The Iron Mullet Becomes a Decorated Shed

The one on the left was created as sitcom backdrop and  recreated for laughs.  The one on the right was created as a city symbol and recreated for laughs -- almost!

I like laughs.  If there's a problem with the new signage of the Bass Pro Pyramid and DeathStyle Center (other than keeping the people of the Pinch and Harbor Town awake at night), it's that it's not funny enough.  

I Am a Sivad Geek

Sivad's Candelabra, in Skelevision! at Art for Jobs
Advance Memphis, 769 Vance Avenue
Thursday, September 20, 2012, 5-8 p.m.

I have my ancient pre-VHS memory of  Memphis' black-and-white-magical late-night can't-wait don't-miss hyperlocal horror host with the terrifying face and deep southern-accented voice,  and I have ready access to surviving video and audio recordings of  the menacing jokester with the impeccable visual showmanship telling the bad jokes and singing the weird songs, but I want more Sivad.

 So I've stenciled Sivad.

I've carved him into a discarded wooden cabinet door

and lit the carving with TV lanterns made from my old smoker.

I've silkscreened him

and illuminated his silkscreened eyes with LEDs.

I've drawn him by hand,

and rendered him in vector drawings.

Most recently, I've cast concrete busts, Sivad's Candelabra, complete with Sivad candles

and lit by Skelevision! lanterns.

And I did it with no more heart and skill than that possessed by an obsessive bored insomniac caveman, hunkered underground in the south of France.

My creating these icons are what The Gates of Memphis are about.  Fo me, it's not enough to have memories and fixed artifacts.  We have to build homages to our giants.  I'm just doing it at a Spinal Tap Stonehenge scale.

But I'm probably not going to making any more Sivads for awhile.  I've got my eyes set on Sputnik Monroe.

Until then, come to Arts for Jobs and buy some great art for a great cause.  Or buy Sivad's Candelabra in Skelevision! priced at either $30 or $50 -- I don't remember.

Good evening!

Signs of Change

It was good to be wrong.

I didn't think Mayor Wharton would make the decision to put in dedicated bicycle lanes between Cooper and Cleveland.  Or at least all the way.  There was no major player pushing it, only a lot of citizens and community organizations.  And while the opposition was relatively small and individually muted, together it had made a big media splash, successfully positioned itself as "business" and counted Wharton supporters the Boggs family among its numbers.  I cynically figured there was no way that the Mayor wasn't going to look for a compromise, as he had on Cooper when he rejected protected bike lanes at the prodding of some Cooper-Young business owners.

Cynicism sucks and I'm glad to have mine sucker punched by the Mayor's decision.  Without the easy cover of the support of a bigwig, the Mayor didn't compromise -- he listened to his Bicycle and Pedestrian coordinator and the many citizens and businesses who had supported it, and re-striped Madison with dedicated bike lanes.  Perhaps it's too much to to call the decision by a Memphis leader to ignore a narrow and antiquated vision of business historic, so I'll just say the decision was great.

The decision was great 6 months ago when the striping began, but now it's been proven even greater now because of something that wasn't mentioned by anybody during the debate, at least directly.

The transformation that's resulted from cars parking on Madison in the new parking spaces.

The extra spaces were definitely part of the give and take of the process, but now that people are using them, not only bicyclists but people walking back and forth to their cars are energizing the street.  Plus Madison lined with cars makes it obvious to anyone randomly driving down the street that something is happening here.  Madison hasn't had that consistent visual cue until now.

The change most pronounced in Overton Square where the street parking has re-energized the district's street without Bob Loeb having to do anything.

I believe that the next Madison location that would benefit is the cluster of businesses and restaurants at Madison and Belvedere.  So the next time you have to drive to Zinnie's or the Lamplighter or Audiomania, park across the street and seed the energy.

Memphis and Urban Magnets

URBAN MAGNETS: ALAN BONIFACE LECTURE from Crosstown Arts on Vimeo.

Alan Boniface of Vancouver's Dialog design group spoke last month to Memphis about the pieces that make a place into an urban magnet.  To be successful, an urban magnet requires

1. retail
2. production
3. education
4. programming
5. form.

After his talk, a local panel representing various Memphis-area districts (Soulsville, Overton Square, South Main, Crosstown, and Hernando) discussed what parts of the urban magnet recipe they have and what they are missing.  Of the groups, the South Main district had them all.

Besides the urban magnet template, the part of the talk that really grabbed me was the statistic that Memphis has 1/30th the density of the densest part of Vancouver (and 1/7th of the overall density of Vancouver).  Which leads to a problem I see over and over again with Memphis' adapting to many urbanist ideas -- that the ideas come from places of categorically greater density, and assume categorically greater density.  So, although South Main has definite and growing magnetic quality, it isn't enough to fill or sparsely populate streets even now on a workaday basis. Obviously it wouldn't happen overnight even in a denser place, but Memphis has to be particularly aware of density and population as its major urbanist challenge.  Which I don't believe we are.  And the danger is that we'll be transporting the same marginally expanding group of people from Soulsville to Overton Square to South Main to Crosstown to all the other districts, with economic sustainability for few.

Still, figuring out how to fill Memphis with people is a fun problem to solve -- once Memphis admits that it is the problem.

Memphis First

I had the real privilege to help with the Memphis First Robotics competition Quick Build session this past Saturday at the University of Memphis.  Students from Memphis high schools came together to begin building robots as the first part of the competition.

The instruction manual

The hardware

Students from the Memphis Academy of Science and Engineering begin work on their robot frame.

Craigmont High puts the motors on their assembled base.

Teams work on the programming and electronic components

It was wonderfully rich mix of young, middle, old, female, male, black, white, Asian, Latino, student, teacher, parent, mentor, sponsor, friend coming to together to learn, build, do, redo, make, program, share, talk, meet, eat, compete, cooperate, collaborate and create with each other.  Most surprising to me was the growing enthusiasm from the student teams as the day progressed.  By the end of the build at 4 p.m., teams from Hamilton, St. Mary's, Manassas, Craigmont and Memphis Business Academy had their basic robot going, and the rest were very much on the way.

While it was a scheduling coincidence that the build happened on the Martin Luther King birthday weekend, the event still demonstrated a great new Memphis that MLK's legacy is helping build.

The Weal of Memphis

This is the second part of a list I've been trying to put together that to list the pros and cons, ups and downs, bad and good, ill and weal of Memphis.  It is a personal, emotional list and I provide no empirical evidence for anything I write.  Also, it is about Memphis as a whole, as a complete platform for destruction, decay, change and creativity, and not about any one detail.  Memphis is a city of a bazillion great and some horrible details, but I will anoint none as the ill or the weal of Memphis.

Preface:  As it's heavily focused on possibility, much of what I write here may not be on anyone else's list as a good Memphis thing.  But they are the soil, seed and climate for a great Memphis if we want to grow it.


The Weal


Grassroots creativity, of business, art, film, music, food, and so on.  Wherever it comes from, everything in our civic power should be set to grow it.  Every Memphian a Creator.

Guerrilla street sign in Cooper-Young

Modern change. Newcomers, oldcomers, hybrids, their ideas and acts are creatively colliding in ways probably unseen since the founding of Memphis. Geographic sprawl and and the ungainly heft of Big Memphis threaten to swallow the seedlings of change, but dynamic change has a workaround for both in the live web.

Bike lanes on Madison

Room to experiment. An advantage to our existing urbanized sprawl is our ability to use the under- and unused for experiments in urbanism, agriculture, art and hopefully all 3 at once.  Always at risk of being pushed out by speculative hoarding by dull and unimaginative public and private owners, but there's more where that came from.

Small enough to change -- stolen from Corey Booker. Memphians, especially natives like me, tend to think of Memphis as bigger than it is.  It's not so big, however, and we can change its trajectory (whatever that is) so much easier than other cities can.  If we want to.

Low cost of living. A pro that is only in combination with other pros. Therefore a pro.

The food. Whenever I've lived in other places I've missed our food. It was great then and it's only gotten better (to our old school comfort food restaurants we've added the breadth of international and heights of fine). The local food movement promises to make it only better.

The music.  

The water. This includes not only our excellent tap water but the abundance of the stuff that flows past and falls on us.  We are rich in the stuff of life and it's tasty too!

The thunderstorms. The west to east suspense of these cataclysms is for the ages.

A beautiful, rich, fertile, exquisite natural environment.  

Good bones -- stolen from Jeff Speck.  Memphis remains a well laid out grid until it reaches the far edges of Cordova and Hickory Hill.

A Name. Memphis.  I'm a citisan but I believe Memphis is one of the great city names of the world.

A River of inspiration. The Mississippi River.

Texture. The intersection of our built form and a hot, humid and rich natural environment.  It's there in a million details but still remains to be created as the Memphis Look.

African-American foundation and majority.  The struggle for freedom and prosperity, and the creativity, of African-Americans has made Memphis a better city.  It's also a huge reason that the name Memphis resonates

Creativity of our myths.  When we get past the corporate genuflection, the myths and legends are ours to build on.  Build on.

Kid created mural in the Children's Museum of Memphis

The Ill of Memphis

This is the first part of a list I've been trying to put together that to list the pros and cons, ups and downs, bad and good, ill and weal of Memphis.  It is a personal, emotional list and I provide no empirical evidence for anything I write.  Also, it is about Memphis as a whole, as a complete platform for destruction, decay, change and creativity, and not about any one detail.  Memphis is a city of a bazillion great and some horrible details, but I will anoint none as the ill or the weal of Memphis.

Preface:  Modern Memphis started in a hole and now we're filling it slow.  Officially slow.


The Ill

Low density and physical sprawl. Memphis' biggest meta-problem, (compounded by near zero civic awareness of this as a problem -- see below), makes so many other solutions difficult. For instance the economic dynamism of entrepeneurship is so much harder to bootstrap in neighborhoods of few.

Prescott Memorial church demolished for a university surface parking lot.

Official neglect of Memphis as a city of place and form. There's been much work in changing this but it's my belief that the leaders of Memphis still overwhelmingly think the city can succeed in an underpopulated landscape defined by brownfields and parking lots, an atopia strung together by asphalt, long car trips and marketing.

Big Memphis, the powerful keiretsu of corporate, political and cultural leaders, that slowly push the big and the usual, and neglect the small and unusual. Its inability to see the small and different makes it all the more likely that the newborn sprouts of creativity and enterprise will wither not from malice but ignorance.

Leadership that is socially, economically, geographically cutoff from creative grassroots culture. The small, the funky, the casual, the natural, the random don't fit the hygenicized corporate model.

Steep hierarchies. The slow and privileged movement and blocking of information, action and people up and down our steep pyramids zaps Memphis' entrepeneurial dynamism and grassroot energy. Ideas become stale, creation is marginalized, people leave. We dissipate and lose civic energy on the incredibly inefficient ascent.  So unnecessary in a city of Memphis' size.

Hugh McLeod, Gaping Void

Creaky hierarchies, or the slow turnover of leadership.  Big names in Memphis in the 1980s are still the Big names in 2010s -- Smith, Hyde, Herenton, Ford, Wharton.  Even poor dead Elvis still lords it over Memphis.

Our heavy-rotation legends.  We're just another consumer of our biggest legends.  Creatively sterile and boring.

Cult of personality approach to problem-solving makes solutions unsustainable. Rather than looking for the replicable how-tos and lessons of successes and failures, Memphis lionizes or demonizes the person who did it.  The person will leave, die or just fade away, but systems (good or bad) they build can endure.

Social density and the the zero-sum mentaility.  The creatively destructive "I win, you lose, I'm in, you're out, you're up, I'm down" mindset is easy into lapse into in our dense thickets of off-line, non-serendipitous relationships.  Plus bad stories and ideas get stuck in the thickets.

Fear of failure and forgotten beginnings.  Forget the heroic stories of the cherry-picked best, and anything else that demoralizes the start.  Begin.  Every Memphian a Creator.

Lack and/or exclusion of capital. Without its flow, the ill-heeled, smart and ambitious will leave Memphis, if they ever arrive.

A history of violence. Memphis' levels of violence have been high throughout its life. In fact, it's possible that we're moving past that history with recent drops that have set 40 year lows for violent crime. But this reputation precedes us and it shapes both the global and more importantly local vision of Memphis as a dangerous place. It may take many years or decades of lower levels to move past it.

Poverty. The chicken and egg of many of Memphis' greatest ills (like racism, sprawl, etc.)

Racism. Beyond the fear and spite that splits Memphis from its suburbs, race remains a excellent tool for unimaginative politicians of all stripes to game for their own personal ambitions while neglecting real problem-solving.