Month: August 2002

Categories
Book Features Books

In Short

From the “So What?” category of contemporary fiction — the question comes from readers, not from practitioners — see After the Quake (Knopf), Haruki Murakami’s new six-story collection. Written in response to the Kobe earthquake of 1995, Murakami sets out to study the effect of that disaster on a cross section of Japanese — an abandoned husband, an aimless twentysomething, a publisher’s underling, a successful pathologist, a hallucinating loan officer, a frustrated author — and ends up with stories that are as flat as can be. Or is that precisely what an earthquake can do to stories as unmemorable as these? The strong strain of mysticism that runs through them only makes matters worse.

No need for mysticism on the part of V.S. Naipaul — just a smart head and a mastery of the written word — and The Writer and the World (Knopf) shows him in possession of both in this major collection of travel pieces from the past 40 years. Sample brilliance: Naipaul’s hundred-page “Argentina and the Ghost of Eva Perón, 1972-1991,” an essay on South American history and a testament to the power of good eyewitness reporting that is as timely today as it was 10 years ago. “New York with Norman Mailer,” Naipaul on Mailer’s run for NYC mayor in the late ’60s (a final wilting of flower power), is, on the other hand, more like ancient history.

More journalism, more truth-telling in the first of Vintage Books’ new anthology series, Best American Crime Writing. Nicholas Pileggi (Wiseguy, Casino) is the guest editor; Otto Penzler of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York and true-crime expert Thomas Cook are the series editors. Sample small-town murder mystery: “The Cheerleaders” by E. Jean Carroll. Sample police-force exposé: “Bad Cops” by Peter J. Boyer. Sample good-guy-as-outcast profile: “The Chicago Crime Commission” by Robert Kurson. Sample court-case drama (and summary of the bestseller Trial By Jury): “Anatomy of a Verdict” by D. Graham Burnett. In short, an excellent anthology to remind you not to throw out your unread back issues of Spin, The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine, the periodicals that first ran the above articles.

Of local note and/or interest:

Ex-Flyer intern Craig Aaron, currently managing editor of In These Times, has put together Appeal To Reason: 25 Years In These Times (Seven Stories Press), and if you’re not already familiar with this muckraking biweekly, one look at this book’s chapter headings will be clue enough whether you’re for or against its progressive, leftist politics: Chapter 2: “Know Your Enemy: Right-Wing Extremism and the Politics of Our Time”; Chapter 4: “Doing It For Ourselves: Can Feminism Break Through the Class Ceiling?”; Chapter 10: “Color and Criminal Justice: America’s Incarceration Epidemic”; Chapter 13: “Beyond Anti-Capitalism: Notes For a Future Manifesto”; Chapter 17: “Shifting Sands: The Myth of Islam Vs. the West”; and a closing piece by Slavoj Zizek: “Love Thy Neighbor,” which dares to put the screws to easily the emptiest assertion of the past year: “Nothing will be the same after September ll.” The list of articles that Aaron has collected is comprehensive. The overview/updates per chapter are good instruction. And the bylines are courtesy the usual suspects: Terry Southern, Barbara Ehrenreich, Martin Duberman, Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, in addition to the publication’s steadier contributors fighting to keep liberalism, antiglobalism, and near-socialism alive. Example: In These Times‘ founder James Weinstein, whose terms of solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are as humane today as they were when he wrote in 1978.

Without Covers (Purdue University Press), co-edited by Lesha Hurliman (herself a former Flyer intern and currently with Contemporary Media, the Flyer‘s parent company) and Numsiri C. Kunakemakorn, comes with this year’s subtitle of distinction: literary_magazines@the_digital_edge. Which is to say its 18 essays focus on the question and future of the small literary magazine. Does it stay bound but read by a loyal audience, or does it move unbound online to win a wider readership but one with the ESC key one stroke away? The book’s opening essay by R.M. Berry is titled “What Is a Book?,” and if you think that’s a no-brainer, think again, if by “book” we mean our very definition of the word “literature.”

No philosophical issue raised, no political side taken, no crime committed/mystery solved, and no earthquake disaster (yet) but some travel required inside the Insiders’ Guide To Memphis (Globe Pequot Press) by Nicky Robertshaw. One quibble. The newsstand price for Memphis magazine is $3.50, not the $5 Robertshaw writes. Which makes that publication even easier to afford in order to enjoy its fine restaurant reviewer — Nicky Robertshaw.

Categories
News News Feature

CITY BEAT

DESTINATION UNKNOWN

Jim Rout won’t say yet where he’s going, but he’s happy to talk about where he’s been in 30 years of county government.

Rout leaves office at the end of August, having completed two terms as mayor of Shelby County plus stints as a county commissioner and county coroner.

“I don’t anticipate being on the ballot again,” said Rout, who turned 60 in June. He’s headed for a job in the private sector but doesn’t want to disclose his plans until the end of this week. He announced his retirement last year. In an informal meeting with Flyer reporters this spring, he said his „ at that time „prospective new employer was not anyone or anything that would pose a potential conflict to him as mayor.

Rout came to the mayor’s office in 1994 as a commissioner known for happily immersing himself in the details of county government. He has spent most of the last two years, however, dealing with former corporate CEOs Pitt Hyde and Ron Terry on the NBA arena and Shelby Farms.

Friends say the long hours have taken a toll on him, and Rout doesn’t disagree.

“No question, it has been a tougher period,” he said. “When you work as long as we all did on the arena or as long as Ron Terry and I did for almost two years only to see [the Shelby Farms proposal] go down the tubes, sure, it is not as much fun. It’s always more fun when you first start. That’s why you see a lot of entrepreneurs move on after four or five years.”

The failure of the Shelby Farms proposal, which Rout thinks will resurface next year, was the low point of his mayoral career, he said. He blamed “bad timing,” although the proposed $20 million infusion of private money into the park failed to catch fire at the grassroots level, allowing several commissioners to safely change their yeas to nays.

The highlight is no surprise either.

“Less than two years ago, no one would have thought we would have an NBA team, a new arena under construction, and Jerry West living here,” said Rout. Controversy be damned, “you’ve either gotta be big-league or bush-league.”

The enthusiasm of Rout, a Pyramid opponent, for the publicly funded arena has to run a close second to Gov. Don Sundquist’s support of a state income tax when some diehard Republicans talk about betrayals. But where Sundquist foundered, Rout succeeded, with the help of Hyde and Memphis mayor Willie Herenton as well as the commission and city council.

Rout and Herenton had “a little brouhaha” over toy towns in Rout’s first term, but “we’ve gotten in rhythm” in the last few years. Yes, and Memphis has been having a little humidity lately. The conflict highlighted all of the fundamental problems with split government, suburban versus urban interests, and school funding which are still around five years later, despite the efforts of two special committees to resolve them. There was no open warfare, but there was no resolution either. Rout predicts there will be single-source funding for schools within the next two years. You might want to take some of that action if you run into him.

Rout and his family know firsthand the suburban growth that is putting pressure on politicians to come up with something. They moved from Parkway Village and Fox Meadows to the Richwood subdivision in southeast Shelby County 13 years ago when it was still uncrowded, even rural in places. Today, it is surrounded by new schools and homes, and by the end of this year, it is supposed to be annexed by the city of Memphis.

“Sprawl is a fact of life,” he said. “We probably didn’t do as well as we should have to attach appropriate fees or requirements on new development as it applies to schools. This is America, and people are going to live where they want to live. Maybe we need to tweak what we require to do development there.”

Rout won his first election in 1972 (as coroner), but he traces his political involvement to 1967, when he helped organize his Parkway Village neighborhood in opposition to a plan to build 2,400 apartments on a site that would become the Mall of Memphis instead. He sold memberships to the upstart Cottonwood Civic Club for $3 by going door to door. When they needed a president, somebody said, “Jim, you’ve been real active. You run for it.”

In a somewhat similar way, that’s what happened again in 1994 when good old Jim got the nod from the Republicans by a two-to-one margin to run for mayor, then prevailed in a six-candidate free-for-all general election. Democrats got their act together after that and started having primaries themselves. But then Republicans like Rout and Sundquist started occasionally acting like Democrats and supporting new taxes and public subsidies to pro-sports teams, and the lines blurred again. Mayor-elect A C Wharton, a Democrat, comes into office by the same three-to-two margin as Rout did in 1994.

“It’s been good. I’ve had a great run,” Rout said. “I don’t mean it as a reflection on anyone else, but there will never be, at least for a long time, a campaign like 1994, when we were able to win the primary two-to-one and the general 60-40 against six opponents.”

At least not for Shelby County Republicans.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Go Slow On Iraq

In a campaign visit to Memphis on Monday, Republican senatorial candidate Lamar Alexander expressed concern to a group of Shelby County officials lest the country soon find itself engaged in military action against Iraq without advance assurances of full support from the nation. Alexander’s Democratic opponent, Bob Clement, has expressed similar misgivings.

In late 1990, when George Bush the First proposed to get tough with Iraq to the point of going to war if need be, there was debate in Congress as befitted a proposition that was, after all, debatable, but ultimately everyone — Capitol Hill, the media, the population — fell in line behind Bush. Why? Because not only did the then-president make the case for action consistently and convincingly, but Iraq’s invasion and forcible occupation of oil-rich Kuwait was too evident to be missed.

Moreover, there were parties in the Middle East itself — Saudi Arabia, to name the most conspicuous one — that were as affected as the United States was, and perhaps more so, by the threat that Saddam Hussein’s incursion posed to peace, stability, and the petroleum-based economies of the developed world. Under all those circumstances, the country agreed with its president that it wouldn’t be prudent to let things fester.

More than a decade later, ranking officials in the administration of George Bush the Second are agitating for another war with Iraq — this time a preventive one. And the reasons for it have never been made, shall we say, perfectly clear. Hussein’s forces have staged no military adventure beyond Iraq’s borders, nor, so far as we know, has the dictator threatened one.

To launch a military attack against Iraq without an overt provocation would put us on the wrong side of international justice. For the first time ever, the United States would be acting as the acknowledged aggressor under international law. Various cases have been made by Vice President Cheney and other Bush advisers for such a preemptive strike: What they boil down to is that Iraq is said to be developing “weapons of mass destruction.” Though this term is broad enough to include the various means of biological warfare, it’s basically a euphemism for atomic weaponry. While it is true that if Iraq is striving to arm itself with nuclear devices, which would be an unpleasant — and perhaps even unacceptable — development, it would hardly be a fact unique to Hussein’s regime.

There are already a number of nuclear-capable nations with which the United States has ideological or policy differences. China, a far more awesome threat in the long run, is the most obvious example. Surely the president does not propose that we also threaten war against the Asian monolith.

The problem is more than forensic or legalistic or even moral, however. To move in the present environment would find us acting without the allies we had in 1990-1991. Moreover, in the present post-9/11 climate, action against Iraq would more than likely inflame sentiment in the other Islamic nations of the Middle East. We have been explicitly warned on the point by Saudi Arabia, which was both active ally and staging area for Desert Storm but is more notable these days as the homeland of al Qaeda’s chief leaders and the source of most of its identifiable cadres.

The caution of candidates Clement and Alexander is to be commended — and recommended to the current administration in Washington.

Categories
News News Feature

War and Peace

It’s the little things, the itty-bitty things.

— from a song by Robert Earl Keen

Gosh, silly us, getting in a swivet over war and peace. The president is on vacation! He’s giving interviews to Runner’s World, not Meet the Press. He and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld didn’t even talk about Iraq during their meeting in Crawford, Texas. It was all the media’s fault. We were “churning.” We were in “a frenzy.” Heck, Bush himself has never even mentioned war with Iraq, much less going it alone.

We don’t have to worry, so party hearty and try not to make a big deal out of the fact that Bush’s lawyers are now claiming he can launch an attack on Iraq without congressional approval because the permission given by Congress to his father in 1991 to wage war in the Persian Gulf is still in effect.

Since that’s all cleared up, here are a few little nuggets you might like to chew on:

· Bush went to Pennsylvania to meet with the nine coal miners rescued earlier this summer to congratulate them. He also cut the budget for the Mine Safety and Health Administration by $4.7 million out of $118 million total: Enforcement was cut, the chest X-ray program was cut entirely, as were mine inspections for coal dust, which causes explosions. Bush filled five of the top positions at MSHA with coal-industry executives.

· Earlier this month, the Associated Press used a computer analysis to dig up some interesting news about congressional spending patterns. Since the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, tens of billions of dollars in federal spending have moved from Democratic to GOP districts. Last year, there was an average of $612 million more spending for congressional districts represented by Republicans than by Democrats. AP also reports that when Democrats last controlled the House and wrote the budget, the average Democratic district got $35 million more than the average Republican district.

That’s quite a shift, and the AP says the change was “driven mostly by Republican policies that moved spending from poor rural and urban areas to the more affluent suburbs and GOP-leaning farm country. … In terms of services, that translates into more business loans and farm subsidies, and fewer public-housing grants and food stamps.”

Now, one could take the attitude of Majority Leader Dick Armey, who was quoted by AP on this subject as saying, “To the victor goes the spoils.” On the other hand, that means more government subsidies are going to people who need them less. The recently passed farm bill, a subject on which I find myself in complete harmony with the National Review, weighed in at $190 billion, a grossly disproportionate share going to corporate farmers: Ten percent of farmers will get 69 percent of the subsidies, according to The New York Times. President Bush signed the $190 billion horror and then made a great show at his public-relations event in Waco of vetoing $5 billion in what he deemed was unnecessary spending in the homeland security bill.

· The media have achieved such a perfect he-said/she-said knot of confusion on the story of Bush and Harken Energy, it would be a wonder if the public ever gets any of it straight. Even though the Center for Public Integrity has posted the relevant documents from Harken on its Web site, the news has been buried under a scrum of pundits shouting, “It’s old news!” or “Is not. It’s new news!” All I can say is that if Slick Willie Clinton had ever eeled out from under information like this, Rush Limbaugh would’ve had a heart attack.

Just for the record, George W. Bush had not just one but four Harken stock transactions worth more than $1 million during the time he was on the board. And in each case, he was months over deadline in reporting the matter to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Second, newly posted documents show that Bush, who claims he had no idea Harken was in trouble when he dumped his stock in late June 1990, was in fact warned twice: Harken’s CEO sent him a memo on June 7th predicting that Harken would run out of money before the end of the month and that it would then be in violation of numerous debt agreements.

Even more egregious, Bush was clearly involved in the phony Aloha Petroleum deal. Aloha was a Harken subsidiary that was sold to a partnership of Harken insiders at an inflated price, a perfect little gem of an example of the kind of fake, pump-the-bottom-line transaction later perfected by Enron. Bush’s business career is a small-scale model of exactly the corrupt corporate practices now under fire.

In case you missed the theme here, it’s hypocrisy. ·

Molly Ivins writes for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Creator’s Syndicate.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Only Human

The Good Girl, the second film from the writer/director team of Mike White and Miguel Arteta (following the minor cult hit Chuck & Buck), is a well-intentioned if overly familiar bit of Americana, like American Beauty as faded suburban noir. Friends‘ Jennifer Aniston stars as Retail Rodeo clerk Justine in what would be the Edward G. Robinson role of the bored, frustrated, middle-class zombie who makes some bad decisions in a desperate stab at rejuvenating a stale life. Donnie Darko‘s Jake Gyllenhaal is mysterious co-worker Holden, the force that lures her astray.

But this is no archetypal noir tale of patsy and predator. Justine makes horrible decisions but eventually frees herself from the film’s tragic trajectory. And Holden (along with pretty much everyone else in the movie, including Justine) is far too dense to make good on any sinister schemes.

Aniston plays against type here as a bored regular gal grown weary of her lifeless husband and mundane job, attempting to jump-start her moribund life by engaging in an affair with the college-dropout loner Holden, who reads The Catcher In the Rye at the register and complains that his parents “don’t get him.” Justine is attracted to this (“I can see in your eyes that you hate the world,” she tells Holden. “I hate it too”) because she doesn’t think her husband gets her either and spends her days in quiet desperation, consumed with regrets. But Justine eventually realizes how disturbed and delusional Holden is and manages to extract herself from the mess of a situation she’s created, resulting in a rather sardonic “happy” ending.

The Good Girl is a well-acted character study in which Aniston gives probably her most notable screen performance (that’s not saying much, granted, though I am a huge fan of one of her previous films, the vastly underrecognized Office Space), but the film’s tone is muddled, as if White and Arteta couldn’t figure out whether they were making a Coen-style satire on service-class suburbia or a bit of hearth-and-home realism à la You Can Count On Me and In the Bedroom. More than likely, they were aiming for an ambitious seriocomic blend of both, but it doesn’t take.

Aniston gives a respectful turn as the not-so-bright 30ish clerk, and the film reciprocates with affection for Justine. And the look of the decaying Southern suburban milieu — the sub-Kmart big-box store, the modest, lived-in homes, the off-brand wardrobes — is dead-on. But the attitude the film conveys about this world makes it far too exotic, a feature only exacerbated by the cartoonish caricatures of the male characters who revolve around Justine. The most sympathetic is Justine’s stoner house-painter husband Phil (John C. Reilly, expertly playing a variation on the comical, good-hearted knucklehead he always plays). Less appealing are Holden (actually Tom, but that’s his “slave name”), who is the creepiest adolescent this side of a Todd Solondz movie, Phil’s painter buddy Bubba (the slant-faced Tim Blake Nelson), and White himself as Holy Roller security guard Corny. These are all naturally eccentric actors and all give fine performances on their own terms, but the cumulative effect is a buffoonishness that feels at odds with the film’s more emotionally serious aims. — Chris Herrington

Taking another sleek stab at the simulacra of Hollywood, Andrew Niccol (best known for penning the script to The Truman Show and helming the darkly satisfying sci-fi thriller Gattaca) here turns in a mindful but minor satire about an ambitious director whose digital star rises further and faster than his own.

Equal parts Pygmalion and Frankenstein, Simone stars Al Pacino as waning art-minded director Viktor Taransky, who’s just been set adrift in the studio climate. A once-successful filmmaker, Viktor is in dire need of a hit and has just been sent a devastating blow by the difficult star of his latest picture. When Nicola Anders (Winona Ryder) pulls out of the director’s latest picture, Viktor is left with no star and a studio suddenly unwilling to back him. When he’s canned by the head of production, who just happens to be his strangely benevolent ex-wife (Catherine Keener), Viktor is assured that his latest baby will never see the dark inside of a multiplex.

So what’s a director to do? Well, conveniently, Viktor is approached by a dying scientist with the answer to those cinematic prayers. The answer comes in the form of Simone (played by Rachel Roberts and written S1M0NE, as in “simulation one”), a beautiful, digital starlet complete with the downloadable range of every actor who’s come and gone through the Hollywood mill. With this new star, Viktor is able to recut his film and place the pixelated performer in the lead. When his picture opens, audiences are captivated with the CG beauty, who becomes an overnight sensation. But having to do double duty as the gatekeeper and creator of Simone proves bittersweet when the seemingly perfect actress goes from overshadowing the director to overtaking him.

Niccol, who demonstrated his ability to intelligently satirize the media with his snarky but slight script for The Truman Show, once again delivers an amusing, if vacuous, tale here. Refusing to explore the most interesting questions posed by his premise — namely, the postmodern implications of adding another layer of artificiality to an already artificial artform — Niccol instead opts to examine the business of Hollywood rather than its cinema. And while it’s amusing to ruminate on the pleasures of working with an actor who never gives any lip and always thanks her director first, it’s certainly not an enduring theme.

But perhaps the most irksome thing about Niccol’s film is its inability to maintain a solid stance on anything. Setting out to undercut the bottom-line nature of the business of Hollywood, which continually undercuts the “art” Pacino’s director is struggling to make, Simone ultimately champions the quick buck. Niccol’s biggest problem may be that he is too similar to his hero. — Rachel Deahl

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

The Cost Of Ugly

Not too long ago, cities were compact living spaces serviced by public transportation. However, many in government and business feared city populations as the source of such evils as promiscuity, feminism, race mixing, and worker unrest. To protect society from these urban ills, city planners, business leaders, and government officials subsidized the growth of suburbs at the taxpayers’ expense.

As people move out of denser urban areas, developers lobby city and county government to build more sewers, electrical power lines, and roads. School, fire, and police services are also required. Fees collected from developers cover only a small percentage of the costs incurred by the city. (Ever notice how chummy city commissioners are with developers?) City government subsidizes suburban migration.

The national government also pays for sprawl. The Department of Transportation subsidizes the cost of commuting each year by spending billions on roads. These are taxes everyone in the city pays.

There are 43,000 traffic fatalities a year. Cars maim or disable 2 million citizens each year. One fifth of traffic accidents involve pedestrians or bicyclists. If a group of foreign terrorists killed as many Americans as cars do each year, we would bomb their county until it looked like one of our big, ugly parking lots.

Exhaust pollution is not just paid for by drivers but is borne by all citizens. Our health is suffering visibly from the automobile. Asthma, cancer, and obesity are directly related to our car culture.

Both our physical and mental health are affected. Noise pollution and the sheer aggravation of traffic take their toll. Commuters all over the country are firing pistols at other drivers.

To hasten commuter travel, roads have been widened all over Memphis, sometimes to the destruction of older, compact, efficient neighborhoods. Memphis came within inches of losing the best urban old-growth forest in the country, Overton Park. What would I have told my grandchildren?

Ugly gas stations and fast-food stands sprout like mushrooms. Vast deserts of asphalt form, making the suburbs too ugly and awkward to attract pedestrians. The cost of ugly cannot be overemphasized.

Car manufacturers spend over $12 billion a year to tell us how fun driving is. Have you noticed that they always film the car driving down a beautiful empty highway? What planet do they film this on? As our commuting and errand-running hours increase, the response of car manufacturers is to increase the comfort of our car interiors.

We now listen to music, talk on the phone, surf the ‘Net, eat, drink, and, heaven help us, watch TV in our cars. Expect to do more because 2 million more cars hit the road each year and the commuting hours are going to continue to increase.

Even though the population is spread thinly, the roads in suburbia become more crowded than the inner city. In response to the congestion, wealthier suburbanites move farther out only to begin the cycle again. In our city, Germantown went from a sleepy village to a traffic nightmare. Collierville is next.

This migration is in spite of the fact that large tracts of land remain undeveloped in the inner city. This is an endless cycle that is doomed to repeat itself if our government continues to subsidize driving and sprawl.

Remember the last time you visited a city that, by design, welcomed pedestrians? For vacation, Americans travel thousands of miles to walk in places like Greenwich Village, San Francisco, and Paris. We visit these places because it feels good to walk there. It feels natural. It reminds us that a neighborhood is something one can walk through.

Bill Stegall is a self-described “free thinker and businessperson” who has relocated to Memphis after spending three years in New York.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Postscript

More Than Mud

To the Editor:

After reading your cover story (“Mudslide Island,” August 22nd issue), I just had to go look and see what all the fuss was about. I went to the bridge and didn’t see much to be concerned about, just a careless mistake by someone untrained in earth-moving. But when I looked from the north side of the bridge, I saw many things to be concerned about.

In the story, mention was made of the possible existence of toxic waste buried under the island. What I saw was an ongoing excavation site that had exposed what appeared to be a line of very dark material. I wonder if anyone who has knowledge of toxic waste has looked at this site? Also, as I walked farther up the bridge, I noticed a corrugated pipe that appeared to be a runoff or storm-drain outlet. Just south of the pipe, I noticed where groundwater runoff had dug a small trench and caused a shift in the riverbank. I wondered, If this small amount of water could cause movement, just how stable is the bank?

I hope that the city intends to send some knowledgeable people to look at these things.

Robert J. Evans

Memphis

Big Ugly Letters

To the Editor:

In response to “Tear Down the Big Uglies” by John Branston (August 15th issue), I have a few suggestions: Yes, I agree, tear them all down! Heck, why renovate anything? No one should have renovated The Peabody, for example, as ugly an eyesore as this city has ever seen. The lobby gives me the creeps. It’s so old! Someone could have put up a nice Holiday Inn in its place. And why on earth did we ever try to save the train station? No one takes the train; normal people drive SUVs. The historic Evergreen district should be bulldozed for Interstate 40 so I can drive to the new Wal-Mart that could be built where the old Sears Crosstown now stands. Forget the previous article in the Flyer about how to attract creative people who can enrich a city (“Talent Magnet,” August 1st issue).

Okay, so maybe my tongue is planted a little too deeply in my cheek. I suggest a middle ground. Instead of imploding buildings, maybe the city could pass a “use it or lose it” law. Give developers a grace period, and if work doesn’t progress, then the city takes possession.

Bill Stegall

Memphis

To the Editor:

In regard to John Branston’s recent column about Memphis needing a few good implosions: As much as it hurts me as a native Memphian to say this, he’s right, and it’s time. It’s past time. The old Baptist Memorial Hospital property downtown should be quickly and mercifully cleared. I was born in that building. My father, an aunt, and I worked there, so there’s history there for me that you could not imagine.

Yet, I say, let’s move on and redevelop the grand old hospital’s site for today’s urgent needs, with a plaque somewhere to commemorate all that the former hospital means to us all. It’s not coming back as we knew it ever again.

James B. Flatter

Memphis

SACRED LINK

To the Editor:

As Molly Ivins indicated in her article (“Out Of Touch,” August 15th issue), working-class and middle-class people in the United States are working harder and earning less. While Ivins says issues such as eroding wages and a woefully inadequate private-pension system are “populist” issues, they are also faith issues.

This Labor Day weekend, speakers will be addressing the sacred link between faith and justice for workers in a dozen Mid-South congregations through the Labor in the Pulpits program, coordinated by the Mid-South Interfaith Network for Economic Justice and the Memphis Labor Council. The national problems pointed to by Ivins are vividly illustrated in Memphis. According to the Economic Policy Institute, Tennessee has the sixth-highest income inequality between the richest and poorest families of any state.

This Labor Day weekend, we must put our faith to work for justice.

Rev. Rebekah Jordan

Mid-South Interfaith Network for Economic Justice

Memphis

White Republicans?

To the Editor:

I enjoyed the recent article about the Talent Magnet project. However, one of the recently published letters commenting on this project gave me pause (Letters, August 8th issue). The writer expressed dissatisfaction with Memphis, because it is a city only for “white Republican men.” Has this joker read any census reports lately? The writer then pulls at our heartstrings by telling how he was made fun of in a local high school (horrors!) for dying his hair and wearing bellbottoms! Surely such a thing could only happen in Memphis!

If you don’t like where you live, by all means, move. Memphis is a great city that would be much better off without such “creative class” whiners.

Tom Holland

Memphis

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

Categories
Music Music Features

Midtown Groove

Prank calls from Ryan Adams, getting half their equipment stolen from their van in New York, getting flashed and harassed by an overeager and middle-aged bar regular in Nashville. These are among the highlights of a year in the life of Lucero, the local band that emerged as one of the most popular acts on the Memphis scene a year and a half ago with the release of their eponymous debut album.

But the time in between the run of shows supporting that record and the upcoming release of their second, Tennessee, has seen the band mostly missing from the local landscape and instead on the road, establishing a following in regional strongholds such as Fayetteville, Little Rock, Louisville, Jackson, Mississippi, Nashville, and Knoxville and venturing out to farther stops such as New York, Denver, and Minneapolis.

“It’s the same thing we went through locally three years ago, where you have to constantly prove yourselves, over and over again, with each new club we play,” lead singer Ben Nichols says of the band’s recent never-ending tour, sometimes in support of local colleagues the North Mississippi Allstars and sometimes going it alone. “It’s tiring, but that’s what you’ve gotta do.”

“Sometimes, it doesn’t even matter so much if a lot of people show up,” says guitarist Brian Venable. “If the booker is there and likes you, that can help you the next time through town.”

“We’re trying to make contacts with the right people and find the right clubs for us in every market in the country, and that takes a while,” says Nichols.

In that respect, the band’s North Mississippi Allstars association has been both help and hindrance, according to bass player John Stubblefield, raising Lucero’s profile among bookers and club owners but also finding them occasionally booked in more jam-band settings that don’t really fit what they do.

Drummer Roy Berry says that the band has played 99 shows since January, with as many in New York as Memphis, trips that have seen them go from playing in front of a thousand people at Irving Plaza with the Allstars to playing solo at Hank’s Saloon, the site of their van break-in.

The band is back in town for August, culminating in this week’s record-release party at Young Avenue Deli for Tennessee, a record mostly recorded a year ago with the Allstars’ Cody Dickinson at the Dickinsons’ home studio, with some post-production work at Ardent and Sam Phillips’ Memphis Recording Service. September will see the band back on the road for a month of shows in the Southeast and then out on the West Coast for the first time in October.

Available for purchase at the record-release party but not officially released until October, Tennessee is getting a national push from local label MADJACK that Lucero didn’t have. And it’s a more confident, more polished record across the board, from the sound to the packaging.

The band spent a lot more time on this record than they did on their debut, and you can hear the difference in the expansiveness of the sound: the layered guitars and programmed percussion of the lead track, “Sweet Thing,” the dobro and lap steel that Venable adds, Nichols’ bare-bones piano, and the contributions of local luminaries such as Cory Branan and Clint Wagner.

This is a band whose music has always been marred by an occasional bum lyric (see the guitar-as-lover metaphor of “My Best Girl” and the romantic machismo of “Raising Hell” on the first record) but whose sure musicality has always overcome it. While there’s nothing that forced on Tennessee, the sweet girls/sad songs sameness is hard to ignore.

But the story, as always, is the music, and in this respect –the band’s smart, dynamic but never indulgent song construction and Nichols’ warm, soulful drawl — they sound better than ever. The band even confronts this dynamic on one of my favorite Lucero moments, the climax of “Nights Like These,” which is in the great rock-and-roll tradition of sound picking up where lyrics fall short. “The beer tastes like blood and my mouth is numb/I can’t make the words I need to say/She had a weakness for writers/And I was never that good at the words anyways,” Nichols admits but then drops into a circular guitar riff that communicates all the emotion the lyric grasps for.

Which is not to say that the lyrics are all that flawed: “Slow Dancing” and “I’ll Just Fall” convey that lonely late-night vibe that the Replacements used to nail, while the lyrical simplicity of “When You’re Gone” works beautifully. But the key to Lucero’s music is still how the lyrics provide a sliver of focus for their more articulate sonics, for the Crazy Horse-style guitar attack of “The Last Song,” the muted piano-and-acoustic-bass mood music of “Fistful Of Tears,” and the rise-and-fall explosiveness of live favorite “Here At the Starlite.”

Opening for Lucero at Young Avenue Deli and then celebrating their own record release a couple of days later at Cooper-Young’s Legba Records is Viva L’American Death Ray Music. Released on the California indie label Sympathy For the Record Industry, the band’s second full-length, Smash Radio Hits, is a giant leap ahead of their poorly recorded first effort. Recorded at Easley-McCain Recording, Smash Radio Hits finally captures the band’s invigoratingly glammy live vibe on disc. A propulsive half-hour of vampy rock-and-roll, Hits evokes the likes of the Velvet Underground, David Bowie, the New York Dolls, and, in Suzie Hendrix’s sax skronk, the Stooges. The band also has a new EP, A New Commotion, A Delicate Tension, in the works, which should be available at the release show.

Lucero Record-release Party

with Viva L’American Death Ray Music

Young Avenue Deli

Saturday, August 31st

Viva L’American Death Ray Music

Record-release Party

Legba Records

Monday, September 2nd, 5:30 p.m.

Categories
News The Fly-By

City Reporter

Math Homework

With teachers making $40,000, how much of the city schools budget is going to the classroom?

By Mary Cashiola

Last week during budget cuts, Memphis City Schools board commissioner Hubon “Dutch” Sandridge said that with 86 percent of the budget going to personnel, it was time to deal with management.

The board was struggling with cutting more than $11 million from the budget to balance it at $731,341,000 for the 2002-03 fiscal year. So how much do the district’s top administrators and managers make?

The system’s communications office said it would take an extended amount of time to find the exact figures for each of the higher-level administrators but pointed the Flyer to the district’s Web site (Memphis-Schools.K12.tn.us/index-a.html) for a good indication.

The beginning salary for an executive director within the city schools system is $3,971 biweekly or about $103,000 a year. The top salary for that same job is almost $113,000 a year. Although it’s unclear, because of the person’s experience and background, precisely how much each executive director makes, the combined salaries of the superintendent, the associate superintendents, and the executive staff come to at least $957,000.

The Web site does not give detailed salary information for each division coordinator and director but does give their average salaries. According to the site, a division coordinator earns an average of $75,495 a year. A division director makes $94,413. According to the communications department, the district employs 18 division directors and 42 division coordinators. Using the average salaries for those positions, that’s $3.1 million yearly for coordinators and about $1.7 million for directors.

The grand total: about $5.75 million in salaries for 70 people.

On the classroom side of the budget, the district had 6,850 teachers according to the 2001 state report card. At an average salary of $42,565, that means roughly $291.6 million, or about 40 percent of the balanced budget, will be paid to teachers.

During the 2001 school year, the district had 405 administrators. Average salaries for principals range from $67,794 at the elementary school level to $81,664 at the high school level. Assistant principals are paid between $58,000 and $60,000 on average.

The entire district has about 16,300 employees.

Superintendent Johnnie B. Watson is expected to bring another revised budget before the board at next week’s meeting. He wanted to wait until after a commissioned study to cut administrative personnel, but board commissioners are asking that he do so this year.

Helping the Homeless

New plan hopes to break the cycle.

By Bianca Phillips

A middle-aged homeless man in a tattered black T-shirt sleeps in a wheelchair in front of St. Peter’s Catholic Church downtown. The sun is shining on the long black hair that’s hanging over his face, hiding most of his features. He’s surrounded by ragged suitcases and duffel bags of various colors stuffed to overflowing with all of his belongings.

But he may not have to sleep outside for long. Last week, Memphis mayor Willie Herenton and Shelby County mayor Jim Rout unveiled the city’s first “Blueprint to Break the Cycle of Homelessness and Prevent Future Homelessness.”

“This blueprint will ensure that every man or woman that is homeless will have a place to go,” said Rout as he addressed the various members of the faith-based organizations, service providers, and media representatives gathered in City Hall.

The blueprint outlines strategies for convincing homeless people to take advantage of available resources — such as Families First and the Salvation Army’s Central Assessment/Intake/Referral project — and also includes plans to make existing services more efficient. Currently, no mechanism is available to measure the effectiveness of homeless services and housing programs or the long-term outcome of the people who have used these resources. To end this problem, the city of Memphis, Partners For the Homeless, and the Greater Memphis Interagency Coalition For the Homeless are collaborating to implement certain standards that services must meet to ensure their effectiveness.

The blueprint also lays out a plan to ensure that homeless people with drug problems and those who are mentally ill have a place to receive treatment. It also lists strategies for providing supportive housing and planning programs for these people after release from mental-health facilities and/or jail.

Finally, the blueprint points out that none of the above goals can be met without more support from area faith-based organizations, more financial help from local businesses and corporations, and improved flexibility of existing programs.

The project is the result of a year’s worth of research and planning by the appointed members of the Mayor’s Task Force On Homelessness, a group responsible not only for outlining these strategies but seeing to it that they’re actually implemented.

The groups involved realized that the problems won’t be solved overnight. “[The blueprint] doesn’t tell anybody that we’re going to leap from tall buildings in a single bound. We think it’s very realistic and manageable,” said Pat Morgan, executive director of Partners For the Homeless.

Fill ‘Er Up

Developers to build new gas station downtown.

By Janel Davis

Residents of downtown, HarborTown, and Mud Island will no longer have to travel long distances for gasoline and other items once a new convenience center is completed next spring.

Uptown Place, developed by Jim Curtis of Tri-State Contractors and built by Guy Payne & Associates Architects, will offer many of the conveniences of everyday life. The mixed-use building, planned at 150 Auction Avenue between Main and Second streets, will contain a ground-floor convenience store with a BP/Amoco gasoline island and retail outlets, including food chains like Subway and a drug store. The second level will consist of 10 loft-style apartments.

“We are trying for a quality development with this project,” says Curtis. “We’re trying to set a standard in downtown for high-scale developments.”

“The Center City Commission [CCC] is delighted to see the project, which is a larger part of the Uptown Memphis development project,” says Jeff Sanford, CCC president. “This will change a dilapidated area into a vibrant, mixed-income area.”

The 25,000-square-foot development is a $3 million project that Sanford describes as “more than your usual strip shopping center.” The CCC’s finance corporation has issued Uptown Place an 18-and-a-half-year property-tax abatement initiative.

“Many people have a misconception about tax abatements,” says Sanford, referring to questions that have been raised about what are usually called freezes for developers. “Since 1979, there are only 141 active downtown abatements, and there are 6,000 total commercial projects in the district. Every project does not receive an abatement, only those projects the [CCC] knows will be completed with or without the tax freeze.”

With the CCC’s support, Payne says there should be no problem leasing the retail and residential spaces. Curtis says construction is scheduled to begin in early October.

Reaching Out

City launches official Spanish-language Web site.

By Bianca Phillips

The digital divide in Memphis is about to shrink as the city launches its first Web site written entirely in Spanish and plans to offer a site catering to the city’s Vietnamese community.

On August 30th, the Spanish version of CityOfMemphis.org will be accessible by clicking a “Spanish” link on the site. The site will contain new information specifically targeted to the Hispanic community here, such as how to get a Social Security card, how to register children in school, even what to do if stopped by a police officer. It will also contain general information about safety and health issues, education, and immigration.

“We hope not only to narrow the gap between these citizens and the city government but to provide pertinent information pertaining to the city of Memphis,” said Mayor Willie Herenton at the site’s unveiling.

The site’s comprehensive A-to-Z guide of city services, containing information on everything from abandoned cars to zoning-ordinance amendments, will be translated into Spanish. The site will also contain a section with answers to the questions most frequently asked by the city’s immigrants.

“We are serving a different kind of Hispanic community in Memphis. They’re brand-new. It’s not like Chicago, where they’ve had a Hispanic community for a long time,” said Naquenta Sims, manager of the Office of Multicultural and Religious Affairs (OMRA).

The new site has been in the works for nearly a year. It began when Kroger volunteered to set up Hispanic informational kiosks in its stores to serve as a pilot program. The program was a success, so OMRA linked Quilogy, the company contracted to design the city’s English site, with a local certified Spanish translator. OMRA also hosted focus groups attended by Spanish-speaking members from various professions to determine what the Hispanic community needed from the site.

“[Hispanic] children are getting this information in schools, but the adults don’t have access to it. We want to take that mystery away,” said Sims.

Plans for another foreign-language site are in the works. The city hopes to launch its Vietnamese site by 2003. A pilot program will be offered sometime in September at the Kroger store at 1366 Poplar.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Rites Of Passage

The dog days of summer, they used to be called, before the events of last September 11th created an aura of menace likely to endure for a while whenever the anniversary of that occasion comes around.

The current season, however, is still more suggestive of easeful transitions than of horrific stresses, and Monday’s meeting of the Shelby County Commission — the last one ever for five of the 13 commissioners — was as mellow as the autumnal shades that will shortly be upon us.

Presiding over a brief ceremony in the commission’s sixth-floor quarters in the county administrative building, outgoing chairman Morris Fair presented framed composite photographs of the current commission to all of his colleagues and plaques to those who were leaving.

There was lawyer Buck Wellford, for example, a poster boy for the proverbial “sadder and wiser” look after two terms during which he rarely shied away from battle — losing one early on when he challenged the findings of a disparity study on county contracting and winning a major one late in the game when he took the lead in passing a tree ordinance that imposed new restrictions on developers (but that, he lamented Monday, could not have prevented the recent landslide on Mud Island). Wellford opted not to run this year. As he cracked Monday, “I always wanted to be a public official — but I’ve got my fill of it!”

There was first-termer Bridget Chisholm, a late 2000 appointee who was much-heralded as a woman of achievement in the financial sector but who seemed unhappy with the demands — always political and often highly partisan — of the disputatious public sector and decided to bow out gracefully.

Another voluntary exile was Tommy Hart, the Collierville businessman who was a solid anchor for conservative and Republican causes but who found himself an active agent of compromise more than once. He said Monday that he prided himself on never having succumbed to a sense of power during his two terms (including an eventful year as chairman) and opined, “The important thing is not to change from who you are.”

Developer Clair VanderSchaaf, badly defeated in the May Republican primary by newcomer Joyce Avery for his unrepentant support of public funding for the new downtown arena and, he acknowledged, “a few other reasons” (presumably including notoriety from a much-publicized DUI arrest) was low-profile on Monday, his still-youthful appearance belying his 60-odd years and a generation of service on the commission.

In the spirit of conciliaton which predominated, budget committee chairman Cleo Kirk said he hoped incoming commissioner John Willingham would rise to the level of expertise on funding matters as had former banker and bond broker Fair, who enjoyed an unusual last hurrah Monday by shepherding through the commission several major retractions in the benefits package enjoyed by county employees.

Economic factors being what they are, downsizing initiatives of that sort will, almost certainly, be one of the hallmarks of the commission when it meets again on September 9th with five new members — Avery, Willingham, lawyer David Lillard, financial planner Bruce Thompson, and publicist Deidre Malone (the sole Democrat among the new commissioners).

Democrat Julian Bolton went against expectations Monday by predicting that the new commission, despite the more conservative cast of the new members, would be “more progressive” than the current body. “That’s because the Republican majority has been joined at the hip with the administration of Mayor [Jim] Rout,” he explained, suggesting that “things will be different” when newly elected Democrat A C Wharton takes office as county mayor next week.

• OTHER POLITICAL NOTES: George Flinn, the businessman/physician who carried the standard of a divided Republican Party against Wharton, got a standing ovation from attendees at the August meeting of the local GOP steering committee. Flinn promised to be heard from again. At the same meeting, Young Republican chairman Rick Rout read a letter of apology for an e-mail to YR board members during the campaign that had seemed to be critical of Flinn. Both Lamar Alexander and Bob Clement — the Republican and Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate, respectively — have made frequent appearances in Shelby County of late, the middle-of-the-road nature of which can best be gauged by the fact that Clement has appeared before such groups as the archconservative Dutch Treat Luncheon and Alexander has allowed himself to sound measurably more moderate than in his hotly disputed primary with outgoing 7th District congressman Ed Bryant. Though Alexander is favored over Nashville congressman Clement, the two will participate in a series of debates, and Clement may find himself the beneficiary of the same expectations game that boosted GOP gubernatorial candidate Van Hilleary‘s stock in a recent debate in which he was judged to have held his own with favored Democrat Phil Bredesen, the former Nashville mayor.

A slenderized, silver-maned Bill Clinton possessed movie-star cachet in the relatively nondescript company of Arkansas political candidates and Memphis-area Democrats during visits Monday to West Memphis and Memphis, for a Democratic rally and a party fund-raiser, respectively. Said the former president in West Memphis, “They [Republicans in Congress] spent $70 million trying to prove I was a winner. And you could have told them that in the first place!”