Author: Bruce VanWyngarden

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At Large Opinion

Wink: A Dog’s Tale

Wink (Photo: Bruce VanWyngarden)

A couple weeks ago, on a day when the temperature was in the low 20s, I decided to take my dogs on a walk at Overton Park. They were acting antsy and I figured I could handle the cold for a half-hour or so.

We usually hit the Overton Bark dog enclosure first, so my dogs can get their ya-yas out with other dogs before walking the trails. On this cold day, however, there was only one dog there — a shivering white pup with no collar or tags. She was standing on an icy patch of ground and her eyes were wide and fearful. An older couple walked by in thick parkas and said, “That dog’s been here for a while. Do you think her owner’s taking a walk?”

No, I thought. I think some asshole dumped this innocent pup at a dog park on a freezing winter day, hoping someone would rescue her. I took my dogs for a walk, resolving that if the pup was still there when we got back, it was my karma to save her.

A half-hour later, as I put her in the back of my car, there was a little grumbling from my two, but nothing serious. The pup looked like a pitbull mix, female, and sported one sassy eye that looked like it had been made-up by RuPaul. She was rib-skinny but affectionate and trusting. When we got home, I put food in a bowl for her. She inhaled it like oxygen, then lay down on a dog bed and slept for four hours without moving, recovering from the cold, exhaustion, and whatever she’d been through on the streets of Memphis.

I named her Wink because of that eye, and I called my daughter Mary, who works with Blues City Animal Rescue. She’s a pro at this stuff. We put out some feelers on social media and, after a couple of days, found a foster home for Wink. But it didn’t work out, so I got Wink back a day later. To be honest, I was becoming fond of her. She was gentle, non-aggressive, high-spirited, and didn’t run to the door and bark every time a delivery person came onto the porch — like my two idiots do six times a day. She was also a great TV-cuddler and would sleep through anything once she conked out.

There were a few suitors. One young couple brought their dog, but it didn’t like Wink. Another guy said he’d get back to me. Another had a family emergency. These things take time, Mary said.

My wife and I noticed that Wink was very independent. She’d snuggle, loved to play and fetch, but wouldn’t come when called. She was quirky. Something seemed off.

The next night, it clicked. I was prepping the dog bowls in the kitchen, my two hounds at my feet, excited, waiting for the nightly miracle. Wink was in the next room, snoring in a chair. When the bowls were ready, I hollered at her. No response. I whistled. I walked over to her and clapped my hands over her head. No response.

Wink was deaf as a stone.

Everything suddenly made sense: the deep sleeps (she was basically in a sensory-deprivation tank); the lack of response to sweet-talk or calls to “come” or attempts to give her a name. How this deaf dog survived out on the streets, I have no idea. How she survived and retained such a loving nature toward humans and other dogs is nothing short of a miracle.

In a couple of days, she began to respond to hand signals. I’ve ordered a sub-sonic whistle, in hopes she’ll be able to hear it. Wink is going to make it. She’s going to find her true home. We’re patient, and she’s a survivor. You heard it here first.

Email me if interested: brucev@memphisflyer.com.

Categories
At Large Opinion

The Quiet Part

The Ninth District: Note phallic incursion from 2010 redistricting. (Photo: courtesy Congressman Steve Cohen)

Maybe you saw this quote last week, when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the quiet part out loud while defending the defeat of the Voting Rights Act in the Senate: “African-American voters,” he warbled, “are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”

Never mind that McConnell apparently believes African Americans aren’t actual Americans, like, you know, white people. And never mind that the bills his party is passing in GOP-controlled states around the country are intended to change that pesky situation before the next election rolls around. McConnell is intentionally glossing over the fact that the Voting Rights Act would have outlawed the implementation of these undemocratic new laws, and that every Republican Senator voted against it — as did two hypocrites calling themselves Democrats, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin.

Since the 2020 election, dozens of restrictive voting laws have been enacted in 19 states, laws that supposedly remedy “voter fraud” (which didn’t happen) but that have the actual purpose of making voting more difficult for poor people and people of color — who just coincidentally tend to vote for Democrats.

You don’t have to look any further than Nashville for a perfect example of how far the GOP is willing to go to establish a permanent and overwhelming majority. Last week, the Tennessee Senate Judiciary and House State Government committees approved three redistricting plans for new state House, state Senate, and Congressional maps, which are drawn every decade after the federal census to reshape state and federal districts, if necessary, to ensure equity at the polls.

The new Republican-created Tennessee maps are a joke at all three levels, a mugging of democracy in plain sight. Newly configured districts in and around Memphis, Nashville, and Knoxville are designed to break up neighborhoods and Democratic voting strongholds in urban areas, especially Black communities. The new maps pit Black and Democratic incumbents against each other in four instances at the state representative level and give Republicans a huge numerical advantage in eight out of nine of Tennessee’s Congressional districts. That’s an 11 percent representation in Congress for Democrats, who made up 41 percent of the vote in the most recent statewide election.

The lone outlier is Tennessee’s Ninth District, represented by Congressman Steve Cohen, but it’s not for lack of trying. After the 2010 census (in what was widely seen as a direct skewering of Cohen), the GOP took a literally phallic-shaped piece out of the Ninth that just so happened to include Cohen’s place of worship in East Memphis and a large surrounding Jewish neighborhood. To balance the population math, the GOP added a large chunk of Tipton County to the Ninth, meaning Cohen now represents a disparate melange of rural, inner-city, and suburban voters. This isn’t just unfair to Cohen (or whoever the Ninth District representative may be in the future); it’s unfair to all the residents of the district, who deserve to be represented by someone who reflects their concerns and values. The Republicans, it appears, would prefer it if Memphis residents found themselves being represented by a Republican turd farmer from Atoka.

But compared to Nashville, Memphis got off easy. The Fifth District — represented by Democratic Congressman Jim Cooper, and which currently encompasses most of Nashville and Davidson County — will now encompass parts of five (count ’em!) counties. The city’s vote will be split and allocated to three rural-majority districts. Meaning Nashville’s urban residents will soon more than likely be represented by three Republican turd farmers.

This isn’t how democracy is supposed to work. Our elected representatives shouldn’t be allowed to create districts specifically designed to keep them — and their party — in office. Geographic political districts — at every level — should be created by bipartisan commissions, not party hacks. And yes, I know gerrymandering has been done by Democrats as well. The point is that it’s wrong, no matter who does it, and that we had in our hands a bill that would have eliminated all this cheating, that would have kept states from arbitrarily reducing the number of polling places in certain districts or shortening voting periods or, for god’s sake, banning the dispensing of water to voters in line.

In our system, unfettered democracy is supposed to be a feature, not a bug. But unfortunately, that’s not how the Republicans see it these days.

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News News Blog News Feature

Staying Up with Anesthesiologist and Author Shira Shiloah

(Courtesy Shira Shiloah)

Shira Shiloah is an anesthesiologist with Medical Anesthesia Group. She’s also a successful writer, whose first novel, a medical thriller published in September 2020 called Emergence, became a best-seller. The plot, we should add, involves a deranged surgeon in a Memphis hospital who is a serial killer. It’s got some tense and scary moments.

So, one could fairly say that Dr. Shiloah puts people to sleep by day and keeps them awake at night, turning pages. Her second novel is set to be published soon. 

We talked with Shiloah about her background, the medical challenges presented by the pandemic, and the dual career roles she has taken on. 

Shiloah has practiced medicine in Memphis since 2004. “I never thought I would be a lifelong Memphian,” she says, “but the city has been really good to me.” Her family emigrated here from Israel when she was three years old and she went to grade school and high school in Memphis. “And I came back here for medical school,” Shiloah adds.

She says the past two years have been stressful and yet transformative. “Early in the pandemic, before I got vaccinated in December 2020 and January 2021, we had to rethink everything,” Shiloah says. “As an anesthesiologist, I was literally managing the airways of Covid patients all day. My greatest fear at that point was bringing the disease home and exposing my family. Things we once took for granted totally changed. I would get home, take off my clothes, and head straight to the shower, before even saying hello.”

Shiloah says the vaccines were — and remain — a game-changer. “It wasn’t until my family was vaccinated,” she says, “that we could relax a little.” She has little patience for those who “spin nonsense” about life-saving drugs. “We should be grateful for these miracle drugs,” she says, adding, “Even though Omicron looks to be less dangerous at this point, we don’t know if it will have long-term effects like memory fog or fatigue, so it’s important to keep taking precautions.” 

Ironically, the pandemic has also served as something of a “sanctuary” for Shiloah’s burgeoning writing career. “I had no idea the first book would do so well, but then it took off. With the pandemic, I had more time at home to write and was able to finish my second book, which is now in the process of being published.”

So how have Shiloah’s colleagues reacted to her writing career? “Sometimes, the nurses and other doctors will bring in a copy of Emergence for me to sign, which is fun. They’ve been very supportive.” She hastens to add that her novel, while set in a hospital in Memphis with a protagonist who is a female anesthesiologist, is fiction, and shouldn’t be taken too literally. 

She says the best writing advice she’s gotten is to “look out the window, not in the mirror.” And she also has some advice for young people with medical careers: “Don’t give up your creative processes while enmeshed in the science. Don’t give up your creative outlets, whether it’s music, art, or writing. You don’t have to become one-dimensional. Never stop nurturing the creative person you are.”

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At Large Opinion

Dead Surfers

So I’m sitting in the dermatologist’s office, waiting to get little pieces of skin removed from my face and shoulders. I’m of a generation that thought iodine and baby oil made a great “sun tan lotion,” a greasy potion that would give you that rosy-brown sheen favored by surfers and lifeguards. Sadly, even though I was a teenage lifeguard and spent hours in the sun every day, I could never achieve the desired bronze glow, just freckles. Now, several decades later, I have to go in once a year to have brown spots frozen off my skin. I like to think of them as little dead surfers.

But I digress. Oh wait, actually, that whole paragraph up there was a digression. See, while I was sitting in the waiting room I’d decided to sneak in a little French lesson on my phone. Except I forgot to turn it to silent mode and before I could do anything, it squawked, “Je bois trois litres d’eau chaque jour.”

A couple of people looked up, no doubt mentally rolling their eyes and thinking, “Why is this idiot broadcasting gibberish in the waiting room?” (If they spoke French, they were probably wondering, “Why does that guy drink three liters of water each day?”) But I digress. Again.

I whispered “Sorry!” to the room and clicked off my phone. Then the receptionist said, “Is that Duolingo?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Pretty addictive, isn’t it?”

“Oui.”

And it truly is. Nearly two years ago, I intended to retire as full-time editor of this paper, then Covid hit, and I stuck around for another year or so. But one of my “retirement” resolutions was to learn French, so I went ahead and started back in April of 2020. My wife’s family is French and I wanted to be able to do more than ask where the restrooms were the next time we went over there. Little did I realize that I was creating a monster. I’ve now had a French lesson every day for almost two years. How do you say “OCD” in French? I could tell you, mon ami.

The Duolingo program I’m using has perfected ways to keep you coming back. It rewards you with points for finishing lessons, and for “streaks,” i.e. the number of days in a row you go without missing a lesson. There are “double point” opportunities, which is when you can really score. Also, you are automatically entered into “leagues” with weekly point standings, and you can discuss answers with other Duolinguists in the chatty (and catty) forums.

My current streak is 597 days. I can’t imagine the glory that will be mine in three more days. So many points! My Diamond League competitors are going to be miffed. Tough merde, losers.

It hasn’t been all vin et roses. Some days I spend an hour or more on my lessons. Other days, not so much. There have been times when life has intervened, where I’ve spent the day fishing or camping or working or driving across the country, and not been able to squeeze in a session. But there I am, in the dark, in bed, knocking out a quick silent lesson before midnight to keep the streak alive. You could call me the Lou Gehrig of Duolingo, except there are thousands of us, many of whom have longer streaks than I do. This stuff is addictive.

So, does it work? I would say yes. I’ve learned to read French pretty well, and I can think my way through most things I want to say in French, albeit slower than I’d like. When I hear my wife talking on the phone to her mother, I understand much more than I used to, but I still miss a lot. They talk too fast. I don’t think there’s any substitute for immersion into a culture where you’re forced to use the native language to communicate. So I may have to go to France and stay for a while to check out that theory. Someday, peut-être.

I’m also working under the premise that the more I exercise my aging brain the longer it will keep working well. Learning a language makes me think, makes me have to remember things.

Like wearing sunscreen when I go outside.

Categories
At Large Opinion

Omicronic

An Airbnb Christmas (Photo: Bruce VanWyngarden)

So, how were your holidays? Merry and bright, I hope. Mine were weird.

Three days before Christmas, my stepdaughter, her husband, and their 2-year-old twins were on their way to Memphis, driving from Brooklyn to spend Christmas and New Year’s with us.

We’d prepared our house for their visit, setting up cribs and high chairs and dragging all the tricycles, toy trains, and other toddler detritus out of the storage room. We’d prepped one guest bedroom for the boys and the other for their parents. It was going to be big family fun for 12 days! Then it all went sideways.

On the day of their planned arrival, my stepdaughter called and said one of the twins had tested positive for Covid. They were eight hours from Memphis. I called my doctor (also a friend) and asked him what we should do. He said, “After being in the car together for a couple days, the whole family will probably test positive at some point. If you and Tatine stay there, you’ll get it.”

He was a very good prognosticator.

No Airbnb in town was going to take a covid-exposed family of four, especially one needing two high chairs and two cribs. So Tatine and I decided to move out and let them have our house. And so the holidays began.

Unable to get a Airbnb on short notice, we spent our first night at The Memphian, the new hotel in Overton Square. For the record, it’s pretty swell, with well-appointed rooms and a friendly staff. Tiger and Peacock, the rooftop bar where we had dinner, is an eclectic and pleasing space — and gets extra points for not ampersanding Tiger and Peacock.

The next morning, after booking a Midtown Airbnb for five days, we went over to “our house” to see the kids and the grandkids. We sat on the deck, six feet apart, masked, no hugs. No one was feeling sick. The kids were running around like normal — riding their trikes, playing with the dogs — as the adults drank coffee and pondered the weirdness of it all.

And so the holiday pattern was set: Meet somewhere outside in the mornings — Shelby Farms, Overton Park, Audubon Park, the backyard — and hang out until the boys’ afternoon nap time. We were fortunate that the weather gifted us with a return to October for 10 days.

The second twin tested positive on the third day; their father on the fifth day; their mother on the eighth. Meet the Domino family. Nobody ever felt ill. The boys had no idea they were “sick.” It was bizarre. We were all sort of stuck in place. (And our dogs were really confused.)

Tatine and I moved into three different Airbnbs over the course of nearly two weeks, testing negative throughout. (If you need advice on finding reasonably priced Memphis Airbnbs, hit us up.)

The two of us had a lot of quiet time on our hands. I was finally able to finish The Overstory, which I recommend. I also relentlessly read about the Omicron Covid variant that had so warped our holidays. I soon became irritated at the American mass media, which kept headlining the “soaring” Covid infection rate, which was obtained by adding the numbers for Delta and Omicron. It was scary on the surface, but it was a sloppy and misleading conflation of two variants with entirely different symptoms, hospitalization rates, and morbidities. Combining their infection rates into one number was about as useful as combining tetanus and whooping cough stats. You don’t learn much about either disease.

Thankfully, by last weekend, the real story started to emerge: Omicron does not invade the lungs or kill people like Delta did, especially those who are vaccinated. Hospitalizations are not likely to rise to anywhere near peak pandemic levels. Omicron blew through South Africa in five weeks and the country’s death rate didn’t change one percentage point. The further good news is that Omicron pushed the far more deadly Delta variant to the sidelines.

I took this information as something of a Christmas gift. The next few weeks may be tough, but I think there is finally light at the end of the pandemic tunnel. And that will be something truly worthy of a holiday.

Categories
At Large Opinion

The Year After the Year

The Saugatuck River (Photo: Andrew VanWyngarden)

It was the year after the year of the big change, the year after the year we all stayed home, the year after the year the offices shut, the restaurants closed, the live music died, the planes stopped flying. It was the year after the last year of Trump. It was 2021.

It began with the most egregious assault on American democracy in our history: The January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol — planned and instigated by the former president of the United States with the assistance and support of numerous Republican flunkies and traitors. It was a pseudo-insurrection that drew thousands of deluded Americans to Washington, D.C., to act out Trump’s final fantasy — that he could overthrow the democratic process and remain president, despite losing the election by 7 million votes. The cultish “patriots” who bought into this lunacy included a planeload of wealthy Memphis Country Club types who, as of this writing, have remained officially unidentified — and out of jail. Maybe they just watched from the hotel lobby. Or went shopping. We may never know. Screw ’em.

As February came on, the first Covid vaccines were administered hereabouts. The state urged us to try the “Sign-Up Genius,” which sort of worked and sort of didn’t. There were long lines, short lines, last-minute cancellations, and sudden open cattle calls for shots. My daughter called me on February 2nd and said, “They’re giving the vax to whoever shows up at the Pipkin today. A bunch of people canceled. You should get on over there.”

An hour later, my wife and I pulled into that strange building on the Fairgrounds, lowered our windows, and got the jab. It felt like a whiff of freedom after a year of suppression and worry. It felt even better 28 days later, when we got the second dose. Vaxxed, baby!

March came and the Tigers missed the Big Dance. The Grizzlies made the play-in playoffs but it was soon over. No one seemed to care much. Maybe it was the shortened seasons, the missed games, the empty arenas, the sideline masks. The magic wasn’t there.

In April, Memphis International Airport (MEM) climbed back atop the rankings as the world’s busiest cargo airport for the first time since 2009. And Amazon announced it was increasing its presence in the Mid-South with two new facilities: a delivery station in North Memphis and a fulfillment center in Byhalia, Mississippi. Some good news at last.

In more good news, I retired as editor of the Flyer in May and set off on a road trip to the East to see distant family and some old friends. The talented Mr. Jesse Davis stepped in as Flyer editor and hasn’t missed a beat since. Thanks, pal.

As soon as I got back to town in June, inspectors discovered a crack in the Hernando DeSoto Bridge and shut it down. I don’t think there was a connection.

Freed from having to be the official voice of the Flyer, I began to write about whatever sparked my fancy: Brooks Museum statuary cleaners, the Waverly flood, the 1919 Elaine (Arkansas) Massacre, Midtown geckos, Donald Trump’s email grift, the latest zoo/Greensward spat, kayaking Nonconnah Creek. It’s been very liberating, and I’m grateful to be able to do it in semi-retirement. Or whatever this is.

I spent most of the summer putting together a collection of my past columns, travel articles, and features for a book, which the Flyer’s parent company, Contemporary Media, published in November. It’s called Everything That’s True, and it makes a great gift, I’m told. So go buy it. It’s at Novel, Burkes, and on the Memphis magazine Shopify site. All sales revenue goes to support the Flyer. End of commercial break.

Thankfully, the year ahead looms with some promise that life can return to normal. Yes, there’s a new Covid variant, but 75 percent of us are vaccinated now and there are medicines that will keep most folks out of the hospital, even if they catch it. Those lines at the Pipkin building hopefully will not reoccur — and the “year after the year” will remain behind us. Onward.

Categories
At Large Opinion

No Country for Us

Rep. Lauren Boebert’s Christmas card (Photo: Boebert’s Twitter)

In 2005, Cormac McCarthy released a novel called No Country for Old Men, a relentlessly brutal tale of a man who stumbles onto a drug deal gone wrong on the Mexican border and makes off with the loot he finds on a dead man. It doesn’t end well. Almost everybody in the book eventually gets murdered. No one gets a happy ending. The characters in the novel (and the subsequent movie) are driven by greed, revenge, grief, and blood-lust. There is no love story, no kindness, no forgiveness, no hero. Only senseless violence and death.

We learned a couple weeks ago that Memphis was no city for Young Dolph, a rising rapper who was assassinated at, of all places, Makeda’s Homemade Cookies. It was reportedly the third attempt on the artist’s life in the last five years. The first two were suspected of being the work of a rival rapper whose name I won’t mention here.

But Young Dolph was nothing if not resilient. Following a 2016 attempt on his life in Charlotte, North Carolina, which involved more than 100 shots being fired at his bullet-proof vehicle, he released an album called Bulletproof, which contained such songs as “100 Shots,” “In Charlotte,” “But I’m Bulletproof,” “I’m Everything You Wanna Be,” and “So Fuk’em.” Young Dolph’s response to a murderous attack on his life was to boast about his superiority to his attackers in his music and to gloat about their bad shooting.

Let me issue a “trigger warning” of sorts here: I — an old white guy — dug into the lyrics of Bulletproof, seeking to learn more about the art of Young Dolph, a performer who is revered by many hereabouts for his good works in the community. His was a name I’d heard, but I didn’t know his music.

Unsurprisingly, I guess, I found Young Dolph’s lyrics revolting. I get that the brutish misogyny, the profanity, the porn-ish sexual swaggering, the celebration of money, drugs, and violence found in Bulletproof’s lyrics is performative. I understand that it’s a genre, a trope; it’s “gangsta” — a celebration of outlaw life similar to Mexican corridos — songs that celebrate cartels, coyotes, and drug-runners. And I get that outlaws have been celebrated in country music and rock-and-roll forever. In “Folsom Prison Blues,” Johnny Cash brags that he “shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”

But this stuff seems next-level and not a healthy next-level. The language is disgustingly demeaning to women; it glorifies casual violence, avarice, and death. And it’s depressing to me that so many of America’s young people love this stuff and take it to heart — like whoever shot and killed two high school girls at a gas station drive-by shooting in Memphis recently. Gangsta.

But, here’s the thing: This toxic version of humanity is everywhere, and it crosses the country’s ethnic and cultural divides. You want to see another soulless, empty celebration of the cult of death? Look at Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert’s Christmas card tweet, wherein she poses with her young male children, all of whom are gleefully brandishing firearms. Listen to her intentional racism in video clips, read her blindingly stupid tweets. What the actual “fuk” is wrong with her? And with us, a country that contains districts in which a majority of the citizens vote for humans like this asshole?

And how do you explain Ethan Crumbley, the Michigan 14-year-old who took a gun his parents had just bought him and murdered four high-school classmates. I’d venture to say that his folks were not influenced by gangsta rap. They are more likely members of the far-right, white-supremacy death-cult that infests the Trump wing of the Republican Party. White American boys committing mass murder is no longer considered unusual. It’s just another trope. Like gangsta rap.

We are a wounded nation. We need to quit glorifying those who appeal to our basest instincts — guns, greed, racism. We need to rediscover the power of kindness and generosity, and do better. Or soon we’ll have no country for anyone.

Categories
At Large Opinion

Tuesdays With Sid

Illustration: John Ryan

Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from Bruce VanWyngarden’s new book, Everything That’s True, which is now out
and available online and at Novel and Burke’s Books.

I moved to Memphis 20 years ago this spring. It was a new city to me, and I liked to wander around Downtown on my lunch hour. One day, I walked into Rod & Hank’s Vintage Guitars, a magical shop then located just across from the Peabody hotel on Second Street. I loved the smell and the feel of the place, and I loved all the classic old guitars hanging on the walls.

Rod Norwood and Hank Sable were friendly guys and would encourage you to take instruments down and play them until you found one that you had to have — as they knew you would, eventually. After a few visits, I fell in love with an old Gibson J-45 that sounded like thunder when you strummed it and whose high notes rang clear as water. I had to have it, and I dropped some serious jack to take it home.

“A J-45 is the guitar Sid Selvidge plays,” Hank said. “A lot of the old country blues singers wouldn’t play anything else.” I’d heard of Selvidge — mostly from reading Robert Gordon’s essential Memphis music and wrasslin’ book, It Came From Memphis — but hadn’t met him. When Hank told me Sid gave guitar lessons in the shop, I decided to give him a call. I wanted to learn country blues, and I wanted an excuse to keep hanging around Rod & Hank’s.

The next week, Sid and I — and our J-45s — met in the guitar shop’s upstairs room for my lesson.

“What do you want to learn?” he asked.

“Whatever you want to teach me,” I said.

Every Tuesday, for the next couple years, Sid taught me lots of nice licks and cool songs, but mostly he taught me about Memphis music. He had a million stories — about Furry Lewis, Mudboy and the Neutrons, Sam Phillips, the Memphis coffeehouse scene, you name it — and I loved to hear them. Sometimes, we’d talk more than we’d play.

After the “lesson,” we got in the habit of going downstairs and playing in the shop for a while. Soon, Hank started joining in on banjo and fiddle. Then, former Commercial Appeal music writer Larry Nager began dropping by with his mandolin. Then Sid’s marvelously talented son Steve began showing up and playing Dobro.

The impromptu “Second Street String Band” even played a few gigs, and it was a thrill for all of us to play behind Sid’s amazing voice. But all things come to an end. Rod and Hank closed the shop and took their business online. Sid got a full-time gig running the international radio show Beale Street Caravan. Nager moved to Cincinnati. I became the Flyer editor, and Tuesdays were never the same.

But Sid remained a friend, and he remains in my memory as one of the kindest, most generous people I ever met. His passing last week leaves an irreplaceable void in Memphis music. I still miss those Tuesdays, and, like a lot of folks around here, I’ll miss Sid Selvidge.

Categories
At Large Opinion

Hit the Brakes

Mr. Siwabud Veerapaisarn | Dreamstime.com

My pappy said, “Son, you’re gonna’ drive me to drinkin’

If you don’t stop drivin’ that Hot Rod Lincoln.”

— Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen

I was northbound on Cooper, first in line at the stoplight at Central, patiently waiting for it to turn green. A guy a few cars behind me wasn’t in a patient mood. He peeled out of the line, roared forward using the oncoming traffic lane, then made a hard right onto Central, squealing his tires as he accelerated across my bow, headed east. I turned to my left to see the driver in the turn lane next to me looking wide-eyed, shaking his head in disbelief.

Two days later, I was having dinner with a friend at an outdoor table in crowded Overton Square. As we were about to dig into our meal, a matte-gray Mustang about 40 feet away on Madison Avenue began spinning its tires, sending up a sulfurous cloud of burning rubber, before passing two cars and accelerating through a red light at Cooper.

The following day, while discussing the incident with friends, I was shown a TikTok video of a white muscle car pulling up alongside a Memphis police cruiser and doing a complete donut around it before speeding off into the night.

What in the world is going on here? The most comprehensive answers to that question were covered in an excellent two-part story by Micaela Watts in The Commercial Appeal in early October. I urge you to read it.

The condensed version is that a subculture of souped-up muscle cars has emerged in the city, fueled by over-powered vehicles (Dodge Chargers, Mustangs, Infinitis) from the mid-2000s that have become cheap to buy, and by the ability of their drivers to obtain or create fake drive-out tags in lieu of license plates. Since Memphis police are prohibited (thankfully) from high-speed chases, the hot-rodders have gotten bolder — on the streets of Memphis and in displaying their dangerous antics on social media.

There’s nothing new about the love affair between reckless youth and reckless driving. It’s been glorified in pop culture since at least 1951, when Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88” (cited by most as the first rock-and-roll record) was released right here in Memphis. Tell me which of the following tunes rings your bell, and I’ll tell you how old you are: “Little GTO,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “Mustang Sally,” “Radar Love,” “Little Red Corvette,” “Pink Cadillac,” “I Can’t Drive 55,” “Bitchin’ Camaro,” “Shut Up and Drive.” I could go on. And on. The Google “songs about cars” rabbit hole has more inventory than Covington Pike.

If it makes you feel any better, the raging muscle car craze is a nationwide phenomenon, not just a Memphis thing. But that doesn’t help the people who’ve been killed by drivers illicitly racing through the city streets of America, including two people here who were killed by an off-duty Memphis cop going 100 miles an hour in his Dodge Charger. Local television stations have aired video of cars racing around the I-240 loop, using other traffic like participants in a video game. It’s crazy out there.

The Memphis City Council passed an ordinance designed to punish those who take part in organized races and stunt demonstrations. The police department launched Operation Slow Down Memphis in August and says it is directing extra resources for patrolling and monitoring local thoroughfares. Speed bumps have been added on Front Street and other areas popular with motorheads.

All good, but I think a more proactive approach might be necessary, at least as long as this phenomenon lasts. Call it profiling, if you want, but these vehicles aren’t hard to spot. If MPD officers see a drive-out tag on a muscle car while on patrol, I would have no problem with them pulling that car over and doing a license and registration check. These vehicles can be as dangerous as a loaded gun. Drag racing and performative stunt-driving in crowded entertainment districts and residential neighborhoods are putting lives at risk for nothing other than misguided testosterone. It’s time to hit the brakes.

Categories
At Large Opinion

Mind Over Meta

Tatine hangs with Al Yankovic. (Photo: Bruce VanWyngarden)

Facebook is a daily presence in my life and has been since 2010 when I joined the social medium to post pictures of a trip my wife and I took to the Grammys in Los Angeles. I remember I created an “album” of photos, each carefully captioned: the beach at Malibu; the HOLLYWOOD sign; Tatine meeting Weird Al Yankovic. So exciting!

It was around this time, I suppose, that most of us basically stopped shooting pictures with a camera. You remember that tedious process: You’d take your film to Walgreens, then wait a few days to go pick up your developed pictures (along with the negatives, in case you wanted to go crazy and print another copy). Then you’d sit out in the parking lot, looking through your vacation shots or whatever. No filters, no enhancements. What Walgreens gave you is what you got. How crude.

Now, our phones take care of all of that. Instant sharing! Filters! Video! No more dusty sleeves of old photos stuck in drawers. And Facebook has all our shots organized by date and subject matter and helpfully suggests reposting them as “memories” for us, so we can amuse/bore our friends all over again.

Around the world, three billion people are using Facebook to advertise their lives, faces, interests, writing, families, gardens, pets, food, businesses, music, vacations, politics. And Facebook uses all that free information we provide to make mega-billions of dollars from companies that want to advertise to us. It is a marketing behemoth with algorithms so advanced, you’d swear they’re reading our thoughts. That’s because they are, literally — the ones we write down for them. We are Facebook’s product and they’re getting top dollar for us, but we don’t seem to much care. Check out my new shoes, y’all!

Facebook has made some huge blunders. When the company pushed for a “pivot” to video in 2015, thousands of journalists were laid off, replaced by video “content providers.” Three years later, Facebook had to tell advertisers (and newspapers and media organizations) that video was not working as they’d promised. People actually preferred reading to being spoon-fed videos. Oops, said Mr. Zuckerberg, give us some journalism again, please.

And the company seems a little touchy these days, given all the bad press it’s gotten regarding its failure to remove political disinformation and racist, white-supremacist content from its platform. I have a friend who was reprimanded by the Facebook popo last week for using the word “Chubby” in referencing the Sixties singer, Chubby Checker. Yes, it’s his name, but it breached some sort of algorithmic dog whistle. I’m guessing that typing “Porky Pig” would definitely get you 30 days in the hole.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a column about the daily emails I get from Donald Trump. The Flyer art director illustrated the column with an image of a Trump fundraising ad that had been emailed to me. Normally, when I post my column on Facebook on Wednesday morning, I start getting comments, likes, etc., within minutes, mainly because I’m followed by a few hundred people, so it shows up in their news feed. That week, however, nothing. By mid-morning, I’d had two comments, maybe three or four likes. Facebook was obviously suppressing the distribution of the column.

When I figured it out and changed the art, things got back to normal quickly, but it gave me a real sense of how much Facebook can shape what all of us read in our news feeds — for good or evil.

Here’s hoping they’re as vigilant at stopping nazi memes and hate speech as they are at keeping Donald Trump from getting a free ad — and at protecting Chubby Checker’s feelings.