About “Campfield Posts Pressure Cooker Bomb Joke”:
“Can’t wait for the stand-up routine. I heard he has some material using 9/11, Challenger and Columbia, Joplin tornado, and the Texas explosion that will have people rolling in the aisles.” — barf
Greg Cravens
About “It’s the County Commission’s Turn on Gun Rights”:
“Mr. Rowland, as an owner of a number of guns, I do support the 2nd Amendment. I think every American should have the unfettered right to own as many muzzle-loading, single-ball and powder rifles or handguns that they want. These should be exempt from all qualifications to gun ownership.” — autoegocrat
About “Animal Advocates to Protest Dismissal of Memphis Shelter Director’s Charges”:
“Please continue to cover this issue in the media. We need everyone in the community to bring pressure on the mayor to remember his promise, ‘worst to first’. We are ready!” — Mary Marjorie Weber Marr
Comment of the Week:
About “Maxine Smith, Civil Rights Icon, Dead at 83”:
“Maxine Smith was a beautiful lady, inside and out. She knew no stranger. With her courage, her tenacity and her smile, she carried this city on her back through decades of struggle and change. Because of her and many other brave activists, anyone can sit at a lunch counter, drink from a water fountain, go to a school of their choice. In her passing, Memphis has lost a lioness.” — MemphisTigers
Memphis In May has released its 2013 app with schedules, maps, and a fun photo booth (which we couldn’t resist testing out in the office). Bianca Phillips has more.
Memphis In May has released their free 2013 smart phone app, and it’s a vast improvement over their apps in years past (thanks Paul Ryburn for letting us know). The app is available for iPhones and Android phones.
The app features the lineup of bands for the Beale Street Music Festival, and users can highlight favorites to create their own personal schedule within the app. There are two general maps of the park tailored to the music fest and the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, each highlighting where stages and vendor tents are located for the events. And there’s a separate map highlighting the disability-accessible viewing areas for music fest.
Additionally, the app includes information for where to take or locate “lost and found” items during the festivals, a list of events throughout May celebrating Memphis In May’s 2013 honored country of Sweden, and a list of barbecue teams participating in the cooking contest.
Perhaps, most importantly, the app includes themed photo booths for music fest, the barbecue contest, and Sunset Symphony. In the spirit of investigative journalism, we’ve tested them out.
Flyer intern Chris Shaw sings for the band, Ex-Cult by night. But we just can’t get him to stop singing … like ever.
We can’t believe Contemporary Media executive assistant Michael Shelton actually stopped eating to pose for this shot. He’s such a pig! Okay, we kid.
Talk about ballsy moves. Time StandsStill playwright Donald Margulies opens the second half of his politically-savvy play with a spot-on diatribe against the frustrating cultural function of politically-savvy plays.
James, a foreign correspondent (Michael Gravois) who’s spent his entire career/adult life documenting the atrocities of war complains about how Americans, of a certain class and disposition, go to see plays that reinforce previously existing worldviews and self-images. We go home basically unchanged, he argues, but feeling like we’ve meaningfully engaged with the world and its woes. Like driving with your headlights on to show you “support the troops,” these personally affirming, but hollow rituals, James suggests, make people feel like they are participating when they’re only consuming, and are more aligned with problems than with solutions.
As a nicely-imagined counterpoint to all of this Margulies has given James a new obsession. He’s becoming a critic, fascinated with bloody snuff-fluff cinema and convinced that the Saw series, and similar torture porn says something unexpected about the modern condition. He’s just not sure what, exactly.
Time Stands Still wallows in visceral sado masochistic pleasures. After James more or less reviews the first act of the play he lives in (potentially insulting a swath of the audience along the way) it’s difficult to experience the drama as anything but another kind of commodity. It’s difficult to not see selfishness and hypocrisy at the core of everything the main characters do. It makes arguably brave, intelligent, committed people look petty and small, and impossible to like as they pursue unique personal comforts like addicts, while managing more common obstacles like injury, insult, and infidelity. Normally, that might not be a good thing, and that’s why this play is special.
The play’s jabs at the audience, and the ritual of live performance are bracing and the big themes emerging in act one crumble as the political turns personal.
The basics: Set in an in a nice but neglected Brooklyn apartment Time Stands still chronicles the quickly evolving relationship between a small group of longtime friends, lovers, and ex-lovers.
James returns home to cope with the nervous breakdown he suffered after seeing one too many kids blown to bits. Sarah, a respected photographer, and James’ life partner (Leah Bray Nichols) follows shortly thereafter when her body is similarly ripped apart by a roadside bomb that kills her guide.
Sarah, the intellectual daughter of wealthy Southern Conservatives, is badly injured, permanently scarred, and grief stricken. She is entirely unable to imagine the kind of mundane upper middle-class life James is trying to embrace.
James and Sarah eventually formalize their relationship with marriage vows. They observe the ever-expanding happiness their old friend Richard (Barclay Roberts) seems to have found in his new, somewhat gooey, romance with a sweet, simple (and extremely young) woman (Katelyn Nichols). The previously unthinkable possibility of children is broached. But life is messy.
William B. Young Photography
Broken not beaten.
Margulies, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Dinner With Friends, has a gift for finding incredibly funny moments in incredibly dark and disturbing places. His most effective joke here is, perhaps, the one that never gets a laugh. Richard, a magazine photo-editor, is helping to create a coffee table book of Sarah’s photography. Because nothing speaks to the comforts of home and hearth like a beautifully made coffee table book full of severed limbs and phosphorous burns.
Over and over again Margulies pulls back the curtain on hollow social transactions, and the casual commercialization of foreign suffering by very extremely serious people who know the score and care deeply. Or something.
“You’re the Sid and Nancy of journalism,” Richard says to James and Sarah at one point. This Romantic grotesque couldn’t be a worse comparison. It is, however, a perfect example of how people in media instinctively, “sell the sizzle,” not the steak. Margulies, on the other hand, is trying very hard to move beyond the usual tropes of socially aware performance, to get a little closer to the red, red meat of things.
Deftly directed by Stephen Hancock, and beautifully performed, Time Stands Still is a great night of theater doing what theater does best. If you miss this Circuit Playhouse production, you’re missing one of the best and most provocative shows of the season.
I wanted to put this up in the meager time between the end of the regular season and the beginning of the playoffs, but was too bogged down. With a two-day break before Friday’s Game 6 and coming off a rousing win last night in Los Angeles, let’s take a moment to remember some of the high points of what was an eventful and thoroughly enjoyable regular season. I’ll return with a Game 6 preview on Friday morning. Let me know what I missed:
10. DPOY: Not a “moment,” but I couldn’t find a clip of Tony Allen’s extraordinary defense late in that home loss to the Pacers, which I wanted to use. So I’ll lead off with this, Gasol adding to a Grizzlies’ trophy case that already included a Rookie of the Year, Coach of the Year, and Sixth Man of the Year award.
9. Rudy Tracks it Down, and Throws it Down (vs. Spurs, Friday, January 11th) Rudy Gay’s massive contract and middling production necessitated a trade, and the Grizzlies have been better as a result. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t have more than his share of great moments. The best this season came in what I still think was the (regular) season’s best game, a home overtime win over the Spurs.
Amid the nonstop sound of gunfire from practice rounds in firing lanes on the other side of the wall from where he spoke, U.S. Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-8th District) delivered a ringing endorsement of gun rights Monday night, speaking to members of the Northeast Shelby Republican Club at Range USA.
During a question-and-answer period following his brief prepared remarks, Fincher was asked for his views on gun issues by Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland, whose “Second Amendment Preservation Resolution,” intended to “prevent Federal infringement on the right to keep and bear arms,” will be voted on by the Commission at its Monday night meeting.
Fincher responded, “You saw a couple of weeks ago gun control could not get passed through the Senate? We’re very clear in the House what’s going to happen to gun control. It’s going nowhere….The Second Amendment’s not about hunting. It’s not about shooting for sport. It’s about protecting yourself from who? The government!….We’re not taking the guns. It’s not going to happen, not as long as I’m up there and I’ve got a vote.”
The congressman could hardly have chosen a more apt location to make such a statement, nor, to judge from the hearty and prolonged applause he got, a more appreciative audience to hear it.
The Bartlett facility, as Martha Montgomery of Range USA explained to attendees before the event, contains two ranges, the larger of which, with 14 lanes, was separated from the canteen area where the meeting was being held by a wall. Activity over there could not be seen, because, as Montgomery said, the wall had “cardboard in the windows.”
Constant gunfire could be heard, however, from the invocation and pledge of allegiance through to the very end of the meeting — confirmation that, as Montgomery said, the facility’s lanes “are always open to the public,” and instructional opportunities abound, including free clinics held there by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department.
Continuing to make his case against the utility of new gun restrictions, Fincher referred to last December’s Newton massacre and asked, “How many laws did that boy break already? What about baseball bats? What about box cutters?” Roland suggested “pressure cookers,” and Fincher added that term on. “Pressure cookers!”
There were even Democrats voting against President Obama’s recently failed background-check legislation, Fincher said. “When you do a good job of messaging, it works.”
For much of the Q-and-A session, Fincher attempted to satisfy the wishes of some of the more conservative members of his audience without necessarily accepting their solutions. Asked about impeaching Attorney General Eric Holder, for example, Fincher said, “We’ve done everything short of impeachment,” and urged the attendees to accomplish their ends at the grass-roots level via elections.
“The American people elected President Obama. I don’t know how, but they did,” he said. “We’ve got to have good candidates.”
Fincher urged his listeners, “without surrendering our principles, “ to practice a sort of political moderation: “Our party, the conservative party more than the Republican Party, we’ve got to be the party of including people, not condemning people. Whether it’s immigration reform, whether it’s pro-life issues, or even, we talk a lot today about gay rights issues — every time we talk about these issues, we divide the country….We’ve got to be the party that cares about folks and doesn’t condemn.”
He even suggested they take Fox News, the preferred broadcast outlet of conservatives, with a grain of salt. “They’re entertainers” who offered their share of “spin,” he said. “Be very cautious, whatever the news organization.”
But the congressman did not shy away from some firm-sounding ideological statements. He noted that he had bucked GOP House Speaker John Boehner on the fiscal-cliff deal reached early this year. And on terrorism, he said, “These are not radical Baptists or radical Methodists doing this. These are radical Islamists.”
“The Constitution and the Bible are our guiding documents,” he said.
A member of the House banking committee, Fincher denounced the quasi-governmental lending agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and predicted, “In our committee, we’re going to do away with Fannie and Freddie.”
Fincher vowed to take a firm stand against any more government “bail-outs,” but suggested that Republicans might cease futile efforts to repeal “Obamacare,” the Affordable Care Act, and let it be implemented, “so people can see what’s happening.”
In concluding, Fincher returned to the idea of inclusiveness. Ultimately, the congressman said, “Democrats, Republicans, Independents, we’re all in this boat together. And if we push people away, we won’t win.”
A 35-point explosion from Chris Paul was mitigated by an injury-impacted performance from Blake Griffin as the Grizzlies held on for a 103-93 win in Los Angeles Tuesday night. More from Chris Herrington at Beyond the Arc.
A 35-point explosion from Chris Paul was mitigated by an injury-impacted performance from Blake Griffin as the Grizzlies held on for a 103-93 win in Los Angeles Tuesday night. The Grizzlies now take a 3-2 lead over the Clippers and will have a chance to close out the series in Memphis Friday night.
The Grizzlies led by eight points entering the fourth quarter, but with Marc Gasol sitting most of the quarter with five fouls and Griffin gone for good with an ankle sprain that limited him to 20 minutes on the night, the match-ups took on an unfamiliar look.
The Clippers went small, with Paul flanked by fellow guards Eric Bledsoe and Jamal Crawford and small forward Matt Barnes shifting over the power forward. The Grizzlies responded, finally returning to the perimeter defense match-ups that had been so successful in Memphis but which the team had oddly avoided for most of this game: Quincy Pondexter on Paul, Mike Conley on Bledsoe, and Tony Allen on Crawford.
On the other end, it was forwards Zach Randolph and Tayshaun Prince who took the team home. Randolph has been good for most of the series, and surprisingly so at home. But this was different. This was a flashback to the spring of 2011, when Randolph polished off playoff games by setting up on the right block/wing and scoring repeatedly. Randolph scored 10 points on 5-6 shooting in the quarter.
But it was Prince, perhaps poetically, given the still existent catcalls about the Grizzlies missing Rudy Gay’s late-game scoring, and whose offense had been MIA until Game 4, who ultimately kept a Clippers’ comeback at bay. Three times, in the last five minutes, when the Clippers threatened, it was Prince who answered: A 21-footer when the Clippers drew to within seven. Then a cut and lay-up off a Randolph feed when the Clippers had pulled to within six. Finally, the clincher — a 27-foot elbow-extended three-pointer at the 1:29 mark, when the Clippers had cut the Grizzlies lead to five and the outcome seemed legitimately in doubt.
While Paul was searching for help — the other four Clipper starters combined for 17 points, and only sixth-man Jamal Crawford joined Paul in double-digits with 15 — the Grizzlies had four starters score between 15 and 25 and again got a strong joint effort from Randolph and Gasol, who have been contained only by fouls in this series.
Chris Paul will undoubtedly be ready for Friday night, back at FedExForum. But the rest of his team has questions to answer with their season on the line.
