Month: February 2001

Categories
News

In Huck Finn Country

CREDIT: photo by Mark Nomura

They don’t mess around with the visitor in Hannibal. You come for Mark Twain, you get Mark Twain. In fact, you don’t even have to worry about all the complexities and contradictions of one of America’s greatest writers, nor worry about the long life lived by anybody named Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

No, when you roll into this quiet little town on the Mississippi River, you get the old, warm, fuzzy Mark Twain, with white hair and suit, who wrote some really cute stories about children playing and having adventures. Not that there’s anything wrong with that — compared to most small towns, Hannibal is lucky anybody stops there for anything more than gas — but if you’re looking for Mark Twain, the Man of Letters, in Hannibal, you might as well look for a meal in a candy store.

It’s all Twain in Hannibal. South of town on Highway 61, the restaurant in Injun Joe Campground is Huck’s Homestead. Down in the old part of town, by the river, the Mark Twain Dinette is across from the Hotel Clemens. Pudd’nhead’s Antiques is right around the corner from Mrs. Clemens Antique Mall. There’s a Mark Twain Gift Shop and a Mark Twain Book and Gift Shop, as well as Tom Sawyer Dioramas and Gifts, a Mark Twain Memorial Lighthouse, Mark Twain Cave, Mississippi riverboat Mark Twain, Sawyer’s Creek Fun Park, Mark Twain Outdoor Theater, and the Becky Thatcher home.

Well, actually, it’s the Laura Hawkins home, and this is where things get a wee bit odd in Hannibal. After a while, you might wonder if you’re in Mark Twain’s hometown or that of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. I confess there were times in Hannibal when I wanted to tell people that Tom and Huck weren’t real, that Laura Hawkins wasn’t really Becky Thatcher — and, for that matter, that Mark Twain wrote some other books that they might enjoy.

Out in front of the Twain home, there’s a sign that reads, “Here stood the board fence which Tom Sawyer persuaded his gang to pay him for the privilege of whitewashing.” Call me a wet blanket, but I’m more intrigued by the fact that America’s Greatest Voice To Be sat on this street one day, looked at this fence, and thought of that story. I was also intrigued to learn that Hannibal’s town drunk at the time was named Finn.

Or you can call me a cynic. While I was enduring a film about “that rascal Huck” at the Mark Twain Museum, I remembered that later in life Twain wrote another story about Huck. In that one Huck came back from “the territories,” which he had lit out for at the end of his book, and he was quite thoroughly insane. I also remembered “The Mysterious Stranger,” about Satan coming to a place just like Hannibal, and Letters from the Earth, in which angels discuss, hilariously, how foolish humans are.

Hell, on the cover of the Hannibal Visitors Guide they have a kid in a straw hat (presumably Huck) holding a frog (presumably a jumping one from Calaveras County). To a Twain purist, this is like Beale Street publishing a picture of Elvis with a saxophone.

But, like I said, you can’t begrudge Hannibal for playing up the Local Hero angle. Without Mark Twain, Hannibal would be Jonesboro, only smaller. So you roll with it. You tour the two Clemens family homes, go through the museum to see one of his white suits and translations of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in Icelandic, Norwegian, Chinese, Finnish, Hindi, and a bunch of other languages. You read that Clemens misspelled a word so Laura Hawkins could win the spelling bee (how cute) and see his actual “orchestrelle,” which appears to be a large music box. The newer museum in town has 15 original Norman Rockwells of Twain scenes and a heck of a collection of old woodworking tools. The tools have nothing to do with Mark Twain and are therefore a unique presence in town.

You can even go nuts and make plans to visit during the first few days of July, when National Tom Sawyer Days features a National Fence Painting Championship (raising the possibility of Regional Fence Painting Championships), a jumping-frog contest, and a Tom and Becky in the roles of King and Queen. There’s also, in a nod to more modern entertainment, a Hannibal Cannibal 10K Run and by all accounts a heck of a fireworks show over the river on July 4th.

Or you can take a different tack altogether: Leave the details of Tom and Huck World to your imagination and go read one of Twain’s books. Better yet, skip the sweet, cute stuff and get yourself a literary meal, something to sink your teeth into. One could make the argument that the very literary heart of America lies in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but you wouldn’t guess it from hanging out in Hannibal.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Short Cuts

Babyface: A Collection

of His Greatest Hits

Babyface

(Epic)

A lot of blame can be indirectly attributed to Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds and his track record as a producer for artists such as Boyz II Men, Sheena Easton, Bobby Brown, TLC, Whitney Houston, Madonna, Brandy, and even that old geezer Eric Clapton. His silky yet clattery production formula has become something of a template for the screechy teen-pop that has infested the charts and the airwaves these last few years. And that doesn’t even take into account his own tepid work as a solo recording artist, which is chronicled on this estimable greatest hits package.

So if his production and solo work are slick and formulaic then how to explain the undeniable attractiveness and, um, soulfulness of his singing? ‘Face, as he is known in music biz circles, has a very expressive voice: quavery, melismatic, full of feeling, kind of like Little Anthony’s (of the Imperials) without the pop drama and sissyman blues quotient. Babyface always turns in a solid vocal performance in the midst of forced funk beats and overly lush production. Edmonds has a well-known affection for ’70s singer/songwriter material (a la James Taylor and Bill Withers) and this shows even on these bloated tracks. However, when he does go for a more stripped-down production style, the instrumental track becomes more grating because there are fewer melodic instruments to cover up the clattering percussion and clichéd drum machine programming.

He sells millions and has arrived as a biz insider who can be depended on to shore up the sagging careers of aging veterans or smooth over teen pop’s rough edges. Kenneth Edmonds’ dream of having a successful, long-term career in the music industry has certainly come true for him, but his sound is mainly headache-inducing. Shame about the wasted voice though. — Ross Johnson

Grade: C

Bow Down to the Exit Sign

David Holmes

(1500 Records)

Movies with “found” soundtracks are often great (Tati’s Playtime, Altman’s California Split), but soundtracks seeking films are often dicey (Eno’s Music For Films, anything by Radiohead). The underlying aesthetic of both ventures is the same, though: the attempt to conjure one medium through the imaginative use of another. Only it’s more successful in movies than it is in music, because a movie rarely plunges the viewer into darkness to concentrate on sounds. In contrast, records are often incidental soundtracks that complement the lives of their listeners but rarely stop them cold. I mean, who has time for staring into the blackness and contemplating imaginary images backed by bass, drums, and keyboards?

Dublin, Ireland, musician David Holmes does, but based on the drippy imaginary “trailer” description in the liner notes, here’s hoping he sticks to making music. Besides, the concept grounding Bow Down to the Exit Sign (as well as 1997’s Let’s Get Killed) is plenty rich and evocative: The Foreigner Bears Witness To Bizarre Tales of the City. His second attempt to draw a chalk outline of urban America through unlikely samples and found hepcat conversations is coarser, less campy, and meaner than its starry-eyed predecessor, which might signify Holmes’ growing discontent with the quality of life in our big cities. Then again, it might signify an attempt to reach down into its concrete heart for a little bit of old-fashioned film noir menace, which Jon Spencer aptly approximates on “Bad Thing.” But who cares if the film part of the equation is ever completed when Holmes gives you actual songs as funky as The French Connection, with lyrics and riffs and propulsion and even a chorus on the first track (“Trying to keep it real/but compared to what?”) that I’ve wanted to hear my whole life? — Addison Engelking

Grade: A-

Mass Romantic

The New Pornographers

(Mint Records)

An ad hoc act composed of musicians from various indie outfits, the Canadian-heavy New Pornographers play a decidedly lo-fi brand of pop music that might be compared to the cream of the Elephant 6 crop. But as the smart, driving, vaguely retro Mass Romantic proves, the Pornographers’ tunes are more accessible and direct and less willfully esoteric than those by many of their Southern counterparts.

Sharing vocal duties are critical darling Neko Case, former Zumpano singer Carl Newman, and erstwhile Destroyer member Blaine Thurier. Newman has an athletic voice that bops along with energetic melodies like the new-wave “The Body Says No,” and Thurier sounds like the Canadian counterpart to Britain’s career eccentric Robyn Hitchcock. But the real standout on Mass Romantic is Case, who belts just a few songs, most notably the title track and “Letter from an Occupant.” Still full of sass and spirit, she displays surprising versatility as a vocalist, shedding the torch-and-twang of last year’s stunning Furnace Room Lullaby and re-creating herself as a pop chanteuse of unexpected power.

The Pornographers half-bury such dynamic vocals and well-developed melodies in guitar buzz and production distortion. But it all works: The effect is a slow revelation of the songs’ many charms over several listens. — Stephen Deusner

Grade: A-

Lost Souls

Doves

(Astralwerks)

The Doves are an almost entirely organic three-piece band that rose from the ashes of not-so-organic Sub Sub — stalwarts on the British techno scene for a good 10 years. Displaying a backward logic in modern rock, Doves shed any and all hint of electronica, falling squarely between dance-pop like the Happy Mondays and sonic blueprinting a la My Bloody Valentine, making for a House of Love living in a Radiohead world, if you will. So, yes, there is that inevitable ghost lingering about, but any topical, semi-underground British pop is going to have a hard time avoiding such a cultural icon.

Now that the name-checking is out of my system, I will say that the songs are built around some inescapable hooks, and when all is said and done, that is what’s paramount, not whom you’ve borrowed a sound from. The guitars are affected but kept in check, no matter how much it seems they want to display some serious histrionics. Instead, underhanded somberness, or maybe even menace, prevails ahead of just showing off a pedal selection. Vocals are spot-on and avoid heavy-handedness — a welcome stance in a world filled with Brit-pop Freddie Mercurys. Kudos are also in order for the subtle Raging Bull-ish cover art. Hey, it could have been the standard abandoned airport imagery, which is becoming a little hard on the peepers. Whenever Radiohead decides to give it up, they can rest easy knowing that bands like Doves are making confident pop in their wake. n — Andrew Earles

Grade: B

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

Categories
Book Features Books

Defining Moments

The Body Artist, By Don DeLillo, Scribner, 128 pp., $22

Don DeLillo is a writer’s writer. Ask many contemporary fiction writers whom they read and an inordinate number of them might answer, “DeLillo.” That’s because he has all the gifts, because he has come to represent an artistic integrity and a willingness to take risks missing from much fiction today, and because, for all his erudition, he is as entertaining as the human race. He may be the most beloved of the postmodernists. He’s not impenetrable, but neither is he Robert Ludlum.

DeLillo’s last novel was the gargantuan Underworld, a bursting-at-the-seams, complex zodiac of a novel, a book seemingly as large as its subject: the 20th century. It should have won all the major fiction awards, and, as time passes, its importance will only be magnified. Now DeLillo has followed the massive with a missive, a 128-page novella about intimacy and loss.

The Body Artist is the story of Lauren, the titular “body artist” who uses her torso in experimental performance art, and Lauren’s husband, film director Rey Robles, who dies after the first chapter. Lauren’s return to the home they shared coincides with the appearance of a strange young man, an ageless creature really, almost a blank, a human template, who is “impaired in matters of articulation and comprehension.” Suddenly he is just there in the house, seated on a bed in his underwear, as if he had been transported from another dimension.

Lauren names her guest Mr. Tuttle and begins to carry on an almost one-sided conversation with him. His replies, when he replies at all, are enigmatic non sequiturs. As the author describes it, “There’s a code in the simplest conversation that tells the speakers what’s going on outside the bare acoustics. This was missing when they talked.”

Mr. Tuttle also comes and goes like a revenant, like the birds to the feeders at Lauren’s window, visitations she is enchanted by. Soon Lauren begins to suspect that Mr. Tuttle is aping conversations she and Rey had. How long has this stranger been in the house? she asks herself. Is he really there now? Or is he just a catalyst to propel Lauren into the next phase of her life? If this is a haunting, it’s a haunting by what? She tries to capture Tuttle’s oblique statements on tape, as if preserving them is saving something: a part of Rey, a part of herself.

“His subject is people in landscapes of estrangement” reads one of Rey’s obituaries. “He found a spiritual knife-edge in the poetry of alien places, where extreme situations become inevitable and characters are forced toward life-defining moments.” Clearly, this is a precise summing-up of DeLillo’s entire, brilliant oeuvre and this new addition to his body of work. The Body Artist, ultimately, is a discomforting examination of Lauren’s search for that “life-defining” moment.

Fans of DeLillo will be delighted with this short, numinous story, a neoteric Grimm tale, an ultramodern spectralogy. The story is made up of particulars, precisely observed and described; each line meticulously crafted and essential to the whole. “[Lauren] was alert to the clarity of the moment but knew it was ending already,” DeLillo writes early on, and the action of The Body Artist seems to take place between such twinklings of observation. It is a work of such refined and well-tuned writing it seems to be a high-wire act, a poem written with a switchblade.

“Time seems to pass,” DeLillo writes at the opening of the novel. “The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web. There is a quickness of light and a sense of things outlined precisely …. You know more surely who you are on a strong bright day after a storm when the smallest falling leaf is stabbed with self-awareness.”

The Body Artist is DeLillo’s most delicate work, a finely etched cryptogram, where mystery is made concrete and the concrete is made mysterious. Its magic is like Beckett’s: serious comedy built slowly and carefully, like that spider’s web. Put another way, this is a novel made of spun glass, brittle, elegant, and sharp at the edges — further proof that Don DeLillo is one of our finest and most important writers.

Categories
Opinion

About Bob

I write in defense of the bump and grind.

And the spotlighted shoulder-roll invitation. Pigeon-toe coyness. The peep-show nod of a bolo hat, sheer black tights, and a bar-back chair. A hand holding a cigarette, its smoke outlining the curve of a woman’s hip.

I write in defense of Bob Fosse.

Not that Bob Fosse, the man, the choreographer, the director, the self-styled dancin’ man, needs defending. He won mainstream accolades galore: an Emmy, a Tony, and an Oscar in one year. It’s his artful mixing of the bawdy and the sophisticated on stage before anyone else and better than anyone else that has been seemingly forgotten in modern musical theater. Consider contemporary adaptations of Fosse style. And if you think you don’t know Fosse, you do. His razzle-dazzle combination of jazz, burlesque, ballet, acrobatics, and Tin Pan/vaudevillian choreography has influenced every major performing artist from MTVers to Carnegie Hallers. Yet, try as some might to mimic the choreographer’s magic, it’s clear that stage entertainment will never be as complex, interesting, or fun as Fosse made it.

True, Fosse, the biographical musical which opened to a full house Tuesday night at The Orpheum, was not choreographed by the man himself but by Ann Reinking, his protegÇ and current Broadway diva since Liza with a Z gained 400 pounds. Though the show appears to be Fosse turned up a notch, with almost identical staging of his most famous numbers from Chicago, Sweet Charity, Cabaret, The Pajama Game, and Dancin’ — missing are Pippin and Damn Yankees — Reinking has carefully placed transitional interludes between numbers as a way to introduce the audience to a different side of the artist. But she doesn’t mess with the essence of Fosse’s special brand of vaudevillian entertainment. “Steam Heat,” Fosse’s trademark piece, stands out in the revue as does “Big Spender” from Sweet Charity. The show is a genuine ode to Reinking’s mentor. And as with anything associated with Fosse, the musical maintains its unapologetic sexiness.

But not every musical that Fosse placed a hip-swivel and finger-snap to has avoided sexual contrivance. Nineteen ninety-seven’s Broadway revival of Cabaret, directed by American Beauty‘s Sam Mendes, is a crotch-grabbing mÇnage Ö trois screw-fest that took Fosse choreography and added a helping of over-the-top titillations. The revamped version is not much like Fosse’s 1972 Oscar-winning film version starring Liza Minelli as the too-talented for a strip club Sally Bowles and Joel Grey as the emcee. Mendes downgrades Bowles to a karaoke-level star in this 100-percent perverse adaptation. “Two Ladies” doesn’t indulge the imagination and, oddly, Bowles’ love interest is a closet homosexual — a twist that isn’t alluded to in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, which the musical is based on. All of this is not to imply that Mendes’ version isn’t worthy; it won a slew of Tonys for a reason. But there is a distinct absence of Fosse’s talent for making the raunchy complex and the profound more digestible.

The film Cabaret was very different from the stage version. It was revolutionary in its depiction of a bleak, upsetting future run by a government of hate bent on destroying all free thinking. Though it wasn’t the first film to feature androgyny, Cabaret‘s Joel Grey in clown makeup likely inspired fascination among glam-rockers and was cinematically echoed by films like A Clockwork Orange. Fosse’s film was a post-modern feat, showing shadows of shadows, stage-like devices such as red ribbons strewn across the ground of a Jewish ghetto to intimate bloodshed, and people in fun-house distortion behind glass bricks. When was the last time a musical was turned into a beautiful, well-choreographed film? Forget Evita. During its dance scenes, the camera managed to cut off all the actors’ feet.

Broadway has become anesthetized, cleaned with giant Disney sponges, its subway stations dripping with plastic cartoon numbers. The hookers of Times Square who could have easily sung their tired hearts out in Sweet Charity have been replaced by Donald Duck and Goofy. What is playing on the Great White Way? Annie Get Your Gun, Beauty and the Beast, Rent, Seussical (starring Rosie O’Donnell, no less). New York Times theater critics as recent as Frank Rich and as far back as Walter Kerr have lamented that there’s nothing exciting happening to characters on Broadway.

Fosse, however, offered dancers a chance to become more than wallpaper for the actors. For the choreographer who died of a heart attack after rehearsals for a mid-1980s Chicago revival, singing, dancing, and acting were interchangeable. And the most concise example of that is Fosse, a musical revue that he had nothing to do with but is dedicated solely to him.

Fosse, Through February 25th, The Orpheum

Categories
Opinion

Magic in a Digital Age

Millions of people fly across the country every year. We’ve made computers that can think faster than we do. We’ve mapped the human genome. But show us someone who can guess our card was the Ace of Spades and we still sit up in awe.

For Kevin Spencer, this is what makes magic worth performing.

“To be in this age of technology and to still be able to bring wonder to anything, to be able to create that emotion in people, is great,” says the magician and illusionist. Spencer is a performer in the escape tradition of Houdini or Harry Blackstone Jr. But neither of them shared the stage with his wife.

“The fact that my wife and I work as a team makes it a better show,” says Spencer. “We know each other so well and so many of those things are expressed on the stage. Who we are together works well on the stage.”

Cindy Spencer got involved in magic through Kevin. She was working as a diamond consultant and dating Kevin’s roommate when the three of them started performing together. After the roommate left the act, Cindy and Kevin continued to work together and eventually fell in love. They’ve been married for 18 years.

Spencer, on the other hand, has wanted to be a magician ever since he was very young.

“I was 5 or 6 when I saw my first magic show. It was so completely fascinating.” After getting a magic kit for Christmas, he started putting on shows, eventually doing them for local civic groups during junior high and high school.

“I lived in a farm town in Indiana. Everybody knew I was the little boy who did magic.”

During college, he majored in clinical psychology and worked his way through by continuing to give magic shows.

“I was going into it to help people with their minds,” Spencer says and laughs. “Now all I do is mess with them.”

It was around this time he saw Doug Henning perform, talked to him backstage after the show for over an hour, and decided that he was going to do magic for a living. But Spencer says his show is a little different from most of the magic shows you see in live venues or on television.

For one thing, the Spencers perform with a lot of audience participation.

“That’s the most exciting part, when people can experience it for themselves,” says Spencer. “When they can be close to it, it becomes incredible.” But it also lends credibility to the show. After an audience member comes off the stage, his friends and neighbors can ask him what exactly happened.

But the main difference, Spencer thinks, is that they try to present the show with a theatrical twist.

“A lot of times when you see magicians perform, they bring the illusion onto the stage and then they carry the box off after they’re through.” This is not the way the Spencers work. Using elements from the theater — music, lighting, scenery, special effects — the duo tries to bring a sense of heightened tension and fluidity to the production.

“Like any good play or musical, the audience experiences a wide variety of emotions,” says Spencer. “There are light-hearted tricks and then there are very dramatic moments.”

But all that sleight of hand is building toward one key moment.

“Each illusion is a kind of act on its own. They are each dressed differently until we get to the finale.” The Spencers try to tailor each show to the stage on which they’re performing. On the stage of the Bartlett Performing Arts Center, that means Houdini’s water trick: A milk tank is filled to the brim with 50 gallons of water, and Spencer is chained and padlocked inside the tank.

“And I have to get out,” says Spencer. “It’s pretty intense. Not many people do it anymore. I’m not sure if that’s because of skill or stupidity.”

He laughs and decides it’s a question of skill.

The Spencers: Theatre of Illusion

8 p.m., Friday, February 23rd

$15

Bartlett Performing Arts and Conference Center

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

The Rattrap Salesman

(BOMBAY) — India is driven by commerce. Despite its widespread poverty, Indians buy and sell everywhere — on the streets, in their homes, in stores and tiny stalls, even in the middle of traffic.

Once the doorbell rang in the Bombay apartment where my family and I are staying with relatives. It was after 10 p.m. When I looked out the peep hole and described the old woman in a sari I saw in the hallway, the people inside just laughed. Apparently they had encountered her before. She was selling sleepwear — lingerie — door-to-door.

Every morning we are awakened by a cacophony of sounds, which includes car and truck horns, crows cawing, and the sing-song shouts of hawkers outside the apartment selling fruits and vegetables from push carts. In the amazing tangle that is Bombay traffic we are offered toys, flowers, books, magazines, and miniature Indian flags (January 26 is Independence Day). Outside the most upscale stores, vendors set up shop, selling everything imaginable. There are even people on the street who will shine your shoes, give you a shave, or clean your ears.

Then there was the rat trap salesman in Hyderabad.

My father-in-law operates a liquor store that was owned by his father before him. One day during our stay in Hyderabad, I noticed a man outside the shop with some unusual wares. On closer inspection, I saw that he was selling all kinds of rattraps and rodent poisons. He had humane traps (both wooden and metal) for catching the rats alive and the more traditional metal traps that break the rodent’s neck.

It was an impressive array of goods and I stopped to look more closely. The man, who had very dark skin and appeared to be in his 30s, smiled at me. I returned the smile. By this time I had learned to avoid the frustrating dance of two people who don’t speak the same language. Since I don’t speak Telugu or Hindi and he didn’t know English, we were confined to smiling at each other and making the universal signs of greeting. We nodded a lot.

I found myself watching the rattrap salesman as he went about his daily chore of laying his rug down on the sidewalk and then putting out his display in an orderly fashion. He didn’t hawk but waited for an interested customer and then began the inevitable haggling. We continued to smile at each other as I went to and from the house (which is above the store).

The night before we left Hyderabad to return to Bombay one of the relatives who works in the store told me at dinner that the rat trap salesman wanted to come back with me to the United States. He had assured the relative that he would be no trouble to me and that he would be available to do any chores I wished him to perform both at my home and in my office.

Because there are so many people in India and so few jobs available, there are people who do all kinds of work. A middle-class family can easily afford someone who will come to their house and cook, another person to clean the floors and make the beds, and another to wash the clothes. (This man is called the “dobhi.”) Likewise it is affordable to have someone drive your car (or wash it), bring you a newspaper, or run your errands. This is the world the rattrap salesman visualized; this is the world he knows.

The next day, I gave him a 100 rupee note — about two U.S. dollars. (I had originally wanted to buy one of his wooden traps, but decided it would be too cumbersome to bring back.) He smiled. I smiled.

When it came time to load the cars for the trip to the train station, I shook his hand before getting into the car. From the front seat, I could see him deliberating. Finally, just before the car pulled off, he handed me a note. It read:

Respected Sir,

I wont to go to America with you. My passport is ready. I shall feel oblige if you kindly arrange for a “visa.” I can work at your office or at your house also.

Thank you.

He did not include his name. He obviously had gone to great lengths to get the note written. He couldn’t have known many people who could write English. Still at the last minute he could not decide whether or not to present it to me.

I wish I could have talked to him, explained the many reasons why he could not go back with me. But the car was pulling off. There was only time for one more universal sign. I shrugged.

That night as dusk settled on the countryside along the train tracks, as shepherds drove their goats wherever it is goats go at night, I thought about the rattrap salesman and how different his world is from mine. I felt sad — for both of us. n

You can e-mail Dennis Freeland at freeland@memphisflyer.com.

Categories
News The Fly-By

A Vital Tool

CREDIT: Photo by Chris Pryzbyszewski

“It’s like stumbling. It’s like you are constantly stumbling. You know what you want to say, but you can’t say it. All of a sudden, you come to a word that you can’t read, that you can’t figure out. You just can’t find it.”

That’s how one student of the Memphis Literacy Council (MLC) describes his experience with illiteracy. The MLC, located at 902 S. Cooper in Midtown, helps about 400 people like him each week. Classes include basic reading, math, geography, and life-skills courses with the aim of helping those with an 8th-grade reading level or less.

The literacy training is done mostly by MLC-trained volunteers in a facility which boasts eight private tutor rooms, three small classrooms for group instruction, and a computer lab with 11 workstations.

The goal of the MLC is to teach people to read at the level that they want to read. According to executive director Gay Johnston, the goals have to reflect the wishes of the readers. She says, “We would be a failure if we tried to put people through academic course-work [alone]. That’s the difference from traditional education. Literacy is linked so closely with people’s lives. It doesn’t live in isolation, literacy lives in connection with a human life.”

The MLC attracts new clients for three reasons, according to Johnston. The first is to increase the chances of getting jobs or job promotions. Johnston believes that people who come to the MLC are capable of doing the work but are afraid that any upward mobility would expose their reading weaknesses. “I’ve heard stories over the years of men who had jobs and were the perfect kind of worker: never sick, loyal, worked hard, worked overtime, and never complained. When they were offered a promotion, they left the company. It was a fear of not being able to handle the new job.”

The second reason that people go to the MLC is because they want to help their children. “Their children bring things home from school and the parents don’t feel comfortable helping them. We have learned that literacy begins at home,” Johnston says. “We used to just ask [new students] about school experience. What you realize is that most of these adults come from families that didn’t read, with parents that weren’t well-educated, with no books at home.” In addition to teaching parents, the MLC also sponsors a book-drive, where parents can get new children’s books for their family if they promise to read them with their children.

The third reason is simply to gain self-reliance. “We need to be doing what it is that helps people have a better quality of life,” says Johnston. “Sometimes that means something as simple as not having to rely on someone else to read your mail to you. One of my favorite stories is about this lady who was afraid to throw away her mail because she thought there might be something very important that she might need later. So she stacked boxes and boxes of mail in her back room. After about two years in this program, she felt like she could sit down and sort through it.”

To say that the MLC deals with a needy population is an understatement. “If someone sits down with the front page of the Flyer,” Johnston says, “and knows what the headlines on the major stories are, then they’re probably too advanced a reader for our program.”

The anonymous student quoted above has only been in a reading class for a year, but has since written two books of poetry that were bound by the MLC. And he’s not finished. “Hopefully,” he says, “I would like to go on to college and pursue a writing career.”

Johnston attributes such success to the hard work of students and the efforts of the volunteer work force. “I work with wonderful volunteers whose motivation is to really help somebody,” she says. “I think that when you match up a volunteer who has some good training and the ability to meet someone as a full human being, good things can happen. I’ve been here for over 20 years and I’m really pleased to see that that sort of social conscience continues and flourishes.”

That doesn’t mean that the MLC is covering as much as it wants to cover. Though unable to give details, Johnston says that the council’s adult and family projects will soon expand. In addition, Johnston is hoping to help the growing Hispanic population.

Educating the public, Johnston believes, is a core challenge for the MLC. “We look down our noses at people who don’t read very well,” she says. “We approach them in a different way, one that intimidates them. Not long ago, I was at a local hospital and they were concerned about asking their patients to sign consent forms. They were working with homeless people who were not well-educated. They asked me, ‘How do I talk to a person like that?’ I told them, ‘You talk to them just like you would talk to anyone else.’

“Literacy isn’t a good or bad thing,” she concludes, “but a tool people need to better their lives.”

For more information on reading classes, call the MLC at 327-6000.

You can e-mail Chris Przybyszewski at chris@memphisflyer.com.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Fool’s Gold

1. Lotteries are a sucker game. In a typical state lottery you have to guess six two-digit numbers out of a possible 49. None of the six numbers is used more than once and you must guess the winning numbers in correct order. The odds of hitting the jackpot in this system are one in 14 million.

You are three times more likely to be killed in an auto accident on the way to buy a lottery ticket than you are to win the jackpot.

Fran Lebowitz quips, “As I figure it, you have the same chance of winning the lottery whether you play it or not.” Or as John Warren Kindt says in his book Gambling, “The only way to win is to never buy a ticket.”

2. The state of Tennessee will need to use blatantly false advertising to lure you in. The Publisher’s Clearinghouse contest is required by law to publish your odds of winning. The lottery is exempt from this requirement. If lotteries made plain your odds of winning, the game would be over.

3. The state will waste an obscene amount of the revenue collected from the lottery on advertising. The Washington Post calls lottery ads “the foulest of gambling lures. And they lure the poorest and most vulnerable among us through publicly sponsored, shamelessly misleading advertising.”

4. A lottery is a regressive tax. During the first year of the Georgia lottery, the lottery sold $249 worth of tickets per resident in ZIP codes with average household incomes below $20,000, compared with $97 in ZIP codes with incomes exceeding $40,000. Per-capita ticket sales were also twice as high in minority areas compared with white areas.

5. Lower-income people will pay for the education of wealthier people. Georgia’s HOPE scholarship program mostly provides scholarships to students from middle- and upper-class families. Of the 16,376 students who received HOPE scholarships for the 1994-95 academic year, the average family income was $44,876 while the average state income was $32,359.

By requiring students to apply for a battery of federal grants and scholarships, poor and minority students are diverted into Pell grants. They receive a $150 book allowance per semester from HOPE while wealthier students receive the bulk of the HOPE money.

6. A lottery will not solve Tennessee’s revenue problems. After payouts and advertising, a lottery typically provides 1 to 3 percent of a state’s revenue. It will be two years before the lottery referendum is held and another year before the lottery is up and running. Meanwhile, Tennessee will sink deeper into the hole. A lottery creates few jobs and no useful product. Compulsive gambling will create a host of social problems, which the state will pay for in the long run.

7. A lottery will not make Tennessee’s tax system any fairer. A lottery is a diversionary tactic that our legislators are using to keep from reforming our antiquated, unfair tax structure.

8. Tennessee is late getting into the lottery game. Lottery revenue has peaked in many states and is dropping off. Virginia has had a lottery for 10 years and is now hundreds of millions of dollars in the hole. How long will it take for Tennesseans to catch on to the sucker game and stop playing? Lotteries are one of the most unstable sources of revenue.

9. The state will decrease the general revenue for education by the amount the lottery makes. Educational spending tends to decline once a state puts a lottery into operation. According to one study, states without lotteries maintained and increased their educational spending more than states with lotteries.

10. The state of Tennessee has a social contract with its citizens to protect them from fraud. This contract is null and void when it comes to lotteries.

Nell Levin is a social activist living in Nashville.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Reserving Judgment

Reserving Judgment

This week was the occasion (as our Web site, www.memphisflyer.com, was first to report) for a visit to Tennessee by President George W. Bush, whose intent was to focus attention on the details of his education plan, one which stresses educational testing and a series of incentives as a means of improving student performance.

Accordingly, the president selected the venue of Townsend Elementary School in Blount County. This is a school where low-income students and high recent test scores happen to intersect, and thus Bush thought it appropriate as a place to proclaim the gospel of his results-oriented approach.

We happened to favor the somewhat more expensive and conventional approach of Bush’s recent election opponent, former Vice President Al Gore, and we remain distrustful of all those polemicists who like to dump venom on the nation’s teachers’ unions, most of whom supported Gore over Bush. These organized teachers may constitute an entrenched lobby, as their critics claimed, but we remain convinced that their hearts are in the right place.

Even so, there is something to be said for “thinking out of the box,” as the current phrase has it. And Bush’s plan, to its credit, does not commit the sin, common to many “conservative” plans, of substituting rhetoric for bona fide fiscal supports. The administration is prepared to commit more funds than have heretofore been available to most school districts, and we have no knee-jerk opposition to the plan’s emphasis on maximizing local control or its application of the carrot-and-stick approach to matters of future funding and teacher rewards.

We are pleased, too, at intimations coming from Washington that the controversial “school voucher” component of the Bush plan has been dropped. We can only hope so. It is simply wrong, however well-intended, to take taxpayers’ money and route it out by whatever formula to private institutions, some of them highly sectarian.

On balance, we are prepared to reserve judgment on the Bush plan, a stance which is in part just good fatalistic sense. For, like it or not, the plan — or something like it — is on the way. And who knows? Maybe it will marry well with the educational reforms Tennessee Governor Don Sundquist is proposing.

Reserving Judgment II

Questions about the XFL are as plentiful today as they were when the gaudy new football league, co-owned by NBC and the World Wrestling Federation, first announced it would make Memphis one of its eight charter members. After three weeks, the TV ratings have settled down to the low expectations that the league itself had before getting the first week’s unexpectedly good viewer totals.

Memphis Maniax general manager Steve Ehrhart tried to stem the tide of bad press this week, issuing a press release proclaiming Memphis as the “number one” UPN market. He spun reporters at the team’s weekly press conference to the effect that things are better than the national media make them out to be, that the Memphis TV market in particular is doing better than expected, and that the two local games drew well, especially considering the weather.

The jury is still out on the Memphis Maniax and the Xtreme Football League. But the combination of NBC’s bucks and the WWF’s chutzpah could give the league real staying power — a la the old AFL and the current MSNBC, two similarly endowed hybrids. Here, too, we’ll reserve judgment.

Categories
News The Fly-By

CITY REPORTER

Death Row Inmate Won’t Appeal

Another Tennessee death row inmate could face execution in just a week.

Stephen Michael West has not filed any appeals that would stop his scheduled March 1st execution. Sharon Curtis Flair, spokesperson for State Attorney General Paul Summers, says that their office is “treating this as if he will be executed.”

“There are no appeals on file and there is no stay,” says Flair.

The inmate has chosen the electric chair — a method of death that he has chosen over lethal injection. West was condemned to death at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution before the state legislature passed a law that mandates all inmates be lethally injected.

West was sentenced to die by a jury for stabbing Lake City residents Wanda Romines, 51, and her daughter Sheila Romines, 16, near their home by Big Ridge State Park. He also raped Sheila. Twenty-four years old when the crime occurred, West was also found guilty of larceny and aggravated kidnapping of the Romines. Photographs at the trial demonstrated that the mother and daughter were tortured before they were murdered. West did not act alone, though. With him at the time of the killings was Ronnie Martin, who told agents with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation that he instructed West to kill Sheila because Martin had already killed her mother. Martin and Sheila also knew each other; they had attended the same high school.

In January of last year, West’s defense attorney John Rogers argued before the Tennessee Supreme Court that his client had been victimized as a child, telling the court that West was born in a mental institution to a mother who constantly abused him throughout his youth and adolescence.

Tennessee Department of Corrections spokesperson Steve Hayes says that no attorneys have since represented West, but Chattanooga firm Miller and Martin is now reviewing the inmate’s case history.

Death penalty abolitionists are speaking about West’s decision to speed up his sentence.

Randy Tatel, executive director of the Tennessee Coalition Against State Killing in Nashville, says West’s death is a form of state-assisted suicide.

“It points out even more reasons why the death penalty fails as public policy,” says Tatel. “The state of Michigan is prosecuting a doctor for doing that, but here we have a man who’s expressed a wish to die in which the government is complicit in carrying that wish out. Tennessee has executed one person in 40 years. Are we going to become like Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, where the state is a killing machine?”

But Tennessee Department of Corrections spokesperson Steve Hayes suspects that West’s position is a false alarm of sorts.

“This has happened before,” Hayes said. “But perhaps not this close to an execution date.” — Ashley Fantz

Work Putts Along For Whitehaven Golf

Golfers in Whitehaven will have to wait a while longer before they’ll have a course in their neighborhood. Though the city council voted almost a year ago to purchase the former Whitehaven Country Club property, construction isn’t likely to begin for another year.

“The residents really want a golf course in Whitehaven,” says Councilwoman Tajuan Stout Mitchell, who represents the area. “The council made a decision and appropriated the money for the course, so it’s not money that we’re waiting on.”

Whitehaven residents have been asking the city for a golf course since McKellar Park was acquired by Memphis International Airport six years ago. The council approved $2 million to purchase the former country club last spring and the purchase was finalized last October.

Earlier this month the park commission submitted a four-phase master plan to the city council, which shows that planning on the Whitehaven Community Park will not be completed until the end of September of this year, with construction to begin after the final plans are approved.

“It’s a slow process,” says Patrick Carter, a Whitehaven resident and golfer. “We’d like to see something done before it all goes to weeds.”

Residents also say they’d like for the Whitehaven Community Park to have a recreation center and a municipal pool. District 3 does not have a community swimming pool.

John Vergos, chair of the city council’s parks committee, says the Whitehaven Community Park will not be included in the city’s enterprise fund, which dictates that city golf courses be financially self-sufficient, relying on greens fees and not the city. — Rebekah Gleaves

Jail Rape Is Still Under Investigation

A February 19th Commercial Appeal story reported that an internal investigation by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Department has been unable to verify a rape that allegedly occurred in the county jail. But according to the sex crimes investigator in charge of the case, it’s still ongoing.

Lieutenant M.A. Featherstone told the Flyer that she has not officially closed her probe into a complaint Joseph Liberto filed against the jail administration. Liberto claimed that he had been assaulted by four inmates who forced the 54-year-old to perform oral sex and then anally raped him with a spoon. Liberto went public with his story in the Flyer‘s January 18-24th cover story, “A Night in Hell.”

According to The Commercial Appeal story, Liberto’s allegations were uncorroborated by witnesses the department interviewed, including an inmate who supposedly had full view of Liberto’s cell and perhaps might have seen the incident.

Liberto’s medical records indicate that he suffered tears to his anal cavity, intimating forced entry.

Attorneys Richard Fields and Kathleen Caldwell are representing Liberto. Caldwell calls insinuations that Liberto’s injuries are self-inflicted or that they occurred outside of the jail “preposterous.”

“In terms of [the sheriff’s investigators] asking questions — they’ve tended to be leading or suggestive to what they wish him to say or for others they’ve interviewed to say,” says Caldwell. “Of course, if you ask questions a certain way, you’re going to get the answers that you want — in this case those that don’t corroborate Mr. Liberto. Of course,[the sheriff’s department is] trying to take this case out of the pattern of other problems occurring at the jail. But that’s not going to work.”

Fields called the police department’s statements about the case “propaganda.”

The CA story does not quote Liberto. During the internal affairs investigation, Liberto told the Flyer that he wasn’t shown any photos of people whom he recalled seeing while at the jail.

“It’s curious that the paper didn’t try to contact Liberto,” Caldwell added. “When [he] went into the jail, he didn’t have these problems. When he came out, he did.”

Chief Deputy Don Wright had not returned phone calls at press time.

— Ashley Fantz

“Stolen” Vehicle Stolen By Police

Two weeks ago Todd Pack discovered that his Chevy Blazer was no longer parked in his apartment building’s lot. Fearing that it had been stolen, Pack filed a stolen vehicle report with the Memphis Police Department, only to learn that the truck had been taken by police themselves.

Now Pack must pay the Memphis Police Department approximately $250 to get his own car back. Officers told him that the truck, which had a broken driver’s side window, had been towed under suspicion that it was a stolen vehicle.

“I shouldn’t have to pay for anything,” says Pack. “I especially don’t understand why I have to pay for an impound. It’s not like I was driving with expired tags. The truck had been parked in the apartment building’s lot until I could get it fixed.”

Mike Jerden, a service representative at the police impound lot, explained that citizens sometimes complain about vehicles and officers can tow them if the officer deems the vehicle suspicious.

Jerden says that the report completed by the officer and on file at the impound lot authorized the towing of Pack’s truck because the truck had a broken driver’s side window and a popped steering column. According to Jerden, this and the truck’s expired out-of-state tags would be reason enough for the officer to have the truck towed. However, Pack says that the steering column was not popped and the window, which he had broken accidentally after locking himself out, was covered in plastic.

Jerden also says that unless the vehicle is actually stolen and recovered, citizens must pay a $75 towing fee and the $10 a day lot fee, even in situations like Pack’s, where the “stolen” car had never been stolen. — Rebekah Gleaves

School Board Tackles New Issues

With a proposed budget deficit of $34 million on the table, the Memphis City Schools public budget hearing lasted all of 10 minutes. And then a discussion of district consolidation, student athletics, required remediation for competency, and a consent agenda took over three hours.

Only one community member at the sparsely attended hearing posed a question. The same Memphis City Schools parent also made the only comment, telling board members that they could not expect people to make comments on something they do not know anything about.

The proposed operating budget shows expenditures at $678 million and expected revenues of almost $644 million. The cost of the 10 new schools opening in August — for 155 more staff members and operational expenses — is estimated at just over $8 million.

“We’re always disappointed we don’t have more individuals that come [to the budget hearings],” said Board of Education president Barbara Prescott before moving into the regular meeting agenda.

Prescott and Commissioner Michael Hooks Jr. also brought up a previously passed resolution dealing with the pending state legislation on county and “special” school district consolidation.

“I would like to research this issue collectively,” said Hooks. A resolution was passed by the board in 1998 that asked the superintendent’s staff to study consolidation but was never conducted or presented to the board.

“Rather than take a stand, we would like for the board to receive a study,” said Prescott, “so we can be prepared to take a stand.”

“It would solve some of our funding issues,” said Prescott. “We always seem to be in competition with the county schools.” It would also create a district of more than 150,000 students, and size seems to be a concern already.

During a discussion about alerting student athletes to NCAA eligibility regulations, Prescott said that some of the schools were already doing an adequate job.

“In a district this large, we have difficulty enforcing some of these things we struggle with.” — Mary Cashiola

PHOTO BY CHRIS Przybyszewski

Oops!

A yellow sign tells drivers the precise height of the railroad span that bridges Nettle-ton downtown. Here’s what happened last week when a truck was a few inches too tall.

Commercial Appeal Changes Size, Format

Noticeably absent Sunday in a Commercial Appeal story about the daily decreasing the size of its pages was a disclosure about the potential millions of dollars in paper costs the newspaper stands to save after the switch.

The story, penned by the paper’s editor and president Angus McEachran, mentioned several other benefits the smaller paper size will yield, such “less clutter” and being easier to read in cramped spaces. But the paper failed to mention that in reducing the size of the printed page, the Commercial Appeal will be reducing its operating expenses and possibly reducing its news hole — the amount of space available for news stories.

When there’s less paper space, stories must be cut or shortened. And when papers elsewhere have used smaller print to keep from reducing the number of stories, as the CA’s new design does, some readers have gotten upset.

In his column, McEachran maintains that by using a new, smaller, typeface the paper will be able to reduce the size of the paper without cutting into the number of stories. He goes on to write that the “letters will be clearer and appear bigger although their computer-assisted design actually makes each word more compact.”

McEachran did not respond to the Flyer’s request for comment.

The Commercial Appeal is not the first newspaper to adopt the “smaller is better” logic. Papers nationwide, including USA Today, The L.A. Times, and The Washington Post have already made the switch. Major newspaper publishers have discovered that by going from 54 to 50 inches they can save a bundle on the cost of newsprint. And with the cost of newsprint currently on the rise, many papers have succumbed to temptation and cut back on paper usage. The Boston Globe, which recently reduced its paper size, expects to save about $4 million this year. News industry experts estimate that newsprint can constitute as much as 60 percent of a paper’s total costs, so the Memphis paper’s profitability could improve significantly.

Nationwide, page sizes aren’t the only newsroom casualities. At many of the other shrinking papers the editorial staff has also been cut. At The Asbury Park Press, the second largest paper in New Jersey, newsroom staff has dropped from 240 to about 180 since 1997. And The Akron Beacon Journal announced earlier this month that it will lay off some 60 employees in order to meet financial goals set by Knight Ridder, its parent company.

According to sources at The Commercial Appeal, the paper has a hiring freeze on new reporters and positions left empty after the departures of Sara Derks, Bobby Hall, and Larry Rea. Warren Funk, the Commercial Appeal’s director of human resources, did not respond to calls from the Flyer, nor did Deputy Managing Editor Otis Sanford.

It’s possible the Commercial Appeal is feeling pressure from its parent company, Scripps Howard, to help maintain the company’s impressive profit margin of nearly 30 percent in its newspaper division. As the second largest paper in the Scripps chain, the Memphis paper would seem to be in a position to greatly impact profit margins. But the newspaper division is the slowest growing of the Scripps ventures. (The cable channels Home and Garden Television, the Food Network, and Do it Yourself are more aggressive properties).

Whether or not the CA will have less news when pages are reduced a couple of inches remains to be seen. And the new size may be indeed be easier to handle in cramped spaces and beneficial to trees. But other beneficiaries will no doubt include Scripps Howard and its stockholders.

— Rebekah Gleaves