Month: April 2016

Categories
News News Blog

IKEA Set for Fall Opening

CREDIT: IKEA

IKEA

An artist’s rendering shows those iconic blue panels of IKEA Memphis.

IKEA is on track to meet its fall open date, store officials said Monday, as the installation of the brand’s iconic blue panels begin to go up on the building near Germantown Parkway.

The new Memphis store will be wrapped in those blue panels, which are a unique feature to IKEA stores. Installing them marks a construction milestone, store officials said.

“With IKEA Memphis taking shape and the blue paneling now going up, we continue to be on track for a grand opening this fall,” Lars Petersson, IKEA U.S. president, said in a statement. “We hope to be enclosed fully within several months, and cannot wait to begin transforming the building’s interior to look like an IKEA store as well.”

The Memphis store will be 271,000 square feet with about 800 parking spaces, all built on 35 acres. Once complete, the store will feature nearly 10,000 items, 50 room settings, three model home interiors, a supervised children’s play area, and a 300-seat restaurant serving Swedish specialties such as meatballs with lingonberries, salmon plates, and some American dishes.

There will also be a “Children’s IKEA” area in the showroom, baby care rooms, and play areas throughout the store. IKEA is also considering on-site power generation for the store.

Construction of the store is expected to yield 500 jobs. Once the store opens, 225 jobs will be created in the store and 60 new jobs will open in the restaurant.

Here are some of the details of IKEA’s impact here from documents released by the Memphis and Shelby County Growth Engine last year:

Total investment: $64.3 million
Estimated first-year sales: $50 million (with annual growth thereafter)
Sales tax revenues: $3.5 million, Tennessee; $625,000, Memphis; $625,000, Shelby County
Jobs: 175 full time, 50 part time
Average annual salaries: workers, $35,500; managers, $40,000-$80,000
Benefits: all employees – healthcare, 401(k) matching, bonus, pension, tuition reimbursement, paid vacation, maternity/paternity leave

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Guess Where I’m Eating Contest 98

A pretty day in Court Square with something good to eat … 

The first person to correctly ID the dish and where I’m eating wins a fabulous prize. 

To enter, submit your answer to me via email at ellis@memphisflyer.com. 

The answer to GWIE 97 is the huevo torta at Maciel’s, and the winner is … Kim Gullett!  

Categories
From My Seat Sports

2016 Grizzlies: Broken and (Finally) Beaten

CREDIT: Larry Kuzniewski

Larry Kuzniewski

A few weeks ago, I stopped my colleague Kevin Lipe in a hallway of our office building. And I asked him to — without pausing — name the Memphis Grizzlies’ current eight-man rotation. He grinned (slightly), looked to the floor in concentration, and proceeded to recite the following: “Ray McCallum, Tony Allen, Matt Barnes, JaMychal Green, Ryan Hollins, Lance Stephenson, Xavier Munford, Jarell Martin.” You’d think Kevin has a blog on the subject, maybe a podcast.

Injuries are never an excuse in professional sports. Until they are. Despite suiting up a team that required a program, literally, to identify over the final two months of the 2015-16 season, the Grizzlies extended the franchise’s streak of playoff appearances to six. Furthermore, Memphis is one of only three NBA teams to enjoy winning seasons the last six years. (The others — San Antonio and Oklahoma City — have a combined half-dozen future Hall of Famers.)

The team’s All-NBA center, Marc Gasol, played his last game on February 10th. Mike Conley — among the NBA’s top ten point guards — played his final game on March 6th. Even the man tasked with supplementing the overworked Conley’s role — Mario Chalmers — went down with a season-ending malady (March 9th). After Conley’s injury, the Grizzlies (counting the playoffs) won five games and lost 19. Twelve of the losses were by margins greater than 10 points. These were not the grit-and-grind Griz an entire region has embraced as a cross-culture bond. These weren’t even the lovable losers we accepted as our own way back in 2001. (Where was Jason Williams? Where was Nick Anderson, for crying out loud?) Ask an artist to paint a landscape without the colors green or blue. Ask a novelist to complete her book without the letters “a” or “t.” These were our Grizzlies, 2016 postseason edition.

Injuries can change the fate of a franchises (and an entire league). Hall of Fame-bound David Robinson hurt his knee early in the 1996-97 season and his San Antonio Spurs face-planted to a record of 20-62, bad enough to earn them the draft-lottery ball that turned into Tim Duncan. (A franchise then known as the Vancouver Grizzlies lost six more games than the Spurs and landed the immortal Antonio Daniels with the fourth pick.) The Spurs have won five championships and at least 50 games every full season since. Perhaps the Grizzlies’ true misfortune this past season was not losing Gasol (and/or Conley) early enough. There will be no lottery savior for the Grizzlies, not that a Tim Duncan exists in this year’s draft pool.

This offseason will be the most agonizing in years for Griz Nation. Conley’s tender Achilles heel will surely lower his price tag on the free-agent market. With his longtime partner in crime, Gasol, facing a steep climb back just to wear a Grizzlies uniform — let alone contend for All-NBA honors — is Memphis the best place for Conley’s professional future? Zach Randolph and Tony Allen — the other members of “Mount Grizzmore” — are another year older. Are we closer to Matt Barnes being the face of this franchise? Will Kevin Durant even glance at FedExForum as he considers his future workplace? Too many questions — and too heavy — to answer this soon after the lights were turned off (for good) Sunday.

At the end of every season, the Grizzlies hang an official team picture in a hallway leading to the practice court at FedExForum. The picture features coaches, the training staff, and typically 12 to 15 players in uniform. How (and when) could that picture be taken for the 2015-16 season? It would feature roughly half the contributors to this distinct (if painful) campaign. The Grizzlies’ 12th most-active player — Ryan Hollins — played all of 32 games (412 minutes). But he belongs in the picture, right? However the photo is framed, apply a bandage to one corner. For posterity.

Categories
Beyond the Arc Sports

The End of the Road: Spurs 116, Grizzlies 95

CREDIT: Larry Kuzniewski

Larry Kuzniewski

The Grizzlies fell to the San Antonio Spurs 116-95 yesterday afternoon, completing an 0-4 sweep at the hands of the Western Conference’s 2nd-seeded team—the third time the Spurs have eliminated the Grizzlies from playoff contention, all of them sweeps. The short-handed Grizzlies won the second quarter of the game—a rare feat in this series—and went into the locker room at halftime trailing by only two points, but in the third quarter, the Spurs realized what was up, knew they only had to play their basketball for one quarter to put the game out of reach, and did exactly that, outscoring the Grizzlies 37-21 in the 3rd. From there on, the final frame was mostly a formality.

I’m not sure what sort of in-depth analysis of these games or this series can even be done. The Grizzlies were missing several of their best players, barely led at all in the series (though they did, especially in the games at FedExForum). They never really had much of a chance to even win a game, and yet… they came out and fought for it. Against impossible odds that turned out to actually be impossible. It was a long-time-coming end to one of the most fraught and frustrating seasons the Grizzlies have had in a long time, maybe going back to the year before the Pau Gasol trade. And yet, that team had ten fewer players see game action through the course of the year.

I’ll have more to say about the year as a whole, what it meant, and what the Grizzlies have to do going forward—there’s a lot to be said about that—but for now, let’s give the Spurs series a proper sendoff.

Five Thoughts

Larry Kuzniewski

★ Knowing something is inevitable doesn’t mean it’s fine when it comes. I knew in my heart of hearts that the Grizzlies probably wouldn’t win a game in the series—but they almost pulled it off in Game 3, and in Game 4, they were playing well in the first half by following the same template: hitting shots when they could, forcing the Spurs into hasty decision-making, hounding them on defense, keeping them on their heels. The Spurs were winning, but not by much, and it seemed like if the Grizzlies could just keep them discombobulated enough that they couldn’t make their big run, the Griz had a chance to steal a home game and make it a Gentlemen’s Sweep.

That didn’t happen. Instead the Spurs came out and did some Biblical “the Grizzlies will strike your heel and you will crush their heads” stuff, putting the Grizzlies in a blender and turning them into a pulp in the third quarter. It was the first time and only time in the whole series that the Spurs looked like the efficient basketball dream destroyers that they are, fully engaged and playing like they meant it, and the Grizzlies just had no answer for it. And how could they? Their hopes rested on Zach Randolph (who was limping around by that point) and Vince Carter and Matt Barnes—who are great role players, but the two of them aren’t going to beat the Spurs by themselves.

I was taken aback by the quickness with which the Spurs punted the Grizzlies into the offseason in that quarter. I had a suspicion it was coming, but when it did, I was still deflated by it—no mean feat in a season full of such deflations at the hands of decent-to-good teams.

Larry Kuzniewski

Lance Stephenson set a new career playoff high.

★ Lance Stephenson is a warrior. And I don’t mean the Golden State kind. Stephenson set a new career playoff scoring high with 26 points on 11 of 19 shooting. He was the only guy on the floor who could make the Spurs’ defense react to him instead of going through the same pre-schemed motions of denial and double teaming (like they’ve been doing to Zach Randolph for years. “Oh, yeah, you’re going to your left hand? We know”). Lance was everywhere, trying to put the team on his back, and in the first half, he almost did it.

I don’t know whether Lance will be on the Grizzlies next year. But whether he is or not, despite all of the questions about his head and his heart when the Grizzlies traded for him, he turned out to be a very polarizing and sometimes breathtaking player who also sometimes does the dumbest possible thing at the worst possible moment, but who never did anything but try to win basketball games for a team that desperately needed his help.

Whether he stays in Memphis or not, I’ll never question whether Stephenson can make it in the league again. In the right situation, properly motivated and kept in check by an established locker room culture, I think he can still be great. I enjoyed watching him this year—he’s always entertaining, even when he’s not making good decisions, but in the Spurs series he seemed like the only guy whose natural abilities made them work for it.

★ I was surprised by Joerger’s emotional postgame presser. Here’s the video, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet:

In a season where Joerger has sometimes seemed at odds with how his team was contructed (especially early on), to see him at the end of a long, brutal slog through this season, overcome by emotion when thinking about his team and their refusal to quit even when it seemed like there was no way they’d hang in to make the playoffs is something I won’t soon forget.

Larry Kuzniewski

A Visit from the Spoon Squad

This season was emotionally draining for me, and I was just watching and writing about these guys. I wasn’t with them in all of the practices and meetings, all the meals on the road, all the shootarounds, halftime speeches after watching somebody else leave with something broken, flights back to Memphis with somebody else in a walking boot. If it was hard for me to watch, I can’t imagine how much harder it must have been for the guys who were going through it (and still are, now that Jarell Martin’s foot thing has flared back up). Joerger’s reaction to the end seems to reflect the same pride and determination that the team has carried itself with ever since the trade deadline, when the “Goon Squad” started as a conscious decision to be positive about trades that shook up the rotation pretty majorly on a team that had only recently started to find its footing.

You can only carry on for so long in the face of crushing odds and inevitable decline. Once the Grizzlies got to the Spurs series, there was no way forward. To have that be over, and to know that most of the guys on this team will never play in a Grizzlies uniform again—Barnes, Andersen, and Farmar almost certainly won’t, Lance Stephenson has a team option that probably won’t get picked up (though that doesn’t mean he won’t be back), Hairston definitely won’t (though he got a DNP-CD in Game 4, so who’ll notice?), and the team has a decision to make about Vince Carter, too—has to be tough for a guy who has worked extremely hard to keep them together.

I don’t know that Joerger deserves as much credit as people are saying for the way the Grizzlies played down the stretch—I think a lot of that came from the players on the team, the way they carry themselves, and who they are—but I do think he’s done a good job in impossible circumstances, and I can’t imagine how bittersweet it must be to know that (1) your team didn’t get it done and there was nothing you could do about it and yet also (2) it’s finally over.

★ This was really two seasons. One before the trade deadline, and one after. More to come on that, but the stretch run injury-pit Grizzlies were qualitatively and quantitatively different from the Jeff Green/Courtney Lee/Marc Gasol team. Just wanted to put that thought out there so I can talk more about it later.

★ The Spurs never really played well. Except for spurts at the end of quarters, the Spurs never really looked like the world-beaters they were in the regular season. I’m not sure how much of that is actually because they played badly, and how much of that is because they knew they could sweep the Grizzlies mostly on autopilot, but either way, they’ve got to straighten that out if they’re going to advance. It was hard to tell whether Tim Duncan is finally showing his age or just coasting at 65% because he knew he didn’t need to work any harder than that. I guess we’ll find out.

Tweet of the Night Afternoon

Joerger cut his press conference short after he got so emotional, because he didn’t feel like he had anything else to say. As folks started milling about after Joerger left:

Up Next

Exit interviews and the draft, I guess. It’s going to take a while to digest this whole season, but that process starts today with the final media availability.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Miles Ahead

Don Cheadle’s performance in 2004’s Hotel Rwanda is one of my all-time favorites — and by “favorite,” I mean “he reduced me to a shivering mess stewing in a puddle of my own tears.”

Cheadle’s been working regularly the last few years as War Machine in the Marvel Universe — you’ll see him taking sides in Captain America: Civil War this summer. He does a fine job, but let’s face it, an actor of his skill is meant for better things than the Marvel C-list. Now, 12 years after Hotel Rwanda, he has another iconic performance in a role he created for himself.

Miles Davis, the architect of bebop, towers large in the history of 20th century music. His cultural influence is so deep, it’s sometimes hard to perceive. After all, his 1949 album Birth of the Cool is one of the reasons we still use “cool” as a positive adjective. He has never had a biopic, because his mercurial personality and extreme appetites made him a hard figure to get a handle on. How can you sum up such a huge personality in a two-hour movie?

Cheadle’s been trying for a decade to bring Davis’ story to the screen, ambitiously, not only taking on the role of the legendary musician, but also making his directorial debut at the same time. The struggle and time invested has paid off big time with Miles Ahead.

Wisely, the film does not try to outline Davis’ entire, eventful life, nor does it, like Walk the Line, focus on the artist’s most productive creative period. Instead, we meet Davis around 1980 in the middle of one of his famously contentious interviews. The intro, while visually interesting, is my only real quibble with the film. The rest of the movie flashes back and forth between an eventful couple of days in 1978 when Davis ran around New York with Rolling Stone journalist Dave Brill (Ewan McGregor), and the decade-long story of Davis’ relationship with his one true love, his first wife Frances Davis (Emayatzy Corinealdi). These parallel story lines create a perfect couplet of cause and effect, deftly drawing us inside Davis’ point of view. Late ’70s Davis is a self-pitying, cokehead burnout who hasn’t recorded music in years. ’50s Davis is a self-possessed man of fierce talent and laser focus whose self-destructive tendencies are baked into his creative personality. But the intro and outro framing disrupts that symmetry and threatens to derail the blue train before it leaves the station.

Don Cheadle as Miles Davis in Miles Ahead

Once over that minor bump, the film opens up into a rich, deep portrait of a genius worn down by time and trouble. Cheadle doesn’t shy away from the central contradictions of the man. After he is beaten by racist cops on the street outside the Harlem nightclub where he’s headlining, he immediately turns around and demands that Frances give up her promising career as a dancer because she is a woman and it offends his sense of proper gender roles for a wife to work outside the home. This is devastating to Frances and has the effect of poisoning their marriage from there on out, but Davis is as blind to his own sexism as the white cop is to his racism.

Cheadle is an empathetic director of actors, drawing out Corinealdi’s love for Miles and the pain it causes her. At the same time, he and McGregor are in some kind of demented buddy cop movie as they float from a coke dealer’s dorm room at NYU to a back alley shootout with record label heavies. Cheadle’s heretofore unseen directorial skills extend into the visual and conceptual, as he proves in a hallucinogenic climax at a boxing match that recalls Scorsese’s fight scenes in Raging Bull. But the most important element is Cheadle’s titanic acting performance as Davis, which transcends mere imitation to give us a glance of a tortured genius’ inner life. When next we see Cheadle, he’ll be spouting a couple of cheeky lines as part of a too-large ensemble cast of costumed crusaders. With Miles Ahead under his belt, he can cash that paycheck knowing he’s got nothing left to prove.

Categories
News News Blog

UPDATE: Zoo Seeks Help in Finding Sign Vandals

CREDIT: Memphis Zoo

Memphis Zoo

UPDATE:

The paint on the sign was cleaned up by Overton Park supporters on Saturday. 

ORIGINAL POST:

Memphis Zoo officials are seeking help from police and the Greensward protesters to find the person or people responsible for vandalizing the large sign for Overton Park that faces Sam Cooper. 

The sign has three panels advertising the zoo, the Brooks Museum of Art, and the Memphis College of Art.

Sometime Friday or Saturday, red paint was splashed on the the zoo’s panel, which features a panda. Also, the word “no” was scrawled over the words “Memphis Zoo.”

Zoo spokeswoman Laura Doty said Saturday that the action is “a cost and liability to the city and the people who love the zoo and Overton Park.” 

Here’s her statement:

“We are working to clean the sign this weekend, and we hope it does not require reprinting.

“While we work with local authorities to find the responsible parties, we encourage the public and the protestors to help the police identify the perpetrators.

“Threats and vandalism to the Memphis Zoo are a cost and liability to the city and the people who love the Zoo and Overton Park.” 

Categories
Beyond the Arc Sports

Game 3 Next Day Notes: Spurs 96, Grizzlies 87

CREDIT: Larry Kuzniewski

Larry Kuzniewski

Last night, the Grizzlies played a much better game than in the first two games of their first round matchup against the San Antonio Spurs, but they still struggled to execute down the stretch of the fourth quarter, and lost at home to go down 0-3 for the series.

When I talked to Hubie Brown on Thursday, he told me the Grizzlies would have to play a perfect game on Friday to win, and that’s almost what they did. Tony Allen was moved to the starting unit in place of Chris Andersen, giving the Grizzlies a much smaller look than they’d gone with in games 1 and 2, and that contributed to a solid start (which, in this series, means they were only down 8 after the first frame).

Larry Kuzniewski

Led by scoring outbursts from Lance Stephenson and Xavier Munford, though really seven different guys scored points in the frame, the Grizzlies’ second quarter was easily the best they’ve played in the whole series. They outscored the Spurs 25-18 in the second quarter to make it a one point game at halftime. The Spurs never really got their offense clicking last night, and Tony Parker (to pick the most obvious one) really didn’t have a very good game. The Grizzlies defense hounded the Spurs relentlessly in a way they hadn’t in the first two games, and at times, you could tell the crowd started to believe the Grizzlies could win—the energy changed in the building, and it started to feel like a real playoff game instead of a polite appearance to support the team.

The third quarter started a little rough, but the Griz quickly got their feet back under them, and an under-the-weather JaMychal Green made an appearance. Green was listed as probably with the dreaded “flu-like symptoms” before the game, but he fought through it, finishing with 10 points in 13 minutes, a perfect 5 for 5 from the field. Between Green and Matt Barnes making big buckets at crucial points, the Grizzlies finished the third with a 71-70 lead.

Speaking of the third quarter, failed mascot sidekick Natch the Black Bear showed up and ruined the birthday party of Grizz, so Grizz did this to him (and yes, I left out a “from” in this sentence, but I didn’t feel like re-uploading the video):