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!

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.

World Reusers

I love the World Redeemers church on Lamar between Park and South Parkway. They have redeemed a defunct mid-sixties auto dealership with a new use, and with touches and flexibility that make it a model of hackitecture, mixing imagination, architectural reuse, personal taste and economic necessity together into a simple and visually evangelizing complex.

They haven't added any new buildings to the complex, with the exterior show lot still intact. However, they surrounded everything (including a much less visible side street boundary) with a wrought iron fence painted in the church's theme colors, purple and gold.

Up against the sidewalk, the fence gives definition to the complex and the street, as well as security; The wrought iron fence, which I'm fairly certain is a new touch, gives a a traditionally ecclesiastical presence to a car lot form.

But it's the reuse of the showroom and signage where WRC really shines. First they changed the string of roadside signs along Lamar from huckstering messages of "Used Cars" and "We Finance" to

and

They also left the Service Entrance sign on the side of the showroom/sanctuary.

At first I thought they left it there due to its height -- too hard to take down. However, they painted around it and above it and so I figure they could have removed it if they wanted. I believe it was it was left there intentionally, as that's part of the sanctuary. It continues the transformation of the commercial huckstering into religious evangelism.

The sanctuary is the original lot's main showroom (I actually looked at a car there when I was a teenager).

The show windows are gone, bricked in and embedded with gothic-arched stained glass. The form of this building is very much the same however.

Without a doubt, the most creative reimagining is of the 3 tailfin beams supporting the west wall and roof of the sanctuary.

To the 3 they added a 4th, a mirror of the original vertical beam, and completed the Cross.

And then they framed it in neon, again in the same color theme, for souls passing by in the dark.

This complex is hackitecture at its best -- reused, imaginative, visual, eccentric.

A city like Memphis that is poor in resources but rich in imagination is the perfect studio for works like this church.

Memphis could be, should be, the world capital of hackitecture.

Thank You Thurgood!

40 years ago today, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark ruling on Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe.

The ruling spared Overton Park and saved Memphis.

What I wrote 5 years ago.

Memphis Builds a Hole

My long-simmering, near burnt thoughts on August's stunningly lopsided 10-2 City Council vote, clearing at least the political path for CVS to demolish the Union Avenue Methodist Church:

• The vote's a template for future defeats that advocates for a better built Memphis can't ignore. Organizational unity, education of both leaders and citizens, and political advocacy for both candidates and systematic change are important to avoid a thousand defeats and an uglier, less livable Memphis.

• A big mistake for the built community would be to try and pin the defeat on Memphis Heritage. In voting for the CVS anti-design, The Council ignored the Office of Planning and Development, the Land Use Control Board, the Memphis Regional Design Center, the Commercial Appeal, the Central Gardens Neighborhood Association, Playhouse on the Square, the Midtown Redevelopment Corporation, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the district's councilmen, Jim Strickland and Shea Flinn, and Memphis Heritage. It was a blow for preservation, smart growth, urbanism, walkability, planning and Memphis' built environment.

• Urbanists can separate themselves from preservationists in fast growing cities. In Memphis, preservation is a necessary tool of urbanism. We can say, "I don't care about saving that building, I care about good design", but as a practical matter 9 out of 10 people who don't care about re-using a good building also won't care about good urban design.

• I heard someone say that the defeat was due to poor lobbying by the opponents of the CVS design. I don't know enough about political campaigns to know the truth to this, but it does scare me that our Council could be so lightly principled that some special political ingredient -- beyond the public pleas of the staff, boards and associations mentioned above -- could have turned a 10-2 defeat into a 7-5 victory. Anyway, even if extra special lobbying could have made a difference, it strikes me as a very expensive, unsustainable, politically exhausting way to move toward a better built Memphis. A thousand city-wide mobilizations for a thousand buildings and designs that start at the bottom of a 10-2 hole won't work.

• The Council made it clear in their words and horsetrading what they would do the next month -- gut the Midtown Overlay.

• I don't think the Councilpeople who voted for CVS are clueless or idiots or [insert your insult here], but I do believe that the issues of smart growth, walkability, good design, much, much less preservation, have made little inroad into our city's political leadership. At this point, the great majority of our Council don't care. Their apathy is a core smart growth problem in Memphis.

• City Council meetings are like a game show hosted by the Great and Mighty Oz. Citizens stand below the raised, intimidating dais of the Council and are given a ticking 2 minutes to speak. Instead of a screamed "Silence!" a buzzer goes off when the speaker's minutes are up.

• Near the end of the debate, Councilman Bill Boyd let the crowd in on a dirty little secret. Numbers of supporters or opponents in City Council chambers don't sway their vote. Perhaps this where the off-the-clock lobbying comes in and citizen advocacy gets the buzzer.

• If you need political support for regression in Memphis, get yourself a spokeschristian. Very effective.

Saving the Union Avenue Methodist Church

Memphis Heritage is holding a meeting tomorrow, Thursday, May 27th, at 6 p.m. at their headquarters at 2282 Madison, to discuss the possible sale and demolition of the Union Avenue Methodist Church by pharmacy chain CVS. The church, built in 1923 and listed on the National Register, anchors the southwest corner of Cooper and Union, diagonally across from Playhouse on the Square's beautiful new theater.

Random notes:

• There's precedent for CVS to preserve a historic building due to public outcry -- the Scherer Building in Chicago. In fact, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has a complete initiative dedicated to the issue of chain drug stores destroying historic buildings.
  


• If you don't think the church is that great, worth preserving, then advocate for a quality new urban design that complements Playhouse, rather than ignores it. CVS also has precedents for that.
  Just saying "tear it down!" is to cede to the default -- anturban blight. Progress in Memphis' built environment is to be fought for, never assumed.
  


• We need to stop bashing Germantown Parkway to make points about Union Avenue. Let's stick closer to home and talk about the Medical Center from I-240 west to Dunlap. Devastated by hordes of parking lots built as enticement to commuters who didn't want to be there, and eventually weren't, the result is arguably the worst commercial strip in all of Memphis
  


• Crappy development threatens Playhouse on the Square's investment of money and vision in that spot of Memphis. Especially a crappy development in the literal center of their vision.
  
  See: A 270 degree panorama I took from the front steps of Playhouse on the Square.
  
  The threat to this vision should be enough to stop a bad outcome, except it's not.


• Preservationists and urbanists could combine forces with CVS to cajole or force Ike's/Walgreen's to sell CVS the soon to be vacant Ike's store on the southeast corner.
  


• Join the cause via the Save Union Avenue Methodist Church Facebook page.