There were six teams the Tigers beat during each of Larry Finch’s three seasons as a varsity player (1970-71 through 1972-73). Name those members of the Missouri Valley Conference.
• Louisville
• Saint Louis
• Wichita State
• Bradley
• Drake
• North Texas
“Gentle” is the word I hear over and over again in reference to 4000 Miles, Amy Herzog’s funny, thorny play about geographical, emotional, temporal, and political distance across generations. Director Tony Isbell dropped the word when we chatted online. It’s popped up repeatedly in conversations with friends who’ve seen the play at TheatreWorks. Even New York Times critic Charles Isherwood called it a “gently comic drama” in his review, so there must be something to the idea that it’s a gentle play. But that isn’t how I experienced 4000 Miles. The play I saw was an uncomfortably real snapshot of a generational moment, a sound thrashing of lifestyle-lefties and a similarly-bracing critique of our elders and their astonishing ability to idealize the past. 4000 Miles is a quiet play, mostly. There’s no sustained shouting or violence to speak of, though death looks out from every corner of the room. Genuinely sweet moments are shared between a self-absorbed millennial and his grandmother, an old lefty at the tipping point of senility. But gentle isn’t the first word I’d choose to describe this subtle, one-act reminder that the reward of a long life is outliving everyone who might attend your funeral.
Did I mention that the show is also funny? It is. What it’s not is tightly plotted. Nor is it full of the archetypal characters that tend to populate the classic American family drama. To that end, 4000 Miles — a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist — is a chamber piece, more meditation than assault. But it’s an uneasy meditation, almost never serene.
The play opens with a scruffy, baggage-laden Leo waking Vera, his elderly grandmother in her Greenwich Village apartment at 3 a.m. The last thing she expected was an early-morning visit from her Left Coast grandson, and she doesn’t seem all that happy to see him. Leo has been cycling across the country with a friend, but when that friend died in a horrible accident on the road, he broke off communication with his family in Minneapolis and went off the grid.
Leo’s not intentionally malicious, but the young trustafarian is a natural manipulator: a wounded rugged outdoorsy-type quick to use his personal tragedy if it buys some sympathy or helps get the hot Chinese girl who looks like his adopted sister into bed. He takes up residence with his grandmother on a temporary basis, but makes her promise to not tell the family where he is.
Over the course of the play we watch Leo lose his girlfriend Bec, making one final douchey request to “remember how our bodies were together.” We also witness an attempted hook-up with a rich girl named Amanda who flips out when she discovers she’s in the huge, rent-controlled apartment of a card-carrying Communist. Amanda says she doesn’t think she can have sex in a Communist’s house, allowing that she’s usually kind of slutty. Her drunken anti-Communist rant is one of the show’s best set pieces. Replace the word Communist with any racial descriptor and the monologue would leave audiences slack-jawed. Then again, Amanda is Chinese, and there’s family history.
4000 Miles took its first Off-Broadway bows about three months before the Occupy Wall Street movement moved into Zuccotti Park. I mention that because somehow that real-world occurrence seems more like the ending of Herzog’s play than its actual ending. She uses the outdoorsy Leo and the urban Vera to look at how far the easily-identified tropes of the American left had evolved. Class-conscious collective action had become a lifestyle choice for people who can afford to protest GMOs and oil companies with their purchasing power. There is some suggestion that Leo is growing by the play’s end. It’s not hard to imagine him leaving for his new job out west only to get caught up in the massive street protest brewing in Manhattan. Nor is it hard to imagine him moving on following a fashionable arrest during some clash with the New York police.
Every character in 4000 Miles is a prisoner of perspective, Leo most of all. He’s loveably disheveled, despicably self-centered, and difficult to like. His grandmother, Vera, can be abrasive and muddled, but she clearly has the more sympathetic role, and Karen Mason Riss is spectacular in the part.
Christopher Joel Onken is completely believable as Leo, although his more cloying antics come across as being downright sinister. Carly Crawford is also effective, if a little stilted as Leo’s girlfriend Bec. Then again, if the show has a thankless part, that’s it.
Ron Gordon’s scenic design gives the impression that Vera’s not-so-Manhattan Manhattan residence is infinitely large on the inside. That’s a quibble, not a deal-breaker.
“Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing … A man can never understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.” — G.K. Chesterton
“We need guidance, we’ve been misled. Young and hostile, but not stupid … “ — Blink-182
If you’re the type of person who watches older movies and whispers things like, “Wow, I can’t believe how young Matthew McConaughey was in The Newton Boys,” to the person next to you, then Boyhood, Richard Linklater’s everyday epic spanning 12 years in the life of Mason Jr. (Ellar Coltrane), his older sister Samantha (Linklater’s daughter Lorelei), his mother Olivia (Patricia Arquette) and his dad Mason Sr. (Ethan Hawke), might speak to you in a voice as old and irrefutable as time itself.
Then again, it might not. It’s odd to like but not love Boyhood, which coasts into Memphis on a tidal wave of critical praise. However, like life itself, the film is full of ups and downs.
Because it was shot in installments over 12 years, Linklater’s film occasionally seems to lunge from one time period to the next, jarring you like a teenager learning how to drive a stick shift. However, it soon becomes clear that Linklater chose to follow Mason’s road from childhood to college without consulting the usual mile markers or signposts. We never see anyone win the big game, lose their virginity, or follow their bliss into the bright future. The few scenes of domestic unrest are troubling, but they don’t drive the story either. Moreover, people who seem like they might be important — a kid with a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, a cute girl in middle school who thinks Mason’s short hair is “kewl,” two bullies in a bathroom — often recede quietly into the background.
Impatient viewers might grow exasperated with these go-nowhere encounters and see them as symptomatic of the film’s apparent lack of focus. For example, Linklater explores Mason’s teen years in much greater detail than his early childhood, while Samantha’s transformation from a mean, mouthy toddler to a sad-eyed but cool college girl is, unfortunately, put aside. Which is too bad, because Lorelei Linklater is my favorite thing about the film.
On the other hand, Boyhood’s resistance to conventional narrative rhythms is crucial to its larger philosophical point. Although it’s comforting to imagine that a person’s life follows a pre-ordained script, Boyhood depicts Mason’s life as a series of potential stories that begin and end without notice or warning. One long scene where Mason shares beers and stories with some upperclassmen at a house under construction (nice metaphor) seems to lay the foundation for lifelong friendships. Yet after this scene, the boys never reappear. They are merely passing through Mason’s life, just as he is passing through theirs.
Yet, Mason and Samantha’s change and growth over time remain queerly compelling. In one cut, Mason’s voice drops an octave; he’s beginning to sound like a teenager. Almost imperceptibly, his pre-teen cuteness matures into a soft handsomeness that eventually prompts a family friend to hit on him at his graduation party. In full view of everyone, the sullen little eighth grader becomes an intelligent, opinionated slacker-in-training. In a sense, then, Boyhood is an earnest, literal attempt to understand what all those distant relatives are trying to say whenever they exclaim, “You’ve gotten so BIG!”
Lorelei Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Ellar Coltrane
Getting big is easy, though. Growing up is harder, even when it could be much worse. For Mason, growing up consists of sitting through a dozen years of poor advice from adults too old or too embarrassing to take seriously. The best scene in this vein involves Mason Sr. trying to explain birth control to Samantha in a bowling alley while Mason looks on with a bemused and curious eye that may explain his later interest in photography.
Boyhood may seem formally daring and unique, but it speaks to other works in Linklater’s filmography as well. Linklater’s decision to cast Hawke, one of the leads in the similarly time-obsessed Before trilogy, only tells part of the story. An animated vision of Lorelei appears at the beginning of 2001’s Waking Life — she’s the little girl with the paper fortune teller who says, “Dream is destiny.” And when Mason and his step-brother go into a liquor store to cash a check for their drunken dad, the one who helps them out is an actor named David Blackwell, who played a similarly mellow liquor-store clerk in Linklater’s 1993 masterpiece Dazed and Confused. As Samantha grows up, she starts to look like her dad; as Mason starts to express his skepticism about the future, he starts to talk and think like him.
When the drama wanes, the intertextuality fascinates. And so does the film’s unintentional scrapbook of cultural and technological change. The pop songs, playthings, and young-adult obsessions in the film’s first hour or so become suggestive and profound in part because Linklater probably had no idea that he was filming potentially extinct rituals, practices, and everyday-use items. It’s a trip to see a college professor using an overhead projector while students take notes with paper and pencil, or hear Samantha talk on a cordless phone and tell her friend that she’s got someone on the other line, or watch Roger Clemens fanning batters for the Astros.
At times like these, there’s such an artless, determined ground-level documentary element at work in Boyhood that its average-looking imagery and melodramatic seasonings feel like unwelcome intrusions from less interesting movies. In other words, one alcoholic dad is understandable, but two is too much. In addition, Mason’s awkward interactions with many of his fellow Texans seem strangely cartoonish. The older, bohemian audience I saw this with chortled with mirth at Mason Sr.’s theft of a McCain-Palin yard sign, and they laughed at the “red letter” Holy Bible and 20-gauge shotgun Mason gets from his grandparents for his birthday. However, the last laugh is on the audience. Mason takes these things in stride, and the first time he shoots something he has the same euphoria as anyone else who’s aimed at something and hit it.
There’s more here than there is room to talk about it, or at least it seems like there is: It seems like a highlight reel from a potentially endless rough cut. Yet after nearly three swift-moving hours, Boyhood ends — or I guess you could say it begins.
Given how fast and complete the fall from power of the Tennessee Democratic Party has been, the fact that the state’s Democrats in 2014 actually have a contested primary for a major statewide office — Terry Adams vs. Gordon Ball in the U.S. Senate race (see “Politics,” p. 12) — is more than remarkable.
Almost as remarkable as the fall itself. This is a party, after all, whose control of state government was reasonably secure from the end of Reconstruction until well into the current century. There had been challenges from the Republican Party, to be sure — beginning in the mid-1960s, when tensions between pro- and anti-Clement factions allowed the election of Republican Senator Howard Baker, who was followed into statewide power by Governor Winfield Dunn and Senator Bill Brock.
There were GOP stirrings in the legislature, too. But Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal tamped things down a bit, in Tennessee as elsewhere. And arguably it was only the Nixonesque follies of scandal-ridden Democratic Governor Ray Blanton that allowed the two-term gubernatorial interlude of Republican Lamar Alexander.
The GOP got another bounce in 1994, with the election of Senators Bill Frist and Fred Thompson and Governor Don Sundquist, but this was at most a bellweather period for Tennessee, with the balance between the two major parties corresponding to that in the nation at large.
In any case, Tennessee Democrats had control of the governorship, the state’s congressional delegation, and both chambers of the General Assembly as recently as 2006.
That was then, this is now, when, in the estimation of state Senator Reginald Tate, the Memphian who aspires to be the next Senate Democratic leader, the Democratic Party may have five members to start the forthcoming legislative session.
“Man, we could have caucus meetings in my car,” says Tate, who lost his first bid for leader in 2013, by a vote of 4-3, to fellow Memphian Jim Kyle, the Senate Democrats’ traditional caucus head and a leading candidate for Chancery Court this year.
There were seven Senate Democrats in the 2013-14 session, out of a total of 33, and the party’s House delegation numbered 28 of the chamber’s 99 members.
So what happened? Like the rest of the South, Tennessee began drifting toward the GOP at about the time, paradoxically, when the Democratic Party, long the party of middle- and working-class whites, began to expand its mission to people of color, to women, and to a variety of other erstwhile heterodoxies.
For a while, that process swelled and sustained the Democratic coalition, but at some point the white middle class — the male part of it, especially — began to make common cause with the well-off constituencies (“job creators” in the jargon of today’s conservatives) who had always constituted the core of Republicanism.
Wealth is, after all, just one kind of status quo. “Values” voters had something to hang on to, as well. Most of the latter never quite got out from under economic duress — especially in the costlier new suburbs to which they retreated in an effort to rekindle the ever-eroding homogeneity they had been used to. They discovered that they, too, like the traditional businessmen and industrialists of the old GOP, resented the hell out of taxes, which they increasingly saw as destined to support unfamiliar ethnicities and radicalisms. Hence the rabid distrust of government by the Tea Party, that bloc of right-wing populists whose New Deal ancestries still survive in their hatred of big-bank bailouts.
There were other triggers along the way. The Tennessee Waltz prosecution of local and state governmental figures mid-way through the current century’s first decade netted Democrats disproportionately — either incidentally or, as skeptical Democrats eyeing the Bush-era Justice Department might imagine, on purpose.
Then there was the presidential election of 2008. Barack Obama’s nomination and subsequent election may have been a triumph for progressivism and the American dream, but what remained of a coherent Democratic power structure in Tennessee had been loyal to Hillary Clinton, and her defeat in the national primaries left it in shambles — a circumstance made worse by the Obama-Biden ticket’s disinclination to campaign in Tennessee or to channel significant funds to the state party.
In 2008, the state House joined the state Senate in electing a Republican majority. And in 2010 — a political off-year on steroids — Democratic candidates were engulfed by a newly indigenous Tea Party wave. And 2012 — ironically the year of another Democratic victory nationwide — saw the Democratic Party in Tennessee, pitilessly gerrymandered, authentically unpopular, and afflicted by self-doubt, virtually eliminated.
So here we are.
Jackson Baker is a Flyer senior editor.
I don’t tend to pay attention to script footnotes, but writer-director Luc Besson’s pre-production “Nota” about his new movie Lucy more or less says it all: “This film is extremely visual … the beginning is Leon the Professional; the middle is Inception; the end is 2001: A Space Odyssey … Don’t interpret this as pretension on my part, merely a visual, emotional, and philosophical point of reference.”
Lucy is many things — self-aware Asian gangster flick, crackpot neuroscience TED talk, half-cocked female empowerment fantasy, pants-optional F/X bacchanal, pop art companion piece to Theodore Sturgeon’s 1953 SF novel More Than Human — but it is not pretentious. It’s too self-aware and self-deprecating to take itself completely seriously. As a result, it’s really fun to watch, most of the time.
Scarlett Johansson stars in the fun and visually stunning film Lucy.
Like Taken, which Besson co-wrote and co-produced, Lucy begins as a paranoid thriller about an American abroad who gets mixed up with the wrong kind of person. Our titular hero is a bleach-blonde bimbo (Scarlett Johansson) forced by a sleazy dude in a cowboy hat to deliver a mysterious briefcase to an office building in Taiwan, where a high-level hoodlum (Min-sik Choi) spends his days in a giant suite, soaking his hands in the blood of those who’ve crossed him.
After a scary-funny reveal of the briefcase’s contents, Lucy is knocked out, operated on and impressed into service as a drug mule. However, when the fluorescent blue contents of the package surgically implanted in her belly start to leak, Lucy discovers that she can access up to 100 percent of her brain. Pretty soon she’s mowing down low-level thugs, contacting Professor Noman (Morgan Freeman) for advice about her altered state, changing her hair color at will, ignoring gravity’s pull, and bending the laws of space and time.
This is an excellent B-picture set-up. And like many excellent B-picture set-ups, it only really works if it’s accompanied by a manic, unflagging sense of style. That’s tough for anyone — even someone with Besson’s pedigree and flair for showmanship — to maintain. (Maybe it’s a two-person job: What would Neveldine/Taylor or Lord/Miller have done with this?) Once Besson depicts all the mobile-phone signals in Paris as a forest of multicolored data strands, what can he show us next? After he stages an exciting kung fu battle where nobody lands a punch, what can he trot out to top it? Luckily, Besson’s playful, smash-cut storytelling earns so much good will that when it all breaks down, it’s no big deal. The movie doesn’t make too much sense as it goes on, but that’s not a problem.
Not when Johansson is on hand, anyway. Writers such as Salon.com‘s Sady Doyle and others have noted that Johansson’s most recent roles — computer program in Her, alien huntress in Under the Skin, unflappable secret agent in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, next step in human evolution in Lucy — have shown her tinkering with, if not completely abandoning, her pre-ordained position as the latest curvaceous sex kitten in the Hollywood firmament. So what may be most striking about this muddled movie is that it restores intelligence and a sense of purpose to a potentially great American actress.
Jason “Witnesse” Sims is showing his roots:
“[I started] collecting disco, jazz, dub, soul. Then getting into early hip-hop and stuff like that. Just getting really crazy about certain things for a while and then moving onto other things. But I’m kind of back to a full circle now. Ten or 15 years later, I’m back into deep house music.”
That return to origins is the driving force behind Chaperone, a DJ collective composed of Sims, Brandon “Wealth” Thornburg, and Don “Wantoo” Seymour. The three have been working together for decades and have followed dance music through its “rave” phase in the 1990s through the recent ascension of electronic dance music, the computer-created, festival-oriented phenomenon known as EDM.
EDM has evolved despite prejudices against the repetitive nature of the sounds. Hint: it’s just like your computer (on, off, on, off, 1, 0, 1, 0). It’s the most fundamental pulse of electricity and the basis of all digital technology. So it’s anything but superficial. But some of the stereotypes have endured. Chaperone is perhaps designed to counter those assumptions about dance music.
“We had a conversation about how we had to agree not to play Chicago house music, as much as we love it,” Thornburg says. “It’s so associated with this music people don’t like. We’re going toward a more psychedelic compositional edge.”
There’s just too much great electronic music.
“The Chaperone thing is a group of guys who wanted to expand on really quality stuff through the ages that might have been overlooked because different things were hyped at the time. You look back on some of this stuff now and you realize this was brilliant techno that someone was writing 10 or 20 years before anybody even cared about it, knew what it was, or it even had a name,” Sims says.
“There are entire club scenes in Europe that had labels people have never heard of except for these weird compilations,” Thornburg says. “There were gay bars in Italy that had their own labels and produced their own music to play in the club.”
“If you had to find a centerpoint, I think you could say Giorgio Moroder,” Sims says. “We’re really into this energy of 1980 trying to describe 2020. It was all sci-fi, but now we live in that era. It’s a fun-motivated electronica, but not electronic that’s in your face. More of a smooth, jovial electronica. Our set list now is such that we’ll play something from 1986 and something that was made this year, and you might not be able to tell the difference. We want to make it seamless and be informed by all the decades.”
Chaperone draws on decades of experience, and devotees of electronic Memphis will know their work. Currently, Thornburg is a computer programmer who runs a label called Voodoo Village. Sims is one of the DJs for Grizzlies games at FedEx Forum. In the past, they ran raves in all sorts of places in town during the 1990s. But before that, Sims had immersed himself in the San Francisco scene and brought those sounds back to Memphis.
“I moved to San Francisco when I was 19 and got really heavy into house music on the west coast,” Sims says. “Particularly 1991, 1992. I got really heavy into this DJ crew out there called the Wicked Crew. Basically consisted of a group of older gentlemen from England in their late 30s and 40s. They were breaking the mold of the ecstasy-house stuff.”
“They were bringing disco elements in and live instrumentation,” Thornburg adds. “They were breaking the mold for the times. House music was exploding, and they were going in another direction entirely.”
“Rave was just coming into existence,” Sims says. “It was this huge thing in itself, but these guys deepened it. That’s what influenced me to get into it as a young punk rocker in Memphis. My initial thoughts on electronica were: cheesy, commericial, stupid. Then being turned onto these guys who had such a deep element to it. It brought me into a lifetime of it.”
EDM had been an underground culture in the U.K. and Germany before it came to the Midwest in the late 1980s. In the U.S., it became “house” music in Chicago and “techno” in Detroit. Since then, the music has splintered into more strands and factions than the American Protestant church. But the rave culture of the 1990s is where the team behind Chaperone began working in Memphis.
“There was a club called Red Square,” Thornburg says.
“And a lot of house parties,” Sims adds. “We were even breaking into warehouses at one point and cranking up a generator and having someone stand at the door as if we had the ability to do that.”
Seymour and Thornburg had a crew for a while, and Thornburg threw the Electrocity parties. But eventually the demands of age and cultural shifts took their toll.
“I know I can speak for myself when I say that I got disinterested for quite a while. I got into different things. But the Chaperone concept is kind of full circle in a way. It was something that brought back and refreshed this old concept for us through thinking of the material that went unnoticed. Thinking through how these [musical ideas] affected each other through time.”
Times have certainly changed for EDM. The current issue of Billboard magazine is dedicated to EDM. A charticle cites 10 DJs who command more than $250,000 per gig and another 10 who earn more than $100,000. Attendees of Las Vegas’ Electric Daisy Festival spent $158 million in aggregate, according to Billboard. The magazine also points out several instances of EDM-based businesses attaining big-time venture capital. EDM is without a doubt the flavor of the moment. But Chaperone, like the Wicked Crew, is ready to put their own spin on what is normally a sound and scene for the young.
“We’re also seeking an adult-format dance party,” Sims says. “Something that’s really groovy for adults. Where you can listen to electronica without having to go to a kiddie party.” Hence the name. “We’re trying to do it in unusual environments. Our debut event was with several hundred people on top of 100 N. Main,” Sims says. “That’s just to give it a better feeling, a new feeling and still be real DJs. We want to give Memphis a good, regular party that it can get behind.”
Chaperone at Amurica Photo, Saturday, August 9th, at 10 p.m.
New management is risky business. Just ask Louis XVI. When he was crowned king of France in 1774, the country had been ruled by guys like him — fat guys with rosy cheeks and beautiful blond wigs —for more than 1,000 years. Then the National Assembly came along, and — it was the darnedest thing — people’s heads started coming loose from their bodies! Poor King Louis was among those whose head was misplaced.
Change can also be good. Case in point: Three Angels Diner. Jason and Rebecca Severs, the husband-and-wife team behind Bari Ristorante in Overton Square, did a culinary 180 when they opened this restaurant four years ago in the Broad Avenue Arts District. They chose the diner format for its flexible menu with dishes agreeable to both parents and kids and for its late-night hours to serve restaurant workers, artists, and musicians. Since then, it has consistently won acclaim, including being featured on Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives with Guy Fieri.
Justin Fox Burks
Amy and Julio Zuniga of Three Angels Diner
Now Three Angels is under new management. In June, the Severses sold it to Rebecca’s sister and her husband, Amy and Julio Zuniga. Which begs the question: Can the new owners maintain the reputation for quality and consistency established by their predecessors?
The preliminary signs are good. On a recent Tuesday, the Carrot Ginger Soup ($3.50) was spot-on: rich and creamy with just the right amount of gingery tang. It neatly complemented the Second Angel Salad ($8), which combines grilled Portobello mushrooms, roasted red peppers, and goat cheese over romaine, drizzled with lemon vinaigrette.
On the whole, the dishes were like the restaurant itself — outside: minimal and stark-looking; inside: surprisingly tasty. And that’s the idea, says chef Julio. He says he wants to steer Three Angels away from a “diner” aesthetic and more in the direction of a tapas and wine bar.
The Zunigas have opened a brand-new patio, and they plan to start serving breakfast soon. They’ve also renovated the menu. They’re keeping customer favorites like the Colossus Burger ($9), a veritable mountain of ground beef, bacon, gouda, fried onions, and slaw. But they’re adding lighter fare like the Angel Wraps ($4), crisp lettuce wraps full of panko-crusted beef and Korean slaw with ponzu sauce.
It’s a revolution worth watching.
Growing up in Chickasaw Gardens, my friend Dan and I used to walk to Raffe’s Deli, just down the street from Poplar Plaza. The reason was simple: They had Bomb Pops. You remember those red, white, and blue popsicles that tasted like cherry, lime, and blueberry? And melted into sticky, multicolored sludge on the back of your hand?
Back then, Raffe’s was a bit of a dive, but these days a new wind is blowing at Raffe’s. On May 1st, it was bought by Sean Feizkhah, who says he plans to transform it into a proper restaurant and beer market.
Just two months later, the place is hardly recognizable. For starters, Feizkhah has torn out the chunky wooden bar and the heavy curtains. The floors have also been redone. The result is a light, airy space where you might actually want to…oh, I don’t know, eat.
Feizkhah says that over the next few months, he plans to continue his overhaul, which will include adding a growler station and expanding the menu to include Persian and Turkish fare. In the meantime, Raffe’s continues to serve its signature Greek food.
Wanna make an afternoon of it? Buy a six-pack of Tiny Bomb Pilsner ($8.99) sourced from Memphis’ own Wiseacre Brewery. Pair it with a Syrian Gyro ($6.50), a flatbread sandwich made with roast lamb and tangy Syrian tabbouleh. All right, it’s no Bomb Pop; but then again, we’re not 12 any more.
Alan Crosthwaite | Dreamstime.com
Comic-Con
Tim Sampson, who normally writes this column on the weeks that Randy Haspel doesn’t write it, is off this week, and he asked me to write this week’s Rant for him. I am a friend of Tim’s, but you don’t know me because I live on a different planet than earth. Yes, there is life out there beyond what you might think.
I live on a peaceful planet far, far away, but we have and always have had the ability to watch you earthlings and the way you have evolved — or in many cases, have not evolved. We are confused by many of the things you do on your planet. Tim has tried to explain them to us, but he finds himself scratching his bald head much of the time when trying to tell us the reasons for many of the things that happen on your planet, in your country, and in your city where Tim lives.
First and foremost, we are astonished at earth’s obsession with war. Your planet has been at war for almost its entire existence, or at least since the creatures on your planet evolved into humans. We don’t understand why from day one you wanted to fight and kill each other, mostly in the name of religion and the various deities you worship. Look at you, United States. You were founded by some people called pilgrims, who left England to start a new country because they were religiously persecuted in their mother country. Yet from day one you have done nothing but try to force your own religious beliefs on everyone else in your country — and elsewhere. You fought the Revolutionary War to have your own country, one that allowed religious freedom, yet you based your entire government on Christianity and you are still operating the same way hundreds of years later. What’s up with that, earthling Americans?
Then, once you got your own country, you kidnapped millions of Africans and brought them there and made them into slaves, despite your devout Christianity. This makes no sense to us. And then you had to have another war to take care of that. And then you had your Spanish-American War. And then you had your World War I and World War II and Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf War, Iraq War, and the War in Afghanistan, which still rages on. We know you are not solely to blame for all of this and that some of your other countries do things that are not nice, but for you, is war always the answer?
Your entire planet, except for maybe Luxembourg and Finland, seems obsessed with war. This thing you have going on now with the Israelis and Palestinians is causing us much confusion. You are killing innocent people and little children in the streets as they play. Do you look in the mirrors and say to yourselves, “This makes total sense”? We wonder about you a lot.
Sometimes we just chuckle at you. For years we have observed your country’s Comic-Con festivities, with people dressed in all forms of costumes based on comic book characters and super heroes. There are many of you who do this. And now, it looks like a lot of sexual harassment at these gatherings has started taking place. We don’t really understand the idea of sexual harassment or any other kind of harassment because we don’t have that on our planet. But in your country, at a convention where men dress as female characters and women dress as male characters and women wear very little clothing for some events, the men among you have begun cat-calling at the women and taking pictures of them when they bend over. And you all drink a lot while doing this and you do it in public, year after year. We don’t understand this at all, but we find it vaguely amusing, except for the harassment part.
But we see that you also have bigger issues with which to deal. We wonder why the women in your country seem to be far and away smarter and more compassionate than the men, yet they still are not treated as equals to men, like there is something inferior about them. This makes our tentacles furrow a bit in confusion. Your country doesn’t pay them as much as men who do the same work. Your government wants to control what they do with their bodies. We feel that you have much progress to make in this area and wish that we could come to your planet and show you how to relax and allow everyone to have the same chances as everyone else.
And you build big fences at your borders — well, some of your borders. You seem to have a lot of animosity toward your Hispanic neighbors to the south of your country, but you don’t feel the same way about your Canadian neighbors to the north. Why is that the case? And you don’t want little Hispanic children to come to your country to have a better life. You’d rather they remain very poor and without access to medicine than just allow them to come to live in your country, which has a lot of space for more people.
Well, there are many other things we wonder about your country, and when Tim writes his next column maybe someone can help him explain. We leave you in peace. Don’t screw it up, any more than you already have.
Last year, the Flyer staff decided to do a “Who’s Who in Memphis Twitter” issue. It was a lot of fun, generated some buzz, and made us think, “Hey, we could do this every year.” Except, we can’t. We tried, but really, who wants to read a list of names that would mostly be repetitive from the prior year? Plus, Twitter has become so ubiquitous that picking “Who’s Who in Memphis Twitter” would be like picking “Who’s Who in Memphis Facebook.” Impossible. All we would be doing is picking the people we follow.
Twitter is now so mainstream, potential employers ask for your handle in job interviews. It’s a very rare politician, journalist, comedian, musician, sports figure, etc. who isn’t all over Twitter these days. It’s become an invaluable tool for businesses and for link sharing and breaking news. And if you haven’t watched a Grizzlies or Tigers game with your Twitter peeps, you’re missing half the fun. Twitter is everywhere and all of you deserve prizes. Except for that one guy. We hate him.
Soooo, instead of a “Who’s Who in Memphis Twitter,” this year we decided to do a bit of a potpourri. We picked some local twitterers and asked them to talk about how they use the medium; we interviewed some local celebs 140 characters at a time; we picked some of our favorite tweets and twitterers. Memphis Twitter is a rich world of information, snark, and news. We’ve barely scratched the surface.
— Bruce VanWyngarden
Carrie Brown-Smith, Early Adapter
Long before Twitter evolved into the ubiquitous social network and microblogging service it is today, Carrie Brown-Smith was dishing out tweets. An associate professor in the University of Memphis’ journalism department, Brown-Smith got wind of the tool early and decided to incorporate it into numerous courses she teaches. She continues to maintain a strong presence on Twitter.
Flyer: How did you get introduced to Twitter?
Carrie Brown-Smith: A friend of mine was working for Apple at the time; he loved it and kept telling me to use it. Like most other people, I set up an account then didn’t use it for the next two months. It was like, “Okay, now I’m on here, but I don’t see why anybody would want to use this.” Much later, I realized it was really useful.
How often are you on Twitter?
I try to limit myself, because you can get sucked in and end up spending your whole day there. Usually, when I’m taking a little break in the middle of the day, waiting in line, or doing something where I can hang out on my phone a little while, I might spend 10 minutes scanning through my feed. If I come across a link or photo or something that I think is interesting, I’ll just hop on there and share it. At least once a day I’m hopping on there — sometimes more.
In what ways has Twitter evolved since you began using it years ago?
A lot more people are using it now. At the beginning, I think it was kind of this big stereotype that people were only going to use it to tell other people what they had for breakfast. But as time went on, people started to see the utility of it for news and information and for connecting with other people. If you look at a lot of job descriptions today, often they include, “This person should know how to use Twitter and social media.” It’s more mainstream than it was a few years ago.
Does it matter what your avatar looks like?
That’s really important, because I think when people see that little blank egg, they also think that it could be a spam account. Even if it’s not your own picture, [it’s good to] have something there that personalizes it; it just makes you a lot more legitimate and credible.
Any advice for making the best out of those 140 characters?
Obviously, a lot of links get shared on Twitter, but I think some people forget that they can do that. If you want to share longer thoughts, you can share a link to a blog post or an article. People have really short attention spans today, so I think it can be a good discipline to practice writing something that catches people’s attention, even though you don’t have a lot of characters.
— Louis Goggans, @Lou4President
CA Commenter‘s Greatest Hits
“Memphis is a war zone of thugs, crooks in suits, and cyclists. I ain’t too fond of Barry Obummer neither. I am the Commercial Appeal commenter.”
So reads the online bio of the most trenchant Memphis satirist on Twitter. This anonymous wit has perfectly nailed the Memphis-hater set. It’s almost scary, it’s so brilliant. That’s my opinion, anyway. Judge for yourself, libtard:
• Lyft sounds like left so I’m starting Ryght, car service for conservatives. Hannity & Limbaugh on the radio non-stop. Burb travel only.
• Maybe on the ballots they could put pictures of the candidates, you know, to see if they have trust-worthy eyes…that’s all…ahem.
• It’s perfect that the trolleys will return this Autumn, right when it starts to get cooler & a nice fire will be warm & inviting.
• Been doing the 30 day #CarFreeMemphis challenge. 1, by using my Hummer which is an SUV not a car & 2, by not actually going into Memphis.
• Sen. Kelsey: What about a bill to have tornado sirens blare Dixie? You’re welcome.
• It sucks that Bring Hannity to TN & Turn Gays Away bills are fine but my Let Duck Dynasty Hunt Peabody Ducks idea was “too out there.”
• Hey @MemphisFlyer, I left the Memphis Press-Scimitar box at your place so you could learn what a real newspaper looks like.
• I wish I would be hired as a coach of a Memphis basketball team because it means you’re guaranteed to leave Memphis in a few years.
• So keeping a building from the 19th Century is a noble cause, but keeping an attitude from that era is wrong? Hypocrites.
• 10 years ago Hurricane Elvis swept through Memphis and Obama did nothing about it. #NeverForget
— Bruce VanWyngarden, @sylamore1
Beth Spencer, Animal Rights Activist
With more than 1,800 followers, Beth Spencer has made a name for herself on Twitter. For more than four months, Spencer has been tweeting every day about the changes going on at Memphis Animal Shelter (MAS) — to the Shelter and Mayor AC Wharton. We sat down with Spencer and asked her how she thinks Twitter can bring about social change.
Flyer: How often do you use twitter?
Beth Spenser: It depends on my mood, I’d say anywhere from 3 to 100 times a day. If something really makes my eyes roll, then my number of tweets increases. The amount of time I spend on Twitter also varies with every time my eyes roll, but on average I’d say about four to six hours a day. When I’m not on Twitter I’m either working or I’m watching Frasier.
What do you normally tweet about?
Normally I tweet about animals, pop culture, and social issues. Today I tweeted about Miley Cyrus and I tried to get the mayor to talk to me. I’ve been tweeting to the mayor for four months now, every day, and I’m not doing it to aggravate him or to harass him, but a lot of times people will retweet what I send to him and it raises social awareness.
Do you think Twitter can bring about social change?
I think it helps people band together. I don’t think it happens in Memphis as much as it does in other places, but a lot of times people can get direct answers on Twitter, and I think ideally it holds those in power more accountable. Twitter gives people a platform that otherwise wouldn’t have one, and I think that’s key to bringing about social change.
Once I sort of “catfished” Memphis Parks, because they run Memphis Animal Shelter. They had been avoiding my tweets as myself so I made a fake name called Mark in Memphis. I made the photo a black male and tweeted them asking about the hour change at MAS. They weren’t responding to any of my tweets or any of the activists that had been asking them questions, but when someone they didn’t recognize tweeted them they answered my questions right away.
Who are you following? Who do you rely on for up-to-the-minute information?
I follow the Memphis Flyer, of course, Miley Cyrus, Jen Sized, the fake Prince Mongo account, and some other local parody accounts like the Midtown Kroger one. I also follow a lot of the usual Memphis media accounts.
— Chris Shaw, @ShawMemphis
Two Funny Twitterers
Twitter is funny (well, y’know, sometimes). Follow the right folks and laughs cascade down that Hootsuite column like Niagara Falls. Twitter, with its 140-character limit, is best for quick hits and one-liners, not for long, story jokes. Think Mitch Hedburg not Bill Cosby.
Ed Arnold and Katrina L. Coleman are two very funny Memphis Tweeters. Arnold is a journalist with the Memphis Business Journal and social media bon vivant. Coleman is a comedian and founder of the Memphis Comedy Fest.
I interviewed them both, on Twitter, of course. Those conversations started fine but were hijacked by friends, other comics, a paranormal mystery writer, and a Memphis City Councilmember.
Of course when I say, “hijacked” that just means Twitter worked exactly as it was designed.
Katrina L. Coleman
(with Shea Flinn, sort of)
Flyer: So, you‘re a comedian and a mover in Memphis comedy (in real life). Why Twitter?
Katrina L. Coleman: It’s a public sketchbook, and a great exercise in brevity, as well as exposure. I have (five minute) bits that started with one dumb Tweet.
Also, constant input. I’m like fuckin’ Johnny 5. News, information, entertainment 24/7. It’s magical for someone like me.
Your style seems tough and self deprecating. True?
KLC: Hell yeah, it is, and I’ll fight you to prove it, but not like in a winning way. (P.S. That’s going in my bio.)
Sounds pretty Memphis to me.
KLC: Totally. Affects all of our arts. (Full disclosure, grew up in West Memphis, which smells like poo. Memphis is home.)
Shea Flinn: I just want to state: the fact that I am NOT being interviewed for the comedy part of Twitter hurts. Hurts bad.
KLC: NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT YOU, FLINN. Ugh. D-I-V-A
SF: Sure take the “funny” crown and then hurl insults. Standup comedy tax, up next!
What‘s it take to be funny in 140 characters in the huge social environment?
KLC: Good spelling, largely. I go the way of sincerity, post what I like. Some people are more jokey joke. Just … entertain yourself.
Ed Arnold
Flyer: So, is brevity the biggest key to being funny on Twitter?
Ed Arnold: It’s not crucial, but it helps. I think a good stand-up comic needs at least a laugh per minute, often more. Twitter forces that. As a consumer of comedy, I love guys who could kill with a sentence. The best Twitter accounts nail that.
Who‘s that in your profile pic?
Spud Web and Manute Bol, two of the best unintentionally funny NBA players of all time.
Is Memphis funny on Twitter? Are Memphians funny?
We’re a tough group. The #ImSoMemphis tweet game had as many terrifying jokes as playful ones.
I think it‘s that underdog thing we do/love so well here. Finally, where are you on the whole Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding thing?
Look, no one deserves a stick to the kneecap, but if I’m getting drunk … Tonya all the way.
— Toby Sells, @tobysells
Let’s Go Kroegrs-ing!
There’s something universal about discussing your neighborhood grocery, and perhaps that’s what makes the Midtown Kroegrs (misspelled on purpose, but the handle is @midtownkrogers) parody account so appealing. Written from the perspective of a faux Kroegrs social media team for the Union store and filled with misspelled words and often-nonsensical tweets, the daily musings fill us in on what’s going on with faux employees (like the day Tony vomited by the cereal boxes because of his nervous stomach or the time Janice had to get a tattoo “cut off her chest”) and faux specials.
Shortly after the account went live last fall, the real Kroger corporate headquarters ordered the account suspended. But with a little misspelling of the store name, it quickly bounced back and garnered a fanbase of more than 2,500 followers.
The Kroegrs social media team took a few minutes to answer some of our burning questions. (All misspellings are intentional.)
Flyer: What makes Midtown Kroegrs so special?
Midtown Kroegrs: We dont know just its so special here its a good mix mash of folks her excapt new Glenn in truck docks he tranferred from nasty Cleavelands.
Recently, you announced that you were hiring because your employees were “sooo old.” What do you look for in a potential employee?
Yes were still allways needing #fresh employs faces who can work late and have a Go get him attitued just apply upfront by the Rug Doctors.
The employees get a lot of shout-outs on Twitter. Have any complained about the exposure?
Lol no if you remember Steve he got fired she said he told Karen he was going to sue her haha yeah right but he works at Mapcos now.
Captain Jerry gets the #freshest fish! Where does he get it from?
Thanks all Krogers #freshcatch is local fish that Jerry finds it somewere, the rest is China freezer samlon then of course theres lobster.
What’s the craziest incident King Don, the security guy, has dealt with there?
Guess what old Don got caught clowning off on the heart pressure chair at Rite Aids Danny tried to fire him but Mr Charley said no you cant.
Janice recently got an old tattoo “cut off her chest.” Has she made a full recovery?
Yes shes is back! But no shes gone she came by and pickedup a box of #otter pops they help out her sad depression mindgrain head aches :).
What‘s been your all-time favorite find from the Manager‘s Special shelves?
Ok well we found 1 Lady Sped Sticks some a bunch of pinchless can Crab’s meat, 2 tore up puff cereal kid bags and a sorted color hair comes.
Tell me about your store specials this week. Any must-have items?
Yes you can defiantly saveon our Morning Farm Vegatrian grill chops, baby freezer cobs #fresh skimp milks and Carpi Suns metal pouch juices.
— Bianca Phillips, @biancaphillips
Politicians, Thought Leaders, and Trolls
On Monday, July 14th, the Commercial Appeal‘s Wendi Thomas posted to her blog about the dress codes at the Montreal, Quebec, location of Bar Louie. The Memphis franchise had been through a controversial revision of its own dress code after allegations that the code was targeting African Americans. Thomas wrote about how people of color feel welcome or unwelcome in spaces based on their race. She linked to the post on her Twitter account, and several people joined in, including Memphis City Councilman Shea Flinn. By Monday evening, it appeared that the two were engaged in a digital kerfluffle. The points of the argument aside, their back and forth and the chorus of folks who were jumping into the conversation revealed the good and the bad of the Twittersphere.
The two primary participants are sharp-witted public figures who were using Twitter to talk about an important social issue in real time. There were no editors to guide the dialog. There were no advertisers or campaign managers to stop what was happening. There was a distillation of opinion that few established media can foster or deliver.
“I was thinking about this,” Thomas said. “One of the reasons that exchange worked — if we can say it worked — is that he and I know each other in real life. If we ran into each other on the street, we say, hey, the side-kind of church-hug greeting. In discussions that I’ve had — and even people who entered that discussion — who I didn’t know, I’m much more leery of what the intent is behind the questions. Are they honestly trying to engage? Or are they trolling?”
“At least from my point of view, we were just having a conversation,” Flinn said. “The weird part about having it in that setting is that there were people on both sides who were interjecting and making it more argumentative than it was between us. We were just having a discussion.”
Wendi C. Thomas: So when you‘ve been in an environment where you felt unwelcome, what was it that made you feel that way? @FlinnShady
Shea Flinn: @wendi_c_thomas lots of reasons. A certain establishment never thought I was “hip” enough. Didn’t like preppy me.
WCT: So I get how that could be uncomfortable, @FlinnShady. I do. But…
WCT: It seems untoward to compare preppy/hipster to a legacy of racial discrimination/modern-day racially charged dress codes. @FlinnShady
SF: I was talking about feeling unwelcome as opposed to discrimination. I see them as very different.
It went on from there. Thomas and Flinn are unlikely to stop with the Twitter.
“Maybe we should have a Twitter chat where people can tune in,” Thomas said. “Wendi and Shea and who ever else is polite can join in. Appointment Twitter.”
— Joe Boone, @Memphidelity
#ilovememphis
Seeing the #ilovememphis hashtag on Twitter might be just another way to join a local conversation, but for some, it means much more than that. Holly Whitfield, who took over the blog about a year ago, said while she wasn’t around for the inception of the hashtag, she’s noticed how local Twitter users have utilized it.
Users will see everyday Memphians, businesses, and organizations all contributing to the conversation through the hashtag, spreading the love through photos, musings, and event postings. Even City Councilman Harold Collins gets in on the action.
“I see people using it in two different ways. One way is when they want to share on Twitter about an event or show. I think they use #ilovememphis because they know that their event is contributing to the cool things in Memphis to make it loveable,” Whitfield said. “The second way I see people use it is when they’re doing something fun that makes them genuinely love Memphis. It’s usually a photo of people having fun — like people at a pool party in Midtown.
“On my Friday post, I remind people to use #ilovememphis to share their pictures over the weekend. I think people are still using it to contribute to the idea that Memphis is loveable,” Whitfield said. “When somebody uses that hashtag, of course their followers will see it, and maybe they’re curious as to whether it’s an official hashtag — which it kind of is — and maybe they’ll look into it a little bit more.”
The I Love Memphis blog will celebrate its fifth birthday on August 17th at Wiseacre Brewing Company.
“When I first started, in my very first post, I said, ‘It’s no longer revolutionary to say I love Memphis,’ which is amazing. When the blog first started, it was. No one was saying that in such an outspoken way,” Whitfield said. “I no longer think it’s a ground-breaking thing, but I do think it’s important. Especially for Twitter. Sometimes it can get really heavy, so being able to see a simple, positive hashtag that is usually accompanied by actual content can be inspiring.”
— Alexandra Pusateri, @alexandrathegr8
They say that everything you read on the internet is true. I just read that country music legend and famed toupee wearer Hank Snow was onstage in the middle of a song when fiddle player Chubby Wise got his bow poked into Hank’s hairpiece. (I mean that literally.) The tale goes that that the hairpiece was freed from the country legend’s dome and went for a ride around the stage on Wise’s bow. According to the internet, Snow screamed, “Chubby, your ass is fired!”
Snow’s toupee is only part of the country bounty you can see and hear on Friday evening in Handy Park on Beale as Nancy Apple brings her Rhythm and Roots Revival to Beale Street. Apple is an essential ingredient to the Memphis music scene. She ran the local chapter of the Recording Academy for a couple of years in the 1990s and was appointed an Emissary of Memphis Music by the Memphis Music Commission. Apple has appeared in film, on television, and on countless local recordings as a back-up singer and cut records in her own right. She has some mighty cool guests with her for this show based on old-time revues.
Kayton Roberts
Kayton Roberts was Snow’s pedal-steel guitarist for 30 years. He’s along for the ride. He may know the truth about the toupee-fiddle incident. Roberts is a member of the Steel Guitar Hall of Fame. He’s 84 years old. Since Snow passed away, he has played with John Fogarty, George Jones, Alison Kraus, and Hank III, among others. Rob McNurlin, Jay Ruffin, and Kenny Hays are on the bill too.
Also of interest is Dulaa, a country rap artist who has worked with Apple. The crunk raper and the Cadillac Cowgirl combine for Crunktry, a hybrid musical form that could only come from Memphis.
