Categories
Opinion The BruceV Blog

Helpful Advice for Grizzlies Fans … and Dave Joerger

There is no joy in Grizzville these days. The team is sleep-walking through one loss after another. There’s no fire, no grit, no grind. Sports-talk shows are filled with the wails of dispirited fans; sports pundits bemoan the team’s lack of effort, the coach’s substitution patterns, his motivational abilities, and even his wardrobe.

What can be done? Are Memphians doomed to six more months of this agony? Must we get used to losing to the Raptors and Bobcats and Wizards at home? Are we lottery bound?

I say HELL, NO! All this team and its fans and its players and its coach need is a good pep talk. Like this one. Listen as the music swells; turn it up; take it in… We’re not done yet. Dammit.

Feel better? I thought so. And there’s nine more like it where that came from.

Categories
News

Griz Fall to Rudy and the Raptors

Kevin Lipe has some thoughts on the Grizzlies’ demoralizing loss to the Raptors Wednesday.

Categories
Beyond the Arc Sports

Quick Thoughts: Raptors 103, Grizzlies 87

Don’t ask me to explain what happened Wednesday night at FedExForum, because I don’t think I can, not really. The Grizzlies got beaten—badly—by the Toronto Raptors at home, and they did so without putting up much of a fight in the final frame. In so doing, they managed to fall to 3-5 on the year the night before they load up and head out West for a four-game-in-six-night road trip that sees them taking on the Lakers, Kings, Clippers, and Warriors before returning home to play the Spurs (again) a week from Friday.

This has the potential to go very badly.

Rudy Gay came back for the first time since the trade that sent him northward last January, and even though he was booed by about 35% of the people in the building when the Raptors’ starting lineup was announced—which I thought was in pretty poor taste, if I’m honest, even though I guess I understand the motivations behind it—and then he and his Toronto Raptors, who I’d like to point out aren’t a very good basketball team once you get past their starting five, and who are typically an incredibly poor jump-shooting team, proceeded to kick the crap out of the Grizzlies for 48 minutes.

The Grizzlies tied the game at 70 in the third quarter on a brilliant run of steals and transition baskets, mostly sparked by Mike Conley (also known as “The Only Grizzly Who Is Playing Well”), but over the last 20 or so minutes, the Grizzlies again got outscored 33-17 and the whole thing went up in flames.

After the game, Dave Joerger didn’t say anything that made me feel especially hopeful, and none of the players sounded like they had any clue why they’d just gone out and gotten housed by Tyler Hansbrough and company. And it made me want to, you know, rend my garments and rub ashes on myself Old Testament style.

It’s not time to panic yet, but it’s creeping in around the edges, the signs and signifiers of what we’re all hoping isn’t a lost season. I’ll have more on this, to be certain, once I’m not completely slammed. But, for now, just try to carry on about your everyday business and keep the howling fantods of lottery picks and empty FedExForums and burning John Hollinger effigies in the streets at the periphery.

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Fly Lounge Mixes It Up at FedExForum

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The sleek, chic Fly Lounge opened in FedExForum Wednesday and brought an experience world’s away in ambience, offerings, and attitude from the arena’s current mix of bars and restaurants.

Fly Lounge has a glitzy, major-metro feel with a clean and modern design and one meant to offer patrons a range of experiences from the communal at the long, freestanding bar to the intimate at a row of low tables along a wall.

The lounge is the Forum’s grand lobby in the same space that was the former home of the Grizzlies team store.

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The small space (1,500 square feet) surged Wednesday with dance music and colored lights over the 150 or so invited guests that filled the room before the Grizzlies shootout with (and ultimate loss to) the Toronto Raptors.

“The idea was to create a destination place in the Forum,” said Fly Lounge founder Steve Adelman, a nightclub maven with properties in Los Angeles and in Asia. “We wanted to build something a little bit more upscale and a little bit different so that it could be a destination – sort of sleek and simple.”

Adelman said the target clientele is really anyone looking for the kind of experience the Lounge offers but it’s clearly aimed at the hip and elite as it can accommodate VIP requests and offers a champagne menu that tops out at $400 for a bottle of Christal.

Memphis chef Kelly English is the man behind the food menu at Fly Lounge, which promises “fresh, health-inspired” fare. The seemingly ubiquitous English is the owner and chef of Restaurant Iris and the soon-coming Second Line. He’s also the chef of the Forum’s Lexus Lounge and serves up po’boys and more at his Crossroads concession stand in the arena.

Michael Hughes, the celebrated Memphis mixologist (and Flyer friend), concocted the cocktails for Fly Lounge. Hughes is the general manager of Joe’s Wines & Liquors and the winner of a long list of cocktail competitions.

“We want guests at FedExForum to begin and end their nights with a memorable experience in food, entertainment, and nightlife,” said Memphis Grizzlies & FedExForum COO Jason Wexler.

Categories
News News Blog

Crosstown Redevelopment Project Gets Funds To Improve Area Surrounding Building

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Although developers are still awaiting a $15 million commitment from the city toward the $175 million project cost for revitalizing the abandoned Sears Crosstown building into a medical, arts, and residential hub, $300,000 has recently been awarded to improve the surrounding Crosstown neighborhood and parts of the building.

The Crosstown Development Project was awarded a $50,000 regional planning award from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to extend the V&E Greenline across North Parkway and through the Crosstown site.

A $250,000 grant from the Delta Regional Authority will be used to implement a plan to equip and program a “theater stair” in the main atrium of the Crosstown building. The theater stair is a wide staircase that will be equipped with audio-video equipment for public lectures and performances. It will be wide enough to both serve as a functional staircase between the first and third floors and seating for performances and spillover seating for the building’s planned cafe.

Categories
Art Exhibit M

Catching Up with Illustrator/Comics Artist Derrick Dent

Derrick Dent, self portrait

  • Derrick Dent, self portrait

Memphis-based illustrator and comic artist Derrick Dent has drawn for Wired, The New York Times, and The Oxford American, among other publications. His brush and ink illustrations have the technical edge of a careful paintings and the caricatural verve of comics. His distinctive comics style takes its cues from the American graphic underground but deals with text and pacing in a way reminiscent of classic Japanese Manga. Dent’s most recent work, a graphic novella entitled MAJOR SLUG 2, follows the ups and downs of a “guy who compulsively punches people.”

I sat down with Dent recently over a cup of Otherlands’ coffee. We talked about dive bars, social media, MFAs, and brush quality. Dent, who is in his late 20s, likes “internet diets” (diets from the internet, not diets found on the internet), teaching, and character studies. He doesn’t like weird pick-up lines or artistic comfort zones.

On sketching:

Memphis Flyer: You brought your sketchbook. Can I take a look?
Derrick Dent: Sure, sure. At one point I fancied myself the kind of sketchbook artist and illustrator who would go to dive bars and draw people. The activities always ended up being mutually exclusive— I never ended up drawing and talking at the same time. Sometimes people would tell me weird stories. Sometimes [the stories] were complete non sequiturs.

… And you would end up illustrating those?
I would end up with the story in the back of my mind, but I always wished that I’d recorded it, if only for posterity, so that I could have held on to the narrative for some illustration project. It was a fun thing, for awhile. It was always a way for me to get out and talk to people.

Somebody is always going to talk to you if you are drawing in a bar.
Yeah, yeah. At the very least it is a “What are you doing?” or “I don’t see that happening very often.”

Anyway, this sketchbook is for this really informal community thing online called InkTober. This concept artist named Jake Parker started it and basically you’re making an ink drawing for every day of October, until the month is over. … That’s what this sketchbook mostly has been. There are times when a note or a small anecdotal detail slips in there.

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On school:

Did you train in Illustration?
Yeah, I studied drawing and illustration at MCA. When I was in school, the illustration students [at Memphis College of Art] really held together. There was a common personality type in the illustration department. Just a bunch of people who cared about drawing, and painting and their craft, obviously …

… But who weren’t totally into theory?
Definitely not. Which is not to say that we were the dumb jocks of the school; I guess we all had a certain attitude about image making, and why we should be doing it, and what it should be all about.

On social media:

Dent: I just had a conversation recently with my friend Jon Lee, who is an illustrator about social media stuff; about “personal branding” and putting yourself out there as a professional. I try not to build too much of a character. [laughs] I don’t post often enough; I don’t live on the internet. I give myself internet diets, sometimes, to avoid that cult of personality.

That seems important, especially if you’re trying to do something that takes a lot of concentration, like drawing. You really have to focus.
It’s about establishing a flow in the first place and not getting online and then waking up 2-3 hours later, staring at my browser saying, “What was I doing? How did I get here?”

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On his new work:

Dent: MAJOR SLUG 2 is probably the most earnest, and in-depth, and sustained effort that I’ve made to make something really silly. It’s essentially just a really long 30-page gag comic about a guy who compulsively punches people, and it is a sequel to a character comic I made last year, when I was teaching comics at MCA. [At MCA] I volunteered to do a “24-hour comics” day, and I made this 10-page comic. Ideally you can make a 24-page full-color comic, but few people have ever actually finished in the history of comics, ever. But I made this fun comic, and I went through a bunch of pretty much random character generation. I was like, “Okay, dude dressed like a dough boy…” [points to drawing]

That guy is awesome.
He is actually based on the sketch of a dude that I met at the Lamplighter. He comes in with his wife… or someone. This one [points to another drawing] is based on a guy who used to come into the art store I worked in and he would always try to hit on my roommate, and he would say the weirdest things to get her attention. We were at the Cooper-Young festival one year and he walks up to her and he looks at her and says, “Hey, how you doing? I just got stabbed six times.”

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On his drawing process:

Dent: Usually it is a weird, Frankenstein’s monster of different processes. I use a really light lead pencil to do the sketches, and then I do the brushwork afterwards, and depending on how clean I want to final product to be, I’ll either leave it this way [with pencil marks] and clean it up in photoshop, or, sometimes, I’ll do the work with rough outlines, and then I will go back in and lay them in digitally. That gives me some flexibility.

I don’t have to worry about drawing outside the edges or being meticulous where I don’t want to be meticulous. It’s not so much “sloppy” as I want it to be fluid. I hate when my working surface gets in the way of marks I want to make.

I use a cheapy little flat brush with synthetic bristles, which have a little bit of spring, so I can quickly lay those marks down and the brush doesn’t give. For the line work, I use a series 7 Windsor Newton brush, and those are an industry standard. Comics people swear up and down by those.

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With your comics, do you work more long-format, or do you do small panel comics?
I enjoy the long-form pacing with the stories that I like to tell. I’m still refining my storytelling skills. I still feel like my stuff is weird kind of character studies. I adopt Eastern storyteller sensibilities. There is an idea in Manga and Eastern films… a kind of emphasis on the moment or slow, mood-setting scenes. I feel like with longer-form comics it is easier for me to have those kind of contemplative pauses. Even when I am working with absurd comedy, it’s difficult for me to condense my work into a three-panel stip comic.

I just read a big graphic novel by Tatsumi, all about the history of Manga, about how it moved from slapstick stuff to taking after film more, post-WWII.
Oh, I’ve read that too— A Drifting Life. It’s incredible! I love [Yoshihiro Tatsumi] talking about how prolific he was, and the other guys he worked with. It’s hard for me, even now. If I crank out a couple pages in a day, after storyboarding, I’m like, “YEAH!” It’s amazing how fast some people’s hands move and how nimble some minds are.

On commercial illustration:

When you are doing basic illustration [not comics], how does that process differ from your comics process? Do you write to hash out your ideas?
I have to. Sometimes it’s really linear exposition, you know, in paragraph form, but sometimes I’ll just do word maps. If it’s for an article (like, if I am doing an editorial illustration), you always want to think about what the article is about. You don’t want to lose sight of what the crux of the information is. From there, it’s a matter of taking from your personal experience. I take what I know, and I think about what my immediate associations are with that. It is me plucking my memories, then making further associations. You’re kind of grasping for straws when you’re in ideation mode. But that’s where the meat of the work it. You know how to draw…it’s all about the content. You’re trying to make a concise visual decision. Sometimes the danger is that you have so many ideas.

I imagine that your illustration takes cues from your comics, and your comics take cues from your illustration.
Yeah! The thumbnailing and preliminary stuff I do for my illustration has made my comics much better because I consider the composition of each panel and each page, even. The page is a unit itself. The illustration benefits from a certain level of speed you pick up from working in comics.

Doing a comic, making all these little sketches, going in different directions…that’s kind of like jam band stuff. But you’re composing a song when you make an illustration.

You can download MAJOR SLUG 2 via derrickdent.com.

Categories
Sports Tiger Blue

“American” Football Picks: Week 12

LAST WEEK: 4-0
SEASON: 44-18

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SATURDAY
Memphis at USF
UCF at Temple
Cincinnati at Rutgers
UConn at SMU
Houston at Louisville

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Jeff Sullivan’s Return

For those who like happy endings — or perhaps we should say “continuations” — to troubled stories, there’s the saga of Jeff Sullivan, a veteran political activist who, in the county election year of 2010, guided the successful election campaign for sheriff of then chief deputy Bill Oldham.

During the year or so after that, Sullivan served as a governmental liaison and spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office and was often seen, for example, in the dock of the county commission auditorium making the case for this or that piece of legislation desired by the department. His wife Maura Black Sullivan, meanwhile, was also working her way up the governmental ladder and currently holds the position of deputy CAO for the city of Memphis.

Jeff Sullivan’s career hit an unforeseen snag in the aftermath of a bizarre incident in Nashville, where he had gone on official Sheriff’s Department business.

Late one evening, Sullivan, who admits to having had a drink or two in the bar of his downtown hotel, thought he’d seen an unauthorized person, a hotel employee, leaving his room, as he ascended to his floor in the hotel’s glass-sided elevator. This was around 10 p.m., an odd time for a housekeeping mission, Sullivan thought.

Finding nothing amiss in his room, he nevertheless went downstairs and apprised the clerks at the front desk of his concern. “They didn’t seem to care,” Sullivan recalls. Later on, seeing the employee in the hotel garage, Sullivan voiced his suspicions to her, and the employee denied anything untoward. Sullivan shrugged and went upstairs.

An hour or two later, after he’d turned in, there was a knock on his door. He opened it to find the hotel night manager who told him, “You’ve got to leave.”

Puzzled but in no mood to argue, Sullivan dressed and got his belongings ready to move to an adjoining hotel, where he intended to check in. He moved his car from the original hotel’s parking garage to that of the adjoining hotel. As he was registering for the rest of the night, he was approached by Nashville police, who’d been tipped by a partisan of the employee whom Sullivan had suspected that Sullivan was inebriated, a fact Sullivan denied then and denies now.

The long and short of it was that Sullivan was booked and charged with DUI and with refusing to take a breathalyzer test. The situation was complicated enough that Sullivan was first suspended with pay from his sensitive job with the Sheriff’s Department, then, as he awaited trial, saw his duties transferred to another employee. He resumed some real estate work that he’d been doing beforehand, and that might have been that.

Except that, several months after the hotel incident, Sullivan’s trial came around, and he was exonerated. Period, end of story?

Not quite. As soon as another election season, that of 2014, began to loom on the horizon, Sheriff Oldham, who was as happy as Sullivan was about the not-guilty verdict in Nashville, decided he needed Sullivan’s help again and asked him to come aboard as campaign strategist for his reelection race next year.

So Sullivan is back doing what he likes doing best, and, in the course of getting back in the political saddle, he has acquired at least one more client, magistrate Dan Michael, who’s seeking to become Juvenile Court judge.

So it is that, as the holiday season approaches, the skies have cleared, the storm has lifted, and the planets are back in their orbit. For Jeff Sullivan, anyhow. Of course, he still has to worry about getting his guys elected.          

• Oldham is not the only incumbent who’ll be seeking reelection next year, of course, nor is he the only one making active preparations for his race. Juvenile Court clerk Joy Touliatos and District Attorney General Amy Weirich both had well-attended fund-raisers within the last week.

Touliatos’ was at Ciao Bella in East Memphis last Thursday, and Weirich’s was at the Pickering Center in Germantown on Sunday. Touliatos and Weirich are both Republicans.

 

• School board races, most of them uncontested and all of them drawing light turnouts, were concluded last Thursday in the six incorporated municipalities of suburban Shelby County that intend to operate independent school districts beginning in 2014.

In Germantown, focus of controversy these days because three of its schools are slated for use by the existing unified Shelby County Schools district, there was one contested race out of five. In that Position 1 encounter, Linda Fisher, with 1,094 votes, defeated opponents Paige Michael (877) and Edgar Babian (616). Other elected Germantown school board members were Mark Dely, Natalie Williams, Lisa L. Parker, and Ken Hoover.

Bartlett had two contested races — one for Position 2, in which Erin Elliott Berry (1,487 votes) won out over Alison Shores (415); and another for Position 5, won by David Cook (1,552) over Sharon L. Farley (365). Unopposed for the Bartlett School Board were Jeff Norris, Shirley K. Jackson, and Bryan Woodruff.

In Millington, there were three contested races — Cecilia Haley (306) defeating Oscar L. Brown (236) for Position 2; Jennifer Ray Carroll (394) winning out over Tom Stephens (113) for Position 6; and Donald K. Holsinger (289) besting Charles P. Reed (235) for Position 7.

Unopposed winners in Millington were Gregory Ritter, Chuck Hurt, Cody Childress, and Louise Kennon.

In Lakeland, the top five finishers of seven contenders become the board. They are: Kevin Floyd (642); Laura Harrison (639); Kelley Hale (610); Matt Wright (556); and Teresa Henry (475). Also running were: James Andrew Griffith (288) and Greg Pater (94).

Arlington, which plans to consolidate its school efforts with those of Lakeland, elected five board members without opposition. They are: Danny Young, Barbara Fletcher, Kevin Yates, Kay Morgan Williams, and Dale A. Viox.

Collierville also elected five board members without opposition. They are: Kevin Vaughan, Wanda Chism, Mark Hansen, Cathy Messerly, and Wright Cox.

• Radio talk-show host Michael Reagan regaled a packed Life Choices audience at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn on Central last Thursday night with stories about himself — and about his father, the late former President Ronald Reagan.

One tale he told concerned his father’s morning-after preoccupation in 1981 with the fate of the brown suit he had been wearing when he was shot by the would-be assassin John Hinckley — and the then president’s unusual suggestion as to how the Hinckley family might make amends.

Lamenting that his new brown suit had been cut away from his body and shredded at the hospital, the stricken president said he’d been told the Hinckley family had lucrative oil interests and wondered, “Do you think they’d ever buy me a new suit?”

The occasion, sponsored by the group’s Ladies’ Auxiliary, was a fund-raising dinner for the organization’s Pregnancy Help Medical Clinics. The clinic promotes adoption as an alternative to abortion and provides medical and counseling support toward that end.

Another affecting story told by Michael Reagan concerned the affectionate relationship he developed with the affable but famously remote president relatively late in his adoptive father’s life and how that relationship continued even into the final stages of Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s disease.

That story concluded with an account of how the former president, unable to speak and with his ability to recognize kith and kin long gone, still retained enough memory, as his son recalled, “to know that I was the man who gave him hugs” and, by taking “baby steps” toward the door and miming, insisted on one as Michael Reagan was leaving the Reagan household one day after a visit with step-mother Nancy Reagan.

The thrust of Michael Reagan’s remarks, in support of the host organization’s goal, was to emphasize that he, at least one sister, and both of Ronald Reagan’s wives, Jane Wyman and Nancy Davis Reagan, had been adopted children and were thus enabled to achieve productive lives. “We were a family put together by adoption,” as he put it.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

All is Lost: Ancient Mariner

Here’s Joseph Conrad in London, circa 1880: “All the tempestuous passions of mankind’s young days, the love of loot and the love of glory, the love of adventure and the love of danger, with the great love of the unknown and vast dreams of dominion and power, have passed like images reflected from a mirror, leaving no record upon the mysterious face of the sea. Impenetrable and heartless, the sea has given nothing of itself to the suitors for its precarious favors.”

Here’s Robert Redford adrift in the Indian Ocean, circa July 7, 2013: “FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!”

Aside from an opening-scene voiceover, that expressive expletive is one of the very few things Redford says during All Is Lost, writer-director J.C. Chandor’s grueling new maritime adventure. Chandor’s film documents the efforts of “Our Man” (Redford) to survive at sea after his 40-foot sailboat crashes into a large floating shipping container. It’s a surprisingly watchable, almost comically pure distillation of the conflict between man and nature.

Seriously, this is what the movie is about: Chandor puts an old man in the drink, sends a couple of storms his way, and watches what happens. Here’s what we see: He sleeps in a hammock over his waterlogged living quarters. He patches the hole in his boat’s hull. He downs a huge glass of whiskey once he finishes that job. He cooks dinner for himself. He tries to dry out his phone and radio. He prepares for a fierce tempest. He steers his ship amid sheets of rain. Over and over again, he replaces the wooden boards that protect him from the elements as he steps on deck and tries to steer his vessel.

He endures.

For the first hour, all of this is mysterious and engrossing. Chandor uses lots of hand-held camera work and sticks to ground- and ocean-level shots that pay off spectacularly when he slips in a between-the-legs shot of the boat from the top of the mast.

But when Chandor tries to get all significant and meaningful, he starts to lose his way. Thanks to a handful of God’s-eye point-of-view shots and a dollop of vaguely spiritual choral music, his straightforward survival tale threatens to become a religious allegory.

Yet, the religious angle doesn’t quite fit. If anything, the film is more successful and instructive as an allegory about the survival instincts of the very wealthy. Consider the film’s opening voiceover again, wherein Our Man is reading from a brief letter he’s written and stuffed into a bottle after eight days at sea. Over the course of a single paragraph, this unbelievably fit, trim, and hyper-knowledgeable alpha male, who radiates money, privilege, and grace under pressure, confesses his failings and wrongdoings. He says “I’m sorry” three times. Sorry for what, exactly? It’s not unreasonable to infer that something has put him out to sea. What, pray tell, is he hiding from?

Seen in this light, the question is not whether man is alone in the universe; it’s whether Robert Redford is too big — of a movie star, that is — to fail.

All Is Lost

Opens Friday, November 15th

Studio on the Square

Categories
News

The Pre-K Sales Tax Push

Jackson Baker and Toby Sells report on efforts by Shea Flinn, Jim Strickland, and others to pass a sales tax to fund pre-K education in Memphis.