“I made a circus in the basement. But before you can see it, I need to take your temperature” — Miles, my four-year-old
1. Our final issue of the year, which goes to the printer next week, features a massive cover project with interviews from 26 Black women in their mid-20s. I can’t get this part out of my head, from a woman named Micah Wilson, who works as a behavior specialist at the afterschool nonprofit Cabbage Patch Settlement House:
“I was looking through the pictures like, ‘Man, (Breonna Taylor’s) patio looks so familiar to me.’ Springfield Drive — I lived there with my mom from when I was 17 to 25, like two units away from her unit. I was like, ‘Wow, that could have been me.’ I walked on those same sidewalks, put my trash in that same trash can. I know the whole layout of those apartments. Maybe I would have run into her one day. I would have walked right up to her, we would have had a conversation, talked about our boyfriends and how they get on our nerves. And it kind of hurts me almost that I never got that chance. I feel like that was stripped away from me and from her and from us.”
2.
I included this video by our collaborators at Kertis Creative last week, but I wanted to share it again in case you scrolled past it in a turkey stupor.
Here’s an exchange between interviewer Faith Lindsey and Jasmyne Jones:
Lindsey: “Hi, my name is Faith Lindsey. I’m 18 and a student at Manual.”
Jones: “I’m a Ram, too. Former Ram. DuPont Manual, class of 2013, MST (math, science, technology magnet).”
Lindsey: “MST? That sounds like a struggle. Not me.”
Jones: “Nothing stuck but the hypothetical research method.”
Lindsey: “I’m in J&C (journalism and communication), so whatever you just said? That’s crazy.”
Jones: “Mr. Zwanzig would be so proud. Listen, when I come back in and we match because I cut off my hair…”
Lindsey: “You would kill it.”
Jones: “People won’t let me do it because I get so down when I can’t do a bun — the bun is my favorite hairstyle. I do want to chop all my hair off.”
Lindsey: “And then that’s when you get a wig.”
Jones: “Oh, I love my half-wig. I’ve lost a wig in a bar.”
Lindsey: “You’ve lost a wig in a bar? Well, what were you doing?”
Jones: “Living my best happy life. It was my first Pride weekend in Louisville.”
3.
Artist Victor Sweatt painted this for a story by Josh Wood in the upcoming issue about what it means to be a Black LMPD officer. For the March 2019 issue, Sweatt, who is from the Park DuValle neighborhood in west Louisville, talked to writer Charles Wolford about artistic inspiration, saying, “I grew up in the West End, so I haven’t seen farmlands and streams and things like that. Just city blocks. So I started going to parks and learning to see things differently.
“The environment I was in, people weren’t used to doing art. I’m self-taught. When everyone else liked toys and things, I liked crayons. I had a box of 64 with a built-in pencil sharpener. I was big-time.”
As a boy, Sweatt spent hours by himself coloring, so focused that his mother would yell, “Vic, are you in the house? You need to start making some noise sometime.”
In the story, Wolford described Sweatt’s workspace at the Louisville Visual Art building in Portland: “Sweatt’s studio is a testament to his range of interests: wooden worktables, a fold-out chair slashed with paint, cans and glasses filled with pencils and brushes, a broom and a basketball and a stuffed toy orca, a cushioned bench large enough to stretch out on, and, arrayed everywhere on the walls, his many paintings.”
4. The next issue also has a profile of celebrity chef Edward Lee, whom writer Chris Kenning interviewed on Zoom while Lee was in Portland filming Top Chef. Kenning writes, “In the hellscape that is 2020, Lee has touched some of its sharper angles. He fought to keep alive his own restaurants — 610 Magnolia, Whiskey Dry and MilkWood in Louisville, and Succotash in Maryland and Washington, D.C. — while watching the pandemic shatter the dining industry. He saw doubts grow about the future of Louisville’s downtown, then witnessed racial-justice protests rock the city.
“Lee says that, at the pandemic’s worst, 85 percent of his 300-plus staff in all his restaurants were out of work, a percentage that has improved to maybe half that since then. ‘Every day I’m on the phone with my lawyer, my accountant, my insurance agent, trying to keep this thing afloat,’ he says.”
5. The issue includes more than two dozen people from the city’s urban-design community talking about what Louisville could/should look like in the future. It reminded me of a piece from 2012, with predictions about our city in 2020 in the realms of business, education, entertainment, food, health, social services, sports, transportation and urban design.
Here are some of the 2012 predictions from Kevin Connelly (social services) and Pat Forde (sports). (I’ll share the others over the next several weeks.)
Connelly, now retired, was executive director of the Louisville-based Center for Nonprofit Excellence:
“How will we improve our educational attainment? How will we drastically increase the percentage of African-Americans earning college degrees? How will we reverse our obesity rates? How will we improve outreach to marginalized and often disenfranchised minorities?”
“Our partisan national politics, in response to citizen demand, will have taken a back seat to servant leadership. The gap between rich and poor will have narrowed substantially.”
“Social workers will make great use of social media and technology. Clients will communicate with their caseworkers via handheld devices.”
“In 2020, American democracy will have shown its resilience and self-corrected, proving once again that famous Winston Churchill adage: ‘Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing…after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”
Forde, now a Sports Illustrated columnist, had recently left ESPN for a job at Yahoo! Sports:
“We’re never going to be a professional basketball town, and I think that’s fine. Louisville is the pro team. Kentucky is a pro team 70 miles away. Will one of them win a national championship in the next eight years? Yes — and Kentucky certainly has a better chance right now.” (The Wildcats won it that year. The Cards did the following season — no matter what the NCAA says!)
“No, Rick Pitino will not be the coach at U of L in 2020. John Calipari won’t be at UK either. I suspect Cal will want to take another shot at the NBA because the first time didn’t go well. Pitino back to the NBA? No, no, no. I think he’s got one more college job in him before he’ll retire. I could see someplace on the East Coast.” (Cal’s still a Cat. Earlier this year, Pitino accepted the head-coaching job with Iona in New Rochelle, New York.)
“The bigger question to me is: Will U of L athletic director Tom Jurich still be here? He’s one of the three best ADs in the country.” (Pitino and Jurich were fired in 2017 in the wake of an FBI investigation into corruption in college basketball.)
“There will absolutely be slot machines at Churchill Downs. And how about Churchill Downs hosting a bowl game? Everybody has a bowl game. Why can’t Louisville?”
“Also, let me say this: In 2020, my friend Rick Bozich will write his farewell column in the Courier-Journal.” (Bozich left for WDRB later that year, in June 2012.)
A little something from the LouMag archive.
This December 1986 cover is of U of L hoops star “Never Nervous” Pervis Ellison, who led the Cards to the previous season’s national title as a freshman. In the story by former senior editor Jack Welch, Ellison talked more than hoops, saying, “As long as there’s starvation, wars going on and people who are generally unhappy, I can never be satisfied, and I don’t see how anybody else can be either. I didn’t used to care about politics, but I care now because I’m 19 and I can vote. I’m aware of who’s in what position.” Ellison, who had an injury-plagued professional career after being the No. 1 pick in the 1989 NBA draft, also said: “I dislike PE because I’m usually tired. I hate PE, especially volleyball.”
Jack still does some work for the magazine in semi-retirement, and I texted him a picture of the cover. Like a true copyeditor, he responded:
“Ooh, that’s the profile where I called Magic Johnson ‘Ernest.’ And no one caught it. ’Course I was supposed to be the catcher. Second-worst mistake to calling the Packers ‘the green and yellow’ (instead of ‘the green and gold’). And I’m a Wisconsin boy!”
A November 1994 story about Louisville native/Heisman Trophy winner/former Packer Paul Hornung included the “green-and-yellow” line. “I was crucified,” Jack says. In the piece, Hornung, who died last month at age 84, interviews Pete Rose at a Chi-Chi’s on Shelbyville Road for an episode of his Paul Hornung Sports Showcase radio broadcast.
This year’s tree ornament:
Merry Christmask! Sorry.
Josh Moss
editor, Louisville Magazine
jmoss@loumag.com