Month: May 2003

Charting a New Course

Post author By Mary Cashiola
Post date May 16, 2003

Memphis Academy of Science and Engineering (MASE) founder Tommie Henderson speaks in the clear, controlled tones of someone who really wants you to understand what he’s saying. Obviously comfortable with public speaking, his eye contact never falters and he repeats the points he thinks are the most important.

An East High alum, he came back to teach at the school six years ago because he heard the engineering program — the one that had helped him get into MIT — was floundering. But now he’s starting a charter school.

“When I first got to East,” he says, “it was hard to encourage the students to take tougher courses because they were so used to courses that didn’t demand a lot of them.” Then, a few years back, a group of five young men — all African-American — signed up for an Advanced Placement (AP) course in physics, a course that hadn’t been taught at East for about 10 years. If students score well enough on the AP test after taking the class, they can earn college credit. Only two of the students had taken a physics course before.

“That year,” he says, “we somehow got under the radar. A lot of people didn’t know these students hadn’t taken a physics course before. We weren’t trying to hide that fact. I just didn’t know they had to have taken physics before they took AP physics.”

The students did extra study sessions after school, on weekends, and during school vacations. In the end, all five passed and scored well. That year, there were only 10 African-American students in Tennessee — and only 200 in the U.S. — who passed the AP physics exam. Most of the others in Tennessee were from private schools.

The next year, bolstered by that group’s success, 17 East High students signed up for Henderson’s AP physics class. Fifteen of them had never taken physics before, and this time, the class didn’t get under the radar. Those 15 students weren’t allowed to take the class. The other two couldn’t either, because there weren’t enough students to make up a class.

A similar situation happened again the next year. “When a junior saw that a senior took this class and passed this class and then when [the junior] wanted to take the class and he couldn’t, that basically kills it,” says Henderson. “The sophomores don’t get to see this year’s juniors taking the class and doing the same thing. You basically hold back something that’s been successful.”

Now Henderson is the driving force behind MASE, one of the three charter schools that will be opening their doors in Memphis next fall. Although he loved working at East, he says his desire to do an even better job is what pushed him toward a charter school.

“It becomes a quagmire of bureaucracy to get anything done that you know will have a tremendous impact,” says Henderson. “What attracted me to charter schools was the autonomy from that process.”

For many people, the Memphis City Schools hit rock bottom when it was revealed that Memphis had the most schools on the state-identified list of low-performing schools. Outgoing MCS superintendent Johnnie Watson and the school board each have initiatives to bring up test scores. Watson has also made a plea for the community’s help.

“In every speech that I’ve made since being superintendent, I’ve said that nine members of a board and the superintendent working alone can make very little difference,” he said recently. In many ways, people have listened. Not only is the district’s “Our Children, Our Future” volunteer tutoring program meeting expectations, but next fall, the community will be involved in opening four new schools, all focused on children in danger of falling through the cracks. Former Craigmont principal and state education commissioner Jane Walters — along with the Memphis Grizzlies — will start the Grizzlies Academy, targeting 15- and 16-year-olds who have not passed eighth grade. Additionally, three new charter schools will also open: an elementary school, a middle school, and a high school.

Although charter schools began generating a buzz nationally in the early 1990s, it was not until last summer that the Tennessee legislature made charters an option for the state’s students. Dedrick Briggs, executive director of the Tennessee Charter School Resource Center, says that educators stopped seeing charters as a threat and started seeing them as a viable alternative, maybe even a last resort. “It got to the point where there were not many options for schools on the low-performing lists,” says Briggs. “I think that prompted everyone to say we need to do something and we need to do it now.”

So while most of the district’s students are out for the summer, the leaders behind Memphis’ three charter schools — the Memphis Academy of Health Sciences, Circles of Success Learning Academy, and MASE — will be working feverishly to get their schools off the ground.

“It’s a daunting task,” says Dr. Jerrie Scott, professor of instruction and curriculum leadership at the University of Memphis and a board member of Circles of Success. “There are so many things that we take for granted that schools have done over the years. If you’re starting at the bottom, you have to do it all.” The schools have to think about things as complex as creating a record-keeping system and as simple as making sure there are chalkboards in each classroom.

The charter-school legislation passed last year in July, and applications were due to local school boards in November. MASE was easily approved as Tennessee’s first charter, but both Circles of Success and the Memphis Academy of Health Sciences were denied the first time and had to amend their charters.

Briggs says he thinks all four charter schools that have been approved for next year — three in Memphis and one in Nashville — deserved the go-ahead. “The department of education had the applications out in mid-September and they were due November 15th, so there wasn’t a lot of time,” says Briggs.

Those involved with the Memphis charters were looking for ways to help local students before the legislation was even passed. Derrick Joyce is the founder of the Memphis Academy of Health Sciences, a middle school in North Memphis. Joyce says that he knows people from his church who work two or three minimum-wage jobs to send their children to private school. “Seventy-five percent of the individuals in North Memphis make an annual household income of $6,000-$7,000. They can’t afford to send their children to private schools.”

Why would they feel they had to do that? Because all the middle schools in North Memphis are on the state-identified list. “That’s why we were watching the legislation,” says Joyce. “If all the schools are failing, wouldn’t you want another option for your child?”

“It’s terribly important that the public school system has everything it needs. It’s also terribly important that we step in and shoulder some of the responsibility and are willing to roll up our sleeves and help. That’s what public charters can do,” he says.

The group decided to start a middle school because they feel many students have trouble adjusting from elementary to high school. They’ve decided to continue reading classes through eighth grade (“They need it,” says Joyce) and to have fewer class-changes than a traditional middle school. The plan also includes a longer school day as well as a year-round calendar. “Why give them two to three months off in the summer?” asks Joyce. “They’re not doing anything. They don’t have jobs.”

Another key component for Joyce is a strong black male presence in the school. The school’s sponsor, the 100 Black Men of Memphis organization, currently tutors at Hanley Elementary. Joyce says of the experience: “When we go into schools, students look at us as heroes. They see black men who are wearing suits who aren’t preachers. … What they see is what they’ll be.”

MASE’s Henderson also began contemplating a charter school before the legislation was passed at the state level. At East, Henderson had developed a widely acclaimed and often implemented and copied four-year engineering program. “I knew there was a possibility of charter schools becoming available in Tennessee in the future, so I was putting together an educational program in my mind,” he says. He was teaching a summer session at Phillips Exeter Academy when he heard the news. By the time he got back to town in the fall, he had developed an entire program. But there was a snag.

“I was really excited that I could be part of starting a charter school. I did my research and I found out that to actually start a charter you have to [be a nonprofit organization]. Well, this is August and to start a [nonprofit] takes six months, so I was looking at the fact that, okay, it looks like I’m not going to start a charter school.”

Luckily, he got hooked up with the Memphis Biotech Foundation. The foundation wanted to start a school but had not developed a curriculum. Then they heard about Henderson.

“They were talking about biotechnology and we’re talking about creating a school based on science, engineering, mathematics, and technology,” says Henderson. “It just meshed very well together. It was a perfect marriage.”

The third charter school is Circles of Success, an elementary school aimed at catching students it says are “at risk of failing in a traditional setting.” Last January the group received a grant from the Hyde Family Foundation to research the problem. They visited two charter schools in Detroit, one a for-profit school run by “edupreneur” and charter conglomerate Edison, the other a grassroots community effort.

The charter schools pose an interesting contrast. The city schools have instituted a districtwide curriculum in hopes of solving their problems. In his vision for one consolidated school system, city mayor Willie Herenton has also sopken highly of a systemwide curriculum. The charter schools are taking a completely different tack.

Through its research, for instance, Circles of Success decided that at-risk children were not connecting with what they were learning and thus were not as likely to retain it.

“A lot of times, children who are at-risk come from lower socioeconomic groups and their own prior knowledge and experiences and culture are not represented,” says Scott. “Therefore, there’s simply no way for them to make a link because all the stuff in the materials doesn’t consider their experiences.”

To combat the problem, Circles of Success will arrange the lessons into themes across subject areas, so a lesson learned in science will also be taught from a social-studies perspective. The school is also looking at how to get parents more involved, from enrolling them in GED programs to having them work with their children at home.

“We want to build what we call a two-way bridge between teachers and parents,” says Scott. “The prevalent model is that teachers tell parents how to do what teachers do in school.” Instead, Scott says the teachers should know what happens naturally at home and tell parents how to use those things to teach. “People who have a limited formal education may not be excellent readers and writers, but those people cook. Everybody cooks,” says Scott. “We’re looking to show parents how to turn natural things into learning experiences. Cooking can become a math lesson or a reading lesson.”

If they can’t get parents involved, Circles of Success has come up with the idea of “surrogates.” “Those people, we would expect to do the same kinds of things the parents would do when the need arises,” says Scott. “We expect them to attend parent conferences, we expect them to take the children to suggested events or to the library.”

At MASE, students will be immersed in science and engineering, although they’ll also have activity periods such as student council or drama. Seventh- and eighth-graders will have class from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.; 9th- and 10th-graders will be in school from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and 11th- and 12th-graders will be there from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

“As the students get older, they’ll want to have more time to actually be able to utilize the facilities in the research park [at the Biotech Foundation],” says Henderson. “They’ll also want to have internships with some of the professionals in the research park and all around the city. By releasing them, we give them an opportunity to use that time to work with a research scientist. Believe it or not, those are the partnerships we’re putting together right now.”

In fact, partnerships are a key part of Memphis’ new educational landscape. The Hyde Family Foundation has provided financial assistance to all the new charters and was the impetus for bringing KIPP to Memphis two years ago. The Grizzlies and Jane Walters are certainly an impressive combination.

Though the Grizzlies Academy is not a charter school, it was approved by the Memphis board of education as a break-the-mold school. Its 40 students will attend class in the Pepper Building at the corner of Poplar and Second.

“[The Grizzlies] came to me and said they were going to put a good deal of money into the school system,” says Walters. “We just talked about a variety of possibilities. … They were committed to being in the schools, and this was just another program they thought would be helpful.” The school district will pay for what it would at any other school, and the Grizzlies will pick up the tab for things such as keeping the students for dinner two nights a week, extra tutoring, or the weeklong retreat out of the city before school starts. The main goal of the school is to graduate these behind-grade-level students as quickly as possible and with a degree that will allow them to do whatever they want after high school.

“There are things you can do in a small setting that you can’t do in a large setting. When you have 40 kids instead of 400, you can literally put them in one room and eyeball them if you have to,” says Walters. “If you have two absent, you can get in your car and go to two houses and knock on the door.” And don’t think she won’t. Walters says if students play hooky, she’ll be their worst nightmare. “I’m not a nice person. I don’t mean no child will ever be absent because there will be children who are sick. But just to be absent because you’d rather sleep? No. No, no, no.”

It’s not just the Grizzlies who have volunteered to help out. “I was stunned by the calls and the letters I’ve gotten. They’ve come from young, old, black, white, rich, poor. They’ve all said basically, ‘I’ll be there,'” says Walters. “I think you have to realize that for the great majority of young people in Memphis, the city schools are their only option. They would like [the school system] to be as good as possible.”

Teresa Sloyan of the Hyde Family Foundation says that the charters have also found a lot of community support. “In a lot of cases, they really need that volunteer support to succeed and you see them seeking it out and really wanting to develop partnerships, whether it’s with corporations in town or individuals who have expressed an interest.”

Though local low-performing schools won’t let charters “recruit” at their schools, Henderson doesn’t see himself — or any charter — in competition with the local district. In fact, his aim is to help.

“If these charter schools are successful at showing how you can do things better, how you can be more effective in educating students, it’s beneficial to the entire system,” says Henderson.

Scott agrees and says that the goal of Circles of Success is to find out what works with the at-risk student population and share that information with public schools. “We’re not trying to do a public-school bashing campaign,” she says. “The benefit is essentially this: There are some children in the traditional setting who are, because of their special needs, unable to get those needs met. They also make it difficult for teachers to meet the needs of the other students. We feel if we can pull those children out, it’s a benefit to the entire school.”

Of course, first the charters have to prove that their methods are working the same way any other school has to: test scores. Dedrick Briggs at the Charter School Resource Center says that it’s important that charters succeed, if only because there are so many people waiting for them to fail. The burden to have good test scores in the charters is no different from other schools.

“Because of No Child Left Behind [the widespread educational reform created by President George W. Bush], there are serious consequences for schools that don’t improve, so [the burden of improving test scores] is not greater, but there’s definitely a sense of urgency and more motivation to do that,” says Briggs. Charters are more immediately connected to their performance, meaning they have to succeed to stay open. “Not only are charter schools accountable to the state, they’re also accountable to the parents,” says Briggs. “If the parents are not comfortable with your school, they’ll transfer their children. If you have a charter school with no students, you no longer have a school.” There are more than 40 groups currently interested in applying for charters for the 2004-2005 school year.

As part of a partnership with the Hyde Family Foundation, the University of Memphis’ Steve Ross will also be conducting a study on the implementation progress and outcome of the Memphis charters.

And while most people are optimistic about the area’s four new schools, not everyone is without worry. The stakes are too high, both for the schools and the students they serve.

“Sometimes I lie awake at night,” says Walters, “and think, You’re an old woman. What have you promised?” n

Charter Schools: a quick and easy primer

The basic premise behind charter schools is a sort of marriage between private and public schools. Charters get public moneys — the same local and state per-pupil amount as the local school system — but are run independently by sponsoring organizations.

A group, such as 100 Black Men of Memphis, gets together and decides they want to start a school. They then submit an application to the local district, providing in great detail their plans for running the school and educating students. The Tennessee law is geared especially toward students who attend state-identified low-performing schools and prohibits any “for profit” schools.

When charter schools began mushrooming across the country in the early to mid-1990s, they were seen as the next best hope for education. Not all of them have worked out that way, but they have given rise to a whole new culture in education. The first charter law was passed in Minnesota in 1991, and since then, everyone from groups of parents unhappy with their public school choices to so-called edupreneurs like Edison (with 150 schools in 20 states) have opened up charters around the country. — MC

News The Fly-By

City Reporter

Post author By Flyer Staff
Post date May 16, 2003

Merchants Using Minors

Bill allows minors for use in underage sales tests.

By Janel Davis

The next time you go to the convenience store to buy a carton of cigarettes or a case of beer, watch out for the young-looking lad to your left: He may be an underage plant, not for the police but for the store owner.

In a new bill proposed by Representative Joe Armstrong (D-Knoxville), minors can be used by store merchants to prevent the sale of smoking material, smoking paraphernalia, smokeless tobacco, illegal drugs, and, eventually, lottery tickets. The bill, which has made its way through the Senate, seeks to allow store merchants to identify any potential problems in advance. (Merchants can lose licenses for alcohol and tobacco products if caught selling these items to minors.) If passed, merchants would be able to perform undercover operations much like law enforcement officers under the present law.

Like officers, merchants would be required to obtain written permission from the minor’s parent or legal guardian and from the juvenile court. Minors — or in the case of alcohol sales, a person under 21 — would also have to adhere to established rules. Merchants cannot disguise the young person’s appearance to misrepresent their age. They can make no statements designed to mislead or encourage employees and must respond truthfully to questions asked by the employee, including the minor’s age. They must also be able to produce a valid state-issued identification card containing the person’s actual birthdate. To verify adherence to the requirements, the minor used in the operation must be photographed before and after the merchant uses the person in order to create a record of appearance. The rules would also apply to law enforcement officers using minors in similar situations.

Tennessee’s bill requirements differ slightly from other states. For example, Texas’ Alcoholic Beverage Code does not require minors used in sting operations to carry identification, but they must truthfully answer questions by employees about their age.

Sliding Scale

Rhodes’ music academy moves to U of M.

By Janel Davis

Beginning this fall, the University of Memphis will be the new home of Rhodes College’s Music Academy. The academy has completed classes for the current spring semester and will not host summer classes.

The transition comes as a result of Rhodes administrators reshaping the school’s mission statement. “The Music Academy is for school children to adults, and we wanted our services and programs to be more geared to undergraduate students,” said Daney Kepple with Rhodes. “[The academy] was stretching our music budget.”

With the move, more than 400 students, beginning with preschoolers, in piano, voice, guitar, and instrumental programs will be phased into U of M’s Community Music School, which has 750 students of its own.

In a written statement, Rhodes dean Robert Llewellyn commented on the transition: “While there is certainly some sadness in relinquishing a program that has been part of our history since 1943, we feel that the decision will benefit both Rhodes and the University [of Memphis].”

Dr. Lauren Schack-Clark with the Community Music School said they were approached with the offer to take over the program by Rhodes’ music department chair Timothy Sharp, who is “very pleased with the arrangement.”

While Sharp hoped to transfer the program intact, space and budget constraints at the U of M may make this impossible. “We won’t change our current systems of administrative operations,” said Schack-Clark. “Some of the Music Academy’s programs will be retained, but some may have to be implemented into programs that [already] exist here.”

To adequately house all of the students and programs, Schack-Clark said partnerships may have to be made with nearby churches and schools for use of their facilities.

In addition to programs, staffing may become an issue, as Music Academy instructors who were not a part of the college’s staff will also lose their jobs. While the teachers have received letters about possible employment with the Community Music School, there are no guaranteed positions. Of the Music School’s 47 instructors, most are university staff members, including eight full-time faculty.

Fare Days

MATA lowers rates for certain groups.

By Mary Cashiola

Gas prices have jumped so much in recent months that taxi companies recently asked the Memphis City Council to approve a rate increase. One would think the Memphis Area Transit Authority would be considering an increase as well. Instead, MATA is lowering selected fares.

In an application of how price influences demand, MATA is testing special lower fares for students, senior citizens, disabled passengers, and trolley riders.

“We’re trying to generate more ridership at a time of day when we have seats available,” says MATA spokesperson Alison Burton. “We have service on the streets and we have seats available.”

The reduced fares target students on weekends, nights, and holidays and senior citizens during peak hours.

“Federal guidelines require us to offer reduced rates to seniors, but we don’t have to do it all day long,” says Burton. “Most transportation companies offer [seniors] reduced fares in off-peak hours.” The senior/disabled fare for peak hours will be $1.10 compared to 50 cents during off-peak hours. Other fare reductions include a $1 two-ride trolley pass (a value of $1.20) and a $75 70-ride bus pass (a savings of $12).

Burton says MATA started talking about the fare reductions and looking at their budget to see if it was feasible some time ago, “before oil prices started going upward.”

Right now the special fares are scheduled to be in effect for the next six months. “We’ll reevaluate them at that time to see if we’ll maintain the new rates, go back to the old rates, or decide to do something entirely different,” said Burton. “We’re trying to find the right structure to balance ridership and fares. … We’re hoping the ridership will support the budget.”

MATA last increased its fares in July 2000; before that, it hadn’t posted a rate increase in seven years.

Star-Spangled Record

Largest living flag may put Memphis in record books.

By Bianca Phillips

We’re known for Elvis, the blues, and barbecue, but after this year’s Fourth of July Red, White, and Blues Extravaganza at Tom Lee Park, the event’s administrators are hoping Memphis will have a new claim to fame — world-record-holder of the largest living American flag.

Five thousand attendees of the annual Fourth of July celebration will be given red, white, or blue T-shirts and will then be assembled into a giant American flag. The stars will be represented by local war veterans holding white star-shaped placards above their heads.

“This has always been a very patriotic event,” said Preston Lamm, president of the Beale Street Merchant’s Association, one of the event’s sponsors along with Clear Channel. “Last year, we gave away 5,000 flags. This year, we’ll be giving away 10,000. This [the flag formation] is something we decided to do this year in support of the troops away from home.”

There are no records listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for largest living flag, and the event’s sponsors have invited representatives from Guinness to witness the formation. Gary Sommer, a spokesperson from Clear Channel, said they have already filled out the paperwork necessary to qualify for a Guinness record.

“You don’t necessarily have to have a Guinness person there, but you have to document it properly. We’ll have to take names and addresses of everybody involved and obviously take pictures and video, but we’re planning on having someone from Guinness here,” said Sommer.

People attending the celebration will also have a chance to register to send free “Touches of Home” care packages to family members remaining overseas. The packages, which will be shipped via FedEx, will include Corky’s barbecue sauce, Memphis spring water, barbecue chips, and other items made in Memphis.

Downsized

Center for Arts Education director resigns.

By Chris Davis

Amelia Barton, director of the Greater Memphis Arts Council’s Center for Arts Education, has resigned her position. Calls and e-mails to GMAC requesting further information have not been returned. According to reliable sources, however, the CAE’s two remaining employees, Kay Ross and Anne Davey, have likewise resigned.

Through a process of firings and attrition the CAE began a major downsizing in 2002. Now it would appear to have an administrative staff of zero. Earlier this year, extensive interviews were conducted with then-director Barton, Arts Council president Susan Schadt, media coordinator Marci Woodmansee, and board president Tommy Farnsworth III concerning the fate of the CAE as well as certain outreach programs which had been axed, presumably due to budget concerns. The Wolftrap Center for early arts education, a prestigious national program based in the Washington, D.C. area, was among the programs cut. Also cut was a program allowing underprivileged families the option of attending art events like the symphony for a significantly reduced price.

In spite of a recent National Endowment for the Arts study showing that local not-for-profit arts organizations pump millions into the Memphis economy, the city council has proposed significant cuts to Arts Council funding. In 2002 certain city council members publicly admonished the Arts Council for being an elitist group, saying they don’t fund enough minority-oriented organizations and events. While that ill-informed outburst may have been Memphis politics as per usual, depending on the ongoing status of the CAE, the city council may now have real reasons to question the validity of providing public funding for the Arts Council.

When the CAE was at its strongest there could be no denying that GMAC was actively involved in bringing a broad spectrum of art and artists into the schools and to students of every race and position on the economic ladder. The brochure for the CAE’s summer youth programs (significantly scaled down from last year) has been released for public consumption, but the CAE, or so it would appear, has nobody to administrate it.

Opinion

Faking the News

Post author By John Branston
Post date May 16, 2003

When The Memphis Flyer uncovered serial plagiarism and a pattern of bogus stories at the Tri-State Defender last month, I thought it was the worst case of journalistic fraud I would see for a while. After reading Sunday about the adventures of Jayson Blair at The New York Times, I’m not so sure.

The Tri-State Defender, according to insiders, has a circulation of about 6,000. Counting Internet subscribers, The New York Times has a circulation of millions. Blair, a 27-year-old reporter, made up quotes, datelines, and descriptions while also plagiarizing the work of others in at least 36 stories since last October.

The Defender made no effort to clear the record. The Times is making a huge effort. Both papers said they were victimized by a rogue reporter. That’s off the mark. Serial fraud can only happen when there’s trouble at the top. I say that based on my interviews with former key employees of the Defender, published accounts in the Times, and my own experience, including being plagiarized by the Times six years ago.

The Times, according to a spokeswoman quoted in The Wall Street Journal, wrote 50 corrections of Blair’s work during his career, only six of which were caused by other employees. That is a remarkable record of inaccuracy and a remarkably tolerant error policy. I have worked for three news outfits in 24 years — United Press International, The Commercial Appeal, and Contemporary Media, the parent of Memphis magazine and The Memphis Flyer, and freelanced for half a dozen more, including the Times. A string of unintentional errors (misspelled names, wrong titles, quotes misattributed or imprecisely recorded) in a month or two would earn you a reprimand and possibly a demotion or desk assignment. Falsifying a dateline, which is a news organization’s way of telling its audience that its reporter was on the scene, is a firing offense. I can only remember it happening a couple of times (once for a concert review), and it was the talk of the newsroom both times and raised lasting suspicions about the reporters who did it.

A rogue can fool readers who either have no way of detecting bogus stories or suspect them but don’t bother to do anything about it. But you can’t fool colleagues, who tend to be savvy, gossipy, and pretty honest when not covering their asses.

At the Defender, a second employee — former classified-advertising manager Myron Hudson — has come forward to support the accusation of former managing editor Virginia Porter that the plagiarist was the newspaper’s owner, Tom Picou, writing as a “consultant” under made-up bylines.

“As a former, 11-year employee, I can emphatically state that Tom Picou is Larry Reeves/Reginold Bundy or any other alias he might have used,” said Hudson. Picou said Reeves is an elderly white guy who wrote 142 stories for free and never came to the office.

The Times is doing a thorough investigation and disclosure of Blair’s sins and its internal policies, to a point. “Let’s not begin to demonize our executives — either the desk editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher,” cautioned publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. What’s next? The investigative Pulitzer? According to the Times account, some of Blair’s editors and colleagues were wise to Blair and complained about his errors and deceptions long before he resigned two weeks ago. (See Viewpoint, page 13.)

I would say I can’t imagine higher-ups failing to heed such a stern warning, but the trouble is, I can. In 1996, I wrote a package of stories for Memphis magazine about Tunica and the casinos. Three months later, on an autumn morning, I opened a copy of the Times we got at the office and was flattered to see several bits of my work in a front-page story on Tunica by a veteran Times reporter. The problem was, there was no attribution to me or Memphis whatsoever.

Once you know where to look, plagiarism is easy to spot, like shoplifting caught on tape. In this case, I had spent several weeks researching the stories and had plenty of time to loaf, rewrite, interview people, travel, collect stories, and play around with the abundant statistics in the monthly reports of the Mississippi Gaming Commission. I found the smoking guns right away, and Memphis publisher Kenneth Neill packaged them in a letter and dashed off a polite but firm objection and request for a printed apology and correction.

To make a long story short, it took us a month, a lawyer, and a few more letters to get it. Maybe that’s understandable. A newspaper’s first duty is to its employees. The “editor’s note” was roughly two parts defense of the Times and one part grudging apology. We asked for and got nothing more.

The Commercial Appeal and The Village Voice did articles about it. The big journalism watchdogs, Columbia Journalism Review and American Journalism Review, were silent even though they routinely write about similar sins of lesser papers. The Times also never mentioned this little incident when writing about plagiarism at other papers.

We were the first to agree it was hard to believe, not at all like the Times. But there it was in black and white with “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” I still read and enjoy the Times, but I’ve never looked at it quite the same way. Now I suppose other readers won’t either.

Book Features Books

Trivial Pursuits

Post author By Leonard Gill
Post date May 16, 2003

Shooting People:

Adventures in Reality TV

By Sam Brenton and Reuben Cohen

Verso, 178 pp., $21

It’s called reality TV. Salman Rushdie calls it “the unashamed self-display of the talentless” — “half-familiar avatars of yourself … enacting ordinary life under weird conditions.”

Rushdie, however, may be underestimating the degree of talentlessness and restricting the definitions of “ordinary” and “weird,” because he is obviously unfamiliar with Susun! Denpa Shonen, a Japanese “endurance game show” broadcast in 1998-99, a show whose title roughly translates as “Don’t Go For It, Electric Boy!” and a show that for some reason has yet to make it to these shores. Repeat, yet.

In that program, according to authors Sam Brenton and Reuben Cohen, an actor “consented to be locked alone in a small apartment until he was able to win one million yen in cash or goods from magazine competitions [?], and was allowed to survive only on the proceeds of his winnings. He slowly disintegrated over the period of his internment, and took to pacing naked, muttering. His hair grew unkempt, then wild, and a beard of sorts emerged. Among the prizes he succeeded in winning was a large consignment of dog food, which he ate, sticking strictly to the parameters of the game. Finally, a producer entered the apartment and led him into a small anteroom, the walls of which promptly fell before a gleeful studio audience, his ‘apartment’ beside him revealed as a set construction. He had been in there for fifteen months, unaware that he was even being filmed and that each week his exploits were winning Japan’s largest TV audience.”

Fans of Survivor, Big Brother, Temptation Island (“Survivor with a dating/infidelity twist”), The Mole (“Survivor with paramilitary adventure-chic”), Eden (“Big Brother for teens, with added audience interactivity”), Shipwrecked (“Survivor for teens”), The Amazing Race (“Survivor, cross-country, against the clock”), Fear Factor (“Survivor challenges with extreme sports twist”), Cruel Winter (“Fear Factor mixed with Big Brother, for the kids”), Road Rules (“The Amazing Race with teens in cars”), Lost (“The Amazing Race” again), Love Cruise (“Big Brother and Survivor on a boat”), Castaway (“Survivor in the cold, without the challenges”), in addition to Murder in Small Town X, Chained, The Chair (“fascist-chic”), The Chamber (more “fascist-chic”), and I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! (no comment), eat your hearts out. Nonfans of reality TV in general (all half-dozen of you worldwide, plus Salman Rushdie), take comfort: Brenton and Cohen’s Shooting People is here to dig quickly but deep into what the hell’s going on and likely to get worse. (Coming soon? The Tenth Victim at last for real?) And what’s really so wrong?

For one, the documentary style and civic goals of such filmmakers as John Grierson in England in the early 20th century bit the dust. (Except inside art-house theaters and on college campuses, what’s left to preach to the like-minded leftists already in the audience?) The camera, once thought so objective a tool in the hands of social reformers, was then suddenly, by mid-century, believed to be nothing of the sort. So “direct cinema” (the “fly-on-the-wall” approach of Frederick Wiseman) and “cinéma-vérité” (of D.A. Pennebaker) got in the act in the 1960s, but even they were eventually judged too intrusive, too phony. So the ’60s itself got in the act, with self-actualization not only in the air but infecting “functionally cretinous schools of psychological healing.”

“To have suffered, experienced, ‘been through’ things, [became] the foundation of real knowledge,” write Brenton and Cohen, and the “dandruff of selfhood [was] elevated to the status of a worthy subject” — thus, “no aspect of personal experience [was] too small to fix a camera on.” Thus, in America you got PBS’ An American Family. Thus, in England, the once-venerable Channel 4, “the spiritual home of serious documentary,” after deregulation, fell into the hands of (according to one former producer and Emmy winner) “a bunch of bloody twelve-year-olds.” (“Snot-nosed bastards,” Oxbridge-educated even so, the same source adds, to clarify.)

Then “docusoaps” entered England in the ’90s. Then MTV’s The Real World and Cops entered America. Then Charlie Parsons and his partners (“the kings of trash TV”) at Planet 24 in England hit on an idea that became Survivor, which was deemed too stupid even for England. So Sweden produced Expedition Robinson, and Sinisa Savija, a Bosnian refugee and the first person to be evicted from the island setting of the new game show, threw himself under a train in 1997. The reason: “They were going to cut away the good things I did and make me look like a fool, only to show I was the worst, and that I was the one that had to go.” Translation: Savija was a goner but ratings skyrocketed. Translation: Survivor went global. And with no small thanks to a Dutch company called Endemol, which markets this stuff big-time, we’ve now got what’s called “delivery platforms,” and hard-core viewers get to watch live-stream Big Brother contestants sleeping in real time. (Never heard of “delivery platforms”? Get with the program. Never heard of Endemol? It’s that company whose new logo looks like “a blob of dough that’s been used as an ashtray.”)

You’d think the psychology profession would be up in arms over all this. A few psychologists are. In fact, they’re into it up to their necks — in consulting contracts with the producers of these shows, acting as “safeguards” to protect contestants’ welfare, weeding out the full lunatics so America doesn’t have a Sinisa Savija upsetting everybody.

But what can you expect? Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist at Stanford University and the mastermind behind something called the Stanford County Prison Experiment in 1971 (the prison was fake; the brutality was not), was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 2001: So, so long codes of professional conduct, questions of ethics.

Dr. Kate Wachs (America Online’s own “Dr. Kate”) is especially eloquent on the subject of the healthy, helpful human truths revealed to the billions glued to this garbage: “Finding the compelling nature of something, distilling it, and giving it back to ourselves in a compelling form is our nature. It’s like turning grapes into wine or cocaine into crack [the authors’ emphasis].” So the authors add: “An unfortunate metaphor — an earlier narcotic is distilled and transformed into a cheaper, more addictive, and destructive substance.” But that’s reality for you when it’s also mindless TV, when it’s also mindless psychologizing, and when the former president of the APA calls Candid Camera a “model of how to convert the psychology of live situationist experiments into entertaining, yet illuminating television.”

A word or two by Brenton and Cohen on Jerry Springer et al., on ElimiDATE et al., and on those classy, role-playing games cooked up for the PBS set (see the recent Manor House) wouldn’t have hurt Shooting People one bit. Plus, what’s really with this bottomless taste of ours for witnessing humiliation? Is it the real mark of a 12-year-old mind or is it the resting place where we’re all most comfy? Must be in “our nature.” See Dr. Kate.

But here’s the last word and it isn’t Brenton and Cohen’s. It’s out of the mouth of the trashman himself, Charlie Parsons, who put it fair and square, for real for once: “No one knows what the fuck is going on with TV.”

News The Fly-By

DEFEAT (AGAIN)

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date May 16, 2003

While we here at Fly on the Wall have tried to keep the level of discourse polite and high minded, it would appear that our ongoing tiff with the glossy semiliterate society magazine Elite Memphis has turned ugly, and in a very literal sense. Okay, so maybe we once referred to their alleged editorial content as “peroxide prose.” So what? But now those overgrown cheerleaders from hell have gone just a few steps over the line. In this month’s editor’s note, they have, like the Heathers they are, mocked your humble commentator because of hiS appropriately humble features: his plain face, lackluster hair, dumpy physique, and droopy — well, you know. They have done so by singling out the fact that the great and powerful but cosmetically challenged Fly was not nominated as one of Elite Memphis‘ 30 most beautiful people. So please, gentle readers, forgive the messy tear stains on the newsprint. I just can’t keep it in any longer. Boo-hoo-hoo.

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.

News

Off the Trail

Post author By Paul Gerald
Post date May 16, 2003

I was about five miles from the nearest road when I felt something give in my heel. The trail was covered with leaves, a thick carpet of autumn colors, which makes for a pleasant walking experience until you step on an unseen rock in an unintended way, and your foot briefly attains a position it wasn’t built for, and then you’re sitting on a stump thinking, “Gee, I’ve never felt pain there before.”

I rubbed it a bit, had some water, figured it would be fine. I had already walked 100 miles since Franklin, through rain and cold and solitude and running out of toilet paper. What’s a little pain in the heel? I was young and still thought the solution to most problems was to just keep moving.

So I stood to start again, took one step, and was back on the stump.

It’s funny how a simple piece of news can change everything. Moments before, I was enjoying a long-planned solo hike on the Appalachian Trail, with nobody around to slow me down, five days’ worth of food in my pack, and no responsibilities beyond finding my next campsite.

And now, one odd step later, I was barely able to walk, with no help available, 40 pounds on my back, and no shelter for the night. The difference between solitude and loneliness is purely attitude.

I was on a section of the trail that offered no big views, no waterfalls, no challenging climbs — no reasons to be there, in other words, unless you were just trying to put in miles. And at this time of year, not many people were putting in miles where I was. So sitting and waiting wasn’t much of an option. I hadn’t seen anybody since the morning before, when a couple of long-legged kids from Kentucky turned to wave back at me and yelled, “Okay, we’ll see you tonight!” I figured they were 10 miles ahead of me at this point.

Besides, even if somebody had showed up, I was still gonna have to walk. So, again, the answer was simple: Keep moving.

It’s funny how a little problem grows into a bigger one, or divides and multiplies into lots of them. A heel injury — I found out later it was a strained Achilles tendon — affects how you walk just enough to expand into leg, hip, and back pain. I put my foot down, and it hurt. When I pushed on the ball of that foot, it really hurt. So my brain said, Okay, next time we’ll keep the leg stiff and push with the heel — the path of the least pain.

Take a few steps that way sometime and see how it feels. Then imagine doing it with a 40-pound pack on your back, up and down long hills, on leaf-covered rocky trails, when you have no choice but to do that for five miles.

As the pain began to spread, and after I’d nearly hyper-extended my knee a couple of times, I decided that intense pain in the heel was better than less intense pain everywhere else. So I started taking “normal” steps again. Normal, in this case, was a standard human step, a bit wobbly, with a “shit” or a “god-dammit” in the middle.

I was probably making about half a mile per hour. Five miles to the road seemed a lot longer all of a sudden, and my decision to go without a watch had transformed from “getting back to nature” into “I wonder if I’ll make the road by dark?”

The road. That’s what it was all about. Get to the road. At the road, I could sit down and wait for a car. The map said it was a county road, and in the northeast corner of Tennessee that meant there wouldn’t necessarily be a car, especially late in the day on a Tuesday — and I wasn’t even sure it was a Tuesday anymore. I’d been in the woods, except for two food runs into two tiny towns, for three weeks.

Get to the road. My heel actually started to feel better, or just feel less; I didn’t care which. It wasn’t long before I could take fairly normal steps again, with a little less cussing. I was walking with my head down, hands in my pockets, heart in my throat, and my mind on that road.

When the sun was down in the trees, the crickets were starting to sing, and my breath was becoming visible in front of my face, I found myself looking at a fencepost. I looked up and saw the fence. Beyond it, through the trees, was something flat and open. I couldn’t figure out what had happened to the forest there, because my mind had turned the road into something mythical, something magical, something huge. I had forgotten that roads are just flat, open spaces.

The moon was over the little valley when I dropped my pack on the gravel shoulder. Other than the crickets, there wasn’t a sound. Other than the moon and a few stars, there wasn’t a light. Other than me, there wasn’t a soul. At least the sky was clear. Somebody would come along. It didn’t matter now, anyway. No more walking. I had made the road.

I figured I would go to town, get a room, lie down, and watch TV. I thought about how that mattress would feel. I thought about warm water, soap, and a towel. I thought about how it would feel to walk on a cold tile floor. I thought about looking out a car window and seeing the miles fly by, with no pain at all. That was the solution, after all; just keep moving.

I looked up the road into the dusk. Somebody would come along.

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

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.