Month: May 2003

THE WEATHERS REPORT

Post author By Ed Weathers
Post date May 17, 2003

BAD MEDICINE

The following is a real letter I wrote a few months ago to my family doc—-no, wait, my “primary care physician.”–E.W.

Dear Dr. B—:

Two days ago, on Tuesday, February 4, after waiting in your office waiting room for one and a half hours to see you, I demanded my copayment back and walked out, angry, disgusted and disappointed–not to mention undiagnosed and still physically uncomfortable. What has the medical system done to you? What has it done to the way you provide (or fail to provide) service? How will you reclaim the respect of your patients and your full usefulness as a physician in a system designed to turn you into little more than a turnstile for patients?

When I first met you several years ago, in your previous office, I came away singing your praises. Your office then was pleasant, intimate, and caring. You never had more than two patients waiting in your outer office at a time. We patients often spent our waiting time talking about what a good doctor you were and what a wonderful office you had. I never had to wait more than two days for an appointment–less, if I was seriously sick. Your nurses, out in the open with the patients, with nothing but a counter between us, were friendly, chatty, caring and considerate. You yourself provided the best care of any doctor I had seen since coming to this part of the country 11 years ago. The first time I saw you, you spent 40 minutes learning about my history, my personal life and my habits. Occasionally, you were late for appointments. When that happened, your nurses let us know that you had been delayed in emergency surgery, or that you had agreed to see a seriously ill patient at the last minute. I told my friends I had the best doctor in the state.

Now let me tell you about my most recent experience dealing with your new office:

On January 21 (I believe it was), I called your office for an appointment. I had a mild skin condition on my arms, and I was having trouble sleeping because of the itching–not a serious ailment, but annoying, unsightly and a bit worrisome. The woman in your office who answered my call cared about none of this. Brusquely, she asked, “What’s your name? What insurance do you have?” She actually seemed annoyed when I said I wanted to see you specifically instead of any other doctor in your new multi-doctor practice. “Our first appointment is February 4,” she said. That was two weeks away. I asked if there wasn’t something sooner? “February fourth,” she repeated, impatiently. I took the appointment.

Meanwhile, still having trouble sleeping, I decided that self-diagnosis was my best option. So I went on the Internet, checked the dermatology sites, found a (thankfully benign) condition that seemed to match my symptoms, and started treating myself. What was my alternative?

By February 4, my symptoms had started to abate somewhat, but I wanted to keep my appointment, hoping to get my annual checkup and a confirming diagnosis of my skin condition all at once.

I arrived for my noon appointment five minutes early. The waiting room was half full. Here in your new office, the nursing and clerical staff were isolated from us patients behind glass windows–a decidedly coldblooded layout. Talking to the receptionist was like dealing with a pawnbroker behind bulletproof (in this case, I suppose, germ-proof) glass.

When I signed in, neither the receptionist nor anyone else asked me how I was feeling, what was wrong, or why I needed to see the doctor. Instead, I was told to fill out forms. I did that. Then I waited. And waited. And waited.

Remember, I had arrived at 11:55. Well, 12:30 came and went. Then 12:45, then one o’clock. The waiting room by then was full. Pretty soon there was no place left to hang a coat, and patients were jockeying for seats. Occasionally a pleasant nurse would pass through on her lunch break, making a joke about leaving when there was such a crowd. (The nurses seemed to want to treat patients as human beings instead of disease-carriers.) One-fifteen came and went. Several old and clearly sick patients, haggard and feverish, had been waiting almost as long as me. One-thirty came and went. I’d been kept waiting an hour and a half, with no apologies and no explanation, and I had had enough. So I complained to the receptionist on the other side of the glass, got my $20 co-payment back and walked out. The receptionist didn’t seem to care in the least that I was leaving. She simply wrote the words “walk-out” next to my name on the appointment sheet. Apparently “walk-outs” have become common in your office.

At no point during all this did anyone behind those glass windows ever emerge to explain why we had been kept waiting so long. At no point did anyone even seem to acknowledge that we had been waiting so long. The wait was bad enough. Your office’s failure to explain and apologize for that wait was worse: it was stunningly inconsiderate.

There were people sicker than me in that waiting room. I decided it was wrong to make them wait any longer than they had to. At least I could get out of their way. Besides, I have a life to live. I wasn’t going to waste it waiting fruitlessly in the dark, even to see a doctor.

So I left.

In some ways, this must be the ideal situation for the HMOs and insurance companies: the patient keeps sending in his monthly payments, but the company rarely has to provide any medical service, because getting service is such torture that the patient suffers in silence and stasis rather than trying to get help.

I still think you are a terrific doctor. You told a friend of mine that you had to join a multi-doctor practice because your small one-man, two-nurse office couldn’t keep up with the insurance forms. I understand that. I understand some of the pressures doctors today are under from Medicare, HMOs and the rest of the health care system. You have too much paperwork. You have too many patients you’re expected to “process.” Your malpractice insurance is too high. I can guess how much a letter like this must pain you.

But something must be done. And some things are easy to do:

Teach your phone receptionist to be polite and to show some care that the person calling for an appointment is sick.

Get rid of the glass partition between the nurses/clerics station and the patients’ waiting room. At least pretend that you’re in the business, not of making money, but of getting people healthy again and that your employees are sympathetic to the sick. If you can’t take down the glass wall, then place a desk in the waiting room with a person out in the open whose job it is to act as concierge or ombudsman to help the patients and answer their concerns.

Every fifteen minutes that an appointment is delayed, give the waiting patients an apology and an explanation.

If you, as the doctor, know you’ll be very late for an appointment, call the patient before he leaves home, so he can reschedule or come later that day.

By my calculations, you wasted at least 30 man-hours of people’s time just in the hour and a half I was waiting in your office. I’m sure patients are sometimes late and waste your time, but even if every patient missed every appointment on a given day, they’d have wasted no more than 10 of your personal man-hours. What I saw on February 4 was unforgivable inefficiency in the human economy. As for the monetary economy, I charge $50 an hour, minimum, for my time. Again by my calculations, your office owes me $125 for 2 1/2 hours of fruitless travel time and useless waiting.

But the money isn’t the point at all. The point is that you are a good doctor–and a good man–and you have been forced into the position of shortchanging your patients, if not ignoring them altogether. This is not quite a tragedy, but it is a real disappointment–and very bad medicine.

Sincerely,

Ed Weathers (former patient)

Endnote: Three months later, Doctor B—– still has not responded to my letter. My ailment went away on its own.

News The Fly-By

OF BATHROOMS AND BARBECUE…

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date May 17, 2003

Cabbages and kings. Well bathrooms and barbecue, anyway. It would appear that Charmin bathroom tissue is a proud sponsor of Memphis in May’s famed Pig-a-palooza. We mean, of course, the barbecue fest. Charmin has announced that it will be bringing the “Potty Palooza,” an 18 wheeler that transforms itself into 27 fully functional, “home-like” bathrooms, to Tom Lee Park this weekend. Charmin claims that Potty Palooza provides “thrones fit for a king” andpromises those lucky individuals who elect to use the rolling attraction for all their bowel-moving needs (what else?) a “Royal Flush.” According to Charmin, over 52,000 sheets of T.P. will be used by festivalgoers, which seems modest given the size of the booties this event attracts. And all of the baked beans, of course.

We Recommend We Recommend

Grounded

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date May 16, 2003

Ondine Geary, the organizing force behind the modern dance collective Breeding Ground, sits perfectly erect and cross-legged on the floor of the group’s rehearsal space in First Congregational Church on South Cooper. She is calm and soft-spoken. The space she has defined so perfectly is relaxed and compact. The dancers gathered around her are not nearly so neat — sprawling, stretching, and bending with a quiet seriousness.

“I’ve worked in restaurants all my life,” Geary says meditatively. “And whenever I told people in the restaurant I was also a dancer, they always assumed I was a stripper.” The comment elicits a bemused groan from the other dancers, and they begin to stretch their eyebrows as rigorously as their hamstrings.

“I’d love to get to the day when that’s not the case,” Geary says. “But there are a lot of people that don’t know anything about dance or about the achievements of [Memphis groups like] Ballet Memphis, or Project: Motion, or Metal Velvet, or ” With assistance from the other dancers, she ticks off a list of influential modern groups that have performed in Memphis over the past decade. Breeding Ground is Geary’s attempt to carry on the tradition while raising the profile of modern dance in Memphis at a grassroots level. It is her attempt to bring some fresh air to what she believes is an insulated dance culture and to share the experience of dance with anyone who has an interest in learning and well, nothing else really. An interest in learning is all that is required.

“Breeding Ground doesn’t think of itself as another dance company,” Geary says, “but as an organization to support dance. So it’s not another faction, and hopefully, we can help blend those lines between Project: Motion and the Memphis Dance Group, the University of Memphis and Ballet Memphis.” Putting her money where her mouth is, she adds, “Breeding Ground offers classes for free. Well, or for donations.”

Though the group has been performing from time to time for almost a year, Breaking Ground, a dance concert opening at TheatreWorks this weekend, marks the group’s official debut. The multimedia affair is the result of a dance workshop which began last October. During the course of the workshop Breeding Ground held open-to-the-public rehearsals and invited other dancers and choreographers to comment and promote a dialogue.

“It helps us to really evaluate what we are doing,” Geary says, and the other dancers mumble their agreement. And then she returns to her mantra: accessibility. “Why are we saying these things if nobody understands what we are saying?” she asks. “And is there a way to communicate what we are trying to do more effectively? It was sort of the thing in modern dance, for a while, to be vague and esoteric. To give no sense of meaning. It’s sort of like modern art when everyone was stripping away the need to have meaning so as not to cloud anyone’s perceptions of the art. But I’m interested in taking a step away from that. To reveal what our intentions were so that the process of watching dance is as meaningful as the process of creating it.” So, for the record, Geary is anything but a stripper. If anything, she’s about adding more layers.

“Modern dance has a leg up on all the other art forms,” she says. “I think people think of forms like ballet and opera as sort of the upper-echelon [art]. Modern dance is more pedestrian. It’s movement and emotion and everyday qualities of life. It’s not all fairy tales. It’s not about escaping. It’s getting down to the nitty-gritty. But dance as a whole struggles with ‘How are we communicating what we are communicating?'” To help with the communication problem, Breeding Ground will be using documentary footage of their process, a process that has involved open collaboration with the public, video artists, photographers, and musicians, including a trumpet player named Nahshon Benford,whose sound is reminiscent of a young Miles Davis.

“People understand TV,” says Breeding Ground dancer Natalie Ragland. “So if you put us on video talking about what we are doing, people can understand it. They can get information out of that box, then they can see us doing it in three dimensions.”

Ragland, a veteran Memphis dancer, is encouraged by other aspects of Breeding Ground as well. “I’m so tired seeing dance in Memphis that is all white women about our age,” says the fair-skinned twenty-something. “Finally we have African Americans, we are multigenerational. And that’s inclusiveness. That’s one way [dance] becomes accessible. Because then it’s not all the same.”

“What we don’t want to do,” Geary says, “is to establish a core of dancers or musicians or anything to make something that is impenetrable in any way.”

Breaking Ground, Friday-Sunday, May 16th-18th, at TheatreWorks

Politics Politics Beat Blog

Who’s Aboard?

Post author By Jackson Baker
Post date May 16, 2003

As they say, it ain’t over ’til it’s over, and there’s no guaranteeing that the intra-party squabble among local Democrats is. But there is, as of Monday night, a new chairman of the Shelby County Democrats. It is state Representative Kathryn Bowers, elected by a vote of 21-20 by the 41-member party executive committee in a special meeting at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union hall on Madison.

Monday night’s special meeting had been agreed upon by the party’s two warring factions — one supporting the now-former chairman Gale Jones Carson, the other backing Bowers — after the two rivals for the chairmanship deadlocked 20-20 at the regularly scheduled party convention on April 12th at Hamilton High School.

But the factions had disagreed seriously about an intervening event, a meeting May 1st at which Carson, still holding office, had presided over the election of other officers, most of whom were her own partisans. (She had offered some positions to supporters of Bowers, all of whom declined in a show of factional solidarity.) Carson’s contention was that party bylaws called for such an election following the convention; the Bowers faction countered that it was up to the new committee elected on April 12th to set its own schedule.

In any case, the work of May 1st was undone Monday night with the election of Bowers — whose support came principally from the party’s residual Ford and Farris factions, from her fellow legislators and their allies on the committee, and from the new committee’s white minority. Carson, who serves as Memphis mayor Willie Herenton‘s press secretary, had strong support from the mayor’s wing of the party. (Herenton himself had put in an appearance on Carson’s behalf at the party’s pre-convention March caucus at Hamilton.)

A slate of new officers, composed overwhelmingly of Bowers supporters, was also elected as the election of the Carson-approved slate on May 1st was formally rescinded.

Among the highlights (or lowlights) of the evening:

™ As soon as the vote totals were announced, Carson offered perfunctory congratulations to Bowers then stepped down from her presiding seat on the platform of the IBEW hall. As Bowers began to officiate in her role as newly elected chairman, a Carson delegate moved to adjourn the meeting and was seconded. But then, before a vote could be taken on the motion, most members of the Carson faction — notably including the now-former chairman herself — began to exit the building, thereby abandoning any chance of a favorable vote for adjournment.

™ At one point, Shelby County Commissioner Deidre Malone, an observer and close friend of Carson’s, busied herself trying to finger for the media a committee member — and Bowers supporter — named Renita Scott-Pickens. Pickens, it seemed, was a county jailer who had taken off from work so as to be on hand to cast her vote. Asked about that, Pickens answered mysteriously that she had a “legal action” pending against the sheriff’s department and would “refer questions to my lawyer.”

™ At another point, police officer Robert Gill, one of the diehard Carson remnant who stayed behind to contest various issues (or to “agitate,” as Bowers would term it), raised one of his several objections to a procedure under way, and the new chairman directed her newly appointed parliamentarian, Del Gill, to adjudicate the issue. Unsurprisingly, the parliamentarian ruled decisively against the officer, who happened to be his brother.

™ Committee member Marianne Wolff issued two apologies — one public and one private. To the assembly at large, Wolff said, “I really feel I caused a lot of this by being sick.” Wolff’s illness at the party convention of April 12th had caused her to leave early and prevented her tie-breaking vote on Bowers’ behalf. And to a reporter she attempted to explain away her attempts to misrepresent to the media the spelling of her name and her address this way: “I said I lived in Germantown and I spelled my name with one ‘f’,” said Wolff of Cordova, adding with an exotic ex post facto logic, “I thought you would know better if I put it that way.”

Committee member Janie Orr, nominated at one point for the position of assistant treasurer, declined, saying forthrightly, “I’d be a disaster doing anything with money!” The nominating process had included several such moments over the past several weeks. At the May 1st meeting, when it was the Bowers faction’s time to obfuscate, committee member Darrell Catron, one of the state representative’s supporters, had ducked out of the meeting long enough to pull himself a Diet Coke and returned to hear what he thought was an attempt to nominate him for an office. “I decline!” he shouted, to general amusement, as his name had not in fact been mentioned.

On Monday night, Carson supporter Malcolm Nelson, who had earlier lambasted Bowers backer David Cocke for moving to disapprove the minutes of May 1st (Cocke’s point being to nullify that meeting’s election of the Carson slate), was nominated for an office by a Bowers supporter and was asked if he had anything to say to the committee. He rose and said gravely, “Good evening,” then withdrew. (Later, though, both he and another Carson diehard, Leenard Jennings, seemed uncertain as to whether they should accept such goodwill nominations. Jennings finally allowed himself to be voted on for an at-large post on the party steering committee but went down 13-12 to Jesse Jeff, his fellow Carson supporter.

Considering that one of the bones of contention between the two factions had been Carson’s insistence that party bylaws called for meetings on the first Thursday of each month (hence her decision to schedule the disputed May 1st meeting), it was ironic that Bowers supporter Duane Thompson moved successfully, late in Monday night’s meeting, to schedule the new committee’s regular meetings on — guess what? — the first Thursday of each month.

As the Old Guard yielded to the New, there were some moments of minor pathos. Freelance journalist Bill Larsha, a committee veteran, had been appointed by Carson as parliamentarian to succeed Del Gill at the May 1st meeting. As he took his seat on the dais before Monday night’s meeting, Larsha beamed and showed off the proud possession he had armed himself with. It was a vintage, dog-eared copy of Robert’s Rules of Order, the parliamentarian’s bible, and he pointed to a faded signature on the inner leaf of the volume.

“Look,” Larsha had said excitedly, “this is signed by the last surviving member of the Robert family!” But when Bowers took over, her first act as new chairman was to depose Larsha, whose tenure in office therefore ended up being measured in minutes, and to rename Gill. Larsha looked forlorn as he gathered up his literary treasure and stepped off the officers’ platform.

At the May 1st meeting, ex-Teamster leader Sidney Chism, a close ally of both Carson’s and Herenton’s, had held out the prospect that if Bowers’ people were successful in both electing her and rescinding the Carson slate of other officers elected at that meeting, then the factions might, as the succeeding months wore on, take turns voting each other out of office.

Chism, who is not a committee member, was not on hand Monday night, but another spokesperson for Carson, Norma Lester, one of the former chairman’s slate, joined Bowers in an appeal to set aside such differences in the common interest of defeating Republicans. But Lester’s proposed remedy — the appointment of a five-member special committee composed of two Bowers supporters, two Carson supporters, and a neutral (whoever that might be, under the highly polarized circumstances) to select a slate of new party officers — was rejected, and the election of a Bowers-dominated slate went ahead as planned.

Upon formally taking office, Bowers had given an exhortatory speech in which she promised to establish a local Democratic headquarters, to raise $250,000 for the party’s 2004 general election fund, and to preside over “not one group but a unified party.” Likening the Shelby County Democratic Party that she foresaw to a locomotive, Bowers urged Democrats at large to climb aboard and declaimed, “It’s going to be a moving train!”

That remains to be seen. On Monday night, in any case, the train left the station without its full component aboard.

Flinn Again?

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE GOP: Shelby County Republicans were preparing this week to hitch their train to the city council hopes of George Flinn, the radiologist/broadcast mogul who ran unsuccessfully for county mayor last year.

Flinn, a novice candidate, won the Republican nomination with a well-financed and — said his critics — abrasive media campaign against then-state Representative Larry Scroggs. Resultant party division was one factor in Flinn’s lopsided loss in the general election to Democratic nominee A C Wharton.

“I think he intends to run a different type of campaign this year,” said GOP party chair Kemp Conrad of the bid by Flinn for the District 5 seat being vacated by two-term councilman John Vergos. Conrad was taking no sides in advance of Tuesday night’s vote on potential GOP endorsees by the local Republican steering committee, but he did not dispute reports that Flinn had the inside track.

Conrad pledged upon taking office this year that the party would endorse candidates for selected seats and aggressively promote their candidacies. In the morrow of Monday night’s Democratic meeting, he could not resist this dig at the rival party’s highly public difficulties: “It’s unfortunate that the Democrats seem to be more consumed in power struggles and personal agendas than they are in the lives of Shelby Countians.”

Among other hopefuls so far acknowledged as seeking the District 5 seat are Jim Strickland, Mary Wilder, Jay Gatlin, and John Pellicciotti. Pellicciotti, Gatlin, and Strickland, like Flinn, had preliminary interviews last week with the GOP candidate-recruitment committee, but each had handicaps to overcome in gaining the endorsement of the full Republican committee.

Gatlin’s was that he is a relative unknown; Strickland’s was that he served a term as chairman of the Shelby County Democrats; Pellicciotti’s was, ironically enough, that he ran a tight race against Democratic state Representative Mike Kernell last year and is counted to do so again next year. Several leading Republicans have said they would prefer that Pellicciotti keep his powder dry until then.

Music Music Features

Local Record Roundup

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date May 16, 2003

While most of the attention given to modern Memphis’ blues scene centers on deserving younger acts such as the North Mississippi Allstars, Richard Johnston, and Alvin Youngblood Hart, the best straight blues record to come out of the city in recent years (this is considering Hart’s brilliant, eclectic Start with the Soul something else entirely) may well be the latest from sexagenarian Robert Belfour. Pushin’ My Luck (Fat Possum; Grade: A-), Belfour’s second album for Mississippi-based Fat Possum, is a solid step ahead of his excellent 2000 label debut, What’s Wrong with You, the sound stronger and fuller, the tempos slightly increased, and the hypnotic intensity of Belfour’s gravelly vocals and sharp, droning acoustic guitar unrelenting.

But other than that, the sound is the same, and that’s good. Unlike better-known Fat Possum labelmates R.L. Burnside and T-Model Ford (the latter of whom Belfour is currently touring with), Belfour’s style is more traditional country blues, differing from his electric colleagues in both sound and tone. Belfour’s recordings offer such a strong, sure style and convey such unadorned authenticity that only a hard-core blues fan would be able to separate them (discounting sound quality) from a lot of the classic blues recordings of the ’20s and ’30s.

Belfour is a hill-country native who moved to Memphis as an adult and worked construction before retiring in the mid-’90s, plying his musical trade in area juke joints and on Beale Street (literally) until Fat Possum helped spread his music across the country and overseas. Despite a strong following in some blues circles, particularly in Europe, Belfour remains less celebrated than his Fat Possum cohorts, whose personae are more easily marketable. And that’s too bad because, as Pushin’ My Luck attests, Belfour might be the label’s strongest artist right now.

With production help from Steve Selvidge and with a rhythm section of Ross Rice and Lucero’s John Stubblefield in tow, singer-songwriter Justice Naczycz has crafted a great-sounding debut with Water for the Withered Root (self-released; Grade: B), giving nearly every song a strong, distinct sonic bed rife with instrumental highlights (especially the piano on “The Last Night with Angela”). Naczycz (a onetime co-founder of the popular Memphis Troubadours series) seemingly makes this variety possible due to his fluency in a lot of different styles, some jazzy, some folk, some straight-up rock.

Naczycz’s idiosyncratic singing and songwriting may be more of an individual taste. He’s a strong, impassioned vocalist, if maybe a little too self-involved sometimes (does anyone actually pronounce “bruised” as “bruise-ed”?), and his vocals come across best when the music is active enough to match them, as on the jazzy, Steely Dan-ish “What Happened Here Part 1” or the noisy “What Happened Here Part 2” (which are back-to-back on the record and make for an effectively jarring transition).

As a songwriter, Naczycz eschews conventional verse/chorus/verse forms in favor of sprawling, straight-line, first-person narratives. His lyrics are cryptic, impressionistic, almost stream-of-consciousness (random but representative example: “And on the edge of a bridge to Arkansas/I see the legacy of Noah and the tools of law”), with echoes of violence popping up throughout, from the obvious “She’s Got a Gun” to lines like, “The earth is much too steep/I’m going deep/Into her chest that I can’t keep/I won’t put my knife down” and “several bullets from freedom.”

Gonna Burst (Madeline Records; Grade: B), the debut from Leroy Star, a young band led by brothers Stewart and Jason Thompson, is, at its best (lead cuts “Stuck Inside” and “444”), catchy, tuneful modern rock in the Jimmy Eat World vein. The band is good at this sound — vague pop-punk blending into straight-ahead radio rock — but gets away from it too much on the rest of the record, with lots of slow songs that don’t quite hold as much interest.

One of the nice things about this record is the vocals, which are strong and affecting but that, contrary to the genre norm, don’t strain too much for shows of soul. And the tag-team vocals on “How Far You Fell” are a nice touch.

Though they’re able to get out of first person (“Jimmy,” which provides the album’s title and which seems to be about a marriage falling apart), the persona captured here is a pretty specific one: Gonna Burst inhabits that netherworld between high school and adulthood (see the teen-movie scenarios of “Rock Star” and “Spotlight”), casting its lot with the interesting side of suburban mainstream. (In other words, they write love songs to Sarah Michelle Gellar when their dopier cohorts would clearly go for Jennifer Love Hewitt, and when they watch Star Trek, it’s Spock and Bones they’re rooting for.)

Gonna Burst is the second recent release from new local label Madeline Records, following last year’s underrecognized Dead Horse Lounge, by Dora. These releases definitely make Madeline a local label to watch.

The brand of bar-blues presented on The Eric Hughes Band‘s debut Paycheck Boogie (self-released; Grade: B) sounds pretty antiseptic next to something like Belfour, but taken on its own terms, it goes down pretty well. Beale Street regular Hughes finds himself in good company here, produced by local blues vet Brad Wood and with a first-rate rhythm section (drummer Keith Wayson and bass player/wife Laura Cupit Hughes) that keeps things popping along, giving ample opportunity for Hughes and guitarist Mr. Norm to strut their stuff up top.

All the songs here are Hughes originals, and while “Paycheck Boogie” might seem too obvious, the blues is about generalities we can all relate to, and that’s sure one of them. Hughes proves adept at pretty much everything in the blues spectrum, the standard bar-blues style making room for Bo Diddley rhythms (“Zombie Song”), country-blues stylings (“Come Home Blues,” “Never Said I Was a Saint”), and some slide-guitar-driven house-rocking blues (“Gone to Mississippi”).

Music Record Reviews

Short Cuts

Post author By
Post date May 16, 2003

Summer Sun

Yo La Tengo

(Matador)

Summer Sun may be the most understated album of a not exactly showy career, this nominal guitar band hiding that instrument in a mix of percussion, bass, and synthesizer whose gentle communicativeness mirrors the tone of co-leaders and marrieds-for-life Ira Kaplan’s and Georgia Hubley’s murmured sing-speak vocals. There are no guitar rave-ups here Ö la And Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out‘s “Cherry Chapstick” and no organ attacks like those on Electr-O-Pura or Painful. Even the lone instrumental, the relaxed, funky “Georgia Vs. Yo La Tengo,” fits the record’s dreamy mood.

It’s true that Yo La Tengo gets fantastic press as much for (but, it should be noted, not more for) what they stand for as what they do. Post-punk-bred rock critics love them not just because their jazzy soundscapes are soft, subtle, and warm without ever descending into lounge kitsch; and not just because they write such sharp songs that manage to be sweet without ever being sentimental; and not just because when Kaplan has the mind to he crafts the prettiest guitar skronk anyone’s ever heard, but also for what they signify: “alternative” not as musical genre, marketing plan, cultural fad, or knee-jerk nonconformity, but alternative as viable, enduring life-choice — modest, arty, adventurous, marginal by design. You can live this way, their records seem to attest, and live well and decently.

Not since John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Double Fantasy has any pop music presented such a cozy, alluring vision of lifelong commitment, of love-and-marriage bohemian-style. The difference, of course, is that Double Fantasy is one record, whereas Kaplan and Hubley have made a whole career out of this subject. And the best songs on Summer Sun focus on a particular and relatively unexplored sliver of this topic — the notion of lovers together yet alone. (“Do you need to be alone to unwind?/That’s alright, that’s alright,” Kaplan sings on “Season of the Shark,” “I want to be the one to make you feel okay right now/Someway, somehow.”)

On Hubley’s “Little Eyes,” she’s an insomniac waiting for Ira to wake up, wishing she could share her nighttime thoughts with him. Kaplan’s “Nothing But You and Me” urges Georgia to wake up so they can make up. And on the heart-stopper “Don’t Have To Be So Sad,” Ira puts his bedtime reading down to watch his wife sleep, offering an atheist’s prayer that she knows how much he loves her.

The band’s 1997 I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One remains their apotheosis, the summation of all they know and all that matters about them. But this lifelong musical partnership is as strong as ever, and Summer Sun adds another winning chapter to the story. — Chris Herrington

Grade: A-

Listening Log

Level II — Blackstreet (Dreamworks): The first half is sex-centric R&B as pornographic as early Prince but without his genius musicality or redeeming weirdness. There’s no real kink to these oh-so-clinical booty-call tales, which makes their over-insistent bluntness less erotic than gross. And this makes the “respectable” lovey-dovey moves down the stretch seem crass. If you’re looking for a groove anywhere near as overwhelming as their one fluke classic –“No Diggity” — keep looking. (“Wizzy Wow”)

Grade: D

Do You Swing? —The Fleshtones (Yep Roc): “Legendary” garage-rock party band from the late-’70s/early-’80s who weren’t that great to begin with give it another shot now that this stuff is selling. The energy and attitude is there; the songs aren’t. If clunky vocals and leaden grooves are your kind of party, give it a spin, but this makes a lot of current-generation by-the-numbers genre bands sound like the Beatles. (“Destination Greenpoint,” “Alright”)

Grade: B-

Bright Yellow Bright Orange — The Go-Betweens (Jetset): In which Crowded House-for-bookworms becomes a full-time band again, glory hallelujah. But this isn’t where to start with the Go-Betweens: Try the compilation 1978-1990 or their fantastic 2000 comeback, The Friends of Rachel Worth, where Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss pushed their romantic guitar-pop skyward. Those already in the know will like this perhaps too-modest batch of new Forster-McLennan tunes fine, especially the one where Grant takes a trip to Brazil. (“Caroline & I,” “Something for Myself”)

Grade: B+

Philadelphia Freeway — Freeway (Roc-A-Fella): Jay-Z protÇgÇ has his Rookie of the Year candidacy sidetracked by a couple of all-too-familiar hip-hop hurdles: an overlong album (70-plus minutes) and overly gratuitous guest spots. (“What We Do,” “Line ‘Em Up”)

Grade: B

The Lost Freestyle Files –Supernatural (Babygrande/Koch): The live freestyle battles captured here aren’t as polished as what you’ve seen in 8 Mile but also aren’t scripted. If you want an example of hip-hop reduced to its raw basics, you won’t find much better than the radio-show and concert cuts from this underground hype. Supernatural rhymes like Biggie and rhymes like a fish, but if you ask this judge, he still gets taken by his competition — Juice — on the collection’s 12-minute centerpiece battle, “Get Ready To Rumble.” Oh yeah, and the studio cuts that bookend the live stuff are pretty hot too. (“Internationally Known,” “A Piece of Hip Hop History Pt. 2,” “Clash of the Titans,” “Get Ready to Rumble”) — CH

Grade: A-

Sports Sports Feature

Sound Advice

Post author By
Post date May 16, 2003

In 1993, then (and still largely) unknown Mary Lou Lord released what I still insist is one of the dozen or so best singles of the ’90s with a little 7-inch for Olympia indie Kill Rock Stars. The sweetly verbose originals “Some Jingle Jangle Morning (When I’m Straight)” and “Western Union Desperate” consciously evoked Dylan and the Byrds while the fuzztone guitars and iconoclastic setting cut against whatever precious folkie vibe the songs might have had. It was an absolutely perfect record. A few years later, those songs saw their first CD release with Lord’s major-label debut, Got No Shadow, but in a recorded form that slicked them up for a radio bid that never came. The whole album disrupted the easy intimacy that had previously been Lord’s calling card, making her seem like just another folk-pop hopeful, albeit one with better taste in material than the norm.

Lord’s most recent record, last year’s City Sounds, returns to her intimate roots as a street musician, recorded by Lord herself during solo acoustic performances on the streets of her native Boston. It’s basically a covers record, but it’s a great one due to both Lord’s smart, breathy interpretive singing and positively inspired taste in material, tackling ace songs from the likes of Springsteen, Dylan, Alex Chilton, Stephin Merritt, and Richard Thompson. Lord performs at Young Avenue Deli Saturday, May 17th, with Cory Branan and show organizer Eric Jay Friedman. This is one show that singer-songwriter fans won’t want to miss, and if everybody plays solo-acoustic, I say feel free to shush noisy folks at the bar and at the pool tables. — Chris Herrington

There was supposed to be a Grifters reunion at the Hi-Tone CafÇ on Friday, May 16th, but thanks to Joe Perry (you know, Aerosmith guitar player Joe Perry) that’s just not going to happen. I can honestly say that is not a sentence I ever thought I would type. It seems Perry has his own line of guitars coming out and Memphis’ Porch Ghouls (a band Perry has taken under his wing) are scheduled to play the “How do you like my guitar?” party. And that means Grifter Scott Taylor, aka Porch Ghoul Slim Electro, will be hanging with Perry. That’s good for the Ghouls (who recently played on an unlikely bill opening for Godsmack at the Cajun Dome) but bad news for Grifters fans excited about hearing all their favorite songs again. But there is hope yet. When the gig officially fell through, Grifters co-frontman Dave Shouse booked the date for his current project, The Bloodthirsty Lovers. Local electro-rockers The Pelicans, originally scheduled to open for the Grifters, are still playing, but The Paper Plates, an indie-pop group which includes the Grifters’ innovative bass player Tripp Lampkins, has also been added to the bill. This lineup would be good enough on its own, but word on the street (which could turn out to be completely false, of course) is that Lampkins plans to join the Bloodthirsty Lovers onstage for a few songs. Might those be Grifters songs? One can only hope. Between the Porch Ghouls’ major-label shot, the popularity of the Bloodthirsty Lovers, and the potential shown by the Paper Plates, who knows when we’ll get to hear these songs again? — Chris Davis

Opinion Viewpoint

Careless Times

Post author By Richard Cohen
Post date May 16, 2003

Years ago, I wrote a column using information from The New York Times. The story contained a mistake — a whopper, actually — which I repeated in my column. When the person involved called to complain, I checked with lawyers for The Washington Post, fearing a libel suit. Nothing to worry about, I was told. Such was the reputation of the Times for veracity that both law and custom permitted me to use it without further checking.

Now the Times has egg on its face. In a lengthy Page One article on Sunday, the paper admitted that one of its reporters, Jayson Blair, acted as a one-man wrecking crew to the Times‘ well-earned reputation. He fabricated stories. He plagiarized them. He said he was where he was not. He made countless mistakes of fact — and he was, despite all of this, relentlessly promoted. At the age of 27, he had become a national correspondent for the nation’s newspaper of record.

A close reading of the Times‘ own account of what went wrong suggests that the paper itself does not fully comprehend what happened. The Times should have known it had a liar on its hands and, despite obvious warnings, did little about it.

Several times Blair was reprimanded for his blatant inaccuracies. He was deemed so serious a threat to the paper’s well-earned reputation for accuracy that in April 2002 the Times‘ metropolitan editor Jonathan Landman wrote an e-mail message to newsroom administrators, saying, “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.” Yet not only was Blair not stopped, he was promoted to the national staff and ultimately given more responsibilities. Why?

The answer appears to be precisely what the Times denies: favoritism based on race. Blair is black, and the Times, like other media organizations, is intent on achieving diversity. Sometimes this noble and essential goal comes down to a parody of affirmative action. That seems to be the case with Blair. Supposedly a University of Maryland graduate (actually, he had never graduated), he was “offered a slot in an internship program that was then being used in large part to help the paper diversify the newsroom,” the paper said.

The young reporter did well — he clearly has talent — and also not so well. But the not-so-well part was both serious and ominous — sloppy work habits and erratic behavior. That should have been enough to halt Blair’s career in his tracks. That it didn’t testifies to a newsroom culture, imposed from above, that cherished diversity — not more than accuracy, but so much so that journalistic standards were bent.

The Times‘ senior editors defensively say that wasn’t the case. But the rigorous reporting the paper is noted for is absent here. Assertions that race played no role are made — and then left at that. Both the editor Howell Raines and the publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. are quoted, but neither gives the slightest indication that they are aware of the culture they have imposed on the newsroom. Careful readers of the paper have long discerned such a culture in the news coverage. Now we know it existed in personnel policies as well — what Landman has characterized as top management’s commitment to diversity.

I can only imagine what the Times‘ editorial page would have said if another important institution had conducted a self-investigation into its own misconduct. Senior editors recused themselves from supervising the preparation of the report — but the writers of it still report to them.

A great and invaluable newspaper has been humbled. But its inability to come to grips with what was at the bottom of the Blair affair suggests that it remains blinkered by the very political correctness that has brought about this ignominy. In this case, all the news has not been printed.

Richard Cohen is a columnist for The Washington Post and the Creative Writers Syndicate; his work frequently appears in the Flyer.

News News Feature

TRANSLATION: MEMPHIS: In Praise of Pork Roll

Post author By Jenn Hall
Post date May 16, 2003

IN PRAISE OF PORK ROLL (YOU HEARD ME, PORK ROLL!)

Culinary regionalism is an interesting thing

Here are some of the keywords that define my native food snobbery: Cheese steaks, chicken parmesan subs (insert hoagies, heroes, grinders, poor boys, or whatever phrase you use to reference the sandwich,) PIZZA, Italian restaurants to be found on every corner, Tastykakes, seafood fresh from the sea, and Pork roll, egg, and cheese sandwiches. Ah…

After a weeklong trip back to Jersey (don’t even say it) I find myself being a bit of a jerk about food.

And it’s exit 67. Shut up.

Surely it’s like this for a lot of people, but every time I go home I wonder how I live without some of the foods I mentioned.

Oh, to order a pizza pie for $6 or so, to open the box and find 8 steaming slices waiting to be folded over (that’s how we do it up there) and savored in all of their yummy goodness. The absence of such locally tortures me, and if you know where I can find it, please God, tell me.

To sit in a restaurant overlooking the water and eat a plate of seared scallops–actually, my Dad’s are better, come to think of it. Mango chutney. Freshly squeezed orange. I’m actually drooling on my keyboard right now, if you can imagine.

As creatures bound by our senses in the collection and utilization of the information that frames both memory and personality, I think taste is often overlooked in importance.

Do we find it too functional to grant its due credit as one of the primary factors that defines place? Do we forget that cuisine is inextricably bound to the circumstances of environment?

Let’s try it out. New York is a city housing a large number of Italians. Ah! New York has a plethora of wonderful Italian food.

Then there’s the Jersey shore. OK, then, great seafood. I think it’s unnecessary to explain that correlation.

But while using this thesis as a basis for my fond feelings about Yankee food, or the food of any region for that matter, there is one thing that completely confuses me.

Pork roll.

What, you’re probably saying, is pork roll?

And that’s exactly what I find so perplexing. It’s pork roll, you know?

As Southern Living magazine recently reminded us, Memphis is hailed as the pork barbeque capital of the world.

Pork roll, my friends, is made of pork.

why, oh why, can’t I find it here?

If you’re a vegetarian you’re probably thinking it’s because it’s nasty, immoral or both. But please bear with me.

Pork roll, for those who have no inkling as to its nature, is kind of like Canadian bacon, I guess, but different. It’s also referred to as Taylor, or Jersey ham, and has been around (in Jersey, at least) for over a century.

Essentially, it’s just pork, hickory smoked with some preservatives and spices. Enter my disbelief at not finding it here in Memphis.

Typically this delicacy is served for breakfast, in the form of a pork roll, egg and cheese sandwich on a Kaiser roll. With salt, pepper and catsup. Yum.

If you find yourself perversely fascinated by this tale of a mysterious Jersey pork product, check out www.fnets.com/johnston.htm, and you can see a photo. Oh, and turn on your speakers. The site plays quite the rockin’ musical accompaniment.

I cannot tell you how many of my grade school lunches consisted of pork roll, and how little I appreciated it. How unaware I was of the fact that this branded me a Jersey girl!

Prior to my emigration, I never even suspected that this might be a cuisine (if you would call it that) particular to my home state. Now I miss it, arteries be damned.

In a pathetic attempt to quell this pork yearning that cannot be sated even here in the capital of all things pig, I found myself ordering a pork roll, egg and cheese at the Manahawkin, NJ flea market last week.

It was wonderful.v

Greasy, salty, and delicious. Yum.

So..if by some chance you read this and are a member of a wayward barbeque team from Jersey, en route to Memphis for the Barbeque Festival, all set to make barbequed pork roll sandwiches, and to enlighten our pig-loving brethren in the South as to the beauty of this meat, please put me on your list.

I will love you forever. Really.