Month: July 2002

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Postscript

Board History

To the Editor:

It was great to see an entire page in the Flyer dedicated to skateboarding (“On Board,” June 27th issue). Bianca Phillips’ article on skate parks said that Memphis got its first one in 1999. Memphis actually had TWO skate parks in the 1970s. They were called Jet Way. One was in Bartlett (there were remnants of it until the late ’80s when it was bulldozed to make way for a strip mall), and another one was on Mt. Moriah.

Urban legend has it that the insurance costs became too high, and the parks were closed and filled in with dirt. I don’t have any other details. Maybe we should “Ask Vance.”

Scott Bomar

Memphis

Elvis Is Dead

To the Editor:

When asked about some of his “creative” projects that were presented to the Memphis Music Commission he heads, Jerry Schilling trotted out the same tired old Elvis/Sun Studios rhetoric (City Reporter, June 27th issue). I love Elvis and Sun Studios as much if not more than the next guy, but if we don’t start looking forward instead of backward, Memphis musicians will never have anything to look forward to except making $50 to $75 a night, playing to tourists who only want to hear cover material.

To pay Schilling that kind of salary and have nothing to show for it is nothing short of criminal. Let’s turn the River Museum on Mud Island into a mecca for local and national musicians who want to learn the art of writing and recording new material. A state-of-the-art video and audio recording center/school would have students flocking to it. Scholarships and funding could be sponsored by record labels and audio/video equipment manufacturers, as well as the big employers who call Memphis home.

Artists come to Memphis to write and record because of the feel that this city has to offer. It’s that kind of weird vortex of different thinking that spawned Dewey and Sam Phillips, Elvis and Sam the Sham. If we don’t nurture the kids who are rocking and sweating in hot garages right now, history is all we will have.

I do not know the inner workings of the Music Commission, but Schilling, of all people, should know that Elvis has left the building … empty. Let’s fill it back up.

Jeff Golightly

Germantown

No Tax

To the Editor:

The Naifeh plan for a state income tax and the recent remarks supporting it (Viewpoint, June 20th issue) seem to unfairly target the hard-working professionals of Tennessee. The statistical data presented in the examples given by the Speaker and the Tennesseeans for Fair Taxation are, in my opinion, a misrepresentation. Given the same basic needs (food, clothing, gasoline, and driver’s licenses) at the same basic costs, of course, a family making less money is using a larger percentage of its income. This is not because they are unfairly taxed nor is it because the higher-income family is not doing its fair share, as alleged. It is basic mathematics.

If the state government finds it undesirable to tax consumption of basic needs, then don’t. Taxing those working but not living in Tennessee deserves serious consideration. Just don’t make those who have a higher income out to be villains or the source/fix for the state budget crisis.

What is fair about an alleged “flat” tax when one pays more simply because one makes more? The idea that a state income tax will serve as the best long-term solution is questionable. There are several other states that have an income tax that are also in a budget crisis. It will serve the citizens of Tennessee well to not be misled into believing that one certain segment of the population is being taxed unfairly but to investigate the issue and demand a better approach to budget reform.

Jason Duncan

Memphis

Egocentric?

To the Editor:

What’s Chris Davis’ deal with Covington (“Quick Getaway,” June 20th issue)? Is he that pretentious that he has to ridicule a small town for its lack of urbane culture? Of course, tapas and foie gras are not to be found, nor is visiting here the same as drinking black Chianti in Tuscany, but it’s a small Southern town. That’s where its grace lies. There are no four-star attractions here, no hip film festivals or trendy cigar bars, but that didn’t stop my wife, son, and me from moving here last fall. What we’ve found is a quiet community with some beautiful examples of Southern architecture, a quaint town square, and a place where we can enjoy the simple pleasures of living — even a Cabernet on our front-porch swing now and then. If we are looking for things we cannot find here, we simply drive to Memphis.

Davis needs to learn to appreciate a place’s culture without relating it to his own egocentric perspective. Looking for things to do here? Get to know the people; walk down Main Street on a summer evening; drive out to see cotton being harvested; absorb the Southern culture. And, trust me, the fried chicken of nearby Gus’ beats foie gras any day.

Adam Calhoun Simpson

Covington

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

Categories
News News Feature

The Mix Is the Message

There are two fast-selling books in the marketplace that are remarkable in their repudiation of the general feeling, often reinforced by the media, that George Bush enjoys enormous popularity and stands invincible in the wake of 9/11.

Both Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men and Mark Crispin Miller’s Bush’s Dyslexicon are powerful, damning, and even scornful of the president’s standing and behavior. And surprise: These books are successful — in Moore’s case, unbelievably so. But you wouldn’t know it from media appearances, book reviews, and bookstore readings.

Moore’s book has astonished virtually all observers of politics and the publishing industry by dominating The New York Times bestseller list week after week (13 weeks at last look). Miller’s book at this stage lacks the public recognition that Moore’s has but is still selling modestly well. Yet neither of these two critics gets any respect from the media establishment.

Miller catalogs in humorous detail Bush’s incredible gift for gaffes. It analyzes in an astute and comprehensive way the efforts by Bush’s handlers to manage and minimize this president’s obvious language shortfalls.

But this is no joke book. It’s a hair-raising look at the man at the nation’s helm by one of the country’s most acute media analysts. As Miller notes, post-9/11, the Bush presidency was reinvented: “From the very timely spectacle of his rock-hard demeanor, many viewers — and especially the press — now extrapolated other inner qualities, despite the lack of any evidence that he possessed them. Thus, our president … was, as if by magic, also eloquent, farsighted, well informed, and wise — a testament to the eternal power of wishful thinking.”

You would think a close examination of Bush’s behavior under duress is a relevant topic in this media moment. But Miller couldn’t get a review to save his life for the hardcover edition, except for a pan in The Washington Post and a brief positive mention in The New Yorker. And now that the paperback is out, with an added 100 pages evaluating Bush’s behavior post-9/11, things are even worse.

Miller is unsurprised by reviewer hostility but says he is “more mystified” by the ongoing press blackout and virtual bookstore boycott of the paperback. Miller observes that while Bush’s numbers are falling and the post-9/11 fit of anxious national conformity is long behind us, the edifice of corporate media and bookstore chains remains a giant temple of Bush-worship.

According to Miller, Barnes & Noble told his publisher, W.W. Norton, that a book signing for him “wouldn’t draw a crowd — this despite the fact that the paperback is selling like crazy. Norton sold out its first printing three weeks before the publication date. That’s unusual for an unadvertised title, to put it mildly.”

Meanwhile, Moore’s experience, given the success of Stupid White Men, is truly remarkable.

For the first three months of the book’s release, Moore says, “I did not appear on a single broadcast network show other than one appearance on Politically Incorrect — which on that particular night did not air until 1:05 a.m. Since then, I have appeared only on Today — and only if I agreed to appear with a right-wing author (as they did not want to put me on alone, even though by then my book had been number one for four weeks). The book has been completely ignored by every single show on NPR and PBS, and 95 percent of the daily papers in the country, including The New York Times, have refused to review it.”

So what does this mean? It appears that consumers, who are craving more authenticity, are increasingly disregarding corporate media hype. In many cases, traditional media exposure may even mean less success as buyers get their signals through e-mail, word of mouth, and independent media of all sorts.

A case in point is Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s recent book Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest For Children. This book about the supposed unhappiness of women who sacrifice babies for careers sold a miniscule number of copies despite what Nation columnist Katha Pollitt called “a publicity campaign from heaven: Time cover story, 60 Minutes, Oprah, Today, wall-to-wall radio.”

Michael Moore concludes: “I am grateful for the near-complete blackout of coverage regarding my book. The more the mainstream press has ignored it, the more copies it has sold. Editors are stuck now and don’t know what to do. They have been reporting for nine months that all of America is in love with Bush — and now how do they explain that gross misrepresentation when a book called Stupid White Men that stars George W. Bush is still at number one in The New York Times, the most-read nonfiction book in the country in 2002? How does that paper simply ignore its own bestseller list? I mean, you gotta have a good laugh over this one!”

Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet, where this column first appeared.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Elvis Redux

When Walt Disney rolled into town recently to premiere its latest animated feature Lilo & Stitch, it’s very likely a miracle occurred. For starters, there was plenty of that legendary Disney magic to go around. It began to manifest itself as each guest arrived for a celebration at Graceland and was wreathed with a lei of exotic flowers as fresh, fragrant, and intoxicating as the umbrella-sporting, blue drinks that were being offered up like water. Those cheap plastic jobs you can buy by the sackful at Party City apparently don’t cut Disney mustard. Hula dancers shook their grass skirts beneath the colored lights, King Louie the fire dancer twirled his blazing baton, and an Elvis impersonator wailed hits ranging from “(You’re the) Devil In Disguise” to “An American Trilogy.” It was nearly impossible to recognize that strip of land directly across from Elvis’ palatial pad, since it had been transformed into a version of Pleasure Island where revelers stood in lengthy lines to have their images digitally imposed in front of a cartoon version of Graceland’s musical gates, even though the real gates were no more than 20 yards away. But this is not the miracle I speak of. That happened back at Muvico downtown. Somewhere between the opening flickers of Lilo & Stitch and its closing credits, Elvis came back to life. Well, at least his music did.

Here’s an experiment: Go up to 10 people at random. Convince them to play a word-association game where they respond to you by blurting out the first word that pops into their heads. Then say “Elvis.” If my theory is correct (and I think it is), none of the people you quiz will respond “rock-and-roll.” You’ll hear “Graceland,” maybe, or “Memphis.” Perhaps they will say “peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches” or, if you are lucky, “pelvis.” These things, along with the man’s legendary generosity, are the things we’ve kept alive in our cultural memory since our King passed away. But through its insistence that Elvis was a model citizen and through its clever use of some of his more enduring songs, Lilo & Stitch (an unusually mean and significantly less sappy answer to Spielberg’s E.T.) has pretty much ensured that every 6-year-old who picks up a toy guitar in the next few years will be belting out “Suspicious Minds.” It’s exactly what Elvis Presley Enterprises needed on the eve of the 25th anniversary of its namesake’s death, when it was clear that Elvis’ most rabid fans were getting up in age and new ones weren’t being easily made.

Lilo & Stitch begins at a tribunal somewhere in outer space. A mad scientist (or, as he prefers to be called, “an evil genius”) has created a monster. “Experiment 626,” as he is called, has four arms outfitted with dangerous claws, can lift 3,000 times his own body weight, and has but a single mission in life: to destroy everything he encounters. 626 may be cute as the dickens, but he’s meaner than 10 Grinches and virtually indestructible. When 626 escapes to Earth, his alien captors set out to capture him without upsetting the delicate balance of nature on our planet, which has been officially declared a “wildlife preserve.” One alien says of the fragile creatures that inhabit this protected planet, “Every time a comet strikes, they have to start all over again.” Poor things.

Realizing that he is trapped on an island with nothing significant to destroy, 626 poses as a rather unusual puppy and is adopted by Lilo, an orphan being raised by her sister Nani and whose serious behavioral problems have aroused the attention of a particularly unforgiving social worker. Of course, things only get worse when 626, rechristened Stitch by the quirky and occasionally violent Lilo, begins to destroy what’s left of the unfortunate sister’s impoverished existence. From the food-encrusted stove to the uncertainty of the job market, this is Disney’s most realistic portrait of a broken home, giving the company a credibility it had lost with its revisionist fairy tales and fabricated versions of historical events. Of course, this is Disney. The ending is a happy one, and it comes with a message: Family is the most important thing there is. It’s a fine message, delivered with only a modicum of sap.

With its references to old-time monster movies (the diminutive Stitch builds a tiny model of San Francisco then wrecks it Godzilla-style), L&S has plenty of good, old-fashioned geek-appeal that will be welcomed by sci-fi fans of every age and stripe. The fact that Nani has been drawn as a thick-legged goddess whose belly button is ever-present likewise suggests that the film’s appeal will reach well beyond the lunch-pail set. For Elvis fans, it will become a must-see film, and the chances are good that youngsters who have only the vaguest idea who Elvis was or what he was about will leave the theater swiveling their hips, singing his songs, and trying their best to cultivate their Elvis nature.

Categories
Music Music Features

Let Freedom Ring

It’s fitting that Etta James is playing Memphis on the Fourth of July. After all, the defiant diva has lived a life defined by independence for 64 years. Songs like “W-O-M-A-N” spell out a lifetime of rebellion, while her autobiography, Rage To Survive, co-authored by David Ritz, tells it like it is: “I wanted to be exotic as a Cotton Club chorus girl, and as obvious as the most flamboyant hooker on the street. I just wanted to be.”

Born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles, James learned independence from the very beginning. Her mother, Dorothy Hawkins, a small-time hustler who left her baby with friends and relatives for months at a time, was just 14 when Etta was born. The whereabouts of her daddy was another mystery. While Dorothy named a handful of men who may or may not have impregnated her, James maintains that pool shark Minnesota Fats — whom she never knew — was her real father.

Living with cousins in suburban L.A., young James was introduced to music at the St. Paul Baptist Church, where she heard Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Sallie Martin Singers belt out hymns. She joined the Echoes of Eden choir before she turned 10, schooled by gospel singer Professor James Earle Hines, who was impressed with the pint-sized talent. “Don’t back off those notes, Jamesetta,” he’d tell her. “Attack ’em, grab ’em, claim those suckers. Sing ’em like you own ’em!”

It was advice she never forgot. At just 14, James auditioned for R&B impresario Johnny Otis with her group the Creolettes. Impressed by the youngster’s deep, husky voice, Otis took her under his wing. The first thing he did was change her name from Jamesetta Hawkins to Etta James. Next, he took her into the studio on Thanksgiving Eve 1953, where she recorded “Roll With Me, Henry” for Modern Records. The song was an instant smash, and James quit school halfway through the ninth grade to go on the road. She was a precocious child — and extremely wild. “I was no Suzy Creamcheese,” she recalls in Rage To Survive. “I was serious about turning little churchgoing Jamesetta into a tough bitch called Etta James.”

With her platinum-blond hair, smooth, coffee complexion, and hourglass figure, James commanded attention wherever she went. She literally poured herself into her stage outfits, store-bought dresses that she tailored to her voluptuous frame. Men were captivated by the sassy young woman with the sensual voice, but most fellow musicians saw her as one of the boys.

Songwriter Richard Berry, vocalist Jessie Belvin, and guitarist Little John Watson (who launched a second career as Johnny “Guitar” Watson in the ’70s) befriended James and did what they could to help her. Berry wrote her second hit, “Good Rockin’ Daddy,” in ’55, and Belvin provided backing vocals on the number. Watson encouraged her to move to Chicago’s blues-oriented Chess label in 1960.

At Chess, James modeled her delivery after the greats — Lowell Fulson, Amos Milburn, and Ray Charles. The self-penned “All I Could Do Was Cry” was her first hit for the label. Other tunes, including the luscious “At Last,” “Something’s Got a Hold On Me,” and the tremendous “I’d Rather Go Blind,” solidified it: Etta James was a bona-fide soul superstar.

But trouble was on the way. James’ don’t-mess-with-me attitude caused problems first, a recklessness that soon led to a serious drug habit.

“More than booze or weed or cocaine, heroin hit me hard,” James admitted in her book. “I loved it. It took me where I wanted to go — far away, out of it — and in a hurry. The danger was thrilling.” Drugs provided a bond for James and her men friends, and they helped keep her weight under control.

Boyfriends were another problem. She associated with pimps and drug dealers who used her fame and wealth to further their own shady careers. James was often beaten and mentally abused, but she acknowledges that “it was just how it went” in those days. Tina Turner and Aretha Franklin often worked with her on the road, and they were also subjected to similar mistreatment from their abusive husbands. “We were all going through hell with men, but never talked about it,” James wrote. “If there was an understanding, it was silent, hidden in a secret part of ourselves we were too scared to look at.”

James couldn’t hold her world together under so much strain, and it eventually came crashing down around her. In 1964, she was sent to New York’s prison at Riker’s Island for passing bad checks. Four months on the 13th floor of Chicago’s Cook County Jail came next. Leonard Chess sent her to a clinic in California to clean up her act. It was just in time — James contracted tetanus from a dirty needle and barely survived the experience. Down to 148 pounds, and with her hair newly bleached, she returned to New York a new woman. She started snorting heroin again a day later.

In 1969, she was back in prison. She spent her 35th birthday there and didn’t clean up until giving birth to her son Donto soon after. Another family-inspired career turning point came in 1993, when James reconciled with her mother. Her Mystery Lady album, released a year later, was dedicated to Dorothy — and it netted James her first Grammy.

These days, James’ career is going stronger than ever, as her latest release, Burnin’ Down the House, attests. Captured live at a December 2001 House of Blues performance, James rocks her way through a dozen numbers, including the tearjerker “I’d Rather Go Blind” and a punchy, passionate take on “All the Way Down.”

“At Last,” James’ biggest hit, is hands down the highlight of Burnin’ Down the House and a standard she’s sure to perform during her rare Memphis performance at the Lounge. The song, a deceptively simple ballad, would be a fitting finale for a night filled with fireworks. “At last,” James sings with an earthy conviction born from years of pain, “My love has come along/My lonely days are over/And life is like a song.”

Few musical moments sound so free.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Short Cuts

The Private Press

DJ Shadow

(MCA)

I have heard the future … and — go figure — it sounds like the past.

That’s because DJ Shadow, six long years after his debut LP Endtroducing…, has returned with his second proper release, another brilliantly produced pastiche of past and present, the sample-heavy The Private Press. Again defying categorization, Shadow harmoniously fuses elements that naturally repel one another, delivering a record of pure scratch-and-mix fun and aural pleasure. It’s an echoing yet wholly distinctive confirmation of the found-art aesthetic he espoused with Endtroducing.

On The Private Press, Shadow shows that he’s still a crafty turntablist focused on traversing the spectrum of musical genres and creating his own kind of jazz — to use the word’s original connotation of free musical improvisation. A suburban white kid from California, he seems to be drawn to just about everything but hair metal (thank God). His projects up to now include playing DJ as a member of U.N.K.L.E. on the electronica-rock experiment Psyence Fiction and backing up old Solesides labelmates Blackalicious and Lyrics Born and other rappers on Quannum Spectrum.

Here, though, he’s the star. On the 14 “tunes” making up this disc, Shadow continues to draw from the vast collection of lost albums no one ever even thought to go looking for. Sampling the combined esoterica of ’60s/’70s one-shots Saint Steven (?) and Phluph (??), “Fixed Income” sounds the depths before breaking into patent hip-hop beats punctuated by tricked-out guitar flourishes, meandering, drawn-out jams, and some anachronistic harpsichord dredged up from the psychedelic past. The laughable boast of some unimaginative DJ on “Walkie Talkie” break-beats into inspired scratching backed up by obese, blown-speaker, beyond-fuzzy bass licks. Following that hyperactive display, “Giving Up the Ghost” pauses for some ethereal, Eastern-influenced trance. Strings lovingly present “Six Days,” its beatnik bongos and effects-laden organ sampled from another ‘delic relic, Colonel Bagshot (???), whose lament “Six Day War” is sampled pretty straight-up. “Right Thing/GDMFSOB” throws the now-famous Leonard Nimoy/Mr. Spock “pure energy” sample into what sounds like a virtual melee of house DJs, and “Monosylabik,” in which you can actually hear the trip-hop mothership land, is one of the toughest, tightest tracks on the disc. It’s like a dizzy, worshipful compilation from the Atari sound-effects lab circa 1983 — which, of course, makes it almost supernaturally cool.

— Jeremy Spencer

Grade: A-

And the Surrounding Mountains

Radar Brothers

(Merge)

In writing about the Radar Brothers, the biggest challenge, one that I am about to muff splendidly in this very sentence, is to avoid comparing them to Pink Floyd. But to deny the inflatable pig that hovers in your consciousness as you listen to And the Surrounding Mountains would be knavish. Now I know that “progressive rock” has gained a little credibility in the last couple of years, but no one, not even the proggiest of proglodytes, lauds poor Floyd. In fact, it is hard to understate the achievement of the Radar Brothers: They are an extremely listenable, inspirational, and, most of all, guilt-free updating of Pink Floyd. Gone are the Orwellian harangues, the study-hall antiestablishmentarianism, and the bloated arrangements. And I’m not even going to mention the dismal dregs that were Floyd’s releases in the late ’80s and early ’90s — The Division Bell and The Delicate Sound of Phoning It In. The Radar Brothers’ And the Surrounding Mountains retains the mournful majesty, the spacebound introspection, and those amazing songs that imperceptibly swell with grandeur.

It’s been three years since the Radar Brothers’ last album, The Singing Hatchet, and the most obvious improvement has been in the production, all of which was overseen by lead brother Jim Putnam in his renovated home studio. The amount of time put into this endeavor is easy to discern. And the Surrounding Mountains is an incredibly lush recording; its sonic strata recall the neutral-hued layers of the desertscapes that adorn the front cover. With song titles populated by so many family members — “You and the Father,” “Sisters,” “Uncles,” and “Mothers” — the album has the mood of a trip home for the holidays — only without the esophagus-clogging shame and self-loathing.

The Radar Brothers, due to their somnambulatory gait, also get lumped in with bands like Low and Codeine in the unfortunately titled “slowcore” genre. I prefer the term used by the Radar Brothers themselves — “sophisticated minimalism.” Imagine if Neil Young’s Crazy Horse got all sophisticatedly minimal and sent all of their chunky riffs to a rich-kid fat camp to slim down. Well, for one thing, they’d have to change their name to Fancy White Pony or something, but they would also sound a little like the Radar Brothers. — David L. Dunlap Jr.

Grade: A

December’s Child

Mark Olson and The Creekdippers

(Dualtone)

With his last major release, the excellent My Own Jo Ellen, Mark Olson and his band of merry men (plus wife Victoria Williams) seemed to have finally found a balance between spontaneity and the focused songwriting he had previously lacked. But with this disappointing new album, Olson flops right back into his old bad habits. The opening cut galumphs into the piano-thumping gospel style that’s Olson’s trademark sound. It’s great stuff, but unfortunately it sounds almost exactly like songs he’s done before. His songwriting is stale, and attempts to orchestrate some numbers just sound amateurish. Olson was obviously going for a Neil Young Harvest effect, but he couldn’t pull it off. Despite all this, December’s Child does contain a few very good songs, including the delicate title cut.

The best tune on the whole release is, ironically enough, his first collaboration with former Jayhawks songwriting partner Gary Louris since Olson left the group. “Say You’ll Be Mine” is a sweet slice of alt-country that possesses all the magic and spark that made those first two Jayhawks albums so special. The chemistry between these two songwriters is stronger than ever.

And on the closing cut, “One-Eyed Black Dog Moses,” a longtime live favorite, they pull out all the stops and do a funkified blues thing with some great psychedelic-metal touches. I love the way that Williams finds her inner bluesmama growl on this one. Of his recent material at least, I think Olson’s heavier stuff is more multidimensional. Writing in this genre seems to make him stretch more, and he would do well to keep exploring this path. — Lisa Lumb

Grade: B

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Running On Fumes

Shelby Countians were prominent actors during the Tennessee legislature’s end-of-fiscal-year countdown on the budget crisis — some by commission, others by omission.

One of the latter was state Senator John Ford, the South Memphis Democrat whose legislative expertise is often spoken to in Nashville — not least by himself — but who was AWOL on Monday, the first day of the new fiscal year and the first day in which state services were curtailed for lack of a budget agreement. He was the only member of the Shelby County delegation and the only senator who wasn’t on hand.

Ford’s whereabouts were a mystery to his colleagues, one of whom was Sen. Jerry Cooper (D-McMinnville) — author of several late-blooming efforts to break the budget impasse, including a new measure, involving increases in the sales tax, various licenses, and alcohol and tobacco levies, which was being deliberated on by the Senate Finance Committee Monday afternoon.

It would turn out that Ford had departed the previous afternoon, presumably for Memphis (for “a family emergency,” supposed Senate Speaker John Wilder, who had reached Ford by cell phone the day before and summoned him back — only temporarily, as it turned out — for a key vote on a Senate appropriations bill).

Clearly nettled by the absence of Ford, a Finance Committee member, during Monday’s deliberations, Cooper asked the panel’s chairman, Sen. Doug Henry (D-Nashville), what he knew of the Memphis senator’s whereabouts. “Senator Ford is MIA — gone for good, I understand?” said Cooper, who went on to wonder out loud what steps could be taken to fetch Ford back. Like many of the patchwork bills being considered in the last several days, Cooper’s was one which might rise or fall by a single vote.

Henry pondered briefly. “Well, Senator Ford ,” he began absently, in his characteristic Cumberland Valley drawl. Guffaws began around the long conference table at the chairman’s inadvertent use of the wrong name, and Cooper made a show of being startled.

“Sir,” he said, with feigned deliberateness, “you are the epitome of asininity!” The arch, accented manner in which Cooper spoke was that of John Ford, as was the epithet itself, one which has frequently come to Ford’s lips over the years during moments of confrontation on Capitol Hill.

Everybody laughed, including the aristocratic Henry, who smiled and went along with the joke. “All right, then, I’m the ‘epitome of asininity.'” And seconds thereafter, with the committee’s business concluded for the day, Henry was saying, “This committee is adjourned!”

A different sort of comic relief had been provided earlier during the same committee meeting by two other Memphians — Senators Jim Kyle and Steve Cohen — as the panel considered a proposal by Cohen to amend the bill by adding a 3 percent sales tax to gasoline and diesel fuel.

During a colloquy on the measure’s intricacies, Kyle said it could be argued that the proposed new tax would compound the existing gasoline levy in such a way that, as Kyle said in a didactic tone that was ever so suggestive of Lt. Governor Wilder, “Why, we’d be taxing taxes!” This was an obvious parody of a favorite Wilder assertion about the nondeductibility of the state sales tax on federal income tax forms. “Uncle Sam taxes taxes!” Wilder says with some frequency, and it is one of the arguments he made again last week during a short-lived boom for his pet “6-0” tax proposal, one which would abolish the sales tax altogether and replace it with a 6 percent state income tax.

Cohen heard Kyle out, smiled in recognition of the parody, and responded simply, with the exaggerated, raspy sound of one hawking up fluids from the throat. This, too, was authentic Wilder. The committee was convulsed.

More was involved in some of these outbursts than merely breaking what was often a quite palpable tension. The invective hurled back and forth in the previous several days between leaders of the General Assembly’s two chambers, with the governor’s office occasionally getting involved, was unprecedented, and it necessarily undermined both the traditional politeness of parliamentary discourse and the assumed dignity of senior officials.

When House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh (D-Covington) and House Finance Committee chairman Matt Kisber (D-Jackson) rejected the budget measure sent over by the Senate during the last several hours before the fiscal year ended Sunday, they had not been dainty about it. Nor did these veteran politicians bother to be politic.

The Senate bill, by Chattanooga-area Republican David Fowler, was but the latest in a series of Rube Goldberg-like concoctions, with a temporary sales-tax increase spliced onto a front-loaded referendum for a constitutional convention concerning the income tax, and it was regarded by Naifeh, who cited what he said were numerous procedural errors in it, as not just unacceptable but as “a piece of trash,” as “gamesmanship” designed “to make us look bad.”

In subsequent debate Kisber would call it “grandstanding the height of irresponsibility,” and both men would denounce a statement by Wilder, who had said, “We are supposed to fund this budget before 12 o’clock midnight — even if it’s fouled up.” (Wilder would defend himself by responding that, unlike the House leaders, he had “done a budget — and it’s balanced.”)

Memphian Lois DeBerry, the House Speaker Pro Tem, would be even pithier about the Senate measure in an aside. Noting that both Ford and another Memphis Democrat, Sen. Roscoe Dixon, each of whom was normally in sync with her own preferences, had signed onto the Fowler bill, she exclaimed wearily on Sunday, “What are John and Roscoe doing putting in a 10-and-a-quarter-cent sales tax. Doing shit like that!?”

Ford would not stick around long enough to respond, but Dixon’s answer to DeBerry’s exasperated question was, “Movement. That’s all. We’re just trying to get some movement.”

But, in fact, as the legislature continued into midweek, with members adding their own verbal fire to the seasonal heat and humidity, movement was hard to detect in the waste motion and circumlocutions going on in both chambers and in the committee rooms of Legislative Plaza.

Rep. John DeBerry (no relation to the Speaker Pro Tem), another Memphian, had spoken a passionate memorial a week earlier as legislators mourned the tragic death of Rep. Keith Westmoreland (R-Kingsport), who, facing charges of indecent exposure, had killed himself. On that occasion, DeBerry had raised to consciousness the idea, shared by many of his colleagues, that Westmoreland had caved in to pressures that had built up during four straight years of inability to find a solution to what Governor Don Sundquist, back in January 1999, had first described as a built-in “structural deficit” in the state’s tax code.

On Monday, as 22,000 state employees stayed home, furloughed by an emergency “essential services” bill signed by Sundquist just before the fiscal-year-deadline at midnight Sunday, the legislators tried again. Not much got done, not even any new patchwork proposals, though several were rumored. The general atmosphere was laid back.

There was not much sign even of the anti-tax protesters who had honked and hollered and surrounded the Capitol whenever the specter of an income tax had been invoked over the four years of controversy and futility. Some of these had gone on a loud last ride of celebration around the Capitol after midnight Sunday but had not been heard from since.

Why should they, suggested DeBerry to his colleagues on Monday. Had they not achieved their end, in shutting down the government and cowing the General Assembly into permanent ineptitude? Drawing a picture of general suffering to be visited on students, on the elderly, and on all those others who would suffer from a complete government breakdown, DeBerry compared the tax protesters to elephant trainers, who had tamed the legislature by ritual terror over the years.

“Our chains are in our brains,” he said, rocking back and forth in physical mimicry of a large, enfeebled, and immobilized animal.

On Tuesday, as both houses made tentative but unproductive efforts to find a solution, Deputy Governor Alex Fischer made a special visit to the House chamber to plead for action.

“We beg for your help to put an end to the madness,” Fischer said. “We beg you to come together for a solution.”

And later on Tuesday Sundquist himself held a press conference, offering the latest proposal for a solution. Like all the previous ones during these past several weeks, from whatever source, it was almost too complicated to grasp. It involved both a one-cent sales-tax increase and a one-cent income tax to begin immediately, followed by a constitutional convention call, followed by several other graded stages. It might add up to enough — $1 billion — to fund the long-looming budget deficit for the coming year.

But, like all the other plans, its sales-tax provision would be a red flag to the House, its income tax would similarly gall the Senate, and, at first blush, it seemed to have no special magic to dissolve the agitation and the impasse.

Sundquist continued to believe that tax reform was possible, though, and concluded by saying, “Common ground is the engine of democracy, and compromise is its fuel. My friends, if ever there were a time for compromise, it is now.”

And he set a new deadline for an agreement: Wednesday night. Two days later, the “essential services” provisions would expire, and the state government, with all its services, might be shut down for good.

What may turn out in retrospect to be the semi-official launching of Al Gore’s newest campaign for the presidency took place in Memphis last weekend. Meeting at The Peabody with a host of his former financial backers and addressing a crowd of enthusiastic Shelby County Democrats at their Jackson Day dinner, Gore tore into the Bush administration on both the domestic and international fronts. Here he hoists hands with Memphis congressman Harold Ford Jr. and the Democrats’ consensus U.S. Senate nominee, Rep. Bob Clement of Nashville.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Say What?

Movies based on novels always seem to lack something. Perhaps it’s the rhythm of the written work’s “he said, she said” or the detailed descriptions of the otherwise trivial. University of Memphis drama professor Gloria Baxter and the ensemble theater company Voices of the South have found a way to stage a novel without leaving out all the little things. It’s called narrative theater.

“Narrative theater is the staging of material not originally written for the stage, usually prose fiction or creative nonfiction,” explains Baxter. “When we stage material, we don’t change the text into all-dialogue. When other people say adaptation, they rewrite the novel into dialect, but we use the author’s actual language.”

Baxter and the nine-member company are currently working on Places of Enchantment, based on Wapiti Wilderness by Olaus and wife Margaret “Mardy” Murie, published in 1965. The Muries founded a nature center in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, dedicated to defending the wilderness and stressing its importance to the human spirit. Their book is the field journals of each spouse, kept while following an elk herd. Olaus’ journal focused on his scientific studies, while Mardy’s deals with what it was like to raise children while leading such a nomadic lifestyle.

Voices of the South will hold only one local performance of Places of Enchantment on July 10th. They’ll then travel to Jackson Hole to perform at the Murie Center in honor of the widowed Mardy’s 100th birthday. The production will return to Memphis next spring for a full run.

Baxter has been involved in narrative theater for more than 30 years. She got her start in graduate school at Northwestern University, a breeding ground of the form. Her professor, Robert Green, was experimenting with the concept of staging novels in the 1960s. He believed “chamber theater,” as he called it, could only be performed in stripped-down minimalist stage productions. Unlike Green, Baxter and company have since put on large multimedia productions based on the works of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Terri Tempest Williams, to name a few.

“Narrative theater opens up the range of stories I would like to tell. Sometimes, I feel limited by the classic repertoire of literature,” she says. “The novel spends so much time with interior life. I love the challenge of trying to figure out how to stage the interior life of a character, how to stage their dreams and memories.”

Baxter goes through a step-by-step process when adapting novels to the stage. The first step, of course, is choosing the book. “Generally, to spend this much time with a piece, it has to be material that I have a deep, emotional connection with and a real need to express something about,” she says. “Wapiti Wilderness is a book I discovered in 1975, and it’s been a guidebook for me during many, many summers in Wyoming. So it’s been in my heart for almost 30 years.”

Her next step is what she calls “seedwork,” or familiarizing the company with the material. To prepare for Places of Enchantment, she joined cast members from Voices of the South at the Murie Center for two weeks. She introduced them to Mardy Murie and took them on walks through the environment to allow them to “internalize the rhythms and imagery” of the wilderness.

Next, she and the company hold workshops where the book is dissected and chapters are explored for theatrical potential. She creates a tentative script, and rehearsals begin. At first, the company creates imagery to go with the text. These early rehearsals show Baxter exactly what works and what doesn’t. The script is then altered to include only the richest imagery.

“My job is kind of watching, editing, shaping, and altering the text to support the imagery because the relationship of language and image is like a tapestry,” says Baxter. “If the company has given me an image of rippling pages, I’ve got to decide what phrase or what sentence goes with that action.”

When the script is finalized, traditional rehearsal begins. Movement is extremely important in narrative theater, and actors are responsible for capturing the imagery they’ve created through emotion and stage action.

The actors must have total awareness of where the other actors are onstage. To convey an image, they must move in a way that suggests that image while other actors play off that movement. For example, if an actor is portraying a heavy wind, she might sway violently while others move as though being blown about.

Since these narrative plays are not solely made up of dialogue, they contain information that isn’t usually read aloud during a stage adaptation, including descriptive paragraphs, the “he said, she said,” and the internal thoughts of characters. As a result, members of the audience have to work their brains. “People love it when their imagination has to be powerfully engaged. The audience is creating what they’re actually seeing,” says Baxter.

And, says Baxter, when everything adds up — powerful vocabulary, emotional imagery, rhythm, and tempo — the performance almost attains the state of music.

“By the end of the play, I’m no longer an architect but a conductor,” she says.

Places of Enchantment

8 p.m. Wednesday, July 10th

Buckman Performing

and Fine Arts Center, 323-0128

Categories
Sports Sports Feature

City Sports

A League Of Their Own

The Grizzlies’ summer camp will help separate the pros from the wanna-bes.

By James P. Hill

Every summer, people from all over the world travel to Memphis to party on Beale Street, search for Elvis Presley, or just eat barbecue. And for the second time in as many years, at least 19 professional basketball players have traveled to Memphis to take part in the Grizzlies’ summer camp.

Jerry West, Grizzlies president of basketball operations, explains why summer leagues are great for free agents, rookies, and veterans alike. “We want to get a read on our younger players and any player we want to invite to training camp,” says West. “We have a bunch of veteran players here, but it’s still to be determined who and what we need to do with some of our other free agents.”

As Grizzlies management continues its makeover of the roster, basketball standouts from leagues worldwide are here, hoping for a chance to prove themselves. You know about Drew Gooden (fourth pick overall out of Kansas) and Robert Archibald (second-round selection from Illinois), but there are several players at camp you may not be too familiar with, such as 6’5″ guard Rico Hill (Illinois State).

“I was fortunate enough to be drafted in 1999,” Hill says. “I went in the second round [to the Clippers]. But my mentality wasn’t where it needed to be and I took my opportunity for granted. I got cut and I got a lot of bad rumors put on my name because of that,” he adds, shaking his head. “I want to reach my full potential, and until I sign, I’m not gonna stop working. And when I sign, it’s gonna get that much stronger. I’m just hungry.”

Gooden may be a lottery pick with a guaranteed contract, but he’s also excited to be in Memphis and wants to improve his game on the hardwoods. The former college All-American has already set some goals for his new team. “I want to just show guys I can play at this level, ” says Gooden, “and make a statement that we are a team that can make the playoffs next year.”

For the Grizzlies’ coaching and scouting staff, summer camp and games are a great way to measure the potential, progress, and skill levels of several players in a short period of time. “Drew and Robert will be involved in those games right away, and I think it’s a great learning experience for them,” says Tony Barone, Grizzlies director of player personnel. “Shane [Battier] did a great job last year in the summer because he could come and play. Pau [Gasol] couldn’t [get here],” says Barone.

This year’s camp format is called “daily doubles.” Players work out for two hours in the morning and for another two hours in the afternoon. Fatigue can be a factor for players who are not used to the grueling NBA workouts.

“You’re starting to see which guys prepared for this and which guys took it for granted,” says Hill. Hill played for the Dakota Wizards in the CBA last season, averaging 11.8 ppg, 5.6 rpg, and 3.7 apg.

According to Grizzlies team officials, only 12 players will be selected to represent the team during summer-league competition. The Grizzlies begin playing games July 7th in the Southern California Pro Summer Basketball League held annually on the campus of California State University-Long Beach. The Grizzlies first game? The Los Angeles Lakers, featuring rookie Kareem Rush out of Missouri.

Memphis will also play in the Rocky Mountain Review Summer League held annually in Salt Lake City, Utah. The schedule has Memphis playing Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, the L.A. Clippers, Portland, Cleveland, Utah, Chicago, and Denver. The games will be something of a barometer for the talent the team has assembled. But for most of these players, the goal is not so much winning as being invited to remain in Memphis for fall camp.

A Daly Dose

The mercurial golfer loses his grip.

By Ron Martin

John Daly’s down-to-earth personality makes it easy to like him. It’s a Southern thing. His “you never know what you’re going to get” life is just as compelling. It’s a human thing.

The moment Daly set foot on the grounds of the TPC at Southwind for the FedEx St. Jude Classic last week, he was the crowd favorite. If he had received a cut of the gate, it would probably have surpassed his week’s prize money. When he finished his round Saturday, most of the fans deserted the course. Only a sprinkling of spectators remained at 18 when the leaders approached. They came to see Daly and got what they paid for — almost. If they came to see a train wreck, they saw one; if they came to see him give it his best shot, they should ask for a third-round refund.

Daly’s third-round collapse was more than a matter of losing his game. He lost his will to play. By the ninth hole, Daly was just walking the course, hesitating for brief moments to hit his ball. The only thing he was aiming for was finishing — and getting into the clubhouse. He paused longer to sign autographs at the 18th hole than he did when he addressed the ball. If this were a baseball game, he would be the player who failed to run out a grounder. Oddly, if this were a baseball game, he would have been booed. But this is golf; Daly’s lack of concern for the ticket-buyer was mostly met with polite applause — and some quiet grumbling.

When he left the final green on Saturday, you had to wonder if he would even wake up in Memphis on Sunday, much less return for his final round. He did show up, and, for that, he should be given a little credit, even though he played the round as though his pants were on fire and with little or no regard for his score. A man who cared what people thought about him would have been embarrassed, but Daly has never worried about what people think of him.

He proved that with his lack of professionalism during the third and fourth rounds of the FedEx St. Jude Classic.

Daly played Sunday without a partner. When he finished, less than two hours later, he was still alone and alone in last place. There wasn’t much of a gallery to witness the debacle, at least not when compared to earlier rounds. Apparently, a 7:45 a.m. tee time is too early for Daly’s fans, even those who come to see the train wreck.

Categories
News

“Lost” in France

If we hadn’t gotten lost in France, I never would have found my magic frying pan.

We were trying to get from some point A to some point B when, naturally, we found ourselves on our way to some unplanned point C. You could say we were lost, but after several days of driving through the rolling farmland of Normandy, we decided we weren’t capable of getting directly from any A to any B — and that didn’t matter, anyway. Some of the best stuff we had seen was on the way to point C.

It was while taking an unplanned route that we saw a sign for a town called Villedieu-les-Poeles. I knew enough French to know that Villedieu was “ville” (city) plus “dieu” (God). I didn’t know the last word, so I had my dad look it up. He flipped through the pocket dictionary and said, “Frying pan.” I laughed, sure he had the wrong word. It was like one of those Mad Lib books where players fill in random words and make goofy sentences like well, like “We went to God’s City of Frying Pans.”

It is goofy, but that’s what the town is actually called. Mom looked it up in the guidebook, and apparently, in the 12th century, the Knights of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem established themselves in the area (hence God’s City), and it just so happens these guys were good at working with copper. Hence, God’s City of Frying Pans. They’ve been making copper cookware there ever since.

By this time, I had already turned the wheel straight toward God’s City. I would have a frying pan of the Lord for myself!

It was like this the whole week my parents and I were driving through France. We would set out each day from, say, Honfleur, with our goal to reach, say, St. Malo. We were armed with a map, an international driver’s license, a Euro-sized minivan (a Caravan could crush it with one wheel), and just enough French rattling around in my head to cause trouble. It was a recipe for, shall we say, considering alternate areas.

The French do drive on the right side of the road, which helps, but their roads tend to be as wide and straight as a garter snake. When they say to slow down for a curve, they aren’t kidding: There’s probably a medieval wall on your right and a tour bus coming the other way. They also have a funny way of alternating which intersection they put signs at. So you might take a well-marked right for Chinon then come to an intersection a mile later with no mention of Chinon whatsoever. We wound up in plenty of surprise destinations that way.

They do have several things figured out better than we do. For one thing, I saw no billboards. I’ll say that again: no billboards. They also have traffic circles, which, Chevy Chase notwithstanding, are so superior to our intersections that you wonder where we went wrong. Not only do most cars get to keep moving most of the time in a traffic circle, they also serve as wonderful check-in points for those of us who are, um, exploring out-of-the-way areas.

Our main drawback, other than the fact that the driver didn’t want to ask directions — for reasons related to language skills and gender — was that our map was of the whole country. That was good with bigger roads, of course, but when we got down to the equivalent of country roads, things got sketchy. Imagine handing somebody a map of the whole U.S. and expecting them to find Red Banks, Mississippi.

The thing is France has lots of villages. It appears, in fact, to be nothing but a great big village once you get outside Paris. Every bend in every road seems to have a name — and a church — but only something like 28 percent of those names appeared on our map. So it was not uncommon to find ourselves looking at five signs advertising five roads leading to 11 villages and none of it on our map. This led to everything from hilarity to family dysfunction, depending on the mood at the time, and plenty of what I liked to call “Places in France You Never Thought You’d See.”

It was on one such occasion that we saw the sign for the holy land of frying pans. We were in a traffic circle, and I think we might have been going around a second time, for it was quite a lovely traffic circle and I wanted to see it again, and when we realized how close we were to sacred cookware, we diverged from whatever long-forgotten route we had already given up following.

And the pan? I think it really is from heaven. It’s copper on the outside, stainless steel on the inside, washes easily, and cooks things to a juiciness and tenderness that couldn’t come from humans. I’m actually not kidding. One night, I changed nothing in my dinner preparations except the pan, and after one bite, my guests stared slack-jawed at their plates and asked, “How did you make this so tender?”

Simple, I told them. I bought my pan the day I discovered God’s City of Frying Pans.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Bush Does Nader

Our personal trainer the president, up and running after his colonoscopy, is trying out a new role — Scourge of Corporate Misbehavior. This has approximately the same effect as opening the refrigerator door and finding Fidel Castro inside, smoking a cigar. “Hard to believe” barely begins to hint at the surrealism of this development.

The Bush people are going to force us to take this nonsense seriously. I guarantee we will soon be hearing about the Pepster’s long-cherished populist beliefs. Ever since the man told us he was the father of the Texas Patients’ Bill of Rights (which he first vetoed and then refused to sign), I have been resigned to the Red Queen quality of his political act.

In the interest of lending some verisimilitude to this new pose — Dubya Does Nader — let us pass lightly over Bush’s own business career, including insider dealing and the time he dumped his Harken Energy stock just before the announcement that the company was going bankrupt. In violation of SEC rules, Bush failed to report that sale to the Securities and Exchange Commission until eight months after the fact. The SEC contented itself with a warning letter but has specifically stated that Bush was “not exonerated.”

And let’s also pass over his six-year record as governor of Texas, an unbroken stretch of kissing corporate butt, including firing an agency head for enforcing state law against one of Bush’s biggest contributors.

Instead, let us concentrate on the repairable: a few things Bush can do to bolster his brand-new image as a champion against corporate malfeasance.

  • Appoint someone to head the SEC who has not spent his career as a lawyer for accounting firms, including advising them to destroy documents in case of lawsuit. Chairman Harvey Pitt has been criticized even by The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page for being too easy on his old accounting clients and for having lost all credibility after his meeting with Xerox’s auditor.
  • Stop the government loans to Enron, which is still manipulating Third World energy markets while applying for $125 million in taxpayer money from the Inter-American Development Bank.
  • n Come out in favor of the Sarbanes bill, now stuck in the Senate. It’s the only serious proposal to deal with corporate chicanery. The Republican plans are a sick joke. Call off Sen. Phil Gramm, who is working closely with the White House to block the bill.
  • Stop working with business lobbies to block the accounting reforms that would prevent Enron from happening again.
  • In order to avoid the appearance that you have been bought outright by corporate contributions, try not to make a recess appointment to the Federal Elections Commission of someone who has long sworn to oppose every effort at campaign finance reform and who is now destroying the McCain-Feingold bill.
  • As you stated in your hilarious radio address, “We must have rules and laws that restore faith in the integrity of American business.” So how about reinstating the Clinton policy, which you reversed last year, against giving government contracts to corporations that have repeatedly violated federal laws?
  • Supporting the repeal of the alternative minimum tax is probably not smart when giant corporations are already paying less in taxes than the janitors who clean their floors.
  • It’s not a good time to push for repeal of the estate tax to benefit only the richest 2 percent of Americans.
  • Your proposal to relax New Source Review standards at the Environmental Protection Agency stinks: It allows dirty coal-fired power plants and the nation’s other biggest polluters to operate indefinitely and to increase their pollution by massive amounts.
  • Ix-nay on the Republican effort to block closing the Bermuda loophole in the federal tax code. They’ve taken to doing things like walking out of committee meetings to keep the bill from coming up. It would clearly pass overwhelmingly if it got to the floor. Time to call the boys in for a chat.

Molly Ivins writes for Creators Syndicate and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.