Month: June 2018

Categories
Book Features Books

Tim Winton’s The Shepherd’s Hut.

Let’s talk about voice in fiction. Sometimes what’s meant by voice is the author’s style. Think of Hemingway, Joyce, Nabokov, Faulkner, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf. Their styles are so much their own voices that they changed the way we read fiction. And then there is the voice of a particular novel, which often means an idiosyncratic first-person narrative. Think of The Catcher in the Rye, The Color Purple, Portnoy’s Complaint, Jane Eyre, or Lolita.

The Shepherd’s Hut, by the Australian author Tim Winton, belongs to that group of novels remarkable for their narrator’s voice. Consider the opening sentences: “When I hit the bitumen and get that smooth grey rumble going under me everything’s hell different. Like I’m in a fresh new world all slick and flat and easy. Even with the engine working up a howl and the wind flogging in the window sounds are real soft and pillowy.” The speaker is teenager Jaxie Clackton. His mother is dead and his father — Captain Wankbag, he calls him — is an abusive drunk. When his father is killed in a freak accident, Jaxie takes off on foot, thinking the constabulary will come after him believing that he killed his father to escape his beatings. His goal is to disappear for a while until he can rendezvous with his paramour, Lee. This romance may or may not be made of air castle.

“There’s a sad feeling,” Jaxie says, “in a place people have just walked out of and left behind. Could be only me thinks shit like this. And you could probably say there’s plenty houses feel just as sad with people still in them. God knows our place was one of them for sure.”

The landscape over which Jaxie travels is barren and uninviting. Winton’s prose — and storyline — is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s. His nimble sentences wield an irresistible power that seems like literary legerdemain. Jaxie’s peripatetic tale is harrowing, though humorous in places, and a coming of age saga like no other. He says, “I been through fire to get here. I seen things and done things and had shit done to me you couldn’t barely credit. So be happy for me. And for fucksake don’t get in my way.”

Along the way, Jaxie stumbles upon another exile, a seemingly cracked, elderly Irishman named Fintan MacGillis. Fintan lives in a remote corner of the saltlands, all by himself except for the unseen companions he is constantly chatting with. The mysterious Fintan — only some of his checkered past is revealed, and I won’t give it away here — will become mentor, enemy, friend, adversary, protector, and protectee. Their relationship is what shapes the second half of the book. Jaxie says, “He was from Ireland where it’s green and rainy and people believe in fairies. He said the Irish don’t believe in the church anymore and they had a right not to, but they still believe in the little people and the Eeyou.”

The latter part of the novel is where the narrative really gets its footing and the slow burn of the opening chapters changes to a high-octane thriller. Here Jaxie’s crude, profane, mordant voice — and Winton’s masterful control of it — meld with the tale’s surprising but inevitably bleak path. “Our stories. We store them where moth and rust destroy,” he says.

Tim Winton is one of Australia’s most revered writers. He is the author of many novels, story collections, and works of nonfiction. He’s been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and his 2008 novel, Breath, was made into a feature film. This newest novel — expect another Booker Prize short-listing, at least — is as powerful as anything he’s written. There is a feral music to Winton’s style, not just here but in all his books, that is somewhat reminiscent not only of Cormac McCarthy but of the wild Glaswegian, James Kelman. Winton, here, has created a seductive articulation for his adolescent protagonist that is as intoxicating as Kelman’s stream-of-consciousness voice in his Booker Prize winner, How Late It Was, How Late. Young Jaxie Clackton — you’ll want to follow him anywhere, even into the burning hell of his self-imposed expatriation.

Categories
Food & Drink Food Reviews

A taste of New Orleans from Regina’s and New Orleans Seafood.

One would be pretty safe calling Regina’s a family affair. Terese Burns and her sister Ciera Robinson, who are New Orleans born and bred, share duties at the restaurant, along with their seven other siblings. A brother found them a prime spot at the corner of Court Square Downtown. A few cousins work in the kitchen, and their father backed them (as his father backed him in his sweets shop). The titular Regina is an aunt. Though Regina is still with us, they wanted to honor the legacy of her genuineness and caring. “She would give you her shirt off her back,” says Ciera. (She can cook good, too, the sisters say.)

Regina’s serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner. All the New Orleans highlights are there: po’boys? “Yeeeesssss,” says Ciera. Jambalaya? “Yeeeesssss.” Gumbo? “Yeeeesssss,” she says, as if to intone, C’mon now, of course, we’ve got that.

The sisters say they were bound to have a restaurant. Both have backgrounds in the industry, and they considered other locations in Houston and Iowa, but Memphis, they say, had that “it” factor. The restaurant opened in November.

But back to that menu. They’ve got seafood by the pound, including king crab and lobster; Cajun nachos (!) with crawfish tails and smoked sausage; crab cakes; a catfish basket; and a crab platter with stuffed and soft-shell crab with fried crawfish tails, and oysters.

They also serve, on Wednesday and Thursday only, Yaka Mein, aka “Old Sober.” This beef noodle soup, served with boiled eggs and soy, hot sauce, Worcestershire, and ketchup, is known to zap a hangover and is a staple at mom and pop stores in New Orleans.

For breakfast, one could order beignets, a sausage biscuit, and a pork chop platter with eggs. And, yes, lots of grits. The grits are made with heavy cream. “We bring it back to our roots,” says Ciera.

The New Orleans vibe extends to the bar, which serves such classics as the Hurricane, the Sazerac, and Pimm’s Cup.

They also have lunch specials. Four dollars can get you well fed at Regina’s.

“We try to reach all folks,” Terese says. All folks include vegans. On Tuesday, they serve vegan tacos.

Regina’s catfish, served fried, grilled, and blackened, is exceptional, the sisters say. They also insist on sourcing the French bread and red beans from Louisiana or “It will not taste the same,” says Ciera. They’ll put their gumbo up against anybody’s.

“It’s the food that we know best,” says Terese.

Regina’s, 60 N. Main, 730-0384, reginascajunkitchen.com

If Tuyen Le looks familiar, that’s because she worked for 20 years cooking and serving customers at her family’s restaurant Saigon Le on Cleveland in Midtown.

While Saigon Le is not coming back anytime soon, you can find Le once again cooking and serving customers on Cleveland at New Orleans Seafood.

This is the second New Orleans Seafood. The original is on Crump. Le got into the business through her boyfriend. She says there was no learning curve in going from Vietnamese to Creole. She’s got her instincts, after all.

The seafood is sourced fresh from New Orleans. The menu features fish and chicken wings. A 12-piece shrimp platter with fries, onion rings, or hush puppies is $8.99. Two dozen oysters are $10.99.

New Orleans Seafood also serves steamed dishes of snow crab and lobster tail, plus turkey necks. They come with potatoes, broccoli, or corn.

Tuyen Le of New Orleans Seafood

Customers can also buy raw seafood to take home and cook for themselves — tilapia, whiting fish, mussels, red snapper, snow crabs, king crabs, shrimp, crawfish, frog legs, and more.

Le hopes to see some familiar faces from Saigon Le soon. “I love my customers,” she says. “I miss all my customers.”

New Orleans Seafood,

288 N. Cleveland, 567-5008, neworleansseafoodmemphis.com

Categories
Music Music Features

Cory Branan: Folk All Y’all and Lightning in a Bottle

CREDIT: Joshua Black-Wilkins

The first time I saw Cory Branan — solo at the Hi-Tone in its former location on Poplar — he performed an act of serious musical hypnotism. The crowd was quiet (for a Hi-Tone crowd), quiet enough that I could pick out every finger-plucked note. His lyrics ambled, getting there but not always taking the most obvious route. He had a country twang and a folky, John Prine-inflected delivery, but he played an electric guitar, a Gibson SG, if I remember correctly.

There has always been a little rock-and-roll in Branan’s country, a little folk in his poetry. He’s a musical amalgamation, and he’s set to play an intimate Memphis set this Saturday at Studio688 as part of the Folk All Y’all series.

Folk All Y’all concerts aim to match idiosyncratic musical acts with intimate, interesting venues to create a unique concert experience. And Branan is tailor-made for the musical experiment. His songs breathe with an authenticity that suggests something in possession of a life of its own. He speaks slowly and quietly, but when he sings, his lyrics don’t always conform to meter. That’s not to suggest he’s sloppy or out of time, rather that he’s counting his own time. Or that he knows the value of losing track of time every once in a while. “Keep up,” his songs seem to say.

Branan, a native of Southaven, spent a handful of years in Nashville, but the singer/songwriter has had an on-again, off-again relationship with Memphis, where he cut his teeth in metal and country bands and where he now lives with his wife Rebecca and son Clemens. (He also has a daughter, Jane, “from a different mama.”) The Branan family moved back to Memphis in February, and since then, the singer says he’s been enjoying home life.

“I’m kind of a hermit. My wife jokes that I went out five times in the five years we lived in Nashville,” says Branan. “When I’m off the road, I just wanna be home.”

The singer has been adapting to family life, learning how to write whenever he can steal the time. After the Folk All Y’all gig, Branan heads out in July in support of California punks Face to Face, who are releasing a record of acoustic versions of old material. In October, he’s set to play the second annual MEMPHO Fest with his full band. And then there are the plans for the new record.

“I’ve never been able to write on the road,” Branan says. He says he would collapse into a bed after a tour, still feeling the ground moving underneath him. But things are a little different now for Branan. “Now, when I come off the road, I just wanna look at the wife and kid.” So the blond songsmith has been teaching himself to write on the road.

Branan has a dozen new songs in the works for the follow-up to Adios, which was released in April 2017 on Bloodshot Records — and named one of the Memphis albums of the year by the Flyer. In contrast to Adios, one of the more polished of Branan’s five studio albums, the new material suggests a raw approach.

“I’m thinking about more of a 1970s-type songwriter record, where you can hear the room, and everybody’s doing it live,” Branan says, referencing Jackson Browne and “even Gordon Lightfoot” before hitting on his ideal example. “For me, it’s some of those Kinks records in the 1970s. You can hear ’em hitting their teeth on the microphone. It’s just so ragged and glorious.” If anyone can produce the Southern Muswell Hilbillies, it’s Branan, who says he plans to play some of the new material during his set this Saturday.

The singer says he plans to hunker down in late autumn or winter to record the new album. Branan’s already envisioning how the process will go. “That’s always been my choice: overqualified, underprepared musicians,” Branan says of his recording style. “Don’t give ’em too much of a heads-up about what’s gonna happen. Just surround yourself with the best people and do it fast and try to catch a little lightning in a bottle.”

Cory Branan at Folk All Y’all, Saturday, June 30th at 7:30 p.m., at Studio688
(688 S. Cox). $20.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1531

Neverending Elvis

Holy scrap!

For 36 years, a 1962 Lockheed JetStar 1329 aircraft has rusted in the New Mexico desert. Though worn by the elements, one peek inside at the velvet-and-wood interior is all it takes to know that, once upon a time, this was Elvis Presley’s ghostly flying machine.

And now, thanks to the online auction site Iron Planet, this can be your rusty scrap heap, if the price is right.

Correction

Your Pesky Fly on the Wall is always highlighting follies and mistakes in area media. It’s only fair to highlight this column’s own shortcomings. Last week, we were naughty and ran a blurb about WMC reporter Janice Broach teasing a story with a riding crop. We failed to include an image. As many readers have pointed out, “pictures or it didn’t happen.” We regret the omission.

Verbatim

“We haven’t reached an agreement with them on what the final agreement will be for antitrust purposes.” — Makan Delrahim, chief of the Justice Department’s antitrust division on the stalled Sinclair/Tribune Media merger. That deal could include Memphis’ WREG.

Categories
News The Fly-By

‘Absurd’ & ‘Dangerous’

CREDIT: PPTNM

State officials formally asked the federal government for permission last week to strip TennCare payments to clinics that provide elective abortions.

They also asked if Tennesseans had any comment on the move. They did. Pink-shirted advocates flooded public hearings in Nashville on Friday and Monday. Public comment on the move is open until Friday, July 13th via mail and email.

State lawmakers passed the bill — aimed primarily at defunding Planned Parenthood — this year, and Governor Bill Haslam signed it in April. Lawmakers said, simply, they did not want taxpayer funds to be used in clinics that perform elective abortions. Representative Jimmy Matlock, the bill’s House sponsor, said its passing was a “huge win” for Tennesseans “who believed in the sanctity of life.”

PPTNM

A public hearing last week.

“Putting an end to abortion is one of the primary reasons I got involved in politics,” he said in a statement. “The very idea that our money was being handed over to industry executives who have proudly killed millions of babies for profit, and there was supposedly nothing we could do about it, absolutely sickened me.”

No TennCare money is spent directly on abortions. But lawmakers felt paying the clinics anything indirectly supported abortion.

Rebecca Terrell, executive director with Choices Memphis Center for Reproductive Health, called that assertion “absurd.”

“If anything, private revenues from abortion care often subsidize our provision of critically needed services to a growing population of Tennesseans without access to other health-care providers,” Terrell said. “In other words, you’re welcome, Tennessee.”

Officials with Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi (PPTNM) called the state’s move “politically motivated” and “dangerous.”

“This amendment blocks patients with low incomes, who already face systemic barriers to care due to racist and discriminatory policies, from accessing critical care at Planned Parenthood in Tennessee,” reads a statement from the organization. “Governor Haslam’s politically motivated agenda is dangerous to Tennesseans and will harm people in need of basic health-care services.”

Texas cut funding to similar clinics in 2011, in an effort to defund Planned Parenthood. After the cuts, 82 family planning clinics closed; two-thirds of them were not Planned Parenthood clinics.

In response to the cuts, the federal government (under the Obama adminstration) cut $35 million in annual funds to the state. Lawmakers there are hopeful that the Trump adminstration will help restore the funds. The ask was made in May 2017 and Texas officials still have no answer.

PPTNM officials said Tennessee’s request would exclude at least 600,000 patients from getting care at their clinics and others like them. While those clinics do provide abortion services, they also provide birth control, cancer screenings, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, and more.

In 2010, 56 percent of all pregnancies in Tennessee were unintended, and in 2016, 53 percent of women who gave birth were TennCare or Medicaid recipients, according to PPTNM.

“This proposed waiver does nothing to improve the integrity and effectiveness of the Medicaid program for Tennesseans,” said Ashley Coffield, CEO of PPTNM. “The last thing Tennesseans need is to have their options for reproductive and sexual health care restricted by additional barriers such as the proposed waiver.”

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Make America Hate Again: Trump’s Inhuman Border Policy

CREDIT: Latino Memphis/Facebook

President Trump has built his presidency on a foundation of untruths and a defense of false equivalence. His defenders have followed suit. Now, the lies and the hypocrisy of an administration that cares only about preserving power and privilege for the loyal few are literally tearing families apart.

Latino Memphis/Facebook

It all started before the 2016 election. In October 2016, the Access Hollywood audiotape showed candidate Trump bragging about how status as a “star” gave him the power to sexually assault women. Initially Trump fumbled through an apology, but he quickly switched to what has become a more familiar posture: normalizing his behavior via diversionary tactics, i.e. by claiming that Bill Clinton had said much worse to him on the golf course.

Next, after multiple indictments of his staff, including his campaign manager and his first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, Trump argued that Hillary Clinton’s emails were a more significant scandal, despite repeated FBI investigations, including the recent inspector general’s investigation, finding no basis for her prosecution.

The president’s proclivity for lying is well-documented but is too often met with the familiar refrain that “all politicians lie.” The truth, however, is that no politician in modern times has engaged in such a continuous and willful effort to mislead the public. The Washington Post recently reported that by May 1, 2018, Trump had lied more than 3,000 times in his presidency, averaging 6.5 lies per day. In one 80-minute speech, Trump lied 44 times.

As the daily lies mount, the administration has begun a truly reprehensible campaign against our neighbors to the south. This administration, in a “zero tolerance” policy they alone concocted, is criminally prosecuting every individual who crosses the U.S. border without documentation. Many are crossing to seek asylum as they flee violence, political unrest, and economic despair. This is a new Trump administration policy; it is not a policy developed — as claimed by Trump and his acolytes — by the Democrats. There is no “law” requiring the separation of families.

Instead of treating migrants with dignity, Trump refers to them as “animals.” The administration, evidently, didn’t think the U.S. public would care about dividing up families, poor people, mostly from Central America. They were wrong. Public outcry followed and forced the president to back down; he signed an order last week ending the policy of family separation. But, the ramifications of this policy have been deadly, and the problem isn’t solved by any means.

One Honduran father killed himself after being separated from his wife and child. Child psychologists have warned about the emotional well-being of children who are held in detention centers without parents and relatives. Last week, a heartbreaking photograph of a two-year-old Honduran girl, in tears, witnessing her mother’s arrest became the symbol of Trump’s cruel immigration policy.

In response to complaints about Trump’s policy, Senator Lamar Alexander initially claimed that “Previous administrations have separated children when their parents were detained for criminal charges or other charges that required their detention.” Senator Alexander has since condemned Mr. Trump’s actions as public opposition has grown.

The senator’s reflexive use of false equivalency is telling. President Trump’s border policy is unlike any that the U.S. has deployed in our history. No administration has ever systematically removed children from their parents, simply for crossing the border. Alexander’s initial claim that previous administrations have separated children when their parents were detained obfuscates the fact that previous administrations took such actions only when the parents engaged in criminal activities beyond simply crossing a border to seek asylum and a better life.

The time has come for Republicans and anyone who clings to a moral compass to quit excusing President Trump’s actions. His words have been callous, his actions cruel and unusual, and if Congressional leaders won’t act now, in the face of objective cruelty to children, then the great American experiment is truly at its end stage.

Bryce Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney and board chair of Latino Memphis. Michael LaRosa is an associate professor of Latin American history at Rhodes College.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Raisin at Hattiloo

From a technical standpoint, I could pick Hattiloo’s Raisin to pieces. The set looks slapped together, the music’s canned, and that’s just for starters. But so much of any show’s success depends on material strength and a cast’s ability to leverage it. In this regard, everything about Raisin delivers. Music and dancing never water down the message in this faithfully adapted retelling of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. This story of the Younger family and their struggle to buy an affordable home and possibly start a family business is a subtle, almost generous look at how America and its wealth became segregated. It is a deeply felt family drama that ends with a devastating loss barely tempered with dignity and determination.

As more and more Americans moved out of apartments and into single-family homes, the limited properties made available to African Americans were typically lower quality and far more expensive than property being offered to whites. Absent credit, it was sold via a contract system eliminating equity. One missed payment could result in eviction, with nothing to show for your effort. This is the legal, social, and economic environment in which Raisin unfolds.

Raisin isn’t about integration or white flight. It’s about a family’s struggle to create legacy inside a system designed to prevent it. The family patriarch has died leaving $10,000 in life insurance. Lena, the surviving matriarch wants to sink most of the money into an affordable home in a white neighborhood, not because of the demographics, but because “It was the best [she] could do for the money.” Her son Walter Lee’s a chauffeur who wants to invest the money in a family business — a liquor store. Her daughter has exchanged faith for science and wants to go to medical school. In the absence of credit or anything more than sustenance income, all these dreams hinge on one pot of cash. Add to this dynamic a white representative of the Clybourne Park neighborhood who wants to negotiate a kinder, gentler way to keep blacks out, and you have all the ingredients necessary for an emotionally honest and devastating primer in how everything went wrong.

Raisin‘s story is famously inspired by the poetry of Langston Hughes. More crucially, it’s informed by the Hansberry family’s personal experience in court, fighting the restrictive legal covenants and members-only neighborhood associations. Hers is a deeply sad but open-hearted critique of the American Dream, a Depression-era fiction embraced by President Herbert Hoover to sell the advantages of single family home zoning where ethnic groups were excluded, over crowded apartment-based urban living where anybody might move across the street.

Raisin‘s Lena became an almost instantaneous theatrical archetype. George C. Wolfe brilliantly lampooned that archetype in The Colored Museum‘s “Last Black Mama on the Couch” sketch. Hattiloo stalwart Patricia Smith never sits on a couch or plays to type. Her Lena shifts from thoughtful, nurturing, and wise, to superstitious, impulsive, and tyrannical. She struggles to create security for her family without realizing how restrictive security can be — or how tenuous. Smith exudes maternal virtue, but hers is a nuanced, warts-and-all take on a part the veteran performer could have easily phoned in.

Director Mark Allan Davis gets top-shelf performances from an ensemble cast that includes Rashideh Gardner, Samantha Lynn, Aaron Isaiah, and Gordon Ginsberg. But Kortland Whalum’s leave-it-all-on-stage take on Walter Lee Younger is really something to see. Whalum feels nothing lightly and his words and songs land like punches — some weak, flailing and ineffectual, some like haymakers. It’s as rich a performance as I’ve seen in ages, just at the edge of too much but never tipping over.

Walter Lee gets swindled, of course. I don’t think that’s a spoiler given the shopworn material. He’s one more casualty of unstable alternative economies created when people are isolated and shut out of the regular economy. The Youngers may be moving into a Chicago neighborhood, but in this moment Walter Lee becomes the embodiment of Hughes’ “Harlem,” and the “dream deferred.” Maybe this gifted, young, imperfect black man, who’s trying to do all the things he’s supposed to do but still can’t get ahead, will finally dry up like a raisin in the sun. Maybe he’ll fester like a sore or stink like rotten meat or sag like a heavy load. Maybe he’ll explode. In a beautifully manicured interpretation, Whalum gives you the sense it’s all on the table all the time.

Short take: This Raisin has some real problems. Telling one helluva strong story isn’t one.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Possible Consensus Looming in Early Voting Controversy

CREDIT: JB

JB

Testifying at County Commission on early voting site controversy on Wednesday were (l to r) Norma Lester, Democratic member of the Election Commission, Election Administrator Linda Phillips, Election Commission chairman Robert Meyers, and Corey Strong, chairman of Shelby County Democratic Party.

After a stormy day of arguments and protests over the location of voting sites for the August 2nd election round, the Election Commission and its critics found possible light at the end of the tunnel.

A mushrooming controversy regarding the Shelby County Election Commission’s provision of a new Early Voting schedule for the August 2nd election round was taken up — and perhaps put on a path to resolution — by the Shelby County Commission on Wednesday, shortly after a press conference in the Vasco Smith County Building by Shelby County Democrats, who denounced the changes.

The Democratic contingent, spearheaded by county party chairman Corey Strong and state Young Democrats president London Lamar, summed up several days of simmering resentment, charging that the majority-Republican EC was catering preferentially to the GOP by the selection of the Agricenter in East Memphis as an umbrella site for for extra days of early voting. Previously that role had been bestowed on a downtown site, more accessible to residents of the inner city.

An additional focus of the Democrats’ displeasure was the EC’s decision to add five new early voting sites to those previously advertised and employed for the county primary elections in May. As Strong would say in later testimony to the County Commission, three of the new sites were in strongly Republican areas, one was in “purple” territory, neither Democratic nor Republican, and the fifth was “a bone thrown to us” in South Memphis.

Yet a third point was at issue — a rumor that early voting sites in the eastern — or GOP-oriented — portions of the county had been provided with newer, more user-friendly election machines and materials than those provided for the inner city.

On that final point, for which no evidence had been presented, the answer given convincingly in a later ad hoc session of the county commission by several different sources, including Norma Lester, one of two Democrats on the Election Commission, was that all voting sites were provided with election machines of the same model and vintage. (There was further uniformity, seconded heartily by Republican Commissioner Terry Roland, that all the machines had reached the end of their life cycles and would be due for replacement in the near future.)

The other issues were not resolved so easily. Both Robert Meyers, the Republican chairman of the Election Commission, and election administrator Linda Phillips said that the newly added voting sites were chosen for the convenience of previously underserved areas and that the Agricenter, in Shelby Farms, was selected as an umbrella site, open for four more days than the other sites, because of its centra location in Shelby County. JB

Lamar and Strong with media at Democrats’ press conference

Democratic members of the audience and of the county commission (which had and has no prescribed oversight of the EC, serving only a referee function on Wednesday) were skeptical, pointing out, for example, that the Agricenter site is not served by public transportation, a fact making it inconvenient for certain classes of working people.
After a fair amount of to and fro in argumentation, there seemed to emerge a consensus that changes could yet be made in the provision of sites for early voting, due to start on Friday, July 13th, and to end on Saturday, July 28, at 26 locations.

Complicating that search for consensus had been some evident contradictions, perhaps incidental or unintentional ones. Just before the commission convened for what would turn out to be its ad hoc session on the site issues, county election administrator Linda Phillips was asked who had made the determination on the location of the new sites.

“The Election Commission,” she said, decisively. As various testimony before the county commission — hers, as well as Election Commission chairman Robert Meyers — would indicate, however, that answer was only technically true. The new sites were among several selected by the administrator’s office, from which the Election Commission would pick and choose.

Another, more fundamental contradiction seemed to emerge from Meyers’ testimony before the county commission. In his explanation of the logic that went into the site selection, he said that pin-pointing previously underserved areas was the only criterion and that, specifically, questions of partisan orientation had not figured in the selection.

In later testimony, however, responding to suggestions from county commissioners, as well as audience members, that most of the newly added early-voting sites were in Republican areas, Meyers went down the list of preexisting sites and identified them by party, with most of those he mentioned being Democratic rather than Republican, then said that all the Election Commissionsion had done was to try to provide some “balance.”

JB

EC Chairman Meyers under the lights

In any case, all may end well. Two proposals for remedying the situation were made — one to make all sites open on the same days and for the same time intervals; another to assign a more central site the same extra days and hours as those now provided for the Agricenter, so that two sites would be available for extra days and hours. Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church, on Bellevue Boulevard in Midtown, was one suggestion for the second site.

To judge by the applause that greeted the all-sites-open-all-days proposal, that was the audience favorite. County Commissioner Reginald Milton further proposed that 11 o’clock starting times be moved back to 10 a.m.

Meyers said “perhaps” when asked if such changes could be made by the Election Commission, later clarifying that conditional answer to mean that it could be done if a majority of the five-member Election Commission conferred approval.

Democratic Election Commissioner Lester, who had been the only member absent when the commission voted 4-0 to approve the new sites, quickly said she would call for an Election Commission meeting, and Meyers agreed to set one on an ASAP basis. (Lester said Wednesday she would have opposed the designation of the Agricenter as an umbrella site but praised administrator Phillips as an objective, unbiased official.)

And that soon-to-be special session of the Election Commission is where the next move in the Early Voting matter will occur, and where the controversy will be resolved. Or not.

Categories
Beyond the Arc Sports

Beyond the Arc Podcast #96: The Draft, Free Agency, and the Return of GNG

This week on the show, Kevin and Phil talk about:

  • The Grizzlies’ decision to make JB Bickerstaff the head coach, like, for real
  • What will the Grizzlies be next year? Do they know?
  • The Grizzlies drafted well
  • The future potential of Jaren Jackson, Jr. and what that might look like in his rookie season
  • What motivated the Jevon Carter pick?
  • Should the Grizzlies trade Gasol and Conley?
  • What were the Hawks thinking on draft night?
  • How will David Fizdale do with the Knicks and will LeBron go play for him?
  • Who can the Grizzlies sign this summer? Can they fire Ben McLemore’s contract into the Sun?

The Beyond the Arc podcast is available on iTunes, so you can subscribe there! It’d be great if you could rate and review the show while you’re there. You can also find and listen to the show on Stitcher and on PlayerFM.

You can call our Google Voice number and leave us a voicemail, and we might talk about your question on the next show: 234-738-3394

You can download the show here or listen below:

Categories
News News Blog

Paint Memphis Calls for Artists for Event Honoring MLK

CREDIT: Facebook- Paint Memphis

Facebook- Paint Memphis

site of future mural on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue

The nonprofit group, Paint Memphis, is calling artists to participate in its annual one-day paint festival.

This will be the fourth annual Paint Memphis festival, where local and regional artists work together to create a collaborative mural. This year the theme is “Dream Bigger,” in honor of the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

Set for Saturday, Sept. 29th, the event will take place around Paint Memphis’ office near MLK Jr. Avenue and Danny Thomas. Selected painters, writers, and muralists will be given a primed wall, a ladder, and paint to create their artwork. There will also be live music and food trucks.

To participate, artists must submit an application, along with photos of three work samples, on Paint Memphis’ website no later than Sunday, July, 15th. Selected artists will be notified by Wednesday, Aug. 1st.

While Paint Memphis says the festival is open to artists anywhere, a preference will be given to local applicants.

Justin Fox Burks

Karen Golightly, director of Paint Memphis with zombie mural city council members called ‘satanic.’

Earlier this year, several of Paint Memphis’s murals, like one of a Zombie at Willett and Lamar, drew criticism from Memphis City Council members, who referred to the artwork as “satanic.”

After heated discussions with Paint Memphis’ director Karen Golightly, the council voted to remove six murals they considered offensive, but city workers ended up unintentionally removing seven of the wrong murals. And the zombie, which is painted on private property remains for now.

This year, Paint Memphis is asking for resident feedback before any murals go up. Through an online survey, residents can indicate what kind of artwork they’d like to see and what kinds they don’t. This is to ensure the “mural reflects this neighborhood and its residents.” Residents can also stop by the future mural site at 711 MLK Jr. Avenue to leave a suggestion. 

In addition to Paint Memphis’ policy of not allowing artists to paint nudity, profanity, obscenities, drug, or gang imagery, the property owner is asking that there is nothing related to guns, other weapons, or politics.