Hannah Sayle reports on three new Italian eateries in Bartlett and Cordova.
Categories
Month: January 2013
By now, everyone should know about the “Present Tense” exhibition opening this weekend at the Dixon. Everyone is talking about this show. Everyone. I have received no less than 40 emails from selected artists wanting me to interview them about their work in the exhibition, emails from artists complaining that they did not, somehow, make it in the show, emails from friends making fun of the other artists who were or were not selected to take part, and emails from people recalling stories of past visual art events from the previous decade. (My work is included.) The group of artists that I think are severely under-represented are art professors from University of Memphis and Memphis College of Art. Maybe, perhaps, they spend all their time and efforts educating future art stars rather than working in the studio and having a presence in the community. Maybe.
Regardless of what you think about the exhibition, who was or was not included, one thing is for certain: People are talking about the visual arts in Memphis. And that, if for no other reason, makes it all worth it.
There is a new alternative space opening on Broad that people are all excited about, Nu Gallery. They are having their inaugural one-night only exhibition this Friday, February 1st, 5:30-8 p.m. Titled “Co-Lab”, the exhibition is collaborative works from artists such as Hamlett Dobbins and Tad Lauritzen Wright, Ariel Claiborn and Leanna Hicks, and Jay Crum and Kong Wee Pang. Artists in Memphis love doing them some collaborative exhibitions. Marshall Arts is showing the second installment of their collaborative shows, “Memphis Connections” in April. We can thank, Hamlett Dobbins for getting everyone excited about working together and having collaborative exhibitions.
Since I am presently on a writing-about-murals kick, I thought I would mention the one by Cedar Lorca Nordbye. Norbye has created this mural in conjunction with the Winter Invitational exhibition at Gallery 56 that opens tomorrow night. The mural, next door to Gallery 56, will be temporary as it was created on the building scheduled to be demolished in a few months to make way for the new Casablanca Restaurant. Spending only about $100 in materials, Nordbye states the mural “brings to mind the Middle-East, or “The Orient” from 19th-century Orientalism to Disney’s Aladdin. Other artists in the Winter Invitational are Greg Bowden, John Sadowski, Mike Coulson, Evan Lebaroff, Terry Kenney, Katie Dann, Bien Howard, Paula Kovarik, Juan Rojo, Gary Parisi, and Shamek Weddle.
It is another busy weekend for the visual arts in Memphis. Check out our Art listing page to get the lowdown on the rest of what is happening and go see some art. If you see me out and about, we can talk about how Memphis just lost a legend. Hamed Haddadi, you will be missed!
Brandon Goldsmith thinks it might possible for a real discussion about guns if extremists on either side just back off a little.
Categories
George’s Truck Stop and Drag Bar
Described as a “drag comedy musical,” George’s Truck Stop and Drag Bar centers around a truck stop diner where a cast of drag queens have taken refuge after the only drag bar in Krisco County burned to the ground.
The queens attempt to solve the mystery of who set fire the Krankshaft Lounge as they take over the greasy spoon.
There are four scheduled performances at Evergreen Theatre (1705 Poplar) this weekend — 7 and 10 p.m. on both Friday, Feb. 1st and Saturday, Feb. 2nd.
To find out more or buy tickets, go here. There will be a cocktail hour before each show.
- JB
- Henri Brooks
NASHVILLE — The legend of Henri Brooks, now a member of the Shelby County Commission and formerly a member of the state House of Representatives, dies hard.
Very hard, as state Rep. Larry Miller discovered Thursday in Nashville. Last week, Miller had placed on the House consent calendar a routine resolution recognizing Brooks, who was recently one of a dozen Memphians cited for their achievements by The Commercial Appeal in an article entitled “Twelve Who Made a Difference.”
Resolutions of that sort on behalf of people in one’s district who are honored for this or that are common and are almost always made part of the consent calendar, which, as the name implies, is a compilation of uncontroversial matters, requiring a pro forma vote, normally unanimous by acclamation.
Brooks, however, is anything but uncontroversial. During her several terms in the legislature, she attracted the attention of her peers — and notably on one occasion, that of former longtime House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh, who took umbrage — for her refusal to take part in the pledges of allegiance to the flag which began each day’s work in the House.
Brooks objects philosophically to the pledge, apparently because she regards it as symbolic of America’s failure to extend the full promise of human liberty to African Americans. She continues that objection as a member of the Commission, most often either standing mute when the pledge is recited by members of the Commission and audience or by taking her seat only when the pledge has been recited.
Though Brooks has always had her defenders, who note that her actions are protected by the Constitution, she has had her critics, too — and the number of them has been disproportionately greater.
So, even though Brooks, who left the House after the election of 2006, was an unknown quantity to most of the current members of the legislature, word of her predilections spread rapidly enough that, when Miller came to the floor on Thursday, he was informed by Rep. Glen Casada (R-Franklin), caucus chair of the majority Republicans, “Larry, we’re going to bump the Brooks resolution.” That meant the resolution would have to be the subject of debate — and vociferous debate at that.
Miller concluded the resolution was doomed for certain defeat after “a whole lot of angry discussion.”
He says he was informed that Rep. Joe Carr, a flamboyantly conoservative Republican from Rutherford County of independent and distinctive views himself (he has recently filed bills challenging federal authority in Tennessee, for example) had been one of the organizers of anti-Brooks sentiment. “He’s getting ready to run for Congress,” Miller notes, by way of explanation.
In any case, a resolution which Miller had regarded as routine would, he realized, became the focus of a floor fight, touching upon partisan and even racial differences and risking a general conflagration. “We would have voted for the resolution,” says Miller, meaning the House Democrats, “but they {Republicans] would have opposed it, and that could have become bitter.”
He says he was urged to make a fight of it by some of his colleagues but decided that something like that, this early in the legislative session, could adversely affect the temper of the body and derail consideration of urgent issues that required at least the semblance of bipartisan cooperation and respect.
Another course suggested by his colleagues was to retailiate by bumping every routine resolution on the consent calendar brought by a Republican member. Miller advised against that as well.
In the end, he deferred his resolution (“rolled” it, in legislative vernacular) until “the last calendar.”
That phrase normally means the very end of the legislative session, which this year will be in late April or early May. In this case, Miller concedes, “the last calendar” probably means never.
“It just wasn’t worth igniting a war over,” Miller said.
After posting my initial reaction to the trade late last night/early this morning, I decided to take in some other reactions before giving it a second take myself. And if I’m going to read this stuff, I might as well pass it on.
A couple of general thoughts about national reaction: I think that if you have your own informed opinions you shouldn’t put too much emphasis on outside declarations or conventional wisdom. The Pau Gasol trade was almost universally panned. I thought it was a rational and reasonable move. I was proven correct. Here, the consensus is much more in line with my thinking. But we could all be wrong. Maybe this “not great but makes sense” deal will end up being a disaster instead.
It’s also probably telling that the writers most optimistic about the deal from the Grizzlies perspective are analysis-oriented types who concentrate on thinking about the game. The writers most pessimistic about the deal from the Grizzlies perspective seemed to be conventional reporter types whose work is more rooted in being a conduit for front-office sources. Doesn’t mean one perspective is inherently more worthwhile than the other, but I do find that split compelling.
Anyway, here’s an annotated guide to my morning reading. I’ll wade into the deal again from some new or deeper angles later in the day and will be on “The Chris Vernon Show” at 1 p.m. to talk about it.
In scoring a career-high 26 points last night at East Carolina, junior guard Joe Jackson became the 48th player in U of M history to reach 1,000 points for his career. Jackson is the 24th native Memphian to join this club, but the first since Jeremy Hunt scored his 1,000th point during the 2006-07 season. The six years are actually the longest drought between Memphians reaching this exclusive U of M fraternity of basketball stars.
- Larry Kuzniewski
- Joe Jackson
Here’s a chronological list of native Memphians with 1,000 points for the Tigers. (For the purposes of this list, we’ll consider the Mississippi River the border it happens to be. So Keith Lee — now a Memphian for life — is technically from West Memphis, Arkansas.)
• John Hillman (1962-65) — 1,009
• Mike Butler (1965-68) — 1,409
• Larry Finch (1970-73) — 1,869
• Ronnie Robinson (1970-73) — 1,150
• Bill Cook (1972-76) — 1,629
• Alvin Wright (1974-78) — 1,319
• James Bradley (1976-79) — 1,254
• Doom Haynes (1980-84) — 1,479
• Andre Turner (1982-86) — 1,442
• Baskerville Holmes (1982-86) — 1,112
• William Bedford (1983-86) — 1,224
- U of M Athletic Media Relations
- Ronnie Robinson
• Vincent Askew (1984-87) — 1,171
• Dwight Boyd (1984-88) — 1,249
• Cheyenne Gibson (1987-90) — 1,035
• Elliot Perry (1987-91) — 2,209 (tops on this list)
• Ernest Smith (1988-92) — 1,122
• Billy Smith (1990-93) — 1,040
• Penny Hardaway (1991-93) — 1,319
• Cedric Henderson (1993-97) — 1,697
• Lorenzen Wright (1994-96) — 1,026
• Marcus Moody (1997-2001) — 1,208
• Antonio Burks (2001-04) — 1,028
• Jeremy Hunt (2002-07) — 1,145
Barring injury or leaving school early, two of Jackson’s teammates from Memphis (both juniors) should join this list. Through Wednesday’s game, Tarik Black has 846 career points and Chris Crawford has 694.
Categories
The Dish
Dishcrawl Memphis hosts its first event on Tuesday, February 5th, in Cooper-Young.
Dishcrawl was launched in San Jose, California, a few years ago and has since expanded to other cities across the country as well as Canada.
Dishcrawl is a walking tour of four restaurants. Participants meet up with a Dishcrawl ambassador at a restaurant, where they try a sampling of dishes of the restaurants’ choosing, with the owner or chef coming out to talk to the crawlers. They then move on to the next restaurant and then the next, with the final restaurant serving dessert. Each stop is 35 to 40 minutes. (There are also Dishwalks that move at a slower pace.)
Technically, the February 5th crawl is Dishcrawl Memphis’ second “first” event. According to Dishcrawl Memphis’ ambassador Paige Laurie, tickets for a crawl on Wednesday, February 6th, sold out within three days, so more spots were added and the Tuesday night event was added.
This will be Laurie’s first crawl as well, and she’s excited. She sees potential for crawls on Madison and downtown.
“There’s a lot of pride in the Memphis food community,” Laurie says. “We don’t just stop at barbecue.”
Dishcrawl Memphis Tuesday, February 5th, and Wednesday, February 6th, 7 p.m. $45. Meeting location is kept a secret until 48 hours before the event. For tickets and more information, go to dishcrawl.com/memphis.
Categories
Out There
Everyone can agree that public art is a valuable social entity. It can represent the cultural significance of a community (the Stax Museum murals on Bellevue) or pay homage to those who have unselfishly sacrificed their well being for the sake of others (the Tom Lee sculpture in Tom Lee Park). It can also bring color to a place that desperately needs it (Greely Myatt’s Quiltsurround at the Federal Building).
At the same time, few people can agree on what best fits the artistic needs of a specific community, as anyone who has ever served on a committee for public art can attest.
When it comes to the current rehabilitation of Overton Square, developers Bob and Louis Loeb have no intention of getting in the way of the artists.
“They are my dream clients,” says Carol DeForest, art coordinator of the Overton Square project.
DeForest, who has created eight public art projects in Memphis, is familiar with the good, the bad, and the ugly process of designing, proposing, and installing public work. She was hired in August to serve as a liaison between the Loebs and the artists. For the initial projects, DeForest skipped the public call for proposals and has reached out to artists she knew would create work appropriate to Overton Square.
One of the first projects is the mural on the north side of Bari Ristorante. The Loebs’ only stipulation, DeForest says, was that it be “colorful, have action, and relate to the neighborhood.”
She found what she was looking for in David Lynch. “Lynch was the only artist we approached who had an idea of how to work with the doors and windows on Bari,” she says.
Lynch designed the mural, a colorful conglomeration of Overton Square’s businesses and buildings. Anthony D. Lee was hired to paint the mural on the building. DeForest knew Lee had painted Jeff Zimmerman’s mural at AutoZone Park and was confident he would be able to accurately recreate Lynch’s vision.
The Loebs and DeForest were so ecstatic about Lynch’s proposal they have commissioned him to design a second mural on the building previously occupied by Paulette’s. According the Lynch, “It is a folk-art design of a scenic view and a couple of old-timey bikes.” There will also be a bike “parking lot.” The artist to design and fabricate the bike racks has yet to be determined.
In terms of the installation of art in Overton Square, everything about this project is moving faster than people are used to seeing. So fast, in fact, that the day that Jason and Rebecca Severs, owners of Bari, found out about the mural was the day they came to work and noticed the scaffolding and workers painting the primer. The Severs do not own the building where Bari is located, but, Jason says, “It would have been good to be part of the process of selecting the mural.”
The Severs support local art. Jason went to art school, and Bari and the Severs’ other restaurant, Three Angels Diner, display work by local artists. “It is not like I am against murals,” Jason says. “I love murals. I think there needs to be more murals.”
Among the artists in the process of creating projects for Overton Square are Yvonne Bobo, Lea Holland, and Suzy Hendrix. DeForest and the Loebs are still looking for artists for additional projects and are open to just about anything. Interested parties should contact Carol DeForest by emailing her at cadeforest@aol.com. She anticipates that all projects will be finalized by the end of February.
Categories
The Rant
It’s still permissible to use the word “pissant,” isn’t it? Merriam-Webster defines it as someone or something without
significance or obsolete. That’s the very word that came to mind while watching congressional Republicans attempt to skewer Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over the attacks in Libya last September that left four Americans dead, including the ambassador.
Jose Gil | Dreamstime.com
Hillary Clinton
The knives were out for last week’s hearings, and the GOP had been salivating for weeks, wanting a chance to place blame for attacks on the American embassy in Benghazi. Fox News bloviators like Charles Krauthammer accused Clinton of developing a case of “Benghazi flu” to avoid testifying, which turned out to be a blood clot on her brain that required hospitalization. But there would be no apologies coming from the right, as gnat after insignificant gnat tried to make their bones trashing the former first lady.
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, reacting as if he’d just smoked a bowl of bluegrass, said, “Had I been president at the time … I would have relieved you of your duties,” undoubtedly drawing guffaws from White House staffers watching on television. The very thought of a Rand Paul presidency set the tone for the ridiculous spectacle to follow. Permanent grouch John McCain, still in recovery over his loss to Obama in the 2008 presidential race, stated that Clinton’s answers “are not satisfactory to me,” as if that still actually mattered. McCain continued, “The American people deserve answers, and they certainly don’t deserve false answers,” implying that Mrs. Clinton was lying. Senator Ron Johnson claimed that Clinton’s emotional and tearful testimony about greeting the returning caskets of the four slain Americans was merely “theatrics” to avoid his tough questions. Johnson told CNN that Democrats were playing “election politics” with the Clinton hearings, tone-deaf to his own party’s desperate political posturing.
Predictably, satire turned to farce when the circus moved to the House of Representatives. Congressman Jeff Duncan of South Carolina shook his finger at Mrs. Clinton while accusing her of allowing the embassy in Benghazi to become “a death trap” and inquiring, “What does responsibility mean to you, Madam Secretary?” This coming from a former auctioneer who’d never been 50 miles away from Greenville until his election to the House. The clear motive of these inquisitions was not to find facts concerning the Libya attack but to issue grandstanding attacks on the secretary of state. At the hearing’s end, there was no resolution over what actually took place in Benghazi, and Secretary Clinton made the political opposition look like an assortment of opportunists and fools.
This is exactly the image the Republican Party was trying to change at its post-mortem winter meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, last week. Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana again rebuked the GOP for being “the stupid party” and urged future candidates to avoid saying things that were “offensive and bizarre.” Jindal said, “It’s time for a new Republican Party that talks like adults.”
Governor Bobby must believe that we forgot about the time he gave his party’s rebuttal to the State of the Union address by coming on television speaking to the American public like he was the newly elected mayor of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
To underscore the image of the “new” GOP, one of the invited and honored keynote speakers was Newt Gingrich. The meeting devolved into another Obama hate-fest, although they paid particular care not to call him a Marxist this time. The GOP-ers believe their principles are solid and that it’s just a matter of changing their messaging that will return them to relevancy. They believe that by softening their rhetoric on women’s issues, they’ll retain more of the female vote. Perhaps not trying to parse the definition of “rape” might be a good start.
Oddly, the emerging Sunday spokesman for Republican “values” seems to be the unrepentant loser Paul Ryan, who attempted to use the term “forcible rape” in his own anti-abortion legislation. In fact, the GOP began the 2013 legislative term by introducing dual bills to defund Planned Parenthood, a “personhood” amendment that would outlaw certain forms of contraception, and offering harsh anti-abortion measures that mirror similar efforts in states with Republican-controlled legislatures. It’s tough to do a lot of soul-searching when you have no soul.
The reelection of Reince Priebus as chairman of the Republican National Committee does nothing to dissuade the “stupid party” label. After Rick Snyder’s attempts to declare martial law in Michigan and Rick Scott’s voter-suppression measures that backfired in Florida, Priebus actually said, “Our principles are more conducive to minorities than the Democrats’.” Fellow in-denial Republicans echoed the refrain that their problems arise from an inability to “explain their values” and the ordinary citizens’ incapacity to “understand our conservative principles.” The meeting then unanimously approved a resolution to strip Planned Parenthood of federal funding on a voice vote.
A Republican lawmaker in New Mexico just introduced a new bill that would require the victim of a rape who was impregnated from her ordeal to carry the child to term in order to preserve the fetus as potential evidence at a criminal trial. This begs the question: Who benefits from such a “trial” — the victim or the rapist? House speaker John Boehner made a speech to the conservative Ripon Society and said, “We’re expecting to be the focus of this administration as they attempt to annihilate the Republican Party.” Austerity champion Paul Ryan further opined, “If we had a [Hillary] Clinton presidency, I think we would have fixed this fiscal mess by now.”
Democrats need do no more than stand back and watch in awe, since the current Tea Party-enthralled Republican Party will most likely collapse of its own accord. With enemies like this, who needs friends?
Randy Haspel writes the “Born-Again Hippies” blog, where a version of the column first appeared.