Month: February 2015

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter From the Editor: Make the First Snow Day an Official Holiday

On Monday, I did what most of you probably did: I skipped work because of the snow. Oh, there’s little doubt I could have made it in to the office. I would have had to drive slower, but a little dusting of snow and sleet doesn’t stop the rest of the civilized world from going about its business. But no one would have been in the office, so why bother?

Don’t get me wrong. As I sat by a blazing fire, book on my lap, coffee at my side, I was grateful for the gift of a day off. But it felt like more than that. It felt like a holiday.

And in fact, a snow day in Memphis has all the trappings of a traditional holiday. It begins, like Christmas, with a shopping frenzy, as we scurry to grocery stores to stock up on our traditional Snow Day foods: bread and milk. The Snow Day spirit abounds as we wait in long lines, smiling and laughing in anticipation of the excitement to come. “They’re saying we might get six inches,” the cashier says. “Oooh, goody,” we say, shivering in anticipation.

And when Snow Day comes, as with all holidays, we get a day off to spend with friends and family. We make Snow Day lawn decorations — creative snow creatures and forts. We have snowball fights. And we somehow manage to overcome our deathly fear of driving in the snow to drive all over town to our few meager hills, where we spend hours sliding on homely little sleds of cardboard and plastic. It’s so cheery!

The streets are mostly clear, but the sidewalks are filled with pedestrians enjoying the snow-dusted magnolias and monkey grass and watching their dogs make yellow snow. Another tradition!

I say it’s high time we recognize that we in the South do snow differently. Up North, they see it as weather, as extra work — shoveling, scraping, etc. In the South, the snow melts before we have to deal with any of that tedious stuff, so we see the snow as a rare gift, a welcome change in our routine. And, let’s be honest. We see it as a paid holiday.

So why not formalize it? The mayor and city council could strike a blow for the city’s often-beleaguered image by declaring the first significant snowfall of the year an official Memphis holiday. Imagine the happy PR we’d get from all over. We’d be seen as a quirky and fun town. Forbes magazine would be hard-pressed to call us “miserable,” for sure. It’s just crazy enough to work.

So, come on, Mayor Wharton. Run with it. A grateful citizenry awaits. Oh, and happy belated Snow Day.

Editor’s note: This column first appeared in the January 13, 2011, issue, but I thought it might be time to rerun it. Especially, since we were all off Monday, due to the … snow.

Categories
Cover Feature News

All about that Uptown Funk

Number One

You can’t do any better. For six weeks straight, Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk” has dominated the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Unless you’ve been living under a rock in East Tennessee, you know it was recorded in Memphis at the legendary Royal Studios, home to Al Green and his guiding force, producer Willie Mitchell. Mitchell passed away in 2010, but his grandson Lawrence “Boo” Mitchell has assumed the mantle with great success. The current number-one single is only part of what’s going on under the new generation. We talked to Boo and to Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, who came to Memphis as the lyricist for much of Ronson’s album Uptown Special.

Lawrence “Boo” Mitchell, grandson of Willie Mitchell, at Royal Studios

We Got the Funk

“Initially, I don’t think Royal was in the plan for them to record, until they came in and saw it and felt the vibe and the energy of the place,” Boo Mitchell says of Royal Studios. “It’s something about the studio that inspires people. It’s got a vibe to it. A lot of studios don’t have a vibe. More modern places, you kind of have to take your inspiration with you. This one still has all of the charm from the 1960s. We haven’t touched anything since 1969. We’ve updated the bathrooms and the green room. But when you walk into Royal, it has this magic quality to it. That’s what got ’em.”

In a city where Sun Studios was rebuilt, Stax was torn down and replaced, and American Sound was destroyed, Royal remains an untouched working example of the Memphis Sound. It’s impressive on every level.

inside Royal, working example of the Memphis Sound

“When they got here, they were kind of blown away by the studio,” Mitchell says of the producer’s visit last winter. “Mark, when he walked into the control room, said, ‘Aw, man, you have the same MCI recording console that I have. I remember that I bought it because your dad had it. That’s why I got it in the first place.'”

Three weeks later, Ronson returned with a band of musical assassins including producer Jeff Bhasker, Kevin Parker of Tame Impala, drummer Steve Jordan, bassist Willie Weeks, and some guy named Bruno Mars. March 1st was Willie Mitchell’s birthday, and the group gathered for a photo in front of the studio. The resulting album,

Uptown Special, is currently at Number 11 on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart and peaked at Number 5. Ronson is famous for melding classic sounds and modern sensibilities. Mitchell delivered the tools to do just that.

Mark Ronson walked into the control room and said, “Aw, man, you have the same MCI recording console that I have.”

“Everything we used was vintage,” Mitchell says. “Eric Martin at Martin Music gave us a whole lot. When Carlos Alomar [David Bowie’s guitarist] came, we had all kind of stuff. Marshall amps. And then the Drum Shop, we went and raided them for the first session. We sent Homer Steinweiss [Amy Winehouse, Dap Kings] to the Drum Shop. [laughs] He came back with like five kits. But Steve Jordan would use this hybrid kit: the Royal Studios hi-hat from ‘Love & Happiness’ and some weird low tom from the Drum Shop. We had all kinds of madness going on.”

Engineer work on Uptown Special is not all Mitchell has going on. He is co-producer with Cody Dickinson on Take Me to the River, a documentary that pairs musicians from different generations in a celebration of soul music’s enduring power. The film, which pairs artists such as William Bell with Snoop Dog and Mavis Staples with the North Mississippi Allstars, won Best Feature Film at London’s Raindance Film Festival last September. Mitchell had just returned from a show at the Apollo to support the music-education efforts of the project.

Boo Mitchell took on a lot of responsibility when his grandfather died, and he credits the film with helping him get to where he is now.

“Cody Dickinson was one of the first cats to go, ‘Hey, man, you produce the stuff. It’s all you,'” Mitchell says. “Okay. Cool. Then all of the sudden, I’m recording Snoop Dog and Terrence Howard and William Bell and Otis Clay and Bobby Rush. Frayser Boy. Then it seems like the doors opened from there.”

Keep It Rolling

Lawrence “Boo” Mitchell was born in 1971. Willie Mitchell is his matrilineal grandfather who adopted him to keep the family name. Boo remembers the Al Green era and has been soaking up lessons from Pops since he was a child.

“Just remembering about how Pops used to talk to the musicians and dealt with the band and the artist,” Mitchell says. “I spent summers down here, from the time I was 8 or 9. I just wanted to be here. Pops would tell you be quiet and don’t talk. I remember he told me one time, ‘When you go in the studio, never ask how long it’s going to take.’ We were doing a percussion overdub, and this guy was taking all of this stuff out of the bag, a glockenspiel. He says, ‘How long is this going to take?’ Pops goes, ‘It’s already done. You can pack your stuff up.’ He said, ‘Go see the lady at the front.’ He said, ‘Boo, you might be in the studio one day. You might be here three days. You never know.’ I never asked that question.”

Since Pops’ death in 2010, Boo has kept things moving in his own right: Robert Plant, Paul Rodgers, Boz Scaggs, and Wu-Tang Clan all worked in the studio with Boo at the console.

“It feels good that I was smart enough to keep the legacy going,” Mitchell says. “It’s not something that I ever thought about doing. I wasn’t one of the type of people who’s like, I’m going to do this and do that. I was just the rover. I was just doing things out of necessity. That’s ultimately how I started being a full-time engineer again in 2004.”

Boo remembers the moment he started engineering as a serious career.

“Pops was sitting up there, kind of upset because the current engineer had gone on vacation without telling anybody,” Mitchell says. “[There was] this big Al Green project where the record company wanted this song remixed. It was a deadline. I just looked at him and said, ‘Well, hell, I know how to engineer, and you’ve got the best ears in town. Why don’t you and me go back there and do it?’ He looks up and goes, ‘Damn, that’s a good idea. Let’s do it.'”

That kicked off a special phase of their relationship and set the stage for Boo’s current successes.

“I would pick Pops up from the house and take him to work and take him home every night,” Mitchell says. “That started around 2000, 2001. I would play records. We started listening to Willie Mitchell instrumentals. He would tell me, ‘That’s Fred Ford.’ The stuff was so old, he’d forget. We’d listen, and he would say, ‘That’s Fred Ford playing the solo on ‘Bad Eye.’ I had no idea. So it was cool listening to these old records with him. He started remembering. I’d ask him how he mic’ed the drums. He said, ‘Everybody wants to know how I mic the drums. This is how I did it.’ That was cool.”

Mitchell is the current president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Memphis Chapter and represents Royal and Memphis all over the country. He has become the consummate professional and a leading ambassador of the Memphis Sound.

“That’s the path of my life,” he says. “Doing things because it’s the right thing to do has blessed me. It’s opened doors for me, and good things have followed.”

Q&A

Michael Chabon, The Accidental Lyricist

Michael Chabon

Mark Ronson asked Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon (Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), who is a crate-digging music nut and Big Star fanatic, to contribute lyrics for Uptown Special. While Chabon did not write the lyrics to “Uptown Funk,” he contributed to most of the other album tracks and made the trip to Memphis for the family-style recording sessions. I asked Chabon about the project and his experience in Memphis.

Memphis Flyer: The story of Ronson and Bhasker renting a car and driving around the South looking for talent has been well-reported. Sometimes we roll our eyes when people “drive through the South” in search of something. But this time it worked. What’s your take on that?

Michael Chabon: We don’t a have a whole lot of mythology in America. A lot of the mythology that we do have — I almost want to say we used to have — was kind of artificial. It was artificially devised creations starting around the turn of the last century, where there was kind of this effort both conscious and unconscious, with all of the immigrants pouring into the country from all over the world, to kind of shape a narrative of what America was and what American history was. That brought us all of these things like George Washington throwing the dollar across the Rappahannock River and the stories of the founding fathers. That kind of iconography of American history was like our civic religion. That was kind of an American mythology that was dreamed up by the equivalent of marketing people essentially. There wasn’t a whole lot of basis in fact.

The real, organically grown mythology was pretty scarce. But the birth of the blues in the Mississippi Delta and the migration of that music up the river and the way that it metamorphosized into jazz, R&B, and gospel — all of that stuff and the cross-cultural fertilization with the European, everything that’s part of that story are mythological elements. There are clearly bogus elements, like Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil or whatever, but the basic story is true. You can drive around. I didn’t get to drive down to Clarksdale, but I would want to do that too. You would just be hoping that you would be touching or be touched by something that’s true: something old and true.

So much of everything that’s around us now is cooked up and synthesized. Whether you’re white or black or whatever … everyone wants authenticity. Authenticity has the highest premium on it of almost any kind of experience that we can have as human beings. Whether that’s even possible or not, it’s certainly hard to find in a contemporary context that we live in. So you’re always kind of looking for places.

What about that building?

It’s an expression of a single human soul and a single human consciousness. That’s how it felt to me anyway, to go in there. It reminded me of outsider artists. There’s a guy in France called the Facteur Cheval. In the 19th century, he was walking down the road one day, and he picked up a rock. There was something about this rock that got stuck in his brain. He ended up building this entire palace complex in the backyard of his house in rural France out of rocks. He spent his whole life working on it. It’s an incredibly surreal environment.

That studio itself and the way Boo explained it to me: There was something that he would hear that wasn’t quite right about the drums, and he would get whatever there was around, like a blanket or a piece of foam and just stick it in exactly the spot. Over the years, all of that stuff accumulated, in this way that you feel like you’re inside of a work of art, not just a recording studio. It’s an installation or an environment that’s reflecting the way one particular brain operated.

The Mitchells are some fun people.

Boo is so lovely. His spirit is so wonderful. You just like being around him. It is such a family operation there. You felt so taken care of. They want to know about you and your family. One of Boo’s aunts cooked up Sunday dinner for us and brought over all of this incredible food, this amazing red velvet cake. Boo’s kids and nephews. But not just that, the whole neighborhood: There’s that lobby area, and every time I’d walk through there would be different people sitting around in the chairs. Teenie [Hodges] was there a lot. But just guys from the neighborhood … they’d be talking and laughing. Sometimes I would just come in and hide around the corner and eavesdrop. I’ve never heard people laughing so hard. Just cracking each other up so much.

They know they are doing something wonderful. There’s a magic they have: this trust, this thing that’s been entrusted to them, this studio that Willie made. They know that it’s special, and they want to share that. They want people to see how wonderful it is. They know that people have choices; there are other studios. You get a sense that they are grateful that they have this place.

So much of what Memphis had is gone or has been replaced.

That’s they way of the world. It’s always been that way. There’s no more Big Star supermarket. All of that’s gone. It’s magical. Long may it reign.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Mr. Turner

Mike Leigh is one of the indisputable titans of contemporary cinema, but his latest film — which shows us 19th-century England (and a bit of Europe) through the eyes of acclaimed landscape painter and grunting, ill-natured ogre Joseph Mallord William Turner (Timothy Spall) — is an altogether less pleasurable affair than either 2010’s Another Year or 2008’s Happy-Go-Lucky.

Mr. Turner is a long, lumpy, and weirdly dull film; for nearly half of its 150-minute run time, period details, production design, and first-rate location scouting threaten to trump any of the half-formed human and social drama on display. You find yourself thinking things like, “Oh, so that’s what a pre-Victorian British art-supply store looked like!” or “Ah, so that’s how the locomotive that inspired the painting Rain, Steam and Speed sounded!” or “Did John Ruskin really have a speech impediment?”

Timothy Spall as J.M.W. Turner

Natural-light cinematography so vibrant it looks artificial is more immediate than Turner’s troubling interactions with his estranged family, his grotesque maid, and his doting dad. Eventually, though — and it took me awhile to step back and see this — these scattered, seemingly disconnected scenes add up to a full, sympathetic portrait of an irascible artist who was alive to something inside himself that others simply could not reach.

Once you realize that, Leigh’s methods and techniques reveal themselves more forcefully than ever before. He and his collaborators don’t forge iron links of cause and effect; they stack great and small blocks of incident on top of each other until they form something like a tabernacle for the souls they’ve chosen to observe and preserve for the British nation — and for us.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Ten Years Of YouTube

Most nights I like to drift off to sleep with Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K). Watching bad movies along with Joel and the bots takes me back to the 1990s, when MST3K was a late-night comedy staple. For most of the 21st century, it was abandoned by both Comedy Central, a network it helped legitimize, and the SyFy Channel, the network whose cluelessness ultimately allowed it to wither. Getting DVD rights to so many movies was an impossible task, so unless you were one of the hardcore fans who traded VHS tapes by mail, it was pretty much impossible to see old episodes. But tonight, I can watch Tom Servo heckle Manos: Hands of Fate, Gorgo, Fugitive Alien II, or any of MST3K‘s 197 titles on YouTube.

It was 10 years ago this month that Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim registered youtube.com. At the risk of sounding old, it’s difficult to remember what the web — and the world — was like back then. Bandwidth was at a premium, so that meant downloading a video could take quite awhile. A funny kid video passed around via email could, and frequently did, bring an entire company’s IT infrastructure crashing down.

There was such an assortment of different video codecs floating around that you might not even be able to play the video it had taken all night to download. The bigger media companies were experimenting with something like streaming video, but it was usually buggy as a dumpster. Remember RealPlayer? I wish I didn’t.

The first video uploaded to YouTube was of one of its founders, Karim, at the zoo. Its title was “Me at the zoo,” and it set the tone for the site’s early content. YouTube was originally marketed as “Flickr for videos,” after the popular photo sharing site that doubled as one of the web’s first social media experiments. For that was YouTube’s biggest innovation: It allowed videos made by a normal person to be seen by anyone, anywhere.

For the first century of its existence, film and video production had been highly technical pursuits that required lots of training and infrastructure. Theatrical distribution and broadcast to a mass audience was the realm of only a select few. But digital video technology, which first started to trickle down to the hobbyists in the mid-’90s, changed that. If you had asked me as a filmmaker in 2005 if I wanted to shoot an actual film on film, I would say, “No, for the same reason I don’t want to paint a fresco.” But back in 2005, we were still dependent on the old film-era distribution infrastructure. Now, anyone with a smartphone can make a video and have it seen by the world in a matter of minutes.

YouTube sensation Psy

The social change YouTube’s democratizing of video distribution has wrought was unfathomable in 2005. As the saying goes, the generational dividing line is now whether you have spent more time listening to U2 or watching YouTube. Entirely novel genres have sprung up. Not even the most drug-addled science fiction writers predicted that famous cats would be making their owners millions of dollars, or that the most popular song of the century would be from a Korean pop singer named Psy who got famous by doing a horsey dance with obscure celebrities few outside Seoul could name.

And then there’s the baffling phenomenon of the unboxing video. There are thousands of videos whose content consists solely of a pair of hands opening the box of a new toy or a “surprise egg,” and they all have more views than anything you’ve ever uploaded.

Which brings us back to MST3K. The fan club that traded VHS tapes back in the ’90s also happened to populate some of the earliest internet message boards. When YouTube started, they were among the first to digitize their aging VHS tapes and upload them to share. This caused all sorts of copyright issues and for a while led to YouTube limiting uploads to less than 10 minutes.

But these days, most of the old videos stay up, preceded by a commercial whose proceeds usually go back to the rightsholders instead of the uploader. Shout! Factory has started an official YouTube channel populated by HD transfers of the shows, but I’ll probably keep watching the old ones in all their grainy glory. They remind me of the bad old days, when video sharing meant you had to, as the MST3K closing credits extolled, “keep circulating those tapes.”

Categories
Book Features Books

Alan Lightman’s Screening Room

In the acknowledgments at the end of Alan Lightman’s revealing new memoir, Screening Room (Pantheon Books), there are matters to keep in mind before you even begin the book. Some of his characters are based on real people. The names are unchanged; their stories are “for the most part true.” Other characters are “loosely based” on family members, and their names have indeed been changed. Some of the characters are “amalgamations” of real people; some are “fictitious.” But there’s nothing “for the most part true” about gilgul neshamot. As Lightman explains in the body of the book, it’s a concept drawn from the mystical element of Judaism known as Kabbalah, and the phrase means “cycle of souls.”

Phasma, however, is pure invention. It was a term Lightman and his distant (and fictionalized) Uncle Nate coined, and it means “ghost” — the ghost of the family patriarch, Lightman’s formidable grandfather, Maurice Abraham Lightman, but he was known to relatives, friends, and colleagues throughout the movie business as M.A. It was M.A. who gave his name to the M.A. Lightman Company, shortened to Malco, which would grow to become a major chain of theaters still operating in Memphis and across the Mid-South.

Alan Lightman

The phasma doesn’t operate just geographically, however. Nor does it “necessarily obey the usual relations between time and space.” It’s a force that can travel forward in time to haunt subsequent generations. It can even travel back in time “to fasten its grip” on family members who lived before the patriarch was born. “No one can control a phasma,” Lightman writes in Screening Room. “Being aware that a phasma is at work offers no help, and being unaware also offers no help.” Though Uncle Nate can somewhat help when he observes: “It’s a weird, weird thing …. But then everything is weird. We’ve got a problem, my friend.”

“Weird” is not exactly the word to describe religious observance in the Lightman household. A prominent East Memphis Jewish family of the Reform variety, the Lightmans were proud of their heritage, but that pride ran along the lines expressed by a family friend, who once said: “I want a mezuzah [for the doorway], but one that is not too Jewish.” Not exactly orthodox either but plenty prevalent when Lightman was growing up: the alcohol-fueled evenings his parents and their friends enjoyed as members of Memphis’ Ridgeway Country Club in the 1950s and ’60s. But Screening Room doesn’t limit itself to those decades. It travels back and forth in time and touches on all of Memphis history, and by the 1930s, that history was often linked to the Lightmans. Uncle Nate was, however, more than right about the other thing: “We’ve got a problem, my friend.” That’s one way to describe Lightman’s conflicted feelings for his high-strung mother and his emotionally detached father. Add in, too, the ambivalent attitude toward his hometown and the South in general when the author was a young man.

What is Alan Lightman — physicist, MIT faculty member, novelist, essayist, and avowed atheist — doing writing of a time-traveling ghost-patriarch in the pages of Screening Room? It’s the same Alan Lightman, artist-scientist, who can imagine a cycle of souls as one way of interpreting a troubled family universe.

On Thursday, February 19th, 6 to 8 p.m., Lightman, who has lived for decades outside Boston, returns to his hometown to read from and sign copies of Screening Room at story booth (438 N. Cleveland). The evening, presented by Burke’s Book Store in conjunction with Crosstown Arts, will also include a Q&A with the author. That landmark building on Cleveland, a few doors down from story booth? It used to be the Crosstown movie theater. Alan Lightman once worked inside it. The Malco company once owned and operated it. And you might say the phasma who built it still haunts it.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Copenhagen at Theatre Memphis

Every theater is a laboratory, every play an experiment — a methodical attempt to create new worlds built in and of imaginary space. Michael Frayn’s ambitious, math-centric drama Copenhagen, currently running on Theatre Memphis’ Next Stage, is just a little more overt than most. The play’s formal conceit: turn traditional dramatic structures into a series of scientific proofs, each of which has been designed to quantify the mechanical aspects of a private meeting between Niels Bohr, the Jewish father of quantum mechanics, and Werner Heisenberg, Bohr’s former pupil and the chief scientist in charge of creating Adolf Hitler’s atomic-weapons program. It’s a heady story told by ghosts in an otherworldly setting.

Copenhagen director Stephen Huff describes the play as “a thought experiment,” like Schrödinger’s cat or single subatomic particles that appear to move through two slits at the same time. “As a thought experiment, the play is set in theoretical time and space,” he explains. “In other words, time and space are fluid and shift into many different modes. For most of the duration of the play, the characters exist in a time and space beyond their earthly being — or an afterlife. They argue about what happened in the past and relive events and emotions in the present of that nebulous existence.

Copenhagen

“None of us are nuclear physicists here,” Huff says, describing the play’s intellectually intimidating content. But contemporary artists and audiences benefit from the fact that Frayn’s play reignited academic interest in the Bohr/Heisenberg meeting, and lots of information has been published in the two decades since its premiere. “MIT has a website that provides summaries of the physics discussed in the play,” Huff says. “Because of its tremendous impact, there is a lot of information out there that is geared specifically toward understanding it.”

While one doesn’t need a degree in science to appreciate Copenhagen, a little homework may enhance the experience.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said (February 19, 2015) …

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About Bianca Phillips’ “Hotties” story …

Man, I tried every trendy thing I could think of to make this year’s Hotties list. Liposuction. A personal trainer. L.L. Bean duck boots. I hung around the Ashley Madison website. Leased a Prius. Reactivated my old StarTAC.

No call from the Flyer. And when I was tipped about the “Puppy Love” theme, I immediately had my beloved Puckered Spaniel groomed.

But, no. Maybe next year. In the meantime I’ve had cosmetic surgery to display a permanent look of shock and disbelief on my face. Maybe that’ll make the Flyer feel guilty about the snub.

Congrats to all the winners. You’re a good-looking and talented bunch.

Smitty Patterson

Smitty Patterson, I sympathize, after viewing this group, I immediately spanked my spaniel.

Crackoamerican

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s editor’s letter on the Republican rift …

Every so-called common sense Republican who has tried has been devoured. The few who have displayed momentary lapses of lucidity were swiftly chastised and quickly repented. As Charles Pierce says, there’s been a prion disease eating away at the Republican brain for several decades now. The Reasonable Republican is extinct as a political species. There are still Reasonable Republicans out there, but they don’t run for office because they know they can’t get elected in today’s Republican Party.

Jeff

Jeff, I would extend that to say there are reasonable people in both parties. The rise of extremism on both sides (for some reason they are much louder among the R’s) has precluded the participation of anyone that could even remotely be labeled as a “moderate.”

There are stories of hope out there. I read in a New York Times article that Republicans in Iowa have very recently “purged” their leadership ranks of the Tea Party/extremist/libertarian elements. The process was apparently undertaken based on a very strong hint by the national party that the use of Iowa as a litmus test of sorts for new candidates was in serious jeopardy. Apparently there were many potential nominees who were not interested in going to Iowa due to the increasingly far-right activist leadership at the state party level and resulting elections that pointed towards candidates considered unelectable at the national level. However, seeing as Tennessee draws neither attention during national races nor is it considered a prize worthy of investment by either party, I guess our chance of seeing a push from above for more levelheaded Republican leadership is slim at best.

Barf

About the post, “Zeke Logan: 1965-2015” …

Zeke, you will truly be missed. Your thoughts and humor made this city a better place to live. My upmost prayers and thoughts go to your family and friends. Know that you brought so many smiles to the faces of so many people.

Sean Jackson

Much love to Zeke and his sweet family. Peace.

Niles

About Ruth Ogles Johnson’s Viewpoint, “A School Schedule Fix” …

This schedule is ridiculous on so many levels that I can’t begin to count them all. Five-hour school days? Buses on the roads after nightfall? Granted, a change does need to occur, but this is not the answer.

Pamela Cates

Can someone tell me why so many people have their panties in a wad because President Obama spoke about historical religious facts? Extremists of all religions are useless, whether Muslim, Christian, or Jew. There are a few churches that are wonderful but too often the extremists ruin it for them. Why deny the truth and get all ticked off because someone mentions historical facts? I would like to get as far away from these people as I can. In fact, I guess that I’d rather be sinning.

Dagmar Bergan

Categories
News News Feature

Good Jobs Lost

For 17 years, Zorina Bowen was a research biochemist. She was good at what she did and loved her job. But in 2006, University of Tennessee Health Science Center laid her off, and she’s struggled to get by ever since.

Her pay shrunk from nearly $30 an hour to less than $10 an hour for part-time work in the home health-care industry.

“I went from sequencing DNA to emptying bed pans,” says the 57-year-old single mother.

Part of Bowen’s story is familiar: It’s the testimony of the shrinking middle class, of good jobs lost and replaced by ones that don’t pay enough to make ends meet. Less noted is the psychological impact, how a changing economy can rattle even the most secure person’s self-esteem.

Bowen is quick to point out: She doesn’t think she’s too good to work as a caregiver — bathing, dressing, and cooking for her elderly client. All work has value, she says, “but the thing is, what is its value to you? Does it challenge you? Does it stimulate you, or are you just going through the motions?”

The slow decline in the federal, state, and local unemployment rate doesn’t capture the 12.5 percent of Americans who are underemployed. For African Americans like Bowen, the underemployment rate is estimated to be as high as 25 percent.

Bowen wants a job that requires the degree she earned. She needs full-time hours. In the years since she left the lab, she hasn’t been able to find either. She’s worked as an administrative assistant at nonprofit organizations, a substitute teacher, and a tutor at an afterschool program.

“I was basically taking any job I could get.”

It was a long way from her years in the lab, including years at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

“My job was to find the dose range to kill off the cancer cells without killing off too many of the normal cells,” she says. She can still rattle off the names of the drugs she worked on, and when she does, she looks happy. But her reminiscing soon gives way to reality. She sounds more like an economist than a scientist as she laments the economic reality for people trapped in low-wage jobs.

“Adjusted for inflation, we’re not making as much as we were in the 1970s,” she says. “Everything has gone up but wages.”

According to the 2015 Assets and Opportunity Scorecard released last month, Tennessee is one of 26 states where more than 25 percent of the jobs are low-wage.

According to the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED), which compiles the annual scorecard, Tennessee ranks 43rd in the country for the number of policies adopted to help state residents gain financial security. In several states, 2015 brought increases above the federal minimum wage, but not in Tennessee. In fact, the state has no minimum wage law.

So while national campaigns to raise the pay for fast-food workers to $15 an hour are great ideas, Bowen still doesn’t believe that would be enough.

“Let’s see what it really actually takes to live out here and adjust wages accordingly,” Bowen says. “Because anything under $20 [an hour] is not making it.”

Her advice to her two daughters: Be prepared for anything. Have a job and a side gig. Save not for a rainy day — but seasons after seasons of hurricanes.

“If I’d known then what I know now, I probably would have tried to squirrel away more,” Bowen says. “It was a six-month cushion, not a six-year cushion.”

According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, if the minimum wage had kept up with inflation, it’d be $10.52 an hour, which is about what she makes now. But if the minimum wage had kept pace with worker productivity, it’d be $21.72 an hour. States that increase their minimum wages, the center found, had higher employment growth.

Even with subsidies, Bowen can’t afford health insurance through the Affordable Care Act. Earlier this month, a legislative committee killed Insure Tennessee, Governor Bill Haslam’s plan to accept Medicaid expansion funds.

When she sees politicians dither over increasing the minimum wage or other measures that help her make ends meet, it makes her angry.

“They don’t have a clue,” Bowen says. “They don’t know what it’s really like out here. … They figure people are poor because they want to be.”

Wendi C. Thomas is a journalist and a Writing Fellow for the Center for Community Change. Follow her on Twitter at @wendi_c_thomas

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News The Fly-By

Group Devises Plan to Save Foote Homes from Destruction

CREDIT: Bianca Phillips

Foote Homes doesn’t need to be torn down. It needs rain gardens, trees, individual porches, a new drainage system, updated lighting, and walkways. That’s according to the Vance Avenue Collaborative, a community group trying to save the public housing complex from demolition. 

The group held a meeting last week to discuss how Foote Homes can be saved.

City officials will submit an application in September to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to raze Foote Homes’ 57 buildings. HUD denied the city the $30 million grant for the project last year. But that did not deter Robert Lipscomb, the city’s director of Housing and Community Development, who said the process is competitive and that the city would simply try again in 2015. 

Bianca Phillips

Foote Homes

Should the city be selected for the $30 million Hope VI grant this year, the project would require $12.7 million from city taxpayers and $60 million from a private developer. In all, the project would cost $102.7 million, according to a Memphis Housing Authority document.

The city’s plan calls for replacing the aging project with a mixed-income housing development like Legends Park, Cleaborne Pointe, University Place, and others. 

The Vance Avenue Collaborative unveiled their alternative plan (called the Vance Avenue Community Transformation Plan) to renovate the Foote Homes complex during a meeting last week at the St. Patrick Center. They believe their plan to save the complex will cost less than the city’s estimates for demolition and building new homes. 

The plan would remove the large fence surrounding Foote Homes to increase pedestrian access to the site and diminish its reputation as a “ghetto,” collaborative members said. New sidewalks would be installed around the campus, which would be rich with new green spaces, according to the plan. 

Rain gardens would catch storm water and hold it to feed community gardens. Residents could eat or sell the produce grown in the gardens, the plan said. More trees would improve the “micro-climate” at Foote Homes. All of this would reduce litter because “the more beautiful the place is, the more we’ll take care of it,” said a voiceover in a 15-minute video describing the plan last week.

Backyards would be made semi-private. Each residential unit would get its own front porch, and they would be made larger than the existing shared porches. Walls would be painted. Mold would be scraped. Windows and screens and doors would be replaced. And it all comes with a price tag of $63 million. 

“Our plan starts with the assumption that Foote Homes is not a problem to be eliminated but an incredible asset that could be even more positive and more uplifting with a little bit of work,” said Kenneth Reardon, a collaborative member and University of Memphis planning professor who has been working on the alternative project for years.

Should the city’s plan move forward, current Foote Homes residents would be forced to move before demolition begins. And they won’t be invited back to the development once it reopens. Instead, current residents will be given a Housing Choice Voucher (formerly known as a Section 8 voucher) for housing assistance, which will allow them to move into mixed-income or private housing located all over the city. 

“If [Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.] were alive today, with all the displacement we’re seeing from the other housing projects, especially given that he was assassinated in Memphis, how would he feel about that?” asked collaborative member Gil Carter III.

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News The Fly-By

Crosstown Building Project Kicks Off with Block Party

For 17 years, the Sears Crosstown building has sat vacant, casting its gloomy shadow over the historic Midtown neighborhoods surrounding the 1.4-million-square-foot former Sears warehouse and retail store.

But on Saturday, February 21st, a community groundbreaking party will celebrate the construction that officially began on January 1st to transform the former Sears headquarters into a lively “vertical urban village” of medical offices, arts amenities, residential housing, and retail space.

And with a new focus for the building comes a new name. The partners in the Crosstown redevelopment project will be dropping Sears from the building’s name and announcing a new name at the groundbreaking party.

Artist rendering of the Crosstown redevelopment

“Everyone referred to the building as Sears Crosstown, but Sears is long gone,” said Todd Richardson, associate professor at the University of Memphis and co-leader of the redevelopment project. “We wanted the building to have its own identity and branding based on what’s going to be happening there.”

When Richardson and his partners started planning for the building’s redevelopment five years ago, the neighborhood around the building, which was called Crosstown in Sears’ heyday, had all but lost that identity.

“The name Crosstown had fallen off the map for most Memphians, and people didn’t even know where the neighborhood was,” Richardson said. “All of the events [put on by Crosstown Arts] — the lectures, the concerts, the MEMFeasts, the exhibitions — were a way to draw people back to the area and recognize its true potential.”

Since Crosstown Arts launched in 2010, Richardson said it has been successful in rebranding the neighborhood as Crosstown and rebuilding the community.

He says the block party, which will run from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in and around the triangle park between North Watkins and Cleveland, is intended as a way to thank the Crosstown community and the building’s founding partners and financial backers.

Besides the name-change announcement, the party will include an iron pour by the Metal Museum. They’ll be on-site melting down iron from old radiators taken out of the Crosstown building. Additionally, there will be live music, beer, and food trucks.

The founding partners — Church Health Center, Crosstown Arts, Gestalt Community Schools, Memphis Teacher Residency, Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, and ALSAC/St. Jude — are moving all or part of their offices into the building when it’s complete in early 2017.

A mix of 21 different funding sources, including public, private, and philanthropic, totaling more than $200 million have made the project possible.

“I don’t know if the general public knows that the financing is fully secured, and we are well on our way to having this building renovated and revitalized,” said McLean Wilson, principle of Kemmons Wilson, Inc. and co-leader of the Crosstown Development Project. “The ‘if’ question is no longer on the table.”

Since early January, about 300 construction workers have been on-site each day, many of them currently working on replacing the mortar between every brick in the building. Richardson said, when construction reaches its peak in about a year, there will be 900 to 1,000 workers on-site each day.

Once the building is complete, they expect 3,000 people — medical professionals, teachers, office workers, and residents — coming and going from the building daily. And those people will need places to eat and shop. Richardson said the development team is beginning to turn their attention to filling the retail spaces on the ground floor.

“We have about 60,000 square feet of retail left to lease. We envision a couple of restaurants, a coffee shop, maybe a small footprint grocer. We’ve got some pretty special retail space along the loading dock and what will be the main plaza,” Richardson said. “We’re excited to have the creative folks in Memphis come up with much better ideas than we could ever think of.”