Month: May 2012

Categories
News The Fly-By

Philanthropy in 3D

CREDIT: Chip Chockley

What could you buy if you saved a dollar every day for a year?

A pair of designer shoes? Sure. A few fancy dinners? Probably. A plane ticket? We’ll let Delta answer that.

But what if saving that amount and pooling it with hundreds of other Memphians meant that you could change lives?

That’s the idea behind Give 365, a program of the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis. Program members pool their annual $365 donations and distribute the money in the form of grants worth around $5,000 each to worthy nonprofits in the Mid-South.

June 1st marks the program’s third anniversary, and so far, Give 365 has given away over $80,000 to 17 local nonprofits.

The Community Foundation first began looking at prototypes for Give 365 in other cities in 2010, when they recognized the untapped potential of small-scale philanthropists and collective giving.

“Our day-to-day job is philanthropy, helping people invest and give away their charitable money,” said Melissa Wolowicz, vice president of grants and initiatives for the Community Foundation. “But we wanted to find a way to engage a younger group — 20-, 30-, 40-somethings. We wanted to make [philanthropy] more accessible.”

After introducing the idea, they quickly realized they needed to cast a wider net, one that didn’t involve age limits.

“We found, even in our first couple of months, that people would call and ask, ‘Am I too old to join?’ We never wanted to send that message,” Wolowicz said. “We very quickly changed the way we talked about it and made it much more about engaging people who like the idea of collective giving.”

Give 365 currently has 215 members, and this year they want to get their membership up to, you guessed it, 365.

“We’re a little nervous because it’s an ambitious goal — getting all of our members to renew and recruiting about 150 new members,” Wolowicz said.

Every year, members put in their dollar-a-day donation, review grant proposals, vote on their favorite proposals, and in October, they hand over checks to the selected nonprofits.

With so many nonprofits in Memphis, Give 365 members narrow down the pool of submissions each year by introducing a theme.

One of Wolowicz’s favorite donation projects involved sending 15 participants to Advance Memphis’ six-week job readiness program. At the end of the program, the participants, all from South Memphis, submitted a video documenting their progress. (The video is available on the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis website, cfgm.org.) They’ve also supported a DeNeuville Learning Center program that teaches women to sew and a job-skills and cooking program for teens run by Juvenile Intervention and Faith-based Follow-up.

While larger nonprofits are not excluded from participating, Give 365’s grant recipients tend to be lesser-known nonprofits that might have fewer resources at their disposal and are most in need of grant money. This is an added bonus for members interested in learning more about the myriad charitable efforts in Memphis.

“You get to see all these nonprofits that you may or may not have heard of,” Wolowicz said. “We all have our favorite things that we love to support, but this gives us the opportunity to support other nonprofits that are working really hard. That little bit of funding goes a long way for them.”

Community Foundation of Greater Memphis: Give 365

Categories
News

Gadflying

Blogger Tom Jones got a lot of support when he started complaining about Delta’s high air fares on social media. John Branston interviews Jones in this week’s Flyer cover story. Also, Jackson Baker gets reaction from local leaders.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Unleaded Art

CREDIT: Clare Caldwell

One Midtown gas station is getting an artistic overhaul.

After a handful of failed attempts at beautifying Discount Gas on the corner of Poplar and Tucker, Loeb Properties, owner of the gas station and a number of other Midtown properties, turned to students at Memphis College of Art (MCA) to help spruce up the property.

Over the last few months, the design department at MCA dedicated one of their upper-level design classes, led by Hyuna Park, to head the project.

“Loeb is studying Midtown Memphis where we have a lot of our properties,” said Tom Hayes, vice president of construction for Loeb Properties. “We’ve done some murals in the past that have been well received, so we wanted to do more.”

Loeb left the vision for the project almost entirely up to the students, and at the end of the semester, they had drawn up plans for a mural and a completely new image for the exterior of the building.

For the students involved in the project, the mural and renovation of the property was an opportunity to work collaboratively with a business owner and the neighboring community on a real-world project, said John Pennington, one of the design students.

The theme was decided after students polled community members on what they’d like to see in the mural. The nearly completed mural on the east-facing wall, which represents the first step in renovating the property, boasts a dynamic, geometric, brilliantly colored design that reads “Midtown Is Our Memphis.”

“We knew we wanted a mural, but MCA ended up designing all four sides of the building and helping us with the overall design,” Hayes said. “They weren’t really obligated to paint it, but there are a couple of students who have stepped up to paint the mural.”

Loeb is footing the bill for all supplies, an anti-graffiti coating to protect the mural, and any outside labor costs, estimated at $12,000. They also paid for some recent landscaping.

“We wanted to get a working relationship set up with Memphis College of Art, and this is the first run with establishing that relationship,” Hayes said. “We didn’t know if they would just do the design and get out, but we’ve been delighted to see that they’ve done the design and they’re actually painting the darn thing. It also lets us connect with young, creative, and able-bodied artist types who we can work with in the future.”

Hayes said that Loeb is also interested in working with the sculpture department at MCA as they develop Overton Square and some of their other properties throughout Midtown.

They eventually hope to hold design competitions for the public art at some of the Overton Square properties. Those competitions would be open to the public, and the winning designer would get the job of implementing that design.

Categories
Art Art Feature

In Bloom

Jeni Stallings grew up in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and from an early age, she developed a talent for creating art with anything she could get her hands on. When the Memphis College of Art offered Stallings a scholarship to study painting, she happily accepted.

At MCA, Henry Easterwood introduced Stallings to her long-standing medium of choice, encaustic. Easterwood taught fiber and collage and led Stallings to incorporate beeswax into her delicate, graceful designs.

“I like the idea of reusing things, so I use a lot of materials that I find at thrift stores. My favorite things are old pillowcases. Sometimes, I’ll just see a figure in it,” Stallings says.

A popular material in the ’60s, encaustic involves painting with heated beeswax to which pigments are added, providing the opportunity for sculpting within the work or collaging other materials onto the surface. After returning from a trip to Africa, Stallings adopted the method as a way to express her newly formed ideas and emotions with something different and more organic. The experience has continued to influence the very core of her vision. She still gets her wax from a local farmer in Arkansas.

“I never thought I’d end up painting flowers, but I did this show several years ago called ‘Apiology.’ The whole exhibition was supposed to be a way for me to show appreciation for bees without actually painting them,” Stallings says. “I started looking at how bees see things. They see the flower very differently than we do. It’s very geometric and all blown up, so the paintings started to look like that.”

She traveled to New Mexico through a program at MCA and was eventually showing her work at Guadalupe Gallery in Santa Fe. Linda Ross, proprietor of L Ross Gallery, went to Santa Fe in search of artists to represent in Memphis and just so happened to stumble upon Stallings’ work. Ross contacted the artist to set something up and was then informed that she was from Memphis. L Ross has represented her work ever since. Stallings currently lives in Atlanta with her husband and young son, but she primarily exhibits in Memphis. “People have been collecting my stuff in Memphis for years. Linda just has this magic,” Stallings says.

“I thought I would go into art therapy after I got my bachelor’s degree but was having a lot of success selling work before I graduated. I decided to put off grad school for a while and explore painting as a career, and I’ve been doing that ever since.”

The organizers of the annual RiverArtsFest contacted Stallings as one of three artists they were considering to design this year’s poster, and she ended up receiving the honor with the painting River Poppies.

“I got really inspired by flowers. It sounds so nerdy, and it’s been done a hundred times, but I just let that be the inspiration, [and get] into more of the shapes and how you can take a flower and make it more graphic-looking,” she says.

“It’s sort of like how Georgia O’Keefe would take the flower and blow it up really big. Sometimes you recognize that it’s a flower, but sometimes it’s not so recognizable … it’s more about the circle. When I’m painting flowers big like that, they’re almost like figures to me because they’re sort of life-sized.”

The sixth annual RiverArtsFest, a three-day celebration of visual, performing, and culinary arts, will take place on South Main in late October. More than 170 artists from around the country will present original fine art, including paintings, jewelry, textiles, photography, sculpture, and ceramics in what’s become the region’s largest outdoor juried artist market and urban street festival.

riverartsmemphis.org

Categories
Music Music Features

Rock and Rant Hall of Fame

“It’s a late date to be saying it, and I mean no disrespect to the people of Cleveland, who I’m sure are a fine people and a spiritual people — but Cleveland ain’t ever gonna be Memphis.”

— Memphis’ Sam Phillips at the first Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Banquet, 1986, via Stanley Booth’s Rythm Oil

“Blow it up! Blow it up! Blow it up before Johnny Rotten gets in!”

— Columbus’ Ron House on “RnR Hall of Fame,” 1995, from Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments’ Bait & Switch

Those two public pronouncements from defiantly independent regional music icons bookend a bitter process in the world of Memphis music. Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, one of the first inductees, was voicing his disapproval on having his hometown passed over for the museum site in a city with less claim on the music but a bigger public check to offer.

Nearly a decade later, with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame finally set to open in Cleveland, Ohio punk/indie mainstay Ron House made his own principled stand against the project, a defiant punk “no” in the face of a civic celebration.

A 66-second spoken rant with noise accompaniment, Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments’ “RnR Hall of Fame” was historic on impact. Railing against an institution that, in his worldview, doesn’t “induct” but “indict,” House protests imagined future exhibits of a venue he sees as inherently exploitative, snarling with comic audacity: “I don’t want to see Eric Clapton’s stuffed baby! I don’t want to see the shotgun of Kurt Cobain!”

House had been an Ohio music-scene fixture for more than a decade at that point, spending much of the ’80s as frontman for Great Plains, which released three albums in the middle of that decade on the notable national indie label Homestead Records. Lower-key, brainy, mildly rootsy, Great Plains were roughly similar to better-known regional indie stalwarts such as San Pedro, California’s Minutemen and Phoenix’s Meat Puppets. They doted on Midwestern history (“Rutherford B. Hayes,” “Black Sox Scandal”), local-scene color (“Columbus Dispatch,” “Letter to a Fanzine”), and other cultural items (“Dick Clark,” “Martin Luther King and Martin Luther Drinking,” “Alfalfa Omega”). It was a pre-internet, get-in-the-van/fanzine era in which most cities had one or two indie/punk bands for the local scene to rally around. The Great Plains were Columbus’ entry — and a good one.

After nearly a decade since Great Plains’ 1987 finale Sum Things Up, apparently unaware that musicians are supposed to mellow as they get older, House reemerged with Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments — a louder, coarser, angrier outfit where House’s more agitated vocals (and outlook) were matched by the under-recognized guitar work of partner Bob Petric.

“RnR Hall of Fame” is such an eternal moment that it has tended to obscure the rest of the record that surrounded it, but Bait & Switch is a legit lost classic from an era when indie and punk bands were ascendant — so much so that this cheap, confrontational album was actually marketed by major-label-connected American Recordings, then making a name for itself via its work with Johnny Cash.

The album showcased Stooges-style Midwestern proto-punk — a sneaky-smart blend of grimy guitars, yowling vocals, and a prowling mid-tempo pace.

“I was born at the start of this song/I never thought I would last this long,” House mewls on the opening “My Mysterious Death (Turn It Up),” which sets the tone. “Down to High Street” is a rock-show call to arms, so to speak: “There’s a time for getting drunk alone/But not now/There’s a time for staying sober at home/But not now.” “Negative Guest List” (“Even if I pay I can’t get in”) puts House in a confrontational position against a scene he confesses he needs. “Quarrel With the World” sums up the mood.

Best of all — discounting “RnR Hall of Fame” — is “Cheater’s Heaven” — a delirious, drunken tale of a married man on the hunt for an illicit encounter: “The woman was long-legged, red-haired, and married/We staggered time and toasted cemeteries/We mourned the loss of lime in cheap liquor/We wondered which way to our homes was quicker.”

A follow-up, 1997’s too-appropriately titled Straight to Video, didn’t have the benefit of American’s muscle or the same kind of reach, though it’s a very good record on its own less momentous terms — less a document of the band’s musical worldview than a series of snapshots of low-rent “love” life. The band’s apparent swan song, 2000’s No Old Guy Lo-Fi Cry, was nonexistent to anyone but scene diehards. The band went kaput soon after, but most members remained in the Columbus area and have played the occasional reunion show. Now, apparently, they’re back on the road: The Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments gig that showed up on the Hi-Tone Café schedule awhile back — and is set for this weekend — is one of the most unlikely but most interesting bookings on the local calendar this year.

Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments with Sharp Balloons and Flamin’ A’s

Hi-Tone Café

Friday, June 1st

9 p.m.; $5

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Food Deeds

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

So maybe you can’t have your cake and eat it too. But as it turns out, you can have your cake and the Food Bank can have it too.

That’s because Tender Loving Cake donates a pound cake to the Mid-South Food Bank for every one of their gourmet coffee cakes purchased.

Founder Bill Oates came up with the idea when his daughter first told him about Tom’s — the brand of shoes that donates one pair of shoes to a child in need for each pair sold.

“We just borrowed that concept,” Oates says, “because it’s the right thing to do.”

Last December, Oates launched Tender Loving Cake with the help of wholesale baker Ed Crenshaw. Crenshaw makes cakes and other baked goods for local grocery stores and restaurants. So Oates, a graphic designer by trade and an inventor and idea-man for fun, found the perfect fit for his business model. The 501(c)3 sells 48-ounce upscale coffee cakes for about $32 each, which then subsidize the donation of a less expensive 35-ounce pound cake to the Mid-South Food Bank.

The Tender Loving Cakes are baked from scratch and come in two flavors: cinnamon pecan and sour-cream blueberry. They can be shipped anywhere for about $11. Currently, Oates is only donating cakes to the Mid-South Food Bank, but he’s in negotiations with Second Harvest Food Bank in Middle Tennessee, the Arkansas Food Bank in Little Rock, and the Mississippi Food Network in Jackson. And eventually, he’d like to sell other kinds of cakes.

The bakery, where you can pick up a Tender Loving Cake and avoid paying the shipping fee, is on Summer Avenue near White Station.

Tender Loving Cake, 5041 Summer

(230-8485), tenderlovingcake.com

L’Ecole Culinaire is expanding its course offerings to include a 10-week certification program for Nutrition and Dietary Management. The certification allows chefs at hospitals, nursing homes, and assisted-living organizations to communicate better with dietitians.

Chef Emmett Bell, a certified dietary manager himself and formerly a chef at Le Bonheur, is heading the program. He says the certification does not mean chefs will be considered registered dietitians.

“That’s a two-year degree,” he says. “Certified dietitians work directly with the doctor, and then they come to the chef or the manager and convey a patient’s dietary needs to us. [The certification] makes it easier for us to communicate with the dietitians and understand what they need.”

The program covers food safety, management of food service, human resource management, and nutrition and practical application. For the nutrition portion of the coursework, L’Ecole is bringing in a registered dietitian to teach the science behind the disease-oriented diets that certified dietary managers implement.

“We already have a Healthy Lifestyles class as part of our associate’s degree,” Bell says. “But with the guidance of a registered dietitian, we’ll learn about renal diets, how to cook low-fat, high-fiber meals, how to make healthier substitutions in recipes, and things like that.”

The program begins in late July and will run every 10 weeks. The course prepares students for the Certified Dietary Manager test. L’Ecole Culinaire does not currently proctor the test but hopes to in the future.

Bell says this won’t necessarily mean that your hospital food will taste better.

“Probably not,” he says with a laugh. “But we will learn how to cook with exactly what patients can have. We’ll know when we can use substitutions instead of leaving an ingredient out. So yeah, maybe it would make their food taste better.”

L’Ecole Culinaire, 1245 N. Germantown Pkwy. (754-7115), lecole.edu

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Ace Detectives

CREDIT: Jay E. Nolan

When the estate of Robert P. Parker went looking for a writer to carry on the name of Parker’s Boston-based private eye, Spenser, the writer Ace Atkins didn’t make a lot of sense. Ace Atkins made perfect sense.

Atkins, who lives outside Oxford, Mississippi, has made his own name as a crime novelist, and this month sees the publication of The Lost Ones (Putnam), Atkins’ second in his Sheriff Quinn Colson series set in north Mississippi. But it’s with Lullaby, also out this month and also from Putnam, where readers can watch Atkins officially take on the Spenser character.

He’s a character that Atkins has been avidly following since high school, and it’s Parker, Atkins admits, who inspired him to become a writer. (Doesn’t hurt that Parker’s nickname was Ace too.)

How did Atkins pull off writing two novels simultaneously — one Southern set; the other largely South Boston set — this past year? He didn’t. He went from one (The Lost Ones) to the other (Lullaby) then back to finish the first, with, as he describes it, some big shifts in inspiration.

“I like to immerse myself in the world I’m writing about,” Atkins says. “When I’m writing Spenser, I read The Boston Globe every day, I listen to standards and classic jazz, I even eat and drink things Spenser likes. When I’m writing Quinn, I listen to outlaw country and north Mississippi blues, drive the back roads around my house, hang out in gas stations and catfish joints and read the always entertaining North Mississippi Herald.”

Could two characters — Spenser and Colson — be more different? Yes, in a lot of ways. No, in two important ways: They’ve got their honor; they’ve got, in Lullaby and The Lost Ones, one author, Ace Atkins.

Ace Atkins discussing and signing “Lullaby” and “The Lost Ones” at the Booksellers at Laurelwood, Tuesday, June 5th, 6 p.m.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Distinguished Service

I started off a recent day by reading the obituary of Wesley A. Brown. I did not know him and, in fact, had never heard of him. He was the first African American to graduate from the United States Naval Academy. He was the sixth black man admitted and the only one to successfully endure the racist hazing that had forced the others to quit. He graduated in 1949. I was 8 years old at the time and had no idea of the sort of country I was living in.

Wesley Brown

I did not know that schools in some parts of the country, but especially in the South, were segregated. I did not know that blacks and whites could not marry. I did not know that the balconies in movie theaters were reserved for blacks only — as were seats in the back of the bus. I did not know about black and white state parks, water fountains, motels, hotels, funeral homes, churches, bar associations, cab associations, medical associations, cab stands, lunch counters, and so much more, including a whole system of justice.

But I learned and I am still learning — the Brown obit was a little lesson in itself — and I simply cannot get over what a mean, racist nation we were. Blacks by and large were treated worse than most minorities, but Americans could be awful to just about anyone. In David M. Oshinsky’s book about polio epidemics (Polio: An American Story), I came across Yale Medical School’s policy regarding minority admission in the 1930s: “Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all.” This was Yale. Boola Boola.

What I did not know, I fear others do not now know. If they are ignorant of the past, therefore they are ignorant of the present as well. They do not know what a miracle has been pulled off — how a nation that once contained so much bigotry now contains so little. I am not a fool on these matters, I think, and I recognize in the disparity of support for President Obama — working-class whites don’t like him much — the residue of bigotry, but still the big picture is that Obama is a black man and he is the president of the United States. Mama, can you believe it?

We live in a land of rapid cultural shifts. After Obama announced his support of gay marriage, 53 percent of Americans said they were with him. Just six years earlier, only 36 percent of Americans said they supported gay marriage. This has been a cultural upheaval, no doubt abetted by television — Will & Grace, Modern Family, Smash — but also by a general liberalization of society; there’s more of everything except marriages. Soon, only gays will marry.

It’s hard to know how deep these cultural changes go. The question has real relevance when it comes to the Middle East. Do revolutions powered by Facebook and Twitter mean that minds, as well as political structures, have been reordered? Does the wearing of Western clothes mean the adoption of Western cultural norms? Maybe a bit. Maybe not at all. We shall see.

The same holds for America. How deep are our own cultural changes? Some insist that not much has changed. They cite a persistent American racism. There are many such examples, but they are newsworthy because they are exceptions to the rule, not what we expect. Once, though, we expected that a black man would be harassed into quitting the Naval Academy on account of race — that this racism was ordinary, normal, and in no way a violation of the rules of the place. (Jimmy Carter, a midshipman at the time, was one of the few to offer support to Brown.)

We have a ways to go. Gays still can have a dicey time of it. Blacks, too. And women still are too often the victims of violence. But when I read the obituary on Wesley A. Brown, I was shocked once again at the depth and meanness of our historical racism and then just plain dumbstruck by how far we have come. The new field house at the Naval Academy is named for Brown. He called it “the most beautiful building I’ve ever seen,” but he was wrong. It’s not a building. It’s a monument.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Check It Out

CREDIT: Danziger

As detailed in this week’s Politics column, allegations of possible election irregularities in Shelby County have once again erupted. These may ultimately blow over, but they have to be taken seriously now. Why?

Election year 2008, which first produced Republican control in both chambers of Tennessee’s legislature, established the GOP as the state’s dominant party, and that fact mandated that the state’s election commissions — county-by-county and in the state at large — should have Republican majorities. GOP electoral dominance was further enhanced by the Republican Party’s overwhelming legislative victories in 2010. And the redistricting carried out by the Republican-dominated legislature following the 2010 U.S. Census basically ensured that Republicans will be in charge of Tennessee’s political fortunes — and its elections — as far as the eye can see.

Gerrymandering was at the core of that GOP redistricting, as it always was during the 150-odd years when the Democrats were in control of the process. Beyond that, the now dominant Republicans have been disingenuous, arguably even deceitful, in two other particulars.

One was in the party establishment’s decision in 2009 to sabotage the 2008 Tennessee Voter Confidence Act, which had mandated the upgrading of the state’s election machines with “paper trail” capability to guarantee accurate election counts. The TVCA had passed a politically balanced legislature in 2008 with virtually unanimous support from both parties. But, pleading technical and cost issues that were largely bogus, Republicans did an abrupt turnabout after that year’s elections, which tilted the legislature in their favor. In the session of 2009, they managed to postpone implementation of the act, and, following their 2010 legislative sweeps, they killed it altogether in the General Assembly of 2011.

What came next in that 2011 session was legislation requiring official photo IDs of all Tennessee voters. The law, based on a model provided by the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council, was theoretically aimed at preventing vote fraud, but its provisions would have done little or nothing to prevent any proven fraud that had actually taken place. What the law would do — and will do, beginning this year — is impose undue hardships on seniors and impoverished or working-class voters, less apt than other Tennesseans to own such IDs, and students, whose college IDs were disallowed. That Democrats include these groups within their electoral base is hardly coincidental.

We cite this not to suggest that only Republicans are self-aggrandizing about the vote. Tennessee’s Democrats are equally capable of subverting electoral justice — as they did in 2008 when they declared invalid the primary victory of one of their own, former state senator Rosalind Kurita, who had broken party ranks to help elect Republican Ron Ramsey speaker of the state Senate.

Elections are about power and about control of legal authority, and where these elements are involved, excesses are always possible. In the present case, it is not unlikely that the purported erasure of selected voters’ election histories from certain Shelby County Election Commission records represents an innocent glitch rather than any nefarious intent. But we need to find out for sure.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Gadflyer

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Tom Jones has been blogging for seven years, rarely going so much as a week without writing his usual three posts while other bloggers lose interest and fall by the wayside. He has calculated that his output comes to something close to two million words and says, with considerable understatement, “I could have written a book.”

But none of his columns created as much interest or reader involvement as the “Delta Does Memphis” campaign he started two weeks ago to see if anything can be done about the high airfares charged by Delta Air Lines in Memphis. A Facebook cast of thousands including a congressman and several establishment types enlisted. The Memphis Shelby County Airport Authority, coincidentally perhaps, announced a $1 million airline incentives package. Other bloggers started related sites. And local and national media members interviewed him.

“This is the biggest response I’ve ever gotten, by far,” Jones said. “It has been interesting to see which media outlets drive the signups. Clearly, print media still matters. It’s like, bam, 500 more people when it’s in the Flyer and The Commercial Appeal. I was on Live at 9 this week, and 200 people signed. While we’re talking about the power of social media, it’s also showing me the power of old media.”

Jones is old-school. He is a former Memphis newspaper reporter with 30 years experience in Shelby County government as a mayoral aide and speechwriter. He writes nearly all of the entries under the banner of Smart City Memphis, as well as a monthly column for Memphis magazine. He started Smart City with Carol Coletta, who used to host a radio show by that name before moving to Chicago to work as a consultant on urban affairs.

“The blog started because Carol and I were coming in every morning bitching about something,” Jones said. “So Carol said, ‘Why don’t we just write something?’ That’s how it started, then we had to ask ourselves, ‘Are you serious about it or not?’ We talked about posting every day, but that would have been a bridge too far. So usually it’s three posts a week. We knew we could attract a lot of people if we wrote it a certain way — kind of throwing bombs and vilifying people. Or we could try to influence a few hundred people that mattered. So we went that direction.”

Jones still throws an occasional bomb, usually at suburban legislators, but the secret of his longevity is his blend of erudition, institutional memory, braininess, and willingness to offend in the anything-goes world of blogging. Unlike some web fiends, he believes that less is sometimes more. He debates serious critics and ignores personal insults with the maturity of a man who has seen much worse things. He straddles the line by working locally as a consultant for, among others, Mayor A C Wharton, which he admits constricts him while it allows him to make a living and keep the blog going without advertising or sponsorship.

“I try to stay away from areas I’m getting paid to work in,” he said. As for why he hasn’t tried to sell advertising: “Probably because I didn’t figure anybody would ever buy one. And then I think you run into the question of whose voice the readers would be getting if, say, Delta had an ad.”

He was a latecomer to Facebook and doesn’t use Twitter. He will be the first to tell you that he didn’t break any news in the Delta story and that griping about Memphis airfares has been around for years.

“I don’t think I got it started,” he said. “We were all hitting the tipping point at the same moment. I just happened to be the person who set up the first group.”

He flies about 12 times a year for business. A personal tipping point for him was a recent $750 trip to Cincinnati at about the same time other consultants were telling him they couldn’t make the numbers work flying in and out of Memphis.

“At the time that we suffer from being isolated, we’re isolated even more by the airfares, so we can’t connect with people in other places,” he said.

He decided to do a Facebook campaign, expecting it to attract about 500 people, but after a week it had exceeded 3,500 supporters — a process, it should be noted, that is not exactly strenuous. He hit a nerve. He gave an old story a fresh angle and a hook.

“Do I think there’s somebody at Delta Air Lines who cares that 3,600 people in Memphis signed up to a Facebook site?” he asked. “No. It’s not to their benefit to come tell us that we don’t have a future as a Delta hub. It just seems like we’ve got nothing to lose by raising our voices as customers or as a city where the ramifications are everywhere. Everybody has a personal story, but the impact for St. Jude or International Paper or conventions is something else. Some people say it’s bad PR for Memphis for us to be doing this, but I think it’s bad PR to just sit here like a bunch of lemmings.”

As of last week, he had not personally heard from anyone at Delta or the airport authority.

“I’m sure the airport authority feels like a lot of this has been directed at them, but one of the things I think is coming through is that everybody needs to get in the game, including our political leadership and CEOs.”

A wit and bit of a cynic by nature, Jones was trending toward a dim view of all the hubbub as the bandwagon attracted more notice last week, including a new Facebook page called “My Memphis Airport,” set up by the airport authority, the Memphis Convention & Visitors Bureau, and the Memphis Chamber of Commerce to counter “Delta Does Memphis.” The site had 77 members after a week.

“The usual suspects are doing the usual thing,” Jones said. “It’s all about control rather than having a discussion with 3,500 people already at ‘Delta Does Memphis.’ That said, it seems like we’ve gotten everyone’s attention.”