Chris Herrington on soul-centric duo THEESatisfaction, performing Wednesday at the Rumba Room.
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Month: April 2013
Simultaneous with published reports that the search firm hired by the unified School Board wants a delay in looking for superintendency candidates, Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell has said he thinks a year-long delay in school merger itself would be helpful.
Luttrell told members of the Memphis Rotary Club Tuesday that the likelihood of multiple school systems in Shelby County’s suburbs and the complications stemming from that process would make such a delay desirable. Luttrell also expressed frustration with the efforts of the unified Board in resolving matters that impinge on its own budget — and consequently on that of the county at large.
“We still don’t know what the schools will cost. I thought we would have a budget for them by now,” Luttrell said. “Maybe we’ll get something from them by May.”
The impatience in the mayor’s voice was almost palpable as he told the Rotarians, “To say I’m frustrated with the School Board is an understatement. They have done us a disservice.”
Luttrell said his own need to prepare a county budget has been hampered by the Board’s failure to come to grip with unfinished items on its agenda. Only last week, in two meetings, the Board — deadlocked between contrary points of view held by holdover members of the erstwhile Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools boards—failed to make headway on school closures or whom the new system should hire for cleaning purposes.
Asked if a year’s delay might be a viable alternative to completing city/county school merger by this August, Luttrell said, “Yes, I think it would.”
Luttrell’s opinion would seem to coincide with that expressed by officials of PROACT, the Board’s search firm. According to The Commercial Appeal. , the search firm, like Luttrell, has been put off by uncertainties created by School Board inaction and would prefer to pursue the search in earnest ”in the fall and winter months.”
Board member Chris Caldwell has said he will present the firm’s request for consideration at Tuesday night’s Board meeting.
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Restaurant Impossible
Somebody call Robert Irvine, the no-nonsense star of the Food Network’s Restaurant Impossible. Have we got a challenge for him.
Beale Street Landing needs help. Our $40-plus million riverfront gathering spot of the future lost its restaurant deal last week, days after the tables and chairs and bar were installed. Beale & Second Inc., with partners Bud Chittom, Kevin Kane, and Charlie Ryan — who have about 100 years experience in the Memphis restaurant and entertainment business between them — bailed out. These guys know something.
RDC director Benny Lendermon notified board members that Beale & Second Inc. “is no longer interested in pursuing the lease of the restaurant space at Beale Street Landing. Based on this discovery, Beale & Second Inc. should cease and desist all actives [sic] on the Beale Street Landing premises other than specific catering services that RDC may contract with you to perform.”
Turn in your keys. Get your equipment out of there. Copy to the lawyers.
The Big Three were the only ones to respond to an RDC request for restaurant proposals.
Who says that if you build it, they will come? If you build it, they might not even open it.
I would resubscribe to my ripoff cable package to see Irvine’s reaction to this. Usually, he takes on a struggling mom-and-pop restaurant in a hardscrabble location with operators mortgaged to the hilt and out of energy and fresh ideas. He did a show last year at Pollard’s Bar BQ on Elvis Presley Boulevard in Whitehaven.
Beale Street Landing is located where a world-famous street meets a world-famous river. It has gorgeous views and a steady stream of tourists. It has millions of dollars of infrastructure in, over, and around it designed by an architectural firm that won a competition. When the RDC needs more money, it simply blames circumstances beyond its control and asks the city council to write another check.
But as Irvine would quickly see, that is not all. When the RDC has a bad idea, it compounds it with another bad idea, like that giant Rubik’s cube on top of the hill. The muscular Irvine would probably instantly demolish it with a sledgehammer. The matching color scheme inside would give any decorator ulcers. Beale Street Landing shares Tom Lee Park and Riverside Drive for part of the year with Memphis In May. And then there is the parking, or the lack of it.
Ryan, who helped develop the entertainment district in Cooper-Young in Midtown, said there were many “challenges, the main one being parking.” Chittom declined to comment. Kane, who is head of the Convention and Visitors Bureau, did not return calls.
“The deal is off,” Ryan said, declining to go into specifics.
Jim Holt, executive director of Memphis In May, said the festival could have co-existed with a restaurant inside Beale Street Landing, which he noted was part of the original plan several years ago.
“We had worked out a plan,” he said.
It isn’t like there were no precedents for do’s and don’ts of riverside restaurants in city parks. Mud Island River Park opened some 31 years ago with two full-service restaurants, one of them boasting linen tablecloths and the best views on the lower Mississippi. When they failed, “bad access” got the blame, even after the bridge from Front Street to Mud Island was opened and there was an acre of parking.
Isolation was more to the point. Tom Lee Park isn’t an island, but it is separated from downtown by Riverside Drive and lacks sufficient parking in Ryan’s view. And that was before a recent proposal from a consultant who recommended doing away with parking lots in the park and allowing parallel parking on Riverside Drive instead.
The most likely future for the indoor space at Beale Street Landing is joining the growing list of fancy places that can be rented for parties, weddings, and other special events. This is a far cry from the bring-Memphis-together gathering spot envisioned in the original plan. It also fails to meet the simple need for a place to escape the summer heat and get a sandwich, a cold drink, and a bathroom. Correction, there are a couple of bathrooms. We will see how long they stay open.
Sadly, food trucks and bottled-water vendors could have met this need for a fraction of the cost. Instead, we have a restaurant that never opened and a kitchen about to be stripped. Robert Irvine, where are you?
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Time and Space
John Branston mulling over everything from desegregation to airfares.
In the aftermath of the obits and tributes to Maxine Smith, this old story came back to me. Mrs. Smith and the NAACP opposed Plan Z — the busing plan for 40,000 students in 1972. They wanted 60,000 students bused and unsuccessfully sued to overrule Plan Z, which they called “a grotesque distortion of the law.” Two dozen schools were left out of the plan because there was no hope that white students would go to them. Fear went both ways. Louis Lucas, one of the NAACP lawyers, told me several black parents complained to him that marijuana and other drugs were more prevalent at white schools than black schools.
Mrs. Smith went on the school board when it was majority white and majority male. The Memphis School System was majority black and trending moreso. One of the things I liked about her as NAACP secretary was that she worked out of a small office in a small building on Vance Avenue in a poor part of town. When I needed some historic photographs for a Memphis magazine story, she got up and dug them out of a file cabinet herself and gave them to me at no charge. We would have paid.
Desegregation was hard, even where it wasn’t violent. But there was a just goal that blacks and white rallied to. The age cutoff for people who remember separate “white” and “colored” public facilities and restaurants is about 50 now. Resegregation is harder in another way. Nobody has an answer. Nobody. There are no leaders because there are no followers who want to be led to a common goal, which is the definition of leadership.
Mayor A C Wharton suggested naming one of the parks for Maxine and Vasco Smith. That came up Monday at the meeting of the parks renaming committee. “Naming a park after her would not do her justice,” said Harold Collins, who suggested a school or school administration building might be more suitable down the road. Doug Cupples, who voted on the other side from Collins on the Confederate names, agreed it would be “premature” to name a park for the Smiths.
The pedestrian and bicycle path on the Harahan Bridge will be 10 feet wide or 12 feet wide, depending on how much planners want to pinch the budget. As an occasional bike rider, I say width matters on a path to be shared by bikes going fast and pedestrians with small children going slow. It is the main thing. Get the main thing right and spring for the extra bucks. The Greenline is 10 feet wide but there are shoulders on both sides most of the way. There will be no margin of error on the bridge path, just fences.
The bridge path from one side of the river to the other will be one mile long. One mile is about the distance from the eastern approach to the A. W. Willis Jr. Bridge to Mud Island to the entrance to Mud Island River Park. Try walking or biking it, there and back, some time on a 95-degree summer afternoon.
I watched the Grizzlies on television with friends in Michigan last weekend. They couldn’t believe that Marc Gasol was a good but hardly great player at a small private high school, Lausanne, and didn’t play college ball.
A year ago I flew Delta to Detroit for $415 round trip. This year it was $260 for the same itinerary. Go figure. And can someone explain why car rentals are so cheap? I got a car for three days for $51, tax included, and a month ago my gang and I got an even better car in Richmond, Va. for $11 a day.
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Grit Grind Donuts
On Gibson’s Grizzlies-themed donuts and more at Hungry Memphis.
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Grit & Grind/Eat & Drink
Grizzlies playoffs equal Grizzlies-themed food …
- The Corked Carrot
The newly opened Corked Carrot is offering this lovely Go Grizz! lemon macaron. Available now. It’s $1.95 per cookie or $19.95 for a dozen.
- Gibson’s Donuts
Gibson’s Donuts offers a number of team-colored options. The striped vanilla donuts are 71 cents; sprinkles in chocolate or vanilla (pictured) are 76 cents; and cream puffs are 81 cents and available only on game days.
For those who want to go big, there’s the Texas donut, a monster at 8 to 10 inches that can be decorated to read “Grit and Grind” (or anything, really). The Texas donuts, $8, must be preordered a day ahead. You can have one just in time for Friday’s game.
- South of Beale
You’ll need something to wash it all down, so we’ll point you to South of Beale‘s Grizz shot ($3), made with vodka, peach schnapps, and blue curaçao.
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Grizzlies-Clippers Game 5, Tonight
The Grizzlies face the Los Angeles Clippers tonight in a crucial Game 5 of their first-round playoff series. The game, from Los Angeles, tips at 9:30 Memphis time. Chris Herrington breaks it all down.
- LARRY KUZNIEWSKI
- Defending Chris Paul will be a key for tonight’s crucial Game 5.
A high-stakes Game 5 between the Grizzlies and Clippers tips tonight at 9:30 p.m., Memphis time. Here are 10 takes ahead of the action:
1. Homecourt vs. Trendlines: The central mystery of Game 5 is whether what we’ve seen so far is simply about homecourt advantage or whether the series is evolving in a more linear way. The Clipper optimist would say both teams have merely held serve on their home floor. That these two teams are fairly evenly matched, that homecourt has been the tipping point, and that now the Clippers have a 2-to-1 homecourt advantage in a best 2-of-3 series. Could be.
But the Grizzlies optimist would counter that what we’ve really seen is a solid, direct trend, with the Grizzlies growing stronger each game. Consider these trendlines:
Outcome:
Game 1 — Clippers +21
Game 2 — Clippers +2
Game 3 — Grizzlies +12
Game 4 — Grizzlies +21
Rebound Differential/Second-Chance Points:
Game 1 — Clippers +24/+20
Game 2 — Clippers +2/Grizzlies +4
Game 3 — Grizzlies +12/+18
Game 4 — Grizzlies +17/+20
Marc Gasol/Zach Randolph Production:
Game 1 — 29-6-8
Game 2 — 30-15-2
Game 3 — 43-19-4
Game 4 — 48-22-6
2. First Game Fluke?: An extra bit of evidence to the “trendline” theory of this series: Game 1, increasingly, looks like an outlier, not in terms of performance, which is impossible to predict, but in terms of roster usage on the Grizzlies part.
“Foul trouble” — which is not predictable — played a role in the Grizzlies’ rotations, but impacted the two teams equally in the Zach Randolph/Blake Griffin match-up, where each played 25 minutes. Elsewhere, the Grizzlies did things in that game that weren’t totally explained by fouls and that haven’t and almost certainly won’t be repeated: Austin Daye getting first-quarter minutes. Keyon Dooling playing more minutes (18) than Tony Allen (17). Jerryd Bayless’ good shooting prompting 30 minutes of court-time even though his defense was problematic and the team was a -11 when he was on the floor.
Quite literally, the Grizzlies team that played in Game 1 is not the same team that’s played since or will play in Game 5. Unfortunately for the Grizzlies, that game counted.
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Imagine’s New Home
Susan Ellis checks out Imagine Vegan Cafe’s new space and new menu items, which include vegan BBQ nachos.