Month: May 2001

Categories
Art Art Feature

FOOTE LIGHTS

You’re likely to see most anything in Huger Foote’s photographs. Lush green foliage scaling a prickly chain-link fence. A woman’s feet clad in orange sandals, picking their way through scattered droppings of cabbage, carrots, and cauliflower. A small girl, seen through a plate-glass window, huddled against a laundromat.

For sure you’ll see light, dappling over a leopard-print sofa in a cluttered, cheerful room; dancing off a car outside a Texaco station; bathing a tree, a dog, a dumpster with mysterious significance.

And to Huger Foote – a native Memphian now living in London, son of historian and author Shelby Foote, and a self-professed voyeur who considers his photographs “gifts to me” – all these minutiae of everyday life are more than significant. They’re extraordinary.

“If my book could speak,” he says, referring to a published collection of his works that was released in fall 2000, “it would say, ‘Look!’ Exclamation point! I guess I want everybody to take another look at the world.”

Foote isn’t sure why he titled the book My Friend from Memphis. “I guess I just liked it,” he says during a phone interview from his home in London’s Notting Hill. “It’s not logical. Who is the friend? I don’t know.”

What he does know is that Memphis holds a powerful attraction for him and that at least half of the 87 photographs in the book were shot here during the mid 1990s. “There’s a part of me that I think I bottle up when I’m away from Memphis,” says the 39-year-old Foote, who has also lived in New York and Paris and has had exhibitions at London’s prestigious Hamiltons Gallery, which has also represented the likes of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. “My heart is always pulling me there. Going home wakes up the oldest part of me. There I can get reconnected to my old true self.”

And it was in Memphis, in 1994, that a near-death experience taught him the discipline that comes with solitude and gave fresh inspiration to his work.Ê

Foote – whose first name was passed down from his great-grandfather and is pronounced “U.G.,” though most folks simply call him Huggie – is the only child of Shelby and Gwyn Foote, who raised him to revere the arts. “Literature, painting, photography, these were and are my father’s gods,” says Foote. When he was 16, his father gave him a list of “99 Best Books” – including Silas Marner, Ulysses, The Idiot – “works that changed me and opened my mind to the big world,” he adds.

Foote can hardly remember a time when he wasn’t taking pictures. He started out around the age of 10, first with an old Polaroid, then with an Argus that his father fished out of an old shoebox. “It was a proper 35 millimeter,” he recalls, “and I was very excited.” His early shots included “lots of photos of my dog,” a bull terrier named Rattler, and “whatever happened to be around.”

As a student at Memphis University School, he won a photography contest for a photo he called Boy Upside Down. “I was standing at the top of some steps and he was below me leaning back, just a kid in the neighborhood,” says Foote. “Those are the kinds of things I started out shooting and have ended up shooting.”

But Foote’s life has hardly come a neat full circle; he’s made some dips and detours along the way. As a rebellious, angry teen, “resenting the self-righteous when they tried to impose themselves on me,” Foote wound up being expelled from MUS in his freshman year. “I was smoking grass with some other guys by the tennis courts and one of the coaches came bounding over the hedge and collared us,” he recalls with a smile in his voice. “The next thing I knew I was in Connecticut, meeting people in another part of the country, experiencing the crazy environment of boarding school.” Although he admits his stint at Pomfret School was “one of the best things in the world for me,” it didn’t snuff his rebellion; he hung out in girls’ dorms, left campus while on restriction, and was ultimately booted out for “cumulative offenses.”Ê

Back in Memphis, the good times kept rolling. He’d sneak out of the house at night and go partying with adults who’d buy him all the Stingers he could drink, then get picked up on the streets by friends who’d drop him off at home before dawn. “Memphis in the ’70s was such a fantastic, bizarre, bohemian community,” he recalls. “The drugs, the late nights – I would snooze through school. But my grades were always good and I graduated from MUS. I started doing adult things and I’m so glad I was in Memphis for that.” While he has no regrets about that period of his life, he’s relieved to be rid of the anger. “I like to think I’ve stopped fighting anyone. It’s a waste of time and spirit.”

After high school, Foote headed for Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, and spent his senior year in Paris. Serendipity, as he calls it, guided him to a job that launched his career in photography. After graduating in 1984 he decided to stay in Paris and was looking for work when he heard about a new photography studio that was hiring.Ê

Soon he’d landed a job as personal assistant to famed fashion photographer Pamela Hansen. “It was a great training ground,” Foote recalls, “an endless amount of film, models, a working environment with major magazines.” After about four years of assisting various photographers, including Annie Lebovitz, Foote came to a realization. “I wanted to be a photographer in my own right.”

Although he set out to shoot fashion, his works revealed as much about the individual as they did the clothes. “I started getting a lot of half-fashion, half-portrait work assignments, including shots of blues artists Aaron Neville and John Lee Hooker,” says Foote, who by this time in the mid-1980s had moved from Paris to New York. “I was New York-based but was always attracted back to the South, to home, and the great subjects there.”Ê

Among these subjects was Foote’s mentor, and fellow Memphian William Eggleston, the first artist to exhibit color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art. Foote’s portrait of Eggleston – dressed in riding clothes, fondling a shotgun, looking at once elegant and dangerous – appeared in the October 1991 issue of Vanity Fair.Ê

In the introduction that Eggleston wrote for My Friend from Memphis, he zeroes in on Foote’s talent: “Over the years I’ve watched Huger get better and better: Delightful thing, his way of looking around. Sometimes, one of the best ways to take pictures is to forget what the subject is . . . and compose a fine image of whatever’s out there. . . . That’s something you can’t teach, something you somehow pick up.”

As it turned out, fate compelled Foote to sharpen his skill of “looking around” and granted him plenty of time to do it. In the spring of 1994, during a two-week visit to Memphis, he was shot at pointblank range with a double-barreled shotgun in an attempted carjacking. “It was random,” he says. “[The shooter] was aiming at my head. I held my arm up, ducked, and the gun went off.” Left for dead, he managed to drive himself to the hospital. “Shock is a weird thing,” says Foote. “I wasn’t scared. Just blissfully floating.” But he sustained serious injuries to his left arm that required several surgeries and an extended convalescence in Memphis, which after the Big Apple seemed “awfully quiet and full of empty hours to fill.”

During recuperation, a large box arrived from a friend in New York, the sculptor Richard Serra. In the box were gifts that helped Foote learn to savor solitude – the journals of Edward Weston, a photographer who retreated from New York to live out West. The journals held a message for Foote about living in isolation. “I knew I needed to listen to this man.”

Soon Foote was spending his long afternoons taking “Memphis safaris.” He’d pack a couple of Leicas in the car and just drive, down Summer Avenue, through neighborhoods he’d never seen, and stop to record the details of life – parking lots and light poles, wisteria blooms and watermelon stands, a lemon peel lying beside a water meter. The next thing he knew it was five o’clock; he’d drop the film off to be developed and edit it the next morning.Ê

Certain photos spoke to him. One was taken while poking around an antiques mall on Union Avenue. “I made a composition of various elements,” – a book, a table, a picture frame, a blur of blue – “but I wasn’t really looking at the subject matter. It was just an abstraction.” says Foote. When some-one told him that the blur of blue was a glass bird called the bluebird of happiness, a self-revelation dawned. “I knew that I was happier and more inspired photographically and more alive than I had been for a long time,” he says. “The message was, ‘Just go with this. Stop worrying and keep shooting these pictures.’ ”

He not only kept shooting but started gluing pictures into books, gradually replacing weaker works with stronger ones. “But I had no intention of showing them in galleries at that time. They were for my own pleasure, or friends and family.”

In 1995, David Lusk and Baylor Ledbetter, who at the time were starting Ledbetter-Lusk Gallery, happened to see one of the photographs. Intrigued, they asked if they could come and look at Foote’s other work.

“I was nervous,” recalls Foote, his voice cracking a little at the memory. “I didn’t know what they were going to think.” Later that day the gallery partners called and said they wanted to represent Foote and display a group of his photographs as their gallery’s first exhibition. Laughing with delight, Foote says now, “Can you imagine my surprise? That show just boggled my mind. The thought that I would make money on these pictures never even occurred to me.”

After that show, titled “Thirty Photographs,” a representative with the Gallery of Contemporary Photography in Santa Monica called, saying she’d heard of Foote’s work and asking him to send her a portfolio. He shipped her 10 pictures, all of which she sold, and she gave him a solo exhibition that spring.

After that, more shows followed. Over the past five years, Foote’s works – which now start at about $2,000 and are available in the dye-transfer and pigment-transfer method of printing – have been displayed in some 30 group or solo exhibitions in galleries from Memphis and Chattanooga to New York and London. Last year the Brussels Art Fair, Sotheby’s in London, and The Armory in New York featured his photography, and David Lusk Gallery in Memphis and Hamiltons Gallery in London gave him solo shows. Foote’s works also hang in the private collections of singer Elton John, model Christy Turlington, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.Ê

In 1997, wanderlust struck and Foote headed for London with only a suitcase of clothes and a portfolio, planning to stay a month or so to see how he liked it. “Within a month, everything fell into place,” he says, “the most important being I signed with Hamiltons Gallery. It’s like a fantasy place, like being in the halls of splendor, right in the middle of Mayfair in London.”Ê

Within Foote’s photographs, some critics see a paradoxical world of joy and pain, innocence and menace. Foote’s friend, novelist Susan Minot, writes in My Friend from Memphis, “In all the work there’s a festive celebratory atmosphere and hidden within, something wrenching.”Ê

Yet others, including Hamiltons Gallery’s Tim Jeffries, consider Foote’s works more sanguine. “It always seems to be summer in his photographs,” Jeffries told British Vogue. And Edward Booth-Clibborn, whose company Booth-Clibborn Editions published My Friend from Memphis, writes, “. . . there is something unusual about this photography, with such brightness, such clear primary colours . . . I could see the light of Memphis in all his work.”

Foote himself says that Minot’s description of his photography – festive yet wrenching – sums it up. Perhaps the wrenching comes from his sense that each moment is fleeting and that a camera’s lens can only capture so much. “Having stared death in the face makes every detail more alive for me,” he says. “It’s like I suddenly woke up to the incredible magic, the extraordinary beauty, of everything around me.”

Refreshingly upbeat, well-grounded, and grateful, with a charming streak of Southern gentility, Foote hasn’t let success go to his head. And while comments about the “extraordinary beauty” of life might come across as sappy from someone else, from Foote they ring with genuine joy and awe. He speaks with respectful fondness of his family, who, he says, “stood by me and encouraged me through thick and thin.” From his father he learned discipline. “Seeing him work in his office eight hours a day, five days a week, I saw what adults did,” says Foote. “By example and advice he’d keep reminding me, ‘The most important thing is your work,’ and if I’d get sidetracked, by women or whatever, he’d say, ‘Son, you need to remember what’s important.’ ”

Perhaps the highest compliment he’s received came from his mother. “She said, ‘After I looked at your book, I walked around and the world looked like one of your pictures.’ And that really was just what I was hoping,” says Foote. “Somewhere deep down that really is probably why I felt this urge to show them to people.”

My Friend from Memphis (Booth-Clibborn Editions) is available at several local bookstores, including Burke’s and Davis-Kidd Booksellers, and at David Lusk Gallery.

[This story originally appeared in the May issue of Memphis magazine.]

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

thursday, may 31st

The Redbirds play Oklahoma at 7:05p.m. Last chance to see them for a while as Memphis goes on an extended road trip Friday.

Categories
News The Fly-By

PARANOIA DEPARTMENT

Not only is Memphis in May over, so is Tennessee s Click It or Ticket month. But don t start unbuckling those seat belts just yet. Though the publicity push for Governor Sundquist s initiative allowing police officers to randomly stop cars for no other reason than to peek inside and make sure that all passengers are wearing their seat belts ends June 1st, rest assured: You can still get a ticket if you don t click it. According to press materials from the governor s Highway Safety Office, The single most important role of government is to protect the health, safety, and welfare of our citizens. So don t be surprised by Eat Your Vegetables or Ticket in 2002, Condom or Ticket in 03, or the controversial 401(k) or Ticket in 04.

Categories
Book Features Books

Smut For Smarty-pants

The Naughty Bits:

The Steamiest and Most Scandalous Sex Scenes From the World’s Greatest Books

By Jack Murnighan

Three Rivers Press, 231 pp.,

$14 (paper)

PHOTO BY PHILLIP PARKER

Jack Murnighan, the man behind Nerve.com’s and Nerve magazine’s “Jack’s Naughty Bits,” has a new book out and guess what. It’s called The Naughty Bits ! And to start off we’ll head straight down, to the bottom, to the Old Testament, because in Murnighan’s closing pages and “for sheer quantity of nudge nudge,” the Bible, he declares, is “up there.” Getting “there,” though, is not half the fun. In fact, it’s more “like trying to distinguish body parts in scrambled adult channels on TV. If your attention wavers for even an instant, you risk missing the enchilada.”

What he means is you risk missing out not on Abraham and Sarah (too complicated), not on Sodom and Gomorrah (too obvious), not on the Song of Solomon (too poetic, yet its beautiful verses Murnighan recognizes) but on Deuteronomy 23:1, in which it is written: “He that is wounded in the stones, or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.” Why the testicularly challenged and unaccountably memberless should be denied Paradise Murninghan, who is not a theologian but the next best thing (a Ph.D. in medieval literature from Duke), chooses not to explain but merely to bring to your sweaty little hands and undivided attention. But if it’s the enchilada you want, that’s what he’s here to serve.

Take it or leave it that he happens also to be conducting you on a crash course in world literature. You know, the books you either once had half a mind to get to or, full-minded, dreaded ever seeing the sight of. But rest assured. Of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, even Dr. Jack, he of the “bourbon-addled memory,” admits that it’s read “in its entirety only by the real triathletes of literary studies.” What we get of Spenser is a scant 40 lines out of his unread thousands. The good Elizabethan topic? The fine art of flirting. This, though, is nothing.

The topic when it comes to the usual suspect, the man behind Ulysses: the fine art of rimming. But with this critical aside from the enlightening Murnighan, who, in his prefaces to these selections, is always and everywhere eye- if not mind-expanding: “Joyce opts for cadence and mellifluence instead of hard adjectives … and it’s a shame, for nothing would have given me more pleasure than to see the consummate wordsmith butt up against the aggressively corporeal — in all its ineffability.”

Praise be then, and more pleasure in the eyes of Murnighan, for his exciting excerpt from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow — a scene of bowel-emptying love-making that could easily empty your stomach and send you, if not to the closest sink, to the closest dictionary to double-check your understanding of the word “ineffable.” (The “butt up” part we get but not nearly often enough.)

No dictionary required and no instance among “the world’s greatest books” in the case of Larry Flynt, who, as an “Unseemly Man,” had his way with, then wrung the neck of his beloved, a chicken. Poor chicken. Have you gotten a good look at the face on Larry Flynt? Or, for that matter, Jean Genet? Even so, Genet gets his too — no chicken, just a guy — and this unaccustomed bit of armchair psychoanalyzing from Murnighan so out “there” it may be true (but what of it?): “Genet seeks out these ‘queers who hate themselves,’ finding, perhaps, in their pained concessions to desire a Dantesque punishment for his own inescapable self-hatred.”

Well, at least Genet, damnation, was in good company. Dante’s story of Paolo and Francesca in the Inferno, in what Murnighan calls “the most archetypal of all naughty bits in the history of literature,” gets pride of place, before and above the low-down we get from Lawrence, Roth, Goethe, Toni Morrison, Shakespeare, Donne, Hemingway, M.F.K. Fisher (!), Hesiod, Boccaccio, Erica Jong, Plato, Rabelais, George Eliot (!!), Chaucer, Sir Philip Sidney, Sappho, Petronius, Ovid, Anonymous (?), Sade, Ariosto, Garcia Marquez, Cormac McCarthy, and for those who really know their international best-sellers, Thibaut de Champagne, John Wilmot (Earl of Rochester), the Pearl Poet, Johannes Secundus, Jean de Meun, and Guillaume IX. Plus, and get this, of all nonentities, Kenneth Starr, whose report, we’re informed, “was written as, and is certainly meant to be read as, a love story.” And I thought it was meant to be read as an attempted coup d’état.

But I, a sucker for the truth be told, even be it in a dead language, am sticking with the 2,000-year-old poems in Latin of Catullus, whose “bawdy and satiric lyrics,” Murnighan argues, “are some of history’s wittiest barbs.” He’s right. In poem LXIX, a certain Rufus is made not to wonder why “no woman/Wants to place her soft thigh under you …” The problem? This Rufus has got a “a mean goat in the armpit’s valley.” But that doesn’t compare to the double-trouble of a playboy named Amelius in XCVII. Jack Murnighan has done the work digging up this guy’s dirt. Your job’s to get wind of it.

Categories
News News Feature

Shoot-out In Nashville

After a recent article I wrote excoriating the Cincinnati police for their well-documented brutality against black residents (including the shooting of an unarmed young man wanted for seatbelt violations), I received many angry e-mails from folks proclaiming that I just didn’t know how difficult it was to be a police officer. They insisted I shouldn’t be so quick to judge cops who shoot criminal suspects. Hesitation in the face of danger could cost an officer his or her life, not to mention the lives of innocent bystanders. When a criminal brandishes a weapon (or even when he doesn’t but is thought to have one), the police have little choice but to shoot, said my detractors — no exceptions.

Yeah, well, tell that to the Nashville police department. Apparently it is quite possible to hold fire and defuse a dangerous situation when one feels like it. It is quite possible not to shoot a suspect, even when he definitely has a gun and is firing it directly at officers and their cars. All that is required for police to show this restraint is that the suspect must be an officer himself.

Recently, 13-year police veteran Sgt. Mark Nelson, distraught over being dumped by the female officer he’d been dating, went to the apartment of her new boyfriend (also a cop) while both were inside. He attempted to gain entry, fired bullets randomly into the air, and when police arrived, proceeded to shoot at three officers and put bullet holes in their vehicles. He then threatened to shoot down a news helicopter and held an entire neighborhood hostage for four hours — all this just down the road from an elementary school.

Now imagine that this overwrought, bullet-spraying individual had been a civilian — especially a young black man. How long do you think it would have taken for police on the scene to drop him in a hail of bullets? In a nation where black men are shot for brandishing wallets and cell phones, it doesn’t take a genius to guess that the time needed to “resolve” the situation would have been well short of 240 minutes.

But in Nelson’s case, his fellow officers insisted that he posed “no real threat” to them or the general public. After calm and rational negotiation, he laid down his weapon and was taken into custody.

Apparently, who constitutes a real threat is in the none-too-objective eye of the beholder. Unlike the black officer who was beaten senseless a few years ago by white Nashville cops who didn’t recognize him as “one of their own,” Nelson was immediately considered family. Never mind that he pointed and discharged his weapon at his brothers in blue — Mark Nelson was a friend, a colleague, and white. So the danger that would likely have been assumed had he been dark and a civilian was dismissed. He was cut slack.

How nice it would be if we could say the same about Timothy Thomas in Cincinnati, or Amadou Diallo in New York, or Tyisha Miller in Riverside, California, or hundreds more I could name had I the space to do so. Hell, in the case of Nashville police, two young men (one white and one black) were recently shot in the back of the head for trying to back up their cars and escape arrest. And why? Because their vehicles were seen as threats to the officers’ lives.

Funny how some folks are seen as dangerous and others aren’t; some worthy of harsh treatment and others not. Consider recent goings-on in the state of Florida.

With the convictions of Lionel Tate and Nathaniel Brazill for murder (both black, both just into their teen years, and both going away for a long time) the Sunshine State has demonstrated that so far as they are concerned, one can never be too young to go to prison. However, apparently one can be too white to go there. Late last year a Tampa judge refused to send a 41-year-old white drug felon to prison — despite his having violated parole — for no reason other than he was white and thin and would be “impossible to protect” in the Florida State Penitentiary. In other words, he would most certainly be gang-raped by black men, who apparently are never too thin or too weak for a jail cell. According to the judge, “I’m not going to send a man like this to Florida State prison. That is cruel and unusual punishment in my book.”

Don’t get me wrong: I certainly don’t fault a decision to send a drug offender to rehab instead of prison or to hold fire in the case of Mark Nelson. Both were humane and appropriate decisions. But in these cases, said decisions were made for entirely inappropriate reasons. Drug offenders shouldn’t go to jail, not because they are white but because imprisonment is an absurd response to drug use or abuse. Whenever possible, criminal suspects shouldn’t be shot, not because they are white or fellow police officers but because of a little thing called due process and the need to restrain law enforcement from becoming judge, jury, and executioner.

Unfortunately, the humanity and restraint shown in these incidents are mostly extended to those lacking a certain degree of pigmentation. Our perceptions of danger and deviance skew the treatment meted out to folks all throughout the various stages of the criminal justice system. A recent study at Washington University in St. Louis found that the mere presence of dark skin increases the probability that an object in the subject’s hand will be misperceived as a weapon.

In New York City white drug offenders, though they make up the majority of drug users there, make up less than 10 percent of the persons locked down for a drug offense and utilize nearly three-quarters of the treatment facility beds.

And still, white Americans wonder why their black and brown counterparts question the fundamental fairness of our criminal justice system? But why ask why? The answers become more and more plain every day. They are as blatant as the daily headlines. And it takes a special kind of color-blindness not to notice them.

Tim Wise is a Nashville-based writer and activist. You can e-mail him at letters@memphisflyer.com.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

By Their Right Names

According to scripture, one of humankind’s first tasks was to name the animals. Our species has done a far better job at that than in coming up with proper political classifications.

Consider that the oppressive government of North Korea still masquerades as a “democratic republic,” when no practice or administrative structure of that government can remotely be said to deserve either part of the title.

In our own country there are some verbal anomalies as well. To be sure, our two major political parties have evolved names for themselves which, in a rough sense, define the difference between them. The Democrats, true to their name, aim their appeal at the broad masses, while the Republicans evoke more distinctly the idea of a representative (as against a participatory) democracy.

But every now and then an officeholder finds himself in the wrong party and goes through a changeover. Some years back, for example, Richard Shelby, a senator from Alabama, judged correctly that his political positions were far too conservative for him to remain a Democrat. He changed.

And now, in a switch that will have far more profound consequences, Vermont’s Senator Jim Jeffords has publicly renounced his Republican affiliation — ancestral as much as anything else — and declared himself an “independent.” More to the point, he has promised to vote with the Senate’s Democrats on organizational questions — as he already does on most ideological ones.

Jeffords’ decision has brought upon him more of the kind of abuse from the Bush administration and GOP party elders that hastened his departure in the first place. The switch comes after the ill-advised tax cut which has just passed the Congress but in time to have major influence on such weighty matters as judicial appointments and environmental legislation. Most important of all, it gives the Democrats control of the Senate’s parliamentary apparatus and committee chairmanships.

What it will end up doing — especially if other Republican moderates such as Arizona’s John McCain follow suit — is restore a broken promise of the 2000 presidential election, in which George W. Bush (whose ultimate victory was, to say the least, technical) ran as a centrist and “compassionate conservative.” Since his accession to the presidency with a minority of the popular vote, Bush has governed instead from the extreme right, with a minimum of consideration for the rest of the spectrum. In his public leave-taking, Jeffords said as much.

Good for him. In the long run, he may end up a Democrat. In the short run, “independent” sounds just about right. In that same vein, “centrist” is utterly and absolutely wrong for Bush, who so far has been an unblinking servant of the party’s extreme right wing.

Dutch Treat

Our congratulations to the men and women of Memphis in May, who put on a number of first-class events this year — the stellar Beale Street Music Fest (which drew record crowds), the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, and the Great Southern Food Festival among them.

The weather cooperated beautifully and everything seemed to go off without a hitch. The MIM organization seems to have risen above its troubles of a couple of years back and soared to new heights. Kudos to Jim Holt, Diane Hampton, and the hundreds of others who made Memphis in May a triumph this year.

Categories
News The Fly-By

City Reporter

CREDIT: Photo courtesy of Jacqueline Smith

Museum Protester Given Car Used By MLK

After 13 years, Jacqueline Smith is getting a new set of wheels.

Smith, the National Civil Rights Museum protester who calls herself the last tenant of the Lorraine Motel, will soon have an automobile to aid her in her battle.

“A supporter of the protest found out about the car on my Web site,” Smith says on this, the 13th year and 128th day of her sidewalk protest across the street from the museum. “He came to me and said that he wanted to purchase the car and then loan it to the protest.”

The car is the 1966 Lincoln Continental that was loaned to and used by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the American Federation of State and County Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union officials during the 1968 Sanitation Workers’ Strike. Originally owned by community activist Cornelia Crenshaw, the car was rotting on the lot of a local body shop.

“They had it for a number of years,” says Smith, “probably since 1979. We found a newspaper in it from 1979, that’s how we know.”

Although Crenshaw died in 1994, she had tried for several years to get the car back and repair it but was financially unable. Smith says she promised Crenshaw on her deathbed that she would do whatever she could to restore the car.

So when the protest supporter came to her with the idea of buying the car and loaning it to the protest, she was delighted.

“I told him I thought it was an excellent idea. It was something that Ms. Crenshaw always wanted,” says Smith.

Last week the car was towed to Chicago where the protest supporter — who wishes to remain anonymous — lives. There, its engine will be rebuilt and the exterior and interior refurbished.

“We want to make sure everything is done to perfection,” says Smith. She estimates it will take about two years to get the car in mint condition. Afterwards it will come back to Memphis where it will be on loan to the protest whenever they want or need it.

“I won’t be driving it,” she says, laughing. “I don’t drive. No, it will have a spokesperson, someone who will relate its history.”

“I would like to use it to continue the principles of Dr. King,” says Smith. “We want to help people who need help.”

Smith has been holding vigil against the museum for over 13 years because she believes it to be a disgrace to King. She feels that to honor King’s teachings, the building should be used to house the homeless and help the poor. · — Mary Cashiola

Cooper-Young Forms Food Co-op

“I want good food at a good price without having to drive all the way across town to get it,” says a member of the Midtown Food Cooperative, a shopper-owned whole and health foods store planned to open in the Cooper-Young neighborhood in late June.

Based on a model that has worked throughout the United States, the co-op currently has just over 100 members, but Jonathan Harrison says they need 330 to receive the maximum $10,000 in matching donations promised by an anonymous donor. The store will be open to all customers, but members would receive a 20 precent discount and be able to vote for products the store would carry, he says.

Right now the co-op is looking for a store site somewhere on Cooper. After helping found co-ops in other cities, Harrison says it is often difficult to get things done with a democratically run organization, but co-ops allow people to have a say in what they eat, assure a steady supply of affordable organic food. and build a community of health- and environment-conscious people.

A gardener who has turned his front yard into rows of salad greens and vegetables, Harrison says the co-op would be able to save its members money by buying in bulk and would also try to support its neighbors by buying local produce and products.

“The co-op will create a community space where people can gather and members can use it for meetings and social functions,” Harrison says. “It would also be a place for people who want to promote local goods and shop with friends and neighbors — a return to the corner grocery store concept.”

Memberships are $25 per individual, $40 per family, $15 per student, $100 for a business, and $200 for a lifetime membership. A potluck meeting will be held at 2086 Nelson on Sunday, June 3rd, at 7 p.m. Contact Harrison at jonathan@altconsulting.org for more information. · — Andrew Wilkins

Parker’s Utility Bill Finally Gets Paid

After an extended battle with Memphis Light, Gas and Water, Mamie Parker’s utility bill has been paid and both of her children are doing fine.

Three weeks ago Parker approached the Flyer because she was unable to pay her $460 utility bill and MLGW was threatening to cut off her power. She was especially worried because her two young children, Keith and Kiara, have severe asthma and rely on an electrically powered breathing machine during attacks.

After this paper reported Parker’s story, a number of Memphians expressed an interest in helping pay her bill. However, when two readers called MLGW, the utility would not permit them to pay the bill, and one of the would-be benefactors says that twice MLGW representatives hung up on him.

Parker says that she asked repeatedly to be included in the utility’s SmartPay plan but her requests were denied. She also says she asked the utility to install a separate power line for her children’s breathing machine and that this request was also denied.

MLGW did not respond to numerous calls from the Flyer.

Councilman Edmund Ford, who represents Parker’s neighborhood, contacted the utility to ask for help for her. Though Parker initially believed that Ford had paid half of her bill, Ford says that the money was actually given by anonymous donors.

“I thank God first of all for the whole debt to be paid off,” Parker says. “I also thank Councilman Ford and each and every person that stood behind me through all of this. Councilman Ford really helps people in need and I feel like I can truly count on him.”

Parker adds that the children are doing really well and have not had recent problems with asthma attacks since the continuation of their breathing-machine treatments.

“I can’t say if any of this will ever happen again to me, but I am going to keep praying regardless,” she says. ·

— Hannah Walton

NBA No(w): What’s All the Fuss About?

While most Memphians agree that getting an NBA team would be beneficial for the city, that’s about all anyone can agree on. Opinions on the financing of a new arena divide residents into two distinct camps: NBA Now and No Taxes NBA. Both groups have well-reasoned arguments, both are passionate about their beliefs, and both believe the law is on their side. With the city council scheduled to vote on the financing package on June 4th, the debate is only getting more heated. So what is it these two sides are actually fighting over? The Flyer talked to representatives from both camps to find out what all the fuss is about.

On the No Taxes NBA side, Memphis attorney Duncan Ragsdale has filed a lawsuit to prevent the NBA arena from being financed in a way that, he believes, violates the Tennessee Constitution and both the Memphis and Shelby County charters. In his lawsuit, Ragsdale cites certain clauses from those documents:

· Article II, Section 29 of the Tennessee Constitution says that no city’s or county’s credit can be loaned without an election on the issue. Ragsdale thinks that the municipal bonds proposed to aid in financing the arena would violate that clause.

· Section 835 of the Memphis City Charter says that the city of Memphis can borrow money for construction and repairs of city buildings “to permit and enable said City to put to profitable use by improvement, lease or license any municipal property not presently needed for public purpose.”

Ragsdale thinks that the city’s lease to the Grizzlies would not be “profitable” and is not allowed. He says this because the lease terms currently being bandied about have been widely reported to be the most team-favorable in the league. (For comparison’s sake, the Indiana Pacers pay only $1 per year to lease Conseco Fieldhouse, and this is a plan that Memphis’ arena is currently modeled after.)

If the Grizzlies would actually get a better deal than the Pacers do, Ragsdale believes that the lease would not be “profitable” to Memphis.

· Section 5.15 of the Shelby County Charter says, “Every obligation incurred and every authorization of payment in violation of the provisions of this charter are void. Every payment made in violation of the provisions of this charter are illegal, and all county officials who authorize or make such payment or any part thereof are jointly and severally liable to the county for the full amount so paid and received.”

Ragsdale believes that if the terms of the deal are found to be in violation of the charter, Memphis and Shelby County could shirk the debt incurred, leaving any and all creditors holding the bag.

Second, the No Taxes NBA group says that similar financing plans used to build the Redbirds’ AutoZone Park and the Tennessee Titans’ Adelphia Coliseum have come under IRS investigation because of the naming rights sold.

In AutoZone Park’s case, the IRS asserted that the “tax-exempt” bonds issued to build the park were not really tax-exempt after all because they were used to benefit a private corporation and not a government entity. (The benefit to tax-exempt bonds is that investors don’t have to pay taxes on the interest they earn from the bonds.) The Redbirds’ owners recently paid $1.6 million to satisfy the IRS, which is currently investigating Adelphia Coliseum for the same bond issues.

Currently the Memphis arena proposal is modeled after the plan used to finance Adelphia Coliseum. If this plan is used, the anti-arena folks say the IRS could investigate the “FedEx Forum” — or whatever it’s called — to see if the “tax-exempt” bonds were actually taxable. If the bonds are taxable, the taxes and penalties would have to be paid. Any purchasers of these bonds could sue the city for issuing fraudulent bonds, that is, bonds the city claimed were tax-exempt when they really were not.

Third, as the Flyer reported last week, Memphis Light, Gas and Water’s involvement in the financing package might be prohibited by the utility’s charter. By charter MLGW must channel any surplus funds into a rate decrease for its customers.

On the other side, NBA Now attorney Marty Regan not only believes that using city bonds to finance the arena is legal but says it’s a common move that municipalities often take to pay for costly construction projects.

“Would communities build airports that will primarily be used by Delta, American Airlines, or Northwest?” Regan asks. “Would we build The Orpheum, where the theater is used mostly by private plays, or the Mid-South Coliseum, which gets used by groups like Ringling Brothers? Besides, the NBA will only use that arena 42 to 44 nights out of 365; the rest of the year it can be used for other purposes.”

And, on the subject of whether or not the lease terms will be profitable, Regan reminds opponents that none of the terms have been settled on or finalized yet. But he does allow that as the smallest market in the NBA, Memphis has to make the deal all that much more attractive.

“To attract a team, you’ve got to offer certain perks. One concession the team is seeking would be the $1 a year rent. One of the reasons they want that is that they’ll have to play in The Pyramid for two years, which doesn’t have the amenities that are standard in other NBA arenas and in the arenas already built in New Orleans and Anaheim, cities that also want a team.”

All of which begs the question: Can Memphis afford a team? More specifically, can Memphians afford to go to the games?

Regan thinks the answer to both questions is yes.

“Corporations here like Federal Express have really stepped up,” says Regan. “In Indiana, Conseco paid $54 million for the naming rights; FedEx has offered more than that.”

And as for ticket prices, Regan says, “Ticket prices here will be among the lowest in the NBA. They’re not going to charge Los Angeles prices here, they’ll charge Memphis prices.” ·

— Rebekah Gleaves

Bartlett Resident Is Upset Over Sidewalk Fee

Bartlett homeowner Bill Purcell recently received a letter from the city’s department of code enforcement stating that he had 90 days to repair his sidewalks and install a wheelchair ramp because he lives on a corner lot. The letter said that he would be financially responsible for all repairs, minus a $250 reimbursement for the ramp.

Purcell, who thought that sidewalks were in the city’s domain, did not take the news well. “I was hot for three days,” he says. “What are our taxes being used for?” According to estimates Purcell received from local contractors, total cost of the repairs will be $5,000 and $400 for the ramp.

According to Ancil Austin, director of code enforcement for the city of Bartlett, Purcell’s problems are not unique or new.

“Bartlett has an ordinance since 1958 that homeowners had to keep their sidewalks in proper repair,” Austin says. In 1997, that ordinance was amended so that the city had a right to send inspectors out and mark sidewalks that need fixing. After the sidewalks are marked, residents receive their letters. If the residents do not comply with the ordinance, the city will make the repairs with a charge of $100 or 15 percent of the total costs, whichever is larger. The charges are billed toward the property owner’s property taxes.

The ordinance was published, Austin says, in the daily newspapers and that all area real-estate agents are aware of the ordinance.

“It should be noted by the real-estate people [to the home-buyer],” Austin says. Few agents actually mention it to potential buyers. He says, “It’s hard enough to sell the house and [the agents] rely on the theory of ‘Buyer Beware.'”

Austin says that anyone receiving a letter like Purcell’s has one recourse. They can petition the “Concrete Board” for an extension but not an exemption. The board, a group of Bartlett citizens appointed by the mayor, meets on the last Monday of each month. ·– Chris Przybyszewski

Categories
Art Art Feature

Heating Up

Just in time to kick off the steamy season, a sexy exhibit at the Cooper-Young Gallery pairs the bathhouse eroticism of Bryan Blankenship with the delicacies of irises and lilies found in the work of Nancy Bickerest.

Bickerest is among several artists in the region exploring nonobjective photography to one degree or another, pushing the medium beyond the realm of documentation into the ephemeral world of light and color. Originally trained as a painter, the artist took up photography to gather resource images but soon discovered that the medium had much to offer in its own right. Bickerest uses a macro lens to capture the minutiae of budding flowers, rich in supple forms and imbued with pungent primary and secondary hues.

The artist is particularly fond of the drama gained from a shallow depth of field, in which details, such as the serrated edge of a flower petal in hibiscus syricus, emerge from a nebulous blur of saturated hues. Gladiolus transports the viewer into a microcosmic domain resembling a fractal image; out of a sea of orange, lemon, eggplant, and lime, the stamen juts into the focal plane. This method heightens the carnal aspect, especially in works like iris prismatic, in which the focal point is the particulars of the openings, folds, and crevices of the subject, cast in a radiant yellow and luscious blue light.

Bickerest displays her C-prints standard-issue: double-mat, black ribbon frame, under glass. Perhaps I have been spoiled by offerings in which the conventional mount has been abandoned in favor of methods that contextualize nonobjective photographs more as paintings. The mats and frames around Bickerest’s work seem an ill fit. The glass is especially troublesome in one of several photos titled lilium ‘star gazer,’ a beautiful image of a flower emerging from a black ground — if only one can find the angle at which the bric-a-brac from the next room is not reflected across its surface.

That being said, the images are captivating in color and form, and one can linger for quite some time on these landscapes, which are just a few centimeters deep.

While the fertile subject matter of flowers is by its very nature sensual, nothing suggests that Bickerest intended to make erotic images. On the other hand, Bryan Blankenship’s tongue is thrust squarely in his cheek for his “receptacle” series. What appear at first glance to be innocent geometric abstractions are in fact symbolic fetishes signifying gender-specific body parts. But what really drives up the temperature is that the artist uses the vernacular of a decaying bathhouse, replete with trompe l’oeil mildew stains, mineral deposits, grimy porcelain, and yellowed grout. The resulting mixed-media works are equal parts Rauschenberg raunch, bathroom humor, and Home Depot know-how.

One such, um, piece is receptacle #3, a rectangular composition that incorporates shoddy paneling, faux stained and yellowed tile, and other signs of mucky decay with an inset panel containing a slit above a drain hole. If not careful, one is likely to miss, among the yuk-yuks, the absolute command that Blankenship has over his materials. His use of encaustic here is delightful, creating an equivalent to the look of glazed bathroom tile, in a dated minty green. Looking at Blankenship’s convincing rendition of decomposition and swelter reminds me of Greg Haller’s stint making unbelievably realistic pictures depicting wretched brick walls, complete with graffiti and dirty windows.

Of course, Blankenship is not simply interested in memorializing decomposing facades; rather a seediness is exaggerated by the combination of tactile sensation and (not so subtly) veiled crotch humor. In the aforementioned receptacle #3, the artist goes for the gold as a yellow bead of beeswax drains out of the slit and crawls down the concave orifice below it (nasty boy). The work next to it, receptacle #4, is obviously its, er, mate, as similar elements have been combined to create an iconic phallus.

Just so you know, Blankenship is not completely obsessed with you-know-what. Untitled offers sanctuary from the sexual innuendo but is still very much interested in decay. It also uses trompe l’oeil sleight of hand to create a balloon pattern one might find in a toddler’s room, except this happy motif is mired by rows of dripping stains and soiled wallpaper. One gets the idea that this paradoxical juxtaposition represents innocence sullied.

If you are not prudish, the works are a delight to behold. But if you are, Blankenship is also exhibiting some very innocuous pottery with not a crease or crevice that’s the least bit suggestive. But I can’t go into that, as I could use a cold shower.

Through June 16th.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Details, Details

Waiting to exhale? EJ’s Brasserie, on Germantown Parkway, is a setting just made for shedding the day. EJ’s interior is small, casual, and festive. The wood is teak, the colors are blue and gold, and the walls are dotted with lively paintings of harbors.

We began our meal with what the menu calls “beginnings.” First up, crab cakes — lumps of crabmeat delicately mixed with bread crumbs, spiced with red pepper, and cradled by curry oil, cranberry ketchup, and papaya chutney. Next were the spring rolls, a mixture of Chinese vegetables wrapped and deep-fried, served sliced atop an orange pico glaze. A mound of steaming black mussels then appeared, though the aroma of curry, saffron, and fennel arrived at the table first. This flavorful cream sauce was a divine accompaniment to the mussels.

Finally, the featured beginning, known as the “smørrebrøds platte.” Smørrebrød, literally buttered bread in Danish, is an open-faced, artfully presented sandwich made with all kinds of fish, meat, and vegetable fillings. This night’s platter — it changes frequently at EJ’s — featured a smoked salmon roll stuffed with cream cheese, beef tips, mushrooms, and havarti cheese, all on a party-size pumpernickel bread.

Salads are not included with the entrées, but do not pass on these greens. EJ’s simple salad is merely mixed baby greens, cucumbers, and tomatoes drizzled with a champagne vinaigrette. The warm goat cheese salad features a ball of pecan-crusted goat cheese on a palette of baby greens with a balsamic vinaigrette. On this night, the cheese was too warm and had begun to melt by the time the salad was served. The flavors mingled well, but the timing was a little off.

The Caesar salad, though, was definitely a hit — chopped romaine lettuce tossed in a mixture of coddled eggs and grated Parmesan cheese in an olive oil vinaigrette flavored with garlic, Worcestershire sauce, and anchovies, then finished by a garlic crisp.

The baby spinach salad had a Danish twist. Baby spinach and pickled beets tossed in a walnut vinaigrette were piled high on a plate surrounded by chunks of Roquefort cheese — a nod to the importance of color and texture in presentation. It’s difficult to find the true Danish blue cheese, Danablu. I commend EJ’s for substituting Roquefort since it’s as close to Danablu as locals typically find. But in Denmark, Danablu is a well-known cheese based on the French blues. Details, details, details. Very good.

The choice in entrées made selection difficult — salmon, halibut, tilapia, calf’s liver, pork tenderloin, duck breast, and chicken risotto. The variety was almost overwhelming, so we sought the advice of our waitress, who highlighted ingredients and flavors. Again, details. It is critical that the wait staff be knowledgeable of the fare they are serving.

After much deliberation we settled on four entrées; the pompano, the veal scaloppini, the filet of beef, and the mahi mahi. Pompano is found off the southeastern U.S. coastline, and it is a beautiful white-meat fish. EJ’s pompano came wrapped in phyllo dough with a mango salsa and orange fennel sauce. The golden richness of the phyllo dough and the texture of the fish melted in our mouths. The mango and orange gave the fish a Caribbean punch.

The thinly sliced cutlets in the veal scaloppini were placed atop a mound of creamy, garlic whipped potatoes. A deep-amber Marsala (Italian fortified dessert wine) reduction intensified the delicate flavor of the veal and potatoes. Not to be outdone, however, was the mahi mahi, cut into fillets and packed with a variety of herbs. The result: a rich, moist, firm, and sweet fillet towering over a tumulus of butternut squash purée, melting leeks, and basil vinaigrette.

Last but not least, the black-pepper-seared filet of beef. My dining companion ordered it medium-well; however, the filet appeared extremely well done. To add to our disappointment, the shoestring of potato tossed in white truffle oils and a grain-mustard demiglace was also overcooked. Don’t rule this dish out, though. It has an interesting mix of flavors, and everybody has an off-night once in a while. Even so, all of our entrées were well thought-out. Balance, color, textures — at EJ’s it’s artwork.

Homestyle desserts with a Danish flair are prepared in-house at EJ’s. The white and dark chocolate mousse was served in a puff pastry. My dining companion was entranced by this dessert, and for a moment the rest of the table wasn’t sure if she was going to let us try the mousse or keep it all to herself.

I couldn’t determine if EJ’s raspberry sorbet included a beaten egg white or milk, which some chefs add to keep crystals from forming during freezing. Unfortunately, the sorbet was swimming in an overpowering and pungent raspberry purée. A third dessert, the lemon tartlet, was tangy, sweet, and savory and had no top crust.

I applaud the owners, the chefs, and wait staff at EJ’s Brasserie for their dedication and attention to detail. It is so refreshing to visit a restaurant that truly embraces its clientele, makes every effort to impress, and keeps diners wanting to come back for more. n

EJ’s Brasserie is located at 1884 N. Germantown Road. Lunch: $5 to $15; dinner: $5 to $12 for appetizers and $16 to $26 for entrées. EJ’s is open for lunch Monday through Friday and dinner Monday through Sunday. For reservations, call 751-1150.

food notes

Mash Mouth

Ever had your ice cream mashed on marble before it’s served to you? Given the crowd at the newly opened Marble Slab Creamery people like it that way.

The Marble Slab Creamery, a nationwide chain, reached Memphis two weeks ago and is as much about the experience as it is about the ice cream. It works like this: Choose among the 38 flavors of ice cream, 35 toppings, and 9 cones, then watch the Creamery-ers smooth the ice cream onto a frozen marble slab, mash the toppings into the ice cream, and then serve it up in a cone. Among the ice creams: egg nog, peanut butter banana, and chocolate amaretto. Toppings vary from every candy bar imaginable to miniature marshmallows and sliced almonds. Customers’ favorite cones include vanilla cinnamon and white chocolate.

The Creamery makes its own ice cream and cones from scratch and also sells frozen yogurt, ice cream pies, fresh-baked items, and gourmet coffee.

Marble Slab Creamery is located in Germantown at the Shops of Saddle Creek. The hours are 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and noon to 10 p.m. Sunday.

A New Market With New Flavors

And speaking of ice cream … Are you in the mood for Jamaican banana ice cream? There’s only one place in Memphis you can find it.

Three weeks ago, Epicure, a European gourmet market, opened in Midtown to sell a wide variety of foods, from Belgian chocolates to French lemonade. Epicure sells fresh bread and ice cream, both of which are made in the store daily.

“This place is different. You can’t find the Jamaican banana or the white chocolate and strawberry ice cream like ours anywhere else in Memphis,” store owner Michel Leny says. “I grew up in Belgium eating the same chocolates we sell, and they are the best. We are only one of eight businesses that carry them, and the only one in the Mid-South.”

Along with the gourmet foods, Epicure has chefs cooking new items daily — crabcakes rémoulade and roast chicken with passion fruit and almond orzo. Epicure also sells seafood fresh from Florida and lamb stuffed with herbs and vegetables.

Epicure is located at 208 N. Evergreen. The hours are 10 a.m.- 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Road Trip

Peaches, peanuts, and homemade biscuits — all are on the agenda of the Southern Foodways Alliance’s (SFA) field trip to Greensboro, North Carolina.

This is the first of a series of Southern Foodways Alliance field trips and an addition to the annual Foodways symposium held at Ole Miss.

There are 75 to 80 spots open for the trip, scheduled July 13th through July 15th. Says John T. Edge, director of SFA, “It’s a true field trip to get immersed in the world of food.”

The trip will include a tour through Goat Lady Dairy, where Ginnie and Steve Tate will discuss gardening and serve samples of award-winning cheese. Participants will also learn to make biscuits. Also scheduled is the Boiled Peanut Party.

Edge expects participants from across the country. The trip is open to the general public at $250 per person and $225 for SFA members. Hotel costs are not included. For registration or more information call John T. Edge at (662) 915-5993. — Hannah Walton

Categories
Cover Feature News

The Man Behind the News

Reporters and editors, newspapers and newsmakers, judges and bad guys, politicians and prosecutors — they come and go in Memphis. Richard Fields endures.

For three decades, most of it as a civil rights lawyer, Fields has influenced the way Memphians hold elections, treat jail inmates, educate children, allocate property taxes, build public housing, sell cars, promote firemen, and run day-care centers.

Memphians like to talk about bridging the gap between the black and white communities. Ladies and gents, behold the human bridge.

He’s a 53-year-old, California-born-and-bred, Stanford-educated sole practitioner who lives alone (unless you count the pet rooster) in the historic Wright Carriage House in Victorian Village. His father was a winemaker. He’s partial to jeans, cowboy boots, and loud open-necked shirts. He sports a gray beard and a ponytail. He can speed-dial most of the important politicians, judges, civil rights figures, and reporters in Memphis. His fingerprints, not to mention his quotes, both attributed and unattributed, are all over scores of front-page stories. He was one of the first white men in Memphis to be legally married to a black woman. The marriage didn’t take. Neither did the next three.

In other words, about as typically Memphis as your average purple snow-capped mountain.

Shown a partial list of his cases over the years, Fields studies it for a moment, nods, and then puts it down with a shrug: “I know a lot of people in Memphis.”

Fields came here in 1969 to work for the Teacher Corps at Georgia Avenue Elementary, an inner-city school. It was the year after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Not a good time, for sure, but a time of opportunity just the same, with liberals, blacks, Jews, and women coming to the fore and making their marks (Fields was raised Lutheran).

“I never thought I’d be doing this when I graduated from college,” he says.

Two events were formative.

He married a black woman at St. Thomas Catholic Church, something taboo and even illegal in parts of the Old South. The marriage, he says, “gave me a different perspective than a lot of people.”

In the fall of 1969, to press their demands for representation on the all-white school board, black leaders organized “Black Mondays” demonstrations. More than 60,000 students and 600 teachers skipped school. The only white teacher was Richard Fields. The only principal was Willie Herenton.

It proved to be a good career move for both of them. Herenton rose through the ranks to become superintendent, with the support of the Memphis NAACP. Fields left teaching for law school at the University of Tennessee, then returned to Memphis in 1976 to work in an integrated civil rights law firm with the late Marvin Ratner and Russell Sugarmon. He immediately went to work on high-profile school desegregation cases, one of which involved Shelby County and is still very much alive today.

Jimmy Carter was elected president that year. One of the things he did was appoint more black judges than his predecessors had. Blacks were still in the minority in Memphis, but by 1980 they had won some judgeships, school board seats, and the superintendent’s job. It was a good time and place for a young civil rights lawyer to start his career.

Through thick and thin, Fields hitched his wagon to Herenton’s star. They did not always agree. Fields was the unbending idealist. Herenton was the embattled pragmatist. One thing they split on was busing.

“When I was superintendent, I did not want segregated schools, but we reached a point where in my opinion busing had run its course,” recalls Herenton. “My position was, ‘Gentlemen, let’s call a truce. Busing has not worked.’ Richard was adamant that I was trying to return the public schools to segregation.”

Fields stood by him as friend and personal attorney when Herenton weathered a scandal involving a relationship with a former teacher, Mahnaz Bahrmand. When Herenton ran for mayor in 1991, Fields and Dr. Harry Moore, a liberal preacher, were the only two prominent whites to publicly support him. Herenton’s 142-vote margin and 49 percent of the vote would have thrown him into a runoff but for a landmark federal court lawsuit pressed by Fields, the NAACP, and others and resolved that year.

“Dr. Herenton,” he says, “has been absolutely a godsend to Memphis.”

And to Richard Fields. Backing Willie Herenton in 1991 was a little like buying stock in AOL at $10 a share. Herenton has been mayor for 10 years and counting and shows no signs of giving up the job. Fields has been there to hold his coat. He has been, at various times, the mayor’s personal lawyer, political adviser, schools liason, and spin-master on issues ranging from the 1999 mayoral election to the controversial firing of a police lieutenant to the proposed NBA arena.

“I give him advice when he seeks it,” says Fields.

Fields’ law practice, meanwhile, has ranged far and wide.

“My theory of law,” he says, “is do as many cases as you can that involve the broadest impact.”

What sets him apart from other busy lawyers is not only the nature of his cases but also his media connections, particularly with The Commercial Appeal and this newspaper. It would be nearly impossible to have been a beat reporter in Memphis over the past 25 years without crossing paths with Fields in the state or federal courts or at the city or county school board. Approachable and savvy, he is often a source for newspaper reporters and helps “spin” or influence their stories. What appears to be reportorial research is sometimes, on closer inspection, a repackaging of Fields’ research, briefs, depositions, or the comments of his clients or associates.

In newspaper terminology, he can set the agenda, often by merely filing a lawsuit. For example, “Fired officer sues for $6 million” was the headline for a front-page story in The Commercial Appeal on Harold Hays and the sheriff’s department in 1996. Typically, the party being sued, the sheriff’s department in this case, declined comment. The attention-grabbing $6 million figure, as is often the case in such lawsuits, was mainly window dressing; the lawsuit was settled for $650,000.

“I certainly don’t control the media,” says Fields. “I think I have credibility with the media, but that is partly the nature of the cases.”

A computer search of stories about Richard Fields turned up over 200 articles from The Commercial Appeal over the last decade, which is as far back as such searches go for that newspaper. The majority of them ran on the front page or the front of the Metro page. Some led to whole series. A partial list (see “Richard Fields’ Greatest Hits,” page 19): sales practices at Covington Pike Toyota, Cherokee Day Care, the Shelby County Jail, school desegregation, and corruption in the sheriff’s department. Some of the reporters who used to write about him are now the editors who make the decisions about where the stories run, including the CA’s Metro editor Charles Bernsen and deputy managing editor Otis Sanford.

In The Memphis Flyer, in the last year alone, Fields has been a key source for cover stories about the jail, foster children, and public housing.

A publicist who got a fraction of that attention for a client would be hailed as a genius. With local news increasingly displacing national and international news in newspapers and television newscasts, Fields highlights the uneasy working relationship between lawyers, who are hired advocates, and reporters, who are supposed to be objective. Each side gets something. Publicity can help a lawyer get business, especially if class-action status is sought, or pressure the other side to make a settlement, as in Fields’ lawsuit this year against Bud Davis Cadillac. The reporter gets a story with a crusading bent, news appeal, and gritty details that might have been mined by the reporter or might have been handed over by the lawyer.

Editors at The Commercial Appeal declined to comment for this story.

Sometimes Fields is on the side of the angels. He handled a case for low-income homeowners against former assessor Michael Hooks and won more than $3 million but took no fee. Other cases, however, have a distinct political angle, often against members of the Ford family, who happen to be the main rivals of Mayor Herenton.

In the Cherokee Day Care case, Fields said state senator John Ford conspired with operators to steer state funds to Cherokee. The case was hobbled by an unfavorable ruling in federal court, but there is a separate grand jury probe on similar issues. Fields himself was going to become a day-care broker consultant for Herenton, who had plans for the city to become the state’s day-care broker in Shelby County. The broker system was scrapped instead. As a lawyer, campaign adviser, and media contact, Fields did all he could to keep the story alive during the 1999 mayoral election when Herenton ran against Joe Ford.

Also during that campaign, Fields was wearing his “campaign attorney” hat when, in the words of The Commercial Appeal, he “drafted an official complaint” to the Shelby County Election Commission about certain actions of campaign workers for candidate Joe Ford. Sounds mighty serious. In plain language, Fields didn’t do squat. But this dog-bites-man fluff got prominent coverage that helped keep Ford on the defensive.

Fields’ favorite whipping boy is Sheriff A.C. Gilless and the Shelby County Jail. Since 1993 he has won seven settlements and judgments against the department totaling $2.43 million. He (and co-counsel in five of the cases) got about 30 percent of that. Another jail inmate suit seeking $20 million is pending. Gilless did not return calls seeking comment.

“I’m not a self-promoter, but certain exposure helps the public understand what kind of issues I deal with and what solutions I hope for,” Fields says. “I give the reporters facts and expect them to investigate fully.”

Not everyone does. This newspaper was burned recently when it failed to distinguish between monetary amounts sought and amounts actually paid in jail cases.

And not everyone likes what they see either. Even Herenton says, “A lot of my friends don’t understand my friendship with Richard because he irritates the hell out of them.” WREG-TV Channel 3 reporter Mike Matthews, a tough questioner of Herenton, is one reporter Fields won’t talk to because he thinks Matthews tries to embarrass the mayor.

Fields used Black Monday-style tactics against automobile dealers Bud Davis Cadillac and Covington Pike Toyota on behalf of black employees, or “our guys,” as he calls them. Kent Ritchey, general manager of Covington Pike Toyota, told The Commercial Appeal the picketing was aimed at “maximizing settlement opportunities.” Contacted by the Flyer, Ritchey declined to comment about Fields. Bud Davis also declined comment.

Fields says fair is fair. The car dealers, he says, launched their own “preemptive publicity” aimed at polishing their image. He does not plan to let up.

Last week Fields got a phone call as he posed for a picture for this story. The Covington Pike Toyota story had attracted some national interest. It seems Memphis might be getting a visit from Jesse Jackson. Fields tucked his cell phone back in his pocket and grinned.

You can e-mail John Branston at branston@memphismagazine.com.

Richard Fields’ Greatest Hits

Michael Hooks Sr.

Inequities in residential reappraisal, 1992-2001. “It was difficult because I had to sue Michael Hooks as assessor and I was friends with him. My clients were the poorest of the poor. Michael should have done it himself.”

Memphis Housing Authority, 1992-2001: “If there was ever a plantation system, MHA was it. They’re on the right track now, but basically they need to tear down all public housing and create mixed middle-income housing like what’s planned for Greenlaw and LeMoyne Gardens.”

Harold Hays (whistleblower in sheriff’s department), 1996-1999: “The best client I ever had and, ironically, the most establishment. His ethics were unquestionable.”

Mayoral election, 1991: “I was one of Dr. Herenton’s original white supporters and encouraged him to run. His comment was, ‘But I’m not a politician.’ I said, ‘That’s good.'”

Mayoral election, 1999: “I made sure the day-care issue got emphasized as a real scandal for this city.”

W.W. Herenton

Mahnaz Bahrmand, (former MCS teacher who sued then-Superintendent Herenton over a love affair), 1989: “Dr. Herenton came out of that with a true understanding of who his friends were and weren’t. Beyond that, it was private, and that’s all I’m going to say.”

Cherokee Day Care, 1999-2001: “An unbelievable scandal involving black entrepreneurs engaged in a corrupt scheme to the disadvantage of poor children and their parents.”

Tennessee foster children, 2000-2001: “One of the finest consent decrees I have seen in my life. It affects children most in need.”

School desegregation, 1976-2001: “As a former teacher with a master’s degree in education, I had to do those cases. Education is the most important issue in the city right now. Along with the Legal Defense Fund, I will continue to pursue the Shelby County school desegregation case which dates back to 1961.”

Memphis elections and local and state redistricting, 1991-1997: “I was the lawyer for the NAACP on the runoff provision in city elections. You know, I had forgotten about that one.”

John Ford

McKinney Truse (a low-income East Memphis neighborhood leveled for a Home Depot), 1987-1997: “A crowning moment in my career. We had to find 300 people all over the world and keep them together for 10 years. We won $9 million from Home Depot. Our fee was 9 percent over 10 years. We didn’t even make our hourly rate.”

Shelby County Jail, 1991-2001: “One of the true scandals of the Eighties and Nineties. Until Judge McCalla came along, no one was willing to deal with it in a systematic fashion, and nobody but Harold Hays was willing to speak out against the corruption in the sheriff’s department.”

Sales practices at Covington Pike Toyota, 2001: “It took guts for The Commercial Appeal to run that story about an advertiser.”