Rex and the City: Scene ya' later

Nashville Scene insiders were putting on a happy face and toeing the company line in the comments section of the newspaper’s staff blog last week about the impending departure of Managing Editor Matt Pulle. What they are not talking about publicly is that the content of the city’s lone alternative news weekly is about to undergo a sea change.

Sources close to the Scene say the publication is planning on axing popular columnists The Fabricator and Walter Jowers. Other changes are said to be in the works that will strip away the last vestiges of the alt weekly’s homegrown take on alternative journalism. Instead, the weekly is preparing to follow the more traditional alt-weekly path mapped out by corporate owners Village Voice Media (VVM).

Pulle leaving is the latest in a series of departures from the editorial staff, including former Editor Liz Garrigan, Elizabeth Ulrich and Sarah Kelly. The publication just underwent a great deal of rather public angst among staff members when VVM brought in new editor Pete Kotz from a property it shut down for financial reasons in Cleveland, Ohio. In the process, Pulle was passed over for the job. That drama was played out publicly when the outgoing Garrigan stated her displeasure in print.

Scene sources say readers should expect an approach much closer to the formula followed by alt weeklies in other markets with VVM products, which focuses content around young readers. Privately, staffers are wondering how much news the paper will actually be reporting in the future.

‘Any of you guys call me Francis, and I’ll kill you.’

Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Bob Tuke may be taking this military theme a little too far.

In a time when an unpopular war hangs around the neck of the national Republican Party like a political albatross, Tuke has left some Democrats scratching their heads at the constant military imagery Tuke is using in his campaign against first a Democratic primary field and now incumbent Sen. Lamar Alexander.

Tuke frequently lets folks know he is a “Viet Nam Marine,” but perhaps the idea has gotten a little out of hand. When you call the Tuke for Senate campaign and are placed on hold, the “hold music” isn’t the expected easy listening but rather military marching band music.

City Paper staffers took a stab at some new hold music for the Tuke campaign:

• “If I Can’t Be Number One In Your Life, Then Number Two On You”

• “I’m Gettin’ Gray From Being Blue”

• “Against All Odds”

• “Blasphemous Rumors”

• “Livin’ on a Prayer”

‘Second prize is a set of steak knives.’

Metro government and members of the city’s business community were abuzz Friday over members of the Metro Planning Commission going well off the reservation on the May Town Center project.

The board in charge of land use for the city suddenly turned its attention to economic development priorities. The problem is that the planners’ takes on what will and won’t work in Nashville fell well outside of the empirical evidence in industry research performed by the movers and shakers at Partnership 2010, the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce’s economic development engine.

For instance, Chamber ECD guru Janet Miller had already identified campus settings as an ongoing wish in corporate America when it comes to relocations — something planning commissioners chose to altogether ignore.

The May Town Center vote leaves the business community and Metro government in a precarious position. ECD insiders were calling the vote a victory for Nashville’s suburban neighbors, namely Williamson and Rutherford counties.

“15 years of work, effort, blood and sweat by a lot of very smart people to be told ‘we don’t care what Partnership 2010 says,’” one heavy hitter told Rex. “And ‘Let the CEOs who want surface parking eat cake’ was not a good idea. …The ring counties had a big party.”

‘It’s a zero sum game; somebody wins, somebody loses.’

Metro Council members are about to find out where they stand with Mayor Karl Dean’s administration.

Metro’s capital budget should come out in the next few weeks, and some members of the legislative body say it will be a litmus test on Dean’s priorities. It will also be an indicator of where some Council members stand.

When Mayor Bill Purcell refused to fund the Bellevue library it set off a feud with Bellevue Councilman Charlie Tygard that never went away, so Rex will be on red alert for which Council members get the shaft this time around.

Rex Noseworthy appears Mondays in The City Paper. He can reached at rnoseworthy@nashvillecitypaper.com