Month: November 2011

Categories
News The Fly-By

Exercise Break

CREDIT: Louis Goggans

YMCA members in the University of Memphis area will have to find another place to work off holiday flab when the New Year arrives.

After operating more than 50 years at 3548 Walker, the Mason YMCA will close its doors on December 31st.

The local YMCA’s Metro Board of Directors made the decision to close the facility after conducting a study on the building that revealed a need for $2.6 million in repairs.

Keith Johnson, president and CEO of the YMCA in Memphis and the Mid-South, said those repairs include updating heating and air conditioning units, boilers, and roofing.

“We did some of those repairs [after the study was completed], and they cost three times more than the estimate. So we decided that if that was the case, [the rest of the repairs were] too much to try to tackle,” Johnson said.

Johnson said the closing of the building is strictly an economic decision and has been discussed for the last several years. The closing will affect more than 40 employees. Johnson said they would try to disperse as many Mason workers as possible to other YMCA branches.

But employees aren’t the only ones being displaced. The Mason YMCA houses 42 low-income residents in dormitory rooms leased for $200 to $400 per month. They will have until January 31st to find a new place to live, but they’ll be allowed to take the YMCA’s furnishings with them when they leave.

“We’re going to help in any way we can to get them placed into apartments and other housing in the area,” Johnson said. “We think they’ll be able to find suitable housing, particularly if some of them have made friends with each other and can be roommates.”

Besides the $2.6 million needed for repairs, an additional $2 million to $3 million is needed to bring the facility up to YMCA standards. This includes improving the quality of the fitness center, locker rooms, meeting room, nursery, and pool. The exercise equipment in the Mason YMCA doesn’t need an upgrade.

The fate of the building has not been decided, but Johnson said they’re talking with other organizations that are interested in purchasing it.

Johnson said renovating the Mason YMCA would have affected the budget split among eight other local facilities.

“If we’re spending $5 million to $6 million at one branch, we can’t spend that to maintain our facilities in other branches,” Johnson said. “Our members are members at all of our branches. We hope that they continue to visit the branch of their choice when Mason closes.”

The closing of the Mason YMCA leaves a geographic gap. There are no YMCA branches in Midtown, and after Mason’s closure, Midtowners will have to drive downtown or to East Memphis branches.

Mason YMCA executive director Cynthia Magallon-Puljic said she understands the decision to close but is saddened that the facility where she’s worked and exercised for eight years will no longer be operating.

“I think we’ve been a wonderful part of the community, and I will miss being here,” Magallon-Puljic said. “I will miss seeing my members every day.”

Categories
News The Fly-By

What They Said

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

About “The Mormon Question” and religion in politics:

“Some of my best friends are Mormons, and none are as shallow and out of touch as Mittens Romney. Rumor has it that he once dated Jay Osmond. Is that true?” — phlo

About “Letters to the Editor” and the Tom Tomorrow cartoon:

“America DOES have the ‘richest’ poor in the world. What other country has people who don’t get paid very much, but can buy motor vehicles, have cable television, and lots of jewelry, tattoos, and body piercings? In other countries, if you are poor, you are lucky to have a roof over your head, food to eat, and clothes to wear.”

— towboatman

About “Mo’s Bows” and a Memphis youngster’s bow-tie business:

“You know what? I love this kid.”

— Ed Arnold

About “Cooper-Young Regional Beer Fest” and our city’s chances of being a craft-beer capital:

“Tennessee state laws would have to be changed to allow such a breeding ground for new brewers to exist here. With an eclectic culture and great water supply (key to brewing, just ask the guys at Ghost River), Memphis has its advantages in the craft beer game. Just hoping someone steps up and starts something great here.”

— Emmerson Biggins

“On my patio Memphis IS a beer mecca. Hey baby, grab me another Anchor Steam while you’re in the kitchen, please.” — phlo

Comment of the Week:

About “Herenton Will Try, Try Again” and his plan to run a charter school here:

“In other news, that zit on my ass has returned, too.”

— jeff

Categories
News The Fly-By

Tricycle Travel

There’s a new form of transportation in downtown Memphis, and it’s run solely on pedal power.

Memphis Pedicab Company began offering rides on their carriage-style tricycles last week. Unlike taxis, horse carriages, or trolleys, rides on the two-seater pedicab are free of charge.

“But we do encourage you to tip our drivers so we can continue to provide a valuable service,” co-owner Chris Copeland said.

The pedicabs pick up and drop off riders in an area bordered by G.E. Patterson, Auction, Riverside, and Third, although drivers are also available for parties, weddings, and other functions outside of downtown.

They’ll operate every Thursday through Sunday night, as well as on special event nights, such as nights with Redbirds or Grizzlies games.

“We have to get Memphis used to the idea of catching a pedicab. It’s very convenient, especially since a lot of what’s going on downtown on a Friday or Saturday night is contained in a two-block radius,” co-owner Jeremy Reese said.

On opening weekend, Copeland said many onlookers weren’t exactly sure what to make of the three-wheeled, open-air carriages.

“People are interested and they look and point and ooh and ahh, but they don’t know how to utilize what we have to offer yet,” Copeland said.

Currently, Memphis Pedicab Company has two vehicles canvassing downtown and two more are on order. Customers hail down a pedicab to catch a ride.

Pedicabs have been around for years in many major cities, such as Austin, New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles, and drivers often take on the role of energetic tour guides. Copeland said Memphis Pedicab is currently seeking drivers who won’t be shy about interacting with riders.

Although the pedicab is powered solely by pedaling, Copeland said drivers don’t have to be too athletic because the bikes are geared low to make pedaling easier despite added weight.

Copeland and Reese met at a previous employer and decided to launch their business, filling a need for affordable, environmentally friendly travel in downtown Memphis.

They secured sponsors, such as Jack Magoo’s Sports Pub, Huey’s, and Local. Sponsors receive an ad on the side of the pedicab, and their money keeps Memphis Pedicab Company in operation.

Although the company is starting with only four cabs, they plan to eventually grow to a fleet of eight or 10.

“Right now, people just wave us down and hop on. We would like to grow so that we can be dispatched and have people depend on us if they call for a ride,” Reese said. “But we need a bigger fleet for that. That’s what we hope to have going into next spring or summer.”

Although they’re offering free rides downtown, Copeland wants to make one thing clear: They’re not trying to compete with other modes of transportation.

“We’re not competing because our clientele are not the people who want to hop in a taxi for a ride across town. The horse carriages add charm to downtown, but that’s better for a tour of downtown,” Copeland said. “We’re a point-A-to-point-B service when you want to get there in style, remain outside in the environment, and have a good time doing it.”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Coming to Grips

Next week will see the formal end of the 2011 city election season with Thursday’s runoff election for the District 7 city council seat. And the outcome of that contest between University of Memphis law professor Lee Harris and actress and Ford-family scion Kemba Ford will determine a good deal of the tenor of city politics for the next several years.

Harris began the campaign year as something of a known quantity, having run in the crowded Democratic primary for the then open 9th District congressional seat in 2006, and though he finished well behind winner Steve Cohen and runner-up Nikki Tinker, he impressed many with his effort. Unlike that year, his 2011 race was relatively well-funded, with receipts of just under $40,000 reported in late September. Just as important was Harris’ network of supporters, including Mayor A C Wharton.

If her family name is well-known in local politics, Ford, who lived for several years in California, was something of an unknown quantity. Indeed, in an early stump speech, she declared as one of her qualifications for office, “I was raised by John Ford.” Her father, former longtime state senator John Ford, was indeed a major figure in local and state politics for decades.

Kemba Ford was not a total unknown. Convention & Visitors Bureau director Kevin Kane remembers her as an energetic and able employee a decade or so back.

Though her late-September financial disclosure showed receipts that were modest (less than $10,000), Ford may have done considerably better in that regard since, having continued to enjoy the avid support of local employees’ unions discontented with Wharton’s support at budget time for 4.6 percent pay cuts.

• State election coordinator Mark Goins made two appearances in Memphis last week as part of his statewide public-information effort regarding the controversial photo-ID law passed by the 2011 General Assembly and binding on all Tennessee elections as of January 1st.

Stressing that he had no part in making the law, Goins made the point that, in essence, it replaced a requirement that voters show state or federal identification containing a legitimate signature with a requirement for a state or federal ID containing a bona fide photo.

The bill’s Republican sponsors touted it as a way of guarding against election fraud. The bill’s detractors, including members of the legislature’s Democratic leadership, see it as a means of suppressing voter turnout, especially among college students, whose student IDs are not regarded as acceptable, and seniors, whose reduced mobility could make their acquisition of an appropriate photo ID difficult.

Goins made an effort to allay concerns about the bill, pointing out that the law permits exemptions — e.g., for absentee voters, for residents of nursing homes or assisted-living centers, for voters with religious objections to being photographed — and that indigent voters and driver’s-license holders over 60 without photo IDs could receive “express service” upgrades at driver’s license centers.

Goins also noted that voters without photo IDs could cast provisional ballots on election day that would be counted if they could furnish legitimate photo IDs within two days of the election.  

At neither of his appearances last week was Goins pressed hard by opponents of the photo-ID measure, but that honeymoon is destined to end. State Democratic Party chairman Chip Forrester announced on Monday the beginning of a statewide voter-education program on the matter under party auspices.

Among other differences of opinion, Forrester contends that some 675,000 Tennessee voters now find their previously valid credentials to vote under challenge, as against the 126,000 currently invalid driver’s licenses cited by Goins.

             

• For an elected body that has at times elevated contentiousness to new heights of rancor and intensity, the Shelby County Commission has somehow settled down and come up with a reapportionment plan that has managed to please everybody.

Well, almost everybody. Two members had reservations on Monday when the commission met for what was intended to be the first of three readings of a redistricting ordinance.

District 1 commissioner Mike Ritz was upset that the mapmakers at the Office of Planning and Development had concerned themselves more with keeping precinct lines intact than with leaving municipal boundaries undisturbed.

And District 5 commissioner Steve Mulroy is a holdout for Scenario 2, an alternate OPD plan that posits 13 single-member districts rather than the six dual-member districts and one single-member district of Scenario 1.

For the record, both Ritz and Mulroy are term-limited and presumably don’t have personal axes to grind.

“It might as well be an incumbent-protection plan,” Mulroy says of Scenario 1, noting that the larger districts of that configuration would require proportionately greater effort and expense for first-time, unestablished campaigners. He also contends that multimember districts dilute the influence of minorities.

For his part, Ritz believes strongly that city and county constituencies should be treated as discrete blocs, and, though he has ample confidence that he has served his mostly Memphis-based constituency well during his two terms so far, he notes that his residence is in a corner of Germantown that was attached to District 1 10 years ago in a manner halfway between jerry-built and gerrymandered.

Ritz made enough headway with his fellow commissioners that a majority opted for sending Scenario 1 back to committee to attend to some modest nipping and tucking of the proposed district lines.

Mulroy is likely to have tougher sledding in his effort to convince a majority of his colleagues to ditch the idea of multimember districts. In preliminary discussions last week in committee, several of them endorsed the concept of shared responsibility in a district.

And Mulroy himself, like virtually everybody else on the commission, acknowledges that Scenario 1 offers something for everybody: seven of the 13 proposed districts have clear African-American majorities, and the same ratio promises fruitful election results for Democrats.

At the same time, outer-county Republicans will have picked up an additional representative — going from three suburban members to four — if Scenario 1 is approved.

The proposed single-member entity would continue to be District 5, and though the district would be pitched farther north than at present, it could prove balanced enough to be competitive, racially and party-wise. Similarly, the East Memphis-based District 1 should allow both Democrats and Republicans a chance at election.

Commissioners will have an opportunity next week to review the situation before proceeding with the first of three required readings in two weeks. They have a deadline of December 31st to submit a finished and approved plan to the election commission, and the third and last reading will require a two-thirds vote to be official.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

A Murky Picture

CREDIT: Danziger

State election coordinator Mark Goins has been making the rounds of Tennessee’s 95 counties, doing his best to explain the 2011 photo-ID law passed by the General Assembly earlier this year — a law that will govern all Tennessee elections, beginning January 1st. Goins made two stops in Memphis (see Politics, p. 14), and, to award him the benefit of the doubt, he seemed genuinely conscientious and complete in his explications of the somewhat confusing law, its requirements, special conditions, and exemptions.

In only one particular was he arguably less than forthcoming. Given that the Republican-dominated legislature cited the prospect of election fraud as a major reason for the bill’s passage, Goins was asked: Was it not true that the requirement for voters to present a valid photo ID, issued under state or federal auspices, would not have prevented the most notorious case of recent election fraud — the fact that ballots were cast in the names of dead voters during the 2005 Ophelia Ford-Terry Roland special state Senate election? It is a matter of historical record that miscreant poll workers, not voters with bogus credentials, were guilty of that misprision and were prosecuted for it.

All we can say is, we remain skeptical, despite the election coordinator’s missionary efforts. What we do know about the new law is that it inconveniences students (college photo IDs are not acceptable under the law, on the grounds that they are too easily forged) and seniors, whose ability to bustle about and acquire new photo IDs is, for obvious reasons, limited (even granting that Goins’ office, to its credit, has sought to facilitate the process for them, somewhat). Democrats have pointed out, with some justice, that college students and seniors are two groups which, in given elections, have favored their party disproportionately.

Inasmuch as photo-ID legislation has been urged upon state legislatures virtually everywhere by conservative-oriented national lobbies and GOP policy-making bodies, it is hard to shake the conviction that such laws do in fact have the effect of suppressing certain classes of voters.

Our doubts as to the bona fides of the voter photo-ID law are increased when we take into account the overtly disingenuous behavior of Republicans in the legislature regarding the 2008 Tennessee Voter Confidence Act requiring simultaneous paper records of electronic voting. In advance of the 2010 election cycle, when the act was to go into effect, GOP principals, including Secretary of State Tre Hargett, whose crusading fervor in that regard has been matched only by his public zeal for the photo-ID law, did their best to delay the law’s implementation and were able to kill it altogether in the last session of the General Assembly. The excuse was the expense of retrofitting state election machinery, though a federal fund had already been set aside to pay for the conversion process.

Given the political tendencies in today’s Tennessee, where Republicans (ironically, ever since that watershed 2010 election) have begun to totally dominate voting, even in formerly yellow-dog Democratic enclaves, we wonder if the GOP hasn’t needlessly committed itself to restrictive measures and repressive attitudes that are no longer needed. The photo-ID law is a case in point.

Categories
Music Music Features

Davila 666 at the Hi-Tone Cafe

Gonerfest veterans from San Juan, Puerto Rico, Davila 666 is about as sure a thing as a live band as you’ll find these days. Their sound runs the pre-punk-rock gamut — mid-’60s pop melodicism, Stooges swagger, Stones groove, Velvet Underground combo of the twinkling and atonal — but somehow manages to sound like more than mere record-collector-rock mimicry. This startling command and musical ambition make them much more than just good genre music. And, on stage, they are a howlingly good time. Davila 666 returns to Memphis for a second time this year, performing at the Hi-Tone Café on Thursday, November 3rd, with the Barreracudas and Manatees. Doors open at 9 p.m. Admission is $10.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Feeling Bleu

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

If you haven’t heard of Bleu yet, you will soon.

The newest restaurant at the corner of Beale and Third, in the former location of Sole, has waged an extensive marketing campaign: mysterious emails, microsites, and advertisements about a “neu” restaurant downtown, various “cleus” about the identity of the restaurant, and a mystery-chef gig at this year’s Zoo Rendezvous, complete with a curtained-off kitchen and a fog machine.

Yes, a fog machine.

And according to executive chef Robert Nam Cirillo, the second wave of their marketing campaign is on its way. When asked if the new restaurant could live up to the hype, Cirillo answered confidently that it would.

“It’s a great bar for us to set and meet and then go over,” he says. “We made a promise to our customers that we will give them something that is new and bold and distinctly different.”

Bold and different come into play with the much-discussed “Grand Finale” on the dessert menu. It’s sort of edible art prepared before the diners’ eyes on a piece of thin wax paper: Molten chocolate cake, vanilla bean gelato, fresh berries, crystallized bacon, Oreo “dust,” chocolate-chip cookie crumble, toasted meringue, chocolate paint, seasonal sauces, and freeze-dried bread pudding are all on the chef’s palette.

Not surprisingly, blueberries are a feature or garnish in many of the dishes, like the blueberry cheesecake, grilled corn and blueberry salad, and the coffee and cocoa lamb chops with blueberry chutney and pomegranate reduction. The specialty martini is the Bleu Steel, made with vodka, simple syrup, muddled blueberries, thyme, and lemon juice.

Otherwise, the menu is what Cirillo describes as “eclectic and worldly.”

And worldly is something Cirillo knows a lot about. Korean-born, he was adopted into an Italian family in New York and grew up cooking in the classical Italian tradition. These influences come together in his favorite dish — the Maine lobster and shrimp pappardelle pasta, served with a spicy green curry sauce.

“I always saw America as a melting pot of cultures, and with cultures come cuisines, so I really think American food is a worldly cuisine,” he says.

Cirillo spent 10 years cutting his teeth on the restaurant scene in Rhode Island before seizing this opportunity at the Westin hotel in downtown Memphis. The New England flare is alive and well in his accent and in the menu’s extensive seafood dishes, including crab claws flown in fresh from Maryland.

Another nice touch is the menu’s drink recommendations, which accompany each entrée item and range from pricey wines to Amstel Light.

Cirillo laughs at this. “I love beer,” he says. “I wanted a place on the menu where I could just recommend Budweiser.”

There are more sophisticated selections as well, like local favorite Ghost River beer on tap and a lengthy cocktail and wine menu.

Bleu is the official hotel restaurant for the Westin, so they serve a full breakfast every day at 6:30 a.m., including a farmers market omelet and Cirillo’s favorite: a smoked salmon eggs Benedict. They also offer late-night hours for special events like Grizzlies games at FedExForum. (We’re talking to you, NBA lockout.) A blue piano sets the stage for live music as well, like that of local lounge singer Lee Taylor.

Dinnertime won’t be optimal for vegetarians, as all of the entrées are meat-based, but lunch offers a host of options, like the chef’s plate or the build-your-own sandwich menu. While a dinner entrée will run you from $23 to $30, you can grab lunch for $7 to $10.

One of the benefits of being a hotel restaurant is that Bleu keeps long hours, and you can snag a bite to eat pretty much anytime you fancy. Bleu is open every day at 6:30 a.m. and closes at 10 p.m. Monday through Wednesday, 11 p.m. or later on Friday and Saturday, and 4 p.m. on Sunday. Bleu, 221 S. Third (334-5950), bleumemphis.com

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Follow the Money

In spite of its lackluster visual style and its queasily compassionate portrayal of heartless Wall Street hucksters, writer-director J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call is one of the year’s most impressive and entertaining films.

Margin Call is about an investment firm facing a financial crisis, but the film’s blackest running joke is that only one or two people who work there truly knows how or why it’s happening. Most of the action takes place over a 24-hour period that begins when financial whiz kid Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) is given a flash drive by his just-fired former mentor Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), who tells him to “be careful” with its contents. As day turns into night, Sullivan finishes the work Dale started. And his conclusions are disturbing enough to prompt a late-night/early-morning meeting with the firm’s top brass.

You don’t need to know much about mortgage-backed securities or market capitalization to share these company men’s sense of panic. Indeed, Chandor lets terms linger throughout the film as ominous shibboleths. In a sly bit of narrative compression, Chandor also positions the firm’s CEO, John Tuld (Jeremy Irons), as an audience surrogate. When Tuld arrives at the office via helicopter to see if he can fix his company’s mess, he asks for a manageable summary of events unadorned by any scary fiscal mumbo-jumbo. When he coos to Sullivan, “Speak as you might to a young child or a golden retriever,” he — and we — are both relieved and frightened.

The additional talk that unspools as the firm’s members figure out how to save themselves is glorious — direct, wry, contemplative, bewildered, and ultimately mournful. There are several superb ancillary performances to relish, with Irons, Quinto, Paul Bettany, and Demi Moore (!) as the standouts. But as longtime trader Sam Rogers, Kevin Spacey may have the best role of all. He’s landed a part his friend and mentor, the late Jack Lemmon, would have coveted, and there’s more than a little of The Apartment‘s C.C. Baxter in Spacey’s conflicted corporate cheerleader. While his prickly intelligence and smarter-than-you vocal inflections never disappear entirely (can any American actor convey more menace with the question “What?”), Spacey’s performance is anchored by a solid, middle-aged fatigue that he’s never shown before.

Toward the end of the film, one of the characters justifies his actions by pointing the finger at the American middle class for its willingness to look away from the dirty financial dealings that have helped underwrite the American dream. It’s a bold and uncomfortable accusation — and one that, in spite of my own loathing for corporate America and disaster capitalism, definitely hit me (and my retirement accounts) hard. The boys at the computers in the big city are easy to blame, but anyone looking for downright villainy has seen too many movies. How shocking that a film full of riffs on numbers, projections, and the expediencies of moral relativism would save one of its best gut-punches for the well-heeled rubes in the seats.

Margin Call

Opening Friday, November 4th

Ridgeway Four

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

An unconvincing Shakespeare expose

In 10th grade, this guy talked to my English class about how he didn’t believe William Shakespeare wrote the plays of William Shakespeare. The traveling academic said that the playwright Christopher Marlowe, the scientist Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere (the Earl of Oxford), or a handful of others might have written them. There’s evidence backing each of the claims, and much of the supposition comes from the idea that the historical Shakespeare seems an unlikely candidate to be the author of the plays.

Now, disaster-movie auteur Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012) has made a movie, Anonymous, about the question of Shakespearean authorship, advocating for de Vere. Such is the extent of the mess the film makes that it succeeds only in eliminating de Vere as a candidate. I don’t know what happened back in the 1500s, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen the preposterous way Anonymous says.

The script, by John Orloff, is a big part of the problem. Anonymous introduces a dozen characters, and before you can suss out the differences between the earls of Oxford, Southampton, and Essex and members of the family Cecil, the film hops around decades with younger and older versions of them. Emmerich doesn’t help with a visual palette that’s dank, dark, grimy, ugly.

But what can be gathered is this: Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans as an adult, Jamie Campbell Bower as a youth) is a genius writer and thinker who cannot publish under his name because of political ambitions and cultural prejudices. He’s penned a library full of unstaged plays with names like King Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet. He’s also the former lover of Queen Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson) — alas, she’s the Juliet to his Romeo.

London aristocracy is a potboiler at the time. Trusted adviser to the throne William Cecil (David Thewlis) and his son Robert (Edward Hogg and Isaiah Michalski) want to control who will succeed Elizabeth as monarch, angling for James, King of Scots (James Clyde). Edward de Vere backs either the Earl of Southampton (Xavier Samuel) or the Earl of Essex (Sam Reid), I can’t remember which.

Seeing the power of the stage — “10,000 people listening to the writings of one man” — de Vere constructs works that will sway the mob against the Cecils and toward his own aims. He feeds works to renowned playwright Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) and asks that they be produced under Jonson’s name. A drunkard actor named William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) seizes upon Jonson’s indecisiveness and claims credit for himself.

That’s just the premise.

The acting in Anonymous, it must be said, is roundly excellent. There are also a few good lines, such as Jonson saying, “I’m a writer, of course I’ve been arrested.”

But Anonymous can’t settle on whether de Vere was a calculating political player or a man suffering for his art, who has to put characters to parchment “to set them free,” else he’ll go mad. And what Anonymous does with its premise is a complete shambles, a farce.

A thousand monkeys fingering a thousand typewriters for a thousand years couldn’t come up with this.

Anonymous

Opening Friday, November 4th

Malco Paradiso

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

I’ve become a little obsessed with the case of Baby Lisa. If you don’t watch the mainstream media morning news shows and have never heard of her, she is the 10-month-old baby who disappeared from her crib about a month ago near Kansas City, while her mother was asleep after drinking enough boxed wine to pass out.

It’s an odd story in that the mother apparently failed a polygraph test and the father, who came home in the middle of the night after working a late shift and says the door to the house was unlocked and a window had been tampered with, has not taken a polygraph test yet. They talked to the police a few times together, refuse to talk with them separately, and won’t allow police to interview the baby’s two stepbrothers who were in the house all night. They say they just don’t want to put them through the interview. And most recently, they refused interviews with the police themselves because they were tired. Huh?

But that’s not the reason I’m a little obsessed with the case. Think about it. Caylee Anthony, Elizabeth Smart, Madeleine McCann, Susan Powell out in Utah, Robyn Gardner in Aruba, that poor little Robert Wood Jr., the 8-year-old autistic boy who was missing for five days and fortunately later found in good shape. These stories dominate the national broadcast news and are often the lead stories, but when was the last time you read in the news or saw on the television news anything about a child or adult missing who wasn’t white? When was the last time there was a public outcry to find a missing black child? Think quickly. Not coming up with anything? See?

It’s not because there are no missing black children. There are. Sometimes they get local coverage, but nothing like the national coverage missing white people get. I guess I’m sensitive about this because A) I should be and so should everyone else and B) I look out of my office window every day at the Soulsville Charter School, where roughly 500 kids, most of whom are black, are walking around in blazers and neckties behaving perfectly and I can’t imagine what it would be like if one of them went missing. They are amazing kids. So the disparity bothers me.

Enough about that. I see Memphis has made the news in the Los Angeles Times, which picked up the story about the guys in Midtown who were cooking a raccoon on a grill outside their apartment. When police were called, they arrested them for cooking up meth. How nice. It seems they had a futon and some large knives out by the barbecue and some buckets filled with suspicious materials. My question on this one is, who calls the police on people for cooking a raccoon? And how did they know it was a raccoon if it was just an animal carcass on a grill? And why must this happen in Memphis, just when it is starting to become the coolest city on earth?

And speaking of that, kudos to Mayor A C Wharton for the Madison Avenue bike lanes. I know some of the businesses along the stretch aren’t real happy about it, but it does make Madison Avenue — and Memphis — more relevant. We need more change like that. We need high-speed rail transportation. We need art and music villages. We need more common areas and green spaces. Yes, we do have plenty now. But we need more.

Have you been to Overton Park lately? It is beautiful. With the Brooks Museum, the Memphis Zoo, Memphis College of Art, the Levitt Shell, the outdoor sculptures, the landscaping, and the forest, it is one of the nicest urban parks in the United States. I don’t know why I’m writing about this, but just go there if you haven’t been in a while. Eat lunch at the Brooks. Take in the zoo, which, by the way, definitely deserves its rating by Trip Advisor as the best zoo in the country. It’s awesome.

And thank goodness for the Loebs, who have taken it upon themselves to make Overton Square a cool place again. I was really hoping for a grocery store there, because I could walk to it from my house, but I’ll take an entertainment district. I’m too old to go out at night and be entertained and I fall asleep in movie theaters once the lights go out, but it will be great to see something lively there again.