Month: January 2019

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We Recommend We Recommend

TedX at Crosstown Arts Theater

When TED conferences took off in the early 1990s, the conversations the organization hosted tended to be technology forward, with a heavy splash of design. But the organization quickly grew into its motto, “ideas worth sharing,” and today, TED talks and their independently produced regional variant, the TEDx, can be about almost anything. But expect Memphis to weave itself in and out of the narratives when TEDx returns to Memphis for its fourth consecutive year. It’s setting up shop for a pair of sessions in Crosstown Arts Theater Saturday, February 2nd.

“Most of our speakers are local, so the ideas often have a particular relevance to Memphis,” Memphis TEDx organizer and Executive Director Anna Mullins says. “But hopefully they have relevance outside the city limits.”

This year’s TEDx theme is “ideas or the next century,” and it is partly inspired by the city’s bicentennial celebration. Mullins says that’s, “just a big broad tent for forward-thinking talks that look at what’s next for the city.”

Fewer than 20 speakers were selected from more that 250 applicants. This year’s presenters include Hooks Institute director Daphene McFerren, who’ll explore topics of artificial intelligence and automation and how they intersect with poverty and race relations. Other speakers include Alex Castle of Old Dominick Distillery, James Dukes of I Make Mad Beats, Playback Memphis founder Virginia Murphy, and Clayborn Temple director Anasa Troutman.

“We don’t just attract great speakers but also a great crowd of people who are inquisitive and ready to be challenged and inspired,” Mullins says. “We want to make sure we’re inviting everyone into the ideation space.”

For those who can’t attend, the program will be live streamed at tedxmemphis.com.

Categories
Music Music Features

“Scars” — John Kilzer’s New Record is Homespun and Philosophical

I first encountered singer/songwriter John Kilzer’s name while recording at Ardent Studios over 30 years ago. He had just released a record on Geffen Records, Memory in the Making, produced by the late, great John Hampton. But I knew of him because a tiny plaque had been mounted above the couch in Studio B, with the words “Kilzer’s Spot.” When I mention it to Kilzer today, the air fills with his hearty laughter. “Yeah, it’s still there!” he says. “That’s so funny. I’m sure that little plaque has plenty of verdigris on it by now. It’s probably more green than copper.”

Since then, much more has changed than the plaque’s patina. After releasing another record on Geffen in 1991, Kilzer’s musical career took a 20-year hiatus, as he wrestled with deeper questions of faith and personal growth. “I was going through the ordination process and getting my Masters of Divinity at Memphis Theological Seminary. And then I went straight into the Ph.D program at Middlesex University in England. During that time, I didn’t have time to do much music. But when I got back here and was appointed to the recovery ministry [at St. John’s United Methodist Church], I realized that music was going to be a foundation of that. Resuming that interest naturally prompted me writing. And so the songs came out, and I did the one album, Seven, with Madjack Records.”

John Kilzer

That 2011 release, recorded with Hi Rhythm’s Hodges brothers (Teenie, Charles, and Leroy) came out just a year after Kilzer had begun The Way, a Friday evening ministry at St. John’s that carries on today, featuring some of the city’s best musicians. “Our premise is that everybody’s in recovery. Everybody has experienced trauma, and there’s something about music that just calls out of each person’s spirit, whatever it is that’s keeping them bound. Music is kind of the language of heaven. But we don’t do church music. We do a lot of my material and some gospel standards, but it’s not contemporary Christian music. It’s just good music. And if, say, Jim Spake’s gonna be there, naturally, I’m gonna pick something that would suit him, but it doesn’t matter. They’re all so good, they can play anything from Bach to Chuck Berry.”

A similar appreciation for quality musicianship permeates his discussion of his latest work, Scars, just released on Archer Records. “When you know you’re gonna have Steve Potts, Steve Selvidge, Rick Steff, Dave Smith, George Sluppick, and Matt Ross-Spang, you feel more comfortable. You trust yourself, and you trust those guys.”

Kilzer, who was a college literature instructor before his Geffen days, brings an expansive melodic and lyrical imagination to these songs, which could be about himself or any number of the souls attending The Way, driven more by character and circumstance than any obvious theology. “Some say time’s a riddle/I say time’s a freight train shimmering in the rain,” he sings, before describing scenes in Lawrence, Kansas. And the new songs, effortlessly blending the homespun with the philosophical, are given plenty of space to breathe.

“It’s so understated, and I think a lot of that is because we were cutting live. When you know that you’re live and that’s gonna be it, you don’t try to say so much. It’s like you honor the spaces between the notes. On Scars, I think there’s a lot of creative space in it. It’s not filled with any unneeded stuff.

“Another thing that’s different about it is, I wrote on different instruments. I wrote a couple on a mandolin, a couple on ukulele, and several on the piano. I would have never, ever considered doing that earlier in my career. So that kind of creative tension manifests in the songs. To be real nervous and have all these conflicting emotions, but knowing you’ve got sort of a protective shield around you in these musicians, I think that’s why there’s something on Scars that I can’t quite articulate. You can hear it, but you just don’t know what it is.”

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Grading Government on the Curve

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

It is probably too early to give out report cards on our various branches of government, but before we move deeper into what could turn out to be a crucial year, a little preliminary judgmentalism might serve a constructive purpose.

Justin Fox Burks

Lee Harris

To start with the national government: Now, that is an unruly classroom. As a collective institution, it gets an Incomplete, and that’s grading charitably. The president, Donald Trump, gets an F, and that, too, is almost an act of charity. It almost implies that Trump is trying to succeed at something. There’s no question that the president has failed singly — to articulate and carry out a coherent, productive theme of government, as well as to accomplish any of his sundry private goals, notorious among which is his insistence on building a wall on our southern border. One of the first things most of us learned in school was the folly of the Great Wall of China. At enormous expense, an impenetrable barrier was erected across that Asian nation’s northern frontier, preventing potentially troublesome access from without but also dooming a once thriving kingdom to hundreds of years of isolation and stagnation from which it is only now recovering. Trump would have us repeat that doomed experiment. Meanwhile, he is failing at various other assignments and seems not to know the meaning of homework.

On the score of conduct, he also fails at working and playing with others — having made a mess of our relations with long and trusted allies and simultaneously permitting — or inviting — outside bullies of his acquaintance to nose into our classroom and creating enough mayhem of his own to shut things down altogether. All in all, some form of expulsion may be the only option here.

At the level of state government, we’ve just begun what amounts to a new semester, and from the looks of things [see cover story], the various students involved in the  process seem entitled, at the very least, to an A for effort.

We have a city council that is just getting reorganized after several of its members transferred to other institutions. The reconstituted group is about to undergo crucial exams in the form of an election year, as is Mayor Strickland, whose authority to lead the body is about to be tested as well. The final grades here will come decisively this fall.

County government is off in a brand new direction under the tutelage of a new mayor, Lee Harris, who is proposing what amounts to a new curriculum based on re-evaluating the nature of justice. So far the body of commissioners he’s working with seem inclined to follow his example and are working in harness, keenly exploring the new group project. This effort, too, needs some additional time for evaluation, but we are impressed so far.

Government is an inexact science, and opinions about it are famously subjective. All grading is, more or less, on the curve of our relatively modest expectations. We will periodically  look in on the various branches of government in this space and let you know what progress, if any, is being made.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Shut Out by the Shutdown

On the 35th day of the partial shutdown, airports along the East Coast experienced significant staffing shortages. Air traffic controllers calling in sick put pressure on the shutdown as flights were delayed in major airports including LaGuardia.

A little over a week ago, federal workers had organized actions demanding an end to the government shutdown. In Memphis, workers rallied outside the IRS’ Memphis Service Center and Downtown at the Civic Center Plaza. More than a thousand IRS workers in the city were told to go back to work without pay.

Serenity Towers

With the partial shutdown now over with the passing of the short-term funding bill, federal employees will be expecting their pay soon, but coming back from the effects of the shutdown will take much longer. As we’ve seen and heard, testimonies have demonstrated how the shutdown has impacted the day-to-day lives of people.

For the residents of Serenity Towers, the shutdown has meant the threat of eviction from their homes. Serenity Towers is an independent living apartment complex on Highland for senior citizens and folks with disabilities. Many seniors living in the apartments receive benefits from the Department of Housing and Urban Development that pay most of their rent. With the shutdown and HUD offices closed, these residents weren’t receiving the assistance that they needed. CNN reported that HUD wasn’t able to renew over 1,600 of the contracts that they have with privately owned businesses, and while HUD claimed that the expiration of these contracts would not mean immediate evictions, residents at Serenity have reported that eviction notices for some had already gone out.

Part of this has to do with the immediate effects of the shutdown and part of it with the management of Serenity at Highland that is currently run by Millennia Housing Management. Early in January, the management sent more than 50 notices to senior tenants, claiming that they owed Millennia money. Many were also sent eviction notices.

Unfortunately for the seniors at Serenity, it is not the first time that the state of their housing security has been questionable, to say the least. For years, under the management of Global Ministries, Serenity and other housing options have left vulnerable populations living in deplorable conditions. The relatively new management of Millennia, which came on last year, brought some sense of hope for change, but in the past months, safety and health inspections of Serenity suggest that not much is changing. That, on top of the shutdown, meant residents were threatened with being unhoused, in danger of not even having a roof over their head.

Residents of Serenity will continue their fight, as they were doing well before the shutdown — and during it. We need to stand with them, support them, and amplify their voices. No one should face housing insecurity. Not in our city and not anywhere else, but that is the reality for many folks. We don’t even have accurate numbers of those who currently are unhoused. The recent Point in Time Count, while it offers some understanding as a snapshot of the population of people experiencing homelessness in Memphis, cannot fully account for everyone, especially when held in one of the coldest days in January.

Those articles that show Memphis as one of the most affordable cities to live? That really applies if you have a salaried job. For example, if you are renting a two-bedroom house for $850, and the cost of one month of housing should be a third of your monthly wages, then you should be earning $2,550 a month (that’s $1,275 every biweekly pay day for 80 hours of work). That means that you should be earning about $15.94 per hour (after taxes) just to make rent on a full-time job. Here’s the thing: Tennessee hasn’t changed its minimum wage since 2008. If you have a full-time job at $7.25 (that’s $1,160 a month) … Well, I’ve never even seen a decent room go for under $400, let alone an apartment or house.

Without going further into the math, I think it’s pretty clear how all these problems add up. It’s hard for people today to find housing, much less to save up and secure comfortable, dignified housing for the future, when they aren’t able to work. We’re already seeing how this impacts senior residents. For those who have no support networks, or no family or friends to reach out to, housing insecurity is even more real. Though the end of the shutdown means federal workers will receive their pay and that housing assistance will be delivered, we need to also consider how to address the stack of problems that were added on because of it. That, of course, can get overwhelming, but we know that folks like the senior tenants at Serenity Towers are already doing the work by making themselves heard and not accepting the unjust conditions created by companies like Millennia.

Aylen Mercado is a brown, queer, Latinx chingona and Memphian pursuing an Urban Studies and Latin American and Latinx Studies degree at Rhodes College.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1562

Dammit, Gannett

We hate to say we saw it coming, but we saw it coming.

In December of last year, Fly on the Wall predicted layoffs would be forthcoming at Gannett-owned newspapers, including The Commercial Appeal, sometime after the new year. It had seemed like an inevitability since November’s dismal quarterly report and the call for early buyouts that always presages another round of cuts.

Last week it finally happened. On Wednesday, January 23rd, Gannett laid off an estimated 400 newsroom employees at papers across the country.

Via the media watchdogs at Poynter: “Another brutal day for journalism. Gannett began slashing jobs all across the country Wednesday in a cost-cutting move that was anticipated even before the recent news that a hedge-fund company was planning to buy the chain. The cuts were not minor.”

The CA appears to have fared better than many Gannett publications. As of now, only one newsroom layoff has been confirmed, 38-year CA vet William Fason. Four open positions were also eliminated.

Dammit, Autocorrect

At least we hope this is an autocorrect error.

Otherwise, if you live in the Memphis area and are currently in the market to purchase an affordable “Queen-size actress,” there’s one on sale via Facebook Marketplace for the low, low price of $200, “with her own box spring.” But buyer beware; unless she’s one of the greatest actresses who ever lived, we’re pretty sure that’s a mattress in this picture, not an actress.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

The Democrats’ Purity Tests Will Only Help Trump

Can you see what is taking shape on the left? That’s the look of liberals forming a circular firing squad to shoot at top Democrats running for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination. 

The Democratic Party is highly unified in its opposition to President Trump. Independent and swing voters also tell pollsters they disapprove of Trump’s policies on taxes, immigration, and race relations. And the Party of Trump — formerly the GOP — lost 40 House seats in the midterms. That political reality makes Trump a weak candidate for reelection.

Juan Williams

But the Democrats still have to find a good candidate with an attractive message to beat even a bad candidate. The president’s supporters can see what’s up. Right-wing websites and Trump cheerleaders on talk radio are attacking possible Democratic candidates as budding socialists who will increase taxes and let every illegal immigrant run across open borders.

Trump’s white, working-class base is being warned on racial grounds that any Democratic nominee will ignore them while playing “identity politics” that favor blacks, Latinos, immigrants, women, and gays.

Trying to divide voters by race is so predictable for Trump’s team. What is surprising is that Democrats are too often fueling the Trump camp’s caricature by insisting on race-based review of their candidates. How painful and ironic will it be if racial debates inside the Democratic Party are allowed to weaken the focus on beating Trump and his racism?

For example, look at the attacks coming from the left against the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination in early polls, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Activists on the far left are bashing Biden for his support of President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill.

That bill had support from the Congressional Black Caucus at the time, being seen as an answer to high crime rates in black neighborhoods. But the old crime bill is now condemned by today’s activists, who take their cues from the Black Lives Matter movement. They fault the bill for pushing more black people into jail as a result of increased sentences for selling crack cocaine, and mandating longer sentences for repeat offenders and violent crime.

Biden is trying to get past this line of attack by asking for forgiveness: “It was a big mistake that was made,” Biden said at a Martin Luther King Day celebration last week in Washington.

Next in line for allegedly failing the racial test is a black woman, California Senator Kamala Harris. Her sin is that she was a prosecutor and California’s attorney general. “To become a prosecutor is to make a choice to align oneself with a powerful and fundamentally biased system,” according to an essay on The Intercept, a liberal website.

Also in line for the gauntlet of race-shaming are white candidates who did not show an interest in racial injustice early enough in their careers. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who supported controversial “stop-and-frisk” police tactics, as well as Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren are all vulnerable on this point.

More broadly, this year’s Women’s March was a case study in how explosive racial issues — and, in that case, accusations of being soft on anti-Semitism — can splinter the unity of anti-Trump activists. Blacks, Latinos, and liberal women are at the heart of today’s Democratic base. There are record numbers of Latinos, Asians, and blacks now in Congress, and they are almost all Democrats. Honest debate about racial justice is overdue for both parties.

That debate will happen in the South Carolina primary, the first contest with a high percentage of minority voters. Early attention to that race indicates its importance for any Democrat trying to win the party’s nomination.

Democratic strategists know that Sanders would have beaten Hillary Clinton for the 2016 nomination if he had won more black and Latino votes. Democrats across the racial spectrum have to keep in mind that they have far more in common with each other than they do with Trump, a man whose racist rhetoric and white identity policies are damaging people of every color daily.

After a Black Lives Matter leader refused to talk with President Obama in 2016, Obama made the point that activists sometimes feel “so passionately … they never take the next step and say, ‘How do I sit down and try to actually get something done?'”

The most important “something” to get done right now is beating Trump. As liberal comedian Bill Maher is fond of saying, there is a big difference between a disappointing friend and a deadly enemy.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

‘Vous and Brew: The Best of Memphis, Old and New

One of the great things about the boom in Memphis craft breweries is what we might call the normalization of local beer. That, and the small buzz of boozy civic pride that goes with showing it off. The taprooms around town are great in their own unique ways, but if your clothes aren’t tight enough to hang out at those places, you can pretty much go to any restaurant and be confident that there will be at least a couple of locals on tap.

That’s good for the people who live here, and it’s good for the people who visit. A friend of mine came into town for a meeting the other day, so we went down to the Rendezvous. For one thing, it’s one of his favorite spots to eat in the city, and second, nothing says “business casual” like having the one sportcoat you packed smell like award-winning barbecue at 8:30 the next morning. He’s also a craft beer enthusiast — and one of the relatively few craft connoisseurs to have actually sampled the vaguely hallucinogenic and entirely unfiltered Murffbrau back in our college days.

I’m old enough to remember when those ribs were invariably paired with an enormous pitcher of Michelob. While I don’t remember anyone ever having a problem with the beer selection back then, the ‘Vous has updated its beer list.

Barbecue packs a lot of flavor, and even the best of the breed can be a bit heavy, so you don’t want to pair it with just anything. But truth to tell, those old commercial American-style lagers went pretty well with ribs, no matter what the dilettantes will tell you. To that end, Wiseacre’s Tiny Bomb lager, with its little twist of honey, would be a great choice. Eventually, though, we went with a couple of Traffic IPAs from Crosstown Brewing.

I once described Crosstown’s Brake Czech (not currently available, because no one asked me) as the cosmic ideal of Budweiser. Traffic IPA certainly fits this mold. It is a West Coast style that fizzes with hints of citrus or fruit, hopped enough to keep it dry and crisp, but not enough to really wallop you with that tongue-sucking bitter. Crosstown does offer an Imperial IPA for the dedicated hophead (and I’ve had my moments), but this isn’t it. Traffic IPA is crisp and drinkable and doesn’t get dense, which is what I like about it with a heavyweight food like barbecue.

Since it opened, Crosstown has done a very good job of not getting too clever with its brews. They don’t seem obsessed with inventing a new beer, but are more focused on making the best of some really great styles. In a world that’s preoccupied with staying on top or ahead of the latest trend — this is refreshing. The way beer ought to be. True, there is no reason to be stodgy about beer-making, but it isn’t all about novelty either.

Of course, to show a visitor the best of Memphis, you have to take them to a restaurant that requires cutting through an alley, around a garbage container, and into an underground bunker. Sneer if you want, but that’s the Rendezvous — and Memphis, too. When the royal British princes came to town a few years back, that’s where they ate. Although, if memory serves, they went in through the other door. Granted, that example is a little misleading, but it is true enough.

So, I thought it fitting to pair some great food from a long-beloved Memphis institution with a local beer rolled out of the newly revamped Crosstown Concourse. It’s pointing to a future that, if we keep our heads about us, will stand on the shoulders of the past. It is the history of Memphis and its future, helping each other out.

No writer worth his salt will ever let a metaphor like that go to waste.

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We Recommend We Recommend

The Art of The Fantasy Novel at the Dixon

CREDIT: Gow927 | Dreamstime.com

Fantasy fiction is vastly popular. The last season of HBO’s Game of Thrones is probably the year’s most anticipated television event. Still, Jenny M. Duggan Jackson thinks genre fiction gets a short shrift.

“You don’t see workshops on fantasy,” she says. “I was like, ‘Why is that?'”

When she was still an MFA candidate at the University of Memphis, Jackson foucued on creative nonfiction. “I can write about the things I know,” she says. Somewhere along the way she discovered that fantasy fiction was something she knew quite a bit about.

Gow927 | Dreamstime.com

Jackson’s Art of the Fantasy Novel workshop is a trilogy divided — like most great fantasy epics — into three distinct parts. The first focuses on classical mythology and its influence on modern fantasy. “[Earthsea author] Ursula K. Le Guin has written several very informative books for writers, and I’m going to use a couple of her writing prompts to help students get started,” Jackson says. “We also have an interesting exhibit here at the Dixon. Annabelle Meacham is a local artist and Neo-surrealist painter. Her imaginative and whimsical art will be another writing prompt.”

The second session is devoted to the nuts and bolts of plotting and character development, and at the final week’s meeting, participants can read their work and receive feedback.

“With fantasy you can talk about important issues that matter to people in life without being too stilted or heavy-handed,” Jackson says. “You can talk about gender or you can talk about race or you can talk about all these different things but slightly removed from the everyday.”

Categories
Sports Tiger Blue

Tulsa 95, Tigers 79

Three days after a so-called “statement win” over UCF, the Tigers found themselves on the receiving end of a statement at Tulsa. The Golden Hurricane — 2-6 in the American Athletic Conference at tip-off — seized command over the game’s opening ten minutes and cruised to the victory. Daquan Jeffries played like the all-conference candidate he is, scoring a game-high 25 points. Curran Scott added 20 to help Tulsa improve to 13-9 for the season.

Freshman guard Tyler Harris scored 18 points — all of them after halftime — to help Memphis stay within nine or ten points late in the contest, but the Tigers couldn’t slow the Tulsa attack for any comeback to prove fruitful. The Tigers got no closer than nine points (80-71 with 4:45 to play) after trailing by 17 (48-31) at halftime. The loss is the Tigers’ fourth straight at Tulsa.

Kyvon Davenport scored 12 points and pulled down 14 rebounds for his seventh double-double of the season. Jeremiah Martin and Raynere Thornton added 14 points each. The Tigers shot 41 percent from the field (Tulsa hit 55 percent) and fell to 13-8 for the season (5-3 in the AAC). Memphis suffered 17 turnovers while handing out but 12 assists.

Now 1-4 in true road games this season, the Tigers visit USF (14-6) Saturday. Tip-off is scheduled for 11 a.m.

Categories
News News Blog

City Will Not Invest Pension Money In Epicenter Fund

A city official confirmed Wednesday that Memphis will not invest a portion of its pension money into a local nonprofit’s investment fund.

Dan Springer, deputy director of media affairs for the city, told the Flyer Wednesday that the city’s pension investment committee won’t consider the proposal from the nonprofit Epicenter.

Epicenter asked the city in December to allocate $10 million of its $2.4 billion pension fund to a pool of money used to invest in entrepreneurs here.

The ask was an attempt by Epicenter to reach its immediate goal of aiding 1,000 entrepreneurs, including 500 new firms by 2025 and its ultimate goal of raising $100 million to fuel a 10-year strategy generating resources in and access to capital, talent, local customers, and technology commercialization.

Epicenter has already managed to raise $40 million for its investment fund, thanks in part to an initial $10 million grant from FedEx Corp.


Looking to grow the fund, Epicenter asked both city and county officials for $10 million from each of their pension funds late last year. The city’s Atlanta-based pension consultant, Segal Marco Advisors, did a preliminary assessment and recommended earlier this month that the city not invest the money into Epicenter’s fund.

In a letter to the city earlier this month, the consultant agency’s vice president Rosemary Guillette said the nonprofit doesn’t meet the city’s rules requiring that money be handled by organizations with a low turnover of personnel, capacity to undertake the fund’s accounts, expertise with similar funds, “demonstrable financial stability,” and a “competitive record of performance.”

Guillette also said that per city rules and strict guidelines around investments with the pension fund, the city’s pension fund can only be “invested for the exclusive benefit of the plan participants and solely in their interest.”

“Our preliminary assessment is that the Epicenter Fund does not meet either of the guidelines listed above and does not meet the fiduciary standards of care needed for a pension fund investment,” Guillette said. “Therefore, Segal Marco Advisors cannot recommend this investment opportunity for the pension fund.”

For this reason, Springer said the point is “moot.” The city suggested in a Facebook post last week that the pension investment committee will have the final decision on whether or not to invest in Epicenter’s fund.

However, Springer confirmed Wednesday that the city’s chief financial officer, Shirley Ford, who heads the committee, will not bring the proposal before the body and that the city will not move forward with the proposal.