Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

On the Road

A journey of a thousand miles starts not with a single step, as might be supposed, or even with a single suitcase. It starts with the first Egg McMuffin.

Of course, this is my own journey. Yours may start with two tabs of Vivarin and a cinnamon roll, or a latte and a banana, with the peel flung ceremoniously out the window at the first on-ramp. We all have our own rituals for eating on the road.

Travelers cannot eat the way they do at home. Can we agree this is impossible? The fridge has been replaced by a malfunctioning cooler, the dining-room table makes way for the dashboard, and the trusty microwave has been replaced by less savory-looking mini-mart models that have seen the insides of too many overheated cheez dogs.

Some travelers bemoan these changes; they become known as city folks, candy-ass tourists, or Californians (or whatever scapegoat state is next to yours). The savvy traveler adapts, thrives, and then comes to find a whole new sense of security in the away-from-home appetites that emerge.

Now, there may be travelers who lapse into uncontrollable veggie-eating and develop a fixation on dry, whole-grain toast. I don’t see a lot of them in my journeys. Mostly I see other people like myself: We become pigs or kids or some happy combination of the two. Cleaning out the car at the end of a trip is like emerging from a dream, and the longer the trip, the weirder the dream: Did I really eat two packages of beef jerky, potato chips, 10 Mandarin oranges, a whole package of cough drops, a Mounds bar, a McMuffin, and three hash browns?

The funny thing is, much of what I eat when I travel, I eat only when I travel. I have no patience for jerky the rest of the time, but on the road it’s a soothing thing, salty chewing gum that lasts for miles. Ditto for the McBreakfast and all those oranges consumed in one 24-hour period.

It’s garbage, this on-the-road eating. But I don’t really want to change it, though I go through the motions of meal-planning at the beginning of almost every trip. I start out with little bottles of orange juice and maybe granola bars, a gallon or two of water, my own thermos of coffee. But like a much-loved CD or the extra double-D batteries, these healthy ambitions get lost quickly in the inevitable entropy of travel. Granola bars crumble only to reemerge two months later as empty wrappers from car-seat crevices (perhaps the seats have their own appetites, which include more fiber). Orange juice undergoes a miraculous transformation into weak, fast-food coffee (more caffeine, and the cups fit better in the rickety little cupholders). And any vows to eat salad for lunch and a well-rounded dinner come to naught somewhere between rest stop 15A and the “Next Services 52 miles” sign, when ranch-flavored Corn Nuts, a chocolate bar, and a breath mint suddenly seem like reasonable items on the lunch menu mainly because they’re the only things available in the roadside vending machine.

Not that I don’t have some standards when it comes to what I eat on the road. It can’t drip, thus eliminating many otherwise excellent foods such as mangoes, popsicles, and ramen noodle soups. It has to fit in the cupholder or the little change reservoir and be something that I can pick up without looking at. And preferably it leaves residue that I can lick off my fingers.

But basically I want something that has no relationship to my normal diet. I want to mark each trip as outside of my day-to-day life. I want to slip from conscientious to unconscionable as easily as we cross from one county to the next, and I’ll wake up tomorrow with the unspoiled appetite of a child.

Pass the Corn Nuts, please. The journey begins now.


If you’re truly feeling guilty about your road-trip regimen, some intellectual rationalization may help. Call it research, take along one of these food books, and make your trip meaningful, if not dietetically sound.

Food Finds: America’s Best Local Foods and the People Who Produce Them, by Allison Engel and Margaret Engel (Quill, 2000). A quirky and comprehensive road map to all the stuff that you’re going to miss if you’re not from here. The authors cover all the bases, including ordering info for armchair travelers and visiting hours for those who like to meet the makers.

Eat Your Way Across the U.S.A., by Jane and Michael Stern (Broadway Books, 1997). Truthfully, either this or the newer edition of Road Food will keep you well fed. These enthusiastic yet discerning travel eaters can stop on a dime for a roadside joint with something tasty to discover.

Travelers’ Tales Food, edited by Richard Sterling (Travelers’ Tales, 1996). Sometimes it’s not so much where you eat but how. This anthology addresses the latter question with essays on eating from all over the world. A great way to get in the mood for exploration.

Manifold Destiny: The One, the Only, Guide to Cooking on Your Car Engine! by Chris Maynard, Bill Scheller, William Scheller, Christopher Maynard (Villard Books, 1998). Combine dining with driving in an impeccably fuel-efficient way. This isn’t just a theory: These guys provide mileage charts for every recipe. Just tuck that tetrazzini under the hood and drive 45 miles (freeway) until it’s done. You’ll be the envy of everyone at the rest stop! — MW

Categories
Music Music Features

For Those About To Rock

The F*****g Champs

Both dabblers and die-hard fans of underground metal will have a hearty palette to pick from this weekend when the first Mid-South MetalFeast is held at Last Place on Earth. A Friday, Saturday, and Sunday lineup (beginning in the afternoon on the weekend days) promises to deliver the goods in death metal, post-grindcore, metalcore, spazzcore, and er “sludgenoise.” Okay, so you see why I prefer the innocuous yet more appropriate term “underground metal.” And in case you haven’t ascertained this yet, the “metal” in MetalFeast means metal. It has very little to do with the loud pop music that saturated late-’80s MTV or with Renaissance fair regulars updating ’70s prog rock.

Friday night headliners Immolation have been around for 12-plus years, hammering away at a distinct black-metal/death-metal sound since before death metal sat next to the riot grrl movement on The Jenny Jones Show. Coming up alongside better-known contemporaries Cannibal Corpse, the New York City band’s more sporadic output and, well, better sound have unjustly caused them to fly under most metal radars. But they are definitely worth checking out in a day and age when most decade-plus “death-metal” careers end up sounding like bad new age.

Another reason to get out of the house for Friday’s lineup is Epoch of Unlight, a local band whose own black-metal/death-metal hybrid and full-length album for Pasadena’s End Records — a metal label that boasts an international roster — have deservedly garnered them positive national attention. The band recorded a second record for End last December, and hopefully that forthcoming release will give Epoch an even wider following in the metal community. Those privy to the mind-shattering live show put on by Today Is the Day will want to check out Mastodon, since they contain the rhythm section for Today Is the Day’s In The Eyes Of God tour and album. Or maybe you’ll just want to check them out because they have the greatest metal band name EVER.

It looks as though Saturday evening’s lineup will prove to be the weekend’s high-water mark. New Orleans is giving us a huge pummeling mess in the form of Eyehategod and Soilent Green. The former’s semi-legendary live set is a fine remedy to wasting your money on a DAT-backed Black Sabbath concert performance, especially since they deliver a wall-of-shit millennium version of Sabbath with nary a whiff of the revivalist rhetoric so common in the current “stoner-rock” scene. Soilent Green will headline the evening with their patented Molly Hatchet-meets-grindcore sound, as people explode on stage behind an 18-octave-vocal-range uh attack.

But most importantly, Saturday night’s lineup features the festival’s can’t-miss band, the Fucking Champs. The Champs exist entirely outside of the metal underground yet are greeted with irony by the indie-rock scenesters that they usually have to play for. But this band does not make ironic music. Is it funny? In that they have a sense of humor about their work, yes, it’s funny. People who are unable to let great music speak for itself will be left making dumb comparisons (“har har, they sound like Hanoi Rocks,” nudge nudge). The Fucking Champs possess a vast knowledge of music, metal and otherwise, as their records make plain. At a Champs show, spectators must be open to embracing an often metallic form of instrumental music that is much more fun than the staunch in-joke-isms enjoyed by Trans Am — a frequent and misguided post-rock comparison.

Some have come to the Fucking Champs by way of guitarist Tim Green, the only member of the revered D.C. punk band Nation Of Ulysses who decided not to make faux soul music with a band of human props (see the Make Up, or don’t). Green has also been moonlighting as an increasingly prolific producer/engineer, having manned the boards for the Melvins’ Maggot/Bootlicker/Crybaby trilogy and a Sleater Kinney release or two. Lesser histories suffice for the rest of the band, but Josh Soete led the untouchable one-shot Weakling through a double album of transcendent black metal before disbanding them to focus on the Fucking Champs.

For the Fucking Champs, two 1994 demo tapes graced with the eye-catching titles Songs For Films About Rock and Bad Recording LIVE!! launched a discography that was to cause the nodding and scratching of heads for the next six years — usually the same heads. In 1997, the more than 400-minute Home Taping Is Music (Frenetic Records) dropped on unsuspecting ears like a ’90s version of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music as if simultaneously interpreted by early Rush and New Order. This recently reissued opus defined the Champs’ (as they were called at the time) modus operandi: Thin Lizzy, Carcass, Steve Reich, Iron Maiden, Giorgio Moroder, and OMD all mix and mingle on Home Taping, as well as the band’s latest, IV (Drag City). The Fucking Champs will be playing at 9:15 p.m. sharp, and coupled with the rest of the roster, Saturday night may turn out to be this year’s local live-music landmark.

Origin and Catastrophic provide notable Sunday night closure to an exhausting weekend. Catastrophic were brought together by Trevor Peres, static guitarist for the now-defunct Florida death-metal band Obituary. Origin, like Soilent Green, call the lofty Relapse label home and seem to have perfected some spazz-out bastardization of death metal to boot. If any of this sparks your interest, then get off the couch and help put Memphis on the metal map.

The Mid-South MetalFeast

Friday-Sunday, April 27th-29th

Last Place on Earth


music notes

by CHRIS HERRINGTON

Book It

This Friday, April 27th, boasts a couple of competing music-related book signings, both scheduled for 5 to 6:30 p.m. At Burke’s Book Store in Midtown, British critic and historian Michael Gray will be signing copies of Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan (Continuum, $35). This third edition of Gray’s Dylan tome — an in-depth critical analysis, not a bio — weighs in at 918 pages, adding 75 percent new material since the 1981 publication of the book’s second edition. I haven’t read all 918 pages, but I have read enough to have my quibbles with Gray’s outlook and appreciate the intelligence and scope of the work.

From my perspective, Gray seems overly concerned with Dylan’s literary merit, a defensive bent that would seem to convey too little appreciation for pop music as a forum for great art. (The book actually has a chapter called “Dylan and Rock Music” — can you imagine a book on Chuck Berry having a chapter called “Berry and Rock Music”?) And, while Gray is far from sycophantic in his analysis of Dylan’s music, his Dylan-centric perspective still inspires some questionable hyperbole, such as Blood On the Tracks as “without doubt the best album of the Seventies” (I’d go either Exile On Main Street or The Clash, actually) and the recently released Live 1966 as “the most enthralling, truthful, priceless concert performance ever issued by a great artist” (I’m not much on live records, but I’ll take James Brown’s Live At the Apollo, Vol. 1 and Jerry Lee Lewis’ Live At the Star Club). But, nit-picking aside, after Paul Williams’ Performing Artist series and Greil Marcus’ Invisible Republic, this is the most impressive Dylan book I’ve laid eyes on.

While Gray is addressing the Dylan faithful at Burke’s, Oxford, Mississippi, writer Steve Cheseborough, who has written for Living Blues and Blues Access magazines, will be at Davis-Kidd to promote his new book, Blues Traveling: The Holy Sites of Delta Blues (University Press of Mississippi, $18). Blues Traveling is a handsomely packaged travel guide for blues aficionados, full of detailed maps and good photos. Outside of a 20-page opening section on Memphis and brief stops in West Memphis and Helena, the book sticks exclusively to Mississippi, working its way down to Vicksburg and Jackson and over to Oxford and Tupelo. And the information is very up-to-date, with the Memphis section providing the new location for the Center for Southern Folklore and information on the artists who play there, as well as a mention of Robert Belfour’s Sunday night gigs at Murphy’s.

Categories
Music Music Features

SOUND ADVICE

One of the most enjoyable and relaxing days of live music every year has to be the Double Decker Arts Festival in Oxford, Mississippi. A free, all-day festival of music, food, and arts and crafts centered on Oxford’s lovely town square, the Double Decker is a blast and will happen again this Saturday, April 28th.

Headlining the roots-music-heavy bill this year is British folk-rock legend Richard Thompson, who will be closing the festival with a solo acoustic set. An accomplished songwriter and extraordinary guitarist, Thompson has been a force since the late ’60s, when he was a founding member of Fairport Convention, sort of the British Byrds. Thompson went solo in the early ’70s and has been making well-regarded solo records ever since, with 1999’s Mock Tudor being the most recent. Arguably, though, Thompson’s greatest contribution to rock history was the music he made with his ex-wife, Linda Thompson, including two legitimate classics, 1974’s I Want To See the Bright Lights Tonight and 1982’s devastating, end-of-a-marriage song cycle, Shoot Out the Lights.

But Thompson isn’t the only reason to head to Oxford this weekend. The rest of the Double Decker lineup is fairly predictable but still impressive, with North Mississippi stalwarts Blue Mountain, The North Mississippi Allstars, and ex-Neckbones front man Tyler Keith leading the way. Louisiana will also make its presence felt in the form of The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Cajun institution The Hackberry Ramblers, and various members of the roots-rock supergroup the Continental Drifters — Peter Holsapple playing along with singer-songwriter Syd Straw and Drifters Susan Cowsill and Vicki Peterson performing as The Psycho Sisters.

Chris Herrington

You must give in to my hypnotic suggestion and go see The Reigning Sound at the Hi-Tone Café on Saturday, April 28th. This band is, without a doubt, the best new band to emerge in Memphis in more years than I can count. Greg Oblivian, the frenzied singer and guitarist for both the Oblivians and the Compulsive Gamblers, fronts this garage-influenced country-soul outfit which also boasts Alex Green, a founding member of Big Ass Truck, on keys and rhythm guitar; Greg Robertson, who produced the compilation Memphis in the Meantime, on drums; and relative newcomer to the Memphis scene Jeremy Scott, from the New Jersey band Maximum Jack, on bass. Their sound is almost impossible to describe, but not because it is unusual in any way. It’s difficult to describe because it is such a potent combination of so many relatively ordinary styles. Imagine a post-punk version of the Byrds and you’ll maybe get some idea of what it is that the Reigning Sound does so very well. While Greg Oblivian’s previous projects have been volatile homages to ’50s and ’60s pop filtered through two decades of punk, the Reigning Sound gives voice to his, until now, less obvious inspiration — folk rock. He’s perhaps the only performer in Memphis who is every bit as convincing singing sweetly sincere ballads as he is screaming, “I’m not a sicko/there’s a plate in my head.” If you have even the slightest interest in contemporary Memphis music, you simply must see these guys.

Chris Davis

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Inklings

“It must not be supposed that I am in any sense putting forward the imagination as the organ of truth. We are not talking of truth, but of meaning: meaning which is the antecedent condition of both truth and falsehood, whose antithesis is not error but nonsense. I am a rationalist. For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition. It is, I confess, undeniable that such a view indirectly implies a kind of truth or rightness in the imagination itself.”

— C.S. Lewis

The great Christian apologist and noted fantasy writer Clive Staples Lewis was certainly no stranger to the concept of death. When he was only 8 years old he lost his mother to cancer. Within a year he would also lose his uncle and his grandfather. As an officer in the British infantry during WWI he watched his fellow soldiers go down in the heat of battle, a best friend and former roommate among them.

It’s not at all surprising, given his lifelong proximity to death, that the theme of resurrection is so abundant in Lewis’ fiction. In fact, The Magician’s Nephew is, in the most metaphoric sense possible, an autobiography of the writer’s secret soul. It tells the story of a young man who journeys into a magical kingdom hoping to find a golden apple that will save his dying mother. No doubt, Lewis wished he could have somehow gone back in time and done the same. The Magician’s Nephew also tells the story of how Narnia, Lewis’ fantastical country filled with elves, sprites, talking lions, and deep magic, was created. Shadowlands, which plays at Germantown Community Theatre through May 6th, shows how in real life Lewis created his own, less exciting world in order to avoid the perils of emotional attachment. It focuses on Lewis’ strange love affair with American divorcée Joy Davidman, who died of bone cancer only three years after their secret marriage. It is a simple, straightforward play entirely bereft of razzmatazz. And yet, in its own unassuming way, it’s as moving a piece of theater as you are likely to find.

In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first book in the Narnia series, a group of children discover an alternate universe while playing a game of hide-and-seek. In Shadowlands, Lewis, an avowed bachelor, discovers that he has been playing this same game for the better part of his life. He has cloistered himself in a world of literature and religious academia, allowing himself only the company of the curmudgeonly “Inklings,” a group of fellow wits who took as much pleasure in debating theology as they did in swilling beer and telling naughty stories. All the while, Lewis, using intellect alone, has been seeking the love of an elusive and seemingly capricious God. When a bright, attractive, and down-on-her-luck American divorcée stumbles into his life, Lewis, against his better judgment, experiences something of an emotional resurrection.

Though he was born in Belfast, Ireland, C.S. Lewis was almost a caricature of the stodgy comfort-seeking British intellectual. His long-toothed “hrum-hrooming” speech was so very distinctive that friend and fellow fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien adopted it for the character of Treebeard in his epic Lord of the Rings trilogy. Former GCT executive director Keith Salter, who plays Lewis in Germantown’s Shadowlands, makes no attempt to mimic his character’s famed vocal tics. In fact, he makes no effort whatsoever to even do a British dialect. And that’s more than likely a good thing. Dialects can be tricky, and a poorly executed accent is a terrible distraction for the audience. It’s far better to focus on honesty and intent. Wisely, Jack Kendall, who plays Lewis’ brother Warnie, does the same. Unfortunately, many of the remaining cast members have not followed Salter’s lead and have chosen to use a British accent. Even if they were proficient in this, which they are not, it would create problems with continuity within the play. As it stands, those who insist on using the sloppy dialects which don’t sound like any language spoken on the planet Earth, significantly diminish the efforts of their fellow actors and the effects of an otherwise solid production.

Salter is positively charming as Lewis. He finds a great deal of humanity and almost as much humor in his character’s utter emotional ineptitude. The anger he expresses toward a God he loves and trusts but cannot begin to understand manifests itself like a swift kick in the groin. Salter is careful not to ever allow his Lewis to become too anti-God. Though he may have been flummoxed by the Almighty’s mysterious movings, and though the script suggests that God is, perhaps, an enemy to man, the Christian writer’s faith never once faltered. Rightly, Salter’s most furiously delivered lines, which are taken almost directly from an essay titled Grief Observed, are at most the complaints of a child who cannot understand his parents’ punishments. Tracie Hansom is no less moving as Lewis’ beloved wife Joy. She is heart-breakingly understated in a role that could just as easily have been rendered as an overwrought pity party. The genuine surprise she expresses when she discovers that she can hold her own among England’s more caustic wits is priceless, and when the character grows ill, the actress chooses to display strength over frailty.

Director Joey Watson has done a fine job steering his actors through an extremely delicate script. It’s too bad he couldn’t get his actors to all speak the same language.

Shawdowlands at the Germantown Community Theatre through May 6th.

Categories
Book Features Books

Selected Nonfictions

As it is in Larry Brown’s fiction, so be it in Larry Brown’s nonfiction: straight up. Language: straightforward; method: straight-shooting. He’s made that way his way in short stories and novels, in one work of nonfiction (On Fire), and again in nonfiction, now, in Billy Ray’s Farm (Algonquin), a new selection of previously published magazine articles, plus a closing essay titled super-economically “Shack.”

That “shack,” like the author’s writing, is simply put: a set of walls and roof Brown built with his own hands on his own land in Tula, Mississippi, where, if he wishes, he can watch the rain come down, maybe step outside and fish, maybe strum a guitar. Maybe write? Sometime, perhaps, when the tiny building is finally finished and when, as he describes elsewhere in these pages, he is: not on a book tour, not at the Enid Spillway “fish grab,” not at Proud Larry’s in Oxford, not aiming at coyotes, not rescuing goats, not wrestling with a “calfpuller” and mother heifer and unborn calf, and not remembering the kindnesses shown to him by personal hero Harry Crews and an unsung hero praised nonetheless by Flannery O’Connor, Madison Jones.

Brown met Jones in 1989. The occasion: Brown’s first literary conference. And it’s an occasion in Billy Ray’s Farm for Brown to state explicitly what Jones succeeded in doing and what Brown, implicitly, hopes himself to achieve in fiction: “a relentless forward drive of narrative”; “the ordinary things of life [witnessed] with great clarity, [the] weather and seasons and the land that lies around the characters”; “people … caught up in the events around them and swept forward … to the point where drastic actions can result.” In short, fiction populated by “people breathing and moving and acting on their own, as if this story was simply found somewhere, fully formed.” Better put, shorter still: to make something that “makes you forget that you’re reading.”

Needing, however, more than a cow’s prolapsed uterus in the way of “drastic action”? Conflict both internal and external, on a grand scale? People caught up in events and swept forward, even unto certain death? Something nowhere near the “ordinary” but “things,” the weather, the seasons, the land around people so caught, witnessed with great clarity? Anthony Loyd’s My War Gone By, I Miss It So (in paperback from Penguin) may be a story the author found fully formed when he first set foot in Sarajevo in 1993, but you’ll in no way forget you’re reading. You may in fact feel the urge to stop reading and throw up once inside this eyewitness reporter’s heroin-fed brain and inside his depiction of contemporary warfare, Balkans-style and centuries in the making.

That this author is still alive isn’t a matter of luck, it’s a matter of miracle. When he isn’t shooting up on return trips to London, he’s shooting (as cameraman) any number of atrocities and being shot at (as sitting duck) by any number of sides responsible for those atrocities in war-torn Bosnia.

Loyd’s employer was The Times of London, but Loyd’s outlook isn’t a seasoned newspaperman’s cool detachment. He knowingly, repeatedly, recklessly, suicidally (?) plants himself where the going gets tough and the tough (including innocents) get … what? In the way. Of bullets and bayonets and worse. Those bullets and bayonets, backed by bloodthirsty commanders backed by competing, insane nationalisms, this book does something to explain but in no way explains away. Better, as in the case of a kitten making off with a man’s spilled brains or as in the sight of a disoriented crone wielding a man’s severed leg, you, like Loyd, cast your feelings in the bin marked “horrible” and wait “until the night’s darkness paroles them into your dreams.” That a self-professed fuck-up as major as Anthony Loyd could pull himself together and graduate to writing this good must say something about A) the educational might of England or B) the survivor instinct inbred in Loyd from a host of military forefathers. The result either way: a dispatch from the nightmare also known as front-page news.

An altogether different, private, bloodless nightmare presents itself the second you so much as read a word of Roberto Calasso’s Literature and the Gods (Knopf), the private portion being the realization, despite education and reading, you don’t know squat. The least but immediate of the book’s virtues? It’s short. Meaning: a complete reread isn’t an option, it’s a given. The topic: nothing less than the foundation of Literature itself, with a capital L; man’s perception of the gods as real entities, interceding, wrecking, inspiring earthly affairs and stretching back to archaic Greece and antique Rome; the much earlier source of that interplay, the early Vedic verses and ritual practices of India; and the revolutionary reworking of individual consciousness that took place in 19th-century Germany and France, according to avant-garde theories of artistic creation, the very well-spring of modernism. Course requirements: a working knowledge (preferably in the original but translations, for wimps, provided) of Baudelaire, Heine, Hölderlin, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Nabokov, Nietzsche, and Novalis, and never will you feel stupider than you will reading this book. Dig out from college your thinking cap and forget about forgetting you’re reading.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Who Are These Guys?

While much attention has been paid to those who make up the Memphis NBA “pursuit team,” little has been given to the potential majority owners who have applied to the NBA to have their teams moved to Memphis. The three men — George Shinn and Ray Wooldridge, co-owners of the Charlotte Hornets, and Michael Heisley, owner of the Vancouver Grizzlies — will most assuredly have an impact on the sporting history of the city. So, it’s fair to ask: Just who are these guys?

GEORGE SHINN: The NBA granted the expansion Charlotte Hornets franchise to George Shinn, 59, on April Fool’s Day 1987. Born and raised in North Carolina, Shinn made millions owning and managing the Rutledge Education System, a chain of proprietary schools. Later, Shinn went into real estate, writing, motivational speaking, and sports teams. Shinn also owns the WNBA Charlotte Sting and the Charlotte Checkers (minor-league hockey) with Wooldridge. Before that, Shinn owned Charlotte’s AAA baseball club, the Knights.

Shinn is the author of five books, including the 1977 autobiography Good Morning, Lord! and Leadership Development, a best-selling textbook. His biography on the Hornets’ Web site stresses his “strong Christian faith.”

Faithful or not, Shinn has been repeatedly criticized in Charlotte for being a cheapskate when it comes to player salaries. Some of the franchise’s biggest names, including Glen Rice, Alonzo Mourning, and Vlade Divac left because Shinn wouldn’t pay the going rates. Shinn’s most famous player mistake was the trade in 1996 that sent Kobe Bryant to the L.A. Lakers for Vlade Divac — straight up. In February 1999 Sports Illustrated urged Shinn to sell the team because his “stinginess has destroyed the franchise.”

And then there is the matter of the two sexual assault cases brought against Shinn in 1999. Leslie Price, a woman suffering withdrawal from pain-killers, accused Shinn of forcing sex on her after meeting with him to talk about paying for her rehab treatment. Shinn acknowledged having sex with Price but denied any wrongdoing. Later that same year, a Hornets cheerleader, Debbie Caddell, also came forward with a sexual assault accusation. (Good grief, Lord!) Shinn’s wife divorced him (go figure) and NBA commissioner David Stern “encouraged” Shinn to sell the team. Shinn at first entered into negotiations with Michael Jordan, but His Airness lost interest when Shinn refused to make him more than a silent partner. When Jordan pulled out of negotiations, Shinn turned to Ray Wooldridge.

RAY WOOLDRIDGE: Wooldridge, 58, founded Space Master International, a modular furniture company, and sold it for a reported $270 million before he bought his share of the Hornets in 1999. Wooldridge paid $80 million for a reported 49 percent share of the team. Wooldridge has been vocal in his crusade for a new arena in Charlotte, a question that will be decided by public referendum. Wooldridge’s original request was that the public be solely responsible for the proposed arena, which did not endear him to the citizens of Charlotte. Since then, negotiations have lessened the tension somewhat and the Hornets have offered to pay for some of the arena costs. Wooldridge is the general manager of the Sting and also a co-owner with Shinn of the Charlotte Checkers.

Wooldridge is — by design — the poster boy for the NBA, brought in to help brighten Shinn’s tarnished public image. “This is a very positive day for the NBA. Mr. Wooldridge should be a good addition to our league,” Stern said at the time.

Wooldridge is a native Memphian who graduated from Mississippi State before settling in Atlanta.

MICHAEL HEISLEY: Chicago-based billionaire Michael Heisley, 63, bought the Vancouver Grizzlies in May 2000. He raised hopes for the beleaguered team by saying, “We are going to build a winning tradition for this franchise …. Having an owner that is committed to this market is an important part.” Less than a year later, Heisley was eating chicken in Louisville while signing relocation applications to Memphis. So much for winning traditions. And commitment.

Heisley is another self-made man. His first profit came from a house he bought and remodeled. He then took that money, bought a business, and later sold it for a profit. He has repeated the pattern on an increasingly larger scale ever since. Heico Companies is now a conglomerate worth $1.5 billion, with interests ranging from telecommunications to prefabricated buildings.

Grizzlies fans initially thought that Heisley might be the owner to turn the franchise around. However, after dismal season-ticket sales (3,000 sold) there were accusations that Heisley intentionally delayed sales efforts. Heisley denied the charges, stating that he had not gotten ownership of the team in time to push ticket sales. A few months later, citing declining attendance, poor TV revenues, and a reported deficit of $46 million, the new owner requested a relocation application deadline extension from Stern and got it. Heisley then embarked on a national tour to shop his team, with stops in St. Louis, Anaheim, Las Vegas, Louisville, Chicago, New Orleans, and Memphis. About the whole affair, Heisley said, “I’m sorry for the way the thing happened. I think the [Vancouver] people have a right to be very disappointed in me.”

Heisley’s biggest impact on the franchise, other than moving it to another country, was the hiring of team president Dick Versace, who has been widely criticized for his lack of experience and his management style. Versace has also had a problem keeping his mouth in check. He was recently asked if the Toronto Raptors, Canada’s only other NBA franchise, might be having problems like those in Vancouver. Versace suggested that the Toronto Raptors would soon relocate to the United States. The comment drew a $10,000 fine from the league. Versace told his team’s media-relations people to pay the fine with their own money since they had not prepped him for the question.

So, there you have them: the three men who could co-own our very own NBA franchise. The lusty, God-fearing cheapskate, Shinn; the homeboy, Wooldridge; and the “know when to fold ’em” Heisley. Who Memphis will get is up to the NBA board of governors, which should have an answer by mid-May to early June. One thing is certain, however: Next to these guys, our pursuit team looks positively angelic.

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

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Postscript

Flagging Interest

To the Editor:

The people of Mississippi have spoken. They had the chance to take off the dunce cap, but, just like the jock afraid that getting the question the teacher asked right will make him seem uncool, they decided cool is better than smart, or for this matter, decent.

Whether we as white people ever realize and admit it or not, there definitely is a debt owed to the black people of this nation. Part of the foundation of the economic prosperity we enjoy today was built upon the subjugation of an entire race of people.

If we want to take history for what it is, which seems to be the case for so many advocates of the Confederate flag, then we must do so wholly and without exception. Maybe the flag in question was not originally intended to be a symbol of oppression, but that is what it became, and that is what it stands for today.

And this is the symbol the people of Mississippi choose to represent them. Maybe it was poetic justice that on the same day this vote was cast I learned of the government study that ranked Mississippi dead last in education.

Kevin Vaughn, Memphis

Air Ball

To the Editor:

While your editorial (April 12th issue) raises some legitimate questions about the NBA arena financing, I believe it missed in two important ways.

Who cares if Gayle Rose and Pitt Hyde aren’t life-long NBA fans? They are trying to help Memphis realize a long-held dream of bringing a major-league sports team to the city. You may argue with the deal they propose, but your assertion that they aren’t “really hardcore basketball fans” seems a petty criticism.

And you write that there has been no appreciable demonstration of public support. True. But I don’t think that means the deal is artificial. I believe what it really means is that Memphians, having been disappointed and embarrassed so many times before by the teams we did not get, are going to hang back until we see that it is real. Just six weeks ago, no more than a handful of Memphians could even imagine landing an NBA team. Now, even though the deal seems close to reality, it’s still hard for most Memphians to believe it will actually happen. Just give it a little time to sink in. I predict people will be celebrating in the streets.

Let’s get answers to the remaining questions, cut a reasonable deal, and get this done for Memphis.

Carol Coletta, Memphis

Utility Peculations?

To the Editor:

While public officials were busy pillorying the Flyer for its overstatement of the amount taxpayers have had to pay for our sheriff’s peculations, an article of major importance apparently escaped the attention of both our elected officials and the community at large. Rebekah Gleaves’ article about the MLGW winter heating bill rip-off (“The ‘Perfect’ Storm,” April 12th issue) was first-class stuff and detailed the gouging Memphians have received at the hands of their public utility.

Where is the outrage of our public officials about the fleecing we all knew we were the victims of, and what steps are being taken to call the utility to task and force it to be accountable for its fraud (i.e., telling us it was magnanimously reducing our winter bills knowing we would instead be experiencing a 100 percent or more increase)? When can the rate-payers expect that action will be taken to return the millions of dollars in excessive charges we were forced to pay by a utility that seems more interested in feathering its own nest than in serving its constituency? And where was our newspaper “of record” during all this? Dutifully acting as MLGW’s lackey, of course, passing along, with every self-serving bit of the utility’s public relations pap.

Thank goodness for the doggedness of Ms. Gleaves’ investigation. Look out, MLGW. You’re being watched.

Martin H. Aussenberg, Memphis

Burning Bush

To the Editor:

Richard Cohen said it best in his article “An Arsenic Era” (Viewpoint, April 19th issue): Bush may be as dumb as we thought he was. It’s nice to know that if there’s money to be made, Bush is going to do his best to make sure he and his buddies get it. Forget our environment, what’s important is that Bush gets every drop of oil from the Arctic Wildlife Refuge and anywhere else he sees fit to drill. The air is still breathable, so why do we need to sign the Kyoto Treaty? What we really need to do is make sure none of the corporations lose any money because of the restrictions the treaty would place on them.

It must be terrible if you’re a CEO and you see forests that need to be torn down, air that needs to be polluted, or toxic waste that needs to be dumped, but you’re unable to do so. What do you do then? Well, obviously Bush has the plan: You appoint those CEOs — the people who contributed the most to your campaign fund — as our leaders. Corporate leaders control our media, jobs, and lives, so why shouldn’t they do the same with our politics.

Joe Stanley, Memphis

The Memphis Flyer encourages reader response. Send mail to: Letters to the Editor, POB 1738, Memphis, TN 38101. Or call Back Talk at 575-9405. Or send us e-mail at letters@memphisflyer.com. All responses must include name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters should be no longer than 250 words.

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News

Sledding In Heidi Country

Looking around the dinner table, I saw no one I would have met anywhere else. There were two chirpy girls from L.A., a recovering addict from Santa Monica, a Republican political activist from Missouri, a college kid from Maryland, and me.

But the important thing was where we were: a little village called Gimmelwald, on top of a cliff in the Swiss Alps, in a hotel that we called — because we couldn’t pronounce its German name — Walter’s. On this winter night Walter had made the few travelers in his place a pot of vegetable soup, and somebody else had brought wine and bread down the hill from Murren, so we were bonding in that particular way that only travelers in a faraway land can bond.

They say Heidi lived in Gimmelwald, but what they mean is that Old Switzerland is alive and well there. There are no cars allowed in the village, and the whole place is designated “avalanche zone,” so developers are not allowed to “develop” it. So instead of tourist shops and fancy hotels, there are cows and winding footpaths and a log cabin from the 17th century. It’s the Switzerland you dream of: green valleys, snow-covered peaks, flowers in window boxes, and little old bearded men inviting you in for a bowl of soup. The locals have an expression: “If Heaven isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, send me back to Gimmelwald.”

So we sat at Walter’s table and swapped stories and tidbits from the European train circuit: the party hostel in Salzburg, the floating hash bar in Amsterdam, the scenic train from Montreux to Interlaken, the $4, seven-course feasts in Budapest, and the best fish and chips in London. The lines which would have separated us back in the States got blurred, and we met as friends.

There’s a wonderful thing that happens when we leave home; we leave part of ourselves there, too, ideally the masks we normally wear, and given a chance to start fresh for a while, we open up to new possibilities and new people. We find out a little more about who we are, and we’re more willing to share it.

Somebody came in and said the local schoolkids were going sledding and did anybody want to come along? For a moment we all looked at each other, and our eyes said the same thing: “Can this possibly be true? Did somebody just ask us if we wanted to go sledding with a bunch of Swiss schoolkids? Good God, let’s go!”

Yelling thanks to Walter and asking him to save our soup for later, we tumbled out the door in a heap, pulling on hats and gloves, and tore down the hill to the cable car station. Gimmelwald is Old Switzerland, but it’s also a stop on the cable car from down in the valley to further up in the hills. The skiers on their way to Murren barely notice Gimmelwald; most people get it confused with Grindlewald, a resort-filled taste of New Switzerland up the next valley.

The schoolkids wanted to practice their English with us, so we spent the ride up to Murren talking about Madonna and which drugs the recovering addict had done and why Americans don’t know anything about soccer. We also agreed, since this was a mostly male crowd, that it would be an American-versus-Swiss sled race back down the road to Gimmelwald.

Now, about that road. It was a winding, half-hour walk on a one-lane road, with steep hills on both sides — and occasionally stone walls on both sides. A lovely stroll when we first went down it, but one storm later it had become a snow- and ice-covered adventure ride. And now we were going to sled it.

I was paired with the Missouri Republican. We covered the tiny sled entirely. We started, with great excitement, ahead of the other Americans but behind several Swiss.

To steer, such as it was, we would drag our feet on one side or the other. We quickly developed commands — “hard left” and “hard right” or “pick ’em up” for outright speed — as well as a running sports commentary. We were the scrappy Americans trying to shock the sledding world by beating the Swiss on their home hill. At one point, we got it together enough to actually pass somebody and move into third place. The scrappy Yanks took aim at the second-place Swiss sled.

Then we hit the Death Turn — an S-curve covered with ice. The sled suddenly left the ground. We passed that Swiss team, all right, but by then we were going sideways, filling the valley with screams of terror. In the next moment we were somehow tangled together, under our sled, suffering a barrage of Swiss taunting, engulfed in laughter.

We would spend the rest of that night back at Walter’s, trading sledding stories with Swiss schoolkids, and I’ve spent the rest of my life thinking that Heaven probably is a lot like that night in Gimmelwald.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Gilding the Lily

Clang, clang, clang went the trolley. Ding, ding, ding went the bell. And Mayor W.W. Herenton stepped out onto space and said, “Let there be an official arts district in Memphis. And, lo, the storm clouds parted and there was an official arts district in the South Main Historic District of downtown Memphis.

And it was good. Well, it was pretty good. Okay, let’s face it, there were and still are some problems. While some critics have posited that rents in South Main, an area which features some of Memphis’ most distinctive architecture, are far too high to allow for any real density of artists’ studios — and they are — that is not really the problem. This is, after all, a commercial arts district and that means it is galleries, arts-friendly retail, restaurants, coffee shops, and the like, not artists’ studios, that must flourish in order for the district to ultimately be successful.

As of now there are nine fine-art galleries in the area, a couple of photography studios, two stained-glass companies, a couple of eateries, a frou-frou gift shop, a scad of hip loft apartments, and a number of rather diverse businesses. And while these may sound like all the necessary ingredients for a successful arts district, there is one major element missing: pedestrian traffic. It is, as any gallery owner in the country can tell you, the single most important ingredient in an arts district’s success. Last year, shortly after Mayor Herenton made South Main Memphis’ official arts district, gallery owner and coffee shop entrepreneur Ephraim Urevbu spearheaded a movement to create an annual arts festival called SOMA (South Main Arts Association) in order to attract a crowd of people who are interested in art but who might not otherwise venture into that particular corner of downtown without some enticement. Now entering its second year and boasting a schedule that includes a variety of musical acts as well as an impressive slate of both visual and performing artists, SOMA hopes to do exactly that.

Jay Etkin, who operates his eponymous gallery in South Main, is no stranger to street festivals and their effects on area businesses. Prior to moving his business downtown he operated the Cooper Street Gallery in the Cooper-Young area which hosts the colossal Cooper-Young Festival. “During the first five years [of the Cooper-Young Festival] I’d have a lot of people come into the gallery and I sold some things. And some of the people who came in became good regular customers,” Etkin says. “But during the last few years [because of the festival’s emphasis on street vending], nobody came in except for vendors looking for a place to use the bathroom.” Etkin even had to rent out the sidewalk space in front of his gallery, as he says, to “keep the door from being blocked by some purveyor of junk furniture.” But he refuses to make any real comparisons between the Cooper-Young Festival and SOMA. “They are two different things,” he says. “[SOMA] is about the artists. It’s a chance to see artists like Jan Hankins and Chuck Zimmer painting live. It’s also a way to get people down here who might be interested in coming downtown. Businesses that might be interested in coming downtown. We have residential and you see people biking around and skateboarding more and more, but we are still selling the idea that this is a viable place to open a business. I would also like to see more contemporary art venues. This would be the perfect place for a satellite branch of the Brooks Museum.”

In addition to displaying works by its regular stable of artists, the Jay Etkin Gallery will join up with Indie Memphis, the organization behind the annual Indie Memphis Film Festival, to screen a number of films by Memphis filmmakers. Elsewhere on the street there will be performances by the Metal Velvet Dance Company and Our Own Voice Theatre Company. There will be live demonstrations of stage combat and musical acts that range from world beat to down-home blues. Poets will air their collected works and puppeteers will demonstrate how they build their marionettes. And for thrill-seekers, members of TheatreWorks’ improv group, Freak Engine, will perform Wheel of Bacchus Mousetraps, which is essentially like playing “Marco Polo” on dry land, barefoot, and surrounded by mousetraps.

“The thing that impresses me most about this event,” says Kysha Urevbu, co-chair of this year’s festival, “is how the arts community really came together to make it happen. We are right on the trolley line, we have beautiful buildings, we are right next to the Beale Street entertainment district, close to the ball park. People who come down here just say, ‘Wow!’ That’s the word, ‘wow.'”

South Main Arts Festival, Saturday, April 28th

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Hot Properties Real Estate

Bucolic Beauty

If you can’t follow Robert Browning’s advice to “be in England, Now that April’s there,” you might try a leisurely drive through Hein Park, which at this time of year is much like an English village with its winding lanes and meadow-like green expanses. The area was originally a dairy farm, part of which was sold for the campus of Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College). In 1923, the Hein, Mette, and Gerber families, who owned the Memphis Steam Laundry and the John Gerber Department Store, began selling lots subdivided from the property. They called the area Hein Park and wanted the development to have a broad socioeconomic mix. Lots sold from $500 to $16,000, and houses ranged from cottages to mansions.

Hein Park was one of many streetcar suburbs developed within or adjacent to the Parkways during the early 1900s, but its curving streets and deep front yards distinguished it from most other subdivisions with grids and houses set close to the street. Its design is a fine example of the City Beautiful movement, which was greatly influenced by the 18th-century English Romantic and Picturesque landscape movements. While there is a great variety of architectural styles in Hein Park, the Tudor Revival is predominant.

This Tudor Revival cottage has all the hallmarks of the style: a multitude of steep gable roofs, a prominent chimney, half-timbering, groups of small-paned windows, and masonry walls, in this case stone and stucco. The front door, made of stout boards bound by heavy strap hinges, looks like the entrance to a medieval fortress. The entry hall has a coat closet with a diamond-paned slit window through which you can see the porch and front yard. One end of the large living room is entirely open to a sunroom with French doors that lead to a side garden and patio.

The living and dining rooms are joined by a wide archway. Off the dining room is an unusually large breakfast room which has its original built-in china cupboard. The breakfast room, kitchen, and front entry have quarry tile floors. The kitchen has lots of cabinets as well as a pantry. The work areas are perfectly adequate, but the space could be easily expanded by combining the kitchen and its adjoining utility room/back-entrance hall. Remodeling to convert a back bedroom to a family room connected to the kitchen would create a “great room” with access to the pool terrace.

A long, wide hallway runs through the center of the house. Three bedrooms, the kitchen, a bath, and the stairs to the finished attic are ranged along the hall. The house still has many of its original details, including a tiny telephone niche and radiator covers with a faux bois finish to match the red-gum woodwork.

The original master bedroom downstairs has two sets of corner windows overlooking the back garden and pool terrace. It also has its own bath. A second master suite upstairs has a huge, sky-lit bath and a series of spaces which could be used as bedrooms, home office, or walk-in closets and dressing rooms.

The deep lot is not immense, but it has been intensively developed. The front lawn is a lush swath of green leading to the broad, open front porch. The foundation plantings around the porch spill out to the side yards. One side has the driveway; the other has a path that leads around to a garden that runs the length of the house and connects to the pool terrace, a fenced area that is surrounded by dense shrubs and specimen plants. The pool house forms one end of the pool terrace and adjoins the garage. This truly charming cottage is one of the reasons why Hein Park is one of Memphis’ great neighborhoods. n

685 Cypress Drive

3,300 square feet

4 bedrooms, 3 baths; $285,000

Agent: Susan Overton

Realtor: Re/Max Elite of Memphis

Agent: B.J. Worthy

685-6000, 754-5177