10 Things I Love About Memphis

To add to the meme over at Smart City,

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Mouse over if you'd like to know what I'm visioning.

Rise Up Memphis Nature II!

Citizens to Preserve Overton Park (CPOP) is having its first public meeting on Thursday, June 5, 7:00pm-8:00pm, at Rhodes College in Blount Auditorium at Buckman Hall (a pdf campus map).

CPOP (which I'm now a board member of) will present a brief program on the devastating impact of the Memphis Zoo’s expansion into the Old Forest of Overton Park, and discuss strategies for protecting the remaining forest.

This meeting is open to the public. Everyone is welcome. Childcare will be available at no cost. If you need more info, contact Naomi Van Tol at naomi@spiny.com or 901-278-2396.

The mission of CPOP is to preserve and defend the Old Forest of Overton Park for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations. You can visit us online at:
www.overtonparkforever.org

Opera and Go Go in Memphis

25 years ago today, Memphis strippers and their supporters executed one of the strange and great protests in Memphis' history. During the performance of the Metropolitan Opera's Macbeth at the late Dixon-Myers Hall, they stripped.

The protestors were part of a group called MASH, Memphians Against Social Harassment that had formed after the Memphis City Council passed an anti-nudity ordinance aimed at the city's topless nightclubs. When the Memphis Police Chief, John Holt, announced that he wouldn't enforce the ordinance against the Met, whose production featured a topless Cheryllyn Ross as the witch Hecate, because the "ordinance is not directed to the arts", MASH hatched the topless protest directed at the Met's performance.


Memphis cultural and business mavens, afraid of the embarrassment that the protest would bring to Memphis (although apparently not bothered by ordinance embarrassment) negotiated with MASH to call off the protest. MASH asked for a repeal of the ordinance. The City Council refused, and MASH put its plan into action, apparently with the support of the visiting Met singers.

When the topless singing witch appeared on stage, 20 topless club dancers and supporters, scattered through the audience, bared and illuminated their breasts with flashlights, lighters and candles.

No one was arrested.

There were photos taken of the protest by photographers from Newsweek and Time, but I don't know if they've ever been released.

The Natural Distinctiveness of Memphis Yards

I like the inconsistently-mowed, over-grown, under-manicured and beautiful yards of Memphis. I like them cultivated, and I like them forgotten. Yards where the trees and vines and shrubs and flowers grow, grow, grow. Places with less unsustainable mowing and more natural curation.

A thought brought to me by the natural background of the film Third Ward TX,and its contrast with Houston's diabolic hyper-mowed freeways and overdeveloped developments.

Like Houston, the humidity coming off the Gulf of Mexico turbo-charges the natural of Memphis. When we stop treating the stuff growing outside as a problem, or an enemy, chopping and mowing and paving it into boring placelessness, we'll find ourselves living in a galaxy-class landscape, like the beautiful setting of Third Ward, TX.

Update: To possibly illuminate the aesthetic, here are some more photos.

The Other Side of the Square

After many, many, many posts about the self-inflicted decline of Overton Square, I wanted to point out an alternative that exists diagonally across from the beast. The alternative:

Maggie's Pharm.

Small, personal, home-grown, unique. Its smells, spaces, textures, light are classic Midtown, young and old at the same time.

Yes, it's a business that's been around since the 1970s, but I present it not as a goal in itself (although I absolutely think you should shop there) but as an ignored model for Memphis' economic future. The mega-vision that sees either empty or $250 million investment, parking lot or big box, will always overlook the simple and textured, even when its plainly visible from a failed and empty stretch of black asphalt.

As a city, we should learn from businesses, places, like Maggie's Pharm.

The Path to Rome Goes through the Paw Paw Patch

All the greatness of the world is here and now, in the forests and imaginations and backyards of Memphis.

Don't believe me? Read this Wikipedia article on the Paw Paw Tree, the ubiquitous understory of the Overton Park Forest. Afterwards take the Sierra Club's second Saturday Old Forest Hike (next hike, December 8th).

Then go back in time, to tonight, and see Rome: Impact of an Idea at the Memphis College of Art in Overton Park (details). Thus prepared, you will be free of the neo-colonial conceit that Memphis is unworthy of the Idea.

By the powers invested in me by the Holy Writ of the Blessed And Sanctimonious Gates of Memphis, I command thee to do all of the above.

Memphis is Rome. Rome is Memphis.

Explore, discover, imagine, create, build, teach, learn, refine, repeat.