Month: August 2003

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

The Top 10 Gay Myths

I had a long conversation with a straight conservative the other night. We were both standing outside the Alabama Supreme Court. There were about 1,000 people there, most of them gathered to protest the removal of Chief Justice Roy Moore’s two-ton Ten Commandments monument from the building. I wasn’t one of the protesters, but my smoking companion was.

He felt strongly that the monument had to stay, because the Commandments represent the “moral foundation of America” and because our nation has strayed from its roots. Divorce rates, spousal abuse, and sexual violence against children can all be traced back to the abandonment of prayer in public schools and to the homosexual agenda, he said.

I decided this wasn’t a good place for a queer girl and went home.

Gay folks have been in the news a lot lately. We can have sex legally now, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Episcopal Church got itself a gay bishop. But these victories for “my people” don’t seem to translate into greater understanding. Straight conservatives seem to hold onto gay stereotypes as if they were the Commandments themselves.

If I could, I would try to debunk some gay stereotypes and to foster some homo-hetero understanding for those on the right side of the political divide, like my smoking buddy from the other night. I might as well start with my own Top 10 list:

1. The myth of gay recruitment. I can find a spouse from the existing pool of gay people the Creator created. I am not out to convert you or your kids. Don’t want to. Don’t need to. God gave me plenty of people to choose from. I chose one already.

2. Being gay is about more than sex. My gayness is based in love, not sex. I have an emotional, intimate connection with my spouse. Sure, we have sex, but it doesn’t define us as a couple, or as people.

3. Pedophiles come in all forms. There are “bad gay people” just as there are “bad straight people.” We’ve got some pedophiles among our group; so do you. You actually have more, because there are more of you. Can we agree to focus on fighting pedophilia? Gay, straight. Doesn’t matter. Pedophiles are bad for kids.

4. The gay community is diverse. We are not all men in leather thongs with feather boas dancing on top of Gay Pride Parade floats. We’re not all male, all white, all rich, or all anything else. (Also, we’re not all liberal. Ever heard of the Log Cabin Republicans?)

5. Some of us believe in God. If James Lipton of the Actor’s Studio ever has occasion to interview me, I have a ready-made answer to one of his standard questions. When I arrive at Heaven’s Pearly Gates, the first thing I hope to hear God say is: “Yes, Jennifer, you have a reservation — but I’m afraid I don’t see Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the list.” The God I believe in is loving and liberatory. (Okay, I know wishing hell on anyone isn’t exactly a demonstration of loving. Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.)

6. I already can get married in a church. Some Christian denominations allow for this. Others don’t. I’m not asking your church to bless me and my spouse. When it comes to “gay marriage,” all we’re after is the civil stuff. You know, things like having the rights of a spouse when my partner’s dying in the hospital. Being able to be a mom to our kids, in a legally protected way. Those sorts of things.

7. Slurs go both ways. The gay community has names for you too. I won’t call you a “breeder,” if you don’t call me a “sodomite.”

8. Please quit putting rainbow stickers on your cars. Please quit hanging rainbow flower leis on your rearview mirrors. Contrary to popular belief, not all of us are equipped with 100 percent accurate gaydar, and if you have rainbows all over your person or property, we may well assume you are a “member of the family.”

9. Gay TV belongs to straight people. With the ratings that Will & Grace boasts, I suspect a lot of straight people are glued to their TV sets week after week. Gay folks aren’t the ones keeping Gay TV alive. We’re a small portion of the market share.

10. We notice your inconsistencies. If you really, really don’t like gay people and think gay sex is disgusting, quit buying porn with women having sex with women. That’s gay sex. Americans spend a billion dollars a year on porn. When was the last time you saw a “straight” porn film that didn’t have two women going at it? If you quit buying this stuff, maybe the porn industry would fold — something that, I think, might benefit women across all orientations. Go ahead. Do it. Call me a conservative.

Jennifer Holladay lives in Montgomery, Alabama.

Categories
Book Features Books

This Modern World

God bless Dubya & Co. but only if for these few reasons: You’re a contemporary American political cartoonist thankful for a bottomless supply of idiocies and especially if you are cartoonists “Tom Tomorrow” and Robbie Conal. Or you’re not an American political cartoonist, but you are fit to be tied over the actions, day one, of this sorry administration.

Tomorrow (Dan Perkins) you know from the contents page of this paper or any of the numerous newsweeklies carrying “This Modern World,” the syndicated strip that’s the subject of a new treasury called The Great Book of Tomorrow (St. Martin’s Press). But why begin with Bush II? The Great Book doesn’t, because it’s a career retrospective into what started as no career at all: Perkins, a wandering college grad in the early 1980s marking time as a word-processor but in his spare time developing his trademark combination of found imagery and original artwork run up against text blocks mocking the daylights out of American half-truths, untruths, and pure poppycock. Again, the nation’s supply of each: bottomless; again, Tomorrow’s surface good-naturedness in the midst of attack: this great satirist’s great weapon.

But if it’s bad-naturedness you want, go to Artburn (RDV Books/Akashic Books), Robbie Conal’s new compilation of “guerrilla cartooning” at its below-the-belt best. The lowdown on Conal: He first came to public attention for his “art attacks”: illegally wheat-pasted posters plastered all over Manhattan and based on his charcoal-on-canvas caricatures of America’s reigning power abusers and scandal masterminders. (For the record: Reagan et al.; “Irangate,” etc.) This was in 1986, the posters were “misdemeanors perpetrated to protest higher crimes,” and they were a struggle a struggle to mount undetected in the dead of night and a “struggle of reason against absurdity,” according to Bill Smith, art director of the alternative newsweekly LA Weekly. In 1997, that paper brought Conal on board as a regular contributor. The result: full-page artwork marked by Conal’s unforgiving attention to detail, with some wise-ass wording thrown in and a factoid or two in paragraph form as capsule history lesson. Conal’s targets, for the record and in addition to George the 41st and 43rd, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Bill Clinton, Albert Gore, Tipper Gore, etc.: Martha Stewart (“the home-design dominatrix of middle-class decoration”), Gary Condit (“sanctimonious sleazebag”), Katherine Harris (“a transvestite queen … doing an impression of Anita Bryant in a power suit”), and J. Edgar Hoover (“[a]rguably the man most dangerous to American democracy for the 48 years he ruled the FBI,” in or out of drag). For Conal’s artistic indebtedness: see the image/text combos of Barbara Kruger and the still insufficiently recognized nightmare drawings of Sue Coe. But for a nice summary of Conal’s national outlook on life, see him on Lewinsky: “I just can’t blame Monica … . She’s been blamed enough, but it could be just a projection of our own embarrassment that beneath the hypocritical rhetoric, our society really works this way. Including bringing down a president for having a girl go down on him. We’re just so full of shit and we know it.”

Had it with Bush-bashing for the time being? This modern world, period? See Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: The Beauty Supply District (Pantheon) by Ben Katchor, new in paperback. Katchor’s weekly strips appear in The Forward and other newspapers (including, once upon a time, the one you’re reading) plus monthly strips in Metropolis magazine. And a metropolis, never named but just the same, New York City, is Katchor’s beat. The time frame in question? This one now minus all easy reference points the city, a system of signs of inscrutable meaning; its storefronts, empty or newly occupied by businesses making even lesser sense than the businesses previous. (E.g.: Sensum’s Symmetry Shop, Simon Magus Misspent Youth Center.) Down these shadowy streets (rendered in pen and ink and every shade of gray) walks Knipl and a host of secondary characters you either size up into some fractured seminarrative or give up halfway trying to. Knipl’s there with you: “There is a pattern, but I lack the mental equipment to discern it. It’s hopeless … .” Not so hopeless according to the “genius” people at the MacArthur Foundation, which recognized Katchor in 2000. But you think Katchor’s is solely a New York state of mind? Think again. There’s a stretch of Jackson, west of Rhodes, that’s right up this guy’s dark alley.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Postscript

Preemptive War

To the Editor:

I’m shocked that the usually aggressive Flyer could be so shy about printing the truth in its editorial “The Point of No Return” (August 21st issue) — that the Bush administration “may or may not have been guilty of lying” about the threat of a U.S. attack by Iraq.

Justification for this preemptive war was based on pictures of a skeletal trailer and a length of aluminum tubing — both of which were “could be” evidence of mass destruction — and two clear lies: about terrorist plotting between Saddam and al Qaeda and the story about Saddam’s attempt to get fissionable materials from Africa.

The war itself proved that not only was Iraq not in a position to attack the U.S. but could not even begin to defend itself against our military. Saddam was evil but not dumb. He knew the weakness of his army, and if the infamous WMD were there, they were buried so deeply that they could not have been prepared for battle without considerable time and technical effort.

A “preemptive war”? Of course. It was based on a lie.

Jim McDearman

Memphis

To the Editor:

Thank you for “The Point of No Return.” I am pleased to see one newspaper, the Flyer, providing some truth concerning Prince George W’s administration. The following from your editorial is worth repeating: “President Bush … may or may not have been guilty of lying to the American public about the seriousness of the threat posed by the Iraqi dictator. Time will tell on that score. But one thing is already certain: The administration has been guilty of what may well turn out to be the most ill-conceived and incompetently executed war strategy in American history.”

Many who were so jubilant over Bush after 9/11 are taking a different look now at his administration.

Hugh Frank Smith

Germantown

Shut Your Mouth

To the Editor:

In Susan Harrell’s food article (“Open Your Mouth,” August 21st issue), she complained about having to pay a cover charge at Isaac Hayes’ Music™Food™Passion. I found it ironic that she spent the day at the Stax Museum, which celebrates the musical history of Memphis, then went to a restaurant owned by Isaac Hayes which has the word “music” in its name and complained about the cover charge. She wrote about how the club was set up for an enjoyable music experience, mentioned what an “awesome” band they saw, and then complained again about paying a cover charge. A cover charge supports the live music of today.

By the way, who was that “awesome” band she saw?

A.S. Hesson

Memphis

The Elephant’s Trunk

To the Editor:

I recognize that there is much I do not know, so I rarely write letters to the editor. I figure I’m looking at the trunk of the elephant while others are studying the leg. But I do know that Ellen Armour is a person of integrity, thoughtful and kind. We are fortunate to have her in Memphis. What I do not know is what the Flyer intended by publishing this “splash” piece of journalism (“God and Women at Rhodes,” August 7th issue).

Surely there is some integrity left in the minds of Flyer journalists. I look forward to an apology for your indecent coverage of such a painful and complicated matter.

Elaine Blanchard

Memphis

The Real Truth

To the Editor:

In regard to the Flyer‘s story, “Eleven Minutes with Carol Johnson” (August 21st issue), I’d like to offer some good advice to the new superintendent and to the city school board: If you really want the truth about the current attitude and conditions in our schools, ask parents and students who are not hand-selected or representatives of the PTO.

Asking the staff and administration won’t put you in touch with the true consumers of education. Listening to the concerns and suggestions of parents and students will provide a less biased and realistic view of the state of education in Memphis.

Grace Benz

Memphis

Correction: In last week’s cover story, Memphis School Board member Laura Jobe’s was identified as a nurse. While Jobe was trained as a nurse, she currently serves as Sen. Lamar Alexander’s Memphis field representative.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Editorial

Big Cuts and Small Ones

It may not be the best expression to use in light of world events, but the road map for analyzing the Memphis City Schools’ $737 million budget should be the MGT of America consultants study, flawed though it may be.

Superintendent Johnnie Watson correctly points out, as the Flyer did when the study appeared in January, that the actual five-year “savings” found by the consultants is much less than the widely reported $114 million. That number included both $4.6 million in new revenue from a soft-drink sponsorship we agree is a bad idea and $37 million that would be saved by scrapping plans to build one middle school and one elementary school.

Watson says those schools “had already been removed from the list of schools to be built and funding was never appropriated.” MGT says, if so, nobody told them.

Whatever. At least MGT drew attention to the continuing cost of maintaining schools with low enrollments and building new ones at an average cost overrun of 30 percent. And if you don’t trust MGT, no less an authority than Mayor Willie Herenton, a former schools superintendent, has publicly stated several times that Memphis needs to close some schools and focus more on instruction and less on buildings.

MGT estimated that consolidating classes and schools could save $69 million. Subtracting $37 million still leaves $32 million. Why not look there instead of going through the motions of cutting and then replacing minor sports and elementary foreign-language instruction at a total cost of less than $3 million?

By the same token, the suggestion that overuse of cell phones is a big financial problem doesn’t ring our bell either. Cell phones are a fact of life. Although cell phones are banned at school, thousands of students have them and, often as not, use them as electronic toys after hours. It’s hypocritical to nickel and dime administrators and board members over their cell-phone use.

The administration and school board can’t explain away the whole MGT study by saying 72 percent of its recommendations have been accepted while ignoring the largest potential savings. MGT defended its work “as former educators” who based their recommendations, for the most part, on facts and information given to them by the school system’s teachers and administrators. The report should not be thrown out.

Herenton’s Gamble

Mayor Willie Herenton is an overwhelming favorite to win reelection this fall, so it isn’t as if he has to preempt challenger John Willingham’s positions.

When the mayor said, as he reportedly did last week, that he favors casino gambling in Memphis and will work toward making it happen, we assume he means it. His outspoken endorsement is one more reason that the idea of turning The Pyramid into a casino some day should be taken seriously and examined on its merits.

Memphis and Tennessee can either act to keep casino gambling dollars and taxes at home or they can continue to help Mississippi fund its government operations. The Tennessee attorney general has said that lawmakers have the authority to legalize gambling, as they have already done with parimutuel betting and the lottery. All they lack is the will.

Herenton simply said once again what people have known for 11 years. Memphis has gambling already but without the tax benefits that go to Tunica and Mississippi. His willingness to say it again loud and clear removes one more excuse for state lawmakers to do nothing.

Categories
News The Fly-By

No Ethics? No Experience? No Problem!

WorldCom Inc., recently and hilariously accused of rerouting phone calls to avoid paying connection fees to other phone companies, ranks with Enron in the annals of modern corporate debauchery. After an $11 billion accounting scandal sunk the infamous telecommunications conglomerate into bankruptcy, the U.S. General Services Administration banned federal agencies from doing business with WorldCom.

So how is a proscribed “company that has demonstrated a flagrant lack of ethics” the words of Maine senator Susan Collins poised to land a $900 million Pentagon contract to build a cell-phone system for occupied Iraq?

“I was curious about it, because the last time I looked, MCI has never built out a wireless network,” comments Len Lauer of Sprint.

Indeed, WorldCom’s MCI division never figured out how to build a cell network in the U.S. and ultimately gave up trying. But who needs experience when you have tasty political connections? Before 2000, WorldCom donated equally to Democrats and Republicans in order to land cell service contracts with U.S. occupation armies in Haiti, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. Now it’s leveraging a $45 million deal with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) into a Halliburtonesque sweetheart contract to build the first national mobile-phone network in Iraq, where more than 2 million new customers are expected to sign up right away.

The Pentagon’s rush to protect WorldCom from a scrappy Bahraini-based competitor, Batelco, which has built cell networks in the Middle East, has exposed yet another unholy alliance between corporate America and the Bush administration.

Demonstrating the brand of lightning-quick entrepreneurship traditionally treasured by free-market-loving Americans, Batelco raced into Iraq after the U.S. invasion and installed cell towers throughout Baghdad. With half of land lines out of service and Saddam’s 1990 plan to build cell towers stymied by U.N. trade sanctions, Baghdadis welcomed the new service.

But the CPA shut down Batelco and threatened to confiscate its $5 million worth of equipment in Iraq. Now the CPA is prohibiting companies more than 10 percent owned by foreign governments from bidding on civilian cell business in U.S.-occupied Iraq. That eliminates Batelco and most other Middle East-based telecommunications companies and, according to analyst Lars Godell of Forrester Research, leaves MCI with “a head start.”

Ordinary Iraqis, meanwhile, are back in the pre-Alexander Graham Bell era.

Old-fashioned influence-buying, coupled with inside-the-Beltway cronyism, is MCI’s not-so-secret weapon in the fight over Iraqi spoils. As recently as June 2002, a week before the big accounting scandal broke, The Washington Post reported that WorldCom contributed $100,000 to a GOP fund-raising gala featuring President Bush.

Before becoming attorney general, John Ashcroft cashed a $10,000 WorldCom check for his losing Senate race. And the University of Mississippi’s Trent Lott Leadership Institute received $1 million from WorldCom. With Republicans controlling Congress, the Supreme Court, and the White House, WorldCom no longer needs to be an equal-opportunity corrupter.

WorldCom’s rivals, furious at being cut out of Iraq, are lashing out. “We don’t understand why MCI would be awarded this business given its status as having committed the largest corporate fraud in history,” says AT&T spokesman Jim McGann. “There are many qualified, financially stable companies that could have been awarded that business, including us.”

Motorola’s Norm Sandler noted that the Iraq gig had never been offered for competitive bidding: “We were not aware of it until it showed up in some news reports.”

Perhaps MCI-WorldCom will overcome its lack of experience, $5.5 billion in post-bankruptcy debt, and an extensive criminal record in order to provide the people of occupied Iraq with affordable, clear cell-phone service. But sleazy back-room deals with Halliburton and MCI-WorldCom belie America’s supposed faith in the transparency of free markets and their relationship to spreading democracy. They do more damage to our tattered relationship with the people of Iraq than any suicide bomb. And they prove beyond a reasonable doubt that George W. Bush’s commitment to fight corporate fraud is just another lie.

Ted Rall’s most recent book is Gas War: The Truth Behind the American Occupation of Afghanistan.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Man of Action

Rob Nilsson, the featured filmmaker at this year’s annual Memphis Digital Arts Cooperative film festival, might be the most accomplished and ground-breaking American director of whom most film buffs have never heard.

For starters, the Berkeley-based Nilsson is a protÇgÇ of indie icon John Cassavetes, the late director whose ’60s and ’70s classics such as Shadows, Faces, and A Woman Under the Influence are widely considered at once the origin and apex of the American independent film movement. (Cassavetes’ widow and on-screen muse, Gena Rowlands, has been one of Nilsson’s key supporters.) Nilsson was the first director to take home hardware at both the Cannes (where his debut, Northern Lights, won the Camera d’Or for best first film in 1979) and Sundance film festivals (where 1988’s Heat & Sunlight won the grand prize). Nilsson is also a key pioneer in the rise of video filmmaking, his 1985 film Signal 7 the first feature shot on video and transferred to film for distribution. Nilsson predated the celebrated Dogme movement by several years with his own similar, organic, and independent film style championed in a manifesto labeled “Direct Action Cinema.”

Nilsson’s Direct Action Cinema prescribes a jazz-like film style that emphasizes the importance of acting and editing and downplays the centrality of the director and writer. Nilsson’s method centers on creating situations and developing characters and allowing those two elements to collide with as much freedom as possible. His manifesto never mentions the use of video, which he has used exclusively for more than a decade, but in a recent phone interview Nilsson makes it clear that the technology has become crucial to his method.

“It’s probably a clichÇ by now,” Nilsson says about shooting on video, “but we’ve been able to reverse the ratio between the time it takes to set up and light a scene and the time you have to actually shoot. Traditionally, you’ll spend three to four times as much time on setup and preparation of a shot as your actual shooting time.”

With more time to let the camera roll, the compactness and mobility of handheld video fit into Nilsson’s mission to create spontaneous, street-level cinema. “This way,” Nilsson says, “you can go out into the world. You don’t announce yourself as a film crew, and most people won’t even notice you. My style is to go and be part of the world and to be interested in it and in the way that it interacts with the known elements of our story. That gives us opportunities that we can hardly imagine. If you’re cordoning off an entire block in order to recreate something that you wrote on paper, that’s just business as usual. There’s no poetry in it, no risk.”

Nilsson’s current project is a nine-film series called “9@Night,” filmed entirely with amateur actors (many of them area homeless or formerly homeless) from a Nilsson-founded San Francisco acting workshop called the Tenderloin Group. The “9@Night” series is a cycle of street-level dramatic features that focuses on the lives of about 50 inner-city characters (with major characters in one film popping up as minor characters in the others). The series’ first three features Singing, Stroke, and Scheme C6 were all screened at last year’s inaugural MeDiA Co-op festival. This year, the series’ fifth film, the recently completed Attitude, will be the opening-night screening, preceded by a free workshop with Nilsson, titled “Your Life Won’t Lie,” on the rise of digital cinema, followed the next day by an all-day Direct Action Cinema workshop (registration required).

Attitude is similar in quality and tone to the other “9@Night” films that screened here last year. The film centers on an auto mechanic and petty criminal named Spoddy, a belligerent, almost Nietzschean, figure who heaps abuse on everyone around him, especially homeless panhandlers who approach him on the street. But Spoddy gets an unwelcome comeuppance of sorts when he learns he’s HIV-positive, a personal crisis made worse after a painful visit to his girlfriend results in his having to go on the lam to flee from her violent brothers. Spoddy ends up hiding in a squatters’ community at a landfill adjacent to San Franciso Bay and finds himself dependent on the people he most despises. Nilsson uses the project to pursue his notion of drama through Method-like acting and to show how an otherwise familiar thriller story arc can make room for acknowledgement of such common but little-seen-on-the-big-screen issues like AIDS and homelessness.

Unsurprisingly, Nilsson doesn’t see much to his liking in mainstream American movies these days but is good-humored about his alienation from Hollywood product, saying that he doesn’t mean to be so “stone-faced and Norwegian” about the present film climate.

“Now it seems like music is king,” Nilsson says. “No one seems to be able to pick up a camera and capture the tenor of the times. We have a colonized music business that creates taste, but at the same time you have these great garage bands and a teeming underground of young musicians [in every city]. The film scene is obviously colonized by Hollywood and by television, but the mainstream in that world seems to hold more sway [over the tastes of local artists] than in music. I don’t entirely understand this, but I think a lot of it has to do with the costs of making a movie relative to the cost of putting out a CD. But, with the costs coming down, I suspect there should be more movements such as what the [MeDiA Co-op] guys down there in Memphis are doing. I’m eternally hopeful that [someday] there’s going to be a Cassavetes in every state.”

Rob Nilsson

at MeDiA Co-op’s Digital Film Festival

“Your Life Won’t Lie” workshop (free): 6:30 p.m.

Attitude screening: 8:30 p.m.

Wednesday, September 3rd

Direct Action Cinema workshop

(registration required):

10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Thursday, September 4th

All Nilsson events at 1st Congo Theater,

First Congregational Church

Categories
Music Music Features

Local Beat

Old South, Meet the New South: The Center for Southern Folklore‘s 16th annual Memphis Music and Heritage Festival, which runs from Friday, August 29th, through Sunday, August 31st, promises a veritable musical quilt of local sounds, traditional and modern. Festival organizer Judy Peiser calls the free event “an amazing musical landscape.”

“We maintain a sense of heritage and tradition with older performers while also connecting with younger players who use music as an expression of their own culture,” she explains, citing established artists like Joyce Cobb, a longtime supporter of the Center for Southern Folklore, who will perform alongside such newcomers as Valencia Robinson and Equoia Coleman at the festival. Legendary bluesmen like Daddy Mack and Blind Mississippi Morris will weigh in with more traditional fare, while upstarts Mark Lemhouse and Billy Gibson will put their own twist on the genre.

“Putting younger and older musicians together makes a cultural impact,” Peiser says. “We constantly talk about Memphis music traditions; this event is the stamp that validates that statement. We’re able to pinpoint those apexes, whether we’re showcasing gospel groups like The Spirit of Memphis Quartet or Darrell Petties, a performer who has grown up in that tradition but took it to a different level.”

Jim Dickinson, another longtime supporter of the center, agrees. “Where else can you see these musicians?” he asks. “It’s amazing that [this event] hasn’t gone the way of all the other festivals — that Peiser still books solely local talent,” he says, criticizing once-local events like the Beale Street Music Festival, which now depend on national headliners.

Recalling his onetime band, the Hardly Can Playboys, Dickinson says that his sons Luther and Cody made their professional debut at the Memphis Music and Heritage Festival. “We were wedged in between a spectacular gospel choir and Rufus Thomas on the schedule,” Dickinson says with a laugh. “That choir was unbelievable; they were playing on the back of a truck, just pumping the vehicle up and down. A world-class choir, and after their set, they just packed it up and went home to South Memphis.”

This year, Dickinson will be backed by The Reigning Sound — his sons’ group, the North Mississippi Allstars, are on the road — for his Sunday evening performance. As tradition dictates, he’ll be following a gospel group, The Pilgrim Wonders. The unflappable musician says he’s looking forward to the event, adding that after his set, he’ll likely be hanging around the TAJJ Championship Wrestling ring on Main Street. “Anyplace they have wrestling, I’m happy to play,” Dickinson says.

Rising star Kavious, a first-time performer at the festival, will be appearing alongside his father, John Moore (aka DJ Disco Hound), and veteran local rapper Al Kapone. “It’s an honor to play the festival,” Kavious says. While his debut disc, Nuclear Records’ Empty Shelves, is selling well according to the up-and-coming rapper, Kavious wants to impress fans with his onstage performances. “I’m an entertainer,” Kavious says. “I want to have a good reputation for my audiences. I show up on time, and I deliver.” Live, listen for the tune “Where You From,” on which Kavious sends shouts out to his own Westwood neighborhood and enclaves across the Dirty South.

Expect many more juxtapositions on the festival stages, as reflected by the region’s cultural evolution over the past few decades. The Sacred Heart Vietnamese and Spanish Choirs point to newfound diversity, as do performers like Afro-Cuban drummers daDDrum, an Asian music presentation from the Greater Memphis United Chinese Association, and spoken-word sets from IQ and J’Malo. Of course, festival stalwarts puppeteer Jimmy Crosthwait, guitarist Sid Selvidge, fiddler Roy Harper, Sun rockabillies Sonny Burgess, Eddie Bond, and Billy Lee Riley, and soul royalty Carla, Marvell, and Vaneese Thomas will also perform.

Don’t miss Saturday’s roots-music program offered by Vaneese Thomas and singer-songwriter Kate Campbell, who will reprise a set they performed at the Bottom Line in New York earlier this summer. Jazz chanteuse Di Anne Price is sure to deliver another memorable performance, as she debuts a song about the Center for Southern Folklore written by her mother, a barrelhouse pianist in her own right. Sunday night’s closing set from Los Cantadores was planned, Peiser explains, “to reflect the cultural changes in the local community.”

For more information, call 525-FOLK or go to SouthernFolklore.com.

You can e-mail Local Beat at localbeat@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Opinion

Losing the Numbers Game

The bottom fell out for the Manassas High School football team last Friday as Mitchell whipped them 81-0.

And the season has just begun. Only 18 players, barely half the team, showed up for practice Monday on the old baseball outfield that serves as the school’s football field. The barren infield is hard as concrete. There isn’t a goalpost or yardline marker in sight.

“I just want you to know I appreciate you all coming out here to practice,” Coach Danny Pogue tells his players before leading them in a prayer and splitting them up into groups by position. The backs work on footwork and pitchouts. The receivers run pass patterns over the remnants of second base. The linemen — all three of them — take turns blocking each other.

Manassas, which opened in 1899, has heart, guts, and history. Entertainer Isaac Hayes and school board member Sara Lewis are among its distinguished graduates. But it has a serious numbers problem both on the football field and in the classrooms, with a total enrollment of about 350 students.

For incoming schools superintendent Carol Johnson and the school board, the looming question is whether to close Manassas or try to save it by building a new school. On the one hand, Manassas is just minutes from downtown, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and the government-subsidized Hope Six housing development that will soon replace the demolished public-housing projects on Danny Thomas. On the other hand, it is directly across the road from a long-abandoned Firestone factory and acres of buckling concrete and an industrial wasteland.

Assistant principal Glen Chapman has been at Manassas for 29 years. But even when he arrived, the school had only 800 students, including middle-schoolers. At its peak, Manassas had nearly 2,000 students who filled the current building as well as an annex torn down several years ago. Students look at the pictures of the old campus in Chapman’s office and barely recognize their school.

“Kids in this neighborhood need this school,” he says. “Without it they would be lost. I would rather see them whittle down the mega-schools. I know most of the kids here by name already.”

Manassas loses students to other city schools with more courses and extracurricular activities, but it has little advantages too. Last week a girl asked Chapman how to get to a class. Instead of giving her directions, he walked her there himself.

“I would hate to see this school closed,” he says. “There is a point where you have to close a school, but I don’t know what it is.”

What he does know is that Manassas has clout on the school board and alumni chapters in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. His hope is that the board will follow through on plans to build a new school, which could cost $25 million or more.

“A few years ago, Mitchell High School was in the same boat we are, but they got a new building and have 1,200 kids now,” he says. He admits, however, that the growth came at the expense of older schools like Westside.

Westside lost 71-0 to Carver last week. “When we play Westside,” Chapman says half-joking, “it ought to be a good game.”

In the football locker room, Coach Pogue isn’t laughing. His team was 1-9 in each of the last two seasons and had not won in 30 outings before that. Handsome, young, and physically fit, Pogue doubles as waterboy and equipment manager. On the Saturday after the 81-0 loss, he called a practice, but only eight boys showed up.

“After 81-0, what can you say?” he asks. “They’re getting beat up. If the game is 85 percent mental, then these kids are getting beat up. I think we could be a real good team if our kids would accept the fact of having a program.”

Manassas has some athletes, just not enough of them. The running backs are husky and run through drills with agility and speed. But they have to play the entire game. Sophomore quarterback Derrick Vaughn, 6-2 and 195 pounds, was a star on his undefeated middle-school team and is used to being on the other end of lopsided games.

“No sir, I hope it don’t happen again,” he says with a smile as he lofts 45-yard spirals. “I couldn’t go to sleep after that loss.”

His teammates who have showed up for practice are equally determined.

“The people who ain’t here might be discouraged,” says a smiling Alexie Smith.

Assistant coach Bo Phillips exhorts them to stay positive.

“We’re going to turn it around!” he shouts.

“Hope so,” comes a tentative voice from the back of the little huddle.

“Ain’t no hopin’ about it,” Phillips snaps. “We’re going to do it. You’re going to see a different ballclub, I guarantee it. You’re going to be proud to be Manassas.”

Categories
News The Fly-By

City Reporter

Settling Up

Police officer hopes to get pay corrected.

By Janel Davis

After 15 years of meting out justice as a Memphis police officer, Cham Payne is seeking restitution for a promotion denied him in 1988.

Payne was one of 200 patrol officers who took a sergeant promotion test that year. According to test results, Officer Payne’s scores left him ranked number 131. The officer ranked 132 was promoted and is now a lieutenant. Payne was passed over and denied promotion.

A review of the test scores revealed that five officers’ tests were incorrectly graded, making them ineligible for promotion. Four of the officers filed a successful lawsuit against the city in 1992 and were made sergeant. Payne, who did not know about the incorrect scores, was not included in the lawsuit.

Ten years later, Payne became aware of the incorrect scores when his name was mentioned in other lawsuits filed by officers against the city of Memphis.

“I just want what’s due to me,” said Payne. “I’ve served the city for 29 years and I think I’m owed that.”

To get his promotion reinstated, Payne contacted city council member Barbara Swearingen Holt, who said the situation could be corrected by city attorney Robert Spence. Holt has declined comment, and repeated attempts to contact Spence were unsuccessful.

Payne’s attempts at restitution may be futile. A one-year statute of limitations on filing lawsuits has long passed, and the police and city administration has changed. Judge Jerome Turner, who tried a 1999 discrimination case, has since died. Still, Payne has support from others.

“If the city knew it was wrong, it was incumbent on them to do what was right,” said police union president Samuel Williams. “I think it’s a shame that the man and his family have been cheated for so many years.”

Court documents and correspondence between Payne and attorney David Sullivan from October 2000 show that the city was aware of the mistake. Sullivan, who was attorney for the four suing officers, said, “Unquestionably, the city knew in May 1992 that your promotion test had been misgraded.”

Next June will be Payne’s 30th year as a Memphis police officer. With that milestone comes the ranking of captain, 12 years after he would have been eligible for the position. During this period, Payne estimates he has lost $100,000 in pay.

Running Out of Time

Board to hear another appeal from Workman.

By Mary Cashiola

The same parole board that voted unanimously against clemency for death-row inmate Philip Workman in 2001 will likely hear his appeal again this September, much to the dismay of his supporters.

Citing new evidence, attorneys for Workman asked Governor Phil Bredesen earlier this month to commute Workman’s sentence. But after Bredesen referred the matter back to the Tennessee Board of Probation and Parole, Workman’s post-conviction defender asked the governor’s office to appoint a temporary board to hear the case.

“Only one member of the board has changed since then,” said Don Dawson of the post-conviction defender’s office, “but it’s the same chairman. It would certainly look a little foolish if they came out with a different determination [from the last hearing].”

Workman was sentenced to death in 1982 for killing Memphis police officer Lt. Ronald Oliver during a local robbery. Because of the earlier hearing’s outcome, as well as Work-man’s lawsuit — currently on appeal in federal court — against five of the six board members, Workman’s attorneys don’t expect fair hearing. “Last time, it was a circus,” said Dawson. “It was not intended to reach any degree of fact finding. It was intended to support the governor in not granting clemency.”

The hearing’s outcome is nonbinding and intended as a recommendation to the governor. Lydia Lenker, Bredesen’s press secretary, said that the governor has sent Workman’s request to the Board of Probation and Parole, but the governor “will not only review the recommendation but how the board reached its decision.”

Monday, district attorney William Gibbons urged Bredesen to deny Workman’s clemency request. Randy Tatel, executive director of the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing, said it’s ludicrous that a government board that is being sued by someone is going to be able to give that person a fair hearing.

“If there is a clemency hearing, it needs to be before an entirely different group of people,” he said. “Almost any other alternative would be more palatable than this one.”

Workman’s hearing is set for September 8th and his execution for September 24th.

Wolf Hunt

Conservancy director takes new post.

By Bianca Phillips

Larry Smith, executive director of the Wolf River Conservancy (WRC), will step down at the end of the week to take on a new role as director of the Shelby County Environmental Improvement Commission.

Smith helped found the WRC in 1985 as an advocacy group to protect the Wolf River and its environs. In 1996, he was named the group’s first full-time executive director. The group is currently reviewing rÇsumÇs to fill the position.

“We’re looking forward to our new leadership, but it will be impossible to duplicate Larry’s specific set of talents and expertise,” said Gary Bridgman, WRC president. “He has a lot of expertise on the science of river conservation, and he’s taught thousands of children about the environment. He’s not just a policy wonk who knows how to go out and measure water quality from time to time.”

In his new position, Smith will be responsible for developing and coordinating elementary-school environmental education as well as managing industrial and consumer recycling programs, storm-water run-off awareness, and litter-control programs.

Bridgman contends that although Smith will no longer be leading the WRC, he has little doubt that he will continue to support the group’s work.

“Larry can become a former executive director, but he can’t become a former co-founder,” he said.

Answers about the Audit

Consultant defends cost study of city school system.

By Mary Cashiola

MGT of America, the firm that performed the overall audit of the city schools last year, said recently that the district did not participate in a “critical step” in the audit, resulting in only “half of the total picture” for district staff.

The report, which identified $114 million in five-year cost savings for the district, has been at the center of controversy since it came out because of factual errors and debatable cost savings. Partners in Public Education (PIPE) said it would withhold funds from the district until at least some of the recommendations were implemented. And Superintendent Johnnie Watson, fighting the yearly budget crunch, criticized the report’s cost-savings projections as being “misleading and inaccurate” in a letter to MGT earlier this month.

But in an August 12th letter, MGT senior partner Linda Recio responded that the district did not want to go through the lengthy technical review process –which can last weeks, even months — the consulting group has used for its other clients.

“MGT intended to submit a draft report to you and your staff that would include all findings and recommendations so that any factual errors, misinterpretations, omissions, or duplications could be easily identified,” Recio wrote. “In this study, however, Memphis City Schools chose not to participate in a full technical review of the draft report.”

Watson’s letter blasted the company’s recommendations to:

1) save $69 million by converting to a multitrack calendar and building fewer schools (the savings came from four schools already removed from the list of schools to be built);

2) establish an Enterprise Fund from the Nutrition Services Fund (which is not allowed by state regulations);

3) save $11 million by consolidating small class sizes (85 percent of the classes cited are either special education, Title One, or alternative school classes whose sizes are mandated).

According to Recio’s letter, MGT usually presents an initial draft of its report to the districts. The administration then takes time to review all the information. For the Memphis report, however, MGT was asked to delete any recommendations, fiscal impact, and rationale from the draft, and the school board executive staff reviewed it over a six-hour closed-door meeting.

“This resulted in a draft report that, at its worst, was impossible for staff involved in the technical review to fully comprehend, and at its best, fell far short of communicating the intended information,” she wrote.

Watson said Monday he specifically chose to go through the partial review process and it was a good decision. He didn’t want to be accused of “teasing” the information or holding anything back. “You commission a report and then you share the information,” he said.

Reached by phone earlier this week, Recio said the district was encouraged to go through the entire process, but her firm respected the client’s judgment. “My letter speaks for itself,” said Recio. “Our reputation is critical to us. That’s why I took the time to look into this even though the project is long closed.”

Categories
Music Music Features

Sound Advice

Labor Day weekend is typically one of Memphis’ most hectic and fruitful times for live music, and this year is no exception. The highlight, as usual, is the Memphis Music & Heritage Festival (see Local Beat, page 53), which will unite a typically stellar grab bag of Memphis artists Friday, August 29th, through Sunday, August 31st, in and around the Center for Southern Folklore.

Then there’s a really special event this year, when most of the city’s garage-rock best — including ’68 Comeback, The Compulsive Gamblers, The Neckbones, and Impala –unite (or reunite, in some cases) for a record-release party for Shangri-La Projects’ A History of Memphis Garage Rock: The ’90s Saturday, August 30th, at the Hi-Tone CafÇ (see Short Cuts, page 48). This shindig will be followed the next night at Murphy’s by a gathering of a new generation of garage bands, dubbed Memphis Future Sound Now Showcase, featuring The Dutch Masters, The Final Solutions, and New Orleans’ Die Rotzz.

Other local shows of note include a couple of bands with ace new records. Lucero‘s latest, That Much Further West, is due to hit the racks next month, with a local release show scheduled for early October. But you can get an early taste Saturday, August 30th, at Young Avenue Deli. That Much Further West, which will be released by New York’s Tiger Style Records, was recorded at the band’s living space here in town and may be their best record yet. Another local record-of-the-year contender is Vending Machine‘s 5 Piece Kit, a lovingly crafted collection of bent, homemade pop that’s been out for a while now but which will get an official celebration Sunday, August 31st, at the Hi-Tone CafÇ. Joining Vending Machine for the show will be The Bloodthirsty Lovers, who will be debuting a new lineup that adds ex-Big Ass Truck guitarist Steve Selvidge to the fold, and comedic genius and Flyer contributor Andrew Earles, who promises new jokes.

— Chris Herrington

It makes no sense that a drum, a tuba, and a guitar can play idiosyncratic post-rock and still be taken seriously. But with hints of funk, nods to be-bop, and big rock drums, the Austin-based Drums and Tuba make seriously great instrumental music that defies accurate description. They come on like the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s mushroom dream, weird but irresistible. They are quite unlike anything else you are likely to hear anytime soon. They are certainly unlike anything else to roll out of the alt-country and roots-rock-obsessed Austin scene. Drums and Tuba have been picked up by Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe label; hopefully, the righteous babe’s righteous muscle can give this most deserving band the higher profile they deserve. If you catch them at Young Avenue Deli on Wednesday, September 3rd, the chances are good you’ll walk away a convert.

— Chris Davis

An annual Labor Day weekend tradition, The Turner Family Picnic is scheduled for Friday, August 29th, and Saturday, August 30th, in Gravel Springs, a small farm community just east of Senatobia, Mississippi. Although the family lost patriarch Othar Turner and his daughter Bernice Turner Pratcher earlier this year, Turner’s protÇgÇe, his 13-year-old granddaughter Sharde Evans, has proven her ability to lead The Rising Star Fife & Drum Band.

Musicologist Alan Lomax first documented the fife-and-drum tradition 50 years ago: “Consider first,” he wrote, “the Spirit of ’76, three musicians marching into battle, proud, erect another thing entirely from [these musicians], slouching along with their hip twisting, their hot licks, and an occasional Watusi leap. One message was writ large,” Lomax concluded, “this was Africa come to life in America.”

Half a century later, not much has changed. Blues fans won’t want to miss the two-day picnic, which will feature the Rising Star Band alongside one-string player Glen Faulkner and guitarists Robert Belfour, T-Model Ford, Elam McKnight, John Lowe, and Daniel “Slick” Ballinger. — Andria Lisle