While driving through the city in recent weeks, I’ve found myself being re-routed around fallen trees and/or limbs several times. There were at least four big ones restricting access to streets within 10 blocks of my Midtown home. Out east, and up north in the Bartlett area, things were much worse.
It’s becoming the new normal. Over the course of several storm systems this summer, the number of Memphians without power at various times was well over 100,000, often for days.
And if it’s not wind turning off our lights, it’s ice, as heavily coated trees and limbs fall on power lines and leave us in the cold and dark. After February’s ice storm, thousands of people were without power, some for up to 10 days. The winter before, it was the same thing — with the added bonus of making our water undrinkable for several days.
MLGW says its infrastructure is outdated and being upgraded, but there’s no getting around the fact that the magnificent trees that shade us through Memphis’ asphalt-melting summers also shut off our air conditioners (and furnaces). If you add up the number of people in the city who’ve lost power just this year as a result of various weather incidents, it’s well into six figures, certainly well above the 100,000 number I cited above.
This was a tweet from MLGW in response to criticism from city council members during the 2022 ice storm: “It took three years to get our budget with a rate increase to fund our five-year improvement plan approved by City Council. We are in the third year of the five-year plan, which has been hampered considerably by the pandemic.”
So, now they’re in the fourth year of the plan. Forgive me if I remain skeptical — and not because I don’t think they’re trying. MLGW workers have been magnificent, working long hours, doing their best to fix a system not built for the increasing frequency of severe weather. They’re trying to play Whac-A-Mole and the moles are winning — with a big assist from global climate change.
The outcry always arises that we need to put our power lines underground. The utility’s response, and I think it’s legitimate, is that it would take decades and cost several billion dollars. So maybe let’s think outside the Whac-A-Mole box.
Some people are already doing it, of course. This has mostly taken the form of buying a gas generator to provide power when storms strike. I get the appeal, but let me suggest another option that came to me when I drove through the back roads of Arkansas last week. I couldn’t help but notice the surprising number of solar panels on rural houses and businesses, many of them new, some even being installed as I drove by. These folks are likely taking advantage of the Inflation Reduction Act’s solar Investment Tax Credit, which reduces tax liability on solar installation by 30 percent of the cost. In addition, taxpayers will be able to claim a 30 percent bonus credit based on emission measurements, which requires zero or net-negative carbon emissions.
So, instead of getting a generator, maybe consider installing solar panels. The initial cost is higher, but the long-term advantage is significant. In addition to a tax credit, you can even get paid for selling electricity back to the grid. Not to mention, solar panels are quiet and don’t pollute.
And here’s another thought: Maybe the city and/or MLGW could divert some of those theoretical funds for burying power lines into incentives to Memphis home and business owners for going solar.
I’m under no illusion that thousands of Memphians will immediately begin installing solar panels, but some will, especially if the benefits are publicized. It beats snarky tweets between city council and MLGW. And there are similar federal tax incentives for businesses that have solar technology installed, so why not sweeten the pot with local funds? Maybe we could get solar panels on our grocery stores. Or our 10,000 Walgreens.
We have to start somewhere. Continuing to chainsaw ourselves out from under fallen debris and wait to be reattached to the grid after every major weather event is not a plan. It’s time to re-route our approach to keeping the lights on.
Foxx, Parris, and Boyega deliver near-perfect performances in this film.
They Cloned Tyrone seems like one of those movies like I Was a Teenage Werewolf or Snakes on a Plane where they came up with the title and worked backwards. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, have you seen Sharknado? They made six of them!
Whatever method director Juel Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier used to come up with the concept, they should keep doing it. To me, They Cloned Tyrone is a very pure form of science fiction. Even after towering masterpieces like Frankenstein, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and The War of the Worlds, sci-fi struggled to gain acceptance in the literary mainstream. The genre was mostly relegated to cheap pulp magazines with pictures of little green men menacing scantily clad women on the cover. But many of the stories inside those lurid covers, from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” were serious works of art.
They Cloned Tyrone leans hard into disrepute with an appropriately sleazy Blaxploitation setup: Fontaine (John Boyega) is running a two-bit drug trafficking operation that is threatened by his better-capitalized rival Isaac (J. Alphonse Nicholson). One typical day on the job, he violently evicts one of Isaac’s guys from his territory and shakes down pimp Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) and his ho Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) for some money he’s owed. But after the shakedown winds down, Isaac’s enforcers catch up with Fontaine. Slick Charles and Yo-Yo see him gunned down in the parking lot. They’re shocked when Fontaine shows up the next day, none the worse for wear, demanding the money they already paid him.
Fontaine, it seems, is a clone. But who cloned him, and why? (We meet Tyrone much later in the story. Spoiler: He’s a clone, too.) Yo-Yo obsessively collects Nancy Drew books, and she’s itching to play girl detective in real life. The three not-quite friends start to see weirdness everywhere; little things they overlooked or took for granted start to take on a sinister aura. What is fake and what is real starts to get hazy. So does the question of who is fake and who is real. And just because you’re a clone, does that mean you’re not you? Since Fontaine is a clone — albeit one with a mixture of fake and real memories — whose side is he really on? Does he even know?
Imagine if Philip K. Dick wrote Hustle & Flow, and you’ll get a sense of what They Cloned Tyrone is like. Taylor is heavily influenced by Craig Brewer’s Memphis hip-hop opus. Parris plays Yo-Yo with the same sass-mouth accent Paula Jai Parker used as Lexus. Yo-Yo even says she’s just trying to get enough money to get back to Memphis. Very relatable.
Throwing DJay and Shug into They Live in the hood makes for some wildly entertaining scenes. But Taylor and Rettenmaier have a lot more on their minds than trash talk and jump scares. They stretch their premise into allegory like Jordan Peele, whose epochal Us is another clear influence.
Three near-perfect performances from Boyega, Foxx, and Parris keep all the plates spinning. When confronted by big weirdness, they freak out appropriately, then get down to the business of saving their hood. Boyega plays multiple scenes with himself but never looks like he’s bluescreening it in. Foxx’s “Playboy World Pimp Champion 1995” is funny but never demeaning. (Get well soon, Jamie Foxx! The world needs you!) Parris is constantly revealing new layers of Yo-Yo, who is largely responsible for keeping the plot moving forward. In the final act, when the screenplay starts to struggle to stick the landing, all the hard work the actors have done keeps the increasingly strange proceedings grounded in reality. They Cloned Tyrone smuggles gold inside a trash bag as only good sci-fi can.
Last week, a former U.S. intelligence officer testified before Congress that aliens are real. Turns out, we don’t really care.
In Wednesday’s House Oversight subcommittee on National Security, the Border and Foreign Affairs — largely discussing unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) — three former military officials gave some confounding testimonies about, among other things, unidentified aircrafts that used logic-defying technology and claimed the government is hiding information about UFOs from the public.
AP News reported that one speaker, retired Air Force Major David Grusch, “was asked in 2019 by the head of a government task force on UAPs to identify all highly classified programs relating to the task force’s mission. At the time, Grusch was detailed to the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that operates U.S. spy satellites.” During last week’s hearing, the former major-turned-whistleblower spoke of “nonhuman biologics” — matter retrieved from found UAP crafts’ pilots — saying, “That was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the [UAP] program I talked to, that are currently still on the program.”
Grusch told the panel his testimony was based on four years of work on the task force and interviews with 40 witnesses: “individuals with a longstanding track record of legitimacy and service to this country — many of whom also shared compelling evidence in the form of photography, official documentation, and classified oral testimony.”
Grusch also claimed he’s faced retaliation and “administrative terrorism” for speaking out and, as NPR reported, said “he had been denied access to some government UFO programs but that he knows the ‘exact locations’ of UAPs in U.S. possession.” The Pentagon has dismissed Grusch’s allegations of a cover-up. The full hearing is viewable on YouTube.
But back to the whole “we don’t care” thing. Sure, it’d be nice to know if aliens exist. What are the implications for humanity? Could someone please tell us what the hell is going on? But right now, after the most uncomfortable few years in recent history — a pandemic, a collapsing economy, the hottest global and oceanic temperatures on record, a list of horrors and struggles and traumas that goes on and on — we simply don’t have the bandwidth to give much energy to the idea of flying saucers or little green men. The world is burning. Unless the aliens are coming to save us, meh.
If the U.S. government has supposedly known about the existence of “non-humans” since the 1930s or so — and has run “a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program” underneath our noses — what’s the big deal? Some are asking, “Why now?” Could this hearing have been a distraction from something else? The possibility of the presence of non-humans with insanely advanced technological capabilities has repeatedly been referred to as a “bipartisan national security concern.” But could this be a scare tactic? A bread crumb meant to plant seeds for another lockdown? Conspiracy theories abound. Between those and governmental obfuscations, who could know up from down? For funsies, you can venture over to TikTok or scan the reels on Facebook or Instagram, where the whole thing has become a big joke. “Earth is awful. Please take me with you, aliens!” appears to be the consensus.
Humans have pondered the potential of extraterrestrial beings for centuries. Even before science began to unfold the nature of the universe — its planets and nebulas, black holes and cosmic dust — simply stargazing would make one wonder. There must be life in the vastness of it all. The truth is out there, to be sure. But even if that meant aliens were real, and even if that info was handed to us with neon flashing lights and red flags and bullhorns, we’d probably still go about our days, same as always, punching the clock and paying the bills — because that’s what’s got to be done. Unless spaceships land in our front yards, we’re sorry, we just don’t have time to think about that. It’s unfortunate, really.
I find some measure of peace in the unknown. Maybe something discovered within it will help unravel our own existential mysteries. Maybe life isn’t just about punching a clock and following society’s rules, without pausing to think deeply about the meaning of it all, until we die. Do you want to believe?
Sean Winfrey features 20 paintings in his current show. (Credit: Michael Donahue)
Sean Winfrey’s art exhibit, “Lines Apart,” honors people he has lost.
“The overall theme, I guess, would seem to be healing,” says Winfrey, 31. “With kind of the emphasis on mental health and grief.”
His big brother, the late John Winfrey, was the initial inspiration for the show. “A few years ago, my brother committed suicide. He was bipolar like me. The art just came about by me just trying to fix myself a little bit and reflect on some of the good times I’ve had with him.
“And it kind of expanded. For a while, I was losing people every other year of my life. So, it was a way for me to eternally heal.”
Winfrey is an instructor in the Cloud901 team learning lab at Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, where he mentors young people in filmmaking, painting, and digital art. He’s also a member of the Memphis Flyer’s 20 < 30 Class of 2020.
“Lines Apart,” which will be on view through August 31st at the library, opened with a reception on July 29th.
The works in the show aren’t typical of Winfrey’s art. “I’m usually making art that is reactive in other ways — making people laugh and music videos and things like that. This is more of an internal struggle I’m trying to push out.”
“Matter” was the first painting Winfrey did for the exhibit. “It’s an abstract piece. And I continued doing this abstract method until it kind of formed into a concrete idea and concept. It’s black-and-white lines. I feel like my fascination with it came whenever I put the epoxy on and the lines started to come alive and feel like they’re moving a little bit.”
“Matter” by Sean Winfrey at “Lines Apart” (Credit: Michael Donahue)
He then began to “make more three-dimensional spaces with just these black-and-white lines. I wanted to create motion with a still image. Whenever I was creating a lot of these images, I was doing a lot of meditation. It was really just an attempt to push myself out of a dark place. I suffer from bipolar and I need to do very tedious things in order to fight through depression and fight through similar things my brother was going through.
“I think there’s a big misconception with people who commit suicide. My brother really did want to live. He just had a bad day and he didn’t have the resources to pull himself out.”
Making the paintings was therapeutic. “It gave me a source of healing. But I feel like this is relatable to anybody that’s experiencing grief.”
The exhibit features 20 paintings. “I was trying to do two paintings a week and just get lost in the process. I dropped all of my other gigs and things just to kind of focus on this. It took me nine months to finish this series.”
While he was working on the paintings, one of the teenagers he mentors at the library, Jonathan Killingsworth, looked at Winfrey’s work. “He came up and said, ‘Oh, this is really great.’ Two weeks later, he passed away from a very senseless gun crime. He got shot for a small sack of weed.”
LaQuindra Killingsworth, Chris Killingsworth, Jeremy Killingsworth, Sean Winfrey, and Amun Tyz with Winfrey’s painting of the late Jonathan Killingsworth at “Lines Apart” (Credit: Michael Donahue)
Winfrey began putting color in the paintings of people “to signify them being alive.”
Then, he says, “I just kept diving deeper. When I was in my early 20s, I lost my best friend. And it was like five years ago when I lost my nephew’s father, my brother-in-law.”
His portraits of people he has known who have died cover a span of about 10 years, Winfrey says. “Doing the portraits probably was the most therapeutic because it was like I was having a conversation with them and reflecting on a lot of memories.”
Instead of pushing away memories of these people, Winfrey decided to “dive into some of those memories and the way they impacted me and shaped me. ‘Cause I wouldn’t be the same person without any of these people.”
“Portrait Of Joey Bingham” by Sean Winfrey at “Lines Apart” (Credit: Michael Donahue)“Portrait of Mike McCabe” by Sean Winfrey at “Lines Apart” (Credit: Michael Donahue)
A native Memphian, Winfrey grew up in an artistic family. His parents are Jen and John Winfrey, owners of Winfrey Works. “My mom does all those ceramic flowers and my dad, all the metal work.”
Winfrey, whose first creative expression was writing his initials on everything he came across, wasn’t encouraged by his parents to become an artist. “My mom always told me not to become an artist because I’ll be broke. But I did anyway.”
Street art was his first artistic endeavor. “I was projecting big images of zebras and things. Spray painting them on walls around the city. There are still some around. I kind of slowed down on that when I was 18 because I didn’t want to go to jail.”
He created paintings on canvas using stencils while at Overton High School. “I did a lot of work about Memphis and about the history of Memphis. Like I did a lot of MLK paintings and just paintings of our trolleys. That was mostly high school. And when I went to college, I mostly focused on cartoons.”
The last pieces he did at Memphis College of Art were rotoscopes. “It’s basically taking film and tracing over each frame.”
“Suits,” which featured images of himself, was Sean Winfrey’s first experimental music video. (Credit: Sean Winfrey)“Bad Scientist” (Credit: Sean Winfrey)
“Drift,” one of those pieces, is “about floating through life. Letting things affect you as you walk through life. Each little clip was a different obstacle. Like me climbing up a hill, climbing up a ladder, jumping off of something. And it all looped back to me going to sleep.”
That film was “just about the day to day struggle.”
Which Winfrey knew first hand. “I had a big struggle with my mental health. When I was in college, I had to take a couple of months off to come back to grips. I fell into a psychosis because I lost my best friend and it kind of threw me out of reality for a while.”
When he was in high school, Winfrey tried to take his own life by taking pills. “I was like 15 or 16. And I had to get hospitalized. I feel like that’s another big reason why I like working with kids around that age.”
Approaching adulthood and starting to think, “What am I going to do with my life?” when you’re that age is “very stressful,” Winfrey says. He wants to help kids “not feel so weighted down by adulthood.”
After he graduated from college, Winfrey worked as a creative producer for about five years at ABC-24. He began freelancing after he left that job. “I was doing a lot of skit shows and comedy skits with some friends of mine. They’re still on the Internet somewhere.”
He began working with Graham Brewer, who introduced him to his dad, filmmaker Craig Brewer. Craig introduced him to Muck Sticky, who then introduced him to Al Kapone. “We made a music video with Al Kapone and Muck Sticky cause he [Kapone] liked my work.”
Winfrey began making cinemagraphs. “It’s kind of like a photo that is slightly animated in that all the photos come alive.”
He made the water, wind, and the Hernando de Soto Bridge move in a cinemagraph in Kapone’s “Oh Boy” video.
Al Kapone’s “Oh Boy” (Credit: Sean Winfrey)
Winfrey also worked on a podcast with the performer, FreeSol, for about a year and a half.
He made a video of rapper DaBaby at Beale Street Music Festival.
DaBaby at Beale Street Music Festival (Credit: Sean Winfrey)
He included his work in Indie Memphis Film Festival, where his “Oh Boy”video came in number two in the Hometowner Music Videos category in 2019.
Winfrey’s creativity doesn’t stop at filmmaking and painting. “I also design a lot of clothes. I have a website I sell clothes through. It’s called existential67.com.”
He’s also a performer. “I used to have a band in college, as well: Emojicon1967.”
Sean Winfrey’s Emojicon1967 performing at a house show (Courtesy Sean Winfrey)
Winfrey rapped and wrote poetry. “It’s a lot of poetry on top of beats. I still write often. It’s another way I express myself. We had a few albums and we put on a lot of house shows. I still rap and I still write a lot of poetry, but I haven’t really brought it out to the public yet.”
He put the pause on a lot of his creative outlets to focus on his current show. “And try to find some sort of healing. I think this is going to be ongoing. I’m not going to be completely fixed until my last day of my life, I guess.”
Future plans include his upcoming marriage to Jamie Bigham.
Sean Winfrey and his fiancé Jamie Bigham, at “Lines Apart” (Credit: Michael Donahue)
As far as maybe moving someday, Winfrey says, “I definitely want to broaden my circle and get outside of Memphis. But I feel like there’s a lot of work that can be done on the ground floor here. And there’s a lot of talented people to work with constantly. I love working with kids and doing something for the community. That’s really fulfilling.”
And, he says, “My main goal is to be financially independent with only my art.”
But if he ever does move to another city, Winfrey says, “I’ve always got to come back to Memphis to drink the water. Because I guess there’s something in it.”
Keshia Williams, Taylor Jackson, Amanda Willoughby, Janay Kelley at “Lines Apart” (Credit: Michael Donahue)Michael Donahue and Carlos Valverde at “Lines Apart” (Credit: Michael Donahue)Memphis Public Libraries director Keenon McCloy and Sean Winfrey at “Lines Apart” (Credit: Michael Donahue)(Credit: Michael Donahue)We Saw You
Two of the oldest African-American communities in North Memphis are continuing to improve quality of life for their residents and promote small businesses while preserving their historic legacy.
The Klondike Smokey City Community Development Corporation (KSCCDC) has a number of initiatives set in place to “improve the economic health of the North Memphis communities through community, workforce, and family development initiatives.” These resources include family preservation, affordable housing, recycling programs, and a small business program.
KSCCDC’s small business program seeks to boost prospects for small business owners through access to financial assistance and capital, along with the promotion of other skills including contracting and procurement, marketing, operations, business development, and exporting industry-specific training.
According to the organization, they are able to help and connect businesses with these resources through the Community Navigator Pilot Program, which is an American Rescue Plan initiative and also sponsored by BLDG Memphis and the Small Business Administration.
“This particular grant was to provide support for small businesses in neighborhoods that were underinvested and underserved,” explained Markuitta Washington, community navigator for BLDG Memphis. “We selected seven of our member CDCs to support with executing this grant program.”
Randall Garrett serves on the board of directors for BLDG Memphis, representing KSCCDC, and explained that there is a “renaissance” in Klondike Smokey City when it comes to small businesses.
The two cities were recently the setting of BLDG’s Memphis’ MEMfix, which Washington explained was a culmination project as a part of the Community Navigator Pilot Program. This specific iteration of MEMFix celebrated “the area’s rich history with a Northside Hall of Fame and museum exhibits,” among other things. As a part of the event, small business owners were able to serve as vendors.
Garrett also explained that residents are excited about the Northside Square project. The project will be similar to Crosstown Concourse, with affordable housing, a community college, and more. According to Roshun Austin, president of The Works, the sponsor and ownership entity, the project will be ready in late Spring of 2025.
“As a collaborative organization, we have control of over 400 properties in the Klondike area where we’re doing affordable housing and possibly some more development in the area. It’s also all community-led organizations that’s in control of the property and planning” said Garrett. “So this MEMfix was the perfect event to showcase these things in these historic neighborhoods.”
The Klondike Smokey City MEMFix event not only served as an opportunity for the community to showcase the entrepreneurial boom in the city, but also its historic contributions.
“People do not know that Klondike is actually the first African-American community in the city of Memphis. People think it’s Orange Mound, but it’s actually Klondike. Orange Mound was first, but it was outside of the city of Memphis. Inside the city of Memphis, it was Klondike. This neighborhood is so very historic,” said Garrett.
In order for residents to “feel good” about their community, they must know who has made the community what it is, explained Eziza Ogbeiwi-Risher, environmental coordinator of KSCCDC, whether these names are publicly renowned or neighborhood heroes. This was showcased in a neighborhood museum built specifically for the MEMFix.
“I know that everybody has somebody in their family, or some event in their family that they’re very proud of,” said Ogbeiwi-Risher. “The museum is an opportunity for everyone to showcase that. Now you have an opportunity to let everyone know ‘hey, we helped build this community, and we want to continue to build it.’”
(Credit: Christina Crutchfield via Instagram)
Preservation is an important component of these two communities, and is amplified thanks to aid from not only community partners, but those who have lived in these communities for extended periods of time. Having people like Ogbeiwi-Risher and KSCCDC executive director Quincey Morris helps for newer developments and projects to come to fruition, while also preserving the historic legacy.
“When you have people who are from the community, in charge of developing the community, then you’re going to have a product that is going to preserve the legacy and history of the community,” said Garrett.
Garrett brought up the fact that new houses are expected to go up in the community soon. However, the first set of designs from the commissioned architects had been rejected because they did not fit in with the current designs of Klondike. He said this is why it is essential to have community natives at the table when it comes to these decisions.
“Anything that’s done in this neighborhood has to fit this neighborhood, has to fit the plan” said Garrett. “When you have people from the community and of the community, running the development and running the programs and running the design of everything, then that’s how you preserve the history and legacy of it.”
Overton Park officials hope construction can begin this year on a project that will end Greensward parking, open new park-land, and relocate some facilities, but they await the arrival of $3 million in federal funds.
In March 2022, Overton Park Conservancy (OPC), the Memphis Zoo, and the city of Memphis announced a plan that would transform the park through a series of land swaps.
In July 2022, the group announced $3 million in federal funding had been allocated for the project. The group is still awaiting the money in order to get the project started.
“The city, the zoo, and the conservancy are all moving aggressively to get this solution implemented as quickly as possible,” OPC executive director Tina Sullivan said in a statement. “With federal funding, multiple partners, and multiple aspects to the project, it’s hard to pinpoint a completion date at this stage. Barring unforeseen circumstances, we do hope to be underway with construction by the end of 2023.”
Last week OPC outlined what will happen when the money becomes available:
• The conservancy will develop a plan for addressing invasive plant species in the forested acreage that is currently adjacent to the zoo’s temporary exhibit space.
• [OPC will] design and build a trail system for the new section of forest, and once it’s ready for visitors, will take down the surrounding fence.
• The city will move its remaining functions from the area in Overton Park’s southeast corner and begin work to make the space more habitable.
• The zoo will then move its maintenance facility there, freeing up its current on-site maintenance facility for guest parking.
• The conservancy will begin piloting potential uses for the remaining parcel of the southeast corner, which will be converted into an area for public use.
