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News News Blog

South Memphis “Safe House” to Serve as Alternative to Gang Activity

Louis Goggans

Clark ‘Preacha’ Chambers details forthcoming ‘Safe House’ in South Memphis.

An area of South Memphis identified as territory of the Riverside Rollin’ 90’s Crips will soon boast a facility that provides at-risk youth with alternatives to gang activity. 

During a press conference held at the Riverview Community Center today, establishment of the city’s first-ever “Safe House” was announced. 

The nearly 3,000 square-foot building will serve as a resource center for youth. It will boast computer workstations, a music room, reading area, along with meeting and office space. Youth will also be able to receive mentorship and apply for scholarship programs. It’ll reportedly operate 24 hours a day. 

The Safe House will be located on Florida Street, one of the areas included in a “Safety Zone” declared by the Multi-Agency Gang Unit within South Memphis’ Riverside community in September 2013. It’s the first of several safe houses that the Bikers and Social Clubs 4 Change (BSC4C) hope to establish in disadvantaged communities throughout the city. 

“We’re tired of our people dying before they get a chance [to live] and not thinking outside of the box,” said Clark “Preacha” Chambers of BSC4C. “[They’re] thinking they’re bound to the cycles that exist in our communities. With these safe houses, they’ll have the opportunity to think more outside the box and turn away from crime.”

Construction of the Safe House on Florida Street is projected to cost $560,000. BSC4C plans to raise the bulk of that money through private donations, along with its upcoming Memphis Bike Fest. The five-day event takes place July 22nd-26th at Tiger Lane and areas surrounding the Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium. 

The organization plans to establish additional Safe Houses in the Frayser, New Chicago, Smokey City and Lauderdale Courts communities. 

Read the Memphis Flyer next week for more information on the forthcoming Safe House in South Memphis.

Categories
News News Blog

City’s Public Works Division Preparing for Snow

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Seven city Public Works trucks are currently dispensing brine as an anti-icing solution for city streets, and if and when the predicted snow begins falling, the city will deploy up to 14 trucks to spread sand and salt.

The forecast is calling for one to three inches of snow this afternoon. According to the Weather Channel, there’s a 78 percent chance that could begin around 2 p.m.

The city’s Public Works division will first focus their efforts on major streets with inclines and declines, as well as any bridges or overpasses. Other major streets will be treated as needed.

The city has more than 5,000 tons of sand and 500 tons of salt stockpiled.

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

At the Swine & Wine for Cozy Corner

Frank Chin

On Monday, Andrew Ticer and Michael Hudman hosted Swine & Wine, a benefit for Cozy Corner, which had a fire in January. 

It was a progressive dinner with folks divided between Hog & Hominy and Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen and then switching places. The evening culminated in a block party at Porcellino’s. 

The list of participating chefs was long and impressive. Among them Felicia Willett, Kelly English, Jackson Kramer, Patrick Reilly, and Ryan Trimm. 

About 150 people packed the sold-out event, with some $20,000 raised for Cozy Corner. 

Cozy Corner is also raising funds via Go Fund Me

All photos are by Frank Chin.

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Categories
Music Music Blog

Bill Frisell at Rhodes Thursday

Jazz guitar great Bill Frisell will play at Rhodes on Thursday night. He will be joined by trumpeter Ron Miles, drummer Kenny Wollesen, and bassist Tony Scherr. The group will perform the soundtrack to the film The Great Flood. Director Bill Morrison eschewed dialog in his depiction of the 1927 flood of the Mississippi. The flood is considered a driving force in the migration of African Americans out of the South throughout the mid 20th century. The film relies on the soundtrack that Frisell composed along with Morrison. The event is sponsored by the Mike Curb Institute for Music at Rhodes College. It starts at 7:30 p.m. in the McCallum Ballroom at Rhodes.

Categories
Blurb Books

Jeffrey Stayton’s Civil War

It took Memphian Jeffrey Stayton 18 years of background research but only six weeks or so to compose This Side of the River (Nautilus Publishing), a novel that takes place following the end of the Civil War in 1865. That puts publication of This Side of the River 150 years after Appomattox, but it’s unlike any Civil War novel you’ve read, and the author, who teaches modern American literature at the University of Mississippi’s satellite locations in north Mississippi, knows it.

“It used to be a big tangle of baroque language where you couldn’t even find the verb,” Stayton said of the manuscript that led up to this, his debut novel. “Two-thirds of the way through that manuscript, widows started showing up — widows who were irate and on horseback with guns. Every time they showed up, it would kick things up a notch or two. I thought: Okay, here’s where the ‘life’ of the story is. As a writer, you follow the ‘life.’ Now the story is lean, more minimalist, more of a page-turner, and I’m like, thank God.”

[jump]

Lean it is at 240 pages. So was one of the novels that inspired it: As I Lay Dying. Page-turner? This Side of the River is that too once disoriented but alert readers get their bearings.

Doesn’t hurt that Stayton has kept the chapters short and that he’s titled those chapters according to the character narrating. And what a tight-fitting mosaic of characters it is: Southern women (widowed or not, but most of them raging mad); white men (both the gray and the blue and still spoiling for a fight); freedmen and -women (still serving according to their prewar slave status); and at the center of this series of unconventional, interlocking narratives: a Texas Ranger teenager named Catullus McGregor Harvey, “Cat” Harvey for short.

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Cat’s plan is to lead a “regiment” of armed widows on horseback out of the South and up to Ohio in order to torch the home of William Tecumseh Sherman. That plan, readers realize soon enough, is as unhinged as the man who devised it. But the outrage of these women-warriors is real.

“The world has done turnt upside down and tipped over,” Cat says near the end of This Side of the River.

He might have added that the world’s been turnt inside out. Cat, for example, dresses in widow’s weeds and paints his face in circus-clown makeup. He’s often coked up on Vin Mariani and at one point adopts another circus element: an elephant named Goliath. He also sexually assaults several of the women in his charge, but he makes men of these women too — traumatized Southern women bent on revenge in the name of their lost husbands and destroyed towns and farms.

“What do I want?” Cat asks when questioned. “I want to light a fire in the North what them that lit the fires in the South have not yet seen.”

What’s a mysterious character named Darkish Llewellyn, a moral focal point in this landscape of ruined lives, to do? Bear witness and listen as even the rocks cry out for mercy, not justice.

Again, this is not your average novel of the Civil War. This is not your average novel, period. The author thinks of it as “literary noir.”

“I’m a sucker for revenge stories, gangster films,” Stayton said in a phone interview. “And yeah, the novel is definitely literary, in that there’s no single narrator. It also deals with some of the darker aspects of human nature.”

That’s putting it mildly. But was Stayton hesitant to write in the voices of so many women, 19th-century women? His years of visiting battlefields, researching, and reading — diaries and memoirs of the period, county and state archives, biographies such as T.J. Stiles’ Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War — certainly show in Stayton’s handling of customs and dress, attitudes and speech. Stayton described all that research as his “launching pad” to the inner lives of his characters. But the faculty at Ole Miss — where Stayton, a Texas native, received his Ph.D. in English — provided him with something else: confidence. They encouraged their writing students to, in Stayton’s words, “go there” — go ahead, write, and see where it takes you.

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According to Stayton, “Barry Hannah, Cynthia Shearer, and Tom Franklin encouraged us to not worry with: How can I, a white male writer, write in the voice of whoever? They gave us permission. They encouraged us to be daring. I had a lot of fun ‘inhabiting’ the characters in This Side of the River and seeing what stories they had to tell.”

For the consequences of the Civil War on soldiers and civilians alike, Stayton looked to contemporary sources, such as the lives of child soldiers in today’s Africa and to accounts of post-traumatic stress disorder — a condition during the Civil War referred to as “nostalgia” or “soldier’s heart.”

“Men were not allowed to express how they felt during the Civil War, and the character of Cat Harvey was a way for me to gain access to that world of wounded warriors,” Stayton said. “I wanted readers to have a visceral reaction to him as a human being, to sense that Cat’s descent into madness is an expression of self-loathing. He’s a very violent, awful person. But he’s also committing all kinds of horrific actions against himself — his widow’s weeds and clown makeup are a provocation to the world … that the world kill him. I wanted to paint a portrait of a man who’s broken.”

And here’s another thing: In addition to being a writer, Stayton is a painter who borrows from the cubists for his oils on canvas. As in Faulkner and other literary modernists, so too the visual artists who presented multiple viewpoints within a single frame. Or as Stayton put it, “You may not have one authorized viewpoint. What you have is a full spectrum.”

Stayton is in the process of giving voice to that spectrum: He’s working with Archer Records in Memphis on an audio version of This Side of the River, due to be released in April or May. He’s drawn from actors at the Hattiloo Theatre and Chatterbox in Memphis, from actors in Oxford, Mississippi, and from nonactors such as local writers Corey Mesler and Richard Alley. Stayton, who tried his hand at stand-up comedy in the 1990s, has cast himself too: as William Tecumseh Sherman and as a character in the novel known as the Ringmaster. He said he still has to perform the eulogy to Goliath the elephant. But his days behind the microphone as a stand-up comedian are long gone:

“I had a lot of fun doing it. I even won a stand-up competition at Texas Tech. But that’s a young man’s game. You have to be fearless.” •

Jeffrey Stayton will be reading from and signing copies of This Side of the River at Burke’s Book Store, 936 S. Cooper, on Thursday, February 26th, 5:30-7 p.m., with the reading beginning at 6 p.m. To reserve a signed copy or for more information, call Burke’s at 278-7484.

Categories
Music Music Features

Music Fest Mayhem

Memphis In May has finally announced the artists playing the 2015 Beale Street Music Festival, unleashing an all-star lineup that’s packed with pop acts, classic rockers, and everything in between. The “song of the day” hints that Beale Street Music Fest was posting on its Facebook page already gave some of the mystery away – it’s been common knowledge for weeks that St. Vincent, The Flaming Lips, and Paramore were probably playing – but the annual music fest did save some of the best acts for today’s announcement, including the overall headliner Lenny Kravitz. Other surprises include The Pixies, Flogging Molly, and local outlaw country act Dead Soldiers. Here’s the complete list of performers at this year’s Beale Street Music Fest:

FRIDAY, MAY 1st:

Lenny Kravitz, The Flaming Lips, Five Finger Death Punch, Pixies, Ryan Adams, Breaking Benjamin, Awolnation, Slash, Jenny Lewis, In This Moment, Spin Doctors, Myslovitz, Robert Randolph and the Family Band, Alejandro Escovedo, Ira Walker, Preston Shannon, Butch Mudbone, Terry “Harmonica” Bean.

SATURDAY, MAY 2nd:

The Avett Brothers, Paramore, John Fogerty, Band of Horses, Bleachers, Wale, Flogging Molly, Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band, Lindsey Stirling, G-Eazy, George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, Big Head Todd and the Monsters, Lecrae, Soul Asylum, Kim Simmons and Savoy Brown, Ana Popovic, Matthew Curry, Copeland, The Vespers, Dead Soldiers, Kenny Brown Band, Kelley Hunt, Leo Bud Welch, Terry “Big T” Williams.

SUNDAY, MAY 3rd:

Ed Sheeran, Wilco, Cage The Elephant, Hozier, St. Vincent, Rise Against, Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn, Of Mice and Men, Kaiser Chiefs, Scott Weiland and the Wildabouts, Shovels and Rope, Elle King, Bettye Lavette, Star and Micey, Prosevere, Tinsley Ellis, Will Tucker, Myslovitz, Indigenous, Jarekus Singleton, Blind Mississippi Morris, Deak Harp-N-Lee Williams.

While the specific stage times are still to be announced, we’ve picked 10 bands that are a must see at this year’s Beale Street Music Fest. Here they are, in no particular order:

John Fogerty

The legendary king of the bayou should never be missed. Even the most casual fans will immediately recognize Fogerty as the voice behind legendary classic rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival, but the California native has also had an impressive solo career behind the Grammy-nominated song “Change in the Weather,” among other songs that convey his classic sound. This will be Fogerty’s first Memphis concert in 30 years.

George Clinton and Parliament

Funkadelic

Do you really need to be told to catch George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic live? I sincerely hope not. Catch this set on Saturday and stay funked up all weekend long.

St. Vincent

Anytime a Grammy Award-winning guitarist comes through town you should make plans to be there. St. Vincent has become a household name behind the tireless work ethic of founder Annie Clark, who’s toured with everyone from the Black Keys to Death Cab for Cutie before blasting off to superstardom.

Lenny Kravitz

The headliner of Beale Street Music Festival needs no introduction. He’s a platinum-selling artist and one of the best guitar shredders of his generation. Recently, Kravitz has ventured into acting (appearing in The Hunger Games trilogy and The Butler), but rest assured he’s got what it takes to leave Beale Street Music Fest in awe on Friday night.

Slash

Is there anyone in the world cooler than Slash? He designed costumes for David Bowie, partied hard with Charlie Sheen, and melted faces with Guns N’ Roses. That’s a pretty solid resume. Slash has now gone solo, with a raucous band called The Conspirators backing him up. Don’t miss this one.

The Pixies

Alternative rock superstars The Pixies lead the pack of ’90s nostalgia at Beale Street Music Fest, along with the Spin Doctors and Soul Asylum. Most people remember the Pixies for the epic “Where is my mind” scene in Fight Club, but the band from Boston has been cranking out infectious alternative rock for nearly 30 years.

Leo Bud Welch

Age is nothing but a number – just ask 82-year-old guitarist Leo Bud Welch. Welch apparently once missed an audition to join B.B. King’s band because he didn’t have the bus fare, but he’s done all right since then, touring the states and Europe many times over with his sparkle-covered guitar. The Mississippi legend plays Saturday at Beale Street Music Fest.

Dead Soldiers

Sure they are a Memphis band, but Dead Soldiers should definitely be shown some local love when they play on Saturday. Since forming a few years ago, the Dead Soldiers have rivaled Lucero as the best local alternative country band in town. Made up of members of old Memphis metal bands, Dead Soldiers put on an entertaining live show fueled by Tennessee whiskey and good times, both of which should be on hand all weekend long.

G-Eazy

Formally of the “Bay Boyz,” G-Eazy is a Northern California hip-hop artist who was chosen to open for Drake after going viral on sites like Myspace and YouTube. G-Eazy has also played Warped Tour and released the critically acclaimed album These Things Happen last summer. The “James Dean of Rap” plays Saturday.

Diarrhea Planet

Winner of the best band name of Beale Street Music Fest, Diarrhea Planet (DP)pack a punch with their live show that includes four electric guitarists. Hailing from Nashville, DP had a monster 2014, which included being named the best live act of the year by Paste Magazine. Musically, they fall somewhere in between pop-punk and indie rock, with enough on-stage energy to get the crowd moving no matter when they are billed.

Beale Street Music Fest tickets are on sale now at all Ticketmaster locations or www.memphisinmay.org/bsmf-tickets. Three-day passes are $95; single-day tickets are $40.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Republicans at the Crossroads

When it comes to the Republican Party’s immigration divide, the more things stay the same, the more they stay the same. 

The 2016 campaign has begun, and Jeb Bush, a pro-immigration-reform candidate, is believed to have raised the most money. Yet Republicans in Congress are under pressure to roll back the president’s executive action that conservatives consider amnesty. Republicans don’t have the votes to do it. The issue promises to dog the GOP from now at least until Election Day.

A few weeks back, House Republicans passed a bill that would defund parts of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in order to block President Obama’s executive order shielding up to 5 million people from deportation. The bill would restore funds that expire in February to the rest of the department. Though the bill can’t pass the Senate, with all Senate Democrats united against it, GOP leaders there promise to bring it up anyway. 

And “Plan B,” they say, doesn’t yet exist. Failure to pass a bill before February 27th will allow Democrats and the president to claim Republicans risked funding vital national security functions in a time of rising terror threats, concerns that register high in polls of voter priorities. 

Some Republicans argue a lapse in DHS funding would make little difference, because most of the department’s employees are considered essential and would remain on the job with their pay delayed. But creating an avoidable cliff, especially for GOP leaders who have promised an end to them, is foolish in light of the unavoidable cliffs that are up next on the calendar.

Conservatives are likely to fight their leaders and push for more confrontation over the debt ceiling in March, the Medicare “doc fix” in April, and the Highway Trust Fund in May — all must-pass bills that conservatives will view as opportunities to gain leverage over Obama.

Meanwhile, to soothe conservatives, the House prepped a border security bill that would effectively eliminate hope for comprehensive reform, requiring the DHS to secure the border completely — blocking 100 percent of entries — in five years. But conservatives dismissed it for failing to include interior enforcement measures for immigrants already here illegally. The bill was pulled.

The latest concession was Speaker John Boehner’s recent announcement that the House would sue the president over his executive action. It’s hard to see that token move assuaging angry conservatives.

Some momentary reflection and reconsideration of immigration followed GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012 — a devastating 71 percent to 21 percent wipeout among Latino voters — but faded rapidly, and two years later, the party is more divided than it was then. The “autopsy” by the Republican National Committee suggested passing reform and stated, “It doesn’t matter what we say about education, jobs, or the economy; if Hispanics think that we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.” The warning went nowhere.

But immigration reform remains a goal for those who influence and fund presidential campaigns. The New York Times reported Wednesday that Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Wall Street Journal and Fox News Channel, recently gushed at remarks by Bush on the benefits of immigration reform. Murdoch, and influential casino magnate and GOP funder Sheldon Adelson, both took the remarkable step of urging the party to pass reform in high-profile op-eds published within one day of each other, after freshman Rep. Dave Brat (R-Virginia) used the immigration issue to topple former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a June primary election.

Republicans won’t be passing any immigration reform, but it will remain the subject of contentious debate for the next two years, from the halls of Congress to the campaign trail — much to the delight of Democrats.

A.B. Stoddard writes for The Hill, where a version of this column first appeared.

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Sir Latimore Love’s River Bluff Diner

I had stopped by Sir Latimore Love’s River Bluff Diner to take an image of this seriously awesome mural when Tommy McCoy stepped outside and cautioned me not to slip on the ice. 

McCoy said the mural was there when Latimore Love took over the space the week before Christmas, but the menu was completely new. 

“What do you recommend?” I asked.

“Everything’s good,” he said. 

McCoy suggests the Don’t Bluff Burger — an upgrade of the Bluff Burger — which features two patties, pepper jack cheese, bacon, and garlic mayo. 

The menu also features po’boys, wings, and a healthy selection of meat and threes — from pot roast and fried pork chops to meatloaf. McCoy says that the only vegetable cooked with meat is the mac and cheese, which comes with bacon. 

River Bluff Diner also serves breakfast and desserts are made fresh daily. (Try the excellent bread pudding.)

The restaurant is open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday-Friday.

McCoy mentions that the health inspector stopped by last week and has been back several times — as a customer. 

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Two Days, One Night

Fabrizio Rongione and Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night

The premise of Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne’s Two Days, One Night is as impersonal and blankly bottom-dollar as a pink slip: “16 pieces of paper. Pick ‘Sandra or bonus’ and put it in the box.”

So it goes for the working-class heroes and villains who populate the world of Belgium’s Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the internationally acclaimed sibling writer-producer-director-collaborators who have yet to make an uninteresting or irrelevant feature. It’s both fair and wrong to complain that Two Days, One Night is another one of their timely meditation on the myriad ways capitalism and Big Business grind up and discard the little guys nobody notices; after all, nobody complains about people seeking revenge in movie after movie. However, the Dardennes’ latest film differs from previous works in both storytelling style and star power. It lacks the itchy and anxious momentum of 2011’s The Kid With A Bike or 2008’s Lorna’s Silence; its rhythms mirror Sandra, its depressed and beaten-down protagonist, who slowly shuffles forward on her quest to win support from her co-workers in a fog of druggy, dolorous resignation that occasionally lifts during brief, clumsy surges of violence.

And this time the Dardennes got themselves a ringer for their nosy and unsparing handheld camera. The actress playing Sandra isn’t some non-professional discovery or some capable, obscure European craftsperson; she’s Oscar winner and Christopher Nolan mainstay Marion Cotillard. But Cotillard’s presence is not as distracting as it could have been. She strips herself of all glamour with some shrugs of her shoulders, some slow blinks of her eyes, and a general inertness that, oddly, equips her for doing all those normal things the normal people in Dardenne brothers movies do—checking on dinner in the oven, sleeping through a ringing phone, or staring out the passenger-side window of an automobile while her husband (Fabrizio Rongione, so naturalistic he practically disappears into the breakfast nook) drives her around.

The film is sort of suspenseful because all the Dardennes’ films are sort of suspenseful. It’s also slow, spacy, stultifying. Except for two songs overhead on a car radio, there’s no music to speak of; moments of disappointment and moments of compassion almost feel equivalent. In a few ways, Two Days, One Night is like a grown-up version of Rosetta, the Dardennes’ 1999 film about a young girl so desperate to get a job that she’ll rip off and double-cross anyone who stands in her way. This time it’s about a grown woman so desperate to keep her job that she’ll beg others to take one for the team.

The subtext of Sandra’s interactions with her co-workers, and the main subject of the film, is responsibility. Who’s to blame for this situation? What can I do to help? And how can I do that without harming my own chances for success? One of the great and troublesome tasks of human existence is trying to figure out the limit of your own actions. At what point do your behaviors stop being your own and become mere reactions to a larger system designed to make you act in this way? There aren’t any simple answers in the film, which might be another way of saying there aren’t any answers at all.

Categories
Beyond the Arc Sports

Next Day More Reflection Than Notes: Grizzlies 90, Clippers 87

Larry Kuzniewski

This picture is not from last night, but this happened to Spencer Hawes pretty regularly during last night’s game.

You know, as someone whose job it is to analyze this team and, basically, nitpick every little thing they do (for better or for worse), it’s easy to get lost in that, to break every game apart into its components and look at them this way and that, reassemble them and look at them again (always leaving that one screw out, because there’s always the one screw left over at the end of putting anything back together). Sometimes you feel like you’re back in tenth grade biology class, chopping apart a pig fetus. This is the brain. It bounces on the table. This is what it does. This is how much it weighs. You forget in the minutia of the game what the whole thing is, beginning to end, the rhythm and the flow and the, for lack of a better word, vibe.

It’s just as easy to lose track of the vibe of the whole season. Each game is its own entity, and there are 82 of them. There are stretches and stands: five games in this week, four home games in a row before this trip, this back to back, that four-in-five-nights. We break the whole thing down into parts because it’s more instructive than considering the whole: it’s differentiation, measuring the rate of change. And sometimes it’s hard to integrate it again, to stop in February and feel what the whole season feels like. To watch what’s happening as something other than “this group of starters has this net rating” or “this guy has been getting more minutes since this thing happened and this has been the result.”

What I’m saying is this: last night, at midnight, sitting on my couch watching the clock expire and the Grizzlies beat the Clippers 90–87 after Chris Paul tried his hardest to will Los Angeles to victory—and he almost did it, he really almost did, and let’s not forget how good DeAndre Jordan looked the next time Griz fans want to write the Clippers off as a bad team, or Jordan in particular as a guy with no skills—and the Grizzlies simply said no and shut them down, I was struck by the realization that I have been taking this season for granted. I have been taking for granted the fact that the Grizzlies are the #2 team in the Western Conference, with 40 wins (well, 41 after last night) before March and only three games back of the number one seed in the West with what, seven weeks of basketball left?

Everyone has said all year that this group is “special”, to the point that it almost doesn’t mean anything anymore. What what does it mean to say that the 2014–15 Grizzlies are special? What are we saying when we say that?

Last night.

It was the end of the game last night. Courtney Lee played perfect defense on Chris Paul, and Paul let his guard down for just half a second, long enough to let the ball bounce away from him right in front of Mike Conley, who immediately jumped it and took off the other way.

It wasn’t anything that hasn’t happened before—the Griz have stolen a lot of games with defense this year and previously. But it was the way it felt when they did it. Like they had ground the Clippers into submission, hanging out pretty much dead even all game and then trading body blows through the last quarter, holding one of the best offenses in the league (lately anyway) to 19 points in the 4th quarter at home. You realize the Clippers just won four games in a row and averaged 117 points in those four games, right? And that they lost to the Grizzlies and the Grizzlies needed an intentional foul of Mike Conley while in the bonus to get to 90?

I am the chief offender here: I have not been appreciating this team for what it is. Whether that’s because I’ve finally watched them enough to be jaded to what’s happening, or because this is the first season I’ve had a baby around the house, or because I’m a year older and thinking about things differently as one always does—you can’t step into the same river twice, is the Heraclitus quote I will keep using in basketball articles and in every other walk of my life until someone makes me stop—I don’t know. But I’m going to try not to do it anymore. This team is playing at a fantastically high level. Fantastic in the sense of “seems like a fantasy, rather than real.” Awesome, in the literal sense of “inspiring awe.” Terrible, in the literal sense of “inspiring terror.” This is not like any basketball team we’ve ever seen in our city in NBA uniforms. It is different in kind, not just in degree.

My wife and I started talking yesterday about maybe taking a vacation this summer, and looking at the calendar to pick out some weeks that would be good. I was looking at the middle of June, when it hit me: When do the Finals start? And I realized that I was actually having to think about the schedule of the Finals for the Grizzlies. The Memphis Grizzlies. You know, the ones who used to play in the Pyramid that’s got a Bass Pro Shop with a Governor’s Suite in it now. I was thinking about when the Finals are, and not just to be extra careful, but because they legitimately might make the NBA Finals.

That’s a glorious thing. A weird, and a little harrowing—if only because we all know it’s not going to last forever, that this might be as good as it ever gets—and positively exhilirating thing. This team is special, and I’m just now getting that through my thick skull.