Ghosted by the Orange Man

Good afternoon, everyone.

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Onward.

A dispatch from the 62nd annual State of Metro address

Accompanied by “First Doctor Whitney Boon,” (the mayor used the term instead of first lady), O’Connell delivered his second annual State of Metro address this morning at the Nashville Public Library. According to the mayor, under his administration crime is decreasing, pedestrian deaths are decreasing, opioid deaths are decreasing, homeless residents are decreasing, and emergency call center wait times are decreasing.

In keeping with the library theme, O’Connell made reference to a couple of books while rehashing the past year and putting forward his proposal for this year’s budget. “We must not lose sight of our high aspirations, despite the challenges of the time,” he said, referring to the Perry Wallace biography Strong Inside. “Our response to the chaos at the moment is the competence of the city. This is Nashville's story.”

While O'Connell hoped to anchor his speech on the catchphrase “schools we're proud of, services we trust, safety we deserve,” the Trump administration caught quite a few direct hits throughout the address—a tendency the mayor has adopted during media roundtables since Trump started making grant cuts. Between categorizing the state of things under the new leadership “murky,” “chaotic,” and cruel, he assured the crowd that Metro will not stand down:

Metro has been ghosted on awarded funds of tens of millions of dollars, but we're not standing idly by as the federal government unlawfully tries to cut funding that's legally ours. We've told them, ‘We'll see you in court.’ This is money that hard working Nashville taxpayers have already sent to Washington, it's money that hard working Metro workforce team members have submitted applications for, and what the White House is unlawfully telling us it's not coming back, but Congress said it should and we're going to fight for it.

The room erupted in cheers, and he later took aim at the group of anti-property tax protesters who attended the address: “Many of you undoubtedly walked past folks this morning who believe that the property tax going up for any Nashvillian, by any amount, is not necessary—just more government spending. These are the same people celebrating the chaos of federal cuts, which, make no mistake, are not about efficiency.”

Instead, when the cost of things are going up—"building schools, patching potholes, picking up trash, and keeping people safe"—O’Connell hopes you’ll renew your subscription even though the price went up, because “people rely on local government to get stuff done.”

“It's not just the cost of governing going up, it's the cost of everything we buy,” he said, after explaining some people are going to see higher taxes. “That's why this is a basic common sense budget, that follows the 2025 budget, in which we ask every metro department to reduce spending.” MEGAN PODSIEDLIK

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🖋️ Edited by Davis Hunt.

🃏 Shuffling the Deck Mayor Freddie O’Connell is planning to reshuffle his inner circle. Longtime aide, campaign architect, and current chief of staff Marjorie Pomeroy-Wallace will stay on through passage of the city budget in June, then slide into a different post as the administration retools for the back half of O’Connell’s term.

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🎓 Charter Rejections Metro Nashville’s school board rejected every charter bid on April 23—The Rock Academy, The Forge School, and a new Rocketship elementary—after members Zach Young and Rachael Anne Elrod declared they are “philosophically opposed” to charter schools, a stance that helps explain why the district hasn’t green-lit one since 2021. The applicants may try again this summer under a new state law that strips politics from the approval process.

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💧 Mystery Murders Metro Nashville Police have identified the two men found shot to death near Percy Priest Lake on Monday as Jamie Valdez-Garcia, 18, and Amir Landon Wilkerson, 19, both from Alabaster, Alabama. Each suffered multiple gunshot wounds and was discovered in a wooded area between Lincoya Bay Apartments and the lake. Detectives say the pair arrived in Nashville together on Sunday and are still piecing together why they came and who killed them.

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DEVELOPMENT

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Ernest Tubb Record Shop reveals reopening, with members-only club (NBJ)
Nashville Yards' $20M entertainment complex rebrands as Hooky (NBJ)
Urban Cowboy Bar opens in Nashville's historic Arcade (NBJ)
London hotel concept set for Pie Town (Post)
Oracle pays $42M for River North land (Post)

✹ REPEAT OFFENDER OF THE DAY

Metro police say Emmanuel Orr, 18, had only known the 18-year-old woman he met on an MTA bus for about a week when he walked with her into Cedar Hill Park on April 30. Moments later he shot her in the leg, then fired several rounds into Officer Jeff Lubey’s patrol car during a stop nearby, ditching his pistol before surrendering inside Mallard’s Family Restaurant.

Orr now faces attempted homicide, aggravated assault and gun charges. The arrest comes less than three months after a February plea bargain on an earlier aggravated-assault case spared him prison—his two-year sentence was completely suspended to probation. (More Info)

✹ REVIEW: SINNERS (2025)

(R · 2h 17m · 8.2/10) Directed by Ryan Coogler

The most exhausting aspect of Art in the Age of Trump is the tendency to boil down complex works to vapid lefty platitudes. But, for the past two weeks, Ryan Coogler’s Southern Gothic period vampire epic, Sinners, has managed to escape the stigma of Good Liberal Groupthink, becoming a multi-demo sensation and allowing the movies to organically dominate the pop-culture conversation in ways unseen since peak Marvel. And, the reason is simple: it’s a fresh and fully realized vision that shows the often-unrealized potential of the Hollywood studio movie.

Set in Jim Crow Mississippi between the wars, the film centers on the SmokeStack twins (Michael B. Jordan) and their attempts to open a hometown juke joint with cash and booze they stole from the various factions of the Chicago mob. But when the SmokeStack’s cousin, Sammie (Miles Caton), accidentally attracts a crew of vampires with his devilishly raw blues stylings, the joint finds itself under siege by bloodsuckers.

Sinners had plenty of opportunity to turn itself into a race relations meme. But, as he did with Creed and Black Panther, Coogler opts to present a multifaceted view of America’s racial milieu that runs contrary to the dominant narrative of the last decade. The vamps are not nefarious Klan members, but a band of Irish immigrants who have also found themselves cast off and turned into Southern stereotype fodder for those on the coasts. Such an approach allows Coogler to come the closest of any director in recent memory to represent the region dynamically (and pull off a vampire Irish Step Dance sequence as breathtaking as it is tense).

Coogler’s singular perspective is enough to make Sinners worth a watch, but that the film extends the same nuance to religion in the American South positions it as an absolute masterpiece. Its characters are not victims of circumstance or clear-cut villains, but reap the end result of their own compromises. They take responsibility as they realize, whether via age or vampire bit, sooner or later God’ll strike them down,

Sinners is now playing in theaters.