Month: October 2017

Categories
News The Fly-By

Walkin’ on Water

Pieces of a connected Memphis riverfront are falling into place as one big project will open this weekend while another celebrates its first birthday.

A new segment of the Wolf River Greenway (WRG), which will open Saturday, bookends the walkable section of the Memphis riverfront to the north. Big River Crossing, the southern bookend, opened on this weekend last year and has seen hundreds of thousands of walkers, runners, and cyclists since then.

At 10 a.m. Saturday, officials will formally open a 1.2-mile paved trail of the WRG with speeches and a neighborhood festival. The new trail features asphalt and concrete paths that meander alongside the Wolf River with a boardwalk, picnic tables, benches, bicycle racks, and a bicycle repair station. The new trail will meet the Mississippi River Greenbelt Park trail on Mud Island right at the confluence of the Mississippi and Wolf Rivers, connecting the Greenway to the Memphis riverfront.

“Rivers often serve as boundaries, dividing communities from each other, but they are just as capable of bringing together towns, neighborhoods, and diverse cultures,” said Keith Cole, executive director of the Wolf River Conservancy (WRC).

The new site will be the western-most point of what will be a 36-mile WRG that will connect the Mississippi River in downtown Memphis to east Fayette County. By 2020, the Conservancy hopes to complete the rest of a $50 million, 25-mile trail along the Wolf River within the Memphis city limits.

Big River Crossing & the Wolf River Greenway

City taxpayers will help build that Memphis portion of the trail. Maria Munoz-Blanco, the city’s director of parks and neighborhoods, said the project is “creating corridors of opportunity for people to go out and enjoy healthy and active living without barriers.” It’s also helping to clean up the city.

“Since construction on the trail began in 2016, the Conservancy, volunteers, and Greenway contractors have removed nearly 100 tires, countless bags of trash, and invasive plants to improve conservation values of the downtown site,” Munoz-Blanco said.

Down at the other end of the riverfront, Big River Crossing has settled into place as one of the city’s most popular places to escape outdoors.

Officials began working on the project back in 2014 and secured $17.5 million for the bridge alone but $43 million in total for a larger, 10-mile project that connected downtown Memphis with West Memphis, Arkansas. The bicycle and pedestrian span across the Harrahan Bridge opened Saturday, October 22, 2016.

As of early October 2017, 247,596 people have streamed across the roughly one-mile foot bridge. Of those, 85 percent were pedestrians and 15 percent rode across on bikes.

To celebrate its first year, officials are hosting the Big River Crossing Half Marathon + 5K on Saturday.

The half marathon will take runners from the foot of Beale Street on Riverside Drive, through South Main, across the river on Big River Crossing, through the Big River Trail on the Arkansas flood plain, along Dacus Lake, and then back over the bridge to Tom Lee Park.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1494

Hello, Kitty

Last week, a new animal joined the Mid-South’s pantheon of fantastic beasts.

On behalf of Hugh Manatee, Zimm the Escape Monkey, Barksdale Beaver, Midtown Coyote, Murder Owl, #PipeKitty, Frayser Bear, and the Alleged Albino Raccoon, Fly on the Wall proudly introduces the Hernando Cat-Like Animal (HCLA).

The HCLA received a lot of coverage, but nobody covered this presumed cougar quite like Fox13’s Scott Madaus. Here’s his report in comic book form with captions.

“I’m Scott Manus live in Hernando, Mississippi, where there’s been spottings of a cougar …”

“And that’s not it. That looks like a house cat. But we’re just feet away from where a local man rolled his cellphone video on what some say is a cougar …”

And what others call the Hernando Cat-Like Animal.

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
Book Features Books

Kobo Abe’s Beasts Head for Home.

Kōbō Abe (1924-1993) was a Japanese writer known for such postmodern novels as The Face of Another, The Ark Sakura, The Box Man, and his masterpiece, The Woman in the Dunes. The latter was made into a film by the great Hiroshi Teshigahara, with a screenplay by Abe, the second of four collaborations between the two. Kōbō Abe, or Abe Kōbō as he is called on the cover of this novel, was Japan’s post-World War II international literary star, their Kafka, Beckett, or Camus. He also wrote poetry and experimental plays and was a photographer and inventor. For many years, it was rumored that he would win the Nobel Prize, but he died before that could happen.

His sensibility was neoteric, often absurd, and his sense of displacement and disorientation was Kafkaesque. Yet, his mid- to late-career novels are also playful, and easy to read, even when challenging. Beasts Head for Home is an earlier novel, his third, and is more realistic and more rooted in place (where the later novels seem to take place in dreamland, with unnamed locations and more surreal elements). It is also, apparently, autobiographical and perhaps explains the author’s sense of being displaced. This translation, by Richard F. Calichman, is available for the first time.

The story concerns a Japanese soldier named Kyuzo, who witnesses the end of World War II and the beginning eruptions of the Chinese Civil War, as he makes a trip home to Japan, a place where his people live but from which he has mostly been estranged. It is this trek from Manchuria, where he’s been stationed for years, that takes up most of the novel’s narrative. He travels by train, until it is derailed amid a skirmish, and then he travels by foot with an inscrutable companion, a man initially nameless but who creates his own identity, Ko. Identity is fluid when the world goes pear-shaped. This long march seems more Dostoevsky (one of Abe’s heroes) than Beckett. He trudges on, heading for a home that may not still be his home. The world has changed utterly, more so in Japan, perhaps, than anywhere else on Earth.

In an essay on Abe, Colin Marshall wrote, “The Typical Abe Protagonist (TAP), perhaps a shoe salesman or a schoolteacher, gets swept up, by little fault of his own, into potentially alarming circumstances. Maybe he’s importuned to find an unusual missing person; maybe he misses the last bus home; maybe leaves begin growing from his flesh.” There are no fantastic elements like leaves growing from flesh in Beasts Head for Home, but our TAP is an average man overwhelmed by unusual circumstances, in this case the destruction of his country.

Even if more true-to-life, the world of the novel is still nightmarish. Kyuzo is a prisoner of horrors, man-made, irrational, and murderous. War is hell. Other people are hell. Kyuzo himself, during the privations of his trudge through a desolate landscape, is transformed into one of the beasts heading home. And the ancestral home he seeks, Japan, is a place unknown to him, eventually, perhaps, unknowable. Abe is asking if home is one way we identify ourselves, one way we become ourselves.

Ko, the enigmatic fellow traveler, tells Kyuzo, “For me, the towns where the two-legged beasts lurk are far more dangerous than the fields where the wolves roam.” But to survive their treacherous journey, each man must become more feral. And later, with their goal seemingly within sight, Kyuzo says to an Army officer, “Please help me. I’ve walked such a long way without food.” And the officer answers: “But, really, nothing can be done. It’s not the same as before, you see.” Nothing will ever be the same again, of course.

As Kyuzo continues his slog down the road that goes nowhere, the book itself becomes a bit of a slog. Beasts Head for Home is a good novel, but it feels like a preparation for the greater novels to come. Abe seems to be licking around the edges of the surrealism that would characterize his later work, the way some of Nabokov’s early novels feel like a preparation for Lolita. Still, this is a necessary part of Abe’s important body of work, a book of vivid scenes and strange characters, a book that feels like the hollow terror after a nightmare passes.

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
News News Blog

Amazon Could Build a New ‘Receive Center’ in Memphis

An Amazon distribution center could come to Memphis and bring 600 jobs, as Wednesday the city’s economic development agency approved a $15 million tax break for the company.

The Economic Development and Growth Engine of Memphis and Shelby County (EDGE) voted Wednesday to grant Amazon a Jobs pay-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT) incentive over 15 years as the company invests $62.9 million into constructing a “receive center” here.

The 615,440-square-foot center proposed for Holmes would be one of near 50 centers in the country that receive, repackage, and store products before going to Amazon fulfillment centers to then be shipped to customers.

The vacant lot at Holmes currently produces under $8,000 in local tax benefits annually, but the proposed receive center would generate approximately $37 million over the entire 15-year term and about $1.5 million annually post-PILOT.

Of the 600 jobs, Amazon officials say 25 of those would be management positions, paying an average of $80,000 per year. The remaining positions would be “Tier 1 Associate” and pay about $29,000 a year.

Memphis City Council member and non-voting member of the EDGE board Martavius Jones told his colleagues that continuing to incentivize low-wage jobs is a “race to the bottom.”

“We have not done a good job at knowing what our priorities are,” Jones said, citing Memphis’ high poverty rate. “We have to be deliberate about what kind of jobs we incentivize.”

Jones said this sentiment is shared among the majority of the city council members.

However, EDGE board chairman Al Bright, Jr., said looking at the potential local tax benefits of the project, which would increase 90 times over after the PILOT, it’s hard to pass up the opportunity. “These types of projects raise the bottom line immediately,” Bright said.

Per terms of the PILOT, Amazon would spend just over $12 million contracting with local women- or minority-owned businesses.

Still, Amazon officials say “it’s not a done deal,” as it is also considering other locations for the distribution center. Officials say they cannot disclose which cities those are. The company expects to announce it’s decision in the coming weeks.

If Memphis is chosen, officials say construction would take about a year from start to finish and the center would launch this time next year.

This comes as the Memphis joins other cities across the country vying to be the location of Amazon HQ2. 



Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Sooth the Pain With All The Rage Documentary at Crosstown Arts

Indie Memphis is coming up in two weeks. Tonight, you can get a jump on the program with All The Rage tonight at Crosstown Arts.

Dr. John E. Sarno in All The Rage.

The Indie Wednesday series presents this film by Indie Memphis alumnae Michael Galisnsky and Suki Hawley. The directorial team first brought their talents to Indie Memphis 2002 with Horns and Halos, which documented the George W. Bush campaign’s efforts to block the publication of a critical biography by Arkansas writer James Hetfield. All The Rage is a look at Dr. John E. Sarno, the late professor of Rehabilitative Medicine at New York University School of Medicine. Dr. Sarno espoused the controversial theory and practice that some chronic lower back pain patients could conquer their malady with meditation and psychotherapy instead of painkillers.

Galinksy will have two more films in Indie Memphis this year. This screening begins Wednesday, October 18 at 7:00 PM. Stay tuned for more Indie Memphis coverage from the Flyer.

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

Lipstick Smear: Let Theatre Memphis’ “Stage Kiss” slip you some tongue

I’ve got to admit, I don’t  enjoy watching long sex scenes in any medium unless the coitus reveals something crucial about the characters and their relationship. I’m not opposed to skin or sin, mind you. It’s the narrative interruption. We all understand the ins and outs of the ins and outs and, absent some real surprises, we know how this particular act ends. Outside the realm of pure titillation (and sometimes in it!) it’s a greater gift to be economical with the touchin and the squeezin’ and let vivid imaginations do the dirty work for you. Or fast-forward through the sloppy parts and, in the words of the poet, show us the money. I mention all of this because, even though the topic’s smooching not sex, it was fun (for me) to hear my feelings on this subject debated so clearly inside Stage Kiss, a nifty little treasure-box of a play that depends on a lot of physical contact. Because, while I do enjoy the resolution a kiss might bring — or the chaos it can presage or set loose — there’s nothing more redundant than watching other people mug down. On the other hand, redundancy is the kind of quality Playwright Sarah Ruhl knows how to weaponize, and transform into an epic, existential gag.

Stage Kiss at Theatre Memphis is a rare and special thing — A RomCom that’s smart, disarmingly hilarious, and not just a saggy, cliche bag of warmed over kissy-boo-hoo. It’s got a solid cast and fun design all around. Still, I’ve got to imagine this  play’s probably a tough sell, even to friendly audiences who own Sleepless in Seattle on VHS, laser disc, DVD, Blu Ray and iTunes. The “backstage comedy” element was played out back when songwriters were innocently rhyming June and moon. All one sentence social media-friendly summaries make Stage Kiss sound like the most dreadful thing ever (or something you might accidentally hate-watch on the Hallmark channel) —  “Two contemporary actors who are also former lovers fall in love when they are cast opposite one another in a failed romantic melodrama from the 1930’s.”

Seriously, who would elect to go see that? You should. 
[pullquote-1]Ruhl’s a deserving MacArthur Genius grant winner who’s gone surreal with Dead Man’s Cell Phone, and gotten down & dirty with the scandalous vibrator play In the Next Room. On the surface Stage Kiss might look like a departure from edgier work, but it’s a classic Ruhl, and a gem for a number of reasons that I can’t fully articulate for fear of spoiling the fun. Instead I’ll suggest that folks who liked the interplay of stage life, real life, and the life of the mind in the movie Birdman will also enjoy Stage Kiss, which has a similar, if slightly less hallucinatory sensibility. Fans of tight character and ensemble acting will also enjoy the work being done here by Tracie Hansom and John Moore as the former lovers, Stuart Turner as their excitable director and Chase Ring as the understudy with Gordon Ginsburg, Lena Wallace Black, and Laurel Galaty in a variety of supporting roles.

Stage Kiss uses the lost-love-regained trope to explore different kinds of loving, trusting relationships attendant incompetency, psychopathy etc. Hansom, as the unnamed She, is married with a precocious, deeply betrayed teenage daughter right out of central casting. Moore’s He is in a “serious” relationship with a woman he doesn’t seem to know very well. He’s not Peter Pan incarnate but, having never settled down, his loft might pass for an upscale dorm room. An organic, but highly artificial rekindling of He and She’s relationship opens up like a farce, and the plays within the play afford ample opportunities for calculated overacting and singing that’s supposed to be terrible whether the audience knows it or not.

Ruhl’s  got a Stoppardian knack for changing her stories — and the meaning of her stories — midstream by altering audience perspective. Stage Kiss begins with a round of auditions in the empty theater. Sets accumulate like a lifetime’s worth of baggage and are summarily disposed of or repurposed. What appears to be from one perspective changes with the scenery — when the (not very) hot new stage couple move on from romantic melodrama to ridiculous hardscrabble grit.

Even wise, loving platitudes from the play’s closing chapter look like part of an epic gas-lighting when the applause fades, and you emerge from the theater into a less augmented reality.

Tony Isbell’s been on a roll as a director. Quark Theatre’s under-attended production of Years to the Day was an unfussy, superbly acted look at connectivity without community. Isbell’s given Stage Kiss the gift of trust and not messing it up by messing with it. He simply lets it all be the sincere romantic comedy it needs to be in order to be a whole lot more.

Seeing Stage Kiss on Theatre Memphis’ main stage was nice, but it made me miss the days when the Evergreen theatre was Circuit Playhouse. Although there should be plenty of room for non-musicals on our main stages, I wanted to see this  kiss-intimate comedy in a kiss-intimate house of just about that size and shape. It’s not that the laughs don’t land or that play loses something because it’s being performed in a big room —  it’s never as snuggly, or as prickly as it might be in somewhat tighter quarters.

That’s really all I have to say about that, though I feel the need to offer some counterintuitive advice to producing bodies: If audiences are leaving your show at intermission because (you think) they think the play is over, let them go on in happy ignorance. Maybe they’ll find out and come back. Or perhaps, instead of explaining how some people misunderstand the show, the person delivering the curtain speech could stress the ability to buy season tickets at INTERMISSION, before THE SECOND ACT. Setting your audience up for confusion places it outside the world of the play before the play has a chance to pull folks in. It changes how chunks of your audience will experience the story, turning whatever script you’re producing  into a meta-mystery — a whodunnit of sorts. Who got fooled? Were they stupid? Was the show not clear? Maybe they just didn’t like it? And so on.

I’m not theorizing here having experienced this before. Last week a decidedly unimpressed couple behind me spoke their theories about act one aloud creating a gravely comic, almost Beckett-like play within the play within the play. Don’t misunderstand, as a critic I probably love Statler & Waldorf more than the average fan, but this intrusion was unwelcome — and unfair to a couple who, through only some fault of their own, were clearly watching a completely different play. 

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Tater Tots Now Available at All Huey’s

Breaking! Tater tots are available at all Huey’s locations starting today.

Huey’s began testing the dish earlier this month at the Germantown and Poplar locations. They announced earlier today, that they were introducing tots at the other seven locations.

From the release:

Starting October 18th, all nine Huey’s locations will begin offering a new menu item- Tater Tots! Earlier this month, the Germantown and Poplar locations rolled out the tater tots for testing and the feedback has been fantastic!

The tater tots were chosen by the Huey’s Menu Development Committee. “We have been thinking about tater tots for a while. It was really just a matter of time,” explains Steve Voss, Vice President of Operations. “Starting with Germantown and Poplar was a way to make sure we can execute all of our quality and service standards. The response has been a big hit so far!”

You can order a basket of tater tots to share or a side to go with a World Famous Huey Burger. The new Cheese Tots are topped with melted cheddar cheese, bacon bits, and green onions and served with homemade ranch dressing.

Basket Tater Tots: $4.25
Side Tater Tots: $2.25
Cheese Tots: $8.25

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

I Love Juice to Open in TN Brewery

The folks behind Memphis’ I Love Juice Bar announced yesterday that a third location will open in the Tennessee Brewery in spring 2018.

From the release:

I Love Juice Bar will open its third, Memphis-area location in Downtown Memphis in the Tennessee Brewery’s Bottle Shop at 500 Tennessee Street, Suite 166. With a projected opening of Spring 2018, I Love Juice Bar Downtown will continue to focus on the healthy eats, juices, smoothies, coffee, and wellness shots served at its popular restaurants in Midtown and Crosstown.

“Whenever we pick a new I Love Juice Bar location, it’s really important that we feel a synergy with the neighborhood. We aren’t just opening a restaurant; we are creating a new community space for neighbors to meet, connect, and enjoy our city.” says Scott Tashie, owner of I Love Juice Bar and City Silo Table + Pantry in East Memphis.

Rebekah Tashie, owner of I Love Juice Bar and City Silo Table + Pantry, continues, “The Tennessee Brewery’s forward-thinking, community minded vision made perfect sense for our third Memphis location, and we are extremely excited to be affiliated with this venture.”

At 867 square feet, I Love Juice Bar Downtown will offer both indoor and outdoor seating, as well as convenient grab and go. Customers can expect the signature I Love Juice Bar experience – fresh juices, great music, warm environment – but tailored to fit the needs of the downtown community.

“The I Love Juice Bar concept of convenient, delicious, and healthy food is exactly what our future tenants and neighbors want,” says Benjamin Orgel of Slovis and Associates. They are looking to grab quick bites on their way out the door, returning from a workout, or during a fast lunch break – I Love Juice Bar is the ideal tenant we envisioned filling this space.”