Month: November 2001

Categories
News The Fly-By

DR. MENGELE, WHITE COURTESY TELEPHONE!

Focus on the Family, a group which has met in a number of cities, including Memphis, will be in the Sunshine State on November 10th to “present the other side of the story regarding homosexuality.” Their one-day conference, “Love Won Out,” which is conducted almost entirely by former homosexuals, is designed to aid and comfort people who struggle with their embarrassing homosexuality and don’t know that there is hope for a hetero tomorrow.

Topics include clinical development, homsexuality and gentics, and the “gay agenda” in public schools. Some pundits are concerned about the attention being paid to this subject, noting that while great strides are being made to eradicate bothersome gayness, there still remains no cure for the common bigot.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

tuesday, 6

Ah, just go have a big ol’ barbecue at the Big S Lounge.

Categories
Music Music Features

So Hard To Come By

Sweet is the melody/So hard to come by/It’s so hard to make every note bend just right.

— “Sweet Is the Melody,” from My Life

Easy’s gettin’ harder every day for Iris DeMent. DeMent rivals Lucinda Williams as the most talented “roots” music artist of her generation, and she’s beginning to rival Williams in the dubious field of making fans wonder when (or if) new music will be coming. But while Williams’ often titanic length between records is the result of well-chronicled perfectionism, of worrying the songs until she gets them just right, DeMent’s cross is that of waiting for songs to appear at all.

Leading off her second album, 1994’s My Life, “Sweet Is the Melody” was a lovely, mysterious evocation of this process — “You lay down the hours and leave not one trace,” DeMent complained, before singing, “A note’s just a note till you wake from your slumber/And dare to discover a new melody.” But she described the process with more plain talk in the liner notes to her next and most recent album, 1996’s The Way I Should: “Songwriters talk a lot about ‘writing’ songs, but it seems to me like I spend most of my time ‘waiting’ for songs. Writing is just something I do to kill time until they get here. I guess that makes the whole thing sound pretty easy, that is, unless you’ve spent much time waiting for something, not knowing when or if it will arrive. By the time you get this music the thrill that came with the arrival of these 11 songs will be a memory [to me], and I will have already spent several months killing time waiting for the next song and, no doubt, feeling crazy all over again.”

Months have turned to years and now DeMent hits town five years after The Way I Should with no new record in sight. DeMent has kept busy during the wait: She was the feature guest on John Prine’s great 1999 duet album, In Spite of Ourselves, and appeared in the recent folk-music film Songcatcher. She’s made innumerable guest appearances on other peoples’ records and on tribute albums and has toured consistently.

But the new songs still don’t appear to be coming: DeMent deflected questions about any plans for a new record while doing publicity interviews for Songcatcher. That project completed, Dement declined interview requests for her upcoming local appearance.

In retrospect, it isn’t difficult to understand how The Way I Should would be a hard record for DeMent to follow up: The record feels like the completion of a journey, a breaking-off point that, in its own small way, feels like as searing a bid for independence as John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band. And though he released plenty of music in the interim, it took Lennon nearly a decade to properly follow up that record.

DeMent was one of 14 kids, a janitor’s daughter raised in an evangelical environment. She was a 25-year-old high school dropout (with a GED) and pizza parlor waitress in Kansas before she ever wrote a song. She was 31 before she ever toured. Now she’s an icon of “traditional” or “folk” music who has turned her gospel-bred sound against organized religion and been interviewed by socialist newspapers. (I imagine Woody Guthrie would be pleased.) It’s a highly compelling mix of biography and art — a mix of progressive politics growing naturally out of traditional, rural, even religious values that mirrors Johnny Cash, or, to a lesser degree, DeMent’s most high-profile admirer, Merle Haggard.

DeMent debuted in 1992 on the folk label Philo with Infamous Angel, an all-acoustic collection of traditional-sounding songs that put DeMent across as a safe, respectable NPR folkie, weeping for the loss of Main Street America in “Our Town” and paying tribute to her beloved mother on “Mama’s Opry.” But that album’s first song — and still perhaps DeMent’s signature tune — hinted at what was to come. “Let The Mystery Be” is an agnostic’s hymn so sure and penetrating that it obscures how much its intellectual independence contrasts with the album’s traditionalism.

My Life followed in 1994, and DeMent took Infamous Angel‘s blueprint and perfected it. If Infamous Angel was implicitly her mother’s album (even getting her mother to guest on the concluding “Higher Ground”), then My Life was explicitly for her father, who died shortly after Infamous Angel came out and whose story DeMent recounts with great detail in My Life‘s liner notes. The centerpiece song is “No Time To Cry,” about dealing — or not dealing — with her father’s death, and it’s still DeMent’s finest moment.

But if Infamous Angel was for Mom and My Life (despite its title) for Dad, The Way I Should was the sound of DeMent finally getting around to herself. Employing a wider range of instruments — organs, drums, electric guitars — the album put folkiedom aside. But the record’s lyrics were the biggest departure.

The Way I Should was marked by what can only be described as protest songs. And awkward ones too: The Vietnam meditation “There’s a Wall in Washington” sounded like something 10,000 Maniacs might have written a decade before. This record’s centerpiece was a wide-ranging litany of political complaint with the almost embarrassing title “Wasteland of the Free.” In short, the record was a mess but a thrilling one. What a lot of people missed about The Way I Should‘s political content is that the most important part of it wasn’t what DeMent was saying (though there’s plenty of righteous truth there) but her need to express it. In theory, it’s a punk record — the sound of someone discovering her voice, discovering the freedom in voicing ideas she isn’t supposed to voice. The political songs are a necessary companion to the record’s better and more elusive songs of personal freedom — “I’ll Take My Sorrow Straight,” “Keep Me God,” and, most of all, the title track.

The Way I Should was the sound of DeMent purposefully challenging the expectations of not only her upbringing — rural, conservative, religious — but of the audience that embraced her — urban, liberal, urbane. DeMent had previously been a comfortable example of Quality and Authenticity — serving the same purpose for her audience that the same audience later found in the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. Now here she was railing against the rich on “Quality Time” and “Wasteland of the Free.”

It was a brave move for DeMent and not without consequences. During an interview I had with her a couple of years ago, she admitted being aware of what kinds of audiences might respond to the new songs in what ways. I saw her soon after the record’s release at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis — the land of Prairie Home Companion — performing before the kind of upscale, liberal audience that gave her a career, and she avoided “Wasteland.” Visibly nervous, she did tell a story about walking down the streets of downtown Minneapolis earlier that day and seeing a punk kid with a Mohawk and piercings and the works and made a point of telling everyone how much she admired his confidence and individuality.

A couple of years later, at the Hi-Tone Café before a packed, adoring, and decidedly less genteel crowd (DeMent didn’t play until about 9:30 and the club was at capacity three hours before that), DeMent played the song.

According to some recent reports, “Wasteland of the Free” has been removed from her playlists since September 11th. This is understandable, not just because the patriotism police are sure to frown on anything remotely negative or questioning about life in these united states. But it’s still a shame, because recent events certainly shouldn’t take economic justice (among other of the song’s subjects) off the table as a legitimate issue in this country.

When the demure DeMent sings the song (“Who else could intimate raging obscenity by putting the words ‘ass,’ ‘crap,’ and ‘damn’ in the same song?” Village Voice critic Robert Christgau wrote), it sounds like she’s finally discovering herself, like the journey from being Flora Mae and Patric Shaw DeMent’s daughter to being her own person is finally complete. It’s no wonder it’s taken Dement so long to commence the next chapter.

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

Iris DeMent

The Bartlett Performing Arts Center

Friday, November 9th

Local Beat

by CHRIS HERRINGTON

Pat Alger

The Memphis and Shelby County Music Commission begins its third week in the TV business this Friday. The commission has partnered with WREC-TV Channel 3 to produce a weekly segment titled Memphis Music Scene, which airs as part of the 4:30 p.m. news on Fridays and then repeats throughout the weekend. According to music commission president Jerry Schilling, the idea has been a year in the works, with its genesis as an idea that the commission took to Channel 3, whose anchor and segment host Alex Coleman has worked with the commission in the past. Memphis Music Scene is a mix of taped segments and live interviews with Coleman and Schilling. The debut segment, on October 26th, focused on the opening of Isaac Hayes’ new downtown club. Last week’s segment spotlighted Ardent Studios and successful producer Paul Ebersold. Channel 3 produces the segments, with input from the commission. This week’s segment hadn’t been finalized as of press time, but Schilling says that future subjects could include the Soulsville development, the city’s hip-hop and rap scene, gospel and Christian music, MADJACK Records, the North Mississippi Allstars and Jim Dickinson, the commission itself, and a look at area music venues.

The board of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) recently approved a $650,000 settlement to resolve sexual assault and battery charges against the nonprofit organization’s chief executive, C. Michael Greene, who has a noted history of working with the Memphis chapter, particularly in the failed bid to land a Grammy museum here. The regional NARAS branch headquartered here declined comment on the matter.

The relatively new Club 152 on Beale has an interesting event scheduled this week. Accomplished country songwriters Tony Arata, Pat Alger, Kent Blazy, and Kim Williams will be performing at the club on Thursday, November 8th. All of the performers have written or co-written songs recorded by Garth Brooks, and Alger and Blazy rounded up these songwriters for their own takes on the Brooks-identified songs on the recent and surprisingly decent album In The Beginning: A Songwriter’s Tribute to Garth Brooks. Tickets to the show are $15 at the door, with all profit going to the band instrument recycling program Play It Again Memphis.

Due to a new distribution agreement between their label Tone-Cool and Artemis Records, the new North Mississippi Allstars record, 51 Phantom, has seen its release pushed back for a second time. The new record is now scheduled to drop on Tuesday, December 4th.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Short Cuts

Feminist Sweepstakes, Le Tigre (Mr. Lady)

Kathleen Hanna is probably the most interesting and vital pop-music figure of the last decade that most people reading this haven’t heard of. Hanna’s current band, Le Tigre, is a poppish project that acts as a musical counterpoint to the cathartic noise of her seminal ’90s punk band Bikini Kill. Mixing new wave, punk, hip hop, and disco, Le Tigre’s musical approach is gentler and more “grown-up” than Bikini Kill’s was, but, as the title of this new record indicates, the band’s political agenda is no less explicit.

At first, Feminist Sweepstakes sounds a little flatter than previous Le Tigre projects. An EP from earlier in the year, From the Desk of Mr. Lady, was more galvanizing, more directed at the outside world. By comparison, Feminist Sweepstakes is more like a preparatory memo to the band’s core audience and comrades-in-struggle, bucking them up for the revolution to come. The album may not have as much sure-shot songwriting as the group’s eponymous 1999 debut (nothing here as undeniable as that album’s “My My Metrocard” or “What’s Yr Take On Cassavetes?”) or seem as desperately communicative as From the Desk, but it may ultimately be an emotionally truer and more moving album.

The first two-thirds of Feminist Sweepstakes is sort of a guided tour of Le Tigre’s world. “LT Tour Theme” opens the album by way of an introduction to the band’s mix of leftist politics and pleasure-intensive sound (“For the ladies and the fags, yeah/We’re the band with the rollerskate jams”). There’s a visit to “Dyke March 2001” (“We recruit”), a slinky bit of subcultural list-making on “Fake French” (inspirational boast/sexual come-on for liberal arts grads: “I’ve got extensive bibliographies”), an oddly endearing bout of burnout on “Much Finer” (“Got a to-do list behind my eyes/So go tell your friends I’m still a feminist/But I won’t be coming to your benefit”), and “F.Y.R.” (aka “Fifty Years of Ridicule,” or what the feminist movement has been unjustly subjected to), an angry, propulsive, blowout anthem where the band announces, “Feminists we’re calling you/Please report to the front desk.” This litany of political complaints can be invigorating or frustrating or both depending on your own political outlook (I say amen to the rightly rude “Can we trade Title IX for an end to hate crime?/RU-486 if we suck your fuckin’ dick?,” but there are plenty of us on the left who think making reparations is a silly idea), but it leaves little doubt that Hanna is still one of rock-and-roll’s great screechers.

Feminist Sweepstakes really finds its voice on the album’s final third. If the pre-9/11 From the Desk was a bullhorn blare, Feminist Sweepstakes sounds suitably post-9/11 with its mood of after-the-fall regrouping. This section begins with the album’s real anthem, the compassionate, community-identifying “TGIF.” This affectionate shout-out to core fans, who are likely to be underemployed and ethically at odds with much of the larger culture, is very affecting. “In five years you won’t remember getting fired/Or whatever,” Hanna counsels at the outset, “And until then and forever/I’m proud to be associated with you.” The tone set, a transcendent chord change pushes the song even deeper, into a reassuring chant of “We will survive as thieves/We will survive as freaks.” “My Art” follows, Hanna demonstrating the defiance “TGIF” calls for. Hearing her move effortlessly from the staccato mockery of “And if you ever wanna adventure” to the swooning beauty of “If you ever want a fashion show/I’ll walk right on yr block” confirms that she’s every bit as savvy a singer as she is a screamer.

The unlikely “Cry For Everything Bad That’s Ever Happened” — two minutes and 40 seconds of piano, static, muted horn, and wordless vocals — acts as an elegy and sets up the raucous, anthemic finale, “Keep On Livin’,” on which Hanna and company send a restored faithful out to keep up the good fight. — Chris Herrington

Grade: A-

Once We Were Trees, Beachwood Sparks (Sub Pop)

Massachusetts’ Beachwood Sparks make music strictly by the blueprint of what Gram Parsons called “Cosmic American Music,” an amalgam of country and folk traditions coupled with a ’60s psychedelic-rock aesthetic. Such an influence is by no means rare; artists as diverse as Uncle Tupelo, Beck, and Sheryl Crow have followed this same rubric, but few artists, especially in the indie-rock arena, adhere to this influence with such a narrow focus.

On the quartet’s second album, Once We Were Trees, their proto-hippie sound has an eerie time-capsule quality to it, a dustiness that warrants some respect for their discipline even as it smacks of nostalgia. “You Take the Gold” and “The Sun Surrounds Me” could have been long-lost B-sides from the Byrds, and “Old Manatee” sounds like obscure Grateful Dead.

The album would be unbearable if Beachwood Sparks didn’t occasionally thread some ’90s indie rock into their ’60s tapestry. A breezy, sincere version of Sade’s “By Your Side” is the kind of sweet declaration of love that never goes out of style, and on the stand-out track, “Let It Run,” a lonely pedal-steel guitar imbues the verses with a sleepy shoegazer grandeur that approaches breathtaking.

In fact, Once We Were Trees sounds most compelling and effective when the band doesn’t party like it’s 1969. The more perfect their mimicry, the more trivial they sound. But when they check the calendar and note the year, Once We Were Trees blossoms. — Stephen Deusner

Grade: B

Gold, Ryan Adams (Lost Highway)

Sometimes you can judge an album by its cover. On the front of Gold, his second solo album after last year’s Heartbreaker, former Whiskeytown frontman Ryan Adams, clad in ragged denim and an oh-so-stylish ’70s retro T-shirt, strikes a self-consciously unself-conscious pose before an upside-down American flag. It would indeed be something remarkable if this were a shout-out to Patton, but it’s just another singer-songwriter defining himself as the new Bruce Springsteen.

That’s a bold claim for any artist to make, but Adams has neither the songs nor the voice nor the fervent belief in rock-and-roll’s redemptive powers to live up to his own album cover. His image as a hardcore troubadour (to use Steve Earle’s old phrase) is just a careful construct — like Slipknot’s masks or ‘NSync’s “dirty” pop. Role-playing is admittedly a fundamental aspect of rock-and-roll, but it must allow the artist’s own personality to show through. Adams seems to have little personality beyond his persona, so his claim to sincerity makes his music all the more disingenuous.

With its pretensions not-so-cleverly disguised as earthy realness, Gold lacks luster. It’s a surprisingly dull album, its songs either too similar, too bland, too forgettable, or, in the case of “SYLVIA PLATH” (caps not mine), deeply emetic. In fact, the most painfully outstanding aspect of Gold is Adams’ voice, which takes on a series of affectations that are alternately cloying (the Muppets falsetto in “Somehow, Someday”) and embarrassing (the staccato phrasing of “Answering Bell”).

In the realm of American rock-and-roll, of course, Adams is not the Boss. He’s not even a supervising manager like John Mellencamp. And if there’s any justice in the world, sonically similar but far superior artists like the Old 97’s and Marah will get corner offices while Adams is stuck in his little cubicle. Ultimately, Gold is a low point in the very inconsistent career of a singer who is very insistent of his own talent. — SD

Grade: C

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Back To Memphis

Relative to its size, Memphis may be America’s most written-about music city, and for good reason. But amid the myriad tomes on the city’s successive cultural eruptions, local writer/filmmaker Robert Gordon’s It Came From Memphis stands alone — telling the story not of Beale and Elvis and Stax but of the subterranean culture of power-pop cult heroes Big Star, of wrestling icon Sputnik Monroe, and, most of all, of a ’60s/’70s counterculture scene that mirrored those then popping up around the country but which was still a world entirely unto itself.

Six years after its initial 1995 publication, Gordon’s beloved tour of the bohemian byways of Memphis music culture returns with a new edition due out next week and a second CD listening companion scheduled to hit stores this week.

Gordon, 40, has spent much of the intervening years working on a biography of blues legend Muddy Waters for publisher Little, Brown. The bio, to be titled Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters, is set to be published next May and will be accompanied by an hour-long documentary Gordon is producing and directing. Gordon is hoping to find a television outlet for the doc, possibly PBS.

Speaking from his Memphis home, Gordon says that he always thought It Came From Memphis would see another run. “I always expected that the interest in Memphis music is broad and eternal and that when [original publisher] Faber and Faber was done with it and I got the rights back it would be published again, and I immediately sold it to Simon and Schuster [which is publishing the book through its Pocket Books division]. Part of the attraction, I’m sure, was that I had this Muddy book on tap.”

In addition to a new cover, the changes to the new edition are minimal. A new introduction pays homage to some of the book’s major players who have passed away since the initial publication, including raconteur Randall Lyon, guitarist Lee Baker, and venerable rock critic Robert Palmer. The book’s notes have been significantly updated and fleshed out. Additions include more reading and research tips as well as a critical guide to Memphis bands of the last few years, which Gordon deems in the spirit of the culture his book celebrates, such as the North Mississippi Allstars, Lucero, and the Reigning Sound.

This new edition may not offer much for those who’ve already read the book, but it offers a great excuse for the uninitiated to dig in. It also serves as a reminder of just how good the book is. Gordon unearths a wealth of great stories from this underreported segment of the city’s musical heritage, but, equally important, he brings a strong critical eye to the tale as well. What makes It Came From Memphis such a compelling read is that it’s as filled with ideas as anecdotes but also manages to keep the author’s analysis from obscuring his subjects’ stories.

But the real treasure for new and old readers alike is the new companion album, It Came From Memphis, Volume 2 (Birdman Records). This is a more focused and more explicitly archival collection than the first volume, which ranged from Dewey Phillips to Big Ass Truck. Rather, Volume 2 focuses on the core story of the book — the city’s blues and jug-band heritage and the inspired twist the city’s white, ’60s/’70s counterculture put on that heritage. Gordon calls Jim Dickinson the “secret hero” of the book, and Dickinson and his Mud Boy and the Neutrons comrades Sid Selvidge, Jimmy Crosthwait, and the late Lee Baker appear, in one form or another, on nine of the record’s 17 tracks. One highlight of the record is an overpowering version of the Howlin’ Wolf classic “Smokestack Lightning” performed by Mud Boy contemporaries Moloch at the 1969 Memphis Country Blues Festival. Selvidge sings lead on the song and Baker’s guitar cuts forcefully through everything.

“I love the Moloch track,” Gordon confesses. “To me, the sound of Baker’s guitar, right there in the beginning when it’s sort of the only instrument, [is] the amplified Delta blues at its pinnacle. It’s so powerful. That track sort of inspired the second disc, because I heard it after the first CD was put to bed but before it came out. It was important to have a Moloch track on the first CD, but [the first disc’s ‘Cocaine Katy’] didn’t represent what the band was [as much as ‘Smokestack Lightning’].”

Equally great is “You’ll Do It All the Time,” a jug-band cut from Jim Dickinson and the New Beale Street Sheiks recorded at Sam Phillips Recording Service in 1964, where Dickinson’s vocal gusto is matched only by Crosthwait’s nimble washboard playing.

At the time, as the mid-’60s folk and blues revivals were being transformed by the drug-centered counterculture of the late ’60s and early ’70s, similar subcultures were popping up around the country, particularly in the Northeast and California, but Gordon contends that the Mud-Boy-and-Moloch-centered Memphis scene was special.

“I think what happened here was totally unique and different from what happened in the Northeast and West Coast in particular, because what happened here was more organic and what happened in other places was more fabricated,” Gordon says. “People here intersected and interacted with the Delta blues artists because they lived in the same place. The two groups had wildly diverse but still shared backgrounds. When you took Delta blues performers out of their home community and put them on stage at a folk festival somewhere, it couldn’t help but have an anthropological feel. What happened here was about enthusiasm and not anthropology. People in the Northeast didn’t really have to face the facts about the circumstances of these peoples’ lives. They only had to interact with them in unreal environments — hotel rooms, backstage areas. They didn’t see Mississippi Fred McDowell pumping gas at Stuckey’s. They didn’t have to go to Jessie Mae Hemphill’s trailer, Furry Lewis’ duplex.”

Gordon plans a formal release party for the book and CD, featuring musical acts and film screenings, on December 22nd at Earnestine and Hazel’s.

Categories
Music Music Features

Sound Advice

Outside of the great Iris DeMent at the Bartlett Performing Arts Center on Friday, November 9th, this week is a little light on notable touring acts. After Iris, the best bet by far is The Pernice Brothers at Young Avenue Deli Saturday, November 10th. Frontman Joe Pernice led the alt-country faves the Scud Mountain Boys a few years ago, but, joining brother Bob in the new band, he’s set country aside in favor of pure pop that conjures half-remembered mid-’60s American acts like the Zombies and the Hollies, not to mention Big Star. The band’s current release, The World Won’t End, is a first-rate slice of depressive pop — a batch of effortlessly catchy and pretty songs whose candy exterior obscures a darker center. Pernice starts off singing about “Working Girls” who are “contemplating suicide or a graduate degree” before moving on to his own romantic problems, but it’s a winner either way. Nashville’s decidedly less subtle Bare Jr. will be on hand to provide butt-rockin’ counterpoint.

Most interesting local show this week may be inspired piano man Jason D. Williams breaking in the new Isaac Hayes club in Peabody Place on Thursday, October 8th. One of the most compelling shows I’ve seen all year was Williams opening for folk icon Michael Hurley at the Hi-Tone Café. I’m sure his show at Isaac Hayes’ club will be much less weird but, hopefully, no less wonderful.

And for amusement, you might want to check out Bands on the Run also-ran Harlow (the VH-1 show’s token chick band) at Newby’s on Tuesday, November 13th. — Chris Herrington

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Nice Balls

Professor Gloria Baxter’s stage adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, an attempt to explore the possibilities of “total theater,” was originally presented at the University of Memphis as part of its 1969 season, and anyone who has spent any time around the U of M’s theater department knows that they haven’t stopped talking about it since. The production attracted the attention of the Studio Arena in Buffalo, New York, and, as a result, the show was revived in 1970 at a festival there focusing on the American avant-garde. Thirty-two years after its nativity, Baxter’s most storied show remains fresh as ever, and it’s easy to see why the tongues have been wagging for so very long. It is a visually sumptuous and linguistically rich phantasmagoria of shifting shadows and bizarre creatures. In the end, however, some of the staging now seems more gimmicky than experimental. Place the emphasis on “seems.”

While the concept of “total theater” was explored throughout the ’60s and ’70s by a number of artists, it appears that Baxter’s interpretation stems directly from ideas presented in Peter Brook’s seminal text, The Empty Space. In The Empty Space, Brook suggests that artists should stop making plays in the conventional sense and start planning what he termed “events.” The idea was to create a charged atmosphere in which the audience senses they are involved in something special. For Something Wicked, a number of seats have been removed from the auditorium, allowing the players to take the action into all four corners of the playing space. It’s not at all unusual for a freakishly costumed player to swing down from the catwalks in order to shine a flashlight in your eyes. Even during the three-hour show’s two intermissions, circus performers appear in the lobby juggling, belly dancing, and banging on drums for the crowd’s enjoyment. It is a bold, and boldly executed, choice that, due to the sterility of the environment, has diminishing returns.

Michael O’Nele’s perfectly simple line drawing of a set is ideal for setting the show’s sinister tone. It is easy to suspend our disbelief and accept the show’s supernatural marvels within this context. When actors come out into the audience, however, and are framed only by the auditorium’s polished wooden walls and glowing exit signs, it is not quite so easy to believe in miracles and monsters. Until the very end, when there is a slight twist on the roles of performer and observer, the fourth wall is solidly in place and only the plane of the proscenium is broken. There is no real awareness or recognition of the audience and the effect is this: Since the playing space has been significantly enlarged it takes the performers longer to move within it. Also, since the audience remains seated in a conventional way, facing the stage, it becomes a real strain at times to observe all the action, let alone soak in the texture provided by various circus performers. The performances during intermission are equally hampered by fluorescent lighting, bulletin boards, and the many other sanitary trappings of academia. These problems are intrinsic to the performance space and have very little to do with the fine work done by Baxter and her collaborators. Still, it would have been nice to see a more concentrated, time-efficient version of this work that exists only within the magical confines of the stage. In order to fully achieve what they were going for, it would have been best to perform in a less conventional venue, though, nuts and bolts aside, it works well enough.

Bradbury’s chilling fable, while perhaps a bit on the hokey side, can still raise the gooseflesh. Something Wicked tells the story of a traveling carnival whose freaks and geeks take time out of their busy performance schedule to dabble in a little soul-stealing. U of M alums Bill Baker (of Our Own Voice Theatre Company) and Jerre Dye (who currently works and resides in San Francisco) turn in the evening’s most memorable roles. As Mr. Halloway, a man cataloguing his losses as middle age slips away from him, Baker is often hypnotic. His vocal and physical control is well-suited to the rigors of narrative theater, and he succeeds in seamlessly making the transition from dialogue to prose where others lose a great deal of momentum. Dye is not as menacing as he could be as carnival owner Mr. Dark, but this has a lot to do with much of the show’s choreography, which has him waving his hands around like a Deadhead and hissing asthmatically. When he is allowed just to act, he’s the guy you don’t want to run into in your worst nightmare.

The remainder of the student cast fares well in ensemble roles, though they too are limited by choreography that seems more silly than scary. Ashley Whitten’s costumes, which look for all the world like they were plucked from an early-20th-century futurist ballet, only enhance the silliness. While the costumes are in many cases gorgeous, they do little to serve the creepy tone of the piece. Circus performers (at least before the advent of Cirque du Soleil) are exotic in a way that is removed from Whitten’s designs, and in certain cases the costumes are obstacles the performers must overcome rather than tools they can use.

Though it may require a little extra patience, Something Wicked is, for all of its problems, something well worth looking into. When it is successful, it is a treat for the senses. When it fails, it is, at the very least, an interesting failure.

Through November 10th.

Categories
News

A Matter Of Trust

The recent rash of uterine cancer in young girls isn’t the first time illness has visited the neighborhood near the Defense Depot in South Memphis, says Doris Bradshaw. She says cancer is common in her community and readily cites several instances of trees and dogs in the area suddenly and mysteriously dying.

Federal officials — armed with two studies and a litany of explanations — are telling area residents the depot isn’t to blame, but some are questioning the government’s testing methods and point to the community’s history of illness.

“They didn’t investigate the [health] history of the community, so their report shouldn’t be called a health evaluation,” Bradshaw says. “It should be called a site evaluation, because it tests if the depot is safe for industry.”

The Defense Depot is a 640-acre compound used by the army since the beginning of World War II to warehouse supplies — including some chemical weapons. The depot was declared a federal superfund site due to heavy chemical contamination. The dangerous chemicals are being removed to make way for industry.

Though her combative and repeated calls for justice have been discounted by some in the mainstream environmental community, the 40-year-old Bradshaw isn’t alone in her belief that the depot is responsible for the neighborhood’s health problems.

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) crafted a report designed only to calm the fears of the neighborhood, says Franklin Dmitryev, an environmental activist who has studied both of the agency’s reports and written extensively about the depot.

The ATSDR took the army’s records on dangerous chemicals, determined how or if they could leave the compound, the likelihood of exposure, and the possibility of illness due to these exposures. Each abstraction was done with theoretical computer modeling.

Based on their methods, Dmitryev isn’t surprised the ATSDR found no cause for alarm. “With over 100 chemicals identified at the site, there are no data to determine effects of exposure to some of them and almost zero to determine effects of exposure to combinations of them. But the assessment uses comparison levels based only on wild guesses to conclude that there can be no harm to people,” Dmitryev wrote in an issue of News and Letters. “Uncertainty is stressed when it means that we can’t be sure anyone was harmed. But uncertainty is downplayed when it means we can’t be sure people are not harmed.” The report doesn’t take into account that children are more susceptible to the effects of chemical exposure, he adds.

Dmitryev cites the case where a bar graph compared the safe level of a potentially deadly chemical with the amount found at the depot. At first glance the graph seemed to indicate levels twice as high as deemed safe, but when Dmitryev looked closer he realized the numbers in the graph were depicted as a logarithm, meaning the presence of the pesticide was actually at least 40 times the safe level.

Senior ATSDR environmental epidemiologist John Crellan says the dose is the determining factor when it comes to proving illness and the data don’t prove anyone has been harmed. While conceding some contamination has reached the groundwater, Crellan says the cancer rates in the neighborhood are within a normal range.

He does admit the government’s testing only covers the potential for exposure in the past 10 years and that the only off-site soil testing was done on the fence-line of the depot.

Chemicals wash out of the environment, Bradshaw says, but their effects often don’t show up until years later. Just because the government can’t find chemicals today, she says, doesn’t mean they aren’t to blame for the neighborhood’s health problems.

Dmitryev says the cancer rates are misleading because the rates are adjusted against the national average for black people, who are more likely to be exposed to chemicals. He also says the results were watered down because they included parts of the neighborhood not likely to be exposed to chemicals.

Defense Depot neighbors aren’t the only ones to have complaints about the ATSDR, says Stephen Lester, science director for the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice, an organization that helps citizens fight chemical pollution.

He says in 1991 an independent government study found 80 percent of ATSDR’s health assessments were of “poor or uneven quality” and many were “seriously deficient as public health analysis.” The agency was forced to redo many of these studies and claims to have mended its ways, but the only significant change is a stepped-up public relations campaign, Lester says.

The ATSDR reports are also misleading because they don’t bring to light gaps in the available research, Lester says. For example, they know contaminants have reached the groundwater but haven’t taken the next step and tested the nearby wells.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue appears to be the strategy on which ATSDR operates. In doing so, ATSDR avoids the hard issues of what happens when people are exposed to toxic chemicals from contaminated sites,” Lester wrote in his group’s newsletter.

Lester also worries that the ATSDR denial reflex could compromise our nation’s ability to respond to a chemical or biological terrorist attack. The agency initially dismissed the risk of dust from the World Trade Center collapse but was later forced to investigate its effect on victims.

Although cancer rates since 1950 have increased by 42 percent, public health researchers still don’t have the tools to track outbreaks of disease. The United States Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) wants to network public health agencies to allow citizens to find out what kind of diseases occur frequently in their community. Then they could compare this data against the toxic release inventory available online and come to their own conclusions about the effect of local chemicals.

“The depot is a great example of the need for more information to establish a link, if there is a link, between industry and public health effects,” says Jill Johnson of the PIRG Southern field office.

Tennessee industries released 72 million tons of toxic chemicals with links to neurological and developmental disabilities. Shelby County ranks in the top 25 U.S. counties for these same chemicals, according to PIRG data.

Drawn into the struggle for environmental justice after her mother died of cancer, Bradshaw continues to fight. Organizing within her community and with other poisoned neighborhoods around the country, she has seen the pattern of abuse against poor and minority neighborhoods. She plans a lawsuit and is demanding a health clinic in her neighborhood, door-to-door health assessment, and real data concerning risks of exposure.

“We shouldn’t have to prove anything. The Defense Depot, as a good neighbor, should prove to us they didn’t hurt us,” Bradshaw says. “African-American history — through slavery, discrimination, Agent Orange, and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments — shows us not to trust our government. Period.”

You can e-mail Andrew Wilkins at letters@memphisflyer.com.

Categories
Sports Sports Feature

GRIZZLES DROP TO 0-3; LOSE TO MAVERICKS, 94-85

The Memphis Grizzlies once again failed to tally a regular season win with a 94-85 loss to the Dallas Mavericks. The loss wasn’t due to a lack of effort from the birthday boy, Memphis center Lorenzen Wright, who scored 33 points and pulled in 26 rebounds. The effort solidifies Wright’s place as one of the league’s top five rebounders.

But that was about all the Grizzlies had going. Point guard Jason Williams scored 21 points and forward Shane Battier scored 11 and recorded four steals in the losing effort.

But in an evening that featured a lackluster Dallas Mavericks team (with the exception of Juwan Howard, see below), the Grizzlies squandered opportunity after opportunity with turnovers, bad shots, and a general lack of hustle.

All that, and the team shot poorly, hitting only 34% of their shots. “We had one of those offensive nights again,” head coach Sidney Lowe said after the game with an intentional pun. “We didn’t shoot the ball well. You can’t win like that.”

But Lowe was quick to point out the positives of the game, starting with Wright. “Lorenzen had a monster game,” Lowe said. “You can count on him playing hard every night.” However, Lowe also knows that this Memphis squad has very little margin for error. “We don’t have a guy to go to and carry us. When we have five or six guys [who perform], we can win games.”

Of the negatives, Lowe mentioned again the lack of shooting prowess by the team. Most notably there is shooting guard Michael Dickerson, who scored only 3 points this game. “He’s just having a tough time shooting the ball,” Lowe said. “But, as a coach, there’s not much you can do.”

Also problematic are Grizzlies turnovers. The Grizz gave up 20 possessions worth 17 Mavericks’ points this evening with point guard Jason Williams accounting for five of them, including a critical turnover late in the game when Williams tried a behind the back lob to Wright who wasn’t looking for the play. The result was that instead of cutting the Mavericks’ lead to three, Mavericks’ guard Tim Hardaway stole the ball, passed to guard Mike Finley, and Finley dunked it to make the lead seven.

“I’ve never been with a point guard who passes that way,” Wright, who was playing on his 26th birthday, said after the game. “We have to learn how to play with each other.”

Wright also talked a little about this season’s early losing streak. “We hate to lose,” he said. “We’re working so hard.” About his own big game, Wright is as humble as his numbers are audacious. “I’m always a rebounder first,” he said. “I took advantage of opportunities. I don’t need to be anything. I just need to win.”

In his way during the game was Howard who scored 36 points, leading all scorers. The Mavericks’ only other offense was from guard Michael Finley who scored 24 points. Back up guard Tim Hardaway contributed 13. In the rebounding category, Mavericks’ forward Danny Manning pulled in 11.

The Grizzlies go on the road for the next three games, traveling to the Phoenix Suns, the L.A. Clippers, and the L.A. Lakers.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES? OR SIMPLE EMBARRASSMENT?

With the incumbent Republican county mayor declining to run for reelection and the two most-discussed GOP possibilities opting not to run, who will the Shelby County Republican Party turn to next?

Mayor Jim Rout has said no to a race. So, in the last few days, have District Attorney General Bill Gibbons and former city councilman John Bobango.

Undismayed, editor Cherrie Holden has included a hatful of names on the Shelby County Republican PartyÕs official website (www.shelbygop.org), listing no fewer than eight names and an open-ended whosoever-will choice for respondents to vote for in an interactive preference poll. The list is as follows:

city councilman Jack Sammons
State Senator Mark Norris
Shelby County commissioner Linda Rendtorff
County Trustee Bob Patterson
lawyer Duncan Ragsdale
County Commissioner Tommy Hart
County Commissioner Marilyn Loeffel
Memphis city councilman Brent Taylor
Another Republican.

It remains to be seen whether this group constitutes an embarrassment of riches or, should none of them step forward, just an embarrassment.

Holden has also included a poll on Republican candidates fornext yearÕs governorÕs race. Only two names are listed in this category, those of 4th District U.S. Representative Van Hilleary and former State Representative Jim Henry of Kingston.