Month: March 2017

Categories
News News Blog

New Social Services Are Coming to Old Church Health Buildings

CREDIT: Micaela Watts

Micaela Watts

Sr. Maureen Griner and Tracy Burgess of the Dorothy Day House hold a photo of one of three former Church Health properties they will buy and renovate for the families they serve. The mantle behind them showcases families who came in homeless, and left with employment and housing.


Church Health and St. John’s Methodist Church have combined efforts to ensure that the area west of the intersection at Peabody and Bellevue will remain dedicated to social services, following the departure of Church Health as the health organization moves to its new location in Crosstown Concourse.

For years, Church Health leased their buildings from St.John’s for a substantially low cost. Ahead of the anticipated move, St. John’s and Church Health made a decision.

Rather than yielding their midtown properties to the market, the church has instead opted to lease their buildings to two social service organizations, the Dorothy Day House (DDH) and Alliance Healthcare Services.

Church Health’s director of communications, Marvin Stockwell, said the decision to make their properties easily attainable to the two organizations was calculated and intentional.

“We’ve had an internal working committee for three to four years, and we want to leave this corner dedicated to the common good,” said Stockwell. “We didn’t want to just leave it to market forces.”

The committee Stockwell refers to was comprised of St. John’s, Church Health, and Methodist LeBonheur Healthcare, and representatives from each organizations spent a year determining the best uses of the property by researching Memphis’ greatest needs. Their research produced three focuses to address; food security, women and children, and behavioral health.

St. John’s already runs a food service ministry, but behavioral health and services for homeless women and children still remained.

“Obviously helping the homeless is a huge need in Memphis. And, behavioral health especially needs to be addressed,” said Stockwell, who noted that he believes that behavioral health as a public need is just now starting to come to the forefronts of people’s minds. 

As a not-for-profit behavioral health treatment center, Alliance is one of the few such facilities in Shelby County to accept TennCare, therefor one of the few options for low-income individuals seeking help for substance abuse or mental illness, or both.

Alliance will move into Church Health’s clinical space fairly soon, according to Stockwell.

DDH, an independently funded organization that helps transition homeless families back into society, will slowly acquire and remodel three Church Health properties, one house at a time as funding allows.

Their current facility has the capacity to help three smaller families simultaneously. In the ten years that DDH has been operating out of a large residential house in Midtown, 45 families have graduated to permanent housing and jobs. If DDH expands by three houses, ten more years could see hundreds of families transition to stability.

The house’s executive director, Sr. Maureen Grinter, said that since the organization is solely funded by individual donors and no federal or state funding, it’s not yet known how long acquiring and renovating the buildings will take.

Stockwell said that St. John’s will hold the buildings for them until DDH is able to raise the funds to buy them.

When thinking about the opportunity and timing of the DDH expansion, Griner references the house’s namesake, who was a social activist and journalist that opened up similar institutions in her lifetime.

“Dorothy Day said, ‘If you put out a pot of coffee, and a pot of soup on the stove, God will take care of the rest.”

Categories
Art Exhibit M

Desmond Lewis’ “Heavy-Laden”

Today is the last day to see Desmond Lewis’ excellent exhibition “Heavy-Laden” at the Fogelman Galleries of Contemporary Art  at the U of M.

Lewis’ work “explores the often-overlooked industrial contributions of African Americans in the construction of the United Stated over time and considers the metaphorical characteristics of the materials used.”

He took time out of his busy schedule to answer some questions for me. Here is part of that exchange.

Dwayne Butcher: Your MFA thesis exhibition is titled “Heavy-Laden” and explores the contributions of African Americans in the construction of the United States. How did you begin working on this project and what kind of research did you do to prepare for the exhibition?

Desmond Lewis: This project is a culmination of a very intimate relationship that I have developed throughout graduate school with steel and most recently, concrete. I make a metaphorical connection with the steel of industrial structures and the industrial labor that African Americans have been apart of in the United States. Steel is important in holding up a building yet it is covered by a concrete façade that has been heavily massaged to appear aesthetically pleasing. Thusly, the viewer fails to realize the importance of that central steel core that is truly holding up the building.

African Americans share a similar type of relationship like steel and concrete of buildings. African Americans have and continue to play an important part in contributing to the industrial construction of the United States yet their efforts are largely unnoticed. My work seeks to carve away at this façade to expose the steel that is crucial to the strength of the column. The intense commitment needed in working with steel and concrete as materials combined with the daily challenges of living as an African-American male in the United States led me to embark on this project. I feel safest in the studio from the racist ideologies of America, so I constantly pushed myself to pure exhaustion in making this work. Research wise, my thesis committee (Greely Myatt, Dr. Earnestine Jenkins, and Dr. Patricia Daigle) directed me to a variety of resources and concepts to prepare me in embarking on this massive scale of this project.

Were there any specific African Americans that you came across in your research that stood out for any particular reason? How did this impact your work?

Not so much specific persons as the general connection that African Americans have had with industrial materials from slavery to the present day. There were several scholars that I looked heavily at for inspiration such as Cornel West, Booker T. Washington, Dennis Dickerson (Out of the Crucible), Douglas Blackmon (Slavery By Another Name), and Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow). All of these scholars have written about or commented on the industrial contribution of African Americans to American society.

How did you first begin working with concrete and steel? Were you working with any tradition art materials before working with the industrial materials used in the exhibition?

Throughout graduate school, I worked with steel, as I love fabrication and the pure physical challenge. Concrete is a fairly recent inclusion in my work. I felt like the steel was missing something conceptually in my work so I started working with concrete. Steel is a traditional art medium in my opinion.

Has working on this exhibition led you to contemporary African-Americans artists who are thinking about the same things you are?

Theaster Gates is probably the closest artist that I can think of that is working on similar issues in a sculptural manner.

Who are other artists that you are looking at currently?

I look at a lot of artists mostly for insight on their process such as: George Smith, Theaster Gates, Melvin Edwards, Richard Hunt, Garry Bibbs, Jane Manus, and Bernar Venet.

Your thesis exhibition also includes a public work in the Orange Mound community. How did this project come about? Was it always thought of as something for your thesis exhibition?

The public work in Orange Mound came about after I completed a project in Soulsville in which I was able to see how a functional sculpture in a minority community could help an area. You can find murals all over Memphis in minority communities, but sculptures aren’t really prevalent in these areas.

While in graduate school, I did a lot of research about the history of Orange Mound and historical importance with African Americans. I felt like I needed to do something sculpturally in the area that is culturally rich but societally oppressed due to a variety of factors. I then met Linda Steele and she helped to make this a reality by finding a space and the finances for this project. It was always thought of as a part of my thesis exhibition as I knew that I wanted to focus on engaging steel and concrete with the community to no longer function as confining mechanisms for African Americans but provides a “value added” component to the community.

How did you get to the University of Memphis, where did you go to undergrad, and how has your time been in the MFA Program?

 I finished undergrad at Tennessee State University. Immediately after undergrad, I started graduate school at MCA and then transferred to the University of Memphis in the spring of 2016. My time in the MFA Program has been life changing. I have had the chance to travel all over the country to attend conferences and exhibit numerous gallery and outdoor works. Additionally, I’ve been fortunate to work with some very amazing companies and organizations that ended up sponsoring my MFA Thesis Exhibition. The companies that sponsored my exhibition are West Memphis Steel, Orange Mound Gallery (Linda Steele and Paul Thomas), Tennessee Sling Center, Razorback Concrete, Williams Equipment and Supply, and MCR Safety.

What are your current short-term and long-term plans now that you are about to graduate?

I’m headed to the National Conference on Contemporary Cast Iron Art and Practices in Birmingham, Alabama, in a couple of weeks. I’m giving a presentation, exhibiting in the student exhibition, and competing in the Student Cupola Contest at the conference. After that, I received a scholarship to go to Haystack School of Crafts in Maine. I’m still searching for teaching jobs as well. The main focus of my work for at least the next year will be public sculptures for low income and minority areas. I plan to continue to exhibit a lot so that takes a lot of time with travel. As of March 1, 2017, I was in 6 shows, so I hope to hit my goal of 15 shows this year. I have only taken 2 days off from my practice in the last 4 years so I don’t anticipate me slowing down anytime soon. Also, I am working on finding a space to build a studio in Memphis where I will build my large-scale work. Even if move to get a teaching job across the country, I will commute to my large studio in Memphis at least once a month to continue that side of my practice. Long term, I’m only 23 so I’ll keep my options open.

What is it about Memphis that makes you want to have a studio here, even if you may leave for a teaching gig?

I think there is a lot potential in Memphis to do some great sculpture in underserved areas. Memphis also provides me with the opportunity to hire younger people that might have really challenging home situations to teach them new skills that may provide them with a new outlook on life. The city of Memphis is also centrally located to a lot of major cities within an 8-10-hour drive and is only 3 hours from Nashville where my major steel processor and family are. The central location of the city is fairly important to the continuation of my large scale sculpture practice.

Images Courtesy of the Artist.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Power Rangers

The endless parade of toy commercial cartoon nostalgia reboots has reached the 1990s. That’s a kind of progress, right?

Anyway, if nothing else good comes out of the Power Rangers movie, at least I learned a new word. (Yes, dear reader, I do research. Shocking, I know.) The word is tokusatsu, a Japanese term that literally means “special filming.” It refers to a genre of live-action, effects-heavy fantasy and sci-fi films and TV shows, including the Toho Studios kaiju films from the 1950s and ’60s like Mothra, Ghidorah, and Destroy All Monsters. TV tokusatsu includes Ultraman and the incredibly long-running Super Sentai series, which has been serving up color-coded super-team action since 1975. The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, which became an American kids TV sensation in 1993, was originally an adaptation of season 16 of Super Sentai, which reused all of the original Japanese special-effects sequences with new English-language teen-drama scenes filling in the gaps. (This is the same scam that turned Gojira, a dark, angsty film that recalled the horrors of Hiroshima and the firebombing of Tokyo, into Godzilla, a silly monster movie where Raymond Burr stands around passively watching things blow up.)

One of the defining features of tokusatsu is people in rubber suits playing monsters. For a movie like Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, the man in the suit would go tromping through miniature cityscapes to create the flimsy illusion of a giant monster on the rampage. By the time the 16th season of Super Sentai rolled around, they weren’t bothering with the little buildings any more. The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers usually fought the monster of the week in a quarry, or perhaps a state park. Tokusatsu is all about doing it on the cheap.

It had to happen eventually — the color-coded, high school-aged heroes are back.

If it sounds like I’m making fun of this stuff, well, I am. But it’s respectful mockery. There’s certain integrity in cheap, gonzo monster movies. The appeal of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was all about what outrageous villain our teen heroes would fight each week. From Scorpina, the human-scorpion hybrid, to Lokar, the floating blue demonic head, the poor saps with no budget tasked with creating increasingly weird rubber suits carried the show for a decade.

Sadly, in this, the third Power Rangers movie, the crass exploitation is in full effect, but the anything-goes spirit is nowhere to be found. Our color-coded heroes are played by moderately priced TV actors, or, in the case of the Yellow Ranger by Becky G., a 20-year-old YouTube star. At least she’s vaguely age appropriate. The Black Ranger, Ludi Lin, is a 29-year-old playing a high school kid. Naomi Scott, the Pink Ranger, is the Jean Grey to Dacre Montgomery, the Red Ranger’s Cyclops, if I may mix my super-team metaphors. The only actor to leave any sort of impression is Me and Earl and the Dying Girl’s RJ Cyler as the Blue Ranger, the autistic brainiac whose nighttime excursions to the small town of Angel Grove’s gold mine uncover the alien power coins buried during the Cenozoic era, transforming our Breakfast Club of misfits into all the colors of the wuxia rainbow. Their chief antagonist is fallen Power Ranger Rita Repulsa, played all the way to the katana hilt by Elizabeth Banks. Subtlety was never a Power Ranger virtue, and Banks seems to be the only person on screen who understands how camp works.

After her 65 million-year-old corpse is dredged up from the sea bottom by the Red Ranger’s dad (Angel Grove apparently being that rare town that has both an open-pit gold mine and a deep sea fishing fleet), Rita Repulsa’s plan is to collect enough gold to build her giant monster Goldar and dig up the long dormant Zeo Crystal, a mystical artifact she will use to destroy all life on Earth, or something. In the most brazen act of product placement in recent memory, the crystal is located beneath a Krispy Kreme.

Instead of leaning into the tokusatsu and challenging our heroes with a wide array of modestly budgeted yet totally outrageous monsters, Power Rangers opts for the Marvel Third Act (TM) move of throwing a bunch of identical, grayish cannon-fodder aliens at them. Even Goldar, the boss fight, is a letdown, looking like he was stolen from the virtual set of Gods of Egypt. I know this is exploitation, and that means cheap knockoffs of whatever is popular in the big budget world right now, but I think that fat, Krispy Kreme money would have been better spent putting the stunt men in better costumes. This is not the time for restraint. This is Power Rangers.

Categories
Book Features Books

Otis Sanford’s From Boss Crump to King Willie.

Between the two giant pillars of Edward Hull Crump, the white Mississippian who established an enduring political dominion over Memphis in the early 20th century, and Willie Herenton, the five-times-elected black mayor whose seeming invincibility concluded that century, lies a tumultuous story worth telling.

And Otis Sanford, the former managing editor of The Commercial Appeal and now holder of the Hardin Chair of Excellence in Economic/Managerial Journalism at the University of Memphis, tells it with accuracy and grace in From Boss Crump to King Willie: How Race Changed Memphis Politics, hot off the University of Tennessee Press.

In a way unusual for a work of history, this book reads like a novel — its facts accounted for both in concise summaries of events and circumstances and in key moments that are rendered as scenes.

Among the latter is an account of how a chance encounter in 1991 between then Congressman Harold Ford and the Rev. Ralph White at a Union Avenue video store resulted in White’s church, Bloomfield Baptist Church, becoming the venue for Ford’s long-postponed “summit meeting” to determine the identity of a consensus black candidate for mayor.

Sanford follows up that revelation with choice reportage of the upstairs meeting at the church involving Ford, Herenton, and disappointed contender Otis Higgs while an auditorium of Herenton supporters, whose energetic wall-to-wall presence had basically called the congressman’s hand, waited impatiently in the church auditorium to hear Ford’s inevitable anointment of Herenton as the people’s choice.

Sanford’s book is a textbook case of how to handle the black-and-white realities of Memphis’ political evolution with appropriate shadings of gray. His narrative concludes before the lengthy period, after Herenton’s ascension to power, of the often grim public and private struggles for preeminence between the African-American mayor and the African-American congressman stemming from the implicit rivalry of these two monumental egos.

But that feud, after all, belongs to a different historical era, post-1991, which has been intermittently post-racial. Consider the overwhelming white support for A C Wharton, an African American, first as Shelby County mayor and, in 2009, as Herenton’s immediate successor as Memphis mayor, or Steve Cohen’s serial victories over black opponents in a 9th Congressional District that is at least two-thirds African American in population, and the comfortable win of Jim Strickland, another white, in 2015 over Wharton in a city whose increasingly black complexion is unmistakable.

Consider the consistent ability of white Republican candidates to prevail over black Democrats in all the Shelby County elections that have taken place in the 21st century, a period when the county at large, like the city, has had a majority-black electorate.

From the standpoint of Sanford’s narrative, such anomalies might be regarded as signals of a modus vivendi between the two dominant races, of a political balance of sorts that required both the deconstruction of white supremacy and the liberation and triumph of an erstwhile black underclass. A viable new order may somehow have been achieved, though undeniable inequalities of various sorts persist and just plain differences endure.

Sanford’s story is one of transformation — from an urban landscape under the domination of Crump, a de facto plantation boss whose quasi-benevolent attitude toward a black population enabled both his own immediate power and the stirrings of that population’s own ultimate abilities and ambitions.

The giant-sized convulsions that belong to the intermediate stages of this saga — the strikes and assassinations and political showdowns — are not overlooked. They are covered in satisfying detail, as are the more nuanced encounters between winners and losers in the chess games of our political history.

Sanford, whose astonishing objectivity as reporter and analyst continues to be featured in his weekly columns in the Sunday CA, knows not heroes and villains. His characters, both black and white, are presented with all the roundness and complex motivations they owned as real live people.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Liquor Before Beer …

CREDIT: Draghicich | Dreamstime.com

Last weekend, I did a lot of eating and drinking. I had friends visiting from out of town, and we tore our way through Midtown and downtown with a stop at Andy Ticer and Michael Hudman’s East Memphis enclave for good measure. Drink-wise, I had a Moscow Mule at Loflin Yard, gin and tonics at Second Line, Miller High Life at Earnestine and Hazel’s — followed by whisky shots procured from Nate at the upstairs bar — cups of Budweiser poured from a quart bottle at the Big S Grill and Lounge, and another Moscow Mule at DKDC. There was also wine: a few glasses of pinot grigio served at the Young Collectors Contemporary show at Clayborn Temple and rosé, poured into Mardi Gras cups at a North Memphis recording studio.

Thankfully, all that alcohol was consumed with plenty of food. I never really got drunk and so never really felt hungover, although I was definitely sluggish by the time my company headed to the airport. But I did worry a few times — particularly when those whisky shots showed up at our table at Earnestine’s, too soon after a few rounds of Miller High Life accompanied our Soul Burgers downstairs. The adage “Liquor before beer, you’re in the clear. Beer before liquor, never been sicker” ran through my head, and I eschewed a second shot and went for a glass of water instead.

Draghicich | Dreamstime.com

Scientifically, there are a lot of theories behind the physiological after-effects of mixing alcoholic drinks.

On the group-think question-and-answer website Quora, the opinion is that because hard liquor has much more alcohol per volume than beer, it takes longer for your liver to detoxify the ethanol in your system. If you drink beer first, then switch to vodka, your body is preoccupied with processing the beer, which means that the higher concentrated vodka is present in your bloodstream for a longer period of time. Eventually, of course, it will diffuse through your muscles, fat, and central nervous system, but all that higher-concentrated alcohol causes major dehydration. And because, hey, you’re drunk, you’re more likely to ignore the signals that indicate that you need water.

In her investigation for the BBC’s “Medical Myths” column, journalist Claudia Hammond studied congeners — the non-ethanol substances produced via the fermentation process, such as acetone and tannins. Dark liquors have high levels of congeners; clear liquors like gin and vodka have much lower levels. Like ethanol, congeners have a major effect on hangovers. Add a shot of whisky to that round of beers, and you’re likely to feel the effect the following morning.

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Hammond also astutely observed that hard liquor — particularly shots, be it whisky, tequila, or any other variety — goes down much faster than a bottle of beer. So when you mix drinks, chances are high that you’re consuming more alcohol overall. And, Hammond writes, “The higher the alcohol content, and the faster you drink it, the worse the hangover. … If combining three or four measures of spirits alongside other ingredients, a throbbing head and dry throat is probably just the result of consuming more alcohol in total.”

When The New York Times‘ Anahad O’Connor weighed in on the discussion, he added to the digestive theories espoused on Quora. Carbonation irritates the lining of the stomach, which can increase alcohol absorption rates, O’Connor noted, and therefore, switching from beer to liquor might make you drunker quicker.

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The experts, however, took Hammond’s side. No matter what you drink, according to what NYU gastroenterologist Roshini Rajapaksa told O’Connor, you can get a debilitating hangover if you drink too much of it. Practice moderation, and eat to slow down the absorption process, or you’ll pay the price.

Categories
News News Blog

Gannett Editors Use Same Words, Similar Phrasing in Letters Explaining New Plan

CREDIT: The Tennessean/The Commercial Appeal

The Tennessean/The Commercial Appeal

Depite a promise that The Commercial Appeal would maintain “its strong voice in Memphis,” the paper’s first output after its Gannett “transformation” Wednesday seemed to have corporate fingerprints all over it.

CA editor Louis Graham’s letter from the editor Wednesday explained that a new structure at the paper would allow it to more easily integrate with other Gannett properties in Nashville, Knoxville, Jackson, and more as part of “the USA Today Network – Tennessee.”

He noted the layoffs that came with the new plan. He promised to aggressively expand the paper’s digital content. He also talked about some of the staff changes and that some staffers would remain on their beats.

He talked about the Memphis-based beat focused on diversity issues. Also, that the Knoxville News Sentinel would cover the aftermath of the Smokey Mountain wildfires. Further, he noted that network reporters in Nashville would cover state issues from gun control to education funding.

Funny thing was, though, Graham’s Nashville counterpart, Maria De Varenne, executive editor of The Tennessean, said the same things, using almost the exact same words.

Here’s an excerpt from De Verenne’s letter:

“Digitally, we’ll be providing all of this to you faster than ever, and more comprehensively with in-depth video and other storytelling techniques. Our goal is to provide news and information when and how you want it throughout the day: print, your mobile device, our website, and on social media.”

Here’s an excerpt from Graham’s letter:

“Digitally, we’ll be bringing all of this you more quickly and comprehensively. Our goal is to be wherever you are, which, for so many of our visitors, is on multiple platforms throughout the day: print, your mobile device, our website, and on social media.”

The two editors’ Wednesday letters appear above side by side. The sections marked in green show where Graham and De Varenne used almost exactly the same words to explain the same things, as in the example above. The section in yellow shows where the two diverged, only to explain some details that pertain to their own newsrooms.      

The similarities in the two letters were quickly noted by Memphis media blogger, Richard Thompson, on his Mediaverse blog.

“How stupid does Gannett think its readers are?” Thompson asked on Twitter. “I mean, really. Cut and paste letters from the editor. Seriously? Come on, man!”

[pullquote-1]The similarities in the two letters also got a mention from Memphis Daily News reporter and columnist Bill Dries who noted the two editors explained the changes to reader “in letters that in places used very similar phrasing.”

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Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday Special Thursday Edition: Dead Soldiers

Music Video Monday is on a Thursday and its time to PANIC!

On Friday, March 31 at the New Daisy Theatre, Dead Soliders is throwing a record release party for their third release The Great Emptiness. The band’s electrifying live shows and careful song craft have made them one of Memphis’ favorites, landing them on the Memphis Flyer’s Best of Memphis Best Band list. For the new record, guitarist and vocalist Michael Jasud says, third time’s the charm. ““If you make furniture, is the first table you make going to be the best? No! The last table you make is going to be the best one…If you want longevity, then lightening in a bottle is not the way to go about it. If it happens by accident, that might make a great record, but it doesn’t necessarily speak to the artistry behind it.”

“Prophets of Doom” is is the galloping first single from The Great Emptiness. The band indulges in a little media criticism, calling out the Fox News fearmongers and self-serving propagandists with lines like “We’ve got to keep you scared to keep our jobs.” In the video, directed by Jasud and shot and edited by Joey Miller and Sam Shansky, the band hits the streets to get the wrd out about the dangers of Candy Crush invites.

Music Video Monday Special Thursday Edition: Dead Soldiers

 For more about Dead Soldiers new record, check out the music feature in next week’s Flyer. Meanwhile, I’ll leave with a little more media criticism from Jasud: “I think the modern comic book movie is one of the worst things that’s ever happened to cinema. They’ve made enough of them, they’re using all the money, Hollywood won’t take chances any more, because they can just spend $300 million on an X-Men movie that has the exact same plot as every other superhero movie. I don’t care about aliens destroying the earth any more. I don’t care about ANYTHING destroying the Earth. In fact, I want something to destroy the Earth for real. I don’t want to go to work tomorrow. So I guess that’s why people go to see superhero movies, but I don’t like them, either.”

Preach it, brother!

Categories
Music Music Blog

Chris Robinson Brotherhood at New Daisy Saturday

Chris Robinson, the former bandleader of The Black Crowes and the singer and guitarist of The Chris Robinson Brotherhood, is bringing his band to the New Daisy on April 1st, but before the show, he’s got some other work to do while he’s in Memphis.

“I’m always excited to be in Memphis, always excited to play music,” he says, “but I’m mostly excited to go to Payne’s Bar-B-Que to get a sandwich.” As thrilled as he is to chow down on some Memphis barbecue, though, Robinson has another Bluff City errand to run before the band takes the stage at 330 Beale Street.

“I have a coat that [Donald] ‘Duck’ Dunn gave me years ago that he used to wear on stage with Booker T. and the MGs that I’m going to let the Stax Museum borrow from me,” Robinson says and laughs before continuing, “My kids have seen it, and they’re not impressed.”

Though he was born in Marietta, Georgia, Robinson’s Memphis-soul roots grow deep — The Black Crowes’ first hit was a cover of a Steve Cropper-produced Otis Redding song, “Hard to Handle.” The catchy, raunchy version of the song helped catapult the fresh-minted blues-rock band’s debut album, Shake Your Money Maker, to platinum status on the Def American label.

But if you’re headed to Saturday’s show at the New Daisy, don’t expect to hear the recklessly delivered, Southern-tinged blues-rock of The Black Crowes. Since its formation in 2011, The Chris Robinson Brotherhood has been dishing out a steady stream of California rock. The CRB, as they are often called by fans of the band, let Robinson’s newly penned songs stretch out, gave them room to twist and turn. Robinson and crew had something less polished and more psychedelic on their hands.

The band eschewed the usual channels, declining to sign with a label and instead took their new songs on the road, up and down the West Coast. The Chris Robinson Brotherhood taped their shows and made them available online through their Raven’s Reels series. “I didn’t want to deal with any record companies. I didn’t want to deal with anyone telling us what it was or what it wasn’t going to be,” Robinson says, managing to come across devoid of bitterness, simply a man who knows what he wants. The plan, Robinson continues, was to let the music steer the ship, to forget plans and marketing.

And that plan has yielded results. Given the freedom to experiment (both sonically and with the means for delivering their music to their fans,) The CRB has grown organically, and though their near-constant tour schedule and jam-friendly songs garner them the occasional comparison to the Grateful Dead, the listener can’t ignore the hints of Sly and the Family Stone or a well-traveled air reminiscent of The Band. Really, though, the band sounds like nothing so much as themselves — a group of musicians in their prime, playing the songs they want to play the way they want to play them.

The Chris Robinson Brotherhood released their fourth studio LP, Anyway You Love, We Know How You Feel, in the summer of 2016, and the third volume in their Betty’s Blends live series, Self-Rising Southern Blends, is set to be released on May 5th of this year. The series compiles live tracks recorded and mixed by the famous Grateful Dead archivist, Betty Cantor-Jackson. “It’s not about the money to us,” Robinson says of the series, but about “The sheer idea that Jerry Garcia’s friend and engineer, one of the first women in the industry to be and do what she did and does with those ears” is personally mixing the band’s live album series. “People use Betty’s name in the Grateful Dead,” Robinson adds. “They sell her recordings, and people take credit. It’s kind of nice to take care of Betty.”

Though the band’s music tends to defy easy classification — beyond simply calling it rock-and-roll — the most fitting description seems to be cosmic American music. The Chris Robinson Brotherhood manages to come across as well traveled, but Robinson is too energetic and exuberant to be called road weary. The band draws extensively from American roots traditions, but the electric guitars are featured too prominently to allow CRB to be saddled with the mostly meaningless Americana label. No, cosmic American music seems to fit best. Robinson is a musician that values the journey and the experiences gained, and CRB continues their musical journey, making a stop this Saturday night at The New Daisy Theatre. With four albums and an EP’s worth of material to draw from (as well as an impressive catalogue of covers — seriously, check out their version of Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”), The Chris Robinson Brotherhood is sure to put on a good show.

The Chris Robinson Brotherhood, Saturday, April 1st at The New Daisy Theatre, 8 p.m. $18 – 20.

Categories
News News Blog

Severe Storm Headed toward Mid-South

Thunderstorms with possible damaging winds are expected to hit the Mid-South today starting early in the afternoon, according to the National Weather Service.

Everyone is encouraged to postpone outdoor activities and find shelter before the storm hits.

The Shelby County Office of Preparedness (SCOP) says a basement or underground shelter provide the best protection, but if not available, interior rooms, away from windows, in the lowest level of your home or building is the next best option.

In addition, windows and doors should be secured, electrical appliances unplugged, and plumbing and corded phones should be avoided.

Lastly, it is advised to have an emergency kit ready with essentials such as a radio (battery-powered), extra batteries, helmet, whistle, flashlight, water, non-perishable food items, blankets, and pillows.

SCOP also stresses the importance of staying informed by looking for darkened skies, lightning, high winds, hail, and heavy rains, as well as, listening to radio weather updates and heeding all watches and warnings.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Flat City

A story came out in The Commercial Appeal this week that caused some chatter around local social media networks. The story was about a report from the Census Bureau that said the nine-county Memphis metro area gained a grand total of 888 people in the past year. That’s “growth,” but an intimate kind of growth, the kind where we could invite all the newcomers down to Loflin Yard for drinks or something.

But it’s important to remember that’s not just Memphis, that’s nine counties, our entire metro area. Also relevant is the fact that, nationally, the growth rate for all major metro areas was .8 percent. Sure, there are still cities with higher-than-average growth rates, but the trend, at least lately, has been flat population growth for most American statistical metro areas.

So how does that flat population number square with the boom in development in downtown and Midtown Memphis? People are moving in, obviously, or all these new apartments and condos and old buildings being built out for reuse wouldn’t be happening; all these new restaurants and entertainment districts wouldn’t be getting built. But that growth appears to be, at least for now, a function of these core areas gaining local residents at the expense of other local neighborhoods that are losing them.

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As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the areas that are beginning to show decline are the vast suburban tracts that were created as a result of the area’s suburban sprawl — the housing and development boom in Memphis’ outer reaches that marked the 1990s and early 2000s. It was seen as “growth” when it was happening, but it wasn’t. We got less dense, population-wise, but we weren’t gaining residents; we were just spreading our chips on the table, instead of stacking them. We built new schools, we got new malls, but it was mostly at the expense of Midtown and downtown Memphis, which lost residents. The growth trend now is back toward the urban core, as mall culture is dying and people are seeking community again.

How do we avoid making the same mistake in reverse: building up some areas while leaving other areas fallow and decaying? It will require first recognizing and accepting that we literally have spread ourselves too thin. We don’t have enough people living here to fill all the space in the metro area that we’ve built out and developed. We need to think creatively about how we recreate the inner core, making sure we avoid the mistakes made in developing our outer ring: overbuilt housing, cheap, transitory architecture, and automobile-centric design. And we need to get serious about de-annexing areas that have been complaining for years about having to be part of the city. Let ’em go. See you at the next Grizzlies game.

Development in the Memphis core must be smart, with an eye toward permanence and architectural cohesiveness. We need to be vigilant against overbuilding neighborhoods around entertainment districts or city parks — “pop-up” projects that appear destined to become obsolete in the coming years.

To that end, the proposed apartments at Sam Cooper and East Parkway are a good case study. The developers seem aware of the need to build something that is architecturally in sync with the neighborhood, but concerns have been raised about increased traffic at an already busy and complex intersection, one that serves as the primary gateway to the city from the east. The development’s proximity to the thoughtfully crafted and artistically welcoming eastern entrance to Overton Park is also a matter for consideration.

But controlling ambitious development in the urban core is a good problem for a city to have; certainly better than the alternative. Sometimes, flat is good.