Categories
Opinion

An Ill Wind?

When in the midst of a Blame Typhoon, with charges and counter-charges being hurled in all directions, I find it most useful to consult those two polar stars of utter wrongheadedness, Tom DeLay and The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page.

Both good for a chuckle, and both perfect weathervanes for the wrong direction. When in doubt, disagree with DeLay, and you’ll be okay.

The Journal, in addition to meretricious arguments, vast leaps over relevant stretches of fact and history, and an awesome ability to bend any reality to its preconceived ideological ends, also offers that ludicrous dogmatism that never fails to charm.

A column about energy politics by George Mellon in a recent Journal contained just the right mix of irrelevant argument (he’s very upset that a bunch of nervous nellies want to shut down the Indian Point nuclear plant, as though this had anything to do with the frail, undercapitalized transmission grid that caused the August blackout), expedient forgetfulness (uh, actually, OPEC had quite a bit to do with the gasoline crunch of the 1970s), and perfectly delightful nuttiness (“millions of Naderites are trying to peddle windmill farms, even though these inefficient H.G. Wells monsters are already destroying the scenic beauty of places like Palm Springs and the Dutch coast”).

Scenic beauty of the Dutch coast?

When Mellon goes on the aesthetic offensive against unsightly windmills as compared to the ever-so-sightly coal-fired plant, oil refinery, and nuclear power catastrophe-in-waiting we must snap to attention. Mellon may be interested to know that in Austin we can purchase “green energy” from the windmill farm near Fort Stockton, Texas, for 2.85 cents per kilowatt hour, and that cost is guaranteed not to increase for the next eight years. Regular electricity from Austin Energy, a municipally owned company, is now undergoing a three-step price increase that will move its fuel charge from 1.774 cents to 2.796 cents per kilowatt hour by the end of January.

Mellon works for our most respected financial newspaper: If the Journal could get a 10-year, fixed-price energy contract at 2.85 per kilowatt hour, would the Journal take it? (In New York City, the price for power generation charged by ConEd hovers around 10 cents per kilowatt hour.)

As for the aesthetics of windmills: Cars pull over by the highway in West Texas so the kids can watch the things go round and round.

Clean, cheap, endless energy no radioactive waste, no air pollution, no strip mining, no oil spills, and no gas-pipeline explosions. Yet the Bush administration wants to spend billions subsidizing coal, oil, gas, and nuclear power and leave both wind and solar technology unsubsidized and unhelped. Now, is that a stupid policy or what?

Every energy source in this country has been vastly subsidized, including hydropower by government-built dams. If wind power were subsidized at a fraction of what we already spend with tax breaks, loopholes, and outright corporate welfare for polluting and destructive energy sources, it would already be the cheapest, not to mention the cleanest, energy source available. This is not pie-in-sky Naderism (whatever that is). This is right now, 2.85 cents per kilowatt hour.

And why do we have such dumb, damaging, self-destructive energy policies? Do you think it has anything to do with corporate campaign contributions? Do you think it has any connection to the fact that Dick Cheney wrote the National Energy Plan? (In secret, with the advice of oil, gas, and coal executives and lobbyists.) A couple of Ken Lay’s suggestions in his famous memo to Cheney were incorporated word-for-word in the Cheney plan.

As for the always-egregious Tom DeLay, the Exterminator, two years ago he blocked a program of loan guarantees for upgrades to the transmission system. Said he of the Democratic proposal, “It’s pure demagoguery.” The first thing he did when the lights went out was to blame the Democrats, of course.

Now, according to The New York Times, the Republicans are refusing again to pass stand-alone transmission-grid improvements. They insist on including the rest of the Cheney rip-and-run plan, including drilling for oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and other economically marginal and environmentally disastrous schemes.

These free-market fundamentalists are on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of economics, the wrong side of technology, the wrong side of progress, and the wrong side of the environment. Better, cleaner, cheaper sources of power are now available. Get your heads out of the sand, your asses in gear, and join the 21st century. This is not “Naderite” romanticism, you dumb schmucks. It’s already making money.

Categories
Music Music Features

Down-South Flavas

Once upon a time, hip-hop’s “third coast” was the music’s red-headed stepchild. No more. As illustrated by not only the sales charts but also by this month’s issue of the hip-hop bible The Source (dedicated to “The New South” and proclaiming itself “The Dirtiest Issue Ever”), the South is now ascendant, a coming of age that can be heard in three recent smash albums from the region: St. Louis rapper Chingy’s Jackpot, David Banner’s Mississippi: The Album, and Three 6 Mafia’s Da Unbreakables, which debuted in the Top 10 on the Billboard album charts just when it seemed that Memphis’ most successful rappers were about to fall off.

Is St. Louis the South? It’s an eternal question, but Chingy seems to belong. If his clear drawl and St. Louis’ otherness in relation to hip-hop’s lingering bicoastal biases isn’t enough, then his status as the hottest member of the Dirty South Mix Tape Tour (which will hit the Mud Island Amphitheater Friday, August 29th, along with Banner, Lil Jon & the Eastside Boyz, Field Mob, and the Ying Yang Twins) would seem to seal the deal.

On Jackpot, Chingy comes across as Nelly’s more shameless, double-r-dropping lil bro, his single-of-the-summer candidate “Right Thurr” responsible for both the vernacular fad of the year (“I’ll be late for dinner, durr. I’m getting my hurr cut after work and the oil changed in the curr. Hey, wurr did I leave my keys?”) and probably my second-favorite recent lyrical moment when he rhymes “porkchop” with “shortstop” (which ranks just behind the part in “So Gone” where Monica threatens to drive by my house in her unmarked car).

But as deliriously fun as “Right Thurr” is, the rest of Jackpot reveals an Eddie Haskell quality to Chingy, his likable, charismatic horndog persona masking an uglier misogynistic streak that surfaces in the album’s relentless pimp talk. And the protest-too-much aftertaste of Chingy’s pimpcentric subject matter mostly negates the charms of his St. Louis sound, probably the lightest and most nimble regional style hip-hop has to offer right now.

If the St. Louis sound is hip-hop’s airiest, then the Memphis sound might be the heaviest, the thickest, and, for cultural outsiders, the most impenetrable of hip-hop’s regional styles. On Da Unbreakables, Three 6 Mafia tries their hand at a “Right Thurr”-style sex anthem with “Shake Dat Jelly,” and the song’s failure is instructive: Three 6 sounds a lot more convincing singing the praises of Jolly Rancher-laced cough syrup on the astoundingly weird “Rainbow Colors,” where Robitussin rhythms + dramatic choral sample + Houston rapper Lil’ Flip = mesmerizing silliness. Sex has never been the group’s most compelling subject, and the masochistic chant “Give me head til I’m dead” on “Put Cha D. in Her Mouth” is probably the most unintentionally revealing explanation their music has ever offered.

But shrunk to a four-piece after losing members Gangsta Boo, La Chat, and Project Pat for one reason or another, Three 6 Mafia has come back strong on Da Unbreakables, probably the most listenable album the crew has ever made. Any type of crossover pop success for Three 6 is an unintended bonus: They make music for a loyal core audience (mostly real-life gangstas, wannabes, and outsiders titillated by racialized social pathology), and they supply what this audience wants. Those on the outside looking in aren’t likely to find much of interest there, but given how reliably lucrative the strategy is, it’s hard to fault them for it. So if belligerent chants like “Let’s Start a Riot,” “Beat em To Da Floor,” and “They Bout To Find Yo Body” are strictly for the core, the rest of us can attend to the weirdness of “Rainbow Colors” or “Bin Laden” (a brand of weed, apparently) and the oh-so-welcome presence of Lil’ Flip, the smoothest thug rapper since Too Short (whom he references on Banner’s “Like a Pimp” single). Flip lends needed vocal gravitas to the Three 6 sound, his matter-of-fact verse on the single “Ridin Spinners” (“Throw the Rover keys/And let me roll/Cause this the way we ball/I’m just letting you know/We like our music slow/But our cars go faster”) the highlight of the record.

But the best of the bunch by far is Banner, a hulking MC who comes across on Mississippi like a hip-hop Howlin’ Wolf.

A decade ago, Arrested Development’s “Tennessee” approached the South as a place to return to a reverse migration where the children of civil-rights-era parents could “climb the trees [their] forefathers hung from.” That was an evocative way into a subject that hip-hop has rarely touched, but it’s no match for Banner’s, which examines “Mississippi” from the standpoint of those who never left, chastising fellow MCs by labeling the state “the place your mama ran from” and “the place you never mention in your songs.”

The title track one of the most essential hip-hop cuts of the year, if not ever is the album’s opus, a meditative acoustic guitar leading into a fast-paced flow a lot more Atlanta than Memphis, Banner reciting a long list of what Mississippi is: a place where “my soul still don’t feel free and a flag means more than me,” where “Medgar Evers lived and Medgar Evers died,” where other rappers used to visit in the summertime, where “The rebel flag still ain’t burnin’/New schools but the black kids still ain’t learnin’,” this litany balanced by colorful day-to-day details (it’s also a place where the clubs still serve fried chicken).

What’s also interesting is that, while Banner is the rare major-label rapper (and even more rare Southern rapper) with something to say, he still can’t stop himself from indulging in the genre staples, mixing chaotic tear-da-club-up anthems like “F*** ‘Em” and “Might Getcha” with more introspective tracks like “Mississippi” and the sad, gorgeous “Cadillac on 22’s,” which acknowledges the dichotomy.

As wide-ranging and compelling a debut as Mississippi is, the album hints that Banner could have even greater things in store: The record’s down-home ease and local color and its tension between thug-by-the-numbers content and big ideas (and, thus, big risks he denounces the Bush administration and its war repeatedly and ferociously) is extremely reminiscent of the first record by a pair of Southern hip-hop pioneers you may have heard about: Outkast, whose desperately awaited new double-disc Speakerboxxx/The Love Below could finally relocate the capital of hip-hop below the Mason-Dixon before the year’s over.

Categories
Art Art Feature

Here and There

UrbanArt moving to new location

There is a sign at the corner of Madison and Third that reads, “Create, design, make a mark that will last forever.” It marks the future location of the UrbanArt Commission, and Carissa Hussong, executive director of the UAC, hopes that they will be moving in the next few weeks. This will be the UAC’s third home since its inception in 1997, having first shared space with the Greater Memphis Arts Council and then with Storage U.S.A. This time, the UAC will be sharing space with the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects. It is a pairing that Hussong says makes perfect sense since many of the UAC’s public-art projects depend on the close collaboration of artist and architect.

“We are creating a space that is a laboratory for art and design,” Hussong says, “and we’ll see what comes of it.”

Hussong believes that the new facility will help to demystify the process of creating public art. She points to brown-bag lunches as one avenue to bring art and architects together.

“There is so much new technology, and so many new building materials out there. [There have been brown-bag lunches for] suppliers trying to reach architects. Well, why not artists too? It’s a great opportunity for architects to realize that, with a small artist’s fee, we can make something really nice. And it’s a chance for artists to see these new technologies and say, ‘Wow, I don’t have to cut tile.'”

Jerry Dye named artistic director of Voices of the South

Last season, Voices of the South, a local troupe dedicated to staging works based on the visions of Southern authors, presented its first full season. Though it had existed in some form or another since the mid-Nineties and had attracted the attention of regional theater groups and arts educators, VOS’ public performances had been a bit sporadic. Now, with the appointment of U of M alum Jerry Dye to the position of artistic director, the group hopes to take another leap forward. While Dye, the younger brother of John Dye of Touched by an Angel fame, has been a frequent contributor to Memphis theater, he has spent the past five years splitting his time among Memphis, San Francisco, and New York.

“After eight years you start to get a clear idea about what you really do, not what you should do or what you think you want to do,” says Dye.

Beginning September 5th at TheatreWorks, Voices of the South presents Homegrown, a sampler of regionally flavored performances, which they hope to develop as an annual event. In addition to the collection of short plays and performances, Homegrown will have music by the Gypsy Blues Caravan with Charlotte Taylor on Friday, September 5th, O’Landa Draper’s Associates on Saturday, September 6th, and the Dempseys on Sunday, September 7th.

New directions for Germantown Community Theatre

“There has to be a way to become a profitable nonprofit, so to speak,” says Steve McManus of First Tennessee Bank, who has recently taken over as president of the board of Germantown Community Theatre. McManus, noting that GCT, like most Memphis theaters, has seen a significant drop in attendance since the economy went south, wants to initiate a more businesslike environment.

“We have to sell more tickets and build better relationships with sponsors,” he says. One of the ways he hopes to achieve his goal is by sharpening GCT’s telemarketing skills.

“I can tell you from my background in brokerage that during a bear market you have to pick up the phone and call clients. If you are just sending out printed materials without making follow-up calls, you’ll be lucky to see a one half of 1 percent response.”

McManus also realizes that GCT is a bit isolated on Forest Hill-Irene Road. And he knows that this is a serious challenge. “We have to do a better job of attracting talent,” McManus says. “We need to make sure that actors and directors feel appreciated from the minute they walk in the door.”

In brief

Representatives from Artspace, the Minneapolis-based organization that helps to create and manage affordable living and working spaces for artists, return to Memphis on September 9th. Artspace has been working with a local group called Art Brew, which hopes to turn the old Tennessee Brewery on Tennessee Street into an artists’ incubator with living space, work space, performance space, etc. For more information, you can find them on the Web at ArtspaceProjects.org.

Lynne Silverstein, the education director of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, will be the featured guest at Arts on the Move: The Governor’s Regional Arts Conference for West Tennessee, which will be held in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, on September 9th. The conference features a number of workshops covering a broad range of disciplines for arts professionals and arts educators. The cost is $20 for those who register in advance, $30 the day of the event. For more details, contact Flint Clouse, (615) 741-2093.

Categories
Cover Feature News

A World Away

He used to be homeless. Now, he’s got a small house just across the river from Memphis on Dacus Lake in Marion, Arkansas, with what he says is the best view on that side of the Mississippi.

A step out of the front door of his makeshift home a wooden dwelling accented with lime-green paint and a string of Busch beer flags places him in a shady grove with an excellent view of the Memphis skyline. From the right side of his lot, he can see the lights of the M-shaped Hernando DeSoto Bridge, counterbalanced by the gleaming Pyramid.

He calls himself “Ieee!” (pronounced just how it looks and vocalized in a high-pitched scream). He’s a gray-bearded construction worker, who, after falling on hard times, got back on his feet with a little help from his friends. They bought him a place at Dacus Lake, a 600-acre oxbow of the Mississippi inhabited by 50 or so permanent and weekend residents.

Ieee! is just one of a peaceful bunch who live in campers or trailers, makeshift wooden houses and converted school and church buses. He claims to enjoy nothing more than freedom and a little peace and quiet and, of course, fishing. From the Memphis side, it’s a pastoral scene of towering trees and grass as green as a fresh crayon. From the highway just across the bridge, trailers and tiny houses come into view.

At Dacus Lake, it’s hard not to be reminded of times when things were simpler, people were nicer, and days went by more slowly.

The Long and Winding Road

The road that leads to Dacus Lake is long, narrow, and winding. On either side of the four-mile stretch from the “Old Bridge” to the lake, fields of cotton, soybeans, and other crops fan out into infinity. It’s easy to forget you’re just minutes away from the bustle of the city.

At the end of the road, a white-lettered sign hanging from the side of a bait shop welcomes visitors to Dacus Lake. The bait shop is an unpainted wooden structure on stilts that serves as a hub for the community. It’s also the place for visitors to check in and pay the $2 fee for bank fishing or the $6 fee to put a boat in.

As for the fishing: Locals say there’s some whoppers swimming in the lake, including some unusual specimens that swim downstream from up north.

“We’ve seen some fish that we didn’t even know what the hell they was,” says Terry Clem, co-manager of the bait shop. “This guy came in here the other day with a fish that had big ole bug eyes. It looked kind of like a trout, but when you took him off the ice, it turned black. The river brings all kinds of fish down here.”

The prospect of fish o’plenty attracts all kinds of people. While most of the residents might be considered blue-collar types, the lake also draws quite a few more upscale anglers looking to take their bass boats out for a spin.

Most Dacus residents are white males, although there are exceptions.

“There’s a lot of guys out here on disability, and they’ve come out here because they have nothing else to do. They’re usually divorced or never been married,” explains Lori Glessing, who lives at Dacus with her husband and three kids.

A drive through the community during weekday business hours reveals a ghost-town-like quality. Susie Countryman, who lives in a camper with her husband, says residents are often mistaken for migrants by outsiders, although most of them hold daytime jobs.

But it’s the eccentric appearance of their homes that attracts gawkers and is probably the source of speculation that residents live nomadic lifestyles. Most are on wheels or raised several feet off the ground to keep them from flooding when the river gets high.

Mary Lou Branch, Susie Countryman’s mother, moved to Dacus from Chicago to live near her daughter and to get away from city life. Countryman owned a yellow school bus, so she gave it to her mother to convert into a mobile home.

Inside Branch’s bus, the small kitchen has a dining area fashioned from two school bus seats, one turned backward so that both face a table in between. The rest of the seats have been removed, and a small air conditioner sits in one of the windows. A teal curtain at the back of the bus sections off the bedroom area.

Bus homes are only allowed on one side of the lake. The encampments at Dacus are divided up into two areas one near the bait shop on the south side of the lake and another a few miles down the road on the lake’s northwest side. Clem says he’s trying to clean up the “bait shop side”.

“We’re getting rid of the buses. I’m trying to clean this place up and make it look nice,” says Clem. “Some of them are pretty nice inside, but the outsides don’t look so good.”

But when the river floods, those buses come in handy. When the Mississippi rises, it tends to flood out the residents without raised homes, forcing them to flee.

Head for High Ground

A.D. Peden, a five-year resident of the area, lives in a small trailer with a yellow Labrador retriever named Gus. He loves the peace and quiet of the lake and the fact that there’s “no fightin’ and no loud music playin’.”

But if there’s one thing he hates about life at Dacus, it’s the floods. When the waters start to rise, Peden and several others in mobile homes and buses are forced to move to a farm road that runs alongside nearby Interstate 40, which usually stays above the flood waters.

“When it floods, I have to go stay with friends in Memphis or my family because there’s no electricity in my trailer when it’s parked out by the interstate,” he says.

But some see the floods as an excuse to party. Branch and several others with generators stay in their mobile homes along the highway while the water’s high. They grill out, drink beer, and wave at motorists.

“It’s a party and a half. We were all out there drinking Budweiser and everything,” says Countryman. “The truckers on the interstate liked us. We’d flash them and get honks.”

The Mississippi River typically floods at least once a year sometimes just a few feet and sometimes up to 40 feet. Those living in elevated homes usually stay put. They park their cars on the road with the buses and trailers and take a boat to their car if they need to leave.

Residents usually have time to prepare since the water rises slowly. Anything located below porch level, like grills or lawn furniture, must be taken inside or tied up or it will float downstream.

“During the floods, we’d stand on the front porch and see coolers and barbecue grills and everything coming by. My husband would get out in his boat and chase them down,” says Billie Babb, who used to run the Dacus Lake bait shop with her husband. She’s since moved back to Memphis for health reasons.

Those whose homes are built on stilts are generally safe from the floods, but not always. Glessing, whose trailer sits about 10 feet above ground, said in 1996 water actually got inside. But she says the waters generally stay under her front porch, allowing her 13-year-old son to jump off the front steps and pretend the lake is the “biggest swimming pool in the world.”

“When it floods, everything’s just gone. There’s no fields, no roads, nothing but my trailer sitting here,” says Glessing. “The last time it flooded, someone stopped [on the interstate] and was taking pictures with a telephoto lens of my trailer surrounded by water. They think it’s so neat because it just looks like it’s sitting here floating.”

Ieee!’s small wooden home isn’t mobile. He has to take a trailer out to the farm road while his home sits covered by water. He says his floor is usually about 12 inches underwater, and it’s been as high as the top of his shed.

But he says he’s developed a plan that will allow him to stay on the lake through the floods. Anchored to the bank in front of his home is the aluminum base of a pontoon boat. He plans to fashion a home on top of it, enabling him to float until the waters recede.

It may seem like a hassle to have to relocate once a year, but as one Dacus Laker explains, “If people didn’t like it, they probably wouldn’t live over here.” Residents say they’ve gotten used to having to come back and pick up the pieces. They say the peace and quiet make it worth the effort.

A Piece of History

In 1995, when Billie Babb and her husband Charlie were running the bait shop, a group of Native Americans came through the area as part of a Trail of Tears reenactment. Dacus is on the Bell’s Route trail, one of the major routes used in the federal government’s forced removal of the Cherokee Indians in 1838 and 1839. The trail ran across Tennessee, through central Arkansas, and ended in Oklahoma.

“They stopped and spent the night here, and they had their fire and ceremonies,” remembers Babb. “When they touched bank on the Arkansas side, they had a ceremony with their medicine man. I forget how many there were, but they came from all over from Canada to Florida and they were all dressed in their native dress. We fed them bologna sandwiches at the bait shop, and they started out again the next day.”

The Dacus Lake area has a rich history. The lake was once a bend in the Mississippi’s course where the river turned southeast, passing the fourth Chickasaw Bluff and Memphis. Over time, erosion severed it from the river, forming the oxbow that it is today.

A settlement was established near the area in 1797 by Benjamin Foy, who was sent from Louisiana as an agent to Native Americans in the Memphis area. The government eventually forced him to leave the east side of the river, so he set up a camp on the Arkansas side known as Camp de la Esperanza, which means “camp of hope.” The name was later changed to Hopefield.

It was the second settlement in the state of Arkansas and played a crucial role as a base for Confederate guerrilla forces during the Civil War. Several Civil War steamers were sunk in the area. The town of Hopefield was burned to the ground by Union troops in 1863. An account of the incident from the Memphis Daily Bulletin in 1863 reads: “The little white houses, with their green shutters and little fenced yards so peaceful as we gazed upon them from the bluffs yesterday, are at this moment smoking cinders or red pillars of vengeful fire … .”

What was left of Hopefield after the war was eventually swallowed by the river, and the bend known as Hopefield Bend formed Dacus Lake.

Today, the area surrounding Dacus is known as the Esperanza Historical and Nature Trail. At one time, 15 historical markers noted significant events in the area’s history. They were put there by a Boy Scout troop years ago, but most were grown over with brush and weeds when the Babbs rediscovered them in the mid-’90s.

“They were in a big clump of trees and my son had to go in there and chop to get them out. He stood them back up and washed them off,” remembers Babb.

Now only metal poles protrude from the ground where they once stood.

The encampment around the lake was formed sometime in the 1950s, although no one is quite sure how or why it was founded. Several residents remember spending time there as children, and Babb says she used to hear lots of tales from people stopping in the bait shop.

“They’d say they used to go fishing here with their daddy or grandfather, and it would only be like 50 cents to go fishing,” she says. “You could camp out, but they didn’t have tents back then. You slept on the ground.”

Fifty years later, Dacus Lake hasn’t changed all that much. The trees and fields and water offer tranquility. It’s hard not to think back to grandpa’s tales of fishing barefoot on a lazy summer afternoon.

“It’s one of the last places the poor man can go fishing,” says Babb. “And if you don’t like fishing, you can just go out on the lake and enjoy yourself. It’s just like you’re in another world.”

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

friday, 29

The Drawer Boy about a young theater researcher who comes to live with two good friends on a farm opens at TheatreWorks tonight. It s the last Friday of the month, which means it s time again for the South Main Trolley Art Tour, which ought to be even more fun than ever with the Memphis Music & Heritage Festival going on down there. In addition to all of the galleries and shops hosting open houses, there s an opening reception at Durden Gallery for Influences, paintings by David George Hinske; a performance by Memphis recording artist Bruce Carroll, and a Minty Mojitos Night party at Tonic. At Isaac Hayes Food Music Passion, tonight kicks off the Lane College Memphis Blues Labor Day Football Classic with a concert by Chante Moore & Kenny Latimore. Tonight s Orpheum Summer Classic Movie Series Feature is Gone with the Wind. Tonight kicks off this weekend s Dingofest V, with some 130 bands in 13 clubs on Beale Street. The Nokie Taylor Quartet is at CafÇ Soul tonight. Calabus, 3 Guys That Hate You, and Adios Gringos are at Murphy s. And, as always, The Chris Scott Band is at Poplar Lounge.

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
Film Features Film/TV

Life As We Know It

he Secret Lives of Dentists

A few years back, a well-acted, well-directed examination of suburban marital and familial distress took home the Best Picture Oscar. If Alan Rudolph’s new The Secret Lives of Dentists doesn’t match that achievement next spring, it won’t be because it isn’t every bit the film (or more, really) that American Beauty was, but only because it isn’t quite as showy or grandiose.

Adapted from a Jane Smiley novella (titled The Age of Grief), Dentists covers much the same territory as American Beauty, only it’s more tightly wound in the scope of characters it takes in, in the acting styles, in its emotional focus and more realistic, tapping into the daily rhythms of ordinary American lives in a manner rarely seen on the big screen.

Indie-identified actors Campbell Scott and Hope Davis play Dave and Dana Hurst, a couple who met in dental school and now share a marriage, a practice, two mortgages, and three daughters. There’s an unease to this seemingly happy couple that’s apparent early on: Dana has a small role in a community opera and she sings her part around the kitchen table only to find Dave too busy with the kids and the kids too busy with each other to really pay attention. Later, at the performance, Dave catches a glimpse of Dana sharing a warm embrace and kiss with another man backstage.

There are two different “secret lives” in this film: There’s the affair Dana may or may not be having, which happens offscreen, and there’s Dave’s interior life, which drives the film. We get Dave’s flashback memories of his and Dana’s relationship (school, work, home, kids, sex ) and his comic-nightmare fantasy projections of Dana’s potential illicit behavior. But most prominently we get Dave’s interior monologue, a facet of the novella converted to the screen not through voiceover but through the insertion of an extra character Slater (Denis Leary), an unruly patient whose flamboyant anger is the polar opposite of Doctor Dave’s repressed dependability. After an early run-in with Slater, Dave begins to imagine him as a devil’s advocate, the voice urging Dave to confront Dana about her perceived infidelity when he’d rather ignore it and hope for a return to normalcy. Director Alan Rudolph puts Leary within the same screen space as the rest of the family around the kitchen table, in the family car allowing the viewer to hear Dave’s internal struggle in the middle of his everyday family interactions. It’s a risky gambit, but it works, Leary’s snappy style lending a nice contrast to the coolness of Scott’s and Davis’ performances.

The home life shown in this film is one of the most realistic and most affecting seen on the big screen in a long time. The Hurst daughters are a remarkably uncute and finely drawn creation, fitting in perfectly with Scott’s and Davis’ profoundly unsentimental and reserved performances. And precisely because no one in this film is striving too hard for effect, you feel the hard weight of this couple’s marital malaise all the more. This is especially true during a long stretch in which the entire family contracts the flu, one at a time (the family doctor had earlier cautioned that one daughter’s constant stomach problems were an emotional reaction to parental tension), in a five-day marathon that presents family life as the epic work that it is.

In the end, The Secret Lives of Dentists is perhaps most powerful for its refusal to indulge the kind of hysterics or dramatic plot twists that are so common in films about infidelity or the perception of domesticity as a prison (American Beauty and Unfaithful coming immediately to mind). Rather, this film finds plenty of drama in the pregnant silences, subtle gestures, and daily struggles that mark a marriage in trouble.

Chris Herrington

Dear Fred,

I enjoyed our conversation the other day and certainly appreciate you remarking that every time you read one of my reviews, you feel like I am talking directly to you. Would that all of my beloved readership felt the same way. I would feel complete in my avocation as an amateur journalist. Until then, this one’s for you, Fred.

I think you would like this new movie Camp. The title has meanings, though. It’s about a camp and it’s campy. Cute, eh? The camp in question is Camp Ovation a performing-arts camp in upstate New York and refuge for the kind of high school kids I think you would be very familiar with, coming from Germantown High School and its outstanding theater program. Now, at Camp McKee, my own Boy Scout camp, we had very little in the way of the performing arts, aside from scoutmaster-skewering skits and songs like “Do Your Ears Hang Low” to keep us entertained. Camp Ovation produces a new show every two weeks, ranging from Beckett to Bacharach. It’s really remarkable.

There’s an interesting cross section of teens here, a little different from other teen-sploitation cinema like The Goonies, any Friday the 13th camp movie, or the American Pies. The boys are gay, for the most part. Except for Vlad (Daniel Letterle). Vlad, upon his audition, solicits the following remark from a giddy acting teacher: “An honest-to-God straight boy!” I don’t know how things are at Germantown, but this is often a Eureka! moment in high school theater especially when casting a musical like Oklahoma! or West Side Story that requires a certain amount of theatrical machismo. Vlad makes the cut: He plays guitar, rides a skateboard, AND plays football. So he’s straight, right?

Also at Camp Ovation: a wannabe drag queen, Michael (Robin de Jesus), meek but fiery Ellen (Joanna Chilcoat), and a Peppermint Patty/Marcy duo in Jill and Fritzi (Alana Allen and Anna Kendrick, respectively). One of the earliest and funniest in-jokes transpires between the arrogant sexpot Jill and the nerdy, intense Fritzi at the bus stop on the way to camp. Jill doesn’t remember Fritzi until Fritzi reminds Jill that they had done ‘Night, Mother together the year previous. ‘Night, Mother is a harrowing one-hour drama with a cast of two. It’s insane that Jill wouldn’t remember that experience, and such is the subtlety/broadness of the comedy in Camp.

In between zany production numbers and scenes from overly artsy-fartsy performance pieces, Camp tries to be perceptive about what teenagers are going through in their high school years particularly the sensitive, different kind of kids who end up attracted to theater and the safety of its particular haven. This doesn’t work so well. The mix of comedy and dramedy is a little bit clunky when making the transition from, say, the hilarious ridiculousness of a 17-year-old white girl belting out “And I Am Telling You” from Dreamgirls to the pathos of young Michael, in his debut as Romeo, noticing that his parents aren’t in the audience as promised because his father is ashamed of him. Writer/director Todd Graff just doesn’t know how to tell this interesting story. He just tells it.

But Camp‘s schizophrenia is usually overcome by the charm of good performances and those great, weird musical numbers. That fantastic rendering of “Turkey Lurkey” really made me want to see Promises, Promises. And the unintended, barf-laden duet of “The Ladies Who Lunch” from Company will forever replace Elaine Stritch’s as its definitive performance. Also interesting about Camp is Vlad the kind of earnest, fresh-faced young man whom everybody wants and who thinks it’s his role in life to make girls (or boys) feel better about themselves by making out with them and then dropping them. The emotional climax of the film involves Vlad getting called out on this and the consequences (or nonconsequences) that befall him. He’s not good, he’s not bad, he’s just nice. In theater and in life, there are many Vlads. And they are infuriating.

So, Fred. We both know Vlads, we both know musical theater, and we both love a good laugh. I liked Camp, as bizarre and inexplicable as its humor is, and I think you will like it too. Unlike Waiting for Guffman, a near-perfect parody of theater that all types can enjoy, this may not appeal to our normal-er friends, but if they would be as excited about an eye-popping cameo by musical-maestro Stephen Sondheim as I was, this is the movie for them. So, say hi to Scotty for me and take him and a bunch of your Germantown High School pals to see this movie.

Your friend,

Bo —Bo List

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
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
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.”