Month: August 2018

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Pyro’s Expands Its Brand.

Chad Foreman and Kirk Cotham met while in grad school. They worked together at FedEx and later at Accredo Health Group. Foreman was in accounting, while Cotham worked in marketing. After being offered a buy-out from Accredo, they had to figure out what to do next. They wanted something practical, something that is used everyday. One of the things they considered was woodworking, specifically cabinetry. But then they settled — against the many warnings from their friends and family — on the restaurant industry.

One thing they liked about getting in the restaurant game was that, in Memphis, when it comes to restaurants, the little guy almost always beats the big guy. That is, nobody’s messing with KFC when we’ve got Gus’s. Why have Pizza Hut when Memphis Pizza Cafe is so much better?

They knew they wanted fast casual and they wanted multiple locations to make it work. As Cotham remembers it, “We were bringing something new to Memphis.”

The first Pyro’s, a build-your-own pizza restaurant, opened in East Memphis in 2013. There are now four locations in Memphis, with one in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, opening soon.

And now they’ve expanded beyond pizza with Wolf River Brisket and Levee Creamery and Highland Creamery (coming soon).

How the newest concepts came about … Well, Cotham and Foreman are both opportunists. Though that word makes them cringe, they admit it’s true. So, there was a TCBY near Foreman’s home. It was neither good nor bad, he says. “It was not an enjoyable experience,” he says. Then he heard that the TCBY was looking to sell. Foreman had always felt like a coffee place would work there — an alternative to Starbucks (the little guy always beats the big guy, remember). They noticed how close schools were to the location. They had a vision of moms dropping off their kids and picking up coffee, people meeting up, after-dinner treats for the kids. There, they opened Levee Creamery.

It was a case of the real estate dictating the direction of the restaurant. And that is certainly true for the two Wolf River Brisket locations. A space opened in the same shopping center as Levee Creamery. For the second location, they found a spot in an old Mellow Mushroom in Olive Branch.

One thing that’s flummoxed them about Pyro’s is the impression that Pyro’s is a chain. “We don’t want to be viewed as carpetbaggers,” says Foreman. They think the issue may be that the spaces are clean, the service and food is uniform. “If you’re nice or stylish, you can’t be from Memphis,” ventures Cotham.

This is perhaps why the names for their ice cream spots focus on the site: Levee Creamery for Houston Levee and Highland Creamery for the street.

The creameries serve up hand-churned ice cream and French Truck coffees. They offer cake batter gelato, cookie doughs, waffle cones, and milkshakes. The Electric Fence Shake comes with two shots of espresso. There’s also a cold espresso bar.

At Wolf River Brisket, they serve Texas-style brisket cooked in a Memphis manner — low and slow. They also serve burned ends. To those uninitiated, the burned ends are the fatty ends of the brisket that are cubed and smoked. At Wolf River, they cover it in sauce and smoke it again so it creates a caramelized bark. “It’s the best of Texas and Kansas City,” says Cotham.

Cotham and Foreman say they have a list of ideas, places they’ve encountered while traveling that they think would translate well in Memphis. But they aren’t divulging what’s in store.

Cotham spells out their business approach, “It’s good for us; it’s good for Memphis.”

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Meg

There is a terrible screech of fingernails across a blackboard, and the room is silenced. All eyes turn to the old fisherman in the back. He waits to speak until he is sure he has everyone’s attention.

“You know who I am,” he says in a clipped New England accent, unchanged since the time of Melville. “You know how I earn a living.”

Something about his battered blue hat and thousand-yard stare rings a bell. “You look like Quint, the old fisherman from Jaws.”

“Aye, Chief. That I am. If you want to make a movie, I’ll tell you how to make a movie. But it ain’t gonna be easy.

“First thing you gotta do is, you gotta get a shark. Now, some people say you don’t need a shark to make a movie. You get a giant octopus. Maybe a school of piranhas. Ole’ Jim Cameron tried piranhas. Didn’t work for him. He’ll be the first to tell ya.

“No, you need a shark. A shark with dead eyes, like a doll’s eyes. But with a twinkle in those dead eyes, a mischievous twinkle. You need a shark that’s got some playfulness to him, Chief. A shark that’s gonna sneak up behind ya, say boo.

“But it can’t just be any shark. Noooo. Bruce from Jaws, now there was a shark that understood showbiz, Chief. You gotta beat old Bruce, and Bruce was a big ‘un.

“No, you’re gonna need a megalodon — a 75-footer. For 20 million years, the megalodon swam the seas eating whales. Then they went extinct.”

Hmmm. “They’re extinct? That sounds like a problem if we need one for the movie.”

“Maybe more than one, Chief. I can find ’em for you. But we’re gonna need some gear, like a giant, state-of-the-art underwater laboratory with transparent tubes big enough for people, so the sharks can get a good look at ’em.

“The next thing we’re gonna need is Jason Statham. Shiny bald head, ripped body just poured into a wetsuit, Chief. Big, sexy Jason Statham, with his cold dead eyes, like a doll’s eyes. …

“Then we gotta give Statham a tragic backstory. Something involving sharks, Chief. For the dramatic irony. Now here’s where the man who doesn’t know about shark movies is going to steer you wrong. They’re gonna say, we should rip off Jaws. But that’s where they’re wrong. You don’t go with the Spielberg, you go with ole’ Jim Cameron. You take a little bit from The Abyss, Chief. Statham’s got this ex-wife, see. He’s a crack rescue diver, but he can’t keep a marriage together, because he’s haunted by the men he left behind to die in crippled nuclear submarine three years ago. He’s in Thailand, running a fishing boat and drinking himself to death. But he’s not fat from the booze. No, he’s super ripped, Chief. Muscles all a bulgin’ …

“Now his ex-wife Lori (Jessica McNamee) is trapped in a crippled submarine with a crew of landlubbers.”

“Hold on. Why is she in a submarine?”

“Turns out the Mariana Trench has a false bottom, and she’s down in it, exploring.”

“Well, that doesn’t make sense. Couldn’t we just use sonar to …”

“Don’t overthink it, Chief! And that big shark, The Meg, is down there with Lori and the crew, and she’s gonna eat ’em up. So Statham has to come out of retirement to save ’em. He gets ’em out all right, but in the process, he unwittingly releases The Meg. And that’s when all the other folks come in. You gotta have a lot of ’em, ready to fall in the water at the right time so your shark can chow down. You have one who’s rich, but nobody likes. Elon Musk type. Everybody cheers when he dies. Get Rainn Wilson to play him.”

“Nuclear submarines? Giant sharks? A beach full of expendable extras? A guy from The Office? This sounds expensive.”

“Oh, it’s as expensive as hell itself, Chief! You’re gonna need buckets and barrels and trucks full of money. That’s why you need the Chinese. See, us Americans, we’ve got all the shark movies we can handle. But the Chinese, they don’t have any shark movies. That’s why you gotta go and tell ’em, ‘You give us $178 million, and we’ll give you a shark movie the likes of which you never seen!'”

“But this sounds like every other shark movie ever.”

“They don’t know from shark movies. We’ll get Statham in there, barefoot, fighting The Meg with a knife in his teeth. They’ll eat it up.”

“Maybe the shark can live in a tornado!”

Quint shakes his head. “No. That would just be dumb.”

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Space Force: The Final Frontier of Lunacy

Sorry, border wall. You’ve been demoted. Trade war, you’re on notice. There’s a new boondoggle in the ole U.S. of A., and its name is Space Force. Because what this country really needs — before we can even think about securing our elections or rebuilding Puerto Rico — is to hunker down for a Space War.

Print 1,000 copies of this and plaster them to my car if I’m wrong, but Space Force may be the dumbest idea of all time. For a president whose avocation is spraying free-association word bricolage from his mouth and Twitter fingers 24 hours a day, that is quite an accomplishment.

Yes, we have played this game long enough to know last week’s announcement is a set of jangling keys meant to divert our collective attention from some sinister immigration policy or looming Mueller investigation bombshell. And, sure, the cockamamie proposal may end up flying warp speed through a Republican Congress whose members are cozy with the industries who stand to make big bucks on anti-gravity space blasters. For now, though, it feels good to laugh.

Watching Vice President Mike Pence detail mercifully vague plans to launch the Space Force by 2020, I almost felt sorry for him — as much as it’s possible to feel sorry for a guy who thinks the movie Mulan is liberal propaganda. He asked for this, though. He wanted to be vice president so badly he’s willing to stand on the Pentagon dais and brief military professionals about an interstellar defense strategy that sounds like it was lifted from one of those YouTube videos of doped-up teens after wisdom tooth extractions. With a straight face!

Like many others who have served at the whim of capricious bosses and clients, I too have been dispatched to look into the feasibility of an “out of the box” idea from above. However, I know the best and quickest approach to these requests is to get an estimate. If a quick number-crunch doesn’t elicit a “Jesus, that’s how much it would cost? Forget it,” get another estimate. The next best approach is to avoid the person or change the subject whenever he brings it up, until he moves on to something else.

Either would have worked in this scenario. The price tag for research and development of a space army would make any true fiscally responsible conservative weep. Name-dropping Barack Obama or CNN before scrambling away would have bought at least 280 Twitter characters’ worth of time. Then again, Pence may have viewed the task as God’s punishment for making eye contact with a lady server and ordering a ginger ale before his wife sat down for dinner in 1993 or something. Nowadays, one must self-flagellate a little in order to be a heartbeat away from the highest office in the land.

I love Space Force because it’s 100 percent the kind of idiotic million-dollar idea people come up with when they’re blasted out of their minds. Having worked in bars, I’m quite familiar with cocaine gibberish. A space army that fights … um, TBD … is exactly the stuff I would expect to hear from a patron who has taken a few too many trips to the restroom. To be clear, I would never accuse POTUS of tooting — that would be downright unpatriotic. But I’m willing to bet at least one fun-loving individual has woken one afternoon with an empty wallet, save for a bar napkin with “SPACE FORCE” scrawled on it. Maybe he muttered “Space Force? What the hell is this about?” before tossing the napkin into the trash. He may have forgotten about his revolutionary strategy for weaponizing the cosmos until weeks later, when a concerned friend mentioned how weird he had been acting. “Bro, you were babbling about space weapons and you were like, ‘Space Force all the way!’ Do you remember? What was that about? Is everything okay with you?”

The name “Space Force” belongs on a child’s generic astronaut costume or a poorly counterfeited Stair Wards or Battlestart Galtactical figurine, not a serious branch of the United States military. I can think of at least a dozen Space Force puns without even trying. Space Force these clowns out of the White House, am I right? Here’s a tagline: To Infinity and Beyond Ridiculous. And do not get me started on the comedic potential of Space Farts. Did no one warn these people about Space Farts?

This administration is a Space Farce.

Jen Clarke is an unapologetic Memphian and a digital marketing strategist.

Categories
Music Music Blog

Listen Up: Cruelty of the Heavens

CREDIT: Josh Owens

Josh Owens

Cruelty of the Heavens

Thank Carl Jung for the band name “Cruelty of the Heavens.”

It was part of a long passage in Jung’s book about Abraxas, a gnostic deity, says Jared Filsinger, bass player/back-up vocalist in the band that includes singer/guitarist Neal Bledsoe and drummer Sam Davidson.

The name was perfect because they now mix “melody with melancholy,” Filsinger says. “Neal writes all the lyrics and we write the music together. And a lot of times it will be melodic. Pretty guitar parts and stuff like that. But there’s always going to be some minors thrown in. And then his lyrics a lot of times are dark. So, it’s that merging of two emotions.”

Filsinger, Bledsoe and Davidson were together in two other bands: The West Bound and Chaos Order, which were a “heavier, fast kind of band,” Bledsoe says. “We had six records. We were doing two EPs a year. I mean, it was insane. Naturally, you just get jaded and burnt out and just tired of the certain thing you’ve been doing for a long time.”

The new music wasn’t really a departure as far as their musical tastes. “We grew up listening to stuff like this. All three of us listen to stuff like this on a daily basis. More than we do the heavier stuff. Jared’s a huge fan of The Replacements. Then there’s a band called Superdrag, that we love a lot. The bigger bands like Nirvana.”

“Soundgarden,” Filsinger says.

“To me, it’s like post punk mixed with ’90s alternative, so, it’s almost like some elements of The Cure and Joy Division with The Replacements and Nirvana somewhere in between that,” Bledsoe says.

It’s “just a breath of fresh air being able to write this kind of stuff and not be screaming into a microphone.”

“For me, personally, it’s like the band I wanted to be in but I didn’t know it all along,” Filsinger says.

They changed their musical direction when they took a break from Chaos Order in early 2016. “We’d been so militant for all those years,” Bledsoe says. “Doing two EPs a year. Then we would do at least two videos for each of those two EPs. So, we’re just like, ‘Let’s take a breather for a second now. Let’s be humans now.’”

They said they were going to take a break, but, Bledsoe says, “taking a break” meant taking a break from writing their heavier material to writing their more melodic songs.

In 2015, Bledsoe and Filsinger wrote “1995,” which was about the death of Bledsoe’s dad. That song was more melodic that their Chaos Order material. “That was the first song that Neal and I had written together,” Filsinger says. “And it showed us we could write a different style of music with him on guitar and me on bass.”

The band members didn’t intend to form a new band when they took the break. “We planned on just doing Chaos Order, but in that break Neal and I got together and we each had songs that weren’t heavy and we jammed with Sam,” Filsinger says.

“We decided we’re going to do the record and not tell anybody who’s in the band and release it and that be it,” Davidson says. “That was the plan, but five songs turned into 10 and we said, ‘Man, this feels right.’ We kept both going for a while, but now it’s just this band.”


Bledsoe tested their new music by giving a recording of it to his friend, who’s in a hardcore band in St. Louis. But he didn’t tell him the members of Chaos Order were the musicians. “If you said, ‘Hey, this is my band. Tell me what you think,’ automatically they’re doing to be partial with you,” Bledsoe says.

His friend liked it.

How did their Chaos Order fans like this change? “Some of them were kind of like, ‘Uh, I didn’t think you guys were capable of doing this kind of stuff,’” Davidson says. “But it was surprising that a lot of people came over like they really liked it. It was kind of like, ‘If these guys can play this type of stuff (and) be passionate about it, then it’s OK for me to like it.”

They released their album, “Grow Up and See” in November, 2016 and their EP, “Somewhere Between Paranoia and Depression” last year.

Songs include “The Magician,” which Filsinger describes as a “dysfunctional love story,” and “Entoptic Phenomenon,” which Bledsoe describes as a “coming-of-age record.”

“I think we can be a lot more honest in this band,” Davidson says. “Not that we weren’t honest in the other bands, but when you’re playing heavy music, people kind of expect a certain content. And when you’re doing something new that is like this, when you want to write about something emotional, you can do that without thinking, ‘I wonder how this is going to be?’ WIth metal, they’re expecting certain topics, Just like dark stuff.”

Satanic rituals,” Bledsoe says. “Satanic. Deal with the fucking devil.”

“With this one, if you want to write a song about a girl, you can,” Davidson says. “It’s like we can be completely sincere and who gives a shit if some hardcore tough guy doesn’t like it?”

Cruelty of the Heavens will perform at 7 p.m. Aug. 17 at Meddlesome Brewing Company, 7750 Trinity Road, No. 114 in Cordova. No admission charge.

.

Categories
News News Blog

State Unemployment Rate Historically Low Third Month in a Row

CREDIT: Department of Labor and Workforce Development

The unemployment rate in Tennessee remained historically low across the state last month, according to state officials, but Memphis has one of the highest unemployment rates in the state.

The state unemployment rate was 3.5 percent in July for the third month in a row, according to a   

report released Thursday by Gov. Bill Haslam and Burns Phillips, commissioner of the state’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development.


Memphis’ June unemployment rate was one of the highest in the state at 5.2 percent, according to the latest data by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

At 3.2 percent, Nashville had the lowest rate in the state. The national unemployment rate stands at 3.9 percent.

In Tennessee, 2,500 new, non-farm job were created between June and July this year.

“Tennessee’s economy is strong and that shows in both a continuous low unemployment rate and the creation of more new jobs,” Haslam said. “We have worked hard to get to where we are, by creating an environment in Tennessee where businesses can thrive and building strong workforce development programs that are paying off for both citizens and employers.”

In the past year, nonfarm employment has increased by sum 56,300 jobs, according to state officials.

“It’s encouraging to see so many new jobs coming to Tennessee,” Phillips said. “We have the state’s business services teams out in communities across the state, working closely with companies, to ensure they have a qualified workforce to fill those positions.”

Department of Labor and Workforce Development

Categories
News News Blog

VIDEO: SUV Driver Swerves Into Cyclists

CREDIT: YouTube/Wes Hale

VIDEO: SUV Driver Swerves Into Cyclists

A new video shows an SUV pulling a trailer swerving into a group of Memphis-area cyclists.

Cyclist Wes Hale posted the video to YouTube Tuesday. Hale seems to be riding in the rear of about eight cyclists rolling down a rural, two-lane road. A large, Ford SUV with Mississippi plates pulling a rusty trailer emerges closely to Hale’s left side, straddling the middle of the road.

“Before the driver passed, they were less than two feet from my rear tire for about 15 seconds,” Hale wrote in the video’s description.
[pullquote-1] The driver passes quickly, edging closer to the cyclists with every foot. At the end of the video, the driver swerves dangerously close to a cyclist in a pink jersey. The cyclist was riding close to the center of the road. The SUV’s trailer seems to miss the cyclist by only a few inches.

Tulio Bertorini, president of the Memphis Hightailers Foundation, said the vehicle came so close, that the tire rubbed up against the cyclist foot leaving a mark on the shoe.”
Tulio Bertorini/Memphis Hightailers Foundation

The SUV’s tire allegedly rubbed the shoe of this cyclist, leaving black marks on his shoe.

”Luckily no one was injured or killed in the incident,” Bertorini said. “This could have ended very badly.”

Bertorini said cyclists should always be aware and should always share the road. By law, drivers must keep three feet away from cyclists, though the rule is seldom enforced “as the officer normally has to be present to issue a citation.”

But Bertorini said cyclists are now riding with front and rear-mounted cameras or are carrying them.

Video evidence was enough to convict a Nashville-area driver on charges of reckless aggravated assault when he hit a cyclist on the Natchez Trace Parkway in July, according to The Tennessean.

The move earned the driver, Marshall Grant Neely III, 10 months in prison. The cyclist is now seeking more than $1 million from Neely in a civil suit.

VIDEO: SUV Driver Swerves Into Cyclists (2)

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

Ostranders to Honor Memphis Performers Who Died During 2017-18 Season

The Ostranders are usually a place where Memphis actors go to laugh together and celebrate the passing of another season. And it will be that again this year, of course. But having lost so many key players and personalities in the past year, it may also be a place where this tempest-tossed community goes for revival — and a big public cry.

Brian Eno famously contemplated the meaning of success by speculating that each of the 30,000 people who purchased a Velvet Underground record went out and started a band. That’s become a rock-and-roll cliche, but on a regional scale, similar math might be applied to George Touliatos’ relatively short-lived but enormously influential Front Street Theater. The professional venture, co-founded with actress Barbara Cason, has been described as “a merry go round in quicksand,” but it was also a launching pad for artists like Cason, Dixie Carter, George Hearn and, of course, Touliatos himself.

Beloved Memphis performers like Dorothy Blackwood, Barry Fuller and Bennett Wood also trace origin stories to Front Street. It inspired and informed the development of Playhouse on the Square. Touliaotos’ theater may only have lasted a dozen years or so, but its influence touches every corner of the contemporary Memphis theater landscape.

David Muskin

Touliatos died in Washington and hasn’t been a consistent part of the Memphis Theater family for a long time,  but it’s impossible to imagine what that family might look today like without him.

Tony Anderson on the right.

Speaking of cliches, I’m pretty sure the expression “big things come in small packages,” was created to describe Anthony “Tony” Anderson who’s been one of my favorite actors for as long as I can remember. Anderson was a generous performer. He launched himself into parts with jarring force and seemed to have such a good time on stage it was impossible not to have a good time watching him, whether he was working out on a weighty classic like Master Harold… and the Boys or lending his talent to an unknown, unproven scripts written by local authors.

This year the Memphis theater community also says goodbye to icons and stars like Ann Sharp, Charles Billings, David Foster, and Greg Krosnes. We’ve lost touchstone choreographer and lifetime achievement honoree Otis Smith, and character actor David Muskin, whose performance as Solly Two-Kings in August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean was a masterclass in subtlety and understatement.

Ostranders to Honor Memphis Performers Who Died During 2017-18 Season

A tribute is being planned for the August 26th award ceremony. Bring your own tissue.

Ostrander tickets are available here.

Categories
News News Blog

U of M to Launch Commercial Aviation Program This Fall

CREDIT: CIT

CIT

Crew Training International instructor working with students

The University of Memphis will begin training pilots this fall with a new commercial aviation program.

The university is partnering with Millington’s Crew Training International (CTI) Professional Flight Training to offer a Bachelor of Science in Commercial Aviation degree.

David Rudd, U of M president said the Commercial Aviation program is meant to prepare students for 21st-century jobs and better position them for opportunities at companies like Fedex Express.

“There will be ample demand for qualified, well-trained pilots in the coming decades, and this program and partnership will help U of M students become top candidates for these careers,” Rudd said.

Students in the program will receive 61 credit hours of professional aviation training, and 59 hours of classroom instruction including courses in business and management. The degree is meant to prepare graduates for careers in corporate and general aviation, other aviation-related businesses, airport operations, and government regulation of aviation.

With a bachelor’s degree in aviation, a graduate’s required number of flight hours to become a commercial pilot decreases by 500.

The program also gives veterans an opportunity to use post-9/11 benefits for flight training costs, now that the U of M is partnering with CTI. Additionally, high school students in the Aviation Study program at T-STEM Academy East High School are expected to “naturally and locally progress into the U of M’s program.”

This will create an “exciting local path that has a global impact,” Jim Bowman, senior vice president of flight operations for Fedex said.

The program will be “uniquely positioned” to support the needs of the local community and address the “looming” pilot shortage. The U of M reports that more than 42 percent of active U.S. airline pilots will retire over the next 10 years. Boeing estimates that in the next 20 years, North American airlines need 117,000 new pilots.

Bowman said as the aviation industry evolves, aviators have to be more tech savvy and better prepared academically than before.

“I’m excited that the University of Memphis is now part of the path to a successful career in the aviation industry, and I congratulate the university’s leadership for having the foresight to create this program,” Bowman said.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Life Its Ownself, No Filter

The PGA Championship tournament was held in St. Louis last weekend. It generated a lot more interest than usual, mostly (entirely?) because the legendary Tiger Woods made a serious run at the title.

Golf fans are well aware that Woods has been attempting a comeback for years — with varying degrees of success — but hasn’t won a major tournament since 2008. Last weekend, the formidable Tiger of old seemed to return to form, closing with a rousing 64 and finishing second in the season’s final major.

But this isn’t a golf column. This is a column about you and me and how the very way we perceive the world has transformed over the past decade or so. I’m going there, because on Twitter, Sunday, I saw a post with two pictures, side by side — and the contrast was startling: One was of Tiger’s gallery in 2002; the second was of his gallery last weekend. In the 2002 photo, the crowd was transfixed by one of Tiger’s tee shots. They stared, hands in pockets or holding a drink, mesmerized by his swing, the crack of the clubhead striking the ball, the arc of the little white pellet soaring into the ether. They were savoring the experience.

By contrast, in the 2018 photo, almost every person in the gallery was holding up a smartphone, photographing or videoing Tiger’s shot. Some were even watching the action through their phones. It was a startling visual reminder of the sea change in the very way we experience reality now. So many of us feel compelled to record what we experience — and to share it. Is it just because the technology is there, and it’s easy? Or is there something more at work?

From the days of cave painting, humans have created images of their lives — our families, our travels, birthdays, and weddings, etc. It’s a natural urge, I suppose, to have a visual record of our time on earth, a memory captured — a little frozen piece of time. And why create an image if it’s not to be shared?

Look, I’m old enough to remember the dreaded call you would sometimes get from friends who’d just returned from vacation: “Come over Friday night. We’re going to be showing slides from our cruise.”

Argh. No amount of drinks could ever make tolerable the prospect of having to “ooh” and “ahh” at slides of palm trees, beaches, and dolphins for two hours. (But we did it, because we Midwesterners are a polite people.) So, maybe the best thing about the smartphone revolution is that it has permanently killed off slide-show nights. That’s because everyone posts their vacation pics on Facebook or Instagram now, so all you have to do is spend two minutes scrolling and hitting “Like” 67 times.

We take pictures of everything — butterflies, flowers, sunsets, sunrises, golf tournaments, our kids, our pets, our new glasses, our clothes, our drinks, our cars, our ever-fascinating faces — and that fabulous sous vide pork chop you whipped up Sunday night.

Is all this because we need “likes” — some sign of public validation that we are interesting, witty, clever, beautiful, fascinating, politically savvy, sophisticated, edgy, and/or knowledgeable? I don’t know. There’s a saying that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Now that we have cameras with us at all times, does everything look like photo? I’m gonna go with “yes.”

We are literally experiencing life in a different way. We’re addicted to documenting what we see and sharing those images to define ourselves to the world at large via social media. We are all documentary filmmakers. And we’re our own favorite subject. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, though there have been studies that show that if we are photographing something, we are less likely to remember it. That’s because we’re paying attention to the act of photography, rather than, say, Tiger’s backswing. So maybe we need to put the camera down now and then and take in life its ownself — no filter.

Andy Warhol once said that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. Now we’re our own paparazzi, and we’re all famous, all the time. Especially you, my friend. You look marvelous. Like!

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Fallout From the August Election and Predictions for November

Here we go again. The voting round that concluded on August 2nd with a virtual Democratic sweep is the second local election in a row in which a resurgent Democratic Party has demonstrated quantifiable strength at the polls, just as it did in the May 1st county primary election, when the Democrats totaled 44,768 votes against 30,208 for the Republicans. 
And here again, too, comes some of the skeptical second-guessing that followed that outcome, the tenor of which is that an apt reading of the numbers actually proves the opposite of what the election results seemed to indicate.

My resourceful and distinguished friend John Ryder, the former general counsel of the Republican National Committee and as eminent a Republican as can be found in these parts, assayed forth in The Commercial Appeal last weekend with an analysis of the August 2nd election that mirrored his conclusions about the previous one. 

On the prior occasion, Ryder juggled some numbers from past elections in order to demonstrate that, as he insisted, the voting curve actually favored Republicans and that Democrats would discover on the then-far-off date of August 2nd, that conditions boded ill for their party.

But, just as the Ides of March inexorably came for Caesar, the 2nd of August would come in for Ryder and other GOP optimists — with the aforementioned result, a sweep for Democratic candidates in countywide races and a measurable gain for them in other positions.

Predictably, however, Ryder managed to find solace in the numbers. More Republicans across the state of Tennessee voted for governor in their primary than statewide Democrats did in theirs, he noted, a finding that led him to conclude: “This does not bode well for the Democrats in the November election.” Considering the difficulties incurred by Ryder since his similar prophecies in May, it may just be that his bod-o-meter is out of order and needs to be serviced.

Or he may be right, of course, in implicitly predicting a victory for Republican gubernatorial nominee Bill Lee, who certainly emerged from the GOP primary as a likeable new face, and who, perhaps conveniently, lacked any political record and thus was immune to the knife-throwing tactics of his chief Republican opponents, Randy Boyd and Diane Black, who managed to slash each other into irrelevance.

Or maybe the problem was that Boyd and Black were engaged in a desperate contest to see who could more accurately pose as a loyal minion to President Donald Trump. Trump deigned not to confer his official favor on either, for better or for worse.

In any case, the Republicans’ four-way gubernatorial race (which included also state House Speaker Beth Harwell) certainly generated more press attention than did the Democratic race between former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean and the woefully underfunded House Democratic Leader Craig Fitzhugh. That could be one explanation for the numbers differential of the two parties’ gubernatorial votes — which Ryder cites as gospel, despite declining to accept the Democrats’ edge in mayoral-primary voting as an indicator back in May.

Whatever the  reasons for his thinking, Ryder seems implicitly to be predicting that 7th District Congressman Marsha Blackburn, an outspoken Trumpian with The Donald’s full endorsement, will triumph over her Democratic opponent for the U.S. Senate. That would be former Governor Phil Bredesen, a middle-of-the-road veteran whose two gubernatorial terms were won with significant crossover votes from Republicans and independents, and who has been faring well so far in competitive polling against Blackburn.

Trump’s coattails or more blue wave? Which bodes well — and for whom — in the November general election? It remains to be seen.

• If Jesse Jackson has his way, the blue wave will keep on rolling. The iconic civil rights veteran and former Democratic presidential candidate was in Memphis early this week on behalf of his Rainbow PUSH coalition’s effort to encourage more voter participation in this year’s election process.

Jackson spoke Monday 

morning to students at Booker T. Washington High School, urging them to register to vote and to stand against violence in their neighborhoods. Afterward, asked his reaction to the Democratic sweep in the county election here, Jackson said he was pleased to see “blacks and whites voting together” in recognition of their “common interest” in “a very difficult season of our lives as Americans.”

Jackson said it was too early for him to get behind a specific presidential candidate in 2020. “We don’t know who’s running. It’s too early.” But he took the occasion to inveigh against the current electoral-college winner-take-all system of voting by states.

“The last time around, the loser won, and the winner lost,” Jackson said, noting Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 3 million popular vote edge. “We need a one-person, one-vote democracy,” he said. “Let the winner win, and the loser lose, to be fair.” 

As for the Electoral College, “we never could apply to it,” he said in a bit of wordplay. What the country needs is “universal rights, not states’ rights.”  

 

• Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, a former local Democratic Party chairman who keeps a low partisan profile as a nonpartisan political official, was invited to deliver the opening statement Saturday at a “Hot Dogs in the Park” event in Overton Park celebrating recent Democratic election victories.

Strickland complied and launched into a congratulatory message to the sponsoring organization, the Democratic Women of Shelby County, and continued with several citations by him of progress on his mayoral watch, which he attributed in part to inspiration by the DWSC.

Commissioner-elect Tami Sawyer, a Democrat, is welcomed by GOP Commissioner Mark Billingsley.

A group of four or five protesters, led by activist Hunter Demster, began heckling the mayor’s brief remarks, yelling things like “Where’s Tami?” (an apparent reference to the absence from the event of County Commissioner-elect Tami Sawyer) and “How many African Americans?” in answer to Strickland’s claims of increased city contracting with firms owned by women or minority members.

In response to the heckling, event organizer Norma Lester called for a police presence, and a few squad cars pulled up, though the officers never entered the pavilion where the event was taking place and stood quietly, as observers on the periphery. After the initial heckling, there was no further interruption, and various newly elected Democratic officials contributed brief statements to the celebration.

• “Changing of the guard” was a largely unspoken theme Monday at what was the next-to-last full meeting of the Shelby County Commission before its newly elected  members are sworn in at the end of the month. Such Commissioners-elect as Democrat Sawyer and Republican Amber Mills sat onstage on the periphery of the meeting, as outgoing members struggled to complete a lengthy agenda of unfinished business. Most got processed, but two key items — one levying a new tax on Airbnb domiciles and another involving a proposed new housing development in Collierville — were kicked back to committee, with but one public meeting left to consider them.