photograph courtesy joshua j. cotten / unsplash
Last month, I left Memphis for ten days overseas — but Memphis kept tugging at my sleeve.
Standing at a Budget car rental desk at the Berlin airport, the very kind agent asks where home is, and hearing Memphis, he says in his perfect English, “Ah! The Tennessee Titans!” We shake our heads a little ruefully, explain that no, the Titans play in Nashville (never mind that one, weird season at the Liberty Bowl in the late ’90s), and that anyway, we’re a basketball city. “Ah! Ja Morant!”, says he, and we nod yes (still a little ruefully, but for different reasons). Memphis in Germany.
Milling around a town square in Prague, consulting the maps on our phones, we realize that we’re feet away from a barbecue stand, pork roasting on a spit, tended by burly men who look like they could have stepped right out of Tom Lee Park in May. Memphis in Czechia.
Driving stretches of the German Autobahn, I notice that I’m unfazed by the variable speeds and the vehicles whipping past us. I’m used to Memphis’ 240 and 385 loops, after all! (Still, it helps that the speedometer reads in kilometers per hour, not miles, so I’m not thinking too hard about how fast we’re traveling.) Memphis on the Autobahn.
I may have heard echoes of Memphis in three different countries an ocean away, but no one would ever mistake another city for Memphis, or Memphis for any place but here.
Sitting outside a café in Edinburgh, a seagull swoops down to nibble our raspberry tart (the audacity!). The aviary theft leads to an instantly chummy conversation with the mother and daughter sitting nearby. I’m jetlagged and 4,000 miles from home, but something about the easy, drifting chat feels like, yes, Memphis in Scotland.
Memphis is a state of mind as much as a place. We’re welcoming, and kinder than we need to be. We celebrate our barbecue and our basketball with swagger. We’re also terrors behind the wheel, prone to heat waves, and often resistant to change. We’re basically … European?
Okay, not quite, but what we are is special — imperfect, but special all the same. I may have heard echoes of Memphis in three different countries an ocean away (and I haven’t even told you about accidentally staying in the world’s tiniest red-light district, in Scotland), but no one would ever mistake another city for Memphis, or Memphis for any place but here. That’s worth celebrating at a time when so many places’ sharp edges are being sanded down to make way for global-commercial sameness.
This month's issue of Memphis Magazine1 is our annual guide to the city (Memphis!) that is our primary topic and inspiration, fascination and consternation. We call it, creatively, our City Guide. We’ve been producing a City Guide every year starting in 1984; you’re holding our 40th such issue.
In the early days, our editors envisioned the City Guide as a sort of introduction to the city for out-of-town visitors, or those who had relocated to Memphis only recently. If you happen to fall into one of those categories — a weekend tourist, a brand-new Memphian — and have found your way here: Welcome! We’re so glad to meet you.
More likely, though, you’ve been reading us for a while, and you’ve lived in Memphis for a while, too. You already have a good sense — cultivated in part, perhaps, by reading Memphis Magazine! — of what’s happening. So what good is a City Guide?
Well, we can all use a refresher course from time to time — including me. I don’t know about you, but I find myself getting stuck in the same old routines, carving the same old patterns, like a panther at the zoo. I tend to take the same dog-walks, visit the same coffee shops, work with my laptop at the same three spots in Crosstown Concourse, order the same dishes at my favorite (read: the same) restaurants. You get the idea.
This year’s City Guide has many of the familiar elements you will remember from years past, like the annual Who’s Who selections. We offer fresh takes and updates too, on everything from the city’s hard-rock scene to the Metal Museum going Rust-y. Plus, a tour of several of Memphis’ most storied neighborhoods, and a feature on none other than our own Michael Donahue, he of the party coverage and pouf of wild hair. The illustrations that you’ll see both on our cover and in that neighborhood journey are by Martha Park, a Memphis-based artist and illustrator whose personal, contemplative style you earlier saw on our June cover. Martha continues our sporadic tradition of working with a local artist to create a City Guide cover by hand — a defiantly human element when some are turning to AI and automation.
We are not perfect, but here is something we made, with our own imperfect hands, just for you.
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1 For those with keen eyes for detail, yes, we recently decided to change our official name from Memphis to Memphis Magazine. You might have read us, in the past, referring to ourselves as "Memphis magazine," which was always a little awkward. Everyone calls us Memphis Magazine, including ourselves, and henceforth that is what we shall be.
