Month: October 2017

Categories
Beyond the Arc Sports

Five Notes on Grizzlies/Pelicans

CREDIT: Larry Kuzniewski

Larry Kuzniewski

The Grizzlies started the season with a win last night, defeating the New Orleans Pelicans 103-91 and creating several new narratives in the process. You can find straight recaps of game action elsewhere—I want to talk about what I think matters from last night.

Five Things

★ Dillon Brooks is for real. He’s going to have bad rookie games, and maybe even more of them than good ones, but last night showed that his preseason performance wasn’t fool’s gold: he’s an NBA player, and most likely sooner rather than later. Last night Brooks got hot and stayed in the game all the way through the end, racking up 19 points, 5 rebounds, 2 assists, 4 steals, and 2 blocks in one of the most impressive rookie debuts by a Grizzly in a long time.

There will be growing pains, of course, and no rookie starts off good and only gets better without some bumps along the way. But Brooks has a confidence about him and a smoothness and ease to his game that make me very hopeful for his future in Beale Street Blue. Last night was a coming-out party for a young guy who is certainly worth watching.

★ This is Mike Conley’s team, still. The playoffs proved it, but last night was another point of evidence. Conley was masterful, with no sign that it was the first real game of the season—he picked up right where he left off in the San Antonio series. The result was one of the quietest 27 points on 15 shots I’ve seen. Conley was dominating the game without looking like it, while the crowd’s attention was focused on other things. One hopes he can maintain this form all year.

Conley’s night was also a stark contrast to Marc Gasol’s. Gasol’s first quarter was bad, he got things going a little in the second half, and then he fouled out. Obviously, the Pelicans’ big man tandem of DeMarcus Cousins and Anthony Davis had something to do with that, especially with Gasol’s new focus on rebounding. But that wasn’t the whole story; Gasol just looked off, as he is wont to do when conditions aren’t perfect. Whether this is a single off night or a bad start to the year remains to be seen, but given the shape Marc is in and that he’s been playing all summer because of Eurobasket, he shouldn’t have those kinds of cobwebs.

Larry Kuzniewski

★ Chandler Parsons finally looked like a basketball player, if only for a little spell. He came in struggling, missed some free throws, got some boos (which Grizzlies fans seem to love doing early in the year to guys who already have shaky confidence, because Memphis remains inexplicable) but—for the first time since signing a 90-whatever-million-dollar contract last summer—he had a stretch where he played well! (Yes! That merits exclamation points!) After the rough start, over a span of a few minutes, Parsons hit a couple of shots, facilitated some nifty plays with drives and kicks, and even played excellent defense on Anthony Davis, which I’m still not sure I believe even though I was present when it happened.

That’s not to say all is well with Parsons, who pretty clearly will never be a third-piece-of-a-big-Three small forward again because he’s just not fast enough anymore. But last night showed promise: even in a diminished role, the Grizzlies would just be happy for him to be productive somewhere in the rotation making things happen, and ultimately he’s probably more reliable than some of the younger guys would be in the same role. Even that seemed like it would never happen again, and last night it did for a little while. Shelve those career obituaries for a little bit longer.

★ The JaMychal Green injury could make things interesting. Green left the game early last night after rolling an ankle pretty badly (which, after the Hayward injury in Boston, made everybody’s stomach a little uneasy until he eventually made it back to his feet and they were still pointing the right direction). If he misses any significant time, it might be Jarell Martin who fills that spot in the rotation, and last night he wasn’t ready for that workload yet.

Granted, I’m going to wait until he’s not dealing with Boogie and AD to make a more solid judgement. New Orleans has issues, but the quality of their starting big men isn’t one of them. But Martin, who played his way back from the brink of being cut by demolishing everything in his path during camp, will have to perform against those kinds of players if he has a future as a starting power forward. We’ll find out, and maybe faster than we would have liked.

★ I remember why I was excited about Brandan Wright. After he struggled with injuries for two straight years, it was easy to forget why the Grizzlies signed Wright in the first place and wish they’d traded his very reasonable contract. But last night, he showed what they signed him for, defending well, making athletic plays at the rim, setting Conley up for pick and roll baskets that no other big on the roster would have facilitated, and more. I hope he can keep it up, because this Brandan Wright makes the Grizzlies better, much faster and more athletic, and more fun to watch.

Tweet of the Night

Five Notes on Grizzlies/Pelicans

Up Next

The Warriors, Saturday night. But we can talk about that more tomorrow; for now, let’s bask in the glory of a promising start to the year. My season preview went out in this week’s Flyer, and is now online. I have a lot to say about what I think this year’s Grizzlies team is going to be, and I said most of it there.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

New Names on the Marquee

A longtime intimate of Harold Ford Jr. was asked the other day if the former Memphis congressman — who, as the Democratic nominee in 2006, lost a U.S. Senate race to Republican Bob Corker by a hair’s breadth — would trade the wealth and standing he has since acquired on Wall Street for the alternate biography that would have followed from a win over Corker.

The answer was quick and unequivocal: “In a minute.” He might have said, but didn’t, “In a New York minute,” since the Empire State has, for some years now, been Ford’s abode. The man, who had worked in close harness with Ford for the duration of his political career in Tennessee, went on to say, “He wanted to be president.”

Should “wanted” be “wants”? Whether it is a matter of his own uncooked seeds or just that various political talk shows want access to his expertise and/or residual star quality, Ford is a staple these days on cable TV — a frequent guest, for example, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe show, where he offers informed centrist commentary when queried on topical issues and affairs of state by the show’s host. Joe Scarborough is often peremptory with his guests but usually deferential with Ford, whom he refers to familiarly as Harold.

Upon the close of a recent colloquy with Ford, Scarborough, a former GOP congressman from Florida during the Tennessee Democrat’s own time there but an independent now and a member-in-good-standing of the resistance to Trump, smiled fondly and declared that Ford just might be the man to close the gap between right and left factions in the opposition.

The same note was also struck recently on an installment of Real Time With Bill Maher, when the eponymous host ended a group discussion that included Ford with a statement to the effect that he and the audience could be looking at the Democrat who could mount a successful challenge to Trump.

It must be said that in neither case did Ford respond with either a mock protest to the idea or a concurrence with it. With a certain modesty, he just allowed the sentiment to be expressed, while there were detectable murmurs of assent from others onstage or in the studio audience.

But how? Ford, no longer an office-holder, lacks the usual political perch from which a bid for national office could be mounted. Just after his loss in 2006, in a race that saw him featured on the cover of Time as a possible avatar of something new in national politics, Ford taught politics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and became titular head of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a center-to-right party organization that had been the launching pad for Bill Clinton‘s own ascent to the presidency.

As Democratic politics shifted leftward during those years of a George W. Bush Republican administration, the DLC ceased to be much of a force and eventually ceased to be, period. Meanwhile, too, a new and ambitious young senator from Illinois named Barack Obama had seized the limelight and, along with it, first dibs on a quest to become the first black president (an honor Ford’s supporters had long assumed to be his).

Ford’s views on fiscal matters had always tilted surprisingly rightward for a Democrat, and an African-American in particular. Indeed, that fact had been a sticking point with self-styled progressive Democrats in Tennessee and something of a brake on their ardor in Ford’s contest with Corker. But those views were consistent with Ford’s next move, which was to New York and Wall Street, where, a married man now with a family, he works as a rainmaker and managing director for the Morgan Stanley brokerage firm.

Early on in his New York residence, Ford took a flyer at a possible run for the Senate seat held there by fellow Democrat Kirsten Gillebrand, but the conservative social views he had expressed as a candidate in Tennessee worked against him in New York despite his efforts to update them in conformity with his new milieu, and he was forced to abandon his trial run.

So whither now? Lack of an office in government did not hinder Trump’s political ambitions, but Ford, for all his ubiquity on cable, is not on the same plane as a national celebrity. 

Ironically, were native son and periodic Memphis visitor Harold Ford still an official Tennessean, he might be the subject of renewed blandishments from Democrats anxious to field a candidate for the Senate seat which Ford’s former opponent Corker is abandoning. That may be happening, anyhow.

 

• Meanwhile, there is continued action in Tennessee on the Senate front and another possible blast from the past for Democrats, with no residential barrier to running.

Phil Bredesen, the state’s last Democratic governor (and last Democratic winner of any statewide office) made no bones of his wish to remain in government following his term-limited exit from office in 2010, but the hoped-for invitation from the Obama administration never came. (Bredesen had been rumored for secretary of Health and Human Services.)

Now, prodded by some of the aforesaid desperate Democrats — and notably by party moneyman Bill Freeman of Nashville — Bredesen announced Monday that, despite an earlier rejection of the idea, he is thinking seriously about a Senate run. Watch that space!

Last week,  prior to Bredesen’s statement, James Mackler, the Nashville lawyer and Iraq war vet who is already a declared Democratic candidate, was the beneficiary of a fund-raiser at the East Memphis home of Brice Timmons, where he demonstrated significant gifts as a speechmaker, articulating a lively point-by-point case against both putative GOP nominee Marsha Blackburn and President Trump. 

Mackler’s affair drew a fair number of longtime Democratic activists and donors.

On the Republican side, the former 8th District Republican congressman Stephen Fincher is serious enough about a possible Senate run — despite the presence in the race already of a like-minded conservative, 7th District U.S. Rep. Blackburn —  to have embarked on a statewide “listening tour” which took him to Memphis this week. More about that anon.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Amazon Prime-time

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about luring Amazon to build its second company headquarters, to be called Amazon HQ2, in Memphis. In early October, the city council voted to offer the mammoth online retail giant $60 million in cash incentives to move to the Bluff City.

“Amazon, here we come,” said council chairman Berlin Boyd, after the vote. To which I say, slow your roll, Berlin.

To put the council’s offer in perspective, consider that last summer, the Grizzlies paid $94 million to sign Chandler Parsons to a four-year deal.

To put the offer in even more stark perspective, consider that Amazon is worth more than $500 billion (with a “b”), and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ personal worth is around $87 billion. Offering Amazon $60 million to come to Memphis is like offering to buy Chandler Parsons dinner at Folk’s Folly in order to get him to accept a trade to the Brooklyn Nets.

Pardon me if I don’t have much optimism about this deal.

Many cities around the country are eager to become home to Amazon’s HQ2, and why not? The company says it plans to spend $5 billion to build its new facility, which would theoretically create 50,000 new jobs, including 2,500 positions that would pay at least $60,000 a year. That’s a big game changer for any city. For Memphis, it would be transformative.

According to city leaders, there could be other incentives from Shelby County, the state of Tennessee, and the Economic Development Growth Engine (EDGE) in the package, but few details have emerged.

But let’s take a look at Memphis’ competition. Dallas is offering a $15-billion bullet-train-based headquarters. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is putting together an incentive package worth $7 billion, including up to $10,000 for each job created. Philadelphia is offering three sites with 28 million square feet of development space in an area already served by transit, retail, and residential spaces. Chicago, Phoenix, and other major cities are also readying pitches for the October 19th deadline. And Stonecrest, Georgia, is offering to rename itself Amazon, which is certainly going the extra mile.

Amazon has set forth several “key preferences” for its proposed new second home: Suitable buildings and sites are of “paramount importance.” Other preferences cited include a “stable and business-friendly environment and tax structure,” incentives from local and state governments, and finally, there’s this: “A highly educated labor pool is critical and a strong university system is required.”

Oops.

No offense to our fine local colleges and universities, but it would be difficult to make the case that Memphis has a highly educated labor force. In a 2017 WalletHub ranking of the country’s 150 “best-educated cities,” Memphis comes in at 114, just behind Montgomery, Alabama. Only 39 percent of Memphians have a college degree.

Don’t get me wrong. I truly hope the city pulls off a Memphis miracle and lands the Amazon deal, but we’d be foolish to count on it.

If, as seems likely, we don’t get it, we should look at the experience as a learning opportunity, a wake-up call to face the conjoined issues of poverty and a subpar education system that are holding so many of our citizens — and our city — back.

This will no doubt be called a case of comparing apples to oranges, but what if we came up with a Payment-in-Lieu-of-Taxes (PILOT) Program to motivate local businesses and corporations to raise their minimum salary to $15 an hour? Or how about using some of those “cash incentives” to pay top-of-the-market teacher salaries in order to lure better educators to the city? Or, since car-centric cities are falling behind the curve, how about coming up with ways to combine county, state, and EDGE money to invest in a modern, high-tech transportation system.

Memphis has a lot going for it and I’m optimistic about the city’s future, but if we don’t land the big one, maybe we could seriously begin to think outside the traditional box and create our own transformative change.

Or maybe we could just get the Grizzlies to sign us to a four-year deal.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Which History Should We Honor?

As I drove down the winding highway to the small East Tennessee city of Athens last Thursday, I wondered what the next day’s Tennessee Historical Commission meeting would hold. Under no circumstances did I think the members of the commission would approve Memphis’ waiver request to remove Nathan Bedford Forrest’s statue from our public park.

And as I anticipated, the waiver was denied, and “leave history alone” was a recurring theme of the morning.

After Mayor Jim Strickland pleaded with the commission to vote on the city’s request and other officials spoke both for and against the statue, a pro-Forrest teacher from Memphis was the first to take the podium for public comment.

She began her two minutes by saying, “It seems that this day and time everyone is trying to make everything pleasant and fair for everyone.”

I was baffled. Why is it wrong that people of color want a pleasant and fair experience sans a monument of a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard when visiting a public park?

Isn’t that what America is supposed to be all about? Do civil rights not grant everyone the privilege of fairness — especially in public places, if, after all, we live in a country with “liberty and justice for all”?

Continuing to justify why Forrest should be glorified and his statue untouched, the teacher went on to talk about the general’s late-life conversion to Christianity, how he begged for forgiveness for the number of people he mistreated, and turned his life around as a result. “Didn’t Christ forgive us for our many sins? If God can forgive Nathan, why can’t we?” she asked the room.

I can’t speak for everyone in this city or all people of color, but I forgive Nathan. I don’t hate him. I, like many others, would just prefer for him not to be memorialized with such grandeur in a public space in my city.

At Friday’s meeting, Mayor Strickland referenced this article from the Memphis News-Scimitar that was published when the Forrest statue was erected in 1905.

Also, what Forrest did in his personal and religious life is not our concern or a relevant justification for having a statue of him in a public park. He might have repented for his wrongdoings, but that doesn’t change what he did, who he was, and what he stood for.

“The next thing y’all will want to remove are the crosses from our many churches. When does the insanity stop?” the teacher asked rhetorically, as her allotted speaking time ran out.

Was she legitimately putting Nathan Bedford Forrest in the same category with Jesus Christ?

How does a Confederate army general and KKK grand wizard compare to a man that only preached and practiced love. That’s insanity.

After the teacher’s two minutes were up, Lee Millar, the spokesperson for the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, was the next to speak.

He claimed that “thousands and thousands” of Memphians support the statue and the history it represents, saying that the statue and history should be left alone.

I understand that history is important. But I don’t understand why someone on the losing side of history deserves a statue. And I definitely don’t understand why the statue of an oppressor is the kind of history that people want to hold on to.

Also, if keeping history in place is the argument for keeping the statue where it is, then it’s faulty. The only history that ever took place where Forrest is buried is the empowerment of whites and the demoralizing of blacks. Which part of history does the statue really honor?

Not the Civil War. As Mayor Strickland pointed out earlier in the meeting, the park where Forrest and his wife are buried now was not a Civil War battle site.

The statue was not erected until years after the war, just as Jim Crow laws were becoming enacted in the South. It was 40 years after the war when the bodies of Forrest and his wife were disinterred from Elmwood Cemetery and moved to the park where the statue was dedicated. The mayor said the park was a landmark that many African Americans passed daily on the way to work, ensuring that Forrest would be ever present and so would the laws of Jim Crow.

“Simply put: This is a monument to Jim Crow,” Strickland said.

I agree. The statue’s got to go. Move Forrest and his wife to a museum, back to a cemetery, or anywhere else but a public park in a majority black city.

Maya Smith is a Flyer staff writer.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Marsha Blackburn’s “Unintended Consequences”

Sometimes in this trade, the act of choosing a headline can be a difficult matter. Not so in this case. The headline of this editorial happens to be the phrase used by 7th District U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn to describe the ill effects of a 2016 law she sponsored that loosened regulations on the prescription of addictive opioids, and it constitutes a wonderful irony.

Blackburn, now a declared Republican candidate for the soon-to-be-vacated U.S. Senate seat currently held by Bob Corker, has found herself in hot water as a result of her role in passing the law — as documented over the last weekend in a collaborative effort by the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes and the Washington Post newspaper.

Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn

Fallout from the investigation has been enormous and immediate and bipartisan and potent enough to force the withdrawal of Pennsylvania GOP Congressman Tom Marino as President Trump’s nominee to head the Office of National Drug Control Policy as the nation’s Drug Czar. Marino found himself in sudden and unexpected disgrace after the CBS-WaPo revelations that he had been among a handful of members who zealously pushed through Congress the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2016. As the investigation demonstrated, that innocuously titled measure, pushed by self-serving drug manufacturers, camouflaged provisions that, according to former Drug Enforcement Administration official Joe Rannazzisi, purposely struck down important sageguards. The result, he said, was that “unscrupulous” pain-pill hucksters gained the virtually unlimited ability to ply their trade and inflate the nation’s current opioid-addiction crisis to pandemic proportions.

Rannazzisi also told investigators that Marino and Blackburn, two of the bill’s 14 sponsors, had been especially active in pressing the DEA and the Justice Department to withhold their initial objections to the legislation, which went on to virtual unanimous passage by Congress.

But, speaking of unintended consequences, “virtual” is a crucial qualifying word. To what may well be Blackburn’s future discomfort, a likely opponent of hers in the forthcoming GOP Senatorial primary is former 8th District congressman Stephen Fincher, who, either by choice or happenstance, happened not to be in Washington when the 2016 vote on the bill was taken. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Fincher has elevated the burgeoning opioid-addiction crisis to the very top of his potential issues to run on. And whoever gets the Democratic nomination for the Senate is likely to follow suit.

As one of the 2016 bill’s prime movers, Blackburn finds herself in the uncomfortable position of having been either classically negligent in relation to the bill’s dangerous provisions or willing to overlook them in the service of drug companies that had been especially generous in their donations to her political benefit.

In any case, she — like other members of Congress who failed to interdict this pernicious measure — will have to provide some convincing explanations for their dereliction, and we can at least hope for some enlightenment on that score in next year’s campaign.

Categories
Cover Feature News

The Way Forward: Grizzlies Start a New Era

CREDIT: Joe Murphy (NBAE/Getty Images)

Nostalgia is a subtle nihilism. It denies the possibility that anything will ever be better than it was in the past and robs us of the ability to see what’s in front of us because we’re always comparing what is with what we remember.

This season, there’s no way for the Memphis Grizzlies to avoid that trap.

With Zach Randolph and Tony Allen gone and suiting up for other teams, you can’t deny that an era has ended and a new one has begun. The “Core Four” era has been, without question, the most successful in the history of the franchise — and the period in which the team’s fanbase finally blossomed into something bigger than a bunch of die-hards hoping the next Three Year Plan will finally be the one that works. The things that happened between the 2010-11 and 2016-17 seasons will not soon be forgotten.

The catch, of course, is that all eras end. Players age out of their primes, injuries derail plans, wild swings of fate move the ground out from under even the best-laid foundations. It was inevitable that eventually the most successful group of players in the team’s history would no longer be together in Beale Street Blue and that there’d be a season in which the Grizzlies first had to face that reality and build something for the future.

This is that season.

The Core Four is gone, and the Grizzlies — still helmed by Mike Conley and Marc Gasol and in the second year of head coach David Fizdale’s tenure — have to figure out what to do next. But regardless of what happens, will it hold up when compared to the glory days that just passed? Will the Grizzlies be able to succeed or fail on their own terms this season, or will they be judged harshly when they fall short of fan expectations because they can’t replicate the glory of the Grit & Grind Days? That’s the question that will be answered over the next 82 games. What will the 2017-18 Grizzlies be, and will that be enough?

Joe Murphy (NBAE/Getty Images)

Chandler Parsons

The Chandler Parsons Project

As the Grizzlies look to reinvent themselves around Conley and Gasol, all eyes will be on the Grizzlies’ big $94M free agent signing from last summer, forward Chandler Parsons. After trying to rush back from a knee injury and then failing to ever reach playing shape, to say Parsons’ 2016-17 was a disappointment would be like saying the Titanic didn’t have a great maiden voyage. The hope is that this year, he’ll be able to contribute in some sort of meaningful way. That way didn’t make itself apparent during the preseason, and given how much Fizdale has talked about using Parsons as a power forward, it seems like his role this season (at least at first) will be coming off the bench to play that position in smaller, two-point-guard lineups.

Obviously, no one thinks that paying $23M per year to the eighth man in the rotation is a successful outcome for Parsons, but at this point, the money is spent, so as long as he can contribute, he’ll play. But Fizdale has made clear that one thing won’t happen: the mandated 20 minutes of playing time while Parsons tried to rehab last season, which frustrated everyone and accomplished nothing.

Parsons was signed to be a playmaker, a scorer with the starting unit that the Grizzlies never had in the Core Four days (apologies to late-period Tayshaun Prince and to the Platonic ideal of whatever people see in Jeff Green). It’s clear heading into this season that the 2015 Chandler Parsons is never, ever coming back, so now the challenge is to figure out a way to get something out of him. If he can play above replacement level, I’ll call it a “win” (and break out the Wild Turkey when it’s time to look at the salary cap numbers). But he won’t be the player they signed him to be — not this year, not ever again.

Joe Murphy (NBAE/Getty Images)

Tyreke Evans

On a Wing and a Prayer

Don’t let the Parsons debacle cause you to give up hope, though, because there is something positive brewing in the wing positions: a depth that the Grizzlies have not had in recent years. The offseason additions of Tyreke Evans and Ben McLemore helped to shore up a rotation already starting to come into its own with James Ennis’ decent season (I won’t call it a “breakout,” really, but it was solid) and the emergence of Wayne Selden as a potential starter during last season’s ill-fated San Antonio playoff series. McLemore won’t be ready to play for a while yet — he broke his foot this summer in a pickup game, just part of the Grizzlies’ ongoing multi-season injury curse — and I wasn’t very excited about his addition on its own, but coupled with Evans, it’s a notable upgrade from the days of Tayshaun Prince and Austin Daye (or even Jeff Green and Matt Barnes, or the 2015 “can’t run” version of Vince Carter). Add the near-miraculous return of Mario Chalmers to the mix as another point guard, and you have a team poised to play smaller and faster with much greater skill at the positions needed to do so.

The operating premise here is that even though none of these guys is particularly a star on his own — Evans is probably the closest thing, but he’s been too inconsistent and injury-prone to ever earn the title — together, as a unit, they’re better top-to-bottom than anything the Grizzlies have been able to put on the court in a while. Since Parsons isn’t going to be the small forward of the Grizzlies’ dreams, Plan B will have to become Plan A. It’s a small victory, then, that there are so many decent-to-good role players ready to step in. For a team that has been so hard up for offensive production the last few seasons, the sudden presence of several versatile (if imperfect) players on the perimeter will feel like a sudden breath of fresh air, even considering the big piece (that is, Parsons) that will forever be missing.

Joe Murphy (NBAE/Getty Images)

JaMychal Green

The Young and The Restless

On Monday, the Grizzlies cut their roster down to the 15 required for opening night, saying farewell to 2016 first-round pick Wade Baldwin IV and Serbian forward Rade Zagorac. Baldwin is a high-upside player who doesn’t seem to be developing toward that upside, and Zagorac was a young Euro player who didn’t seem to be able to make the leap to the faster, more athletic NBA game. But even though the ranks have thinned, the Grizzlies will still be relying on young guys to step up and produce.

Some of these (Andrew Harrison and Wayne Selden, especially) stepped up last year. Others (thinking specifically of Dillon Brooks, who has looked very good in Summer League and in preseason action) are still mostly unknown quantities. But regardless, if the Grizzlies are going to be any good this year, it will take a burgeoning of player development the likes of which we haven’t seen since the days when O.J. Mayo was scoring 30 points a night for Marc Iavaroni.

What the Grizzlies are doing, really, is rebuilding in place around Mike Conley and Marc Gasol. The plan was to have a Big Three that included Parsons, but that plan’s no longer workable. That means the process of retooling is more important, because the young players have to be able to contribute more than was previously expected but also need to be able to do so on a much shorter timetable. It’s not the position the Grizzlies thought they’d be in when they signed Conley and Gasol to 5-year max deals, but they’re determined to make the most of it while they can.

Joe Murphy (NBAE/Getty Images)

(left to right) J.B. Bickerstaff, Dave Fizdale, Keith Smart

The West

It’s worth considering what the best-case scenario would be for this season’s team before talking about what’s the most likely outcome.

The top tiers of the Western Conference continue to become cartoonishly overpowered. Houston added Chris Paul over the summer. The Oklahoma City Thunder added Paul George and Carmelo Anthony to supplement Russell Westbrook. The Warriors will be the same as they were last year. The Spurs will continue to ride Kawhi Leonard’s dominance.

And while the top teams will all be the same or better, there’s a new crop of younger teams looking to break into the postseason for the first time. Denver will be strong this year. Minnesota added Jimmy Butler to a team that was already brimming with young talent. Both teams look to make the leap this year.

Where does that leave the Grizzlies? They won’t be in the top tier. They probably won’t be in the second tier of teams that could conceivably make it to the NBA Finals if they catch the right breaks or a top team suffers an injury. In this season of transition, they’re looking to make the playoffs and develop what they can with an eye toward maximizing the next two years. That’s not to say this year is a throwaway — just that it’s unreasonable to expect a team with this many question marks (even one that still features Conley and Gasol in their primes) to be much better than a low-end playoff team.

Ultimately, the teams around the Grizzlies have (mostly) gotten better, while the Grizzlies rode the same venerated core for a long time, and now the Grizzlies are reloading while their peers are leveling up. That’s not an indictment of the Grizzlies — it seems unlikely that Carmelo Anthony would have come to Memphis, for example — but it does make the failure of the Parsons signing that much more real. The Grizzlies could’ve had that, too. They tried, and instead they’re scrambling to develop a rotation and a style of play.

Conclusions

So what’s the ceiling for this year’s Grizzlies team? How good can they be, given the challenges in front of them? I think an optimistic projection would put them somewhere around 44 wins, which I figure might be good enough to make the eight playoff spot in the West. They’re in a group of teams (also including the L.A. Clippers, the Portland Trail Blazers, and the Utah Jazz) that could all finish around the same place, teams with a lot of uncertainties yet to be ironed out that look decent on paper.

That’s an optimistic projection. One serious injury to Mike Conley or Marc Gasol and things could get away from them in a hurry. They’re deep, but that depth is unproven. They’re tough, but that tenacity hasn’t been tested the way it will be over the course of the upcoming season. They’re faster, more athletic, and younger, but that doesn’t mean they’ll gel out of the gate.

A pessimistic projection gets dark in a hurry. With two big-name players on what are likely the biggest contracts they’ll ever get, if the Grizzlies think the current configuration isn’t going to work, the smartest thing to do may be to trade them for picks and start over. If things are going poorly, you can expect the rumor mill to be churning out reports about Gasol trades left and right, but ultimately I’m not sure the Grizzlies “have” to make that trade the way national conventional wisdom would suggest. It’s the downside of being in this position, though. If it’s January and the team is significantly below .500 for some reason, you will start hearing these rumors. It’s just the way the NBA works, for one thing, but also, it wouldn’t be the craziest move for the Grizzlies to make.

That said, I honestly don’t expect things to come to that. The Grizzlies have been pronounced dead several times over the last five seasons, and they’ve always found a way to over-perform. They’re due for a year where that doesn’t happen, but until it does, it seems safe to bet on their success, at least “success” on the terms of this season. There’s a way forward for the Grizzlies, and they’re only now starting to discover it in the young talent on the roster. The process of finding the next great Griz core could be a long one, but they’ve got no choice but to start that journey.

It’s tempting to compare this season to the seven before it, the best run of success in the history of the franchise. But to live in that (recent) past is to deny that this season can be a success on its own merits — even if that’s admittedly a smaller scale of success than the fanbase is used to. The Grizzlies will not contend for a title this year, but that’s not the interesting thing about them. What we should watch for is whether they learn what they’re going to be next. If you’re not watching for that, if you’re living in the past, you’ll probably be very disappointed.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Buried Child at TheatreWorks

What if everything you believe about you, your family, your country, and everything else is just a half-buried memory and lies? It’s a recurring theme in plays by the actor, cowboy poet, filmmaker, and sometimes drummer Sam Shepard, who died earlier this year. It’s one that winds in and out of his Pulitzer-winning Buried Child, opening at TheatreWorks this week.

With an ear for vernacular, taste for the absurd, and a gift for penning intense dialogue that plays out at the edge of slapstick, Shepard’s work ranges from bizarre Twilight Zone scenarios to epic American tragedies about broken homes, broken people, endless war, and a primal urge for new frontiers. This week, New Moon, an ambitious company that’s delivered jarring productions of Tracy Letts’ Bug and Killer Joe, turns its attention to Shepard. Buried Child is about a dysfunctional, dishonest, and partially dismembered family whose secrets come crawling out of the ground when grandson Vince brings his girlfriend Shelly home to meet the folks.

Buried Child

“You know New Moon has done the zombie plays, and we did Frankenstein,” Buried Child director Gene Elliott says, describing his company’s dedication to great scripts and Halloween-season thrills. “But unless you want to do the same stuff over and over, there’s only so much of that available. But when you start looking at plays that are just really creepy, there’s a whole lot more to choose from. And a lot of that stuff is really good.

“Buried Child‘s got a little something to make everybody uncomfortable,” Elliott says. “And it’s so funny.”

Elliott directs a top-shelf cast that includes Stephen Garret, Emily Peckham, Mersadies Burch, and James Dale Green as the sickly, couch-bound patriarch Dodge.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Florida Project

It’s a neat trick in storytelling to have emotions come in late. Frontload your story with the crassness of everyday human interaction, then sucker punch the audience in the home stretch with the emotions drama usually has from the start. Comedies like Withnail and I or In the Loop do it. It mirrors how life is: Your routine predominates, but entropy leaks it away to reveal passion or despair.

Sean Baker’s breakout hit Tangerine pulled this off well, sketching a comic, over-the-top Los Angeles skid row but slowly winding its way to the emotional concerns of its lead prostitutes and john. Baker’s follow-up, The Florida Project, is longer and more pastel, with twice the scenes that veer into humorous non sequiturs about life in the cheap hotels next to Disney World. This time, it’s a little long in the buildup. It keeps its heart off its sleeve almost all throughout.

Our gateways are impish six-year-olds who appear at first as the annoying kids of Magic Castle and Futureland, de facto housing projects originally for tourists. The kids are introduced spitting on a car from a balcony. When its owner threatens to come after them, they tell her, “Go ahead, you ratchet bitch. You are shit” and other phrases humorously beyond their years. They speak mostly in one-sentence jokes and behave like little con men, telling blatantly false sob stories for ice cream money, turning electrical breakers off for fun, and setting an abandoned building on fire. But slowly they become more likeable. Beleaguered apartment manager Bobby (Willem Dafoe) shifts from responding to their infractions to being protective, letting their zest for life infect his own.

Both their joy and terror are imitations of little nightmare Moonee’s (Brooklynn Prince) mom, Halley (Bria Vinaite), who never stops grifting, but can never pay the rent. Halley is the movie’s central figure, resolute against the quieter notes of a more traditional struggling film mom. She sells thrift perfume in parking lots and steals Disney World passes from her johns. Unlike Tangerine‘s Sin-Dee, who constantly shot off one-liners and whose hard edges eventually showed softness, Halley’s lust for life long ago curdled into self-rationalization. She encourages the kids’ reign of terror.

Bobby also never quite makes the obvious dramatic step of covering for the family and endangering his job. Instead it blinds him. He sneers as he puts Halley’s rent money under UV light and coldly films her vacated room to prevent her from establishing residency. The characters’ place on the cooler end of the spectrum is a clue to the film’s larger themes: People who can’t make money get tossed aside, and those who endanger others’ ability to obtain it are the highest-order threats. This keeps ostensibly good people like Bobby from reacting humanely.

The kids of The Florida Project

The kids are like the free spirits of Daisies, Los Olvidados, Looney Tunes, or the credits suggest, Our Gang. They are less characters than just tiny factories of funny observation and unchecked will. They can only afford one ice cream cone and share it, then fight adults over cleaning up drops. They call asbestos “ghost poop” and free associate pet alligator names. Moonee wipes ketchup on her pillow and declares it her right.

This is a follow-up to a hit in every sense. It has a higher budget, a famous actor, and plays many of the same tricks to less effect. But those tricks are worthwhile. The universe the kids inhabit is tacky: They walk repeatedly through wide shot compositions of rundown tourist traps, one with a giant plastic wizard perched atop. The hotel they live in is purple.

The people are slightly less garish. Is it exploitation? The movie’s wry in how it presents them. It certainly does not give them the level of dignity Moonlight did. Baker has a People of Walmart aesthetic. There’s an element of “look at these crazy poor people and revel in their pluck.” But there is a humanity, even with characters who keep their inner selves hidden and present only hard edges. Late in the story, when Halley gets a hug, she looks bewildered. When one of the kids reacts to the unfairness of her situation, it’s a long, uncomfortable close-up of a crying child — and well-acted. Life does not present itself as a series of speeches but rather as humdrum interactions that reveal themselves piecemeal. Slowly, you learn about a person.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Invest in Yourself, Memphis

CREDIT: John Kirkscey

After decades of depression, Memphis finally finds itself in the early stage of a renaissance. We’re also blessed to have before us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to remake so many of our most prized public spaces. Yet Memphis is once again the poorest large metro area in the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. How we go about finding the right solutions for Memphis at this defining moment will determine how authentic, inclusive, and sustainable our renaissance will be.

Believing that the best visions for our city can come from any Memphian would help engender such a rich renaissance. After all, that’s how we became famous in the first place.

John Kirkscey

So imagine this, Memphis: The city issues a request for proposal (RFP) for Tom Lee Park, the Fourth Bluff Promenade, Mud Island, the Fairgrounds, or any public space, where any local citizen can submit a proposal — be they a “highly qualified” developer, a University of Memphis student or class, an entrepreneur, a group of local creatives, or even a kid with a vision. The RFP could be done in stages, where proposals are voted on to see who makes the cut to the next stage. At each stage, seed money is kicked in to the winning participants, if needed, to help them further develop their proposals (creating equal opportunity), until a final winner is awarded.

Rather than limiting the pool of ideas to established firms and community sticky notes, the city would be creating the optimal conditions to get the most innovative and visionary ideas that are organic to Memphis. As urbanist Carol Coletta said in an interview with the Smart City Memphis blog, to be successful, Memphis must be a place where “we all have the opportunity to develop all of our talent and put all of our talent to work.”
So let a thousand local flowers bloom, Memphis! Open meritocratic exchanges are the future. Websites such as ideaconnection.com offer financial rewards to independents who solve problems or offer ideas to companies. So why not have an open, meritocratic, local RFP for public spaces — or even for public problems or issues?

The city hands out incentives and subsidies to established firms. Why not incentivize our most creative, community-oriented minds? It’ll pay loads of dividends locally. Stoking entrepreneurial minds sounds more promising than subsidizing minimum-wage jobs. We need all the help we can get.
It’s not easy being an independent creative in Memphis. Open RFPs would facilitate fruitful connections as local visions coalesce with local know-how and wherewithal. New collaborations may lead to innovative solutions. Fresh ideas could be sparked. New careers could be launched. Emerging creatives may be inspired. The incentive to stick around becomes greater. Such a movement would help build our community problem-solving capacity and boost our confidence.
At his swearing-in ceremony, Mayor Jim Strickland pledged: “We will work harder than ever to renew our city’s sense of self-confidence.” Well, widening opportunities for locals and investing 100 percent of all disposable resources into our economy would be two surefire ways of doing that. When free ideas are expected from locals, then big bucks are paid to out-of-town firms for theirs, that’s, as they say in soccer, an own-goal.
Ditto commissioning out-of-town artists to create public art for local spaces. Every dollar is precious to the poorest large metro area in the nation. Why needlessly throw any away and risk being a me-too city at the same time? Why invest in the creative capacity and economy of another city with our scarce dollars when we need the stimulus more than they do? It just adds to our city’s cynicism and insecurity.

“Local” is all the rage these days: local businesses, farmers markets with locally sourced, organic food, etc. Why is this any different? Locally sourced community spaces and public art that are organic to Memphis sound pretty healthy to me. No artificial flavors wanted here. Just knowing that it’s created by locals instills pride. Plus, big bonus: locally created ensures authenticity and distinctiveness and adds to the sustainability of our renaissance, all of which best connects our community.

So invest in yourself, Memphis. Till, nurture, and cultivate your own garden. You don’t need to ask others for advice, ideas, or inspiration, because, guess what! You’re no longer depressed!

Write down “insecurity complex” on a piece of paper and then burn it. Know that you’ve got the goods right here and trust the force within. Are you what you are or what, Memphis?

John Kirkscey is a community activist and the developer of memphisartpark.org.

Categories
Music Music Features

How Coco Hames Got to Memphis

CREDIT: Rachel Briggs

Let it be known: Lindsay “Coco” Hames is now a Memphian. Though it may have been difficult for the native Floridian to identify with any particular place over the years, since moving here to be with her husband, music writer Bob Mehr, she feels an affinity for the green spaciousness of Memphis. Of course, she is strongly associated with Nashville, adopted home of the Ettes, the band she helped found in Los Angeles in 2003. And she still feels a connection to the place where she first discovered what it was to feel settled.

After years of living on the road, the Ettes visited Music City and realized “We could stay here! We could get a house, and we could rehearse in the basement, and there’s a yard!” recalls Hames. “I started baking, and [bandmate] Poni [Silver] started sewing, and we’re doing these very normal, domestic things, and we were speaking to other human beings. It was really great. And so we stayed. We definitely wanted to establish some life off the road, because we didn’t have one.”

Hames notes that the very things that made the Ettes a strong touring unit were also obstacles to developing a richer life. “We were so co-dependent. It wasn’t just like a band. We called it the three-headed monster. We did not have lives; we did not have relationships. All we did was tour. We lived in the van; we didn’t have apartments. I thought that’s what everybody did. But life has a way of making itself clear to you, and we knew we had to dismantle the three-headed monster. It was hard, but we had to learn how to be human people.”

Though the band continued a strong career out of Nashville for some time — along with baking, sewing, and even opening the record store Found Object together — it was “learning to be a human person” that ultimately led Hames to chafe at the constraints of the style she ironically dubs le garage.

After releasing four albums and garnering much respect on the trash rock scene, “it had run its course,” she reflects. “I was done writing songs for that construct. It’s great to write songs in that formula; you can write ’em forever. Just listen to [garage rock compilations] Pebbles and Nuggets and just write ’em.”

A collaborative project in 2010 with Reigning Sound’s Greg Cartwright, the Parting Gifts, helped expand her horizons. “We can do anything,” she thought at the time. “We can write prog operas if we want to! So that was a cool project. I didn’t think beyond it. But eventually I was like, ‘Well, when you stop playing with a band, you do a solo record, right?’ So that’s what I did.”

In 2016, she began work on her eponymous solo album at The Bomb Shelter in Nashville, which was released in March. “It was this massive leap of faith for me,” she admits. “After being in a band for so long, this time I was on my own — no gang to hide behind or fall back on.” Hames co-produced the record with Andrija Tokic, whose production credits include the Alabama Shakes, Hurray for the Riff Raff, and others.

Playing guitar, piano, and electric harpsichord, Hames enlisted bassist Jack “LJ” Lawrence (The Raconteurs), drummer Julian Dorio (The Whigs), lead guitarist Adam Meisterhans (The Weight), and veteran organist Dave Amels of Reigning Sound.

“I grew up listening to ’60s pop, like Dusty Springfield, but also classic country music, like Patsy Cline, and things that bridged both worlds, like Bobbie Gentry,” notes Hames. “With this record, the end result doesn’t fit into any one category, which is an exciting thing to me.”

Indeed, the record evokes those artists and their times, but what’s most notable is her openness to the simple beauties of ensemble playing without the de rigueur noise or aggression of le garage.

“I just tried to put together a batch of good songs,” she explains. “And being in the studio with Julian and LJ, I had no idea how they were gonna turn out. And some things turned out like, ‘Is this funky? Is this funky? I don’t know.’ Because Julian and I would just be feeling something out, and then if LJ liked it and Andrija liked it and it was driving somewhere, I would hop onto it.”

The result has the earthiness and historical resonance of many longtime Memphis artists, which made her move to the Bluff City a natural one. And not just for musical reasons: “Well, then I fell in love,” she smiles. “Which, you know, can be very inconvenient, but …” She trails off, wistfully.

Coco Hames, with opening band Little Bandit, will make her Memphis debut at the River Series at the Harbortown Amphitheater on Sunday, October 22, at 3:00 p.m. In case of rain, event will be held at Crosstown Arts.