John Beifuss

john.beifuss@commercialappeal.com

New Year's Eve is a time for resolutions. With that in mind, here are 17 for '17 — a baker's dozen-plus-four suggestions for Memphians interested in making 2017 a particularly "Memphicentric" year.

1. Get a Memphis tattoo, even if it's not permanent. Some suggestions include the Piggly-Wiggly logo, a funky chicken, the Zippin Pippin, the "new bridge" or Sam the Sham, in full turban.

2. Stay off the interstate loop. Avoid Poplar and Germantown Parkway. When possible, take side streets. Explore. Become a hometown tourist. You'll be amazed by the unusual neighborhoods you never knew existed and the houses you never imagined. Some will fill you with envy, some will fill you with sadness, but you'll have a new definition of "Memphis."

3. Visit the National Civil Rights Museum. Find an "I Am a Man" sign from 1968. Contemplate it not solely as an artifact of the sanitation strike but as a work of art: succinct and direct yet unsurpassedly eloquent and eternally, endlessly meaningful.

4. Make a pilgrimage to the 4900 block of Summer Avenue, site of the long-gone "Holiday Inn Hotel Court" motel, opened in 1952 by Kemmons Wilson as the first of what would become the world's largest chain of hotels. Reflect on the idea that chains and franchises — now disparaged for their cookie-cutter aesthetic, impersonal management and matricidal-patricidal impact on mom-and-pop businesses — originally were intended as guarantors of quality and signifiers of progress.

5. Visit the "shrunken head" at the Memphis Pink Palace Museum. Murmur: "There but for the grace of God (and a poisoned blow dart) go I."

6. Fall into the bottomless well of Memphis professional wrestling footage on YouTube. Be amazed as an apparently down-on-his-luck Adam West shows up in Batman garb to banter with "Superking" Jerry Lawler during WHBQ-TV's "studio wrestling" program. Watch a "22-man battle royale" spill into the stands at the Mid-South Coliseum. See Lawler "suplex" Andy Kaufman. Learn "the Fargo strut."

7. Write the names of all 33 of Elvis' movies on a piece of poster board. Tack it to the wall. Throw a dart at it. Watch whichever movie the dart hits, even if it's "Stay Away, Joe," in which Elvis stars as "Native American rodeo rider Joe Lightcloud."

8. Go to a public library branch or locally owned book store. Check out or buy a book. Actually read it. (An easy yet quality choice would be "True Grit," possibly the most entertaining novel of the 20th century. It was written by Charles Portis, who launched his professional writing career as a reporter for The Commercial Appeal, so there's hope for all of us yet.)

9. Go to the Memphis Zoo. Try to make eye contact with one of the 900-pound Nile crocodiles in the Zambezi River exhibit. Appreciate the humbling fact that, in close quarters, your big brain would be no match for its big jaws.

10. Find a basketball court. Channel the spirit of Grizzlies guard Troy Daniels. Hit six three-pointers in three minutes.

11. Listen with fresh ears to familiar Memphis soul music. Feel the world fold around you like in "Doctor Strange" as you come to understand that it is no exaggeration to say the Hi Rhythm Section in its 1970s Al Green-backing heyday probably really did create the most soul-stirring and expressive collaborative groove in the history of recorded sound.

12. Drive by 1408 Rayner Street and gawk at the home that served as the Memphis hangout for Prohibition gangster and kidnapper George "Machine Gun" Kelly and his wife, Kathryn Kelly, who were arrested there by the "G-Men" on Sept. 23, 1933. Wonder at the factors that enable a notorious criminal to become a popular culture antihero.

13. Walk a trail in Shelby Forest by yourself or with your closest loved ones. Try to be quiet. Hope to meet a deer.

14. Expand your arts outlook. Attend a symphony concert, theater production and opera performance. Go to an art gallery you've never visited before. See how you like it. If you don't like it, so be it.

15. Learn the words to "Beboppers' Christmas," recorded in Memphis by Cordell Jackson for her Moon Records label in 1956. It is probably the only song that introduces Santa Claus as a "red-dressed Daddy-O." Adds Jackson: "He had white fuzz all over his chin/ He came boppin' up and said, 'Give me some skin.'"

16. Stop saying "Memphis has the worst ___." Memphis doesn't really have the worst crime. Or the worst traffic. Or the worst schools. But in acknowledging it's not "the worst," don't stop trying to make it better.

17. Never use the excuse "There's nowhere to park." This is Memphis. There's always somewhere to park.