Month: February 2001

Categories
News News Feature

A LEVEL FIELD

Let me say first that I’m not a sports writer. Though I have a glancing recognition of most sports, terms like RPI and RPM get mottled in my brain, a stew of letters and numbers no more clear to me than algebraic equations. I have, however, always been an athlete. Though I don’t know sports at a sports-talk-radio-junkie level, I know sports at an athlete level and that gives me the wisdom and experience to be plain mad about what’s happening to the Melrose High football team.

These players, all kids — all under 19, must now forfeit the entire blood, sweat, and tears season they’ve already finished because of a Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association (TSSAA) ruling.

No doubt it was a season of twice-a-day sweltering summer practices, of taped ankles, iced knees, glorifying wins, humiliating losses. Now it’s all for naught. It’s like they weren’t even there. Why? Because sixteen Melrose players attended a football camp that neither they nor their parents paid for — and that’s a violation of TSSAA rules.

When they got to the camp the boys’ coach handed the camp director a check for $3,200 — enough to cover the $200 camp costs for each player. Who knows where the money originally came from? Who cares? Sixteen teenage boys got a chance to become better athletes and learned to work together as a team — a chance many probably would not have been able to afford without financial aid.

TSSAA rules prohibit players from attending camps not paid for by the player or the player’s parents. It’s a good thing that TSSAA never got wind of Cara or Patrick.

Cara was the sweeper on my high school soccer team, I was the goalie. Being the last line of defense before the game became just me and the ball, Cara was very important to me and to the team. I wanted her to be the absolute best sweeper she could be, as much for me and the team as for Cara herself.

So when Cara, whose father had walked out on her and whose mother could scarcely provide for her two children, quietly told our coach that she couldn’t afford the team’s soccer camp, the team made sure that she could. We each approached our parents, told them about Cara’s situation and our parents gladly handed us checks for $10, $20, or $50. Some of the school’s teachers contributed, too. We took the checks to our coach and when the money was counted, we had more than enough to cover Cara’s camp fees. We never talked about it, but we had started our own “scholarship” fund for players that might not be able to go to soccer camp otherwise.

Had the TSSAA found us out, we would have had to forfeit our entire, hard-fought, season because this “scholarship” made Cara ineligible. We would have then, like Melrose, been fined $100 for every game in which Cara played.

My brother’s basketball team would have been in a much worse position. They had several “Caras” — kids who would not have been able to truly be a part of the team had others not helped them financially. One of these players was Patrick.

As one of five children being raised by a single mother, Patrick did not dare ask his mother for money for camps, for new basketball shoes, for the necessary items many teenage athletes take for granted. The money simply wasn’t available. Patrick didn’t have to ask his mother because he and his teammates had been playing together since junior high and the other kid’s parents took care of it for him.

Fortunately for us, my high school was economically mixed. Many teams are not. And teams like Melrose, many of whose players may not be able to afford camps on their own, still have to play teams like White Station, whose players and their parents probably can.

My high school’s athletic teams always had “haves” and “have-nots” on them. When one player couldn’t raise the money for necessary items, the money could be raised for him. My brother’s team always had a “scholarship” fund to pay for these essentials so that members of the team would not feel left out. That’s what a team is and that’s why so many teams opt to go to team camps. It’s great for individual players to refine their own skills, but winning seasons come after whole teams get refined together.

Later, when Patrick’s mother and his family were evicted from their home and had to move into a tiny house with one of his relatives, Patrick came to live with my family. My parents never became his legal guardians, and he never officially lived with us, but for about a year Patrick spent every single night with us, ate dinner with us, even went on vacations with us. People that weren’t his parents helped pay for Patrick to be a normal kid, to have the kinds of things many of us take for granted.

But if the TSSAA had found out, we all would have been in trouble — and it would have been Cara’s and Patrick’s fault because they didn’t come from affluent families. Unfortunately this is the life lesson the TSSAA seems extremely eager to teach. Unfortunately, it’s the kids who ultimately pay the price.

Categories
Music Music Features

Bringing Back the Bomp

Everybody see Bono at the Grammys? I loved how, receiving what I think was the third award of the night for the typically grandiose if still lovely “Beautiful Day,” he expressed “humility” then immediately proclaimed his group “The World’s Greatest Rock-and-Roll Band.” There are worse choices these days, I guess. But if a lot of Radiohead fans were mulling over that claim carefully, I’m willing to bet that plenty of people — more than you might think — were also yelling back at the television: “Sleater-Kinney!” Though obscure to casual music fans, that post-riot-grrl group has been critics’ choice for years now. But they better watch out, because a blast from their own past — Kathleen Hanna, formerly the screech-and-snarl behind ’90s scene-starters Bikini Kill — is giving them a push for the throne.

Hanna’s new band, the riot-grrls-catch-disco-fever Le Tigre, arrived in late 1999 with an uneven but often thrilling eponymous debut that gradually found an audience and landed on Spin‘s list of 2000’s 10 best albums. With its ruminations on indie-film icon John Cassavetes and shout-outs to academic/feminist heroines that less well-educated listeners have likely never heard of, Le Tigre carried an art-school aftertaste that, for some, may have clashed with the political populism inherent in the music’s punked-out pleasure principle.

But with the new From the Desk of Mr. Lady (the band’s record label), they’ve delivered a more direct, more forceful statement, one that finds the band less preaching to the choir than taking a bullhorn into the crowd. At seven songs in 17 minutes, it’s the most fully alive collection of music to hit the racks so far this year.

The first words from Kathleen Hanna’s mouth on Le Tigre were, “Who took the BOMP?!” The line was a reference to an early-Sixties hit, now oldies radio staple, from Brill Building songwriter Barry Mann, “Who Put the Bomp (In the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp).” Mann’s song is a loving tribute to the simple sonic joy of early doo-wop and rock-and-roll. “Bomp,” in Mann’s song, refers not only to the common nonsense syllables deployed in early rock and soul, but to that music’s ineffable magic; “bomp” is an essence so otherworldly that it’s assumed that some outside force had to put it there.

Hanna evokes the line at a time when hip hop and R&B are absolutely bompalicious but when the world of white guitar rock, both the mainstream and underground, is noticeably lacking in bomp. But Hanna doesn’t just bemoan the lack of spirit in modern rock, she puts the bomp back. With an inspired amalgam of pogo-punk, new-wavey disco, and hip-hop-bred beat racket, Hanna and crew have taken to heart the essential message for any would-be rock-and-roll revolutionaries: Fun Matters.

Le Tigre’s music is a rebuke to mainstream rock culture — reactionary, macho, money-mad, solipsistic. But it’s also a seemingly conscious rebuke to the boycentric side of the rock underground — obscurantist, pleasureless, apolitical, solipsistic. Who took the BOMP?!

If Radiohead mope-maven Thom Yorke is the new frontman of a suffocating, art-rock-loving alternative culture, then Le Tigre offers a hearty, rude “I dissent.” On the new record’s “Mediocrity Rules,” the dullard date being skewered could be the male half of Le Tigre’s native indie-rock world: “I can see it in your eyes that nothing scares you like a real idea.” If so much that passes for independent rock these days is a withdrawal into the subcultural closet, then Le Tigre feels triumphant for how broadly their homemade agitpop engages the world. This is music made on the fringes but aimed squarely at the center. In the words of like-minded Sleater-Kinney, this band has come to join the conversation and is here to raise the stakes.

But if the beatwise bump ‘n’ grind of Le Tigre’s music is enough to get them in the door, the messages and emotions it carries make it a Trojan horse. The band sports female vocals alternately flat, bored, and exasperated or shrieking, taunting, and declamatory — an Everygirl voice that is everything assured, professional singing is not supposed to be and is all the more thrilling for it. The band’s lyrics are expressions of basic political outrage and common-language calls to arms, fed-up meditations on feminist backlash and lowered cultural expectations.

From the Desk of Mr. Lady starts off in a funk — “It feels so ’80s/Or early ’90s/To be political/Where are my friends?” — but then blasts through it — “Get off the Internet!/I’ll meet you in the street!” The record’s centerpiece is the Amadou Diallo-inspired “Bang! Bang!,” the most galvanizing “protest” song in recent memory. Instead of artists with issues, the band sounds like outraged citizens (which, as non-rock-star New Yorkers, is exactly what they are) turning the town hall meeting into a radical house party, screaming the truth in the plainest, crudest terms they can come up with: “Murder is murder/Why’re they confused?” and “Wrong fucking time/wrong fucking place/There is no fucking way this is not about race.”

If the rousing harangues of Rage Against the Machine sound like pamphlet polemics, Le Tigre’s politics are more conversational and lived-in — like a pissed-off neighbor grabbing you by the collar on the street and throwing their anger in your face — and anger almost seems too tame. Last year the band paused during an ode to public transportation to offer a deliciously succinct dismissal of their martial-law mayor — “Oh, fuck Giuliani/He’s such a fucking jerk/Shut down all the strip bars/Workfare does not work.” Here they ask for his head.

From the Desk of Mr. Lady is an art-punk answer to the imposing challenge that has been laid down by hip-hop heroes Outkast: It’s political party music that breaks down musical barriers, speaks truth to power, and never forgets to dance this mess around. But Le Tigre’s triumph also hints at further riches below, and one new band that’s risen to the challenge is Sleater-Kinney labelmates the Gossip.

The Gossip aren’t at all engaged with the outside world — the lyrical content of the band’s recent full-length debut, That’s Not What I Heard, never gets beyond first-person accounts of tumultuous young love. But it takes the same musical lesson to heart: Cramming 14 songs into 24 unrelenting minutes, this introductory blast from the Arkansas-by-way-of-Olympia punk band is a wide-open wonder, nothing but bomp. Crashing backbeats shadow-box punk-blues guitar that should make the folks at Fat Possum wet themselves, while lead singer “Beth” wails over the top of the clamor like the bastard child of Janis Joplin and um Kathleen Hanna. (Blues Foundation Alert: Please consider That’s Not What I Heard when putting together the “Best Debut” category at next year’s Handy Awards.)

Maybe it’s their Southernness, but with their blues-drenched guitar, gospelized vocals, and comfortable expressions of sexuality, the Gossip sound more open to “black music” without being calculating about it than any other contemporary punk band that never varies from the guitar-bass-drums format.

“Swing Low” is a lesbian-punk booty call with Beth establishing herself as the most sexualized punk singer on the planet (“Better make it good/Better make it now/Well, baby, shake it honey/Nobody has to know”), while her bandmates back that azz up approvingly (“Make it oh-oh good/Make-it-make-it-make-it now”).

Can an all-girl art-collective-turned-pop-band become the new Rage Against the Machine or Public Enemy? Doubtful. Can three scruffy kids on a tiny record label defiantly called Kill Rock Stars sweep bar-band blooze into the dustbin of history? No way. But if you find yourself scanning rock radio and wondering what happened to the bomp, don’t say I didn’t give you a heads up.

You can e-mail Chris Herrington at herrington@memphisflyer.com.

Categories
News The Fly-By

CITY REPORTER

Old Debate Continues on School Consolidation

While some Shelby County residents reacted negatively toward a proposed school consolidation bill last week, at least none of them, or their municipalities, threatened secession.

School consolidation has a controversial history in Shelby County. When the idea of joining the city and county school districts was considered more than 10 years ago, the mayors of Arlington, Bartlett, Collierville, Germantown, Lakeland, and Millington warned they would secede from the county if the two districts consolidated. The secession, had it occurred, would have created Neshoba, the first new county in Tennessee since 1869.

Luckily, then-county Mayor Bill Morris quieted supporters on both sides by forming a 62-member task force to study the districts’ options.

“We’ve been through studies before on this matter,” long-time Memphis City Schools board member Carl Johnson recalled early last week. “Consolidation didn’t mean a good thing in ’71, ’72, ’73, or through the ’80s.”

The 1990 threat of secession by the suburban mayors was the result of a 1988 proposal by J.C. Williams, then a member of the city school board, who thought the city and the county school systems should consolidate to unify funding.

But even before the task force could issue its suggestions, a deficit of $35 million in the city schools’ proposed budget reopened the school consolidation debate in 1991. The city school board decided to wait for the task force’s results before taking any action.

Eventually the task force came back with the solution of single-source funding under the Shelby County Commission, possibly setting up a central overseeing body, and creating five smaller districts. Ultimately tabled because of statewide education and tax reform, the idea of five school districts was not revisited.

The idea of limited consolidation, however, resurfaced in 1993, when it was mentioned by city Mayor Willie Herenton. Herenton had proposed an all-inclusive city-county consolidation, but his plan was rejected because of its various legal and political entanglements. Memphis would have had to surrender its charter and it could not do that without approval from the state legislature. Limited school consolidation was suggested as a way to slowly consolidate the city and the county, but it was never carried out.

“I feel like we’ve been talking about this issue forever,” Memphis City Schools board president Dr. Barbara Prescott said last week.

In 1998, the Memphis City Schools board passed a resolution to study the effects of consolidation on the schools, but the study somehow got lost in the shuffle. It was never presented or even conducted.

The Memphis City Schools board reissued the resolution February 19th so that they could take an educated stand on the issue. Three days later, the Shelby County Schools board, as well as many residents, made up their mind to oppose the measure.

A consolidation of the Memphis city and Shelby County school districts would create a system of 160,000-plus students, making it the 10th largest in the country.

Were the measure to pass, it would take effect September 2004.

And even if school consolidation doesn’t pass, proponents take heart: This probably won’t be the last time we hear about it.

— Mary Cashiola

Zoo Plans To Open New China Exhibit With or Without Pandas

Motorists driving down North Parkway near McLean cannot help but notice that a good chunk of the Memphis Zoo appears to have been flattened by a meteorite. While the reasons behind the clear-cut are not quite so unusual, they are pretty exotic in their own right.

Though the zoo officially broke ground for its forthcoming China Exhibit back in December, it has only recently begun to transform one of the oldest and most outdated portions of the zoo into a Chinese garden complete with a pagoda, stone bridge, and a number of wild animals that can’t be found outside of China. Featured animals will include Asian small-clawed otters, a species of monkey found only in China, Chinese goldfish, and pandas.

Well, maybe not pandas — at least, maybe not right away.

Visitors to the China exhibit will begin their tour by watching a film about panda conservation, and early press releases mentioned areas for viewing pandas up close. Still, there is no guarantee that the zoo will have the animals on display by the time the exhibit opens. In fact, there is no guarantee that it will have pandas at all. The zoo does have a letter of intent filed with the Chinese government and is presently working diligently to secure a pair of the endangered animals.

“We’ll open the exhibit with or without pandas,” says zoo spokesperson Carrie Strehlau. “After all, it’s about Chinese history, culture, and architecture, too. And there are other animals.”

According to Strehlau, obtaining pandas is extremely difficult since the animals are found only in China and are among the most endangered creatures in the world. “It’s very political,” she says. “It’s a question of conservation. You have to prove that you are capable of doing more than just putting these animals on display.”

Nevertheless, the zoo is confident that the exhibit, which is scheduled to open in Spring 2002, will eventually have pandas. “It’s just a matter of time,” Strehlau says. Zoo director Charles Brady was unavailable for comment. He’s currently in China. — Chris Davis

Galloway Fees Remain a Mystery

Playing golf on the renovated Galloway Golf Course will cost golfers more than it used to, but how much more remains to be seen.

Paul Evans, city golf operations administrator, told the Flyer that the exact fees have not yet been established.

“I can’t even speculate on what the fees will be,” says Evans. “I don’t think it’s going to be as much as some people think it will be. I think the increase will be moderate.”

When the city council approved $3.7 million in renovations for Galloway, it was estimated that fees would increase from 3 to 5 percent, or approximately $18 to $25. However, now that the renovations have begun, some, including city councilman John Vergos, doubt that the $18 fees will cover the debt. Vergos and some Galloway golfers speculate that the fees will more likely be in the $35 to $50 range to play 18 holes. This pricing is in line with what area public, non-municipal courses charge.

“I don’t know how you can spend almost $4 million on a golf course and not raise fees significantly,” said Vergos.

City Finance Director Mark Brown confirmed that Galloway will pay the principal and interest over 20 years and that studies conducted before construction showed that Galloway can repay the loan with only a modest increase in fees. The exact amount of increase, however, remains a mystery to everyone.

“The city provides park services for its citizens,” says Vergos. “I just don’t think the city should provide top-flight courses. I’m concerned that it will cut out the senior citizens and kids that would have played Galloway before.”

— Rebekah Gleaves

Death-Row Update: Workman Loses Last Appeal; West Is Tried For Competency

PHOTO AP
Philip Workman

Philip Workman’s only chance to live now rests with Governor Don Sundquist.

Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to hear an appeal that the death-row inmate was convicted on perjured testimony and that ballistics evidence suggested he did not kill a Memphis police officer in 1981. Sundquist can commute Workman’s sentence to life in prison, a decision the governor is taking what he calls “a reasonable amount of time” to make.

One month ago Workman was granted a stay of his scheduled January 30th execution date — a move by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals one day after a state paroles board voted unanimously not to recommend that Sundquist grant clemency. The board’s decision came after nearly 12 hours of testimony, which included lengthy debates about an autopsy X-ray which the defense says demonstrates that Workman’s bullets would not have caused the type of wounds the officer suffered.

The autopsy was not introduced as evidence in Workman’s 1982 trial. A reference to the document was found by the defense as they were perusing paperwork from the Shelby County Medical Examiner’s office. Workman’s attorneys claim that the X-ray was purposefully omitted.

Workman’s attorney Jefferson Dorsey says he is “more than a little bit surprised” and had “high hopes that the Supreme Court would step in.”

Dorsey says he believed that the highest court would hear Workman’s case because of a tied ruling delivered by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals last fall during a rare en banc (entire bench) hearing. All 14 justices split their decision to grant Workman an evidentiary hearing along party lines, with seven Democratic-appointed justices voting in favor and seven Republican-appointed justices voting to deny the inmate a forum. It was the 6th Circuit that stepped in the day after Workman’s January 26th clemency hearing to issue the prisoner’s current stay.

“It’s just an extreme letdown,” says Dorsey.

The Tennessee Supreme Court could set a date for execution any day.

Late last week, U.S. District Judge Curtis Collier stayed death-row inmate Stephen Michael West’s execution until June 15th.

Longtime West attorney Roger Dickson of Chattanooga says that a hearing has been set in Knoxville for June 13th to decide if the prisoner is making a “knowledgeable and intelligent” decision not to file any more of his allotted habeus corpus appeals. West purposefully did not choose to pursue his appeals and told Riverbend Maximum Security Institution officials that he wished to die in the electric chair.

But Saturday Tennessee Attorney General Paul Summers filed a petition to proceed with the execution. The petition, arguing that West is competent and has given no indication of mental deficiency, was filed with the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. There is no word yet on whether the request will be granted.

But opponents of the death penalty, most vocally the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing, stated that they believed the execution to be “state-assisted suicide.” West declined after being asked three times by U.S. District Judge Todd Campbell to explain why he’s chosen not to pursue his federal appeals for an expedient death in the electric chair — a relic that was tuned up 10 years ago but hasn’t been used since 1960.

Campbell assigned Dickson to this portion of West’s defense. The inmate’s case is Dickson’s first death-row litigation since 1979. — Ashley Fantz

Fighting Words Turn To Bluster, Backtracking

The fight between Alabama football booster Logan Young and University of Tennessee booster Roy H. Adams looks more like a farce, at least temporarily, as both men backtracked last week.

Young said two weeks ago that he plans to sue Adams for alleged defamatory comments on the Internet. Such a lawsuit could test the limits of Internet freedom of speech and, possibly, help get to the bottom of the Memphis football recruiting rumors.

But now the Young-Adams fight looks more like a spitwad war, with both men saying, in effect, they had their fingers crossed.

Young will wait until the NCAA finishes the investigation of the Alabama football program announced last Thursday. If the investigation leaves him and Alabama unscarred, as Young hopes it will, then he may not “stir it all up again” with a libel suit, Young said. A damning investigation, on the other hand, would undermine a libel suit.

Many skeptics have doubted all along that Young would follow through. In a radio interview with the Flyer last week, Birmingham Post-Herald sports columnist Paul Finebaum said Young is “famous for threatening to sue.”

If so, the threat seems to have gotten the attention of Adams, the chatty Memphis booster known as “Tennstud” on the Internet. He posted messages suggesting someone else could have used his computer to say those bad things about Young.

“In fact, my computer is in an open area in my library and numerous friends have lurked and some have even posted using my name,” he said in one Internet message on the Gridscape Web site. “Under Gridscape, tacked to a shelf, I have left on an index card my pass word for Gridscape!”

Fellow posters greeted this with a razzing (“As the Dud backstrokes,” began one), giving the whole bizarre affair the tone of a schoolyard shoving match between two boys who don’t really want to fight while the crowd eggs them on.

In an interview with the Flyer, Adams owned up to the mystery-poster posting.

“I’ve been real careful in making posts about the Memphis situation that I didn’t use [Young’s] name in a defamatory or mean-spirited manner,” said Adams. “I’ve tried to be careful not to open myself to any libel or defamation suits.”

Young’s lawyer, Louis Allen, says they are “still looking into all aspects and going ahead with our investigation.” Former Shelby County District Attorney General John Pierotti, now in private practice, is also working for Young and Allen, “doing whatever they ask me to.”

Young has been repeatedly mentioned in Internet postings and news reports in connection with an alleged $200,000 payment to high school football coach Lynn Lang for delivering player Albert Means to Alabama. Young and Lang have denied that there was any such payment.

The source of the allegation is former coach Milton Kirk. According to Adams, Kirk blurted out the story last October to a crowd of people, including Adams.

“I know a dozen or more people heard it that night,” Adams said, but it was January before Kirk went public with his story in The Commercial Appeal. Adams denies speculation that he paid Kirk to put the story out in order to hurt Alabama’s recruiting.

“The only advice I have ever given Kirk was to keep it quiet, and that shows how much influence I have on him,” said Adams.

Adams, University of Tennessee Class of 1963, even disavowed his now infamous nickname. He said he tried several other Internet handles before choosing “Tennstud” after the Doc Watson tune about a horse that was “long and lean, the color of the sun and his eyes were green; he had the nerve and he had the blood, and there never was a horse like the Tennessee stud.”

“I hate that damn name more than anyone knows,” he said. “I am short, fat, ugly, old, and balding and anything but a Tennessee stud.” — John Branston

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Lottery Yes!

The state lottery in Georgia, upon which Tennessee’s constitutional provision is modeled, has been hailed as the finest scholarship program in the country and the best constitutional lottery provision as well. Tens of thousands of Georgia students have tuition paid through the HOPE scholarship and then join the state’s work force, which fuels Georgia’s economic engine for the 21st century.

Seventy-five percent of the best and brightest students in Georgia now attend Georgia universities rather than the 25 percent prior to the establishment of the HOPE program. SAT scores have risen by 11 percent since the inception of HOPE, and pre-kindergarten programs have provided an early start to children in reading and learning — and a great start toward a HOPE scholarship.

Critic Nell Levin, a state income-tax advocate, missed the point when she wrote in the Flyer last week that “a lottery creates few jobs and no useful product.” It creates hundreds of thousands of jobs and better workers who enter the work force debt-free because of the proceeds of the lottery. Further, when people go out of state to buy lottery tickets they often purchase groceries, alcohol, and gasoline. If those people buy their products in Tennessee, they contribute to Tennessee’s economy and pay Tennessee taxes.

Levin suggests that the lottery will not solve Tennessee’s revenue problems. On this she is right, of course; it will also not cure cancer, malaria, or whooping cough.

It took 17 years to get the lottery on the ballot in Tennessee. Its failure to do so did not help the cause of those who advocate tax reform, and its passage this year will not hinder them either. A lottery isn’t a tax. It is a voluntary form of funding scholarships and participating in a game, which is a form of entertainment. People play the lottery in approximately the same proportions as their income levels. In fact, the typical player is middle income and a high school graduate.

Tennessee’s program has not yet been developed, but I would advocate not allowing Pell grants to be used, as they can be in Georgia, as a credit against lottery scholarships. This would benefit lower-income families while not disadvantaging students from other income levels.

Ours will be one of only three states whose constitutional provision for a lottery mandates education spending on new and specific programs. The amendment requires that the money supplement, not supplant, education funding.

Tennessee may be late getting into the lottery game, but a study by the state’s Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations estimates we will net $300 million for college scholarships and post-secondary technical and educational improvement opportunities, in addition to pre-kindergarten and after-school programs and K-12 capital construction improvements.

We might have made more had we started earlier, but for right now and the past 17 years we have gotten nothing. It is like buying a stock for a penny a share, which climbs to 300 million in the first year. If it should fall to 250 or 200 million, we still bought it for a penny. That is a pretty good investment for Tennessee shareholders whose dividend will be a better-educated work force and citizenry.

I have always played the lottery wherever I go and have won a few small returns. I enjoyed picking the numbers and look forward to seeing the winning numbers. My only regret is that I have helped other states meet their needs rather than my own state.

I look forward to making a voluntary contribution to a Tennessee lottery game and know Tennessee’s future will be better for it. It is a sure-fire winner.

It says yes to Tennessee, it says yes to young people with ambition and ability, and it says no to Tennesseans traveling to Kentucky, Georgia, Missouri, Virginia, and other states — as they have done with more than $200 million — to play the lottery in those states. Lottery yes!

State Senator Steve Cohen is the sponsor of the statewide lottery referendum, coming in 2002.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Herenton’s Baby

Right now, school consolidation — the subject of a controversial state bill which is floundering, or about to — is an idea without a constituency, and that’s a recipe for irrelevance. The only person who might be able to change things is Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton.

If there is a case to be made, Herenton, the former city schools superintendent, and his friend Johnnie B. Watson, the current superintendent, are the people to make it. They need to explain three things: what the cost savings would be from city-county school consolidation, where those savings would come from, and how classroom instruction would be affected.

Herenton needs to say more than what he has said — that, without consolidation, school costs are going to bankrupt this city and its school system. Where is there duplication in the city and county systems? How many administrative positions could be cut, and at what savings? How would the two school boards be merged? Would the 45,000-student county system become an adjunct to the 116,000-student city system? That seems to be one of the fears of the county administration and school board, who maintain — not unreasonably — that any aggregate containing 20 percent of the student population of Tennessee might become an entity too unwieldy to manage.

It’s understandable that Herenton may not want to come out with a detailed plan for consolidation. He has done so before, only to find himself leading a charge without any troops behind him. The problem back in the mid-1990s, when Herenton was focusing on governmental, not school, consolidation, was that black politicians in the city feared loss of their power, while white suburbanites dreaded the thought of being involved with what they imagined as crime-ridden, defective inner-city schools.

Back then, Herenton attempted to defuse the consolidation issue by separating the schools from it, constructing his consolidation pitch around the maintenance of independence for both the city and the county school systems. Now he’s coming at the issue from the other end, professing a desire to consolidate the schools first and the rest of the two separate governments later.

To be sure, he has cut the base of resistance in half, but as was made obvious from the intensity of county school board members’ reaction, the suburbanites who doubted consolidation almost a decade ago when its chief specter was concealed are bound to be more adamant than ever now that the disguise is off.

Herenton, now in his third and presumably final term as mayor, is at an optimum time politically to make a new bid for consolidation. Considering how easily he won the most recent mayor’s race against several opponents (including one from the rival Ford political clan), the mayor might be inspired by the apparent determination of George W. Bush to push an agenda that his hairbreadth victory hardly gave the new president a mandate for.

If Herenton can pull off consolidation, or any important component of it, during his third term, that fact could become even more of a legacy than his being the city’s first African-American mayor.

Incontestably, the consolidation issue is Herenton’s baby.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Short Cuts

Roots

Blue Mountain (Blue Mountain Music)

.

The Oxford, Mississippi, band Blue Mountain have endured some tumultuous times during the past few years. Expanding from a three-piece to a quartet, the band released their third album, Tales of a Traveler, in 1999. While it ambitiously expanded their sound, it failed to garner any critical or commercial attention.

Shortly thereafter, the band left its long-time label, Roadrunner, which specialized in heavy-metal acts and didn’t seem to know how to effectively market a country-rock band. Subsequently, singer Cary Hudson and bassist Laurie Stirratt’s marriage ended in divorce. Because their romance had spawned several songs, many fans thought the band would likewise split.

But, as their self-released fourth album testifies, Blue Mountain — again a trio with Hudson, Stirratt, and drummer Frank Coutch — are made of tougher stuff than that. A thoroughly researched, sensitively played collection of traditional Southern and Appalachian songs, Roots captures the jangly rowdiness and rambunctious spirit of the band’s most memorable work as it relates stories of boozers, losers, outlaws, and railroad hobos.

“Banks of the Pontchartrain” tells of a railroad stray who finds love in the black hair and warm home of a Creole girl. It is a gentle ode to a lost opportunity, and Hudson’s voice shines with a warm grace, subtly drawing out the tale’s bittersweet emotion. The raucous send-up of the well-known “Rye Whiskey” sways like a drunk, and “Spring of ’65” sounds ancient and otherworldly, Hudson’s plaintive vocals and precise guitar evoking 1865 as if it were 1965.

And “Rain and Snow,” the album’s most haunting track, resonates with an appropriate storminess. Hudson invests the tale of a man who murders his wife with a sense of deep regret and profound loss. Lending the song an atmosphere that is no less than gothic, he howls and moans like a truly tortured soul, while his elemental guitar work lurks threateningly.

The album’s closer, “Little Stream of Whiskey,” finds Coutch assuming vocal duties as he tells of a dying hobo’s last wishes. His rusty-hinge voice fits the song perfectly, lending its unique vision of a whiskey-soaked afterlife a rough, drunken swagger.

Ultimately, Roots serves as a reassertion of the band’s identity, a reconnection with its influences and with the dark corners of Southern music. Despite the band’s several recent splits — with its fourth member, with Roadrunner, and between Hudson and Stirratt — Blue Mountain haven’t sounded so together in a long time. — Stephen Deusner

Grade: B+

Blue Mountain will be at the Hi-Tone Café on Friday, March 2nd.

Stephen Malkmus

Stephen Malkmus (Matador)

When Pavement first emerged from the indie scene in the early Nineties with a sound both rawer and richer than any of their cohorts, mystery was part of the allure. Band photos were scarce and the group’s core members — high school buddies Steve Malkmus and Scott Kannberg — were known solely by the monikers SM and Spiral Stairs. The mystery matched the music: cryptic, dissonant, yet stunningly melodic noizetoons that made the post-punk milieu of Suburban Anywhere seem strange and romantic for the first and last time. Back then, no one saw a conventional rock story in the band’s future — “maturation,” break-up, solo moves.

But here we are. With Pavement no more, generational icon Malkmus has released his first solo record and it’s a doozy. Stephen Malkmus doesn’t compare with the three essential Pavement albums — Slanted and Enchanted; Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain; and Brighten the Corners — but it’s a more focused, more engaging affair than fine second-tier-band works like Wowee Zowee and Terror Twilight. Backed by a Portland indie duo Malkmus has dubbed the Jicks, this solo move is close enough to the mid-tempo, sugary crunch of late-era Pavement to confirm that Malkmus was the musical as well as verbal soul of his old band, though the spark-filled guitar interplay between Malkmus and Kannberg is missed.

Malkmus’ hyperliterate songwriting here is more direct and narrative-focused than before, displaying a more distanced, literary wit than he did in Pavement: songs about Ancient Greece, autobiographies of Yul Brynner and Captain Hook. But the best moments are still the most personal. “Jennifer and the Ess-Dog,” a sardonic yet compassionate take on young love amid the upper middle-class — “Jennifer takes a man/in a Sixties cover band/He’s the Ess-Dog/Sean, if you wish/She’s 18/He’s 31/She’s a rich girl/He’s the son/of a Coca-Cola middleman” — returns Malkmus to his native turf with truly stunning results. It’s the most straightforward song he’s ever written, and one of the best. Almost as great is the soaring “Church on White,” the most intimate and emotional song on the album, which has Malkmus taking stock of his own shape-shifting legacy with the chorus, “All you really wanted was everything/Plus everything/And in truth I only poured you/Half a lie.”

How many other artists have stepped immediately out of a great band and released a solo album this good? John Lennon definitely, Paul Westerberg maybe. It’s a short list. — Chris Herrington

Grade: A-

Liquored Up and Lacquered Down

Southern Culture on the Skids (TVT)

I remember the intense feeling of joy that rushed through me a couple of years back when I saw that big marquee over East Parkway. It read “Southern Culture on the Skids at the Mid-South Fair.” It was perfect. It was beauty. It was at once an announcement of a party pending and a statement of undeniable fact. It also contained the exact blend of verity and irony that puts SCOTS songs a dozen diesel lengths ahead of all the other guitar-shredding trailer-park poseurs who cropped up in the mid-’90s. Now, after two years without a record deal, SCOTS is finally back with Liquored Up and Lacquered Down, a mighty fine 13-song release that, in spite of its technical superiority, lacks the rocket-fueled punch of the group’s previous efforts.

“I Learned to Dance in Mississippi” is far and away the best song on the album. With its fat Stax groove and approving nod to the funky bluff city we all live in, this song about a wild night at Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint should certainly appeal to the Memphis hipsterati. Likewise, when Mary Huff, whose husky voice sounds better than ever, croons the soulful garage-girl anthem “Hittin’ on Nothin’,” it sounds like a Hellcats reunion.

Memphis isn’t the only Southern music town whose sound gets sampled on this disc. The groovy retro licks on “Pass the Hatchet” and Rick Miller’s spoken “Let me chop it/Let me chop it/TIMBER!” will remind folks that SCOTS owes a great debt to Athens’ own B-52s. And while we’re talking Georgia, it should be noted that both “The Haw River Stomp” and “King of the Mountain” sound too much like the Georgia Satellites to be taken very seriously. Even worse, the Mexicali-pop of the album’s title track creeps into territory hitherto solely owned and operated by the parrot-king himself, Jimmy Buffet. Sadly, the thin ode to booze, big hair, and beauty queens isn’t exactly a vast improvement on “Cheeseburger in Paradise.”

Southern Culture on the Skids have always worn their roots on their sleeve, but Liquored Up and Lacquered Down almost seems like some kind of tribute album. It’s solid front to back but desperately in need of some hellfire to make it cook. — Chris Davis

Grade: B

Southern Culture on the Skids will be at the New Daisy Theatre on Friday, March 2nd, with the Forty-Fives.

You can e-mail Chris Herrington at herrington@memphisflyer.com.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Past Tense

CREDIT: photo by Herbert Randall

It’s been 38 years since dynamite killed Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, and Cynthia Wesley in Birmingham, Alabama; 37 years since members of the Ku Klux Klan shot and killed James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi; 36 years since a lone gunman shot and killed Jon Daniels outside a rural grocery in Lowndes County, Alabama; and 35 years since fire bombs hit the home of Vernon Dahmer near Hattiesburg, Mississippi, leading soon after to Dahmer’s death.

Dahmer was a middle-aged black businessman and landowner respected by blacks and whites alike. Daniels, age 26, was a white seminarian originally from Vermont. Chaney, 20, was a black from Meridian; Goodman, 20, and Schwerner, 23, were whites from New York. All five participated in the Freedom Summer of 1964, and all, for that reason alone, were objects of suspicion, potential targets of white violence.

Denise, Carole, Addie Mae, and Cynthia were not local civil rights activists, however, nor were they “outside agitators” acting on conscience and publicly calling for an end to bigotry. They were, on September 13, 1963, four girls in their early teens in Sunday school at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. But their church had been the starting point the previous April for a march led by Martin Luther King Jr., and when dynamite ripped through its foundation, the blast blew their Sunday best from their backs.

Who was directly responsible for these crimes? Initial investigations on top of reopened investigations over the past several decades have identified the guilty, overturned in some cases innocent verdicts, and put those guilty behind bars. But several new books — one memoir, one biography, a photography collection, and two major histories — depict more than the well-covered events enacted by equally well-known players. Together they concentrate on individual figures, some known, some not-so-known, who shaped or were shaped by the uncivil Sixties South.

One of those not-so-knowns was a minister named Robert Marsh, who moved his family from the relative quiet of southernmost Alabama in the spring of 1967 to become pastor of the First Baptist Church of Laurel, Mississippi. This was a plum assignment for an up-and-coming “Man of God, revered by everyone who knew him for his preaching and teaching and spiritual insight,” a Man of God equipped as well with the build of a line-backer and “killer good looks.” The words are those of Marsh’s son Charles, who in The Last Days: A Son’s Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of the New South (Basic Books) tells of just how unquiet Laurel’s corner of Mississippi was in 1967, especially unquiet if a pastor so much as questioned his white congregation’s basic stand on race. And it was Bob Marsh’s basic stand too until two events drove him near to breakdown: his handing of the Jaycee of the Year award to a man who within the hour was arrested for killing Vernon Dahmer; and his subsequent talk with a black minister in Laurel who gave Bob Marsh a lesson in the price paid for taking an honest stand. But the book is more: an especially close look at the fine-tunings of racism within a single, extended, Southern family — from the author’s grandfather, Kenneth Toler, who “dared to tell Jim Crow’s dirty secrets” as a reporter covering Mississippi politics for The Commercial Appeal, to an uncle in Kosciusko who helped found that town’s virulent Citizen’s Council.

Any wonder, then, that Bob Marsh, on the invitation of Green Acres star and Laurel native Tommy Lester, preached to Jesus freaks for a few weeks north of San Francisco? Laurel had changed him, California changed him, and Bob Marsh (along with the political gains of blacks in the South generally) helped change Laurel upon his return. Author Charles Marsh, professor of religion at the University of Virginia, changed too — into directing the “Project on Lived Theology,” a topic his father taught him even as his father perhaps scarcely realized it.

Lived theology took a life-ending turn, however, in 1965, in Alabama, in the person of Jon Daniels, subject of Charles Eagles’ recently republished Outside Agitator (University of Alabama Press). A child of New England Congregationalist parents, the quiet, bookish Daniels hardened himself at the Virginia Military Institute, quit Harvard as an English graduate student his first year, and turned his sights to the priesthood when he entered the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There his training required work with the inner-city poor, and there, in the spring of 1965, he heeded Martin Luther King’s call for clergy to march from Selma to Montgomery. And it was in Alabama that Daniels mostly remained — registering black voters, integrating churches, manning protest lines — until August, when he and other demonstrators (including Stokely Carmichael) were arrested in the town of Fort Deposit for marching without a permit.

The mayor was advised to release them, but he could not advise Tom Coleman, who encountered Daniels, along with the Catholic priest Richard Morrisroe and two black women also serving as civil rights workers. Outside a grocery near Hayneville, Coleman pulled out a shotgun, fired on Daniels, who died instantly, and fired on Morrisroe, hitting him in the back, an injury from which he eventually recovered. An all-male, all-white jury took 1 hour, 31 minutes to find Coleman not guilty of manslaughter. The defendant, the jury informed the court, was understandably acting in self-defense against two churchmen Coleman alleged were armed.

In 1994, the Episcopal church officially made Daniels a martyr of the church and added his name to its Calendar of Lesser Feasts and Fasts. And in the Chapel of Saints and Martyrs of Our Own Time at Canterbury Cathedral, his name appears alongside Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King Jr., and Archbishop Oscar Romero. This for a man Charles Eagles in his thoroughly researched and equally troubling Outside Agitator calls “a civil rights activist who was not a leader.” What Eagles means is a self-knowing leader in his own eyes in his own time. But T.S. Eliot, with eternity in mind, called a martyrdom “a design of God, for his love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to his ways.” Make God, then, the designer; Jon Daniels, the non-knowing means back to God’s ways. (And if this makes Tom Coleman an unwitting tool, you are welcome to your beliefs.)

A year before Daniels’ murder, the look, the black and white look of civil rights volunteers from North and South, you can find in the photographs by Herbert Randall in Faces of Freedom Summer (University of Alabama Press). Published here are a handful of the 1,759 negatives Randall’s camera generated thanks to a fellowship which enabled him to spend a year creating a photographic essay on black life, an essay, thanks to the urging of Sandy Leigh, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee field secretary, Randall centered on the committee’s work that summer in Mississippi, Hattiesburg in particular.

Randall’s end-products were negatives not even he had thought to print until a University of Southern Mississippi staff photographer went to work producing them for the school’s archives and an exhibition in 1999. And what the resulting photographs lack in polish they make up for in immediacy: whether it’s Pete Seeger smarting under the glare of a Southern sun, Vernon Dahmer topped in a pith helmet and instructing Northern volunteers on the anatomy of a cotton plant, Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld’s blood-stained head and shirt, or Sandy Leigh’s anxious expression during a community center get-together in Palmer’s Crossing — an expression denoting full knowledge that Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner had disappeared. Did Leigh know or not know then that on August 4th their bodies would be found?

What he certainly did know was Birmingham 1963, “Magic City” turned “Bombingham,” and King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” What we now know, thanks to S. Jonathan Bass’ Blessed Are the Peacemakers (Louisiana State University Press), is not only a textual analysis of that landmark document but the lives of the men to whom it was ostensibly, though not formally, addressed: the eight city clergymen who had called on King, in print, to follow a gradualist course of action in order to safeguard the nation from what they sincerely feared to be guaranteed acts of further violence. But it was King who changed these clergy to varying degrees, not the clergy who changed King, and none more so than then Catholic bishop of Alabama Joseph A. Durick, soon to be bishop of Tennessee and, as events in Memphis would prove, the greatest risk-taker of the group. Bass focuses squarely on these men, respectfully: their careers, their ministries, their heartfelt beliefs, their sense of justice applied and misapplied, what they stood to gain and loose, what they owed to the culture that produced them. What history makes of them isn’t Bass’ job because a history this comprehensive has yet to be written.

Just as no future history of Birmingham the city can now do without Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (Simon and Schuster), the product of 15 years of research by New York Times reporter and privileged daughter of Birmingham society Diane McWhorter. Privilege blinded the author’s eyes to much as a 10-year-old in 1963, as sheer or willed ignorance did to privileged and unprivileged alike throughout much of Birmingham’s story. But with close to 600 pages of highly readable text and 70 pages of microscopically sized notes, it will be impossible not to cite McWhorter in future books on the period and place. From anti-unionizer industrialists to nascent Communist cells, from tough-as-nails Dixiecrats to New Dealer sympathizers, from prominent city politicos and white-shoe lawyers to Ku Klux Klanners and the truly psychopathic fringe, from hardhead City Commissioner Bull Connor to equally hard-headed civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth, from Hoover’s FBI to Kennedy’s White House, there was hardly room for King to engineer the publicity he needed to restore his flagging image, and “engineer” is the right word for King’s tactics, as both Bass and McWhorter leave us without doubt.

Whenever McWhorter questions her own father’s capacity for trash-talk and his knowledge of explosives, however, the view in Carry Me Home presents a truly chilling prospect, one even Vulcan, Birmingham’s good god on Red Mountain, can’t warm. Trust then to the arm of justice, not to the arm of a torch-bearing god: In May 2000, two longtime, still-living suspects in the deaths of Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, and Cynthia Wesley were indicted by a state grand jury and turned themselves in to Birmingham’s county jail. The charge: murder. No bond.

Diane McWhorter signing

Carry Me Home

Davis-Kidd Booksellers, Monday, March 12th, 6:30 p.m.

Charles Marsh signing

The Last Days

Borders Books, Wednesday, March 21st, 7 p.m.

Categories
News The Fly-By

AND LO, HE WAS ASHAMED

When asked why he fled when police attempted to pull him over, West Memphian Fate Patterson answered, Because I was naked. Of course, that s not entirely true. When Patterson was extracted from his vehicle he was wearing a jacket.

Categories
News

REPORT: LAWLER LEAVES WWF

According to 1wrestling.com, Memphian Jerry “The King” Lawler has left the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) in a dispute involving his wife.

WWF.com issued the following statement:

“Stacy Carter (The Kat) was released today by the World Wrestling Federation. Her husband, Jerry “The King” Lawler, also decided to leave the company under protest.”

Categories
News The Fly-By

POP CULTURE PRESS

Okay, I ll be the first to admit. Sometimes we do some silly things here at the Flyer. Heckfire, the pesky Fly is certainly responsible for more than his fair share of the silliness. But when the CA, our mighty daily up and does something just plain odd (on purpose anyway) it s a little bit disconcerting. This past Sunday, not one, but two regular columnists burned a fair amount of column space by quoting familiar TV theme songs. Religion columnist David Walters, showed great restraint by quoting only the first verse of the Beverly Hillbillies theme, while Captain Comics quoted the theme to Wonder Woman in it s entirety.

But who can blame them? They re just good old boys, wouldn t change if they could, fightin the system like two modern day Robin Hoods.