Mind over Memphis: Enter the Wellness

I had the good misfortune of running into illthcare professional Dr. Harold Toboggans at the Old Forest Jamboree. As tireless promoter for his patented brand of street quackery, he let all know about his latest work, Enter the Wellness.

Place of Creativity

I love spots like these.

How can Memphis encourage, create, expose these spots?

Read the notes from last Thursday's fantastic Creative Conversation, Ideas that Work for some beautiful, mind-expanding answers.

$5 Dollar Cover, No Cover and No UDC (Yet)

Here are 2 great events and 1 contest deadline coming up in the next couple of days. Hurry!

A rapidly approaching (maybe Wednesday, April 22) deadline for the the Commercial Appeal's Your $5 Cover Night Out contest.

Upload pictures and videos of your $5 Cover-style night out in Memphis. We want to see what you did on the weekend - did you check out a band at the HiTone, go to a roller derby bout or record swap, or head to Beale Street for a big night out? Whatever you did, we want to see it.

the prizes are sweet - two tickets to the local $5 Cover premiere and two VIP passes to the Indie Memphis film fest later this year

For more info, go to http://focus.commercialappeal.com/ContestGallery.aspx?e=41.

Thursday night, there's the biggest TechFuel yet:

What happens when you

• fly in two top thinkers in innovation, culture, technology, and media for a panel discussion,
• retain the services of an international renown DJ,
• serve up good food and drink,
• and invite entrepreneurs, technologists, and new media mavens to chill for two hours?

You get the extravaganza LaunchMemphis calls TechFuel.

I hope you will take the time to join us, Adrian Ho, C.C. Chapman, and DJ Mr. White for an evening unlike any other served up in Memphis. The event will be held Thursday, April 23rd from 5:30pm to 7:30pm at EmergeMemphis (516 Tennessee Street, Memphis, TN). It will be a great time for you to meet with your fellow technology, social media, and startup enthusiasts. There is no cost to attend, but we ask that you RSVP on Facebook here http://www.facebook.com/events.php#/event.php?eid=74847833872 or to techfuel@launchmemphis.com.

Also Thursday night, Livable Memphis is having another Pizza with Planners session, this time about the very important, long-anticipated Unified Development Code, aka the UDC.

Pizza With Planners: A Citizen's Guide to How Your City Works.

This next session is on the Unified Development Code and how it will provide tools for neighborhoods to become more livable.

Please note that this (and future sessions) will be held at the Hooks Public Library.

RSVP to Sarah via email or phone 901-725-8370. See you there!

Fact: the Return of Li'l Film Fest

Live from Memphis' Li'l Film Fest is back.

Live From Memphis announces the re-launch of the LI'L FILM FEST with its 9th edition: Memphis - Fact or Fiction? That's right, it's back and it's gonna be better that ever thanks to our new partnership with the Memphis Tourism Foundation and collaboration with Indie Memphis!

Besides the "Memphis - Fact or Fiction?" theme, the films must contain an extra, surprise ingredient.

This "surprise ingredient" will be revealed at our Li'l Film Fest Kick-off Party! Wednesday, January 28, 6-8pm at the LFM Studio - 1 S. Main St. 38103.

Entries are due by February 27, 2009. The Fest takes place at 2 p.m. on Saturday, March 21st at the Brooks Museum in Overton Park. All the details can be found at the Li'l Film Fest site.

I will miss the funky First Congo location (what has become of that space?), but the Brooks is a fine replacement. I do hope the august surroundings don't diminish the fun, DIY spirit of the previous incarnations.

Great news for the New Year.

Success in 2008

I have only one top Memphis event of 2008. Only one because a) I'm lazy, and b) people from the future have assured me it dwarfs everything else. I have this:

Term Limits added to the City Charter.

This change was a systematic and democratic repudiation, approved by a hugely overwhelming majority of voters, of Memphis' historic (and royally fucked-up) paternalism.

The change will create more leaders, and not just political leaders. The more leaders we produce, the more creative, dynamic, honest, responsive, prosperous -- greater -- Memphis will be.

Here's to a civic Memphis that looks more like a Mississippian mound than an Egyptian pyramid.

Spreading the Creation: Civic Economy

...an economic system which is beyond capitalism, that is a system which enhances the participation in the creation of wealth, not only its accumulation.

Civic economy can be defined as the economy resulting from generalized repricocity, from people helping people to succeed, with the understanding that the well-being of each member of the community is to everybody's advantage. Whereas unbridled capitalism destroys diversity, competition, and ultimately the market and has to be controlled with anti-trust laws, civic economy encourages diversity and supports small and medium companies and cooperatives with legislative and fiscal tools.

The result is an entrepeneurial economy where repricocity matters.

Ernesto Sirolli,
from the Epilogue of
Ripples from the Zambezi: Passion, Entrepeneurship and the Rebirth of Local Economies

Civic economy is a way forward for a healthy, dynamic, prosperous Memphis.

Term of the Week: Irrational Paralysis

Irrational Paralysis: a malady turning the otherwise creative and active of Memphis into the hesitant and passive. Perhaps caused by fear of failure.

Spoken by a stranger (no longer strange) during a conversation at Otherlands a few nights ago.

Density of Creativity in Memphis

Not a week passes where I don't meet, almost at random, new people on the ground here in Memphis who are creatively working to make change happen.

Speaking as someone who by nature is neither extroverted nor connected, the frequency of these meetings has started to amaze me.

Is Memphis' creative density growing?

Creative Cluetrain

Wow!

Artist Chandler Pritchett's ArtMemphis 2.0 is a digital native's spitball, targeted at Memphis' tired (and expensive -- spend the money on art!) PR and advertising strategies for arts advocacy.

It's a great piece, and any arts leader in Memphis who doesn't read it tomorrow should be fired the day after tomorrow (announced by their successor in a tweet).

Memphis' Creative Conversation

Update: one of the panelists, entrepeneur Eric Mathews, has posted his answers to the Creative Conversation questions on his blog. As some of this great stuff didn't make it into the talk on Wednesday, it's a web extra, and a good example of the creativity of the discussion and the panelists.

Last Wednesday, Memphis held a fascinating Creative Conversation, Working Creatively, at the Memphis College of Art.

The panelists (and audience) discussed:

• empty buildings and creativity
• micro-finance
• muni wifi
• talent attraction vs talent growth
• creativity and poverty
• official Memphis' part in creativity (including a critical and balanced recap of that history by an audience member)
• models for best creative practices

It was a great mixture of the honest and the hopeful, the critical and the creative.

For your listening pleasure and our future creativity, here's the complete audio.

The entire conversation, including introduction.

Or if you want to take it a piece at a time, the conversation separated into 3 relatively equal pieces, plus the intro:

The conversation, part 1.

The conversation, part 2.

The conversation, part 3.

The conversation, introduction.

Quote of the Week: Always

When introducing new ideas and new creative thoughts, I so often heard the words, "No, we can't do that."

That is the most frustrating thing to creative people.

Because there is always a way to do something, there is always a way to figure it out.

Chris Reyes
Founder, NinjaCat and Live from Memphis
at Memphis' Creative Conversation

Climbing the C&I Bank Building

Architects and architecture lovers presented lots of great ideas at last week's meeting to save the C&I Bank Building (an example), and a few that Memphis Heritage and friends have begun work on.

While the best idea will be the idea that saves the building from the worst idea, which is the Regional Chamber's plan to sell the building for kindling, until then I declare my idea the best and hope those with an interest will consider making it the best in fact.

Make it the home of The Junkyard Memphis.

Why?

It fits the Mission of Junkyard:

The primary purpose of The JunkYard is to engage the efforts of local artists and art students in the construction of their own museum. Once open, the exhibits will feature large climbable structures that can be enjoyed by everyone of all ages. This tactile nature of the new museum will be a useful learning tool for kids of all ages, as well as a method for creating an emotional link with adults and their city.

The C&I has a large 4 story glass atrium, with balconies open to it, that seems perfect for the climbable structures that Junkyard Memphis wants.


(While it's not mentioned on the Junkyard website, I've always heard that the City Museum of St. Louis is a model. A few photos from that museum can help you envision the types of climbing structures possible.)

The stupendous views from that atrium out at downtown Memphis are a huge part of that emotional link to their city.



Since the C&I Bank Building has already been gutted, its interior is a tabula rasa for the imaginations of the artists and art students.



Plus,

it's a wonderful piece of architecture-as-advertisement, an iconic Fun House beckoning over the right field wall of Autozone Park for the multitudes of kids and adults who go to Redbirds games every year.



And because of the glass atrium, the favor is returned to the Redbirds.


If they exploit this spatial and visual connection, each could help the other be much more than they are by themself.

Along the same lines, it's would form the 3rd vertex in the fun and education triangle of Downtown Elementary and Autozone Park. See:


It could be a tangible, visible, climbable lesson in recycling and creativity.

Quote of the Week: Talent in the City

So much more often than not, what we fail to do, whether it's Chattanooga or any city, is to recognize the assets we have existing.

If we don't offer the opportunity for our young people and for the people who have been here for awhile, to maximize their potential, while they're here, in offering them the opportunities to engage civically, to engage creatively, then what do we have to offer someone who is going to relocate here?

Helen Johnson
Createhere Creative Strategist
speaking to Carol Coletta on Smart City Radio
about Createhere's talent philosophy.

Memphis Pops Tonight and Tomorrow

More details about the great lineup this week's Flyer.

Tomorrow night the Warble play. Until the ArtsMemphis Our Vibe, Our City, On Film competition I'd never heard of the Warble but ended up voting for their film, the Warble Atelier,


which came in second. Along the way, I also discovered this video.


Showmen.

Why We Need A Public Skatepark

Memphis skaters need a skatepark and Memphis needs a skatepark.

Skaters need a challenging, fun, accessible, legal, and public place to skate. This city needs the energy, enthusiasm, youth, diversity, cameraderie, visual dynamism, creativity, numbers and fun that the skaters bring.

We need a public skatepark.

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 Benches of Idlewild Elementary

The Commercial Appeal wrote a great story about these benches, created by Idlewild students with Idlewild's artist-in-residence, Deirdre Daw. I wanted to add a few pictures I took at their unveiling on Earth Day.











You'd think that the benches, while looking beautiful, wouldn't really work as seats. Something about all that raised environmental ornament sticking you in the butt.

But looks deceive -- the benches are very comfortable. I even saw a couple sitting on one for 45 minutes straight at Idlewild's Neighborfest.

Organic Art with Crape Myrtles

Walking through Cooper-Young last Saturday, I noticed that these 2 crape myrtles


each had hollow bases.

As you can see and I discovered, each "tree" is actually multiple myrtles planted around the stump of a departed tree (not a crape myrtle). They were then wound together so that they would grow together, leaving the hollow base above the stump, and below the wound "tree".


Pretty cool, if you ask me.

I love the result, and I love the creative possibilities.

Bonus link: strange green art.

Visual Musing on Imaginative Leadership

How's it that Memphis civic leaders remind me of this guy
or this guy


but never this guy?

Our Vibe. Our City. On Film. At ArtsMemphis

ArtsMemphis has posted the 5 semifinalists for the "Our Vibe. Our City. On Film" contest. Go there to view, then vote for your favorite film.

Voting ends April 14th.

By the way, click the titles above the images to see the films.