Month: April 2003

Sound Advice

Post author By
Post date April 18, 2003

I remember reading somewhere that Texas-based singer-songwriter and guitar player Chris Whitley didn’t consider himself a singer-songwriter or guitar player. He said he thought of himself as an “expressionist.” I think it was then and there that I decided to actively dislike Chris Whitley. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do since he makes gorgeously eclectic recordings like some roots-minded answer to Beck. Blues with a side of trip-hop, anyone? And let’s face it, the guy can turn a phrase. But his poesy has grown so self-consciously poetic that it sounds like something ripped from the journal of a precocious 15-year-old coffee addict whose grandma told him the beats were way cool. Take this line from his latest record, Hotel Vast Horizon: “No time lost to passers-by/Lonesome transmission/The miles decide/Everyday departures/Loosen from the land/All the wide open returns/In your stride.” Expressionist? No. Cubist? Maybe. Pretentious? It is decidedly so.

Whitley will be playing with his band at the Gibson Lounge on Saturday, April 19th, with Messenger labelmates Johnny Society opening, though for my money it should be the other way around. When Johnny Society released Wood in 1998 it looked like Guided By Voices might have some lo-fi Beatles-worshiping competition. But the band got too slick too fast, and their sound began to list in the direction of bad Cheap Trick. (Could working with Robin Zander be to blame?) Their latest, Life Behind the 21st Century Wall, sounds like Cheap Trick trying to write a Stillwater song for Almost Famous II with a little New Orleans blues thrown in to remind us they are with-it.

— Chris Davis

Living proof that hailing from somewhere as mundane as Akron, Ohio, and being a protégé of Peter Gabriel are not mutually exclusive, singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur emerged from obscurity to critical acclaim with his 2000 sophomore and breakthrough album, Come to Where I’m From, a batch of experimental folk rock variously compared to the likes of Beck, Leonard Cohen, Joe Henry, and the late Jeff Buckley. Arthur hits Memphis this week for a show on The Peabody rooftop Friday, April 18th, as part of 107.5-FM The Pig’s excellent “World Class Concert Series.” The only way to get tickets is to register online at www.radiopig.com.

The latest installment of Tha Movement goes down this week, Saturday, April 19th, at the Hi-Tone Café. Scheduled performers this month include the reggae band One Stone, Drum Circle, and Memphix’s Red Eye Jedi. — Chris Herrington

News The Fly-By

City Reporter

Post author By Flyer Staff
Post date April 18, 2003

Meeting of the Minds

City council, school board try to work out differences.

By Mary Cashiola

After months of indirect squabbling, the Memphis City Council and the Memphis City Schools board had a largely harmonious luncheon meeting this week that ended with a plan to have more meetings.

City council members and city school board commissioners called it “critically important” and “a giant step in the right direction” that the two bodies were sitting down together and not talking through the local media. The entire school board and all the city council, with the exception of Jack Sammons and Tom Marshall, were present.

Although originally slated to be a discussion on consolidation — council members wanted to speak to the school board before the council votes on a resolution to urge the board to hold a charter referendum in October — the meeting’s agenda was fairly open. Discussion ranged from annexation to having a CPA look over the district’s budget for the city council before members approve it.

“You don’t need to be dealing with the nuts and bolts of Memphis City Schools,” school board president Carl Johnson told the council. “We don’t need another set of administrators. We don’t need another board. What we do need is a meeting of the minds of elected officials.”

Later, council member Janet Hooks complained about the city repaving Cooper Street and then tearing up the street a few weeks later for gas-line maintenance. “Can we not coordinate these things? Hopefully out of this meeting, that’s what we’re doing,” she said.

Council chairman Brent Taylor proposed a series of meetings that would bring individuals from all over the country to help the city council and the board look at student achievement, parental involvement, the implication of the No Child Left Behind act, and consolidation. He said he would be willing to ask private sources to fund the series.

The Light Returns

Dinner theater company reopens after 17 years.

By Janel Davis

Dinner and a show will soon take on a whole new meaning with the revival of one of Memphis’ most popular entertainment establishments next month.

The Gaslight Dinner Theatre returns May 30th for a two-day production of John Patrick’s comedy Everybody Loves Opal at Heartsong Church in Cordova. Although the production sports a new venue, the pioneers behind the original theater, Howard and Diann Cobbs, haven’t changed. Both will be involved in producing and managing the production, with Howard emceeing the show.

The Cobbs have done everything from teaching school to working with computers since retiring their first Gaslight Dinner Theatre production in Whitehaven 17 years ago. The original theater, located on Brooks Road, closed in 1986. “The area went down, people moved out of the neighborhoods, and theatergoers no longer wanted to come into the area,” said Howard. “[At the time] we didn’t have the financial backing to move to a better area.”

The building was demolished a few years ago, leaving a grassy lot as the only remnant of more than 25 years of entertainment. “Sometimes me and my wife would go out to the old location for the memories. The production lived and died in the Whitehaven area,” he said.

After hearing numerous “Gaslight stories” from longtime fans, the Cobbs decided to revive the theater. The May show will be a Gaslight reunion of sorts, with Joey Butler, former executive director for the company, returning as designer and director. Butler will also join other area actors, including Gaslight veterans Trisha Branch and Sharon Fewell, on stage for the opening production. Plans for future productions include two seasonal shows in the fall and spring.

Gaslight Dinner Theatre at Heartsong joins Trinity United Methodist Church as two of the remaining dinner-theater venues in this area. Trinity’s annual theater show will also take place next month with a production of Rumors Are Flying.

Bringing Home the Green

Green Eyeshade Awards honor local journalists.

the Memphis Flyer and its sister publication, Memphis magazine, were winners at the 2003 Green Eyeshade Awards, held April 5th in Atlanta. Hosted by the Atlanta chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, this competition honors the best work of writers and photographers in 11 Southern states.

This year’s winners included:

Marilyn Sadler: first place, feature writing, “Meeting Halfway,” Memphis magazine.

Vance Lauderdale: first place, humorous commentary, “Ask Vance,” Memphis magazine.

Vern Evans: first place, photography, “Return to Shiloh,” Memphis magazine.

Jackson Baker: third place, non-deadline reporting, “Meltdown in Nashville,” The Memphis Flyer.

Chris Herrington: third place, sports commentary, “The Second Time Around,” “Split Personality,” and “Silver Lining,” The Memphis Flyer.

Other local finalists included The Commercial Appeal‘s Geoff Calkins, second place for sports commentary; and David Williams, third place for sports reporting.

A New Refrain

Music commission looks to the future after CEO’s departure.

By Mary Cashiola

When Jerry Schilling moved on, so did his former employer, the Memphis and Shelby County Music Commission. Even though it’s been without a CEO since Schilling’s resignation last September, the commission has been working toward the future of Memphis music.

“For a commission that’s not doing anything, we’ve been very busy,” said commission chairman Phil Trenary. It has sent the Bar-Kays to Hollywood and the North Mississippi Allstars to Congress. And this week, it’s releasing a questionnaire for an economic impact survey of people affiliated with the music industry.

“There is a difference between the music commission I worked for before and the music commission I work with now,” said interim director Joann Self. Self, the writer and director behind The WLOK Story, was once Schilling’s executive assistant. She returned in March to head the commission until a new CEO and president is named in June. “When I was here before, there was more of a hang-up on the heritage side and how do we bridge the heritage with what’s going on today. Now we’re more focused on moving into the future.”

As part of an overall planning process, the commission is looking for input from those in and around the music industry. In addition to the economic impact survey, Self said it is planning 15 focus groups and a lifestyle survey, all of which will steer the commission’s focus.

“If you went around the board,” said Trenary, “and asked everyone what is the role of the music commission, you would get very different answers. Everyone is very committed to the commission, and that’s wonderful, but you can’t be effective that way.”

The economic impact survey is partly to show how much of the Memphis economy is generated by the local music industry. But the commission’s primary goal, Self said, is to help the most people make the most money. “It’s not just for musicians but for graphic artists who like to design CD covers or entertainment lawyers who don’t have enough clients to be entertainment lawyers all the time. Everybody has to be a generalist,” said Self of the local music industry. “We want to increase the opportunities for making money.”

Under Trenary’s guidance, the music commission forged a partnership with Memphis Tomorrow, a group of local CEOs who funnel investments into sectors such as biotechnology, early childhood education, and music.

“One of the things I keep hearing from local artists is that we have to find a way for artists to make a living doing music. One of the problems is it’s hard to get exposure,” said Trenary. “If you’re a musician, you almost have to leave Memphis to have a career. We have a lot of recording studios and a lot of engineers, but we don’t have everything we need.”

In February, the commission held its first Grammy reception at Manhattan’s China Club to increase exposure. Memphis and the Mid-South boasted 14 nominations, but the party was open to any Memphis musician. Trenary said two major-label CEOs were also there, as well as CEOs from several indie labels.

“It’s so frustrating to see a city like Austin, Texas — whose musical roots go back to 1974 — declaring itself the live music capital of the world,” said Trenary. “What they’ve been so successful at doing is reaching a consensus on that. Their chamber, their [convention and visitors bureau], the city council, the whole state signed on to declare, ‘We’re the music capital of the world,’ and people started buying into it.”

Trenary thinks this is a perfect time for Memphis to reposition itself. “I believe music is one of our most important assets, both economically and culturally,” he said. “We’re sitting on top of a gold mine, but we’re not mining it.”

News The Fly-By

They’re Out There

Post author By Walter Jowers
Post date April 18, 2003

One thing you should know about termites: You can poison them, you can light them on fire, you can stomp them, or even drop a neutron bomb on them. Whatever you do, you can never be sure that your house is immune to a termite attack. The termites were here before we got here. They’ll be here when we’re long gone and there’s nothing left but Styrofoam, sharks, and Cher.

Usually, the first indication of termites eating your house is a termite swarm. In our part of the world, termite swarms happen right about now. When the bugs swarm, they come fast. One minute you’re sitting on the sofa reading the Sunday paper, the next minute there are bugs in your hair, bugs on the walls and floors, bugs on the dogs and cats. If it happens at your house, don’t freak out. Termites don’t bite or sting. They can’t hurt you. Just suck ’em up with the vacuum.

Sometimes, a plague of flying bugs turns out to be an ant swarm. An ant swarm isn’t good, but it’s better than a termite swarm. Here’s how to tell ants from termites: Termite swarmers are black. They look like ants, except that they’re about the same size all the way from head to butt, without the pinched-in waists that ants have. Termite swarmers have straight antennae. Ants have crooked ones. If you get termite swarmers in your house, it’s a safe bet that termite workers have been eating your house for a while. I know that sounds worrisome, and it is. But it’s usually not a crisis. Often as not, replacing or reinforcing termite-damaged wood is a medium-sized job at worst, and it’s nothing a decent carpenter can’t handle.

Swarmers outside the house don’t necessarily mean termites are eating your house. It’s perfectly all right for termites to come flying out of a rotten stump 100 feet from your house. That’s what termites do. But if the bugs are coming out of the ground immediately adjacent to your house, that could mean your house is under attack. Call the bug man. If you’re lucky, you won’t be home when a swarm hits, and the bugs will let themselves out before you get home. You’ll find some live and dead bugs here and there, but you’ll mostly find wings on the windowsills. That’s because wings fall off the swarmers as they fly out of their dark underground colonies and toward the light.

House-eating termites (workers, not swarmers) are white and they don’t have wings. They live in the ground and build mud tunnels up to your house. You probably won’t see the workers unless you go into your crawl space or basement and break up their mud tunnels (about as big around as a pencil) or probe into a piece of infested wood. An Orkin factoid: There are about 12 to 13 termite colonies in a typical American acre, each with about a million bugs. Using those figures, I’d say that my yard alone has more termites than Tennessee has Tennesseans.

People ask me all the time: How can they be sure that there are no termites eating their house? Well, you can never be sure. You’ve got millions of termites in your yard, and they get up every morning with nothing to do but find wood and eat it. There’s no fool-proof termite-detection system, and there’s no truly effective termite-killing system. My smarty-pants sources tell me that the bait systems are best but far from perfect. When we’re doing our home-inspection work, we go into a crawl space packing a 500,000-candlepower flashlight. We look for termite tubes, termite-chewed wood, and termite poop. But the flashlight beam is only about a foot across. We can’t promise that there isn’t some termite damage somewhere. The guys who come from the bug companies are specialists, but their termite inspection still involves one guy with one flashlight. Truth is, nobody can inspect a house and know if it has termites or not. Some exterminators have trained beagles to sniff out termites. I’ve been told that the beagles are good. But shoot, with 12 million bugs to the acre, I could put my own nose to the ground and say I smelled termites, and nobody could prove me wrong.

Homeowners, listen to me: Just give up the notion that any company, person, or beagle can find all the termites. Any Tennessee house could have termites at any time. If you want protection against termite damage, hire a good pest-control company, which can treat the house, put out termite-killing bait traps, and inspect the house frequently. If you’re lucky, you might find a company that’ll sell you a no-loophole repair bond, which means if bugs eat your house, they’ll pay to fix the damage.

Cover Feature News

Place Your Bets

Post author By Flyer Staff
Post date April 18, 2003

The Pyramid Scheme

by John Branston

When it comes to gambling in Tennessee, what’s “impossible” in Nashville is low-hanging fruit in Memphis.

That would be, of course, casino gambling, not the lottery whose pesky details are bedeviling Gov. Phil Bredesen and the General Assembly.

For Memphians, the lottery has all the excitement of a new convenience store. Anyone with $100 and a car can enjoy casino gambling with better odds, good food, and big-name entertainment 40 minutes away in Tunica. It’s the difference between a champagne buffet and a bag of Krystals. When the lottery starts, Memphis, with the largest poor population of any city in the state, will be supporting the college educations of middle-class Tennesseans on the backs of its immobile underclass.

Mike Rose, former CEO of Holiday Inns and Promus when they were headquartered in Memphis and in the casino business through their Harrah’s subsidiary, said casinos appear to be illegal under Tennessee law but the idea has considerable merit.

“Having a location like The Pyramid would be fantastic as opposed to having to shlepp down to Tunica,” he said.

Hard times call for fresh ideas, and what was considered impossible yesterday is taken for granted today. Just 15 years ago, the big gambling issues in the Mid-South were horse racing and charity bingo. Today, there’s an anything-is-possible spirit in the Bluff City, tempered by the realities of deficits, service cutbacks, and tax increases in local and state government. In that context, the idea of turning The Pyramid into a casino after FedExForum opens is worth discussing. Instead of paying Mississippi’s bills, gamblers could pay some of Tennessee’s.

At the urging of Commissioner John Willingham, the Shelby County Commission may reconsider next week giving a casino consultant the go-ahead to explore the barriers and benefits. Shelby County Attorney Donnie Wilson has inoculated the proposal with “whereas” clauses aimed at making sure the county wouldn’t have to pay for anything. Lakes Entertainment would do the legal, economic, and legislative research for free. If anything came of it, Lakes could compete to be the operator or take a $20 million finder’s fee from the winner.

Willingham, who once campaigned bare-chested, was elected last year. He is on a lonely crusade at this point.

“Until somebody proves to me that this thing has legs, we’re not going to get in the middle of it,” said Kevin Kane, head of the Memphis Convention and Visitors Bureau, which has Tunica casinos as members.

There are concerns about how a casino would fit in downtown Memphis.

“In my experience, most casinos basically want to keep all the patrons inside the casino,” said Beale Street developer John Elkington, who also has a development in Shreveport, Louisiana, between two casinos. “They don’t want to share with restaurants and other businesses. The casinos are really not helpful with respect to driving tenants into the entertainment district.”

Kane and Elkington agree that a Pyramid casino would make a lot of money for its owners. Kane estimates it might get a third of the $1.3 billion business now going to Tunica.

“The real question boils down to two things,” said Elkington. “Will we be able to get taxes that would help reduce the tax burden we have in the state and will it promote economic development in this community?”

Several states are using taxes from riverboat casinos or negotiated payments from compacts with Indian casinos to help close deficits.

Mississippi, of course, is the closest. The Mississippi Gaming Commission estimates that 28 percent of Tunica gamblers are from Tennessee, with most of those coming from Memphis and Shelby County. That translates to roughly $365 million for the casinos, which pay combined state and local taxes of 12 percent.

In Connecticut, two Indian casinos gave the state’s general fund over $300 million last year. Indian casinos are regulated differently from the casinos in Tunica or Las Vegas. Tribes recognized by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs enter into compacts with state governors. If granted a monopoly, like the Pequots and Mohegans have in Connecticut, they give up as much as 25 percent of their slot- and video-machine winnings. If they compete with other casinos, they pay next to nothing. The Choctaw-owned casino in east Mississippi, which negotiated its compact with former Governor Ray Mabus, pays the state $250,000 a year.

Lakes Entertainment specializes in doing the legal and political spadework for Indian casinos. While Indians were undeniably an important part of Memphis history, the state attorney general has said “there is no Indian tribe which holds Indian land in Tennessee.”

That’s not to say that consultants, politicians, and creative draftsmanship couldn’t change that. The attorney general has also noted that “the regulation of all types of gambling, other than lotteries, is a matter for determination by the General Assembly.” Lottery proponents recognized as much when they included anti-Indian casino booby traps in the language of last year’s lottery referendum.

Legalities aside — and that’s a big aside — a Pyramid casino, Indian-owned or otherwise, is a potential 800-pound gorilla. As broadly outlined in the Lakes Entertainment proposal, The Pyramid’s debt and operating losses would shift from the city and county to the casino operator. The owner/operator would get first crack at the fourth-largest casino feeder market in the country, thousands of potential employees, and the existing parking and easy access from Interstate 40. At Mississippi tax rates (8 percent state, 4 percent to the county where the casino is located), a single casino that earned $300 million would pay $24 million a year to the state and $12 million to Shelby County.

A Pyramid casino could revive the Mud Island Amphitheater as a concert venue. Entertainers go to Tunica where the casinos can pay them more because they’re effectively subsidized by the gamblers they bring in. And no one has come forward with a better idea for The Pyramid, whose future obsolescence and financial burden were predicted by Rose and others during the debate over the new arena.

“That’s 16 months away, and so far Willingham’s the only one talking about it,” said Kane. “We better start thinking about what to do with The Pyramid sooner rather than later.”

On its surface — literally — converting a pyramid-shaped arena into a pyramid-shaped casino seems doable. A casino hotel called Luxor in Las Vegas, built about the same time as The Pyramid, is its virtual golden twin from the outside: 30 stories tall with 2,256 hotel rooms. The Pyramid’s interior space, from the makeshift exhibition hall used by the Wonders exhibition series to the dazzling but never-developed room at the top, presents both challenges and opportunities. New Orleans and Detroit imposed restrictions and requirements on downtown casinos to keep them from overwhelming other attractions and businesses. In New Orleans, the highly touted Harrah’s casino fell far short of expectations (even though it is the only land-based casino in the city) because it was forbidden from adding hotel rooms or upscale restaurants.

Ralph Berry was vice president of communications for Harrah’s Entertainment when it opened its Tunica and New Orleans casinos. He now works in public relations for Thompson and Company in Memphis, which does not do business with casinos.

“If there are too many restrictions, it’s not good for the casino and it stifles the additional development that traditionally would take place around it,” he said.

He sees another potential controversy if the idea ever takes off. “The moral argument is not moot,” he said. “It is one thing to have to travel 45 minutes to gamble and an entirely different thing to be able to walk from work or housing. Whoever operates an urban casino should have very aggressive responsible-gambling programs and ways to keep those who can’t afford to be there from being there.”

There is nothing stopping Shelby County from dealing with someone other than Lakes Entertainment, which has development and management contracts with four Indian tribes and is hardly a giant in the industry. Lakes, a publicly traded company, is an offshoot of Grand Casinos, which operates in Tunica and on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. In 1998 the Mississippi properties were merged with the gaming division of Hilton Hotels to form Park Place Entertainment. Grand’s Indian casino management business was spun off into a new company that became Lakes Entertainment. Its CEO, Lyle Berman, was one of the founders of Grand Casinos and oversaw its huge investment in Tunica.

Berman and Lakes Entertainment got a foothold in Shelby County through Willingham. He began working with them during the campaign for the Tennessee lottery referendum and introduced the Pyramid casino resolution to the commission in March.

If Willingham’s resolution fails next week, a state legislator named Steve Cohen could tell him a little about the value of persistence in the cause of legalized gambling. The lottery referendum Cohen authored took 18 years.

Additional reporting by Mary Cashiola, Janel Davis, and Bianca Phillips.

The Lottery Battle

by Jackson Baker

State Sen. Steve Cohen struggled for years to get a lottery referendum authorized by both chambers of the legislature, then oversaw a strenuous campaign last fall to get voter approval, and even now is involved in a multifront battle to get what he regards as an acceptable version of the lottery through the General Assembly and past some structural obstacles posed by Governor Phil Bredesen.

Under those circumstances, the Midtown senator has little to offer John Willingham in the way of either advice or sympathy. “It’s a fantasy,” he says bluntly, offering some chimerical visions of his own. “I’d like for Exxon Mobil to move their headquarters to Memphis. I’d like to see the Pacific Ocean waterfront moved to Front St. with lots of hotels and wonderful lobster restaurants.”

Cohen’s belief is that talk of putting a casino into The Pyramid is counterproductive in a double sense — “It detracts from the real issues of the lottery and from the question of what we do with The Pyramid” — and the senator is unmoved by speculation that the state Constitution does not expressly prohibit casino gambling. “As far as I’m concerned, the attorney general’s ruling doesn’t say that. Not only has he [State Attorney General Paul Summers] said that casinos are unconstitutional, he has also ruled that there are no registered Indian tribes in Tennessee, and no application from any tribes to be so considered.”

With that, Cohen dismisses the whole Pyramid-as-casino concept as hypothetical and says, “I don’t get into hypotheticals.”

Cohen is a notoriously complex personality, equal parts Mr. Congeniality and firebrand, famously determined, and, some say, overly competitive. In any case, there are those who see his disdain for Willingham’s casino effort as an instance of perceived rivalry. But that sense is dampened somewhat by a conversation with Cohen’s Senate colleague Jim Kyle. Kyle serves the working-class population of Frayser and Raleigh and is allied with Bredesen this year in resisting provisions of Cohen’s lottery concept, which Kyle sees as favoring the state’s elites against the interests of common folks. Kyle has also butted heads with Cohen repeatedly over the years over this issue and that, and, though the two Memphis senators entertain a kind of mutual respect, they are conspicuously short on mutual affection.

Even so, Kyle is like-minded about the Willingham proposal, at least partly because of the provisions of the constitutional amendment effected by Cohen last year and approved by the voters. The concept of casino gambling is legally unsound, says Kyle, because “Senator Cohen, in his infinite wisdom, in order to pick up a couple of votes (in the legislature), expressly forbade casino gaming.”

Beyond that, Kyle’s reaction, like Cohen’s, borders on scorn — indeed, crosses that border. “I thought Mr. Willingham served barbecue instead of pie in the sky. This is unrealistic. It’s putting your hope on something that’s going to bail you out of having to make some tough choices for the county.”

Laments Kyle: “We missed our opportunity when Tunica was born. There wouldn’t be one more Memphian gambling if we’d moved on it when they did. We’d have all the convention business. There’d be half a billion dollars on the property tax rolls. But that train left town 10 years ago.”

What if the constitutional issue were resolved in favor of permitting casino legislation in the General Assembly? “No way,” says Kyle. “I don’t know of a single Republican in the Senate that would vote for it. The Senate is more conservative now, more Christian-right, than it was 10 years ago.” And, opines the senator (like Cohen, a Democrat), prospects would be equally bleak in the state House of Representatives.

Meanwhile, the state lottery itself is in the category of unfinished business, and Cohen and Kyle are quite likely to square off against each other this week and next — Kyle wearing the governor’s colors and Cohen championing legislative prerogatives — as various bills to implement the lottery inch their way toward the achieving of a final product.

Various sticking points that were prominent earlier in this term of the General Assembly have more or less been overcome. Some key ones remain. One question to be resolved is the disposition of lottery proceeds — designated, under terms of the constitutional referendum, for college scholarships — with “excess” funds (i.e., those unclaimed by eligible scholarship applicants), destined for early childhood education.

There is tentative agreement that scholarships should be pegged to applicants’ grade-point averages, with 3.0 being the qualifying figure more or less agreed on, though some members of the legislative black caucus — and Kyle — still think that bar is too high. “He’s caved in to the very people who kept him from passing the lottery all those years, the right-wing Republicans,” says Kyle of Cohen’s acceptance of this provision, as well as of others also favored by legislative Republicans — waiving an income cap on recipients’ eligibility and allowing scholarship money to be spent at private Tennessee institutions, as well as public ones. Though he acknowledges making concessions, Cohen insists that these were not primarily to Republicans in the Assembly so much as to worthy institutions like Christian Brothers University in Memphis and, in several instances, to Bredesen himself.

Still at issue is the point at which scholarship money would be considered paid out. Also still being debated is what would happen to the remaining funds. Recently beaten back as old-fashioned “pork” was a rural legislator’s proposal to dispense “leftover” funds equally to the 99 House districts for disbursement on educational projects to be chosen by the recipient legislators. Cohen’s House co-sponsor, Rep. Chris Newton, a Turtletown Republican, has come up with a proposal to set aside, in advance, $25 million for pre-kindergarten purposes. Cohen himself has not signed off on that idea, and he is even more dubious about Newton’s call for scholarship levels to be dropped from $4,000 to $3,000 (though poverty-line students would be entitled to additional stipends).

But those disagreements can be worked out. The real showdown is between Cohen and Bredesen over the point-blank matter of control. There are four areas of conflict:

1) An “ethics” or “revolving-door” provision which Bredesen insists on to prevent members of the General Assembly from working in control positions on the lottery for two years after the completion of their legislative service. Cohen, who took umbrage at that provision as having been designed to impugn his own motives, has countered with an amendment requiring professional experience in the field for a lottery director. “That eliminates me from the job,” says Cohen, who has for his part alleged that some of the governor’s own associates may be angling for a piece of the action.

2) The issue of vetting annual budget estimates, which Cohen thinks should be the work of the lottery’s private board of directors and which Bredesen believes is the responsibility of the state Funding Board, operating under executive aegis.

3) The governor’s proposed “procurement board,” consisting of the state finance commissioner, treasurer, and secretary of state, which would review the private directors’ proposed contracts and purchases and which would own veto power over them; Cohen and other legislators, including House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh, oppose this vigorously and insist on hewing to the model of Georgia’s state lottery, which served as the model case in last year’s legislative and electoral action on the lottery.

4) Finally, and most importantly, a clear difference of opinion on who should appoint the lottery’s board of directors and, ultimately, control the lottery itself. In addition to the government oversight mentioned above, the governor wants to appoint three members of a five-member board of directors, with one each to be named by the House and Senate speakers, respectively; Cohen and legislators in general have proposed a nine-member board, whose members are appointed in equal measure by the governor, by the House speaker, and by the Senate speaker (lieutenant governor). Clearly, this part of the battle is a tug-of-war between branches of government.

All of this will get resolved in the next fortnight, and Kyle, a believer in close government regulation of outsourced activities and a Bredesen supporter who was dubbed “Phil’s boy” by a Nashville columnist in recognition of his hand-in-glove closeness to the governor, concedes that Cohen has legislative “traction” on many of the disputed issues. But, after all the hardball has been played, the final tally is likely to show that both sides have scored, compromise still being the name of the game in Nashville.

That’s how politics is played in Shelby County government as well; the question is (to return to the pending issue of converting The Pyramid into a gaming casino) whether Commissioner John Willingham can comply with those standing rules of play. The basic conclusion to be drawn from his several months of service so far is that of an unpredictable maverick — hewing neither to a Republican nor a Democratic line, nor one reflecting either urban or suburban values as such. Elected as a populist of the right, he is pro-consolidation, flexible on development, but intent on playing watchdog over the FedExForum now being constructed. He can be regarded as either broad-minded or opportunistic, depending on how one looks at it.

Both qualities can serve him well during next week’s commission showdown over his resurgent casino proposal. If Willingham had his druthers, he would have Shelby County government begin to implement a scheme he has drawn up of staggering complexity, one that would totally remake the way procurement and construction are carried out in the county. Or, he can settle for half a loaf (in his case, one should probably say a 10th of a loaf), forgoing his threat to take back his pivotal vote last week for rural school bonds — a threat which, if carried out, would force Commissioner David Lillard, in his words, to fight Willingham “tooth and nail” in ways Lillard left unspecified. And Lillard would scarcely be alone in that regard. Meanwhile, Democrats so far partial to the casino project but opposed to rural school bonds are eyeing Willingham warily from the other side.

Ironically enough, the short-term success of Willingham’s casino initiative depends on how much of a gambler — and how good a gambler — he turns out to be.

Film Features Film/TV

Below and Beyond

Post author By
Post date April 18, 2003

Filmed in state-of-the-art Imax 3-D, Ghosts of the Abyss chronicles director James Cameron and his 2001 return to the ship Titanic, four years after winning a basketful of Oscars and zillions of dollars from the 1997 mega-blockbuster film Titanic. He has taken Bill Paxton with him, who serves as a kind of Everyman narrator, blankly commenting upon mundane scientific exercises and providing requisite exclamations of awe when cool things get shown — like the approach of the mini-subs to the bulkhead of the ship or light shining through intact leaded-glass windows for the first time since it sank on April 12, 1914. Paxton, one of my least favorite Hollywood actors, is not bad playing himself, though a wittier Everyman might have been found. Director Cameron and he are buddies, and Paxton was in his Titanic film, but I would have preferred that old lady Gloria Stuart or maybe Kathy Bates. There’s a movie — miles under the surface of the ocean in a tiny submarine with Kathy Bates. Not for those who squirmed during her About Schmidt hot-tub scene, perhaps, but a jazzier set-up for a film. I did not need Paxton’s observations to let me know when something was “spooky.”

One of the marvels of Cameron’s Titanic was that it was able to, for three hours, sustain the attention of an audience that already knew the ending. He successfully wove a melodramatic romance into the tragic nonfiction, combining Romeo and Juliet with our collective cultural fascination with disaster. Mine, anyway. I’m one of those who loved Titanic. I saw it three times in the theater and a couple of times on video and insist that it is a masterpiece of good, old-fashioned movie magic. All the more disappointing that there is no real story to Ghosts of the Abyss. No narrative push. The closest thing we get to suspense is the loss and subsequent rescue of one of the mission’s miniature camera robots. There were two picture-taking ‘bots on the trip, dubbed Jake and Elwood (after the Blues Brothers!), and these little floating toasters are the heroes of Ghosts of the Abyss. Elwood gets lost and his battery runs down. So Cameron and Co. devise a system by which they can use Jake to latch onto Elwood with a special hook and hopefully tow him (it) back to safety for repair. It’s a close call, but — they save him! Whew!

As for the 3-D, I can report that Ghosts of the Abyss is neat-o in that department. The glasses were gray instead of the archetypal red-and-blue combo, and they provided me with less of a headache than when I saw, say, Jaws 3-D 20 years ago. Instead of things merely popping out at you, the 3-D successfully pops you into the film, making you feel like you are on the boats, riding the waves, and actually playing volleyball with the crew of explorers. However, like the rest of this underlong 59-minute ramble, there is no big finish to the 3-D. No grand finale. The effect just kind of stops. So while it’s cool and all, it really doesn’t go anywhere and there doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason to have done this in 3-D at all, since the footage itself is sufficiently impressive. (Frankly, my subsequent visit to that pretty, retro Cordova McDonald’s provided a more eye-popping experience: the curly-haired boy at the pay window said, smiling, “Thank you very much for coming to McDonald’s. Please come again.” In my three years in Memphis, I have not experienced this brand of McDonaldian friendliness, and I soon forgot all about Bill Paxton’s 3-D head floating too close to my lap.)

Ghosts of the Abyss is a somewhat confused documentary that teeters between the clinically academic and the narrative grandeur of one of the last century’s great stories, and it never quite figures out how to marry the two or choose one. As much of a showman Cameron is, I had hoped for some kind of aesthetic payoff or reason to do this project beyond cool wreck footage (though, in truth, Titanic is disintegrating and will be gone in a matter of decades). A flimsy attempt is made here by dramatically re-creating moments in and on the ship, visually juxtaposed against the decay of the ship’s current state. Some of this is haunting, as we hear music from the voyage and see optimistic people unsuspectingly enjoying their trip, all the while superimposed against the rusted, decrepit ruins of the most glorious ship ever built. I guess this is done to make sense of the inclusion of the word “ghosts” in the title, but nothing of this can surpass the raw majesty of the dead ship itself or Cameron’s celebrated other Titanic movie. — Bo List

A sleeper hit in the U.K. last year and a graduate of last year’s Sundance film festival, Bend It Like Beckham is poised to be this year’s designated feel-good underdog hit, a girls-soccer movie guerrilla-marketed to the target audience (judging from the little Sporty Spices and their soccer moms and dads at a recent local preview screening) in order to prime a larger box-office offensive in a strategy similar to that mother of all feel-good underdog hits, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

For those who don’t follow what the rest of the world calls football, the Beckham of the film’s title is David, the world’s biggest soccer star, the Michael Jordan of the U.K. He’s also the face that peers down from a bevy of posters on the bedroom wall of teenage suburban Londoner Jesminder “Jess” Bhamra (Parminder Nagra) in this perhaps too-gentle take on intra-family culture clash and generational tension.

Jess is the youngest daughter of a traditional Sikh family, busy preparing for the wedding of its eldest daughter (a “love match,” Jess explains to soccer teammates who assume all Hindi marriages are arranged). With one daughter following the proper path, Jess’ parents turn their attention to her misdeeds, like playing soccer in the park with neighborhood boys (which equates to “showing your bare legs to strangers,” according to Jess’ mother) instead of focusing on finding a nice Indian boy to marry and learning to prepare a full Indian meal. “Anyone can do aloo gobi, but who can bend a ball like Beckham?” Jess asks. And thus we have our driving conflict.

The pitch-meeting shorthand here is Love & Basketball meets My Big Fat Greek Wedding amid a now-standard Indian-family culture clash, and in this case the shorthand about covers everything. The culture-clash part has been done to death recently, and much better, in films such as Monsoon Wedding and East Is East, or even the excellent My Son the Fanatic, which reverses the generational dynamic. Instead, the depth of family turmoil and ethnic humor in Bend It Like Beckham is about as shallow as in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, though less pandering and, consequently, with considerably more surface charm. Monsoon Wedding is melodrama worthy of Douglas Sirk by comparison. Thank Nagra, an appealing young actress who is believable as both tomboy and love interest, and who brings an earthy charm and dry humor to the role, for carrying the film through its rough patches.

Visually, Bend It Like Beckham, directed by Gurinder Chadha, is competent but a little on the dull side. The only time the sitcom-style camerawork changes is out on the soccer field, but even then we get the standard pop-song-montage scenes, and without the jazzy rhythmic editing that made the equally formulaic girls-just-wanna-have-fun surfing flick Blue Crush a not-so-guilty pleasure. In fact, not only is there no real kinetic energy to the soccer scenes, there’s also little of the in-game context that one would expect from any sports-themed movie. If you aren’t a soccer fan heading into the film, you aren’t likely to be won over. And if you don’t know what it means to “bend it like Beckham,” you won’t know by the end of the movie, either, though I suppose that part is easy enough to figure out and assumed knowledge for the English crowd the film is made for.

But, for all of Bend It Like Beckham‘s flaws, it goes down easy. Though one wishes it were less dull and less predictable, the film manages to combine a gentleness of spirit with a lack of saccharinity that is pretty rare in mainstream movies these days.

— Chris Herrington

In A Man Apart, we have Vin Diesel as Sean Vetter — ultracool undercover agent for the DEA. He has a pretty wife, Stacy (Jacqueline Obradors), who functions in the film only to get shot and die — but not before several candlelit montages showing how IN LOVE she and Sean are. (Yawn.)

Anyway, after jailing a high-profile drug kingpin Meno, thugs are sent to Sean’s unlocked (?) beachfront home and shoot the sleeping couple. Sean takes them all out but not before being shot himself and not before his beloved Stacy is mortally wounded. Sean passes out before she dies and wakes up from a coma much later in a hospital — to be told only then of her death. It is impossible to know how long he has been in a coma, because while his facial hair is longer, someone in the hospital was kind enough to keep Diesel’s trademark pate buzzed.

Sean then becomes a Bad Cop and roughs up some people on his quest to find Stacy’s murderer. His partner Demetrius (Larenz Tate) is reluctantly along for the ride and frowningly assists Sean’s law-bending, like when he shoots the body of a man Sean has already beaten to death and then tosses the gun at the body of one of the bad guys to cover up the cause of death. What are friends for?

Sean learns that the person responsible for all the drugs and murders is a man named Diablo, which leads Sean to hijack a plane (don’t worry, it’s a bad plane) to Mexico, where he is thrust into the center of Diablo’s machinations and no-goodedness.

Diesel is a fascinating movie star. Named after a kind of gas, he is clearly the heir apparent to the brain-dead shoot-’em-up actioners of the 1980s: Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Willis. Sly and Ah-nuld are both in their 50s and haven’t learned how to age as Hollywood hulksters. Bruce is pushing 50 but at least has learned to act and choose worthier projects. (Though look out: Die Hard 4 is on the way.) Diesel reminds me of a favorite Schwarzenegger quote: “I am to acting what Raymond Burr is to pole-vaulting.” That’s Diesel. He is instructed, apparently, to do little more than act cool and grieve at the same time. The only real acting in the film comes from Timothy Olyphant as a fascinatingly flamboyant drug lord/salon entrepreneur named Hollywood Jack, and from a drug-sniffing Chihuahua — though now I have spoiled the film’s only two fun surprises. My sister Lucia, instant-messaging me as I started to write this review, implored me: “Say something nice about Vin Diesel in your review.” I asked, “Why?” She replied, “Because he’s my boyfriend.” Me: “May I say THAT in the review?” Her: “No. Well, okay.” This is for you, Lucia:

Diesel, while running the emotional gamut only from A to B, succeeds at diverting one from the shooting and violence of real life. After all, the plot really makes no sense beyond “Sean gets even for the murder of his wife.” He doesn’t act like a cop, and he and his partner do foolish things — as when Demetrius climbs into an attic, unarmed, to talk a crazy, gun-wielding, frightened junkie into helping them out. Earlier, when Sean calls 911 to come and save him and Stacy, he doesn’t answer when they ask what the emergency is. He wastes precious seconds staring at Stacy as she dies beautifully. But he doesn’t know she’s dying, so shouldn’t he finish the call? The ending, as well, defies all movie logic about action climaxes.

I could have seen Phone Booth instead. But all I would have done with Phone Booth is fantasize about being stuck in the booth with Colin Farrell, which I did anyway during A Man Apart. So I guess I got my money’s worth. — BL

Letters To The Editor Opinion

Postscript

Post author By Flyer Readers
Post date April 18, 2003

Fly On the Map

To the Editor:

The “Fly On the Wall” (April 10th issue) comment regarding the father of Lisa Marie Presley was tasteless and uncalled for. The poor boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, who became the great Elvis Presley made mistakes like any human being, and he isn’t here to defend himself. Elvis chose to live in Memphis, and because of him thousands of people come to this city every year to celebrate his all-too-short life. And they spend a lot of money here. How about some respect and loyalty for this great entertainer and humanitarian? Elvis put Memphis on the map!

June Robertson

Memphis

The Right to be Biased

To the Editor:

Bruce Selcraig’s sports column “Shooting for Peace” (April 3rd issue) is as biased as the writer he was criticizing (Skip Bayless), but they both have that right. It’s a right given to them in blood by my brothers in arms. I am a Southern white boy who marched with Dr. King, boycotted with Cesar Chavez, marched for women’s rights, marched for Poland’s solidarity, and would go to war and die for either of the writers in question.

Steve Nash has the right, even as a visitor, to speak his mind. And I have a right to disagree and boycott him and you.

William E. Scott Sr.

Memphis

Bush-whacking

To the Editor:

The hubris of the Bush administration is extraordinary. Their seeming sense of entitlement to order the affairs of the world and promote an American empire is similar to the expansionist dreams of the old Roman empire. Using the military as his own personal “storm troopers” with the acquiescence of a Congress afraid of public backlash and abrogating its duties under the Constitution to stand firm as the sole dispensers of “war powers,” this president has seized upon a popular uprising of self-righteous cookie-cutter moralists to reorder the world in his image.

By disposing of dictators who have the means to develop weapons of mass destruction but not necessarily the will to use them, they unknowingly promote the visions of their own potential dictator instead of upholding the requirements set forth in the Constitution. This president, who is bound by law to uphold the law, routinely violates it at his whim by ordering assassinations of suspected terrorists, holding American citizens in prison without benefit of legal council, and promoting a systematic downgrading of laws protecting Americans from illegal searches and seizures. How long will it be before the Bush supporters put a crown on his head and then turn around and brand his critics as enemies of the state?

Bush has crossed the Rubicon of world opinion. Will the world praise him or bury him? I could be wrong (wouldn’t be the first time), but I believe he will wind up in the omelet shop along with his egghead advisers, Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney, and all their ditto-head groupies.

I am not a liberal; I hate liberalism. I am a patriotic troop-supporting American citizen and native Texan, like George Bush (although he was only raised there). I am also a conservative, evangelical Christian, born-again by faith in the substitutionary death, burial, and resurrection of my savior and Lord, Jesus Christ. But as you can see, my brain has not been put in neutral or programmed by a bunch of right-wing fundamentalist spoon-fed Republican fanatics.We’re out here (conservatives against Bush policy), but so far our voices have been ignored.

Joe Spitzer

Memphis

To the Editor:

Quite a few human beings are dead now (hundreds, perhaps thousands), rotting in the ground, because our appointed president would not wait for the Hans Blix team of inspectors to continue their search for “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq.

Bush, in his very best imitation of John Wayne (“48 hours for Saddam to get out of town”), decided that the Iraqi invasion required a hurry-up process like the Florida vote count did. We now know how democratic factions in Germany felt when Hitler told the world opinion to screw itself and then ordered the Wehrmacht to invade European nations one by one to exterminate “evildoers.”

One bright note on the American economy: The body-bag business is booming and this invasion will give our weapons-of-war industry a real boost.

One question, please. I know that our leader’s followers tear to shreds anyone who dares question anything he says or does. Un-American! Unpatriotic! Because I served in the Naval Air Corps during World War II, will that help mitigate charges against me? Or will John Ashcroft’s secret police still come take me away?

Bob Honore

Germantown

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.

Politics Politics Beat Blog

Where’s the Beef?

Post author By Jackson Baker
Post date April 18, 2003

A propos that old adage about politics being a sausage factory: The Shelby County Democrats’ biennial convention last Saturday at Hamilton High School may have been a messy and shocking spectacle, but it was at times spicy and even delectable. And lots of fun. The only problem was that the process ended with no sausage.

Which is to say, no chairperson. Current chair Gale Jones Carson and her challenger, state Representative Kathryn Bowers, both ended up with 20 votes apiece — thanks to a sudden illness that forced a presumed Bowers delegate, Marianne Wolf of Cordova, to go home early. When various remedies for the standoff — including a proposed revote and an attempt to invoke a tie-break via Roberts’ Rules of Order — failed to come off, both contestants (and their backers) finally agreed to an adjournment and a runoff vote at a special meeting of the newly elected executive committee to be called later on.

Some of the contests that produced the 41 elected committee members in conclaves (based on state House of Representatives districts) held throughout the Hamilton auditorium were close in their own right –and self-sufficiently dramatic. For example, in District 85, one of several to experience a tie vote requiring several ballotings, a shoving match erupted at one point involving radio talk-show host Thaddeus Matthews, a Bowers supporter, and Carson supporter Jerry Hall. In the end, the majority vote went for Carson.

There were accusations and controversies aplenty in other district conclaves. A Carson supporter in District 87 (Bowers’ home district) was city council member TaJuan Stout-Mitchell, whose credentials were challenged by Bowers booster James Robinson on grounds that Mitchell had not participated in last month’s preliminary pre-convention caucuses. Mitchell denied the allegation.

As Carson wanly noted toward the end of the proceedings, the old Arab proverb that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” was very much in play. There were all manner of unnatural alliances and combinations to be seen — starting with the fact that longtime antagonists David Upton and Del Gill, both Bowers advocates on Saturday, were on the same side. And, though most known partisans of 9th District U.S. Representative Harold Ford Jr. were deployed on Bowers’ behalf, at least one, field rep Clay Perry, was on hand to give apparent lip service to Ford’s public statement on behalf of Carson.

That statement, made last month as some of Ford’s cadres apparently invoked his name on Bowers’ behalf, seemed clearly pro forma and the result of what some of his supporters saw as a panic reaction. A Bowers backer on Saturday remarked bitterly that the congressman had “left us high and dry” after earlier promises of support.

Late in the game, Carson supporters were insisting that Roberts’ Rules mandated a tie-breaking vote by the chairperson or — since Carson, in the apparent interests of propriety, declined to do those honors herself — the first vice chair, who happened to be one of her supporters, freelance journalist Bill Larsha. The crucial argument was supplied by lawyer David Cocke, a Bowers proponent, who somehow prevailed on a hastily assembled jury of fellow barristers to accept his interpretation that parliamentary rules exempted election of a chairperson from that sort of tie-break.

Cocke, a newly elected committee member and voter himself, was under clock pressure to get something done fast, inasmuch as he was due to attend the funeral of his mother-in-law Saturday afternoon. “We kept them from knowing that,” gloated Upton, who with another Bowers ringleader, John Freeman, had been involved in another time-sensitive mission, pleading on the telephone to the ailing Wolff for her return.

Wolff, who was suffering from nausea (presumably for reasons other than the raucous events at the convention), had been carried home early by her Cordova neighbor, Nancy Kuhn, a Carson supporter whom Wolff had beat out for a District 99 committee slot. To compound the irony, it was Kuhn who dutifully drove Wolff back to the auditorium after Wolff finally said yes to her insistent implorers. By then, the convention had adjourned, however.

“That was insensitive,” Carson said scornfully about the prolonged effort to persuade an ailing delegate to return.

Insensitive or not, the Wolff mission was as nothing compared to the arm-twisting and cajoling and threatening and subtle — and not-so-subtle — bribery that will go on (as all of it had during the run-up to Saturday’s convention) in the days remaining before the newly constituted committee is reconvened to break the tie.

Whatever the final result, the course of civilization at large will not be much altered. Clearly, a Bowers victory would gratify those Democrats critical of Carson or of Memphis mayor Willie Herenton, whom she serves as press secretary, or of Carson/Herenton ally Sidney Chism, blamed by Bowers and other legislators for recruiting election opponents for them last year. (Herenton, who showed the flag on Carson’s behalf at last month’s caucuses, was not on hand Saturday, though many members of his inner circle, including city finance director Joseph Lee, were.) White Democrats on the new committee seem mostly to be Bowers backers, testament to one of the convention’s subtexts, invoked subtly by Bowers in earlier remarks from the stage calling for more “inclusion.”

Just as clearly, many Democrats faithful to Carson’s cause (and the mayor’s) were among those who have traditionally been alienated from what they have seen as the party’s establishment — an ill-defined aggregate including partisans of the party’s Farris and Ford clans and, these days, members of the county’s legislative delegation.

In any case, the Democrats will take one more crack at creating a sausage when they meet again, though it is doubtful that the next attempt will have quite the sizzle and spectacle of Saturday’s convention.

Opinion Viewpoint

Info Underload

Post author By Ruth Ogles
Post date April 18, 2003

The folks at Microsoft aren’t going to tell you. Neither are the guys at Dell.

But the truth is, computers in the classroom haven’t had much of an effect on student achievement.

Zealous advocates of computers in the classroom cloak their ideas in a number of assumptions, all designed to make us tremble at the prospect that “technology” might disappear from our classrooms:

1) Computer skills are essential to functioning in a high-tech society.

2) There is a “digital divide” that keeps poor children impoverished if they do not have access to technology over the span of their school career.

3) Computers “facilitate” learning in a way that causes students to be engaged in their education.

It is true that some computer skills are necessary in almost any job. Even counter help at fast-food restaurants are expected to interface with computer programs. But beyond basic job-related skills associated with computer use, what is there to this “functioning in an information age” thesis?

Not much, if you list the mostly peripheral uses of computers for those of us who are not subscribers to Wired magazine: e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet, database, and the Internet.

That’s about it, really. Unless you’re a network administrator or a programmer or a member of some other profession whose existence revolves around technology, these five functions form a very short list of essential skills. How long did it take you to learn how to use e-mail, type a document, create a spreadsheet, form a database, or surf the Internet? A few minutes, hours, even days?

When I did my student teaching four years ago in two city schools whose students mostly qualified for free lunch (a major indicator of poverty), I had not one student who did not know how to download information from the Internet, including “research” that they copied and pasted into papers they wished me to accept as their own work.

They could not, however, pick out key facts in the paragraphs they submitted. They were intimately familiar with simulation games like “The Oregon Trail,” but when asked to transfer this technology experience to a study of the real pioneers who traveled westward, they were unable to make the connection that there were real provisions that spoiled, that real wagons became disabled, and that there were no convenience stores or wagon repair shops to solve these problems.

In other words, they spent years playing a game that was designed to simulate “real” life, yet they had not even a clue what this game represented in terms of the struggle real humans engaged in to colonize the Western reaches of this country.

Digital divide? No, my friends. What we have is a literacy and knowledge divide. And computers, at least as they are currently being used, can’t fix that, no matter what the technology titans tell you.

If computers can’t solve the problem of poor student preparation, what can? The three constants in any educational program are teachers who are allowed to teach, parents who support the aims of education, and kids who are motivated to learn. These are the only real and lasting solutions to low achievement.

It is not testing that should be faulted or a lack of technology but rather our desire for a quick fix that does not involve human struggle. Testing a child to determine if he can read or identify a place on the map or compute a math problem is neither unfair nor unrealistic.

What is unfair and unrealistic is to expect teachers to do more every year with fewer resources and for less compensation — and to expect almost no sacrifice on the part of parents and students who believe that 13 years in a classroom will magically and painlessly confer upon them a quality education that is “fun.”

Ruth Ogles has been a substitute teacher in the Memphis city schools since 1998; she ran for the city school board in 2000.

Politics Politics Beat Blog

POLITICS

Post author By Ed Weathers
Post date April 17, 2003

MARSHA SAYS SHE’S READY FOR A CHALLENGE

If there ever was a government official who was entitled to hold court, it was 7th District U.S. Representative Marsha Blackburn on Tax Day, April 15, 2003. And the freshman congressman and seasoned anti-tax battler did it in the right venue — with an open house in her branch office on Stage Hills Boulevard in eastern Shelby County — the other end of the district from her own Brentwood residence but the home of her once and maybe future opponent, Memphis lawyer David Kustoff.

“I’m just going to continue to try to be the best congressman I can,” said Republican Blackburn about the potential 2004 challenge which Kustoff acknowledges he is considering. News of Kustoff’s intentions — first reported in these spaces last month — reached her almost instantly. “I wasn’t surprised,” she said — something of an understatement since she and her staff people had been on orange alert for news of a Kustoff bid for several months.

The premise of a Kustoff run is that Shelby County is — and will remain — the largest voter base in the sprawling 7th, which runs from Memphis to Nashville, and that, had not Kustoff been saddled with two major local opponents — Memphis city councilman Brent Taylor and state Senator Mark Norris — in the GOP’s 2002 primary, he might have had good one-on-one chances against Blackburn.

“I’ve had a lot of encouragement to run,” Kustoff has said, and likely he has — though it is still hard to estimate his chances against an incumbent who has worked Shelby County as often and as hard as Blackburn has (last year she finished a strong third in the county, to Kustoff and Norris) and who hit the ground running in Washington, where she serves as an assistant Republican whip and won another plum as vice chairman of the Government Operations subcommittee on government efficiency.

The latter post gives Blackburn a chance to work out on her pet scenario of government as Big Bumbler. And she hasn’t laid aside the tax issue that boosted her fame (or notoriety) in Tennessee — where as a state senator she became one of the focal points of opposition to a state income tax.

Just now she is pushing legislation to allow taxpayers in Tennessee — along with those in other states that have a sales tax but no income tax — to deduct their sales tax expenditures on their federal income-tax filings. Whipping out her Blackberry, on which she has her research information recorded, she ran through a chronology which began, as she outlined it, in 1913 with the imposition of a U.S. income tax and continued through 1986 when state sales-taxes became the last of of a variety of local and state taxes which had progressively been eliminated as a basis for deductions.

“It was social engineering pure and simple,” Blackburn maintained in all seriousness , “ a way of forcing the states to shift from sales taxes to income taxes. I promised [state Lt. Gov.] John Wilder I would try to restore the sales-tax deduction when I got to Congress.”

Did that mean she makes floor speeches using the vintage Wilder line “Uncle Sam taxes taxes”? Blackburn laughed. “No, and I haven’t said, ‘The cosmos is good,’ along with everything else.” That, of course, is an allusion to Wilder’s liberal use of the adjective “good” to describe virtually everything (notably and primarily, the state Senate itself).

And Blackburn is the last person you would accuse of being liberal about anything — except maybe in her consumption of the breakfast bars and nutrition supplements she says she substitutes for most regular meals..

In particular: “I can’t use sugar. It gives me headaches.” If last year’s election season was any indication, Blackburn knows how to exude sweetness on the campaign trail (she was one of the few contestants who eschewed mudslinging as such), but she clearly knows how to give headaches to the opposition, too — even someone as shrewd as Kustoff, who ably directed George W. Bush’s crucial electoral win in Tennessee but has since seen Blackburn cop her own share of Republican mainstream action.

If the race comes off, it’s one to look forward to in 2004.