Month: April 2002

Categories
News

Happy Earth Day

From a blanket outside the gates of the Raoul Wallenberg Shell in Overton Park, Christina Campbell watches the spectacle that was Memphis’ Earth Day celebration last weekend.

Environmental and social activists, midwives, neo-hippies, Buddhists, pagans, artists, and craftsmen gathered among families, food, Frisbees, and music in a two-day celebration of the planet and grassroots efforts to prevent its destruction by neglect and greed.

Campbell attends every year to spend time with her family, enjoy the weather, and listen to some of Memphis’ best bands. Looking out over a park full of people, she wonders why this type of gathering doesn’t happen every weekend.

“This could be the best thing that has happened to Memphis,” Campbell says, “if we all came and hung out with our dogs and kids and had a good time.”

The reason every weekend can’t be Earth Day is simple, organizers say. Just as with the environmental movement, where everyone enjoys the benefits of clean air and water, only a small group of people are willing to put in the time and effort to make it happen.

Conceived in the 1970s, Earth Day celebrations were staged across the country as Americans began to realize the harmful effects of industrial pollution. Federal clean-air and water laws resulted — this country’s best example of how hard-working, organized citizens can demand legislation, according to festival organizer Scott Banbury.

“People don’t realize how bad it was,” Banbury says. “You could wake up and find a layer of soot on your car from coal-burning power plants. Fish couldn’t survive in the rivers. We’ve come a long way, but loopholes and grandfathering clauses keep us out of full [regulatory] compliance.”

Under a tree at the back of the shell grounds, Melissa Stallings gives out information about her career as a “birthing” assistant and on the presence of dangerous chemicals in everything from cleaning products to fruits. She’s one of many people who set up a booth to inform the public about their chosen battle in the war to save the planet.

Advocating natural births isn’t going to make much money for Stallings or hospitals, but she believes the traditional practice of midwifery is healthier than the technology used in the majority of American births.

“If you can change the world one baby at a time and make it more healthy and connected to its mother, it will in turn be more connected to its planet and community and be more likely to give something back,” Stallings says.

Between the music, ranging from Native-American chanting to pseudo-German robotic techno, was a demonstration of a Chinese exercise system called falun dafa. Similar to the gentle, flowing movements of tai chi, falun dafa is a self-improvement program that in seven years has, according to practitioner Annie Wu, attracted 100 million Chinese followers.

“When I was younger I was weak, got sick easily, and always had constipation, stomach ache,” says Wu. “But when I started the practice, it was gone like a miracle.”

Wu says that the new-found health benefits have saved the Chinese government on medical expenses but that 400 people have been tortured to death and many others oppressed by the Chinese government. She blames the crackdown on the government’s fear that healthy people won’t be as easily controlled by the state.

Among the others present at Earth Day were a reproductive clinic, the Midtown Food Cooperative, and craftspeople selling handmade furniture, soaps, salves, and candles. The most ironic coupling was the pagan sword salesman set up next to the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center.

Even the shell itself is run according to grassroots principles these days. John Larkin has put on shows at the shell since 1985, largely from donations from events such as Earth Day. The 66-year-old shell won’t reach its potential, he says, until the city gives its nonprofit group a management contract so they can get capital-improvement loans for the historic structure. Other nonprofits have contracts with the city, Larkin says. He contends the shell could be one of Memphis’ greatest attractions if the city would give his group the authority to get loans and make improvements.

“We put out sound 40 times a year for 40,000 people on a budget of less than $15,000,” Larkin says. “What did Mud Island [amphitheater] do last year and how much money did the city spend on that?”

While organizer Banbury is proud of the work done to fight toxic pollution in Memphis neighborhoods, he says the environmental movement hasn’t caught on here like it has around the country. He suspects Memphians aren’t involved because they think their drinking water is safe and don’t realize the value of resources like the Wolf River and nearby forests.

Audubon Society and Sierra Club memberships are growing, he says, but there are only two paid environmentalists and a handful of committed volunteers working in the city.

A candidate for county commission, Banbury is a custom woodworker and active environmentalist. He says he’d like to see Earth Day happen every weekend, but there would have to be many more volunteers to help carry the work load.

I volunteered to help with Earth Day again this year and was assigned garbage duty. A nearby trashcan filled quickly, and I had trouble extracting the bag.

Several people flung garbage in my direction and kept walking, while another told me not to worry about it. As I struggled, a fellow from a local Vietnamese Buddhist temple came over to help. Though we didn’t speak the same language, we shared a common goal and took out the trash together.

Categories
Book Features Books

Whodunit

The Bondwoman’s Narrative

By Hannah Crafts

Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Warner Books, 338 pp., $24.95

When Henry Louis Gates Jr., head of Harvard’s Afro-American Studies program, first learned of Swann Galleries’ lot number 30, the auction-house catalog had it down as: “Unpublished Original Manuscript. … ‘[A] fictionalized biography … purporting to be the story of the early life and escape of one Hannah Crafts, a mulatto, born in Virginia.’ … It is uncertain that this work is written by a ‘negro.'”

What was almost certain, though, was the date of composition — circa 1850s, which, if the manuscript were the work of a “negro,” would make it a rare document indeed: in Gates’ words, “possibly the first novel written by a black woman and definitely the first novel written by a woman who had been a slave.” More than that, lot 30 would be the first holograph (or handwritten) “belletristic” work (in this case, novel) by an ex-slave to survive — an “unprecedented opportunity,” Gates writes, “to analyze the degree of literacy that at least one slave possessed before the sophisticated editorial hand of a printer or an abolitionist amanuensis performed the midwifery of copyediting.” On February 15, 2001, Gates bid on the manuscript, and that day Gates won it: a tangible record, Gates states, of “the unadulterated ‘voice’ of the fugitive slave herself, exactly as she wrote and edited it.”

“It” is The Bondwoman’s Narrative, a work which internal evidence does suggest is autobiographically based but a work of fiction nonetheless. How it was that Hannah Crafts wrote it is one thing; who Hannah Crafts was is another. And to the first question (which he largely answers), Gates went to science; to the second question (which still awaits answer), Gates went to census records and contemporary news events. You can read of his researches in Gates’ lengthy introduction to the book and in the textual annotations he supplies and the appendixes he reprints. But on the quality of Crafts’ writing, go to the popular literature of the mid-19th century, because that is where you’ll find Crafts twisting convention to suit her purpose and making for herself, after a century and a half, a name.

Crafts’ story, which comes to us with eccentric spellings preserved, unorthodox punctuation corrected, and clear borrowings from Dickens intact, is heavy on the melodramatic and even heavier on sheer coincidence, darkest treachery, highest virtue, narrow escapes, implausible disguises, brutality, suicide, insanity, and whatever other sentimental, gothic, audience-pleasing element you could hope to find. And Hannah is the name of the light-skinned house slave (not field hand) at the melodrama’s center. Over time and in her native Virginia, then in North Carolina, she meets with a kind mistress, a diabolical (and omnipresent) lawyer/slave-trader, forced travel on foot, near-starvation, imprisonment, one very unkind mistress, the filthy streets of Washington, D.C., the threat of rape, further escape on foot, and final freedom in the North.

What we as readers meet with is, however, something clearly uncommon for its time: a novel that presents the slave not as object but as human being. Crafts makes the point every time she withholds our knowledge of a character’s skin color and every time we read of Hannah believing herself “a rational being” who could “think and speculate,” of intimate scenes between maid and mistress that for a moment release Hannah from the “disparity in our conditions,” of Hannah’s opinion that “those that view slavery only as it relates to physical sufferings or the wants of nature can have no conception of its greatest evils” — meaning “the fear, the apprehension, the dread, and deep anxiety” attending slavery in all its forms, be it worker to master, wife to husband, man to money, knowledge to ignorance, present to past.

In 1982, Gates rediscovered and authenticated Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), the first novel published by a black woman but a black woman born free. With The Bondwoman’s Narrative he does Hannah Crafts, born unfree, the same honor, with the added distinction that Crafts’ book was until now never published. It was, however, kept safe, until her death in 1995, by a woman Gates equally honors in his introduction and in his dedication: Dorothy Porter Wesley. Wesley, librarian and historian at Howard University, bought the Crafts manuscript from a New York dealer in 1948 and instantly recognized the novel’s “sentimental and effusive style.” But she also believed its sensitive handling of black characters owed to black authorship.

Why Wesley failed to try to locate the historical Hannah Crafts is a question Gates asks before embarking on his own author search. That he has so far failed to end that search makes publication of The Bondwoman’s Narrative no less an event. For students of African-American literature, reading it’s a requirement. For general audiences, reading it’s a rare look into the antebellum South and a good look into literary detective work.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. will be signing and reading from The Bondwoman’s Narrative at 5 p.m. Friday, April 26th, at Off Square Books (five doors down from Square Books) in Oxford.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Shameful Meddling

Both 4th District congressman Van Hilleary, the presumed Republican front-runner for governor, and ex-Nashville mayor Phil Bredesen, regarded as a prohibitive favorite among the Democrats, have done their best — which is to say their worst — to prevent the Tennessee legislature from dealing with a state fiscal crisis that is on the edge of disaster.

In the last week or so, there have been fresh signs that the legislature might actually hazard a long overdue solution to a revenue shortfall which is heading toward the $2 billion mark. For three years, legislators have dithered and ducked their duty as emergency funds were raided and basic state services — notably education — were cut to the bone. The state House of Representatives made it clear that it would not approve any further increase in the state’s already oppressively high sales tax. The Senate contains members who have held the line against an income tax. And special-interest lobbyists have prevented substantial revenue solutions of any other kind.

Finally, it began to appear that both legislative chambers of the General Assembly might agree on a mild “flat-tax” version of an income tax. Such was the word tentatively passed last week on Capitol Hill in Nashville and reinforced later in the week on the grounds of the Covington Country Club, where throngs of influential politicians gather annually for House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh’s “Coon Supper.”

But that was before Hilleary and Bredesen butted in. In their gubernatorial campaigns so far, both — no doubt influenced by intense and highly organized propaganda campaigns overseen by radio talk-show hosts and others — had taken stands against a state income tax. Both were undoubtedly mindful that a virtual riot stirred up by income-tax opponents brought state government to a panicky standstill last July and forced the emergency use of tobacco-settlement funds merely to provide for minimum levels of state services. Even the use of those one-time funds, however, did not prevent draconian cuts forced upon Governor Don Sundquist in the areas of state parks, education spending, and health care.

As Sundquist, an advocate of tax reform, said in Covington, he felt vindicated in that even longstanding opponents of revenue adjustment had admitted the urgency of the moment and had begun to come around. Hence the pending flat-tax vote.

Enter Hilleary and Bredesen, each of whom released statements this week that they would seek to “repeal” a state flat tax if one were to be passed by the General Assembly this year. Nothing could have been better calculated to undercut the last-ditch efforts of the governor and legislative leaders to avert the gathering financial catastrophe.

Hilleary, at least, can point to a substantial number of his partymates who are adamantly opposed to a state income tax. Bredesen can boast of no such groundswell among state Democrats. Both men come off as unacceptably opportunistic. Whatever their personal convictions, each could have — and should have — declined to interfere with the legislative process under way.

We do not endorse in election races, but we would be remiss not to point out that Republican gubernatorial candidate Jim Henry, while opposing an income tax, has been open-minded enough not to rule it out. Democrat Randy Nichols has been sufficiently brave to campaign in favor of an income tax, while another Democrat, Charles Smith, has accused Bredesen and Hilleary of “pandering” and has promised to make no comments of his own on the legislature’s ongoing deliberations.

Illustrations, if you will, of the difference between statesmanship and demagoguery.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

thursday, 25

All right. I am now officially old. I actually left my house Friday night and went to a concert on the Christian Brothers University campus and, save for a security guard, could have been the father of anyone there. But I must say that I finally saw and heard the band Ingram Hill live and was very impressed. With all due respect to the other members of the band, that lead singer certainly has a future. I even stayed up until midnight to hear them. But it was tough. I ve got that old-age sleep pattern now of going to bed really early and waking up in the middle of the night and never going back to sleep. In fact, it is 8:41 a.m. as I write this, and I have been up for five hours. And because I am too old and lazy to get the satellite-dish people to come turn on the dish that s already on the roof, I am limited to only the local stations. By the time I actualy leave the house, I have seen untold numbers of infomercials for proucts you know don t work I lost two whole dress sizes in 48 hours! and feel as if I m on a personal level with every bankrupcy lawyer in the city. I was so bored one morning that I even called and listened to a prerecorded message about it, which basically said if I would come in and file for bankruptcy I would lose nothing and would be debt-free so everyone and their brother would love to loan me giant sums of cash. I have heard the same news repeated over and over until I start reciting the lines along with the announcers. It s usually at this point that I start doing my other old man thing: puttering around the house. I like to stand in the kitchen and fiddle with the Vent-A-Hood that hangs over the stove but day by day is getting closer to falling out. I like to think that I am going to fix it but know in my heart that I am far too mechanically challenged to do so and that one day I m going to hear a loud crash when it finally falls. I walk around turning lamps on and off and make coffee and call to see which checks cleared overnight and go out on the porch to see which plants I ve killed and, well, just putter. My memory is also at its worst in the morning, fuzzy from being asleep and from being old. I try to figure out who all of my cousins are and who their parents are, but I can t. Even in my wide-awake hours, the memory isn t what it used to be. Just the other day, I was with a friend hitting the yard sales. After leaving one, we started following a sign, driving around in circles until we finally found it. Got out of the car only to realize it was the yard sale we had just left. So there. Anything you read on this page must be taken with a grain of salt, because I can t remember what it is I m supposed to be doing.

Oh, yeah. What s going on around town this week. Here s a brief look. Tonight, Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead, the story of someone forced to watch and listen repeatedly as George W. Bush calls Ariel Sharon a man of peace for pulling his troops out of the refugee village of Jenin after leaving the mothers there to dig their dead babies out of the rubble with their bare hands. Okay, I couldn t help it. It s actually an Eric Bogosian play about the humor, fear, hypocrisy, and rage of Americans and opens at Rhodes College s McCoy Theatre. NSync, with the Mid-South s own Justin Timberlake, is at The Pyramid. Sun House is at the Flying Sacer. And the Keith Sykes Songwriters Showcase is at the Lounge.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Stranger Than Fiction

DYERSBURG, Tenn. — As an attorney in Dyersburg, Charles Kelly has seen his share of strange cases come his way. But the case of the heavyweight championship fight may be the strangest one yet.

About a month ago, Kelly, a 1960 graduate of Central High School in Memphis, got a call from boxing promoter Brian Young in Nashville. The question: Could Kelly find investors to put up the crucial $12.5 million site fee for the Mike Tyson/Lennox Lewis fight, and could he do it in one week?

The laid-back, silver-haired lawyer with a stack of business cards for a crappie fishing guide on his desk pulled it off. Now the only thing more surprising than a heavyweight title fight in Memphis may be that the financing is coming from some unusual sources in Dyersburg.

“It’s strange,” admitted Kelly, who is about to add well-known Memphis defense attorney and part-time actor/comedian Wayne “Cousin Bubba” Emmons to his office. “I have wondered what am I doing with this in Dyersburg, Tennessee, 80 miles away from Memphis.”

Stranger than fiction, maybe. What we have so far is a heavyweight championship fight (not recognized by some boxing associations) being held in Memphis after being turned down by Las Vegas and New York, prestaged at two Tunica casinos, promoted by novices from Nashville, and financed by, among others, a Dyersburg businessman convicted of bank fraud 15 years ago. All that plus Mike Tyson, who is so unpredictable that there is talk of holding separate weigh-ins for the fighters lest there be another brawl.

Kelly was referred to Young by a former Kelly client they won’t identify. And while Kelly is willing to talk about his involvement, most of the investors aren’t. The site fee is a standard requirement for a big fight, but negative public reaction to convicted rapist and ear-biter Tyson coupled with reticence on the part of fight investors in this northwest Tennessee town of 20,000 people have made it difficult to pin down details.

Last week, Kelly said First Citizens National Bank in Dyersburg, headquartered across the street from the historic Courthouse Square and Civil War monument, was issuing letters of credit for the investors. But bank officials denied knowing anything about that when visited by a reporter, although bank personnel seemed familiar enough with the story and even eager to run it to ground.

On Sunday, the local newspaper, the Dyersburg State-Gazette, following up on last week’s story in the Flyer, reported that First Citizens and Security Bank did issue the letters of credit. The newspaper said the banks declined comment.

Kelly said he first took the deal to Don Crews, president of First Tennessee Bank in Dyersburg.

“Don Crews thought it was a viable business deal and moved forward to handle it,” said Kelly. “He was going to handle the main letter of credit plus personal letters. Then the headquarters bank in Memphis said no the night before the letters were to be issued, and the plug got pulled.”

Both Crews and First Tennessee CEO Ralph Horn declined to be interviewed. Sources told the Flyer that First Tennessee got a strong negative reaction to the fight from its employees and customers, but the real reason for balking was that the request came from an outer office that wanted it approved in one day. That was too little time.

“When you get one head of sheep or cattle on the run, it spooks the others,” Kelly said of the reluctance of Memphis banks to handle the fight financing.

Kelly said there are six investors. The only one who would comment is Billy York Walker, head of Dyer Investment Company LLC in Dyersburg and former president of Farmers Bank. In 1987, Walker was convicted of conspiracy to commit bank fraud in federal court in Memphis, according to court records. The charges included making false entries in the bank books with intent to deceive the officers, directors, and the FDIC and making false statements on a loan application. He was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to make restitution of $269,687. He served his sentence at the federal correctional facility in Marion, Illinois, and was released in 1991.

State records show that Dyer Investment Company LLC was established in 1994.

In a brief telephone interview last week, Walker said the investors are “country people” who value their privacy, but they’re not hiding from the media.

“I think how we got involved with this is about as absurd as the fight coming to Memphis,” said Walker. “We were contacted by a Nashville group about possibly handling the site fee. We looked at it and thought it was a long shot. It was so convoluted, I didn’t see any way it could happen. But we decided to take it one step at a time and see what happens, and that is what we did. This is the first fight we’ve ever been involved in and probably the last.”

After talking for a couple of minutes, Walker said he had to take another phone call and would call back. He could not be reached again. The Flyer was also unable to contact Dyersburg road builder John Ford, head of Ford Construction. Sources told us Ford helped put the site fee together. Ford told the State-Gazette he is not a direct investor but is involved with Dyer Investment Company.

The investors stand to make a profit on the site fee if the bout goes off as scheduled on June 8th and sells out The Pyramid at prices of up to $2,400 per seat.

Kelly said he’ll be there. He likened it to being in the delivery room when your baby is born.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

The Unbearable Whiteness Of Being

When Rebecca Gilman’s Spinning Into Butter, a play confronting the slippery nature of racism in America, moved from Chicago’s Goodman Theatre to New York, it found a slavering crowd of reasonably hostile critics waiting to shred it. Nobody wanted to come right out and say that the playwright was wrong in her assumptions or that the piece was poorly written, but almost everyone wanted to show how the play was overly simple: a primer for the few unfortunates among us who have never really stared down our secret demons and seriously considered the issue of racism before.

And while it’s hard to deny that the piece makes for a superb introduction to the ugly issue, I strongly disagree with anyone who claims that it is simplistic. In fact, Spinning Into Butter is a complex, courageous work by a writer who is not afraid to take huge political risks. And while it may not address even a single issue that has not crossed the mind (if not the actual lips) of your average East Coast critic, it makes all of these private ideas public and accessible. Running the gamut from genuinely entertaining to genuinely shocking, Gilman’s play gets to the heart of the matter and beyond as she explores not so much the roots of racism as the root system. We are never confronted with simple solutions or solutions of any kind, for that matter. We are only shown how this evil proliferates and grows wild even in the most liberal circles and how it ultimately corrupts even those who seem to be far above the petty prejudices that lead to discrimination. It also shows how the politically correct school of thought has created an environment in which even heartfelt efforts to level a racially divided playing field have created a killing field laden with deadly linguistic traps.

Though, like any good farce, Spinning Into Butter twists and turns like a country road, the premise is fairly simple. An African-American student at a highfalutin, predominantly white East Coast college has been receiving threatening letters. The faculty rushes willy-nilly to turn this horror into a “meaningful learning experience” by creating a series of “race forums.” In actuality, these forums are just an exercise in vanity and an opportunity for various faculty members to congratulate themselves for being so very progressive.

Only one of the deans, Sarah, a white, razor-witted Midwesterner and avid student of African-American culture, understands how utterly useless and potentially offensive these forums are. She also knows that, regardless of intent, her own motivations are the product of guilt and ultimately racist in nature. She admits that, try as she might to walk an enlightened path and make the world a better place, she finds many black people to be rude, loud, ignorant, lazy, and terrifying. She knows that it’s wrong to judge an entire race based on the actions of a few and that her feelings, like those of the scary, undereducated people she won’t sit by on the subway, are the result of a failed system. She desperately wants to exorcise these feelings but doesn’t know where to begin. Her admissions, which are entirely at odds with her public record, are rewarded with nothing but contempt by foolish academics who seek catharsis in the creation of empty gestures and the general proclamation that hate is bad. To say much more, to even attempt to give this play the critical workout it deserves, would give away too many of the vital plot elements that make it so very rich and compelling.

Director Bob Hetherington has assembled a top-notch cast, including Brent Lowder, John Moore, S.A. Weakley, Ann Sharp, John Rone, and Jordan Nichols. In the midst of so much general excellence, Anne Dauber still manages to stand out as the conflicted Sarah, finding humor even in her darkest moments. It’s the sort of performance that makes even a devout non-hugger like myself want to rush backstage to squeeze the daylights out of the actor while shouting, “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

Usually, I’m quick to take issue with plays that take on hot-button issues. All too often, they are precious attempts to generate some sort of sympathetic magic, and the playwright hopes the “importance” of the issues addressed will imbue his or her work with an equal degree of importance. They are windy affairs, predictable and full of high-minded platitudes offered up to an ultraliberated crowd that has, presumably, already seen the light. Spinning Into Butter is aimed at this same liberated crowd, but instead of confirming their convictions, it challenges them. Or, given the tepid New York reviews, perhaps it even threatens them. Using the numerous, nearly slapstick plot devices, it accomplishes all of this at breakneck pace with an abundance of humor. Spinning Into Butter is not only a textbook example of how to create good, politically charged theater, it is an excellent example of just how exciting the form can be. It’s the sort of show that you’ll still be talking about months after it has closed.

Through May 26th.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

No Land Bridge!

If, on May 7th, the city council gives the go-ahead to the Riverfront Development Corporation’s master plan without modification, the city of Memphis will start down the path of an expensive, poorly conceived project that will change it forever.

The cornerstone of the project is a land bridge connecting a major section of downtown to Mud Island and creating an artificial lake.RDC’s rationalization for this is their conclusion that Memphians have an unfulfilled desire to come to the river. In reality they plan to create approximately 50 acres for some future unknown development and to open many downtown areas to the development of multiresident housing.

The RDC claims that the project will cost less than $300 million. Their estimate is presented as a detailed budget (with estimates down to the dollar level), when in reality it is at best a guess at the true cost. If inflation, the cost of closing and/or moving the many businesses and Coast Guard station located on the harbor, and the cost of bridging over the mainline railroad track are considered, the cost is easily more than double their estimate.

Memphis will lose its vital and active harbor. For 10 years, from the start of construction, the riverfront will be the site of a massive landfill. The fill required would be the equivalent of a large truckload dumped every four minutes, seven days a week, 24 hours per day for four years.Imagine the views from our newly completed Performing Arts Center and the newly landscaped Riverfront Drive during this massive construction effort. Instead of a welcoming waterfront, for years it will be fenced off to allow for construction.

The plan is built around the completion of the land bridge. In fact, 80 percent of the cost of the project (which I estimate to be at least $680 million) is related to closing the harbor and preparing for and building the land bridge. This results in new land that will cost an unbelievable $11 million per acre. To make the new land competitive for developers, Memphis will have to absorb most of this cost.

Memphis can provide land for growth at a much lower cost.

The impact on downtown is unacceptable. For years, the landfill will be under construction, just when we are beginning to attract new tourists and residents. Once the bridge is in place, we will be looking at a barren 50 acres while the newly filled land settles and developers are found. Special foundations and pilings will be required to overcome the poor ground conditions, further complicating and increasing the cost of construction.

Claims for new jobs created by the land bridge are pure speculation and don’t account for the many jobs lost through closing the harbor. The funds used for creating this new land will be unavailable for other developments that have equal job-creation potential.

The environmental impact has not been evaluated. Permits are not in place. The potential requirement for an environmental impact statement is real and could further delay the project, increasing its cost. The creation and maintenance of a large artificial lake has unknown implications, including leaching of pollutants, accelerated algal growth, and groundwater changes.

The eventual result of the land bridge is likely to be the loss of Mud Island Park and Museum, the loss of The Pyramid, and the delay or loss of many other potential waterfront improvements.

There are many projects that would enhance the Wolf River harbor and make the waterfront a more attractive place to visit. These projects would not need to focus on creating more land for development and would not need to compete with the land currently unused in the downtown area.

The plan for a land bridge needs to be stopped now!

Thomas Kroll, a Harbor Town resident, is the retired president of an engineering and consulting firm.

Categories
Sports Sports Feature

Bluff City?

Grizzlies general manager Billy Knight — a good guy and a good GM — just got canned. Welcome to the real “Big Time,” Memphis. In pro sports, changes can occur at any moment and the public gets little — if any — insight into the situation. The Grizzlies brain trust has shut out everyone, including members of its own staff who might leak information anonymously. Simply put, the Grizzlies management is wearing a poker face right now. So are they hiding a royal flush (i.e., does owner Mike Heisley know what the hell he is doing?) or are they bluffing?

Much of the spotlight has fallen on president of basketball operations Dick Versace. Versace has a spotty career record at best and is widely disliked by many members of the media. His most notable accomplishment was a coaching stint with the Indiana Pacers. According to the Grizzlies’ media guide, Versace “developed” Pacer Reggie Miller to All-Star status. (One can only wonder what Reggie thinks about that.) He got the job with the Grizzlies because then-new owner Heisley was a longtime buddy. Here are some of Versace’s Grizzlies career highlights:

n According to Craig Daniels of The Toronto Sun, Versace tried to make the Grizzlies PR staff pay his $10,000 NBA-instituted fine for saying that the Toronto Raptors would tank in Canada. Versace reasoned that the staff did not prep him on the question of Toronto’s viability and so were personally (and fiscally) responsible. The good thing is that since PR personnel get paid so much more than team presidents, no one on the staff would have felt the pinch. Not that much, anyway.

n Versace hired head coach Sidney Lowe (which was a good thing). But then, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Stephen Smith, he bragged to people in the stands of Vancouver’s GM Arena about how he would coach the team, should he (humbly) get the opportunity to do so. Versace started such antics after only 20 games into Lowe’s career. Lowe would go on to record the two best regular seasons in Grizzlies history and played a major role in developing the team’s young talent.

n During the 2001 draft, Versace wanted Eddy Curry, who eventually went to the Chicago Bulls. Billy Knight insisted on Pau Gasol. According to veteran NBA writer Sam Smith of the Chicago Tribune, Versace went so far as to threaten Knight’s job if Gasol didn’t pan out. Knight won the battle and Memphis drafted the eventual 2002 rookie of the year. Chicago, to put the matter delicately, did not.

* After the 2002 season, Versace fired GM Billy Knight and blamed the firing on owner Michael Heisley. Rumors from insiders say that Versace was furious that Knight got the credit for drafting Gasol.

And Versace may not be done. So here’s a word of warning to Grizzlies head coach Sidney Lowe: Watch your back. Any number of scenarios could develop that would leave him out in the cold. One is that Versace could fire Lowe, “demote” himself to coach, and then let Lakers mogul Jerry West run the head office as GM and president. Another scenario is that West could become president (West has said he doesn’t want to be GM), and Versace would become GM and coach.

Give this to Versace: He’s opportunistic. If either of these scenarios happen, he would take control of a team that should easily win over 30 games next year. Versace would also benefit from West’s presumably adroit touch in the front office. Versace would be known as the man who turned the Grizzlies into winners, even though he’d be using the talent acquired by Knight and developed by Lowe.

But will Lowe really get fired? Heisley has said publicly that while he wants Lowe on the team and he would be surprised to see the coach go, that decision is not in his hands. Heisley charged Lowe with developing talent this year, not winning ballgames. Lowe has one more year on his contract, and here’s hoping he gets to fulfill it. But if Lowe can’t pull off 35 wins or so next year, don’t count on him being around the following season.

Peter Vescey of NBC says that West is leaning toward coming to Memphis. But in what capacity, no one seems to know. Change, power struggles, good guys getting fired. It’s all part of the big leagues, Memphis. Get used to it. The best — or worst — may be yet to come.

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Music Music Features

Local Record Roundup

Along with then-wife Laurie Stirrat, Oxford’s Cary Hudson led one of the ’90s’ most prominent alt-country bands, emerging in the middle of the decade to expand a genre created a few years earlier by Uncle Tupelo and the Jayhawks. Blue Mountain bid adieu with last year’s covers record, Roots, and Hudson has spent much of the last year helping back up fellow North Mississippian Tyler Keith as part of the old-time rock-and-rollin’ Preacher’s Kids. But now Hudson returns to more familiar ground with his solo debut, The Phoenix (Black Dog Records; Grade: B).

The record is like a textbook on Hudson’s particular take on alt-country. The reserved, rural anthem “By Your Side” is the most conventional alt-country song on the record. Everything else is a trip along the stylistic map of Americana. As a Mississippi boy, Hudson’s version of alt-country is more steeped in the blues than most, and The Phoenix reflects this. The album’s lone cover is an electrified version of Blind Willie Johnson’s “God Don’t Never Change,” while the closing “August Afternoon” is nimble acoustic blues in the vein of Mississippi John Hurt. And Hudson updates his blues repertoire with the Dylanesque carnival blues of “Bend With the Wind,” approximating the gleeful growl and vicious one-liners that Dylan presents in similar-sounding songs, even if Hudson’s lyrical putdowns are decidedly more earthbound.

But the blues bent is balanced by a lighter shade of roots as well. Southern rockers like “Mad, Bad & Dangerous” and the opening “High Heel Sneakers” are transitional, the latter featuring bluesy riffs and slide-guitar shrieks along with simple down-home party lyrics like “Well, it’s midnight in Mississippi/And the moon shines all around/C’mon all you good-time people/We’re gonna get on down.” By contrast, “Lovin’ Touch” and “Butterfly” seem more indebted to El Lay soft rock, alt-country’s often unacknowledged forebear, with the former somehow managing to split the thin difference between the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. And while the title song is the most tedious thing on the record, it’s useful in that it connects Hudson’s roots tapestry to straight country.

The director of the ethnomusicology department at the University of Memphis, blues scholar David Evans, authored a key blues text with the 1978 book Big Road Blues and offers a different kind of scholarly examination of blues culture with his debut solo album, Match Box Blues (Inside Sounds; Grade: A-). But just because Match Box Blues is a scholarly endeavor doesn’t mean it’s stuffy or distanced. Evans’ accomplished playing and appropriately rough singing convey his clear love of blues traditions without sounding overly reverent.

Match Box Blues mostly consists of Evans’ versions of early blues standards, with the few Evans copyrights being reworkings of preexisting material. “Aunt Caroline Dye Blues,” about the oft-referenced Arkansas “hoodoo woman and spiritual counselor” of the title, mixes original and traditional verses, while Evans crafts “Railroad Blues” from the stray bits of other performers, such as Fred McDowell and Furry Lewis. Evans has made much of his mark by exposing and championing relatively unknown blues performers, and, in that vein, the repertoire on Match Box Blues focuses on early blues artists who, while they may be household names for serious blues fans, are likely to be unfamiliar to more casual fans, including tunes from Yank Rachell, Lemon Jefferson, and Leroy Carr. The most familiar song is likely to be Evans’ raggedly spirited ramble through the recently ubiquitous “Shake ‘Em On Down.”

Evans is probably best known to Memphians as a performer with the Last Chance Jug Band, and fans of that outfit shouldn’t despair, as many of Evans’ Jug Band cohorts make guest appearances here. Indeed, rather than a straight solo, acoustic blues record, Match Box Blues nods to the jug band tradition with its liberal use of other instruments, including the kazoo, piano, washboard, and jug. This fine album also features detailed, copious liner notes from Evans and fellow blues scholar Andy Cohen.

Recent high-profile releases like the multidisc Malaco Story box set and Rhino’s Chitlin Circuit Soul! compilation have helped expose the Southern “chitlin circuit” scene to a broader audience, highlighting a brand of old-fashioned soul music that proudly serves a specific audience (black, adult, working class) and stubbornly persists in a music climate in which the influence of hip hop and modern production techniques have made Southern soul rather unfashionable.

Memphis’ Ecko Records is one of the genre’s stalwart labels, and the company’s latest release from soul veteran Bill Coday, Love Gangsta (Ecko; Grade: B+), is one of their finest releases in recent years. A Coldwater, Mississippi, native who first made his mark on the R&B scene in the early ’70s, Coday sounds more modern and urban here than many of his circuit colleagues and also more self-conscious about the undeniable kitsch value the genre holds for many. After a female voice-over proclaims him “armed and extremely dangerous,” the opening title track/declaration of principles has Coday winking his way through some priceless chitlin circuit couplets, including “Calling women on the telephone/Gangster-style, like Al Capone,” “Breaking hearts is my claim to fame/The Love Gangsta is my name,” and, my fave, “The game I play, it ain’t shoddy/You think I’m lying, you better ask somebody!”

Similarly, Coday’s “On the Chitlin Circuit” takes outsider interest for granted, offering the uninitiated a tour of life on the circuit — the towns, the clubs, the other performers. And “Hoochie Dance” (“It wasn’t so hard to do/This dance I was turned on to”) is a loving ode to one of the milieu’s trademark institutions (repeated in a “dance mix” at the end of the record).

The comical cheating song “You Caught Me With My Drawers Off” (“There wasn’t a damn thing I could do,” he croons regretfully) and the standard double entendre of “If I Can’t Cut the Mustard (I Can Still Lick Around the Jar)” are to be expected, but Coday also proves he isn’t all kitsch with “I Ain’t Gonna Cry No More,” a fine, serious soul ballad.

A one-off project on the local Goner Records label, Bad Times (Goner; Grade: B) teams Memphis garage/punk stalwarts Jay Reatard (the Lost Sounds, the Reatards) and Eric Oblivian (the Oblivians, natch) with New Orleans’ like-minded King Louie Bankston in a thrash-rock session that doesn’t quite match the intensity and artistry of Reatard’s and Oblivian’s other bands but does conjure the same off-the-cuff attitude, evoking the likes of early Replacements. Songwriting credits are pretty evenly distributed, but Reatard, unsurprisingly, steals the show with inspired, shrieking, snot-nosed anthems like “Momma Told Me So,” “You’re So Lewd,” and especially the back-to-back shot of “Listen to the Band” and “Trapped in the City.” As near as I can tell, this is vinyl-only, but you should be able to find it in indie record shops.

Emerging chamber-rock band Loggia made their recorded debut last year with a cut on the Makeshift 2 compilation and are heard from again on the fine 7″ single “Idris”/”Angels” (Rural Metro Music; Grade: B). On “Idris,” Rebecca Green’s violin is the lead instrument, soaring over a dual-guitar/drum foundation, vocalist Paul Rauen’s subdued singing and cryptic, poetic lyrics coming in after a long, instrumental intro. The flip side, “Angels,” is all instrumental.

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Music Music Features

Sound Advice

To tell the truth, I’ve never been a big fan of outdoor music festivals. Too often, they’re overcrowded, uncomfortably hot, littered with trash, and not really conducive to good music. Give me a dark, dank, cool club anytime. But one of the rare outdoor festivals in this area that really works for me is The Double Decker Arts Festival on the lovely courthouse square in Oxford, Mississippi. A free, all-day roots-music festival, the Double Decker is set for this Saturday, April 27th, with music starting at 11 a.m. and going on through the night.

Nothing on this year’s bill is quite as exciting as recent headliners such as Wilco and Lucinda Williams, but it’s still a solid, varied set of roots acts. New York’s Holmes Brothers (set to go on at 4:30 p.m.) are one of the finest acts on the contemporary blues scene, their gritty, three-piece blues-band sound spiked with heavy gospel influences. Last year’s Joan Osbourne-produced Speaking in Tongues was a little disappointing to these ears, but the previous Promised Land is one of my favorite blues albums of the last decade. Other festival highlights will include the party-starting New Orleans rhythm and blues of the Wild Magnolias (3 p.m.), the incredibly tight bluegrass of the Del McCoury Band (6:00 p.m.), and the dulcet folk tones of Nanci Griffith & the Blue Moon Orchestra (9 p.m.). And perhaps most compelling of all, the more modern pop of Memphis’ all-time greatest rock band, Big Star (6:30 p.m.). — Chris Herrington

No matter how I try, I can’t banish the theme to The Courtship of Eddie’s Father from my head. “People, let me tell you ’bout my best friend/He’s a one-boy cuddly toy/My up/My down/My pride and joy.” How sweet and yet how vaguely disturbing. And while on the topic of vaguely disturbing, ’80s hardcore heroes The Dead Kennedys are coming to town on Friday, April 26th, at the Hi-Tone. Of course, they are coming without famous frontman and rant-machine Jello Biafra. But, hey, seeing original band members like Easy Bay Ray, D.H. Peligro, and Klaus Fluoride shredding on tunes like “Holiday in Cambodia” has got to be worth something. And does it really matter who is shouting “Too Drunk To Fuck”? Filling in for Biafra is primo thrasher Brandon Cruz, a veteran of the California hardcore scene who began his life in the entertainment biz playing Bill Bixby’s cute kid on (you guessed it) The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. — Chris Davis