Author: Davis Christopher

• Dang!

Embattled City Council Member/Bee colony Janis Fullilove was pulled over by a Memphis police officer Tuesday for looking 30 in a 45.

“She was working it hard too,” says Officer Weston Krupke who wrote Fullilove a ticket for driving while fabulous. “She wasn’t going straight but kind of weaving back and forth in the road. Slow. Fierce.

“Damn, I just can’t stop smelling her perfume,” Krupke exclaims. “I could look at that woman all day, and that’s what makes her such a danger to herself and to other drivers.”

According to the police report it was the powerful odor of fresh polish that alerted officers to the fact that Fullilove’s nails had just been done. The nails were also extremely well manicured and shiny and the colors she’d selected beautifully complimented a generous application of electric blue eye shadow. Her rouge and lipstick were perfect, if thickly applied, and her short blonde wig was sharp and businesslike.

“She blew a perfect 10 on the fabulyzer,” Krupke says. “I had no choice but to issue the citation.”

No attempts were made to contact Fullilove who is too busy thinking about Memphis and the people she represents to be bothered.

Additional reporting by Danny Bader, a Wiseguy and regular contributor to Fly on the Wall.

Midtown— “It was chaos, absolute chaos,” Indie Memphis Film Festival volunteer Ginger Grant said, breathlessly describing an altercation that took place after she called in a complaint about Dorf Ungolf, a Norwegian performance artist known for making loud phone calls during movies and live theatrical productions. Ungolf, who has been banned from all area cinemas, was attempting to purchase an all-access pass to the popular festival.

“I asked him to leave but he wouldn’t,” Grant further explained. “I called the police but the team they sent looked more like a military unit. They had body armor, and all kinds of weapons, and they just started pounding him. It was awful. It was amazing.”

Regional cinemas had been on high alert since Ungolf posted a message on Facebook explaining how he had been “inspired and empowered” by the “rich white people” in a new series of online advertisements for the Motorola Droid Ultra. He said he applauded the telecommunications company for encouraging “sexy rich people” to flirt electronically at “shitty fat people operas.”

“Once these deviant phone behaviors were ascribed only to the poor and powerless — to the gang bangers, and the Norwegians like me,” Ungolf wrote. “Now that we see that hot wealthy American white people in tuxedos are also enjoying these same wicked pleasures there is no turning back.”

In various interviews Ungolf has claimed that the people of Norway didn’t appreciate his art either and that he moved to Tennessee after the opening of a 22 screen Muvico megaplex in Downtown Memphis. He has been annoying the shit out of regional cinema and live theater fans since. In fact, he has often been blamed for the now-shuttered Muvico’s ultimate demise.

“People always fear the new,” Ungolf was quoted as saying in August, 2007 after being dragged from the Muvico-22 by the MPD’s Gang Unit.

“If only these stupid cow-faced audiences would listen they would know I am not talking to friends. I am not hooking up to say ‘Yo-yo man, whazzup’ like you see on TV. I am responding in the moment to what is actually happening on the screen. If it is an asshole up there I may say, ‘Look at that asshole up there, who does he think he is?’ And sometimes I am then responding to people who are responding to me. And it is beautiful.”

According to police reports Ungolf was removed from the theater when two Muvico customers who were trying to watch Transformers complained that there was a man behind them who was even louder than a Michael Bay movie, taking selfies and making frequent attempts to contact his drug dealer to obtain marijuana.

Eyewitnesses to Ungolf’s recent arrest say the crowd that assembled at Playhouse on the Square to watch police officers mercilessly brutalize the artist was both large and enthusiastic.

“They were all chanting, ‘Kill him, kill him,” Grant remembered. “I can’t remember who started it,” she added, conspicuously crossing her fingers.

“Best show I’ve seen all year,” community actor Giles Hamm said, after expressing some concerns about the use of excessive force. “That guy who talks through movies was just screaming and asking, ‘where is your freedom of speech now fat opera people? Where is it now?’ And that’s when somebody would hit him in the face again or shoot him with a TASER. You can’t script this stuff.

“I’ve got to admit, I have been concerned about what looks like an epidemic of police brutality in America,” Hamm added. “But this time they were going after somebody who deserved it. They were just kicking the absolute crap out of somebody who I personally hate, and who everybody hates. That kind of thing always brings people together.”

• Future Home of the National Museum of Terrible Ideas

Memphis— Finally, after numerous setbacks for Beale Street Landing there’s good news for the $40-million boondoggle. Following a whirlwind negotiation, Beale Street Landing will become the new permanent home for the National Museum of Terrible Ideas.

“It’s exciting but it’s also scary,” says museum founder and CEO Jerry Manders who originally operated the museum from the back of his 1998 Chevy Tahoe before upgrading to a converted school bus. “We are entering uncharted territory. The NMTI has always been a mobile attraction, but it’s time to settle down, and the fact that this project has such a tremendous reputation for being a SNAFU-plagued money pit is icing on the cake.”

“The building is also attached to this impressive floating boat dock that hasn’t really worked out,” Manders adds. “There are no downsides to this partnership.”

Although he’s happy with the way things have turned out, Beale Street Landing wasn’t Manders’ first choice.

“Oh no, it was’t even on our radar,” he says. “We’d originally hoped to open up shop in the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame building in Cleveland, but when it became clear that space wouldn’t be available any time soon, my people put in a more than reasonable offer to move into the empty Memphis Pyramid.

“At the end of the day, unfortunately, the city liked Bass Pro better,” Manders says. “It was their decision to make.”

Rather than becoming discouraged after the Bass Pro deal went south, Manders and his “board of directors” — Mittens the one-eyed kitten, an Iguana named Sam, and Dookie, a 13-year-old Basset Hound — decided that Memphis was where they needed to put down roots.

“The decision to put a gigantic Bass Pro store with its own indoor cypress swamp in a building modeled after an Egyptian tomb is absolutely in keeping with our museum’s mission,” Manders says. “It told us that this was where we needed to be.”

Although numerous friends recommended that he look into the Beale Street Landing project, Manders says he was reluctant to do so.

“Frankly, a more developed riverfront seemed like a really good idea to me at the time,” he says. “But when things kept going further and further over budget, I became interested. When they finally built that plaid elevator thing on top I knew it was destiny.”

Manders isn’t sure when his new riverfront museum will open, but hopes to announce by the end of next year.

“The Beale Street Landing project is supposed to be complete sometime in 2014, but I’ll believe that when I see it,” he said.

• Seymour Mantiddi

Seymour Mantiddi, a loud and proud Shelby County resident says he can’t imagine why anybody would live inside the Memphis city limits, where everybody is a criminal, teachers especially.

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” says Mantiddi, a former neologistics specialist who currently operates an ill-defined internet business from his home in the never-completed Knightwood subdivision near Eads, TN.

“You couldn’t pay me enough to live in Memphis,” Mantiddi insists, and recent history suggests he’s not kidding.

“It’s true,” says Hammertow Neologistics CEO Ted Pickens, Mantiddi’s most recent employer.

“I wanted him to take over more responsibility, and made one helluva good offer,” Pickens says. “But, in our line of work you sometimes need to be in the office at a moment’s notice. He was great and all, but that’s a pretty big commute, so I said it might be better if he lived in the city, and that’s when he got all red, and yelled out something about ‘President Osama,’ and he quit right there on the spot.

“It’s not like I said he had to move, it was only a suggestion,” says Pickens who deeply regrets having opened his mouth in the first place.

“I don’t know what kind of fool you people take me for,” Mantiddi says, claiming to possess “rock solid proof” that everybody who lives in Memphis is addicted to drugs

“For starters, they live in Memphis,” he says adding that he follows many members of the local news media on Twitter and is keenly aware of “what goes down in that hellhole.”

When asked to name the top three reasons why nobody can pay him enough to live in Memphis Mantiddi says he can do even better.

“I’ll give you one reason,” he says. “Because nobody wants to live there. And nothing they do works.”