Perspective is funny – not haha-funny, but huh?-funny. Sometimes you don’t know where you are – where you’ve been all this time – before you leave, then return again. You find the angles have tilted a little; you allow yourself to slide into discombobulation. Perspective, perplexèd: there are gifts in shaking the snowglobe you call home.
Once, standing on the roof of the apartment building where I rent a quirky old space, I saw what I perceived to be two enormous domes. The domes seemed very far away, each one topped with a cross. Flummoxed, curious, I made it my mission to search for these mysterious and no doubt massive structures — some megachurch I’d never encountered? Alien Byzantine apparitions?
After crisscrossing south Memphis, I gave up and turned back (figuring I’d send the query to Vance Lauderdale), only to pass Immaculate Conception Cathedral, all of one mile from home, and its twin cross-topped domes. Not very mega at all, as it turned out, and very close: the inverse of what I’d been wracking my mind and map to find.
I grew up in Memphis, spent all but my first year of life here, then left at 18, as one does, adamant as only an 18-year-old can be that trips home would be limited to visits. But my plans and my health were at cross-purposes, and here I was, eight years later, grown now, back in the city I never thought I needed to love.
The thing about Memphis is that you have to love the place before you can like it. From loving to liking, the river runs backwards, its current strong and muscular, from full-throttle passion to delicate source. Stand on the Harahan Bridge and watch the water hurl itself along like the sides of a racehorse. Tepid, this city is not. To like Memphis, love it first. This isn’t a mathematical equation: It’s a spell you allow the city to cast. No conventional order of operations applies.
And to love Memphis, what you need to do is listen to its stories: the stories of the people here, notables, newcomers, and neighborhood fixtures; of the small, stalwart, steady businesses; of musicians and the little and less little music-box venues where they play.
August is the month that we at Memphis magazine publish our annual City Guide issue. A good time of year to rekindle your love and knowledge of our ever-changing city and its steady soul: Students return to their pencils (or tablets) for a new school year; new neighbors move in down the street. The days are still long, and the air still sauna-adjacent, but you start to believe that it’s possible summer will, eventually, blow downstream for another year. All I’m saying is that it’s possible.
This year, we’ve approached City Guide with a fresh perspective. Instead of the billowing lists of Memphis Things, we’ve drawn closer to the stories that make Memphis so … Memphis. If you’re new to town: Hey, welcome. We hope these stories help you sink your soles into our steamy soil. We’re betting you have things to teach us, too. That’s why we’re including Q&As with city newcomers in our own City Guide.
We trust that if you are looking for a list of local sports teams and amateur leagues, you can find exactly what you seek with a few swipes of your thumb on a glass screen. Here, a letter to Penny Hardaway, whose own very Memphis narrative has him — of course it does, and of course you know this — boomeranging back to where it all began, to coach the Memphis Tigers.
Instead of a list of local musician and music venues, we have vignettes about venues worth visiting, plus a longer listen to the changing soundscape of the city, as hip-hop becomes one of the city’s most distinctive exports.
And we’re adding some new views, too: new avenues to follow in falling in love with this big-hearted, undaunted, grimy-gorgeous river town.
Memphis’ corners and side streets are full of small businesses, tucked away, that just keep on keepin’ on: You can keep time on these little local landmarks, these timepieces. We picked two hands’ full, scattered throughout the city, and you’ll find their stories tucked into the corners of this magazine. We’ve taken to calling them — no matter how hard we tried to come up with something more elegant — Nooks and Crannies. What can we say? It fits.
You’ll find a few fashion photos, but not the sort of fashion photos you might have seen in these pages in years past, if you’re a longtime reader of Memphis. In exploring the stories Memphians live, we saw some of those stories visually — through street-fashion photos bright with personality. The half-dozen such photos and the local characters in them are not staged or styled. They are, in true Memphis style, authentic, unvarnished, unretouched — and inspiring, inventive.
And there’s dining (featuring two of Memphis’ centenarian restaurants), and art, and faith, and nightlife. It’s a real Memphis mix.
Maybe there are other cities you can get to know with more lists, fewer sentences, less storytelling. We are so glad Memphis isn’t among them. To learn this city, to love this city: Listen.
