Rallies are planned Wednesday across the country and in Memphis for Pervis Payne, a Memphis man who has been on death row for 33 years.
The rallies taking place in New York, Chicago, Dallas, Washington D.C., and here near the intersection of Union and McLean, will mark the one-year anniversary of the weekly #FreePervisPayne rallies in Memphis.
A year ago, Andre Johnson, pastor of Gifts of Life Ministries, began organizing weekly rallies here to raise awareness about Payne’s case.
Since then, the Innocence Project, which works to exonerate the wrongfully convicted, has taken on Payne’s case, working to get him off death row. The group started a petition in support of Payne, which has garnered more than 750,000 signatures to date.
Johnson issued a call to action on Facebook Wednesday, urging people to “come and bear witness.”
“You really want to be on the right side of history,” Johnson said. “And you really want to be able to say that you were a participant and helped free an innocent man… We believe that Pervis Payne is profoundly and profusely innocent of this crime.”
The rally in Memphis is scheduled for 4 p.m.
Payne was convicted of murdering Charisse Christopher and her two-year-old daughter in 1987. He was set to be executed in December 2020, but was granted a temporary reprieve of execution due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
In May, Payne’s legal team filed a petition arguing that it would be illegal to execute Payne because he has an intellectual disability. A hearing on this claim is set for December 13.
So, somebody has finally made his move, and there is — as of 10:30 Wednesday morning — a more or less declared candidate for Shelby County Mayor in 2022.
It is Ken Moody, a longtime aide to Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, who summoned media to the offices of his campaign consultant, Deidre Malone, on Madison Ave., and announced, not yet a formal candidacy as such, but the formation of an exploratory committee to make a decision, over the next 6 to 8 weeks, about running.
Moody seemed at ease and ready to go in his chat with the media. He reviewed his history as a homegrown product from Carver High School and the University of Memphis, where he famously played basketball.
He boasted of the “front row” he’s enjoyed during the last 16 years in city government, serving both Mayor W.W. Herenton and, as at present, Mayor Jim Strickand, whom, he noted, he (Moody) had been an early supporter of among African Americans. Asked if he would have Mayor Strickland’s support in a county mayor’s race, Moody simply said, “You should ask him.”
He said his support of Strickland in 2015 was due to a feeling that the city was then in need of a “new direction,” and he felt “the same way today about Shelby County.”
Incumbent County Mayor Lee Harris was the elephant in the room as Moody discussed his prospects. Asked to evaluate Harris’ performance as mayor since his election in 2018, he avoided direct criticism but said he felt Harris did not have a good relationship with the Shelby County Commission, which he saw as calling the shots in county government.
“It’s never easy to upset an incumbent,” he said. “We don’t know what his plans are for running again.”
Moody said he thought he could bring about a better relationship also with the county’s outlying suburbs. The closest he came to a direct jab at Harris was a reference to the problems encountered earlier this year in the county’s distribution of anti-Covid vaccine — a variety of difficulties that resulted in the city taking over distribution.
Asked about his own problems running Memphis Animal Services in city government, Moody said, “Those were my responsibilities. I’ll own up to that. I’ve dealt with controversy. I do not shy away from those experiences.”
He noted that the county mayor had less direct power than did the city mayor, and no “apples to apples” comparisons really worked.
Moody observed that county elections, unlike city ones, were partisan and that, as mayor, he would be dealing with Republican Commissioners as well as those in his own Democratic Party.
“My background has had me dealing with Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. You can’t work the silos. You’ve got to bring the people together.”
Amid the gray, rainy city of London, fashion student and Memphis native Kris Keys found herself in an indescribable pain. A gallbladder attack, the doctors told her, triggered by hereditary elliptocytosis — a rare blood disorder that Keys was diagnosed with as a baby.
Searching for a way to heal, Keys turned to research. She contacted St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, where she was treated as a child, and got a hold of slides of her blood cells and the blood tests doctors performed on Keys’ older relatives.
Soon, those organic, elliptical blood cells that Keys observed spread across her illustrations as she replicated the deep reds and purples with watercolors. It was cathartic to see her disorder on paper and later on fabric in her 2019 womenswear collection, “Hematology.” “Using my pain as an artist was my way to heal,” she says. “One thing that shifted my mindset of having an illness was pushing it into an art space.”
Kris Keys uses watercolors to heal and understand her pain, passed down by the generations before her. (Photo: Brian Manning)
After returning to Memphis and releasing “Hematology,” Keys says, she started hearing from people around the world who shared the blood disorder, and she knew she hadn’t finished her research. The disorder is genetic, affects one in every 3,000 to 5,000 people in the U.S., and mostly affects people of African-American and Mediterranean descent. “I wondered, how can this be resolved?” Keys says. “How can we avoid continuing this pattern?” She wanted to find the genesis of her disorder, so she started tracing her lineage and listening to her older relatives’ stories.
“I still haven’t found the origins of the disorder,” she says, but the stories she did find have offered her insights into her identity. “There’re so many reasons why we act the way we act. A lot times it comes from our ancestry. There’re these streams of things that lead back to slavery. I never realized how much slavery affected DNA. I started seeing patterns in my relationships, my friendships that I really couldn’t get a grasp on until I started to sit down and think about where these patterns are coming from. Like, oh, this is coming from my grandfather or my great-grandfather.
“Sometimes,” Keys continues, “the patterns help us to be stronger, but sometimes they work against our purpose.” Her most recent collection, “Genealogy,” explores this connection between ancestral patterns and the opportunity for healing. Unlike the mysterious and dark violets and reds of her first collection, this collection features flowers in dusty yellows and earthy tones, light colors that reflect the enlightenment Keys has found in uncovering her family’s stories.
Photo: Brian Manning
“Flowers have these healing properties,” Keys says of the floral motif. “I thought, what natural resources do I have around me, and what did my ancestors have?” During her travels, Keys noticed wildflowers, daffodils, and elderberry and magnolia flowers growing around her relatives’ homes, and the inspiration took root and blossomed with the help of her choice medium of watercolors.
“Watercolors are one of the only mediums of painting that you have to completely surrender,” says Keys. “You can’t control where it goes. You put the paint down, and it kinda flows where it wants to even if you have an idea of where you want it to go. I relate that to life. You can have an idea of what you want your life to be, but you have to surrender to your story and make beauty out of what you have.” She adds, “To really live a life that’s magical and purposeful and that’s gonna make an impact, we have to learn where we’ve been and how we got there.”
Keys unveiled “Genealogy” with a virtual exhibition on September 7th. The exhibition, still accessible on her website, features watercolor paintings, accompanied by videos that explain the story behind each piece. Within a year or so, these paintings will be turned into a patterned fabric for womenswear that emphasizes comfort and style for the traveling woman.
To register for the exhibition and for more information, visit bykriskeys.com or @bykriskeys on Instagram.
Memphis is a car town, no doubt about it. While it’s possible to exist here without one, nobody would say it’s convenient. For many, simply maintaining reliable transportation to get to and from school and work is a challenge that must be supported by an unscrupulous network of used car dealers, predatory lenders, and insurance companies catering to the less affluent and creditworthy market.
If you’re caught in that cycle, there’s not much we can offer in a brief article to help you. But for many car owners, rethinking your relationship with cars could make a major difference in your long-term financial picture.
Cars are uniquely positioned at the intersection of transportation, identity, and status. It can turn into a cycle: When the car gets paid off (or the lease expires), a new car quickly arrives in the driveway. Car payments seem to be a permanent bill, just like rent or mortgage, taxes, insurance, and utilities. Five-year car loans are now standard and terms stretch to 72, 84, or even 96 months, so it’s no surprise that car payments never seem to go away.
But is this cycle really necessary?
One justification for a new car is that it’s too expensive to maintain an old car. While this is true toward the end of a vehicle’s life, there’s a lot of time between the end of a 36,000-mile warranty and the 100,000 to 200,000 problem-free miles most cars enjoy today. Short of catastrophic failure, most maintenance issues from reliable brands rarely cost more than $500 to $1,000 to fix. That’s in the range of one to two months of typical car payments, which means you can pay for an awful lot of maintenance before it really makes sense to buy a new car.
Another justification for an endless treadmill of new cars is safety. It’s true that cars from previous decades don’t have features like airbags, shoulder belts, and highly engineered crumple zones that have reduced traffic fatalities so dramatically in recent years. However, a lot of money is spent in the name of safety for a few years of improvements that have marginal utility at best.
Finally, some people say they have to have a certain level of car for career reasons. This might be true for real estate agents who drive clients around all day. Then again, they also are likely able to deduct their lease payment as a business expense. The vast majority of business colleagues and clients will neither notice nor care if you drive a 10-year-old Camry or a brand-new Mercedes.
I was listening to a podcast recently about marketing to affluent households. The guest talked about how they use ownership and registration data to identify households with expensive vehicles — and then exclude them from the marketing plan! The reason? In a given population (in this case, people living in high-income ZIP codes), the people who actually have money in the bank tend to be the ones who don’t spend it on depreciating assets like sports cars, boats, and recreational vehicles.
You might be thinking: “That’s great, but what are we supposed to do without cars in places like Memphis without good public transportation?” I always smile when I hear this because people who say this generally have not earnestly looked into our MATA buses, trolleys, and on-demand services like Ready! and Groove.
All that may not be for you, but along with the backup plan of commercial ride-sharing services, these services can be a real alternative to a car. I discovered a while back that an almost perfectly direct bus route connected my house to my workplace, and I still remember fondly the years of paying a couple dollars a day to read the paper rather than fighting traffic.
At the end of the day, some people simply like to have new cars, and that’s their choice. But even slight mindset shifts can pay big dividends, like a family deciding to get by with an older car or even fewer total cars.
Lots of people spend a lot of time justifying a need to buy new cars. Spend some of that energy toward justifying older, cheaper, and fewer cars in your life — you’ll likely see profound differences in your financial outcome. Have a question or topic you’d like to see covered in this column? Contact the author at ggard@telarrayadvisors.com. Gene Gard is Co-Chief-Investment Officer at Telarray, a Memphis-based wealth management firm that helps families navigate investment, tax, estate, and retirement decisions.
Matteo Servente and Ryan Watt are peddling their gelato. Literally.
The Zio Matto Gelato owners recently bought a bicycle with an attached cart/cooler to help them sell their five-ounce gelato containers, which are already in area restaurants and markets.
“We had this idea of ‘How do we bring it to people as much as possible,’” says Servente. “The cart is such a visually iconic image in people’s minds.”
And, he says, “We could really use it to bring gelato to people for weddings, corporate events, whatever people might be interested in. It’s a great way to bring the gelato experience to your backyard or wherever you want it.”
Servente, who is from Torino, Italy, founded the business. “The name comes from my niece. When she was very little she couldn’t pronounce my name right. ‘Matteo’ was ‘Matto,’ which is ‘crazy,’ and ‘Zio’ is ‘uncle’ in Italian.”
Servente, a filmmaker and former Crosstown Arts resident artist, says Zio Matto is his main focus. “For many years I had been toying with the possibility of bringing some of these Italian treats to Memphis that I’m used to from growing up. Gelato became the obvious choice.”
He learned “the secret” to making gelato in Italy, and it seemed like the right treat to bring to “a place where the options of real, authentic gelato are not too many.”
Enter Watt, former Indie Memphis executive director. “Ryan and I have worked before in film and have known each other for years. We always had a good friendship and working relationship,” Servente says.
Before Indie Memphis, Watt owned a technology company at Emerge Memphis. “The challenge and excitement of growing something new is really what I get excited about,” he says.
“Gelato is not ice cream,” Servente explains. “It’s a part of the same family, but it’s a less fat version of ice cream. The texture is much silkier in ours and a little bit denser as opposed to the cold, almost icy, texture of ice cream. So, it kind of packs more flavor.
“As far as the ingredients go, there’s nothing really revolutionary in the way we make it. It’s more like the process of making it that makes us stand out. We don’t use the gelato machines that mass produce gelato. We just use kitchen mixers and our hands to make it and mix all the ingredients together. ‘Less is more’ is really what applies perfectly to the food-making process in Italy.”
Tamboli’s Pasta & Pizza was the first restaurant to carry their gelato. “When the pandemic hit and they had to sort of readjust a little bit of their model, our pre-packaged containers were perfect.”
They’re now up to 15 locations, including High Point Grocery, Cordelia’s Market, Lucchesi’s Ravioli & Pasta Company, Ciao Bella Italian Grill, and David Grisanti’s Italian Restaurant. It’s available on Saturdays at the Downtown and Cooper-Young farmers markets.
Zio Matto’s six flavors include stracciatella. “A very popular flavor for gelato. The way we do it is Italian sweet cream with chocolate chips in it.”
The new bicycle/cart is ready to roll. “It’s not the easiest thing to ride,” Watt admits. “It’s nice to roll up and maybe park and serve gelato.”
But, he says, “Right now, we’re a pretty small team. Our plan is to use [the bicycle] for bookings. You may see it out and about so we can get the word out. Maybe it will become a league of bikes, and we’ll have to hire riders, people that can run the carts for us.”
And, like any “Good Humor Man” vehicle, Zio Matto’s bicycle comes with the proper accessory: “It does have a little bell,” Servente says.
“Rural Route” art and sale show (Photo: Deborah Fagan Carpenter)
City life is chaotic. The world is a crazy mess fraught with viruses and tension. Maybe it’s time to take a soothing trip somewhere close to home. Three well-known local artists are opening their home studios to the public this weekend in Lakeland and Eads during the “Rural Route: Autumn Aesthetic” art show and sale.
Just 30 minutes from Downtown Memphis, Deborah Fagan Carpenter and Jimmy Crosthwait invite art lovers to wander their Lakeland home and studio.
“The whole house is filled with art — even the bathroom,” says Carpenter. “I will have small and large paintings for sale, and Jimmy will have sculpture pieces for sale, including a large selection of his zen wind chimes that make the sound of — in his words — ‘one hand clapping.’”
Crosthwait’s work is designed for movement while Carpenter’s work is quiet and soothing, a perfect complement to each other. Meander onto the patio in the garden and be treated to homemade refreshments.
Just a short trip down the road in Eads, potter Agnes Stark will also have her home studio open to the public. Each piece of pottery is unique, fired in a gas kiln. Along with decorative and useful stoneware and ceramic clay pieces for sale, guests are invited to walk Stark’s property where there is also a log cabin amid open spaces.
Whether you are seeking a unique piece of art, a quiet respite, or both, you are invited to travel an artful autumn rural route this weekend.
“Rural Route: Autumn Aesthetic,” Fagan-Carpenter Studio, 4881 Canada, and Agnes Stark Pottery, 12675 Donelson, Friday-Saturday, Sept. 10-11, 11 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sunday, Sept. 12, noon-5 p.m., free
Reach up and stretch at Memphis Rox Yoga Festival. (Photo: Courtesy ABO Marketing)
Making your Saturday healthful at an outdoor event this weekend might be just what you need. If you want to get your yoga on, Memphis Rox Yoga Festival is for you. Join a variety of local studios from Memphis, Nashville, and North Mississippi for a festival celebrating all things yoga.
The festival will offer lectures, workshops, film screenings, and yoga classes for all levels — even kids. Browse the Memphis Botanic Garden while enjoying live music, food trucks, kids’ activities, lectures, and 20 different yoga classes throughout the venue for the entire day.
A portion of the proceeds from the festival will benefit Memphis Rox, a nonprofit climbing gym located in Soulsville, South Memphis, that functions on a pay-what-you-can model. The community benefits from the climbing facility that offers programs to foster relationships across cultural, racial, and socio-economic backgrounds. Rock climbing is a metaphor for overcoming life’s obstacles. The higher the community climbs physically, the higher the community climbs metaphorically. In addition to rock climbing, Memphis Rox also offers other community amenities such as yoga, a community closet, and the Juice Almighty juice bar cafe lunch program.
Co-founder of Memphis Rox Yoga Festival and Memphis Rox board member Susannah Herring says, “When we created the festival, we wanted to partner with a nonprofit organization that supported both yoga and Memphis, and Memphis Rox was the perfect fit. Often rock climbing and yoga go hand-in-hand.”
It’s become almost a daily story in the media: Some outspoken anti-vaxxer dies of Covid. Some are repentant in their final days, like conservative radio talker Phil Valentine of Nashville, who, after coming down with the disease, changed his tune and urged his listeners to get vaccinated — before he died on a ventilator. Others have gone to meet their maker still insisting that a) Covid was a hoax, b) the vaccines don’t work, or c) they really just had the flu.
Three conservative radio hosts have died in recent weeks: Valentine and two Florida talk-show mainstays — Marc Bernier and Dick Farrel. All three disparaged the vaccine, masks, and distancing; trashed the CDC; and told listeners not to fear Covid. Bernier tweeted: “Now the government is acting like Nazis, saying ‘get the shot.’” Farrel tweeted: “Why take a vax promoted by people who lied 2u all along about masks, where the virus came from, and the death toll?” He also called Anthony Fauci “a power-tripping lying freak.”
This week, Joe Rogan, aka the “little ball of anger,” the most popular podcaster in America, announced that he’d contracted Covid. Rogan, unsurprisingly, is also an anti-vaxxer. He claims that he is taking a horse dewormer to treat his case. I hope he is as lucky as he is stupid.
But it’s not just radio hosts who are dying from denial of science and common sense, who are losing the ultimate bet, making the deadly choice to pick ideology over science and medicine. It’s evangelical ministers, politicians, anti-mask leaders, and other assorted right-wing spokespeople, now dead because they bought the bilge being spewed by Valentine and their cohorts, and, even worse, by prominent talk-show blatherers with national audiences, like the loathsome and hypocritical Tucker Carlson (who’s been vaccinated) and Laura Ingraham (also vaccinated), to name just two. Their lies are quite literally getting people killed.
Several country music stars and boomer rock heroes like Eric Clapton and Van Morrison are also virulent and outspoken in their anti-vax, anti-mask positions. The latter two have written horrible songs about losing their freedom. To be idiots? Most of Kid Rock’s maskless band caught Covid at the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally last month. (South Dakota’s Covid infection rate went up 700 percent following the gathering.)
Locally and statewide, we are seeing the results of a low vaccination rate and anti-mask sentiment, due mostly to ignorance and ideology. Parents in this county and this state are intentionally sending their children to school, unmasked and unvaccinated, convinced that all these deaths, these ever-rising case numbers, these young people dying in our hospitals, are somehow a Joe Biden/Anthony Fauci plot to take away their freedom. Their own children (and ours) are being sacrificed on the altar of know-nothing ideology, aided and abetted by GOP state governors, including our own absurdly incompetent Bill Lee, who when asked how he planned to deal with the fact that Tennessee now has the highest infection rate in the nation, answered that he didn’t plan to “change strategy.”
“Strategy?” No, Bill. “Strategy” is a plan, a course of action, a way to take on a problem sickening and killing the people in your state. Sitting on your ass and saying that “parents know best” is not a strategy. You are an embarrassment, a wanna-be DeSantis, a mini-Trump with the charisma of a pine-stump.
King Arthur and the Black Knight
All this reminds me of nothing so much as the fight scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which the Black Knight refuses to allow King Arthur to pass. In the ensuing sword fight, the knight’s left arm is hacked off. “’Tis but a scratch,” he proclaims, fighting on. When his right arm is severed, he still refuses to surrender.
“Look, you stupid bastard,” says Arthur. “You’ve got no arms left!”
“’Tis but a flesh wound,” says the knight.
Then a leg is sliced off, then the other. Still he persists, shouting insults and threats, a noisy torso on the ground. “The Black Knight never loses!” he shouts.
Y’all means all, y’all. (Photo: Nashville LGBTQ Chamber of Commerce)
Tennessee’s top attorney believes in the sanctity of school sports and work bathrooms more than “every person should be treated with respect and dignity and should be able to live without fear, no matter who they are or whom they love.”
Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery led a 20-state coalition in a lawsuit this past week that hopes to stop an anti-discrimination order from President Joe Biden. The order was issued in January and prevents discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation.
“Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports,” reads the order. “Adults should be able to earn a living and pursue a vocation knowing that they will not be fired, demoted, or mistreated because of whom they go home to or because how they dress does not conform to sex-based stereotypes.”
But Slatery says no.
“The guidance purports to resolve highly controversial and localized issues such as whether schools must allow biological males to compete on girls’ sports teams, whether employers and schools may maintain sex-separated showers and locker rooms, and whether individuals may be compelled to use another person’s preferred pronouns,” Slatery said in a statement.
However, Slatery claims Biden’s order “threatens women’s sports and student and employee privacy.” To get there legally, Slatery and his coalition (including Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and more) claim only Congress — not the president — can change “these sensitive issues” of “enormous importance.” The coalition’s complaint asserts that the claim that the order simply implements the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock decision on anti-discrimination is faulty.
“The agencies simply do not have that authority,” Slatery said in a statement. “But that has not stopped them from trying. … All of this, together with the threat of withholding educational funding in the midst of a pandemic, warrants this lawsuit.”
Government watchdog group, Accountable.US, said last week that anti-LGBTQ rules hurt people, especially kids, and they hurt business.
“Unfortunately, it seems that legalizing discrimination is so important to Attorney General Slatery that for him, it outweighs the risks to his constituents and Tennessee’s economy,” said Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US. “Students deserve to learn in a safe environment where their identities are respected, not used as props in a conservative culture war. If businesses are serious about opposing discriminatory legislation and valuing the rights of LGBTQ Tennesseans, now is the time for them to speak out.”
Earlier this year, leaders with 184 Tennessee businesses — including Amazon, Live Nation, and Lyft — issued a letter urging against anti-LGBTQ legislation in Tennessee.
So many posted the rainbow brought by Hurricane Ida’s near miss. But MemphisAsFuck said it best on Instagram: “Did y’all catch that beautiful ass rainbow yesterday?”
Marsha, Marsha
Senator Marsha Blackburn wished us all a “happy #901 day” on Facebook last week. Memphis showed out in the comments.
“You’re about as popular here as reheated vinegar-based barbecue at a restaurant owned by John Calipari,” wrote Allan Creasy.
“And they’re wishing you a very happy #resignplease,” wrote JP Paul.
“KEEP OUR NAME OUT YOUR MOUTH,” wrote Harrison Lampley.
Fixed it
Posted to Instagram by @unapologeticallymemphis
Just JPK Tweets
“Just moved into our new place,” tweeted MEMernet mega-star John Paul Keith. “I haven’t been this giddy since Trump got Covid.”
