacles in the General Assembly. On Monday, the state House voted 66-29 to express its opposition to the health-care act recently passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama.
Styled as a “non-binding resolution,” the measure, brought by state representative Susan Lynn (R-Mt. Juliet), will have no effect whatsoever on the fact or inevitability of the act’s implementation. Meanwhile, several other anti-health-care bills sponsored by Lynn or her opponent in this year’s election for a state Senate seat, incumbent Republican senator Mae Beavers, also of Mt. Juliet, are wending their way through committee and will doubtless find their way to the floor.
All this despite a clear, unambiguous statement last week from state attorney general Robert Cooper Jr. that these legislative measures, insofar as they aspire to reverse federal action, are manifestly unconstitutional. We imagine that the sponsors of the Tennessee bills, as well as those members of the House and Senate who vote for them, are fully aware of the fact. What’s happening in the legislature is political posturing — nothing less, nothing more — and much of it, particularly with regard to Lynn’s and Beavers’ competitive bills, is simply attributable to the ad hoc improvisations of ongoing political races.
We sympathize with a remark uttered during debate on the House floor by state representative Joe McCord (R-Maryville): “We sound like we’re in a coffeehouse discussing national politics. We ought to be discussing our own problems.”
And we especially like the response by a Shelby County Republican House member, Curry Todd of Collierville, who called the proceedings “totally asinine.”
Indeed, they were — and are. What troubles us is that the state House bill passed by a margin of 66-29 in a body that is only barely under Republican control. In other words, the scofflaw attitude in Tennessee runs well across partisan lines.
Under the circumstances, we take comfort where we can, as in the recantation offered in Memphis Monday by Chattanooga congressman Zach Wamp, currently a candidate for governor in the state Republican primary.
Asked about his well-publicized statement that, in opposition to the implementation of the health-care bill, he would meet federal officials “at the state line,” Wamp walked that statement back, right over the border. His statement had been only “proverbial” or “theoretical,” he said. Metaphorical? “Yes, thank you,” he said. Not literal, in any case. “Fighting may be in a court of law, fighting may be at the ballot box … but I think these things are worth fighting for.”
Fair enough, and, even though Wamp said what he said in defense of the highly questionable “state sovereignty” movement, he drew a clear rhetorical line this side of the old segregationist “states’ rights” formula. He is entitled, if he wants to, to complain about “a billion-dollar mandate that [the state] can’t afford” whether that’s an accurate appraisal or not. And so are fellow GOP gubernatorial candidates Bill Haslam and Ron Ramsey, who also oppose the bill. So, too, are those 66 errant House members, so long as they, too, stop this side of interposition.
“So, what are the bloggers talking about today?” That was invariably the lead-in to almost every conversation I had with co-workers during my first blogging job at television station WKRN, where for two years I was tasked with giving the web audience of Nashville’s ABC affiliate a window into the world of political blogging.
While tempted many times to retort with something like “anarcho-syndicalism and applesauce,” I usually just gave them an answer I thought would be easily digestible and suitable for small talk.
Blogs had been around for at least seven years or so at that point, but most in the newsroom didn’t know quite what to make of me and my fellow paid blogger Brittney Gilbert.
We might have drawn a paycheck but reading and writing blog posts all day did not merit entry into “the club” — at least not initially.
In my four years as a pro blogger, both at WKRN and nashvillepost.com, I often encountered journalists who did not view me or what I did as “legitimate.” I never really protested too much. I still don’t. As Eminem so eloquently put it, “I am whatever you say I am.”
From the time I was first hired as a professional blogger by WKRN to the time I was sacked at nashvillepost.com, I was at one time or another a pure blogger with a strong voice, an aggregator passing along news of interest to readers, and even, with varying frequency, a provider of breaking news previously unpublished by other media outlets. Very rarely during any of that time did I wonder whether what I was doing was “Big J” journalism. I was more concerned about keeping the readers engaged and coming back for more.
In 1998, when I was fresh out of school, I applied for many journalism jobs and was turned away from every one. By the time I eventually became an employee of a media company in 2006, after a string of dead-end jobs, I had more or less given up on the dream of being a journalist, so it never much concerned me whether my colleagues in the two newsrooms in which I worked viewed me as such. I was getting paid by a media company to read and write blog posts. I intended to keep doing that as long as I could.
Of course, I was aware of the treatises being written on the effect of bloggers and “new media” on the craft of journalism, but the debate over whether bloggers were journalists was one I mostly shied away from. I was less interested in waxing philosophical about blogging than I was in trying to actually keep readers abreast of news and generating page views for my employers.
Blogs are merely a delivery system for — well, whatever. It’s a platform, not an art form. Like the printed page, television, radio, or Twitter, a blog is just a medium. Time-stamped posts displayed in reverse chronological order — that’s what a blog is. It can be a diary or a list of recipes. It can be a log of libel or an archive of real-time reporting.
Aggregation, analysis, commentary, and reporting all have come under my byline on a blog at one time or another. You can call that journalism or you can call it pancakes, it doesn’t really matter. What does matter is serving the reader.
Online gurus who say that blogging, citizen media, or whatever the latest buzzword is will eventually replace the “mainstream media” have always been smoking that proverbial “good stuff.”
The news still has to be gathered. After that, it can then be analyzed, commented on, and, yes, aggregated. So when I am asked about the future of news aggregation, all I can say is that the future is only as bright as the news being aggregated. Technology has made it very easy to receive and send information. It has lowered the barrier to entry to the publishing business significantly. To hold open the possibility that the challenges confronting the news business are ultimately insurmountable is not pessimism, it is realism.
This is not to say that the craft is going away. The news is not going to die. Readers and viewers are going to get information. Whether that information is going to be trustworthy and whether people will continue to make their living distributing it, however, is still an open question. A question, unfortunately, that my four years of professional blogging still leaves me unable to answer.
A.C. Kleinheider is a Nashville-based blogger-aggregator — and, at the moment, unemployed.
If Plato’s account is accurate, the Greek philosopher Socrates was a funny, thoughtful man who preached a rigorous gospel of reason. He espoused a firm belief that those who claim great wisdom have little and those who profess to know nothing are usually the wisest among us. Naturally, that kind of thinking got him in lots of trouble. He was labeled a radical, identified as an enemy of the state, and charged by the court of Athens with the terrible crimes of being an exceptionally curious fellow and a heretic who worshiped gods of his own invention. Socrates, the father of all Western philosophy, was subsequently sentenced to death for corrupting the Athenian youth with his wild notions but not before having the opportunity to defend himself in front of his accusers.
This week, The Apology of Socrates, an original creation of the Greek Theatre of New York, brings Plato’s account of Socrates’ impassioned final defense for two performances at the University of Memphis. Yannis Simonides, an Emmy Award-winning documentary producer, has played the part of Socrates since the project made its debut in 2003. The Yale-trained actor begins the show wearing the large mask of a Greek tragedian, but he removes it almost immediately in order to begin an intimate conversation with his audience about everything from the meaning of life to where we go after death. What follows for the audience is a full immersion in the type of probing dialogue that has come to be known as the “Socratic” method.
“Unsheltered: Unseen” is an exhibit that hopes to heighten community awareness by revealing to the public “unseen” areas of Memphis. Organized by a group of Rhodes College students, the exhibit will showcase 80 photographs of Memphis captured by members of minority groups.
The students distributed more than 80 disposable cameras at Idlewild Presbyterian Church’s More Than Art and More Than A Meal program, Rhodes’ Souper Contact soup kitchen, and the Manna House, a homeless outreach program. Participants were asked to photograph Memphis from their own perspective, and nearly 40 people responded.
The intent of the exhibit is to bridge population gaps and to connect all members of the Memphis community. The students want to illuminate the often ignored issues in Memphis to stimulate change, particularly in the homeless community.
All works will be for sale, with proceeds going to local hunger and homelessness programs. Rhodes CODA (Center for Outreach in the Development of the Arts) and Idlewild Presbyterian Church are sponsoring the event. For more information, contact Justin Deere at deejt@rhodes.edu.
When the local chapter of the Recording Academy hosts Grammy GPS: A Roadmap for Today’s Music Biz this week, the daylong “mini-conference,” as Memphis chapter executive director Jon Hornyak calls it, won’t exactly be a new event.
Grammy GPS is instead a reconfigured version of the Recording Academy’s previous “Indie Impact” seminar.
“We wanted to rebrand this so it sounded a little broader-based,” Hornyak says. “We felt like ‘indie’ had been a little overused as a word. So we came up with what we think is our clever ‘Grammy GPS’ name, navigating the new music business. It’s not SXSW, but there are performance opportunities. There are panels and workshops. Networking opportunities.”
The event, which is bringing a variety of significant music-industry insiders to town, kicks off Thursday, April 15th, with a registrant-only party at The Warehouse downtown that will feature live music from Ryan Peel, Yung Kee, Star and Micey, and The Summers. The conference itself will be held from noon to 7 p.m. Friday at the new Playhouse on the Square in Midtown and will be followed by an open-to-the-public showcase at the Hi-Tone Café.
“We thought it would be interesting to make this a Midtown event,” Hornyak says. “In recent years, we’ve focused on downtown. With Playhouse putting this swell new building together and with the Hi-Tone so close by, it would be easy for out-of-towners to navigate. Maybe people can grab some dinner at a Midtown restaurant [after the conference] and then head to the Hi-Tone.”
The event, which is free for Recording Academy members and $40 for non-members, is envisioned as a professional development conference that allows attendees to hear from and mingle with established songwriters, producers, label reps, and other music-industry insiders. (Hornyak says he expects anywhere from one third to one half of the attendees to be regional college students involved in the organization’s GRAMMY U program.) Among the seminar topics are demo critiques for both rock and “urban” artists, “Direct-to-Fan and Internet Marketing,” and “Supply and Demand: The Basics of Distribution.”
“Things are changing so much now,” Hornyak says of the event’s emphasis on artist control. “CDs don’t sell the way they used to. It’s harder to get a major record deal, and even if you get one, it might not really be a good deal. So artists are getting more control of their careers, because they have to. It’s about where the industry is today.”
Along those lines, the keynote speaker will be Mark Montgomery, an “entrepreneur in residence” at Nashville’s Claritas Capital who is said to be a pioneer in e-commerce and direct-to-fan marketing.
“I think Mark is someone who looks to the future in this business,” Hornyak says. “He’s one of the people who was involved early on in the ‘direct-to-fan’ idea. He’s worked for labels, and he’s worked for artists. His clients have included Kanye West, Keith Urban, Bon Jovi, and Pearl Jam.”
Hornyak says he expects most of the out-of-town attendees to stick around for the showcase concert at the Hi-Tone, which will present a diverse mix of local and regional artists.
On the rock side, the showcase artists are emerging classic-style rockers The Dirty Streets, who recently toured with Lucero, longtime local punk fixtures Pezz, heavy modern-rockers Sore Eyes, indie/metal band Tanks, and singer/songwriter Jeremy Stanfill. On the urban side is Louisiana rapper DEE-1 and the highly promising young local hip-hop artist Skewby, who recently was featured in the “Unsigned Hype” column of venerable hip-hop magazine The Source.
Registration for Grammy GPS is open through the day of the event. You can register on-site or in advance via Grammy365.com/events/Memphis-grammy-gps-roadmap-todays-music-biz. The showcase concert at the Hi-Tone is free for conference attendees and $10 for the general public. Showtime is 8 p.m.