Month: July 2015

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1375

Verbatim

“They hijacked the civil rights movement and say it’s the same thing, but it’s not the same thing.” — Memphis pastor Bill Owens, founding president of the Coalition of African-American Pastors, explaining why he opposes same-sex marriage. Owens is encouraging religious leaders to engage in civil disobedience to protest the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling. “When we sat at the counters at restaurants, we knew we were going to be arrested. You do things to get arrested, to call attention to it,” Owens said.

In related news, Charles Lee was released on probation after sending a slur-filled bomb threat to the Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center and decorating his delightful missive with a German swastika. Authorities had hoped to charged Lee with a hate crime, but charges were reduced because Tennessee’s anti-intimidation laws cover race and religion but don’t include sexual orientation.

Hair Loss

We’ve all seen them. The flipped wig. The tumbling tumbleweave. Memphis is a city of feral hairpieces separated from their owners and left to rot in the street like roadkill. Fly on the Wall is reaching out to readers and asking them not to ignore all this senseless hair loss. If you see a lost wig or some lonely extensions, take a picture and email it to the Fly on the Wall blog. We’ll post it in the hopes that we can reunite some good people with their good hair. Send your photos to davis@memphisflyer.com.

Also, if you know whom this hair belongs to, contact Fly on the Wall. We’ll tell you where it was last seen but can’t guarantee a successful reunion, because we’re not touching that.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Community Garden Takes On Kroger

All manner of flowers and vegetables are in full bloom on a piece of land that was once home to the now-demolished Court Manor nursing home on Court Avenue in Midtown. But the people behind the Washington Bottoms Community Garden are worried about the garden’s future.

Kroger is currently looking at the lot where the garden sits — 1414 Court — as a potential buy, and the garden’s advocates worry that if Kroger buys the land they’ll be forced to clear out.

The garden is run by Homeless Organizing for Power and Equality (H.OP.E.), an advocacy group for people experiencing homelessness. The group falls under the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center’s umbrella. Earlier this month, the H.O.P.E. Garden Crew launched an online petition to show Kroger their objection to being bulldozed.

Washington Bottoms community garden

Kroger recently purchased 18 acres of vacant land in Washington Bottoms, across the street from its Crosstown store, for $3.9 million. Kroger told the Memphis Business Journal in April that they had no immediate plans for that land but rather were just investing in the area in anticipation of the opening of Crosstown Concourse in 2016.

The community garden’s land was not included in that sale, but Kroger is considering buying it from Cushman & Wakefield for $585,000.

Teresa Dickerson, public affairs manager of Kroger’s Delta Division, said, if they do buy that land, the retail chain has no intention of infringing upon the community garden.

“We have no plans of taking away their garden,” Dickerson said. “Honestly, I was little surprised at the news. … We support what they’re doing with the community garden. They’re very passionate.”

Still, proponents of the garden don’t fully trust Kroger, and they worry about the retailer’s long-term plans for the land. They started an online petition to save the garden, and it has just over 300 signatures after being shared on social media. The garden crew also has been circulating a paper petition.

Jamie Young, who works with the H.O.P.E. Garden Crew, said they have been told that a provision to clear the property would be included in Kroger’s contract to buy the land, so the group is being proactive in trying to save the garden.

“[Cushman & Wakefield] has every right to sell the property,” Young said. “We had their blessing, and now that we’ve been tipped off [about the potential Kroger sale], we think that’s wrong.”

Proponents of the garden have tried to get in contact with Kroger, but Young said they are waiting to hear back.

“We are not looking to build on the land right now,” Dickerson said. “It’s just a great area, and we have an investment in that area. We put over $1 million into [renovations at] our nearby Poplar and Cleveland store.”

Young said the garden’s placement has helped improve the neighborhood, especially since the lot was a hotbed of illegal activity before the garden was established in 2013.

Young said that she hopes proponents of the garden have more time for discussion with the company.

“If they’re not developing on the land, then it’s a win-win for everybody,” Young said. “It makes the neighborhood safer.”

Proponents of the garden have even suggested working and partnering with Kroger if those communication lines are open.

“Why don’t they come out and meet us?” Young said. “I think that a lot of folks would jump at the opportunity to buy more local food. We could be part of the greenspace in their development projects. We certainly buy stuff at their stores all the time.”

Categories
News The Fly-By

Study Analyzes Love/Hate For Memphis

The honeymoon phase is over, and it’s time for Memphians to consider their long-term relationships with the Bluff City.

That was the basis for “Let’s Stay Together, Memphis: Relationship Therapy for the City and its Citizens,” a recently released study by the University of Memphis Design Collaborative (UMDC) that asked Memphians to consider ways to improve their long-term relationship with the city.

The UMDC hosted an event in March, where the group’s members asked Memphians to write a “tough love letter” to the city. There were 140 people at the event, and an additional 52 people filled out letters online.

The UMDC then compiled and analyzed the responses, which they divided into three categories: things people love about Memphis, things that need to change in Memphis, and where Memphians see their relationship with the city going.

On the top of the love list was the city’s authenticity and character. Several respondents described this as the city’s “grit and grind,” the phrase coined about the Memphis Grizzlies.

Study respondents expressed the most frustration over civic governance. Some said the city’s bureaucracy limits the amount of influence the average person has.

Memphians seem to have a love-hate relationship with the local transportation system. Transportation was number three on the list of most frustrating things, due to the lack of investment in public transportation and the quality of sidewalks. However, people still found things they liked about the transit system, such as its influence on lowering automobile congestion and recent bicycle transit improvements.

The study was the first project for the recently launched UMDC, a collaboration between the University of Memphis Division of City and Regional Planning and the Department of Architecture.

“[The UMDC] is going to focus on community challenges and urban design and community development,” said Charlie Santo, associate professor of the Department of City and Regional Planning. “We really want to bring the idea of comprehensive planning back to Memphis. As a city we tend to take on projects one at a time in this piecemeal fashion, so we want to promote a comprehensive planning approach. But we know that’s not a language that people necessarily relate to. The idea of relationship therapy was a way for us to make it more accessible to a wider audience.”

While the turnout to the March event provided the UMDC with a lot of information, they were disappointed in the lack of neighborhood diversity represented since most respondents lived in Midtown or downtown. To get a wider range of input from people across all neighborhoods, the UMDC will be bringing the project to the streets — literally. In the coming months, UMDC members will be on-site at events in areas not yet represented in their study.

The UMDC will use all of its combined research for this project to set the agenda for graduate city planning courses in the fall.

“I think we probably will start by trying to tackle this transportation issue, having a conversation about that,” Santo said. “[The commission] is going to evolve and unfold over time, but I’m glad that we have the opportunity to tackle this, to set this.”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

A Two-Man Mayor’s Race?

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

As this week’s second-quarter deadline for financial disclosures approached, it was a near certainty that Mayor A C Wharton and City Councilman Jim Strickland would lead the rest of the field in funds received by a large margin. The Memphis mayoral contest could not yet be considered a two-man race, but both candidates had defining moments that set them apart.

The horrific events in Charleston, South Carolina, two weeks ago, still resonated and cried out for a dramatic response — in Memphis, no less than elsewhere in an outraged nation. To give him credit, Wharton had provided one last week when he proposed to end a long-simmering controversy and demanded the removal from what is now Health Sciences Park a statue of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest mounted on his warhorse, as well as the graves of the general and his wife.

The statue, which had stood in that prime downtown acreage for a century, would be remanded to the custody of the presumably still-extant Forrest Monument Association, which had originally placed it there, and the remains of the Forrests could be returned to Elmwood Cemetery, the vintage resting place from which they had long ago been disinterred and transplanted to the Union Avenue site.

It would not do, said Wharton, for African-American children to picnic in the shadow of a man who had been accused of numerous offenses on the wrong side of history, including pre-Civil War slave trading, an alleged massacre of black Union troops during the war, and the post-war founding of the Ku Klux Klan. 

At the moment of the mayor’s announcement, he appeared resolute and forceful and, most important, sincere. He had caught the spirit of the moment, it seemed, and there seemed to be little downside. Public reaction to the name changes of Forrest Park and two other Confederate-themed parks in 2013 had ranged from enthusiasm to acceptance, with resistance largely confined to memorial societies — such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organization that many thought had precipitated that crisis and broken a tenuous truce with an indiscreetly bold (and unauthorized) granite sign proclaiming the name “FORREST PARK.”

The mood of two years ago was nothing compared to the universal revulsion, in Memphis as everywhere else, that came in the aftermath of the horrendous murders of nine African-American members of a bible-study class by a deluded fanatic who wrapped himself in Confederate imagery. The feeling was summed up in a single word: enough!

That African Americans, in particular, could be expected to back the mayor’s action was a given — though it would surely be wrong to suggest that dividends at the polls on October 8th constituted a significant motive. In any case, Councilman Strickland, widely considered Wharton’s main opponent, wasted no time in conferring his approval of the mayor’s proposal. “I’m for it!” he said decisively, just before making something of a watershed speech last Thursday at Overton Square’s Zebra Lounge at a meet-and-greet that targeted black voters.

Jackson Baker

Jim Strickland at Zebra Lounge

Could Strickland, well-financed and known to be strong along the Poplar Corridor and in recently annexed suburbs like Cordova, garner enough African-American votes in a majority black city to be elected? Jerry Hall, the veteran black operative who introduced Strickland at Zebra Lounge, raised the question rhetorically and then answered it: “Hell, yes!” Memphis needed to move beyond issues of race, said Hall. “We need a new direction in City Hall.”

In his speech, Strickland laid out his most detailed recipe yet for that new direction. “We have a tsunami of a challenge on the horizon,” the challenger said, and he gave it a name: population loss. Strickland promised to reverse an exodus that had accounted for a net loss of 12,000 residents in the first decade of this century, despite annexations. He would be a “strong mayor who will run an efficient and effective city government.”

Strickland proposed a three-pronged strategy for establishing and maintaining a safe, clean, and desirable place for people and businesses: 1) drastic reduction of violent crime through resurrection of Blue Crush policing of trouble spots and “zero tolerance”; 2) elimination of blight and repair of infrastructure; and 3) strictly holding officials accountable.

If all that sounded a bit abstract, Strickland floated some new specifics: a privately supported fund that would help allay the costs of expunging criminal records of citizens resuming productive lives; a residential “PILOT” program granting tax breaks for people undertaking urban infill; and publication of city administrators’ performance records.

A bit technocratic, perhaps, but it expanded on Strickland’s reputation as a budgetary maven and gave him a larger theme of general competence to juxtapose against Wharton’s undoubted flair in using his mayoral bully pulpit.

There was still time for other candidates — notably Councilman Harold Collins, County Commission chair Justin Ford, and Memphis Police Association head Mike Williams — to make a move, but with every passing week, the bar gets moved a little higher.

• Meanwhile, the sheer drama of successive news-waves — abetted by a pair of U.S. Supreme Court decisions — kept shifting public attention. The sense of a racial crossroads lingered, but a court decision in King v. Burwell eliminated a threat to the Affordable Care Act and highlighted local and statewide efforts to revive Governor Bill Haslam‘s so-far-stymied Insure Tennessee plan. These included a showcase press conference in Raleigh featuring state Democratic Party chair Mary Mancini with legislative Democrats and local health-care advocates.

And the LGBT community had its rainbow moment, basking in a second SCOTUS decision legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states, and given further mainstream momentum via the endorsement of President Obama, who, having articulated the nation’s outrage and sorrow over the horror in Charleston, was having a major moment himself.

Governor Haslam came to town on two occasions: on Friday to grace the opening of a new Nike distribution center, and on Monday to announce a half-million-dollar grant for tech training and to help Youth Villages celebrate successes in its work with former foster youth.

During both visits, the governor made it clear that he intended to push ahead with Insure Tennessee (though not with an immediate special legislative session) and that the state would comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage. His reluctance on the second score, however, was underscored on Monday with a statement supporting “protection” of pastors who opt out of performing same-sex ceremonies for religious reasons.

Haslam endorsed the idea of removing a bust of General Forrest from the state capitol and said he saw no impediment to Wharton’s plans for Health Sciences Park. Others noted, however, that state law seemed to contain obstacles to the removal of the graves without the express permission of the Forrest family, and state legislation passed in 2013 on behalf of war memorials may complicate any attempt to remove the general’s statue.

“We’ve got lawyers working on it,” Wharton said on Saturday when asked about such obstacles during a drop-in at a Democratic Party breakfast at the IBEW building on Madison.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Fireworks Ahead

This issue of the Flyer precedes a 4th of July weekend, and the revolutionary impulses that attended the birth of this nation 239 years ago will be symbolically re-enacted in thousands of fireworks shows across the country and here in Memphis.

This time of year has often witnessed turbulent, world-changing events — the American declaration of independence and the start of the French Revolution, both in July, being only two of many. And the period leading up to this year’s observance of Independence Day has certainly provided an astonishing sequence of political fireworks.

Whatever deluded impulse provoked a young racist assassin to gun down nine innocent African Americans in a church two weeks ago in Charleston, South Carolina, his unspeakable action generated nationwide grief and outrage and an apparent determination to do away with the remaining barriers to some form of racial reconciliation in this country. That would seem to include the physical vestiges of nostalgia for the Confederacy, at least in places of official sanction. And for those among us, many good of heart, who find this thought unbearable, let us merely point to the extraordinary transitions that have occurred in recent years at the University of Mississippi, which has managed to divest itself of such outmoded symbolism with no great loss to local pride or alumni loyalty.

Simultaneous with this development has been a landmark Supreme Court decision upholding the recognition of same-sex marriage throughout the 50 states. It is fair to say that no prior ruling of the court, not even its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision mandating desegregation of schools, has had the transformative effect that is implicit in Obergefell v. Hodges, with its stripping away of long-standing stigma.

And, though it was destined to be overshadowed in pyrotechnic intensity, the Supreme Court’s ruling one day earlier in the case of King v. Burwell may have long-range consequences just as lasting as any of the aforementioned by quashing a technical and pedantic challenge to the Affordable Care Act.

“Obamacare Cheats Death Again” was the headline of an emailed lament to his constituents this week from state Senator Brian Kelsey of Germantown, who has been in the vanguard of the legislative effort to forestall the ACA in this state, including Insure Tennessee, the Medicaid-expansion proposal by Governor Bill Haslam to channel billions of dollars into the state for the relief of Tennessee’s financially beleaguered hospitals.

Kelsey’s text, wherein he vowed to fight on legislatively, conceded it would do no good “to continue to file lawsuits” against the ACA. Kelsey and other opponents of the ACA such as Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, may delay the inevitable, but Obamacare would seem to be here to stay.

And that’s yet another of the several revolutions that are under way as of July 4, 2015.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

County Commission Unites Across Party Lines to Challenge Authority of Mayor Luttrell

CREDIT: JB

JB

The GOP’s Chism hurls a barb as Democrat Melvin Burgess looks on in apparent approval.

The administration of Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell had, over the last month, fought — and won — a skillful battle with Commissioners of the Mayor’s own Republican Party over the fiscal 2015-16 budget and tax rate.

The Mayor’s preferred $4.37 tax rate was up for a third reading in budget committee Monday — unchanged from this year and lacking the one-cent tax decrease the GOP contingent had, in previous meetings, tried hard to squeeze out of Luttrell’s well-advertised $6 million surplus.

The tax rate sailed through committee this time out, and there were no new objections to the Mayor’s proposed $1.1 billion budget. Instead of the usual stack of stapled-together sheets, Monday’s agenda was confined to a single scanty sheet, so — Done deal, and the war’s over, right?

Wrong.

The final two items of Monday’s committee agenda looked innocent enough on paper.

One was a “discussion” of the administration’s decision to end a 30-year relationship with Nationwide Insurance as handler of county employees’ alternate deferred-compensation retirement plan and to sign a new contract with the rival Prudential company. The other was a resolution by Democratic Commissioner Van Turner authorizing the Commission to hire its own attorney, a la the Memphis City Council, to deal with unspecified special issues.

The two proposals together ate up four hours’ worth of heated discussion, including a lengthy back-door executive session in which the argument was closed to the press.

And this time, unlike the case of the budget/tax rate conflict, the renewed battle saw the entire body of Commissioners present, Democrats as well as Republicans, arrayed against the Mayor. It was an eyeball-to-eyeball power struggle, pure and simple, and, though both sides gave a little, at the end it was the Mayor’s reps who may have blinked.

The matter of a revised contract with Prudential for the county’s 457 plan (as the deferred-compensation, defined-contribution plan is called in official jargon) had been raised by county CAO Harvey Kennedy at last Monday’s regular business session of the Commission, and there had been flak from several Commissioners, who expressed a preference for Nationwide.

But the 457 issue was lost in the shuffle of disagreement and maneuvering over tax-rate/budgetary matters, and things seemed placid enough on Wednesday morning when, at what seemed the tag end of the committee day, an administration review team sat at the witness table and laid out for the Commission’s general government committee a sequence of reasons for changing vendors, including a modest annual savings of some $60,000 in the Prudential plan.

Cascade of objections to new Prudential contract

If Luttrell, Kennedy et al. expected that to be that, their expectations were quickly dashed.

One by one, and regardless of party or their prior positions on the tax-rate-budget matters, the Commissioners present proceeded to question both the administration’s judgment on the 457 matter and its prerogatives.

Nationwide had been a good manager of the 457 plan and a generous ally with county government in various public-private partnerships providing recreational and other services to constituents, GOP member George Chism objected.

The new contract’s provision of office space for Prudential in the Vasco Smith County Administration, a prerogative never offered to Nationwide, invited a “cozy relationship” that was improper, the GOP’s Heidi Shafer objected.

JB

Attorney Koratsky and CAO Kennedy try to hold their own against Commission fusillade.

The administration had not consulted with the Commission on changing the 457 and behaved in a “proprietary” manner, senior Commission Democrat Walter Bailey objected.

In its peremptory behavior, the administration had revealed a very troubling pattern, freshman Democrat Eddie Jones objected.

The way in which the administration juggled numbers to justify a preference for Prudential over Nationwide had been a “work-around” that was “subversive of our accounting process,” Republican David Reaves objected.

“You’ve used the system to make the employees have only one choice,” Republican Terry Roland objected.

Republican Mark Billingsley and Democrat Willie Brooks raised a series of points objecting to specific line-items in the administration’s presentation, and several Commissioners concurred that the administration had not provided a clearly stated opportunity for an obligatory protest period regarding the new contract, nor did it permit sufficient time for such a period before signing the contract with Prudential.

Objection followed objection in a veritable cascade, and an increasingly testy Kennedy, abetted at times by county attorney Ross Dyer and assistant county attorney Kim Koratsky, insisted (correctly, it would seem) that the county charter made contracts the prerogative of the Mayor, that administration assessments of competing proposals were conducted fairly, that a legitimate protest period had been allowed for (though Kennedy could not say how long it had lasted or whether it had expired before the Prudential contract had been signed), and that the Prudential offer was, by however minute a margin, superior to Nationwide’s.

Kennedy’s clenching point, repeated numerous times, was that the arguments raging on Monday were moot: “The contract has been signed.”

Even so, after inviting representatives of Nationwide to testify and hearing them say that their company stood to forfeit at least $260,000 annually (a figure that seemed to attach an ad hoc financial value to the 457 contract), general government committee chairman Van Turner, a Democrat, introduced a resolution that made the case, point by point, that the Prudential contract was potentially “null and void” by virtue of several of its provisions as well as in its omissions.

Foremost of Turner’s contentions was that the 457 contract was a de facto ticket for profits well above a ceiling figure of $100,000 for the vendor, and that the profits derived ultimately from county employees, a fact placing the contract into the category of contractual obligations substantial enough to require Commission approval.

The administration team insisted again that the county charter was clear on the Mayor’s contracting prerogatives and that Turner’s resolution, which was tagged for legal vetting before next Monday’s public Commission meeting, was itself null and void.

Nevertheless, the Commissioners present voted 9-1 to support the Turner resolution, which might or might not turn up for renewed scrutiny on Monday, depending on how the legal vetting goes.

That discussion had taken just short of two hours instead of the 20 minutes originally allotted to it, and the final item of the day, also before the general government committee, concerned the aforesaid resolution allowing the Commission to engage a “special counsel” for limited and specific matters.

A Separate Attorney to Serve the Commission?

There ensued another robust and protracted discussion of well over an hour in which the Commissioners seemed to coalesce around a conflict-of-interest argument that was stated by Roland this way: “How can one person or entity serve two masters?”

The thrust of that was that, while Dyer and Koratsky insisted that they served the administration and members of the Commission with equal fidelity, the county attorney and his staff, though subject to an initial vote of approval by the Commission, were appointed by the administration and served entirely at the Mayor’s pleasure.

Moreover, said the two county attorneys, the county charter explicitly forbade a permanent counsel of the Commission’s own, though, by comparison, other local government units, including the Memphis City Council and the county Election Commission, were not so constrained.

Ultimately the various principals to the argument agreed to recess to review the legal implications of the Commission-attorney resolution for a Commission in executive session. At some point, between thirty minutes and an hour later, the county attorneys and a handful of Commissioners emerged from the back lounge where the executive session had taken place.

Turner announced that a general agreement had been reached that the resolution was unnecessary and that the Commission already possessed the ability to engage separate legal counsel for specific and limited needs, as indeed it had done when a previous set of Commissioners had hired attorneys to advise and pursue litigation during the school-merger controversy that raged early in the current decade.

Anti-climactic and incomplete as that concord seemed, it was enough to justify an adjournment, with all the arguments and counter-arguments to be either re-enacted on Monday or, conversely, declared resolved.

Whatever comes next, however, Wednesday’s prolonged committee session had brought into the open a long-simmering power struggle pitting the County Commission, as a body, against the Mayor and the county administration, and that struggle has by no means been resolved.

 

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Margarita Festival Champ, and More Memphis Winners

CREDIT: Kendrea Collins

The winner of the first-ever Memphis Margarita Festival was the Blue Monkey. 

Kendrea Collins

Congrats!

The day not only included margarita-swigging but also the cupid shuffle. So, in other words, it was perfect.

• Pyramid Vodka has won yet another award. They recently took home the platinum in the vodka category at the 2015 SIP Awards. 

This is the third award that Pyramid has taken home in the less-than-a-year they’ve been in operation. Impressive. 

Pyramid scored silver at both the Denver International Spirits Competition and the Los Angeles International Spirits Competition, both in the vodka category. 

[jump]

• Phillip Ashley Chocolates won the gold for “Most Unique for Best White Chocolate” at the International Chocolate Salon by TasteTV.

In other chocolate-covered news, Phillip Ashley just launched its 2015 Summer Collection inspired by cake and ice cream. Flavors include Red Velvet and carrot cakes and such ice creams as rum butter pecan and salted caramel gelato. 

Clearly, the best way to eat these chocolates is on top of cake a la mode. 

• Finally, a shout out to Celtic Crossing, which marked its 10th year anniversary weekend. They spruced up the place (new barstools, a re-done bar, and new furniture, etc.) for the occasion and went non-smoking. 

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News News Blog

Council Could Vote on Forrest Statue Removal

Memphis City Council chairman Myron Lowery will ask for a vote next week to remove the statue and gravesite of Nathan Bedford Forrest from Health Sciences Park.

Lowery said he has directed city council attorney Allan Wade to draft an ordinance that would remove the statue and the remains of Forrest and his wife. Lowery said he expects the proposal to be heard in committee on Tuesday, July 7.

“Because of the importance of this issue, I am asking every member of the council to join in co-sponsoring this ordinance,” Lowery wrote to council members Wednesday.

Wade’s ordinance reads liks this:

“Ordinance to transfer ownership of the equestrian statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest and to remove and relocate said statue from the City of Memphis’ Health Sciences Park pursuant to Section 579.1 of the Charter and subject to the provisions of Tennessee Code Annotated Section 4-1-412 (c) and to ratify the February 3, 2013 Memphis City Council Resolution naming Health Sciences Park, Memphis Park and Mississippi River Park.”

Lowery said members of the Shelby County Commission have expressed interest in passing a resolution supporting this proposal.

The move comes nearly a week after Memphis Mayor A C Wharton called for the statue and remains to be moved form the park. That call came after race-fueled murders in a Charleston, S.C. church nearly two weeks ago.

“We are simply saying that there might be a more appropriate place,” said Wharton. “In the case of the flag, put it in a museum. Don’t put it out in common places.
“You see, we all have to drive down Union Avenue. It’s a common, unavoidable place. If someone wishes to see that, then go over to the cemetery in the peace of solitude, tranquility, and reverence and do it there. What Americans would say, I’d like to have a picnic in the shadow Bedford Forrest?”

Categories
Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

Reunite Lost Hairpieces With Their Owners #2

Fly on the Wall has noticed that a lot of people seem to be losing wigs, weaves and toupees. So we’re reaching out to readers and asking them not to ignore this epidemic. If you happen to see a lost bouffant or some lonely extensions, please take a picture and send it to us. We’ll post it in the hopes that we can reunite some good people with their good hair. 

I am sorry to say that we don’t have a whole lot of hope for this week’s unfortunate hairpiece. It was spotted in the parking lot of a Memphis school, and looks as though it may have been in a terrible altercation. It hasn’t been seen since March.

Do you recognize this mess?

If this is your hair or you know who it belongs to please contact Fly on the Wall via comments and we’ll give you all the information we have pertaining to where the hair was last seen.  We cannot promise a successful reunion because, as we’ve said before, nobody wants to touch that.  

Categories
News News Blog

Paint Memphis Working on Large Graffiti Mural in North Midtown

A large graffiti mural, spanning about .3 miles from North Evergreen to Chelsea and painted by more than 70 artists, is adding some color to the floodwall along the Chelsea Greenline.

The mural, a project of the Paint Memphis organization, will be the centerpiece of a July 18th neighborhood festival along the greenline. Festival goers will get an up-close look at the mural, while graffiti artists do a little live painting. There will be food trucks and family-friendly activities.

The Urban Arts Commission is sponsoring the Paint Memphis project along the greenline, and the grassroots arts organization plans to eventually do similar graffiti murals in other areas of the city. They’re hoping the project helps boost acceptance of graffiti as an art form. Once the Chelsea project is done, Paint Memphis members will monitor the wall regularly to ensure objectionable or offensive graffiti isn’t added to the wall. And they’ll keep the trash picked up in the area.

“Giving these artists a palette, time, and materials can help them to find a safe and legal space to showcase their talent,” says Karen Golightly, a Paint Memphis event coordinator and street art photographer. 

The Home Depot contributed 35 gallons of paint for this project, as well as paint sprayers and volunteers.