Category: Letter From The Editor

I’ve never met Paul Ryburn, but I feel like I know him. That’s because I regularly read his blog about life in downtown Memphis (paulryburn.com/blog). Most of the time it’s a fun read, and it’s a good way to get a feel for life among Memphis’ downtown social set.

I learn things, too. Like the fact that a pigeon is not able to lay eggs unless it can see another pigeon and that a new restaurant called Dawgie Style is getting ready to open on Madison. I find out which team won at trivia at the Flying Saucer and what happened at the Peabody rooftop party — and that June is Tube-Top Month. (At least, Ryburn has declared it to be such, and I applaud this kind of civic-mindedness.)

But in the past week or so, Ryburn’s journal has taken on a more serious tone. Something’s been bothering the blogger and his downtown friends, and that something is crime: muggings and robberies. Restaurant workers are being robbed on the way to their cars after hours. A couple of Ryburn’s friends were mugged while walking home. They see cars full of young men backing into parking spots, as if to ensure a quick getaway. They see security guards with metal detectors checking IDs before allowing people on Beale Street on the weekends.

“I’m frustrated. I’m angry,” he wrote last week. “A lot of other people are too. I feel like the neighborhood I love is being taken away from me. I think downtown is still pretty safe overall, but I also think we’re approaching a tipping point, where if we don’t fight back now, the criminals will take over for good by the end of the summer.”

Scary stuff. But this is where the story gets better. Ryburn and his friends and readers started organizing. They contacted the City Council and police at the downtown precinct. They created an e-mail address to report and discuss crime downtown [saferdowntownmemphis@gmail.com]. They met with officials of the Memphis Police Department and came up with a citizen/police plan.

They haven’t solved the downtown crime problem yet, but they’ve made a start. And they’ve demonstrated how the Internet can make things better in the real world, not just in cyberspace. Ryburn has even resumed his regular cheerful blogging. (And though I’ve never met him, I’m sure he would want me to remind you that June is Tube-Top Month.)

Bruce VanWyngarden, Editor

brucev@MemphisFlyer.com

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution

Take a bow for the new revolution

Smile and grin at the change all around

Pick up my guitar and play

Just like yesterday

Then I’ll get on my knees and pray

We don’t get fooled again …

— Pete Townshend, The Who

By pushing for a constitutional amendment prohibiting gays from getting married, President Bush and Senate majority leader Bill Frist are betting you will get fooled again, just like last November, when so many states had anti-gay-marriage laws on the presidential ballot — all of which passed. Of course, the real payoff was the fact that all those riled-up moralists also voted for Bush and helped give him the presidency for a second time.

I’m not fooled, and I hope you aren’t either. How stupid do these guys think we are? At a time when 46 million Americans have no health insurance, when gas prices are through the roof, when Americans live under tarps and in trailers on our Gulf Coast as hurricane season approaches, when most cargo containers enter our ports uninspected, when our soldiers and Iraqi citizens die every day in a senseless and unending civil war, these two leaders of the free world are pretending that the issue we really care about is keeping gays from getting married.

It doesn’t matter that gays can’t get married anyway, due to 45 state laws prohibiting it and the passage in 1996 of the national “defense of marriage” act, or that the Constitution is supposed to be reserved for issues of critical national import. It doesn’t matter that this amendment — which has to win two-thirds majorities in the House and Senate and then be ratified by 38 state legislatures — hasn’t a chance of passing. What matters to these two bozos is that this “wedge” issue might fire up their right-wing base enough to pull the Republicans back from the cliff they’re headed over in the fall elections.

It’s divisive and it’s pandering and they ought to be ashamed of themselves. This “Marriage Protection” amendment is an affront to the intelligence of the American people. And if we don’t wake up and figure out we’re being played for suckers, the name of the new boss will be the same as the old boss.

Bruce VanWyngarden, Editor

brucev@MemphisFlyer.com

Memorial Day weekend always serves as the unofficial kickoff for summer. Around these parts, the parks are full of family reunions, with legions of folks dressed in identical T-shirts — playing horseshoes, volleyball, and, yes, soccer. At Shelby Farms, where I spent Saturday afternoon, the sounds of soul music and salsa blended and faded in the humid air, depending upon where you walked.

At other gatherings, later in the weekend, I saw many folks I hadn’t seen since that spate of parties that precedes Christmas and New Year’s. Memorial Day, it occurred to me, is almost like a counterweight to those holidays — an acknowledgement that, yes, we survived another season of winter and school and basketball fever, and now, by God, it sure is hot and these mosquitos are a pain in the butt, but it’s summertime and the livin’ is easy. And aren’t we all glad to be here.

At my weekly golf match, I heard all about my friend Jon’s new driver and my friend Larry’s new irons. And I marveled at the hope that springs eternal — that new clubs will overcome our bodies’ old habits and flaws. I decided I probably needed a new driver.

I attended a party on the banks of the Mississippi on the Arkansas side. It was a celebration for a friend’s child who had just graduated from college. I saw kids — who I watched play T-ball and whom I drove in carpools — drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, talking about their jobs. “How are you, Mr. VanWyngarden?” they said, apparently surprised at my survival into dotage.

“Old,” I thought. But alive and happy to be so. I watched barges churning their way up the wide brown river, listened to soul music as the sun set over the dark trees, and — because this is Memphis, and it’s required — savored a plate of barbecue with my beer.

I heard political gossip — some old, some new. I threw a frisbee. I caught a catfish. I let the ubiquitous big party dog nuzzle my posterior. And it was good.

Ah, summer. Let the daze begin.

Bruce VanWyngarden, Editor

brucev@MemphisFlyer.com

What About Bob? is a 1991 film starring Richard Dreyfuss as a psychiatrist named Leo Marvin and Bill Murray as an absurdly needy patient named Bob. The running gag is that Bob won’t leave Leo alone. He stalks the therapist — following him home, to lunch, to appointments, etc. Bob even wriggles his way into the Marvin family’s vacation. Everywhere Leo turns, there’s Bob. By the end of the movie, the therapist is crazier than the patient.

I can relate.

You see, since mid-March, those of us in the editorial departments around Contemporary Media, Inc. have had our own Bob. And he too is relentless in his need for attention. Bob, you see, is our internal name for the revamped MemphisFlyer.com. We originally called him Bob as a shorthand way to make it clear to everyone in the company that MemphisFlyer.com was a totally new “publication” — one that would demand contributions from all of our editorial staffs, including those of Memphis magazine and Memphis Parent.

But then Bob became, well, Bob. And Bob needs attention six or seven times a day — fresh, newsy, gossipy, sporty, quirky attention. Every editorial staffer now has to post a few items on MemphisFlyer.com every week. And every staffer has learned to expect periodic e-mails from me with such cute titles as: Bob needs love; Bob is hungry; Bob’s cupboard is bare, etc.

But, all in all, it’s been well worth the effort. MemphisFlyer.com page-views have more than quintupled in less than three months. And it’s not just because readers can now get the latest snark on Justin Timberlake or David Gest. Bob’s best feature is that he has searchable listings, which means if you want Caribbean cuisine, you can just click the appropriate header and it will list all your local options — with a link to a description of each restaurant. If you want to hear, say, alt-country music on June 6th, you can find out with a click of a mouse who’s playing that angst-ridden white-boy stuff and where. In short, you can search by date, venue, type of cuisine, type of music, etc. It’s way cool.

Go visit Bob. You’ll be glad you did.

Bruce VanWyngarden, Editor

brucev@MemphisFlyer.com

Last week, the City Council budget committee released its recommendations for the 2006 Park Services budget. One of those recommendations was to close Davey Crockett Golf Course, which the committee said lost $237,000 last year.

On its face, that decision seems understandable. That kind of money isn’t chump change, and golfers have several other city courses to choose from. But therein lies the rub. This same City Council is spending $4 million to build a new nine-hole golf course in Whitehaven, plus $700,000 a year to maintain it. This same City Council is spending $1.5 million to build a new clubhouse for the little-used nine-hole Riverside Golf Course. That’s six million tax-payer dollars invested in two half-golf courses.

And how much money will these two boondoggles lose next year? I’m betting that it’s going to be a whole lot more than $237,000.

Why would the budget committee do something so financially illogical? Let me give you the one-word answer: pork. That’s right, friends — pork. And that starts with P and ends with K and that spells, uh, well, tax dollars up in barbecue smoke. You see, the concept of doling out government-funded sweetheart projects to one’s constituents is not limited to Washington, D.C. It’s alive and kicking right here in River City.

A couple years back, Councilwoman Tajuan Stout Mitchell decided she wanted a golf course in her district and, by God, she got it. And after Mitchell got her pulled pork for Whitehaven, Councilman Edmund Ford decided he needed to build a lavish new clubhouse on the dirt-and-crabgrass goat field known as Riverside. (The clubhouse is reputedly more than twice the size of the clubhouse at the most expensive private country club in Memphis.)

Meanwhile, Davey Crockett, a real 18-hole course that is undeniably the prettiest and most challenging of all the city’s public courses, will be allowed to return to weeds and forest — or sold to the highest bidder. Sorry, Frayser.

It’s a stupid decision. The City Council needs to take a mulligan on this one. Their first shot went way out of bounds.

Bruce VanWyngarden, Editor

brucev@MemphisFlyer.com

About a year ago, the Flyer published a story by Little Rock writer Leslie Peacock about the rediscovery of the ivory-billed woodpecker in Arkansas’ Big Swamp country. A version of the story had originally appeared in the Arkansas Times a couple of weeks earlier. Peacock is a talented writer, and she’d come up with a clever concept. To quote from her story: “Poet Wallace Stevens’ ’13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ is about the vagaries of perception. This story is about how we see things too. And so: 13 ways of looking at an ivory-billed woodpecker.” Peacock broke her story into 13 numbered segments, each concerning a different aspect of the search and discovery.

Imagine my surprise when I opened The New York Times Sunday magazine this week and read Jack Hitt’s story about the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker in Arkansas. It too was broken into 13 numbered segments. The title: “13 Ways of Looking at an Ivory-billed Woodpecker.” In the age of Google, I find it highly unlikely that the writer hadn’t seen the previously published stories. It’s not exactly plagiarism, but it certainly seems to be a case of fowl play.

Speaking of wild life: Did you read about President Bush’s interview last week with Bild, Germany’s largest newspaper? Near the end of a wide-ranging discussion on foreign policy, Iraq, Iran, and other weighty subjects, the interviewer asked the following question: “What was the most wonderful moment in your terms of being President so far, and what was the most awful moment?”

The president, not surprisingly, cited September 11, 2001, as the most awful moment of his time in office. As for his “most wonderful moment,” Bush said this: “I don’t know, it’s hard to characterize the great moments. … I would say the best moment was when I caught a seven-and-a-half-pound largemouth bass on my lake.”

Oy.

Let’s review, class: The president’s worst moment in office was a terrorist attack on U.S. soil that killed 3,000 Americans. No argument there.

His best moment as president: catching a big fish on his private lake. Come to think of it, no argument there, either.

Bruce VanWyngarden, Editor

brucev@MemphisFlyer.com

I just got back from a fishing vacation in the deep woods of Pennsylvania — no phones, no Internet, no worries. I sat in the Pittsburgh airport Sunday morning, watching the news, trying to catch up. I learned that 70 American servicemen had been killed in April in Iraq. I learned that gas prices were still over $3 a gallon and rising. I was reminded that the next day was May 1st, the three-year anniversary of President Bush’s declaration of the “end of combat operations in Iraq.” The Middle East was still a powder keg, exploding daily. Starvation in Darfur was still killling thousands of innocent people.

So what dominated the political agenda on Monday? Whether or not “The Star-Spangled Banner” should be sung in English. Lord, we are doomed.

Soon thereafter came the onslaught of press releases from Tennessee’s intrepid senatorial candidates. Harold Ford Jr. declared that “our anthem should not be lost in translation.” Ed Bryant, Van Hilleary, and Bob Corker quickly chimed in on this vital issue, affirming that they too thought the national anthem should only be sung in English.

Senator Lamar Alexander quickly moved into action, sponsoring a resolution on the Senate floor stating that “songs that symbolize the unity of the nation … should be recited or sung in English.”

Such jingoistic lunacy staggers the mind. Seriously, fellas. With all the problems facing this country, this is how you choose to spend your time? This is the issue you focus on? What’s next, creating a language police? (“Pull over, buddy. We’ve got a report you were singing ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ in Swedish in the shower this morning.”)

“Songs of national unity”? What the heck does that mean? We were all singing “The Macarena” a few years back. It unified the country, you might say. Macarena, as it turns out, is a name for “Our Lady of Hope.” I think we all need to invoke her help in our prayers for our current “leaders,” who seem to have nothing better to do than to create pointless and divisive “issues” designed to pander to our basest fears and prejudices.

¡Ay caramba! ¿Quien es lo mas estupido?

Bruce VanWyngarden, Editor

brucev@MemphisFlyer.com

I get zillions of self-serving press releases from local officeholders, including dozens from 7th District representative Marsha Blackburn. Those missives I usually ignore, since her simplistic politics appear to be somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan. But last week, she topped herself. The headline on her press release read: “High Gas Prices the Penalty for Environmental Extremism.”

Yep, it seems those damn tree-huggers are the reason your gas is at $3 a gallon. Marsha explains: “Prices wouldn’t be so volatile had we been exploring for oil on American soil and expanding our refining capacity. … But there are those in Congress who’ve fought tooth and nail to prevent any and all domestic oil exploration for 30 years.”

This is a classic straw-man argument and a huge lie. First, Congress has been controlled by the oil-industry-loving Republicans since 1994. Second, I doubt that Blackburn could name a single congressman who has fought to “prevent any and all domestic oil exploration for 30 years.”

Yes, some environmentalists and many in Congress have fought to prevent drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but as anyone who has bothered to research that issue knows, the oil in the ANWR would provide at most a year’s supply. Hardly the answer to our energy problems.

The fact is, if Congress had listened to environmentalists and imposed higher gas-mileage standards for automakers and other conservation measures, this crisis would have been forestalled for years, and the now-floundering American auto industry would have been the better for it. But under the direction of Vice President Cheney’s secret “energy task force,” the oil industry wrote our energy policies and ignored environmentalists’ calls for energy-conservation measures. Now, profits are at an all-time high for the oil industry. No doubt, that’s also the fault of those damn tree-huggers.

So why would Blackburn send out such a travesty of the truth? The answer came in another press release two hours later. It announced that Blackburn would appear on Fox News that night to “discuss energy policy.” Argh.

I’m issuing my own press release. Here’s the headline: “Blackburn Will Say Anything To Get on Fox News.”

Bruce VanWyngarden, Editor

brucev@MemphisFlyer.com

Every once in a while I like to peruse the personal ads, those micro-type listings in the back of the classifieds where “women seek men” and vice versa. I don’t read them because I’m “seeking”; I’m fortunate enough to have a great marriage. I read them because they are such an amazing testament to the human spirit, particularly to its capability for optimism and self-delusion.

Women in these ads almost invariably seek a man “who can make me laugh.” They enjoy “long walks” and “intimate conversations.” But anyone who’s been through a rocky relationship or two knows that it can be a short distance from those romantic ideals to the day when you pull into the mall parking lot and hear your sweetie say, “Walk? From here? Don’t make me laugh.”

The men are just as delusional. In their ads, they’re always oh-so-sensitive. They love “movies, dining out, and dancing.” But we all know it won’t be long before Miss Ideal might hear, “You want to eat out, again? You ever hear of cooking? Besides, there’s a Grizzlies game on tonight. Burp.”

Yes, I’m being cynical. But, as all of us in committed relationships know, you eventually have to move past the “walk on the beach” stage and into the “you didn’t empty the dishwasher” stage. If you’re lucky, maybe after you empty the dishwasher you can take that nice walk. It’s all about compromise and forgiveness and playing straight with each other.

Without these, things can go bad in a hurry. You think you’ve signed up for true love, and reality slaps you upside the head. It could be what made a minister’s wife in a small Tennessee town shoot her husband in the chest with a shotgun. Reality crushed the ideal.

It could be what made six Marine Corps and U.S. Army generals turn on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and demand his resignation — something that’s never happened in U.S. history. Apparently, these veteran military leaders reached the point where what they experienced on the ground in Iraq exceeded their capacity for optimism and self-delusion.

There’s no avoiding it: Reality trumps wishful thinking every time. That’s just the way it is — in love and war.

Bruce VanWyngarden, Editor

brucev@MemphisFlyer.com

All I’m interested in is “fairness.”

I’ve been with the Flyer for six years now and I’ve almost led the team to several national awards. This year, we even made the “elite eight” of alternative papers. I’ve recruited top talent — Cashiola, Herrington, Davis, Phillips, Popper — and I’ve kept our key veterans — Branston and Baker — happy by giving them enough playing time in the paper. It’s not easy juggling all those egos and all that talent, believe me.

And I think the advertising staff would tell you I’ve been a prince — easy to work with and principled but flexible about special sections and titty-bar ads. And just ask the art department what a fine person I am — funny, yet focused like a laser on putting out the best-looking paper in the Mid-South. They know I feel their pain at deadline.

I put on the coat and tie and mingle with corporate bigwigs at company functions and never complain. I’ve been an exemplary employee in every way. Heck, publisher Ken Neill takes me out to dinner at Ronnie Grisanti’s every week and tells me how happy he is to have me. But, as everyone knows, money talks; linguini walks.

Lord knows, I don’t want to leave Memphis. It’s become my home. The people here have been great to me and to my family. I’ve got a huge house in a fancy neighborhood just a couple minutes from work. My kids go to school here.

But fair is fair. An alternative paper in North Carolina has offered to pay me $2 million a year to take over as their editor. I only make $1.2 million here at the Flyer. I ask you, How the hell am I supposed to support a family on that pittance?

All I’m asking is that the Flyer play fair by matching the offer. (And I want my managing editor compensated fairly as well.) I don’t need a jet — FedEx will fly me wherever I need to go. But I do expect fair play.

The publisher of the North Carolina paper flew in this weekend and made me an offer I’d like to refuse. I mean, I’m a loyal guy, but what can I do? Just say no outright? Say I’m grateful for all Memphis and this company have done for me and my family? Walk away from more money?

C’mon. Play fair. Get the stockholders together and come up with something a little more reasonable. I’ll see you at Ronnie’s, Ken. We’ve got some talking to do.

Bruce VanWyngarden, Editor

brucev@MemphisFlyer.com