Reinaldo "Reny" Alfonso (Credit: Reinaldo Alfonso)
Reinaldo “Reny” Alfonso, an old friend of the Memphis culinary community, is back in town and getting ready to take the helm at the new Bog & Barley restaurant, which is owned by Celtic Crossing owners DJ and Jamie Naylor.
The Irish restaurant, which will be located in a 7,100 square-foot space in the Regalia Shopping Center at 6161 Poplar Avenue, is slated to open in 2022.
Alfonso is director of operations for Bog & Barley, as well as Celtic Crossing.
Former chef de cuisine at Chez Philippe at The Peabody, Alfonso more recently has been corporate chef at Starr Restaurants in Philadelphia. “So, my role was always doing independent research on different cuisines and opening new restaurants for the company. We’ve done English pubs. I can’t name how many concepts I’ve done. The end goal is to develop systems to make restaurants successful. Team building. Internal promotions. You name it.
“DJ and I have always had a good relationship ever since I did leave Memphis 11 years ago. And one day we were just talking on the phone and we struck up an idea for me to come back to town and do some projects. So here I am.”
Celtic Crossing and Bog & Barley owner DJ Naylor. (Credit: Samuel X. Cicci)
Bog & Barley will be “more of an elevated take on the Irish pub with the emphasis of a strong whiskey program. And modern interpretation of Irish cuisine.”
And, he says, “It’s going to be a scratch kitchen with good ingredients and the emphasis on freshness. It’s not going to be a fancy restaurant. It will be an elevated restaurant. It’s going to be straightforward. Just a place you can come and grab a pint and have a great meal at the same time.”
As for the decor, Alfonso says,”It’s going to look like an Irish pub. A dark Irish pub. The builder of the bar is from Ireland. High ceilings. Warm, inviting place.”
Alfonso won’t be cooking at Bog & Barley. As director of operations, he says, “I’m focusing on the kitchen. Building teams for the kitchen and menu development.”
And it’s nice to be in Memphis again, Alfonso says. “I am extremely happy. It’s nice to be back.”
Portrait of the Artist as a Sportsman, 2019 (Photo: Abigail Morici)
“Fire Danger Today! Prevent Wildfires,” alerts the sign at the entrance of the Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College. In lieu of rating the day’s level of fire danger from low to extreme, this sign carries the message: “I don’t want to talk about it.” Alternative plaques say, “Gestures broadly at everything” or “Well, it’s been worse.”
Raina Belleau, a professor at Rhodes, considers this piece, entitled Fire Danger, to be a pillar of her exhibition, “Enchanted Forest Fire,” through which she reflects on her climate anxiety. The messages on the plaques, she says, “are directly pulled from everyday phrases when we want to tell other people what a situation is like without causing alarm. These signs are scattered throughout the gallery to show that we’ve gone through these phases of denial or false reassurance [about climate change and environmental issues], and we are now in a place where we no longer lack the knowledge to have the conversation that needs to happen.” Instead, she suggests, we are unable to cope with our fears and realizations; we feel static, stuck between the choice to take accountability for the impacts of climate change we have caused as humans or to ignore them.
“One of the ways that I approach that sense of anxiety in the exhibition is through humor,” Belleau says. “I think humor is a way to open up some of these heavier subjects for discussion to acknowledge that there are feelings shared among a lot of different people in a lot of different places.” As such, Belleau took notes from some of the most widely familiar interpretations of nature — cartoons and fairy tales. “Like Disney, the way they use animal characters in children’s movies to elicit emotional responses.”
But unlike the classic Disneyfied, fairy-tale Enchanted Forest, the animals who inhabit Belleau’s exhibition are under a severe distress that evinces itself physically, distorting their bodily forms. The polar bear wears jeans, cuffed above his human ankles and two left human feet; he has no eyes, only sockets through which a disco-ball interior reflects light. The raccoon stares at her hand with eyes that swirl hypnotically and glow under black light as if under a drug-induced trance. A life-sized bear sits in a lawn chair, with crumpled silver cans lying around his feet, as exaggerated tears well up in his strained, cartoonish eyes. “He’s having a moment where he doesn’t know how to feel the emotions he’s having,” Belleau says. “He may be indulging in some less-than-healthy coping mechanisms.”
To sculpt the forms of these animals, Belleau turned to her preferred medium of found objects, particularly ones that are difficult to recycle, like single-use styrofoam coolers or the air packets that come in online shipping orders. However, unlike her usual style where these objects are recognizable — where the viewer can recognize that leaves, for instance, are made out of recycled plastic bags — these animals hide their recycled interior. “It was important for them to have some of that artificiality, like a cartoon character would, and not show what they are made of,” she says. “It’s been important for the work to reflect some of my personal commitments. That doesn’t necessarily have to be seen by the viewer, but that act is embedded in their cores quite literally.”
“There’s an element of escapism in movies, stories,” Belleau continues. “I think that visiting an art exhibition is also a form of escapism, but letting you enter this realm of the unreal or the imagined will never let you fully let go of what’s happening in the real world.”
“Enchanted Forest Fire” is on display at the Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College until October 16th. The gallery is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday. Vaccines and masks are required.
Harrison Downing perfects the craft of cheesy sandwiches, without Kraft Singles. (Photo: Michael Donahue)
Harrison Downing’s first cooking attempt involved cheese.
“When I was super young, my mom would let me microwave cheese sandwiches,” says Downing, 30. “Probably the only thing she would let me cook. It’s still my guilty pleasure to this day.”
Now the chef at Greys Fine Cheese & Entertaining, Downing’s sandwiches are more elaborate. A recent “Sandwich Saturday” creation was made with cotto salami, pepperoni, finocchiona, fennel, and Der Scharfe, a raw milk cheese.
“Learning about a bunch of cheeses” is one of the benefits of his job at Greys, owned by Jackie Mau and Kurt Mullican.
Mullican, aka “Cheesemonger Kurt,” “walks up to me every five seconds and hands me a piece of cheese,” Downing says.
He “gets a cheese scraper and just scrapes off a little piece,” describes the texture and how long it’s been aged, and says, “Here. Take a sip of this wine with it.”
Sommelier Bradley Sharp pairs the wine with the cheese.
Mullican also showed Downing how to properly eat cheese. “You warm it up in your hands, in between your palms, because cheese is supposed to be eaten at room temperature. You get all the flavor profiles out of it.”
A native Memphian, Downing says, “My mom was an amazing cook. She sparked my love for cooking. I’d hang out with her. We always bonded and cooked together.”
They listened to James Taylor, Carole King, as well as country artists while she cooked. “She’s a cheesy country lady.”
Realizing college wasn’t for him, Downing eventually got a job at Jim’s Place Grille in Collierville, where he began as an expediter. “That’s when I fell in love with it — watching those guys on the grill. Watching the food come out really made me want to be on that side of the kitchen.”
Under chef Nick Acosta’s tutelage, Downing rose to sous-chef before leaving the restaurant four years later.
Schuyler O’Brien helped him get a job as a lead cook at Hog Wild Pit BBQ. But Downing was laid off when the pandemic hit. To “kill time,” he and his wife picked peaches and blueberries at Jones Orchard, and Downing made jam to sell and give away.
A friend told him about Greys. “I got linked up with Kurt to help him organize his menu and do all that. Right when we talked on the phone, me and Kurt really hit it off. We knew it was going to be a good chemistry.”
Downing originally was just going to make jams and cheese boards until he told Mullican, “I can build a couple of small plates. Based off of a cheese.
“Like I have a ricotta dish, a feta dish. And people who don’t want to just eat meat and cheese, they can have a salad option. That blossomed to my obsession with all these sandwich creations. ‘Why not try to put a couple of sandwiches on the menu?’”
And, he says, “It blew up.”
“Gabagool” is made of gabagool meat, house-made spicy pickles, Brie, and raspberry coulis. “Then I smash it on the sandwich press so it’s super hard. It comes out melting hot, spicy, and sweet with the raspberry.”
For Sandwich Saturday, Downing makes a limited number of sandwiches that sell out between an hour and a half to two hours after the shop opens, he says. “I don’t tell anybody what I’m doing until Friday at lunch.”
He describes the sandwiches as “all very wild.”
“The challenge is to find a cheese I like and make something with it. These cheeses are so crazy when you taste them, it just sparks something in my head: ‘I can put this with this and it will taste like it should go with whatever.’
“I have all these cheeses from all over the world to play with that Kurt brings in.”
Downing, nicknamed “Chef Harry,” says he probably used “American Kraft Singles” on those microwave sandwiches he made as a kid. His mother used “just like basics, jack cheddars and Parmesan and things like that. All of the things that will make Kurt’s skin crawl.”
Greys Fine Cheese & Entertaining is at 709 Mendenhall Road; (901) 529-7046.
Theo James and Nisa Williams (Photo: Jamie Harmon)
The Mid-South Coliseum, Memphis’ first racially integrated facility, once host to concerts, basketball games, graduations, and more, has been closed to the public since 2006. This summer, the Coliseum Coalition, which has been advocating for the Coliseum’s revitalization, commissioned Nisa Williams, a Crosstown High School senior, and her father, Theo James, a textile and graphic artist, to add visual appeal to the landmark’s exterior.
Within two months, Williams and James painted six 15-by-15-foot panels that illustrate Memphis values, with Otis Redding captioned as representing culture, Larry Finch as talent, Justice Constance Baker Motley as justice, a grad in cap and gown as community, Unapologetic as passion, and three children with a globe in their hand as imagination. The father-daughter duo finished the paintings in early August. I recently spoke with them about their project.
Memphis Flyer:How would y’all describe your process?
Nisa Williams: The words were given to us, like prompts, from the coalition. We had a little more freedom of who we wanted to portray. We were given a list of names, and we were also told we could do our own research on what provokes us.
Theo James: After we decided what we were going to do, Nisa and I bashed around the idea of sticking to a graphic style. We didn’t want to go for a photorealistic look because we wanted it to be punchy from a distance.
NW: We just got started doing stuff. I’d start painting in one area, and then he would do another, and it kinda just came together. I think I served the most in concept sketches and making sure that the framework of the murals, as soon as we started painting, was correct.
TJ: Yeah, she was the one that organized how we were going about doing it. I was impressed with what she was capable of doing. There’s some difficulty in translating a screen-size thumbnail into a 15-by-15-foot panel. I think I would’ve had a lot more difficulty without her. I felt that we had an eye-to-eye approach.
What was it like to work together as father and daughter?
TJ: For me, it’s probably the most flattering thing a parent can feel. I didn’t twist Nisa’s arm; she got into art on her own. She started doing little rudimentary things and then it went from there, like people discovering fire to the internet, with her. She has a style already. I know it’s her stuff when I see it, and I’m amazed by it. I’m self-taught. Nisa — she’s taught herself a lot — but she’s had the benefit of good high school art classes. I’ve actually learned a lot from her.
NW: I appreciate that a lot. You can ask him, I’m not really good at receiving compliments. He’s a really talented artist with a notable style. I learned a lot of techniques and more professional and streamlined ways to problem-solve and how to appeal to clients. I think a lot of people underestimate how influential he is in the city, and I think it’s cool that anybody can provoke you through art or make you think about something. That’s a hard thing to do.
What do you hope this project will provoke in onlookers?
NW: We wanted to get people to inquire about the space and what’s happening to it. A lot of the composition has references to the people embodied in the picture. It functions almost as a timeline of the Coliseum.
TJ: Every one of the people portrayed had a piece of history that happened at that location. You can’t live in Memphis without having a story about the Coliseum. You went there to see a show or you went there to graduate. This is a place that has history with a community already connected to it, a place that shouldn’t be demolished. It’s a large space where there’s so much potential. We have to have a place that people can bond over, a place that’s central.
NW: A place to have a collective experience.
TJ: Yeah, I think that’s how a city gets its identity.
Nashville-born, Brooklyn-based author Nichole Perkins contains multitudes. She is also a poet, an essayist, and a podcast host. And, of course, she’s a person, someone who cannot be defined by a career. This weekend, Perkins will discuss her multifaceted writing and life as a panelist in the Southern Festival of Books, which is being presented virtually this year, giving Memphians an easy option for viewing the usually Nashville-based literature festival.
Virtual events have become a regular aspect of Perkins’ life this year, as she has worked to promote her recently released memoir, Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be (Grand Central Publishing).
“I wrote the bulk of it during the pandemic last year,” Perkins says, explaining that it was a strange experience to delve deep into her memory while feeling so disconnected from anything resembling a normal routine. She did experience a “weird sense of timelessness” as many people did during the pandemic, adding a wrinkle to the already difficult task of writing a memoir.
“That’s one of the reasons I wanted to anchor the book in pop culture,” Perkins says of Sometimes I Trip, which uses seemingly disparate pop culture icons as touchstones. “I’m not super great at dates,” she admits, “but I can remember what I was listening to, what I was watching, what were the TV shows we were talking about in class.” So by using Kermit the Frog, Prince, or Frasier’s Niles Crane (played by David Hyde Pierce), Perkins is able to anchor her memories. But her detective work doesn’t end with the pop culture references elegantly infused in her essays.
She wrote a chapter called “The Women” about her great-grandmother, her aunt, and her sister. To help inspire herself, Perkins went to dollar stores and bought soap like the soap her great-grandmother used to have. She would smell the soap to help encourage the memories to come. “I was living in New York while I wrote the book, so a lot of the Southern smells from my childhood are not here,” Perkins says.
Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be is at times heartwarming and heartbreaking, honest and humane, humorous and haunting. It’s the chronicle of Perkins’ growth into herself as a person, as a Black Southern woman, as someone who fully inhabits her body, and as someone who has had to learn by trial and error what all of that means. It’s a story, told in essays and with references to Prince songs, of someone coming into her own “like a storm gaining strength just off the coast,” as Memphis-born writer Saeed Jones says on the back of the book.
“Serena is so many things,” Perkins writes in “Softness,” noting the acclaimed athlete Serena Williams also owns a clothing line, makes jewelry, and went to school to learn how to do nails, “but her focused athleticism intimidates many, so they resort to the laziest insult. Her treatment reminds me that for people who believe gender exists as a binary, there are only absolutes. You are either masculine or you’re feminine, and there’s no room for nuance.”
In Sometimes I Trip on How Happy We Could Be, Perkins has made room for nuance, for her own multitudes. The book is an excellent work of memoir, and it should not be missed.
Nichole Perkins is a panelist for the Southern Festival of Books’ “In Conversation: Brian Broome, Anjali Enjeti, and Nichole Perkins” event on October 9th, 4:15 p.m. To find out more or attend the festival’s virtual events, go to sofestofbooks.org.
Facebook user Tasha Jeffries bravely stepped up to explain this meme last week.
“Within the last two years in Memphis, there has been an influx of people buying older model Infinitis (AKA Fin Fins). They are usually bought with body damage, two-toned, and most people never get actual license plates.
“Typically, the drivers of these vehicles drive as if there are no laws to abide by. They go in between cars, cut people off, and tend to run red lights. If you see one — even if you have the right of way — treat them as if they are the police or an ambulance. You do not want to be hit by one of these vehicles because they are less likely to be insured.”
A.R. The Mermaid
Posted to YouTube by Dirty Glove Bastard
Memphis rapper A.R. The Mermaid was featured on Dirty Glove Bastard’s YouTube channel last week for a signature “Off The Porch” interview.
When asked what’s life really like in Memphis these days, the East Memphian responded, “Shit, I ain’t gonna lie to you. You smooth. You straight. You gotta know where you at, who you fuck with, or be at. You can’t get fucked up being at the wrong place at the wrong time, you know what I’m saying. But, shit, they fuck with me out there. It’s love. So, I fuck with the city.”
“Never, never kissed a car before” — Agathe Rousselle stars in Julia Ducournau’s Titane.
Film, like all art, has its own cycles. It’s not just cycles of marketplace expansion and contraction, or the rise and fall of great stars — although those are things that affect film production — but of artistic direction and audience taste.
In the 1990s, the so-called indie era began with a flowering of filmic weirdness. There was no shortage of social realism, like Kevin Smith’s Clerks, a no-budget look at the world of the service economy’s working stiffs. But there was also formal experimentation, like Quentin Tarantino’s timeline-scrambling structures; magical realism, like Spike Lee’s nods to musical theater; and downright surrealism, like Stephen Soderbergh’s experimental cul-de-sac Schizopolis. By the 2010s, the cycle had receded. Mainstream studio films had been taken over by magic and superheroes, so the underground reacted by swerving toward realism.
Now, there are signs that the film weirdos want to get weird again. This January, the Sundance lineup was crowded with magic, such as Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney’s Strawberry Mansion and Dash Shaw’s animated tour de force Cryptozoo. Then in July, the Cannes Film Festival awarded the Palme d’Or to Titane. Director Julia Ducournau became only the second woman in history to win the festival world’s most prestigious award — and, since Jane Campion’s The Piano tied with Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine in 1993, the first to win it outright.
If you’ve heard anything about Titane, it’s probably that this is the movie where a woman has sex with a car. I’m here to report that yes, that absolutely does happen more than once, but there’s a lot more to it than that. We first meet Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) when she is a bratty tween. Angered by some unseen slight, she’s annoying her father (Bertrand Bonello) from the back seat as he drives on a French freeway. But the family conflict takes a tragic turn when Dad, chastising his daughter, takes his eyes off the road and crashes the car. He’s okay, but Alexia sustains a fractured cranium, which requires the implantation of a titanium plate to fix. She survives the injury, but the doctor warns Alexia’s parents to “watch for neurological signs.”
When we flash forward a decade or so, there is no shortage of “neurological signs” with Alexia. You would think her youthful brush with death would have put her off cars, but in fact the opposite has happened. Alexia loves cars — I mean, she really loves them. She makes her living as a booth girl at automotive shows, getting paid to dance seductively with custom autos. When random guys follow her into the parking lot to hit on her, she simply kills them. See, she’s not just a sexy technophile, she’s also a dangerous psychopath who has been terrorizing Europe for years.
After gruesomely dispatching a would-be rapist with a chopstick, Alexia works off a little extra energy with a Cadillac lowrider that’s been giving her the come-hither headlight. A few recreational slayings later, she finds out that 1) the cops are onto her, and 2) she’s pregnant with the Caddy’s car-child. She goes on the lam, but a close call with the gendarmerie causes her to decide that she needs to radically change her appearance. After an excruciating sequence where she remakes her face with brute force, she poses as Adrien, a missing child whom she may have murdered. Adrien’s father, Vincent (Vincent Lindon), is a fire captain who has been mourning his disappeared son for a decade. He accepts Alexia as Adrien because he wants it to be true. But Alexia’s Adrien gambit is destined to be short lived, as she grows more and more visibly pregnant. If you think it’s going to be awkward to explain to Vincent that she’s not who he thinks she is, throw in the fact that his “son” is also pregnant with a car baby.
I’m a big fan of Ducournau’s film Raw, which transforms eating disorders into cannibalistic urges for some cutting body horror. Titane is a lot messier and more uneven. It starts off strong, with Rousselle’s fearless performance channelling Malcolm McDowell’s charming psychopathy from A Clockwork Orange. But once she takes up with Vincent, and Ducournau ramps up the paranoid body dysphoria, the story loses momentum. Even if the director can’t quite stick the landing, Titane is a visually ravishing and thematically daring film unlike anything else you’ll see today.
Sex and, maybe, sexual dominance were broadcast from the license plate of a Nashville woman who says the Tennessee Department of Revenue (TDOR) officials allowed the vanity tag for a decade but now say it’s illegal because someone complained to the department’s chief of staff.
In July, the Flyer told readers about the woman who sued the state after it revoked the vanity plate, which reads “69PWNDU.” Leah Gilliam got the plate in 2011 to marry her loves of astronomy and gaming, her lawyer claims in the suit filed against TDOR in July. She said the “69” part references the 1969 moon landing. The “PWNDU” part references “pwnd,” a common gaming term for “owned.” So, “pwndu” means “owned you,” or something like “I have dominated you in this video game.”
A ruling on the matter was expected early this week but was not available at press time. Check memphisflyer.com for updates.
Officials have interpreted these vanity plates as offensive, despite the car owners’ insistence otherwise.
Who PWND Whom?
No one — state officials or members of the public — lodged any formal complaint against Gilliam for a decade. Her cars — a Volvo and two Mercedes-Benzes — carried the personalized banner until Gilliam received a surprise letter from TDOR on May 25th that the plate had been “deemed offensive.” She was instructed to return the plate immediately or face fines and up to 30 days in jail.
In June, Gilliam requested a hearing about the plate, explaining its phrase “is a gaming term and — above all — not rude, mean, or implying anything other than a friendly term for ‘I won.’”
“It is my hope I can get some younger jurors at my hearing who are familiar with the term and can enlighten the non-gamers in the crowd,” Gilliam wrote in June.
In 2018, Gilliam requested three choices for her vanity plate: “69PWNDU,” “PWNDU69,” and “IPWNDU.” She preferred “69PWNDU” and explained on the form that “PWND = video gaming term. [69PWNDU] is my Google phone.” The plate was approved.
By July 9, 2021, Gilliam’s case was before Administrative Law Judge Phillip Ewing. Daniel Horwitz, of the Nashville-based firm Horwitz Law, represented Gilliam. Camille Cline, assistant general counsel in TDOR’s legal office, represented the state of Tennessee. The conference was brief, set to establish that the attorneys would need time to gather documents for evidence and set future meetings. It also set the stage for a fight.
Horwitz asked, “My question was whether or not the state is going to take the position that they screwed this one up and that they should not have demanded this revocation. Is that going to happen?”
Cline responded, “No, sir. No, we are not going to take that position.”
Tennessee state law “requires” TDOR officials (including the commissioner of the department) to refuse to issue any vanity plate “that may carry connotations offensive to good taste and decency.” As for “69PWNDU,” it satisfied this part of the law, according to state attorneys, as it “was deemed to have a sexual association.”
“Specifically, the department determined that the significance of the configuration was likely interpreted to mean ‘69 pound you,’ which includes two terms or phrases with a sexual association,” reads the state’s explanation. “The numerical sequence ‘69’ is likely to be understood to reference a particular sexual activity; whereas, ‘pound you’ is a colloquial phrase that is also likely to be ascribed a sexual association.
“Additionally, the configuration could also be interpreted to mean ‘69 pwned [sic] you,’ with ‘pwned’ [sic] being a term frequently used by the gaming community in situations where one player has ‘owned’ or dominated another player. When this portion of the configuration is combined with the ‘69’ sequence, it could be read to signify sexual domination.”
In his legal complaint, Horwitz argued Tennessee’s law discriminates against Gilliam’s federally protected rights to free speech. The law, and the revocation of her plate, violated the First Amendment, Horwitz claimed, on the basis of both content and viewpoint. That is, laws cannot stop speech based on what it says (the content). Laws also cannot stop speech because of the underlying views in the message (the viewpoint).
“A law banning all political speeches in a public park would be content based,” according to the First Amendment Encyclopedia from the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee state University. “A law banning only political speeches by members of the Socialist Party would be viewpoint based.”
Horwitz also complained the Tennessee law is vague, does not adequately describe what it prohibits, leaving “reasonable people to guess at its meaning,” and “leaves the definition of its terms to law enforcement officials.”
For this and more, Gilliam and her attorney wanted to stop the state from revoking her “69PWNDU” plate, stop the state from revoking any vanity plate, the court judge to rule the law unconstitutional, for the state to pay court costs and attorney fees for Gilliam, and pay damages in the amount of $1 for every day she was forbidden from displaying her license plate.
State attorneys argued Tennessee’s personalized license plate program could not violate First Amendment rights. The program “involves government speech, which is outside the scope” of free-speech rights. Also, the program “is a nonpublic forum” and laws regulating it cannot violate the First Amendment. They also argued, generally, that laws governing the vanity plate program are not “unconstitutionally vague.” They asked the judge to declare the law constitutional, affirm TDOR’s decision to revoke the “69PWNDU” license plate, dismiss claims against TDOR Commissioner David Gerregano, and to have Gilliam pay all costs associated with the matter.
Interesting stuff emerged when state lawyers began handing over documents in the case. Horwitz wanted a list of every Tennessee license plate — personalized or not — that included “69.” State attorneys said the request was overly broad as there are over 250,000 license plates that contain the “69” sequence, including many non-personalized plates they deemed irrelevant to the case.
Those attorneys, however, turned over a list of active vanity plates in Tennessee that include “69” and were approved by TDOR. Most of them — the lion’s share of them, actually — are harmless reference to cars like “69ETYPE,” “69BUG,” “69FORD,” “69VET,” or “STANG69.” At least two — “697IBEW” and “IBEW969” — are references to labor unions.
Another — “USAFA69” — seems to be a reference to a graduation date from the United States Air Force Academy. “USMC69” seems to reference to service in the United States Marine Corps. Another — “ETSU69” — may communicate a graduation year from East Tennessee University. “ELVIS69,” perhaps, references the artist’s continued revival in that year. “LOSTN69” may even communicate a sweet nostalgia for a time gone by.
Others may be easy to understand but hard to know the intent: “KARMA69,” “MAGIC69,” “COOK69,” “FROG69,” “HUB69,” “PONY69,” “SUMMR69,” and more. Some of them, however, are harder to decipher: “PM37369,” “ROATE69,” “VLB669,” “X69,” “52769,” “656909,” and “356911.”
It does seem, though, that some naughty (but crafty) “69” aficionados got plates past the state censors. Consider “REAL69Z,” “TOPLS69” (both of which may be auto references), “694FUN,” or, simply, “I69.” The meaning of two plates are hilariously obvious, “42069” and “69420.” All of those, including “Gilliam’s “69PWNDU,” were approved at one point by officials in Nashville and released into the wild.
So, who are these officials? How do they decide what gets stamped on a plate and what does not? These were the central questions in an August deposition by Horwitz to Demetria Hudson, TDOR’s assistant director of vehicle services.
She said the plate caused no issues from May 2011 to May 2021. One day that month, someone verbally complained about the plate to Justin Moorhead, chief of staff in TDOR. After 10 years on the road, the department got that one complaint, reviewed the tag, and deemed it offensive. Why?
“Because it represents the department and it sends a message to the constituents that the department released one … a license plate … what the license plate entails … ,” Hudson said.
She said the “69PWNDU” plate was not protected by the Constitution because it was “harmful because somebody complained about it and took offense to it.” Asked about the department’s definition of “offensive,” Hudson said she wasn’t sure how state law spells it out. However, she gave an impromptu definition of “offensive,” saying it means “anything … that makes someone uncomfortable, or readily angry, or upset … ” and said that was the department’s definition of it. She said she got the definition from Webster’s Dictionary but wasn’t sure the department relied on it totally to define “offensive.” Similarly, Hudson said her department did not have formal definitions of “good taste” or “decency” and no training materials defined them.
However, she said the department does have formal regulations to determine whether or not a plate can be deemed offensive. She was not sure, though, that those regulations were “published for the public to see.” But the rules include a glossary of prohibited terms. She described those as “anything that pertains to ethnic or racially … ethnic, racially, sexual, violence, patriot.”
Asked about ethnic terms, Hudson said she didn’t know them all off the top of her head. When asked to name some she said, “things like white trash … or honky.” [Editor’s note: She was able to remember some other derogatory ethnic terms that don’t belong in this paper.] Asked about sexual terms, Hudson replied “things like screw you, 69 you,” but “that’s all I can think of off the top of my head.”
As for formal vetting of plates, Hudson said “[O]ur objectionable table is checked and then we also check Google search and Urban Dictionary.”
Answering questions from Horwitz, Hudson said “69420” should not be allowed on a license plate “because the 69 have [sic] sexual connotations.” Neither should “42069.” Neither should “694FUN,” “69BEAST,” “69BOSS,” “I69,” “69PONY,” “SMOKIN69,” or “TOPLS69.” Hudson did say that all of those plates should have been vetted before they were approved.
She said “69” alone was not enough to disqualify a plate. The number’s context had to be sexually explicit. However, she said she was sure sexually explicit “69” plates have “slipped through.”
Unsettled Law
Ken Paulson, director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, said Tennessee would have to show “extremely strong state interest” in banning any kind of speech from its license plates. He believed last week its regulations on them would be overturned.
“Offensive speech is protected by the First Amendment,” he said. “In fact, you only need a First Amendment to protect offensive speech. You don’t need protection for speech that everyone agrees with.”
So far, the U.S. Supreme Court has not ruled on license-plate speech. Two federal court rulings have gone in opposite directions on the matter, he said, and Tennessee’s ruling will likely follow one of those.
In 2001, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Missouri officials violated the First Amendment rights of a woman by denying her request for the license plate “ARYAN-1,” according to the Freedom Forum Institute. That same year, the 2nd Circuit said Vermont officials could deny a vanity plate that said “SHTHPNS” because license plates are a nonpublic forum and government officials can regulate them.
With no official ruling from the highest court in the land, states make up their own laws on plates and how to manage First Amendment protections on them. Paulson said two federal judges have decided what the Constitution says, and the rest is “fine tuning by state legislators.”
Case Study: California
Chris Ogilvie sued the state of California in March 2020 after he was denied his vanity plate. The plate, “OGWOOLF,” was a mash-up of two of his nicknames. “Og” was his military nickname, and “Woolf” was his nickname back home. It was deemed offensive as “OG” could be read as an acronym for “original gangster” and was too offensive for other motorists.
The Pacific Legal Foundation took up the case and added four others to join the suit. “DUK N A,” short for “Ducati and Andrea,” was rejected because it sounded like an obscene phrase. “BO11UX” was rejected because the term was said to have sexual connotations. “SLAAYRR,” a reference to the metal band, was rejected because it was considered “threatening, aggressive, or hostile.” “QUEER,” a reference to a musician’s identity and record label, was rejected because it was considered insulting, degrading, or expressive of contempt.
The group won the suit in November as a federal judge ruled the state’s restriction of vanity plates it considers “offensive to good taste and decency” was unconstitutional.
“This is a great day for our clients and the 250,000 Californians that seek to express their messages on personalized license plates each year,” said Foundation attorney Wen Fa. “Vague bans on offensive speech allow bureaucrats to inject their subjective preferences and undermine the rule of law.”
Case Study: Rhode Island
A Rhode Island man Sean Carroll and the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island argued to a federal judge in July 2020 that he should be able to put a plate on his all-electric Tesla that reads “FKGAS.” Carol contended the phrase read “fake gas.” He displayed the tags for six months until another driver complained to the state Department of Motor Vehicles.
Attorneys for the state contended vanity plates are sold to raise money for the state. They said the plates were government property, and they are not a public forum to express themselves.
However, the judge ruled that the state’s law on such plates was vague and violated Carroll’s First Amendment rights.
“I am thrilled with [the judge’s] decision on my First Amendment right allowing me to express my views through my vanity plate,” Carroll said at the time. “The only thing better is to be able to continue to see all the smiles, laughter, thumbs up, and fist bumps in the rear-view mirror as people continue to read and get the humor in my message.”
Case Study: Maine
Maine stopped vetting vanity plates altogether in 2015. The program was loose enough that WGME reporters this year found 40 vanity plates that straight-up used the “F” word, and dozens had variations on it. Another review by the BangorDaily News found as many as 400 “obscene” plates with phrases like “FARTN,” “KISMYAS,” and “PHUKU2.”
But those wild and free days ended this summer. Maine lawmakers passed a bill that created “appropriate standards” for the Secretary of State to follow when approving vanity license plates. The bill became law in June.
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a former director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, testified in support of banning the plates, according to a story from The Boston Globe.
“The First Amendment protects your right to have any bumper sticker you want, but it doesn’t force the state to issue you a registration plate that subjects every child in your neighborhood to a message the government wouldn’t allow them to see in a movie theater,” she told lawmakers.
The rules were not formally passed by the Maine legislature. Though, many expect the rules to face many legal challenges before they can be enacted.
Printing Plates and Money
Paulson agreed that the issues would all be cleaner if states just did not allow personalized license plates. They aren’t likely to stop, though, because they make money. In the 2020 fiscal year, Tennessee’s personalized plate program yielded $368,041.66 to state coffers, according to the TDOR.
But Paulson noted that while these issues seem countless and the topic is “fascinating,” it’s hardly a “pressing level matter.” The First Amendment Center is nonpartisan, he said, and does not lobby nor litigate.
“But as a matter of philosophy, we believe America is stronger if everybody is free to express themselves in any medium they choose,” he said.
Cars parked on the Greensward (Photo: savethegreensward.org)
Let us hearken now to those halcyon days of 2016, back to the difficult final months of the Great Battle of the Greensward. For those of you new to the history of the Kingdom of Memphis, let me share the tale: The Memphis Zoo — led at that time by a rather intransigent fellow named Chuck “You and the Horse You Rode In On” Brady — had begun to allow increasing numbers of cars to park on the Overton Park Greensward, a large, flat, grassy field used by park patrons for Frisbee football, soccer, picnics, and the occasional drum circle.
Over several years, the zoo kept expanding its parking footprint, finally going so far as to set up temporary fencing across the middle of the Greensward — usually on nice weekend days. On one side of the fence were people doing the aforementioned park things. On the other side were cars, SUVs, trucks, and the occasional bus, which left dead grass, mud, and deep, rutted tire tracks in the Greensward, rendering it useless for recreation even when it wasn’t being parked on.
Things started getting really heated in 2014. Park lovers formed groups: Get Off Our Lawn (GOOL) and Citizens to Preserve Overton Park (CPOP). Activists stood on nearby street corners urging zoo patrons to park on nearby streets, rather than despoiling the Greensward. Aerial photographs were taken that showed just how much of the people’s parkland was being taken over by a private entity. The pictures got national attention. Protestors were arrested. Houses all over Midtown bore signs urging Memphis to save the Greensward. Then the zoo cut down some trees. Some activists threatened to begin spray-painting cars. A zoo sign at the park entrance was defaced. Things were tense.
And then, in the winter of 2016, newly elected Mayor Jim Strickland managed to get both sides into mediation. After months of costly negotiation, a compromise was struck. The zoo would be allowed to enlarge its lot to 415 spaces, taking some of the Greensward, but with the great majority of the land being preserved. The zoo subsequently announced that it would build a parking garage on nearby Prentiss Place and wouldn’t need to expand its lot. Huzzah! Parking on the Greensward was a thing of the past. Peace reigned in the Kingdom.
At least it did until last Friday night at 5:06 p.m., when the zoo and city issued a joint press release stating that the Prentiss garage project was being scrapped because it was too expensive and that the zoo would go back to the lot-expansion plan, and, oh, while it was being expanded, the zoo would once again be letting its customers park on the Greensward. Enjoy your weekend. Nothing to see here.
This is some seriously tone-deaf policy and very stupid politics. The zoo has amply demonstrated over the past five years that it can operate without parking on the Greensward. The zoo has also amply demonstrated that it has the resources to raise millions of dollars from its patrons and funders. Now it can’t afford a parking garage? There’s an aroma of fish here. You don’t do a Friday night news dump unless you know you’re doing something that doesn’t bear scrutiny in the light of day.
Activists are already meeting and planning. This move is not going to play well with those who went through all this drama five years ago. And I need not remind those who’ve lived here a while that Overton Park has been under assault before, and that its supporters (then derided as “little old ladies in tennis shoes”) once managed to defeat the mighty U.S. government when it announced plans to split the park with Interstate 40 more than 50 years ago. Overton Park is the only place in the country where I-40 was stopped and forced to take a detour.
The force is strong in this place, this Old Forest, this people’s park. There is a history here, and the Memphis Zoo and the city of Memphis would be wise to take a cue from it.
At the beginning of 2019, as a newly elected governor, Nashville Republican Bill Lee, an industrialist of sorts, prepared to inaugurate his first four-year term, it became my task — both self-assumed and officially assigned — to write as authoritative a take as I could possibly make on what this ascendant Tennessee executive-in-chief had in mind to do.
As the Flyer’s chief politics writer, my job at the onset of a new state administration would be to chronicle the opening of a new session of state government, focusing significantly on the early actions and intentions of the General Assembly. The problem was that the issue allocated (or, as we say, budgeted) for just after New Year would be on the streets before the first gavel was destined to fall on the opening of the 2019 General Assembly.
The solution was to shift gears and write instead about the mind of the Governor-elect, and, if we could get to him beforehand, to dilate upon his plans and his intentions as against the actions of the General Assembly. The calendar permitted me to take in his formal inauguration (and with it access to the rhetoric of his acceptance address and the theater of the state ceremony).
To accomplish my end, however, I needed to flesh things out with the kind of detailed explanations from him on his plans that would be unlikely to turn up in a formal acceptance address. Accordingly, I made overtures through what was then but a thin group of gubernatorial retainers and got his assent to take part in a remotely conducted interview on the eve of his installment. The result was done partly via phone calls and partly through his answers to a questionnaire I sent to him. I had covered his election campaign fairly extensively as well and had that to go on, along with one of those superficial and polite relationships writers have (ideally) with their sources.
The piece, a Flyer cover story, begun on Memphis turf and completed in Nashville during inauguration week, turned out more or less successfully.
Dated January 31, 2019, it was entitled “Fresh Start in Nashville” and focused mainly on Lee’s expressed support for criminal justice reform, one of the few planks in his inaugural platform that could be called remotely “progressive.” (His views on that issue were actually praised by Tennessee ACLU head Hedy Weinberg!)
Most of his positions on other issues — education, public safety, government spending, what have you — were antiseptic Republican generalities. All in all, the profile probably suggested the same thing that Lee’s campaign had: Here was a man who had a pleasant exterior and was something of an enigma, enough of one to allow such benefit of the doubt as one might have toward a political figure.
Curiously, in the collection of bromides and generalities that constituted his answers to my questionnaire, there was one glaring omission. I had asked what he might do regarding the dormant industrial megasite that for more than a decade had been out there in Haywood County, a stone’s throw from both the needy cities of Memphis and Jackson, a bane to his several gubernatorial predecessors’ efforts to find a big-time industrial proprietor to make it more than a jumbo-sized vacant lot.
Lee shied away from answering that part of the questionnaire, saying he’d have to think about it. And think about it he presumably did for the next couple of years, even as the more straightforward positions he claimed for other issues dissolved into his version of a bully pulpit, one in which the adjective “bully” predominated. Attacks upon “socialism”; idealization of guns and school vouchers; restrictions on LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, and other non-insiders; clampdowns on efforts to minimize the spread of Covid-19 — all this was his legacy.
Until, lo and behold, it is Lee, after the failures of all his immediate gubernatorial predecessors, who has actually succeeded in getting somebody big-time — the Ford Motor Company, for crying out loud — to commit to a $5.6 billion factory at the megasite, to make electric-powered vehicles (read: environmentally friendly ones) and to open up economic prospects for the beleaguered backwaters of West Tennessee.
A nice pre-election move, that, and maybe enough to justify a new look at Lee’s developing legacy.
