Month: September 2003

Personal Best

Post author By
Post date September 26, 2003

Every year, along about June, we at the Flyer start thinking about our annual “Best of Memphis” issue. Not because we want to, but because we have to. It’s simply too big a project to put off until the last minute. This year, we had a June meeting at which the greatest minds in the building came together to discuss the theme of this year’s issue. We came up with nothing, nada, bupkis.

No big deal, we thought. “Let’s meet again next month,” we said brightly. “Everybody put on your thinking caps.”

But the July meeting didn’t happen. We got busy with other things, including surviving “The Storm.” By August, desperation was setting in. The marketing department wanted a theme; the ad department wanted to know what we were up to. We hadn’t a clue. The editorial staff tossed around numerous ideas, most of them lame. Someone finally said, “Let’s just call it ‘The Best We Could Come Up With.'” Ha, ha. Chuckles all around, then a little silence. Then, a collective “Why not?”

That morphed into something called “Personal Best,” in which the staff wrote whatever they wanted around the “Best” theme. Sort of like those essays about “What I Did Last Summer” that you had to write in high school. Which led to the high school yearbook concept. Which led to “yearbook” pictures of the staff. Which led us to this: probably the best “Best of” issue we’ve ever done.

Of course, that’s just my personal opinion. — Bruce VanWyngarden, editor

THE BEST OF MEMPHIS ISSUE

thursday, 25

Post author By Tim Sampson
Post date September 25, 2003

Did anyone smell that odor in the air in Memphis last week? Smelled kind of like bull feces? Was it a raw sewage backup? Rotting garbage leftover from the storm? And there seemed to be a layer of slime in parts of town. Oh, wait a minute. I forgot. For some inexplicable reason, someone let Attorney General John Ashcroft come to Memphis to speak. To speak about his so-called Patriot Act. You know, the one that allows the government to hold suspects of crime in detention for unlimited amounts of time with no legal representation at all and no contact with family. Now, that s what I call Patriotic. Forget the Constitution (and how sickening was it the other day when W. unveiled the newly restored Constitution, something he ignores on a regular basis?). Ass, I mean, Ashcroft also spoke about the Patriot Act s Section 215 law that allows the FBI to monitor our personal records regarding what we read. He says no one should get in a huff about that one, either. He also talked about crime being down, thanks to him. I guess he hasn t heard the statistics about this group of people: 29 have been accused of spousal abuse; 7 have been arrested for fraud; 19 have been accused of writing bad checks; 117 have directly or indirectly bankrupted at least 2 businesses; 3 have done time for assault; 71 cannot get a credit card due to bad credit; 14 have been arrested on drug-related charges; 8 have been arrested for shoplifting; 21 are currently defendants in lawsuits; 84 have been arrested for drunk driving in the last year. Nope, those are not the statistics from a prison group. Those people, friends, are members of congress. All this, and they still won t pass a law to keep you from going to jail for smokeing a little pot. But back to Mr. Ashcroft. Let s forget the FACT that the man looks like Ray Bolger all puffed up from alcohol poisoning. He used to and maybe still does make his staff have sing-a-longs led by him during morning meetings. Why do I get the feeling this man dresses up like Little Red Riding Hood and watches gladiator movies on the weekends while he taps into our personal e-mails? One politician, perhaps, summed up Mr. Ashcroft best. In a speech earlier this year to a press corps, which, for some reason, got little or no coverage in the press, our own Congressman Harold Ford Jr. ended his remarks by saying, and I paraphrase, There s one man who wanted to be here with me tonight to speak to you, Attorney General John Ashcroft. But if you have something you d like to say to him, just talk into the centerpiece on your table! Well, said, I d say. And now here s a brief look at some of what s going on around town this week. Tonight s Mid-South Fair concert is by le Cracker. Mutant Space Bats of Doom, Staff, Tim Prudhomme, and The Grundies at Young Avenue Deli. At the Caravan tonight, there s a show by , And Then Again, and one of Memphis hottest new bands making their debut live show, Hopes Like The Hindenberg. And the master of the blues, B.B. King, is at the club that bears his name tonight and tomorrow night.

News News Feature

‘THE SHAME OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM’

Post author By Kenneth Neill
Post date September 25, 2003

I’ve been in this business for the best part of thirty years now, and for most of that time, I’ve been proud to be a tiny, relatively inconspicuous part of something called the “American news media.”

I was not very proud last night. Yesterday evening, I happened to watch a few of the network TV news broadcasts, focused as they were, primarily, upon Tuesday’s UN speech by President Bush, and upon another interesting news development, one datelined Guantanomo Bay, Cuba.

Most of you saw reporting about that, I’m sure; but in case you missed it, here’s the transcript of the BBC WorldNews’s 5 pm CDT lead on Tuesday:

A US airman who worked at the detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has been charged with espionage and aiding the enemy, the Pentagon has said.

Senior Airman Ahmad al-Halabi, who is in jail at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, was charged after recently serving as an interpreter at the base, said Pentagon spokesman Major Michael Shavers.

All the American networks played this “big,” this particular item rivaling George W. Bush’s UN speech for top billing. On CNN, for example, Wolf Blitzer was positively breathless about this “new development in the War on Terror.”

The BBC World Service also played the Al-Halabi indictment large, making it their second news item, after a summary of UN head Kofi Annan’s opening remarks to the General Assembly. But unlike the BBC, most of the others skimmed over this little detail, also taken from the transcript of the BBC’s live 5 pm CDT telecast:

Mr Halabi faces more than 30 charges relating to espionage, aiding the enemy, disobeying orders, and making false official statements. Mr Halabi was arrested on 23 July but news of his detention only emerged this week. The BBC’s David Bamford, in Washington, said defense officials would not say why they had kept the two arrests quiet.

Interesting. Al-Halabi was arrested on July 23rd, and the Pentagon just “happened” to announce his indictment two months to the day later, on the same day as a potentially controversial Presidential speech at the UN?

I’m sorry. Call me a jaded journalistic skeptic, but I smell a rat.

Particularly since September 23rd’s news was already due to be tilted in a direction possibly unfavorable to the Bush administration. A story on a major “War on Terrorism” breakthrough, one that hits the wire simultaneously with Bush’s UN speech. Why do I see the hidden hand of Karl Rove behind this?

No, not because I’m paranoid, although this administration will do that to you. I suggest this news nugget about Al-Halabi was released on that very day because (a) the President was delivering a bound-to-be-controversial address at the UN, (b) French Premier Jacques Chirac was also speaking, and would likely — from the Bush perspective — have nothing good to say, and (c) Iraq Administrator Paul Bremer was being grilled by Senate Democrats, a news development also unlikely to “come out” positive.

I’m not surprised that the Pentagon coincidentally decided to release the news of Al-Halabi indictment at the same time all these other things were happening. Not surprised, and not bitter, in the least. Hey, the Bush PR flacks are just doing their job, and doing it well. If they can make the Blitzers and Rathers of the world hop when they say hop, more power to them.

My problem is not with the Bushies, at least not here. My problem is with the national-media guppies, who swallowed yesterday’s Al-Halabi gambit hook, line and sinker. This is nothing new, of course. The national news media has been following the administration’s lead at every step of the way with its Iraq war coverage. But there was something particularly galling, and shameless, in yesterday’s treatment of the Al-Halabi incident.

I think the Bush Administration owes a lot to its shills in medialand, to the Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters of the world. Thanks to this continuous right-wing bombast, a mood of uncertainty has been created, at the highest media levels. Constant harassment from the right about “liberal media bias” has left national TV news leaders afraid of their own shadows. Calling attention to details like those surrounding yesterday’s indictment certainly won’t play in talk-show circles.

And so on Tuesday, the Pentagon spoke, and TV news listened. All the networks fell in line, speaking with one voice, about the Al-Hamani indictment. Not a one among them had the courage or independence to move this manufactured “scoop” down the charts, on the grounds that it was a two-month-old story simply being released at the administration’s convenience. Not a one.

However the Al-Hamani story was reported, that critical timing issue should have been front and center, as it was in the BBC report. September 23rd was not the day this story “broke.” It was the date the Pentagon had the story “broken.” And our broken media just went happily along for the ride.

(Kenneth Neill is publisher/CEO of Contemporary Media, Inc., the parent company of The Memphis Flyer.)

News News Feature

CITY BEAT

Post author By Ed Weathers
Post date September 25, 2003

LOOKING OUT FOR NUMBER ONE

In an unprecedented tax grab, downtown’s power elite plans to corral as much as $250 million in property taxes over 30 years for the exclusive benefit of downtown at the expense of the rest of Memphis.

The plan working its way through the City Council is known as a Tax Increment Financing District, or TIF. Here’s how it works: Over the past 25 years, the Center City Commission (CCC) has granted property-tax freezes as an incentive to downtown development and property ownership. Several properties are now “rolling off” their 20- or 30-year freeze and are supposed to start paying full freight.

But now the rules are being changed in the middle of the game. Instead of going into the city’s general fund, downtown property taxes would be earmarked for downtown projects under the guidance of the CCC. The general fund would be left with less revenue, and city taxpayers, who already pay 50 percent higher property taxes than Nashville residents, will likely face a property-tax increase after the upcoming election.

It’s a measure of the clout downtowners have that the TIF proposal has gotten this far. If the residents of Central Gardens or River Oaks or Zip Code 38117 banded together and proposed hoarding their property taxes (less 24 percent for public debt service, as the TIF proposes), it would be branded as the betrayal of the spirit of democracy that it is. Only downtown has the clout, push, and publicity machine to pull it off.

An influential downtowner candidly told me that, given a choice between sending his taxes to his neighborhood or my neighborhood, he will quickly and gladly choose the former. The CCC has prepared a nine-point defense of the TIF and given it to politicians who will vote on it, probably within the next few weeks.

It says CCC research, based on a “block-by-block analysis,” indicates only 30 percent of downtown’s redevelopment has been completed. My own research, based on a walking/driving tour from the north end of Mud Island past Harbor Town, down Front Street, along the Bluff Walk, and up Riverside Drive to the old bridge, found almost no blight. Just the opposite, in fact. And if downtown is 30 percent redeveloped, what of Frayser, Midtown, Whitehaven, Hickory Hill, the Fairgrounds, the Mall of Memphis, and Raleigh Springs Mall? None of them even has an agency that can afford to do a block-by-block needs analysis.

The CCC says a “$615 million public investment Master Plan has been drafted to leverage billions of dollars in private investment.” There is no evidence that incentives work that well. In the past 15 years, Memphis has spent roughly $600 million on The Pyramid, riverfront, trolley, mall, convention center, and FedExForum. The CCC has granted tax breaks currently worth $6.2 million a year. The incentives have not brought one out-of-town corporation downtown. They couldn’t lure FedEx from Southwind and Collierville. They couldn’t stop Union Planters and Baptist Hospital from moving to East Memphis and leaving white elephants behind. And they couldn’t keep the First Tennessee Bank building from falling into bankruptcy.

Downtown’s best success story is residential development, thanks largely to the efforts of Henry Turley and Jack Belz and the unique opportunities presented by Mud Island and the South Bluff. The single most cost-efficient incentive, hands down, was the $10 million Auction Street Bridge that enabled 5,000 people to move to Mud Island since 1987. Thank you, C.H. Butcher Jr., and rest in peace.

The CCC’s TIF plan counts “PILOT roll-offs” (expiring tax freezes in layman’s terms, but wrapping a proposal in jargon helps keep it under the radar) as “new growth.” That’s the “increment” in TIF. In fact, an expiring tax freeze is a completely predictable accounting entry, akin to the Memphis Grizzlies getting a key player off the injured list.

Downtown tax freezes were granted with the understanding that their recipients would eventually become full-fledged taxpayers. On older projects such as the Shrine Building, that is exactly what happened, to the benefit of downtown and the city. With a few exceptions, the CCC’s case-by-case approach of giving real dollars to real deals has worked well. Some of the worst downtown blight is not due to a lack of incentives but to ex-downtowners like Baptist Hospital which simply abandon their old buildings. It could be that what’s needed is not more carrot but more stick.

Now several big properties are facing loss of their privileged status. Downtown’s power brokers have their eyes on the loot. They have campaign contributions, contracts, free tickets, advertising, board appointments, and other goodies to pass out. Neighborhood groups have potluck-supper invitations.

In such circumstances, it will take political courage for elected officials to suppress their sycophantic tendencies. Sure, a giant TIF would be good for downtown. The question that needs to be fully debated is whether it would be good for the rest of Memphis.

Politics Politics Feature

POLITICS: Gloves Off

Post author By Jackson Baker
Post date September 25, 2003

GLOVES OFF

With early voting now under way, some of the candidates for city office are not making nice. Some of them are throwing punches, and a few are even throwing bombs.

The best example of the latter has come from candidate James Robinson, who hopes to depose Rickey Peete in city council Super-District 8, Position 2. and has not shied away from describing the incumbent, who once served time for extorting a bribe from a developer, as a “crook” and a “felon.”

(Robinson, who goes on to decry (and, no doubt, to envy) Peete’s fund-raising prowess this time around, is not without sin, despite his penchant for throwing stones; he was bounced from his role as head of the Memphis Housing Authority residents council a few years back after pleading guilty to charges of misappropriating funds. Presumably, his current housing is not made of glass.)

Runner-up for aggressive language against an opponent may be Arnold

Weiner, the indefatigable Republican activist who is one of five candidates hoping to unseat Pat VanderSchaaf in Super-District 9, Position 1. Not unskilled as a speaker, though a bit shrill in his delivery, Weiner normally laments the incidence of crime and the decline in educational excellence in these parts, then, none too subtly, goes on to say that “with her image and with her record” the incumbent needs to go.

This is usually enough to remind an audience that VanderSchaaf, who has served on the council for nearly three decades, indeed has a “record,” having copped to a misdemeanor plea for shoplifting a few years ago, and may also have something of an image problem.

It should be said that on the one occasion when he found himself sitting next to VanderSchaaf at a forum, Weiner played the gentleman and declined to attack her so directly. Indirection is also the tack of businessman Scott McCormick, who cites some of the some problems as does Weiner and characterizes VanderSchaaf as “part of the problem — not the solution.”

That’s as far as McCormick goes in a flyer he’s mailed out, too, but VanderSchaaf brandished one irately at a weekend forum, apparently outraged by an unflattering photograph of her over the words, “Are you going to re-elect Pat VanderSchaaf?”

In a wholly different category from Weiner or McCormick is another candidate in the same race, businessman Lester Lit, a mild-mannered man whose incendiary rhetoric is not directed at VanderSchaaf (or any other opponent) but at a more impersonal kind of icon. “We should blow up The Pyramid,” he declared at a recent forum after trying the line out in private a few times. Lit, who has made some serious headway with yard signs and vigorous personal campaigning, proposes a shopping development instead, noting that downtown residents have very few such venues to choose from.

Then there are the elbow-throwers, candidates whose attacks o each other run more to the sky dig and the innuendo. A championship thrust of this kind was delivered at a forum for District 5 council candidates this week by lawyer Jim Strickland, who noted the seating arrangement for two of his opponents and informed the audience, “This is the first time I have ever seen George Flinn to the left of Carol Chumney.”

That, of course, was Strickland’s way of trying to stigmatize both opponents as creatures of ideological extremes — Democrat Chumney on the liberal end and Republican Flinn on the conservative right. (In fairness, both — like Strickland himself — are seeking votes throughout the spectrum.)

Chumney was not without her arsenal of responses, noting that she had been in “public service” for 13 years (as a state representative), not having served as a “paid lawyer” (dig, dig) for petitioners before the council, as, presumably, had Strickland. And she noted for the record that she and Strickland had once worked at the same local law firm (Glankler, Brown) but that only she had ever risen to the rank of partner.

Chumney and Strickland may be unique in actually having exchanged words over a bona fide issue — that of a proposed children’s services office in city government, which Chumney favors and Strickland disparages as a needless replication of services available elsewhere.

Seemingly averse to expressing any form of antagonism this year is another 5th District council candidate, George Flinn, who picked up more than his share of criticism for allegedly negative tactics employed by his handlers in his campaign last year for Shelby County mayor.

Flinn seemed pained to be reminded at this week’s forum of one of the controversies of that 2002 campaign — the issue of whatever machinations went into the making and selling of a new arena for the NBA Grizzlies. Noting that the arena, now well under construction and scheduled to open next year as the FedEx Forum, has long since been a done deal (and was so even during the mayor’s race) Flinn said, “We make our points and we move on.”

He is at pains to present himself as an agreeable man who believes, on the basis of his success as a physician and broadcast executive, that he can do something for the city and the 5th District. Though some of the solutions he proposes — education-boosting videotapes for the mothers who visit medical clinics; broken-down police cars left parked in problem areas as discincentives to criminals — seem homespun to the point of quaintness, their modest scale is arguably a welcome contrast to the sometimes grandiose seeming proposals of others, who often seem to be offering elaborate dossiers qualifying them for executive positions.

The fact is that members of the city council are limited in their powers and have mainly an advise-and-consent role in the scheme of things. Their chief role is to review expenditures and approve or reject zoning proposals — that and serving as mediators for constituent requests. It is a mundane calling, something like being an associate pastor, the one who visits the sick and counsels the unhappy, while someone else — in this case, the mayor — does the preaching and gets the glory.

A fourth 5th District candidate, Mark Follis, an “arborist” and political newcomer, is an interesting case — scrappy and increasingly self-confident in his presentations and equipped with some crowd-pleasing one-liners. Two are especially effective — one in which he notes, accurately, that city council candidates always call for improved education, enhanced crime control, lower taxes, and the like., “but then what do we end up with? Two downtown arenas within a mile of each other!”

The other is a bit of aw-shucksing which, ironically, serves as a boast: “I’m the David among three Goliaths,” he says by way of summing up. That line never fails to draw a smile from his opponents, who are clearly flattered by it and who regard Follis as harmless.

He probably is, and it would truly be surprising if he finished higher than fourth. He has made a virtue of soliciting no campaign contributions — not just from the developers whom he never misses an opportunity to disparage but from anyone at all. There are two problems with that approach: One is the obvious disadvantage of trying to run a competitive race without resources; the other is that in a representative system of government, the candidate who has no visible connections to identifiable groups of supporters risks irrelevance.

Phil Bredesen, the Nashville mayor and health-care billionaire who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1994, using his own hefty holdings to pay for virtually everything, did things differently last year — making a point of forming networks and raising money from as many disparate sources as possible. The result? Citizen Bredesen is now Governor Bredesen. (Flinn seems to have applies something of the same lesson, husbanding his own considerable resources much more than he did in his mayor’s race of last year and engaging in more open fundraisers as such.)

Early Voting Locations

Early voting for the 2003 Memphis city election began last Friday and will be conducted at 15 locations through Saturday, October 4th. . Hours of operation at all the sites will be from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through Friday, and from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday.

The locations are:

Downtown, 157 Popular Avenue.

Agri-center,7777 Walnut Grove Rd.

Anointed Temple of Praise, 3939 Riverdale

Berclair Church of Christ, 4536 Summer

Bishop Byrne High School, 1475 E. Shelby Drive

Dave Wells community Center, 915 Chelsea Avenue

Ed Rice community Center, 2907 N. Watkins

Greater Middle Baptist Church, 4982 Knight Arnold

Mississippi Blvd. Christian Church, 70 North Belleveue

New Salem Missionary Baptist Church, 2231 S. Parkway E.

Pyramid Recovery Center, 1833 SD. Third

Raleigh United Methodist Church, 3295 Powers Rd.

St. Stephen Baptist Church, 3045 Chelsea Aven.

Westwood High School, 4480 Westmont St.

White Station Church of Christ,1006 Colonial Rd.

Voting at 262 polling locations throughout the city will take place from 7 am. to 7 p.m. on Election Day itself, Thursday, October 9th.

Letters To The Editor Opinion

Postscript

Post author By Flyer Readers
Post date September 24, 2003

Thanks

To the Editor:

Thank you for the meaningful, beautifully written pieces remembering Johnny Cash by Jackson Baker and Chris Davis (“The Man in Black,” September 18th issue).

As Davis observed: “His artistry was matched in equal measure by an uncompromising sense of justice and an indomitable faith.”

Arthur Prince

Memphis

Return of Serve

To the Editor:

What is “so difficult for liberals to understand” are people like Rik Anderson (Letters to the Editor, September 18th issue) who say things like, “If you really want to pin it on a group …” as though it isn’t important to find out who actually killed 3,000 Americans. Like, “It was Muslims, and Bush is killing Muslims, so what’s yer problem?” is supposed to be a reasonable response? Hell, yeah, I’d like to pin it on someone — the guilty ones. Call me crazy, but it’s this thing we’ve had around here for a couple hundred years called justice. Maybe you’ve heard of it.

Liberals also have a really hard time understanding a fellow American who “almost” wishes for another terrorist attack just so liberals will shut up. As much as I loathe Dubya, I wouldn’t wish death and destruction on my country, even if it meant Dubya’s resignation or impeachment. The murder of thousands is far too high a price to pay for my political ideology, but apparently, for some, it “almost” isn’t.

I happen to believe that democracy is strong enough to meet the challenge of terrorism and that we can combat terrorism without giving up the principles upon which this country was founded. Liberals aren’t your enemy, unless justice and democracy is your enemy.

Jeff Crook

Memphis

To the Editor:

Rik Anderson and I can agree generally about Muslim terrorists being crazed, but he doesn’t know history. “Terrorism has always been committed by crazed Muslims,” he writes. A few minor exceptions: American KKK lynch mobs against blacks; Russian pogroms against Jews; the destruction of Jewish villages in central Europe during the late Middle Ages; the Spanish Inquisition. All those crazed “terrorists” were Christians. I’m sure their namesake must be really proud of how these groups acted in “His” name.

Muslim terrorists are bums. However, let’s not forget Christians have a long, bloody history that is the complete antithesis of Jesus’ teachings.

Jerry Nachison

Memphis

J.Lo vs. G.Love

To the Editor:

The comments by Joe Boone (Letters to the Editor, September 18th issue) gave an excellent insight into the structure of the music industry — and, ironically, provided a strong argument against file-sharing.

The music industry exists not to entertain us but to provide huge profits for its owners. “Liberating” products from such an industry has predictable results. The industry will take legal action and will also seek to control the bottom line by focusing on profitable items and ruthlessly cutting less profitable ones.

Inevitably, J.Lo will get more resources and G.Love will get less. So, if we as consumers want to see an end to practices like reissues of obscure and diverse artists and support for new ones, and if we can be happy with a music industry that only provides us with McMusic, then keep on strokin’ that download button.

Paul E. Nunis

“The Bluescaster”

Memphis

Go Back, Jack, and Park It Again …

To the Editor:

Awful. That one simple word sums up the Steely Dan concert experience. The promoters ruined it.

We turned off Walnut Grove at 7 p.m. for the 8 p.m. show. We wouldn’t be sitting down until almost 9 — well into the band’s first set. It took an hour and a half to get to our parking spot, only to find that the spot was over a mile from the stage. I thought we were at Woodstock. No such luck. Such a lack of preparation might be understandable for a $3 concert. For $50 a ticket, the amateur performance of Archangel Entertainment was inexcusable.

J. Lewis Wardlaw

Memphis

The Memphis Flyer encourages reader response. Send mail to: Letters to the Editor, POB 1738, Memphis, TN 38101. Or call Back Talk at 575-9405. Or send us e-mail at letters@memphisflyer.com. All responses must include name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters should be no longer than 250 words.

News The Fly-By

My Girl

Post author By Walter Jowers
Post date September 24, 2003

About 15 years ago, wife Brenda sat up in bed at 4 a.m. and announced, I m quitting the management job and I want to have a baby. It was a good plan all around. Brenda never was management material. In management, you have to tell the same people the same things every day until you go full-out crazy. That s not Brenda s style. She s more the listen-up-because-I m-only-going-to-say-this-once type. As far as the notion of having a baby, I was all for it. Then, as now, Brenda was excellent mother material. So, don t you know, I held up my end of the baby deal with enthusiasm. Daughter Jess joined the family 10 months later.

About nine months after that, Jess said her first word, which, of course, was Daddy. A week or two later, she called Brenda Mom-mom. Soon after Jess named us, she got busy on creating her very own language. For instance, as a toddler, she invented the verb hoju. That came from Brenda and me holding out our arms and asking Jess, You want me to hold you? To Jess, hoju was the act of getting picked up, hugged, and carried around on my chest or Brenda s hip. Every day, Jess would toddle up to one of us, reach up, and say, Hoju, hoju, until she got picked up.

When we fed Jess, we d ask, Do you want some? Soon after, all foods and drinks were some to Jess. Whenever she was hungry, she d lock eyes with one of us and say, Some? Some?

When I was outside, I liked to ride Jess around on my shoulders. I d put her up there, fix her legs so they straddled my neck, and grab ahold of her ankles. She d grab two handfuls of my hair and off we d go. We didn t do this inside, though, because I m taller than the standard 6 8 door frame when I ve got a baby on my neck. I learned that the hard way, and I m lucky the government didn t send somebody to take my bruise-headed baby. Anyhow, Jess enjoyed all but one shoulder ride. She came up with a better name for shoulders, though. For the first three years of her life, Jess asked many times to ride on Daddy s holders.

As her vocabulary expanded, Jess decided that P was the finest of the consonants and deserved more exposure. There was a long stretch where she liked to play with palloons, eat pananas, and play a little puitar.

Now, before I go any further, let me tell you new parents something: Videotape your kid while the kid is an infant and toddler. When you watch the videos years later, you ll learn that all those early coos and random vocalizations were proto-words which actually meant something. You ll understand what your kid was saying when she was 9 months old. It s great fun.

Oh, before I leave the subject of videotaping: Do all your taping at your own house. Don t bring the video camera to every dance recital, play, party, and sporting event. That s unforgivably vain. Worse yet, you get all in the way when you stand up in the aisle or park yourself behind home plate. Believe me when I tell you: You obsessive videotapers kill a whole lot of fun for people who want to watch their kids and not the danged parent paparazzi. I m amazed that I have to explain this.

When Jess was about 5, she started arguing with me about words. For instance, she told me that my pickup truck was really a holder truck. It duzzint pick up anything, Dad, she said in her over-enunciated kindergarten accent. It just holds things. Jess still has the kindergarten accent, which, oddly, has no uh sound. Jess, and most other kids at her school, say they didint, wouldint, and couldint do something. Their shirts have buttins. That big grey animal at the zoo is an elephint. And when they sing the national anthem, they sing of the perilis fight.

When Jess was 6, she turned quotable. She adapted the box of chocolates line from Forrest Gump. Life is like a box of nerds, she said. Sometimes you get some red ones on the green side and some green ones on the red side. In fifth grade, she turned a little cynical. I had a perfectly good life, she sighed, before I ever heard of latitude and longitude. Soon after, she went logical. At a mall, Jess spotted a sign that read: Dippin Dots Ice Cream of the Future. How stupid is that, she said. It s not the ice cream of the future. It s here now!

These days, she s quotable, cynical, and logical. Last week, she heard somebody use the term head over heels. She rolled her eyes and said, Isn t your head always over your heels? If somebody went around with his heels over his head, that would be news.

Music Music Features

Local Beat

Post author By Andria Lisle
Post date September 24, 2003

On A recent trip to New York, I visited more than a half-dozen record stores in Lower Manhattan, and one thing I was struck by was how much contemporary Memphis music I stumbled across without really trying: North Mississippi Allstars, Three 6 Mafia, Reigning Sound, Yo Gotti, Lost Sounds. But the most common and most prominent Memphis music I came across was the one that’s probably the least-known locally –the new Memphix joint.

Titled Express Rising, this collection of instrumental hip-hop is the first official full-length (other than the subterranean-funk 45 comp Chains + Black Exhaust) released by Memphix and the label’s first album-length collection of original music. Express Rising is the nom de plume of Chicago-based beat-digger and amateur musicologist Dante Carfagna who, along with Memphians Chad Weekley and Luke “Redeye Jedi” Sexton, founded Memphix in 1999.

Carfagna first met Weekley and Sexton while working at a record store in Kansas City. “I was working at a record shop and they came in looking for funk and breaks,” Carfagna remembers. “I started to sell them things from my own collection and our relationship grew. I came up with the Memphix moniker and we decided to issue some 45s of the music we had been making.”

As unlikely as it may seem, Carfagna got his start as a Miami-based teenager doing some production and scratching on (Public Enemy member) Professor Griff solo albums, recorded at the South Florida studios of booty-bass impresario and 2 Live Crew founder Luke Skywalker. These days, Carfagna’s reputation is strictly underground, where he’s become a major name in the oft-hidden world of indie-hip-hop DJ culture and crate-digging record collectors. Carfagna has toured with scene kings DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist and is a contributing editor to New York-based Wax Poetics magazine.

As for Express Rising, DJ Shadow’s ground-breaking 1996 debut Endtroducing is the unavoidable comparison. Like that genre-defining masterwork, Express Rising is a beat symphony composed from record-shop refuse, anonymous found sounds sampled, sequenced, and plumbed for hidden grace to create wholly original music. It can’t quite match the grandeur or wit of Endtroducing, but it replicates many of that record’s considerable charms and with a nostalgic, reflective vibe that’s all its own. It’s also, save Memphix’s earlier singles, entirely unlike any other music released by a Memphis-based label.

“The tracks that went onto the LP were songs that I had been working on over the past five years or so,” Carfagna says. “I am very particular about the records that I sample. I wanted to make a completely sample-based LP that had a similar emotional feel throughout, even though all of the sources were disparate. I don’t remember how many different records were sampled to make up the LP, but not as many as one would think.”

The result is a lovely, moody sound-cycle made up largely of hip-hop-heartbeat drum breaks and understated organ loops. The wistful vibe is underscored by the sampled sound of children playing on the opening “Neighborhood,” while the record’s body-rockin’ insistence comes through on the bhangrified redux “Neighborhood (Gentrified).”

“I didn’t attempt to directly create a mood as a whole,” Carfagna insists, “but, as many of the tracks were colored in the same way, I grouped them together as a long-player. The two words I had in my head as I sequenced the album were ‘muted’ and ‘forested.'”

Carfagna will be making the trip down to Memphis this week for a local record-release party Saturday, September 27th, at the Hi-Tone CafÇ, where his set will be preceded by one from Redeye Jedi, Paul Taylor, and Atlanta-based Memphix associate DJ Klever. Showtime is 9 p.m. and the cover is $5.

According to Weekley, who handles most of the label’s business affairs, Memphix shipped all of its initial 2,000-copy run of Express Rising within the first few weeks of release and is still a few weeks away from shipping copies overseas, where the label has done the bulk of its business. Weekley says tentative plans include a European and U.K. Memphix tour later this year. Express Rising is currently available on both vinyl and CD at local indie stores, particularly Shangri-La Records.

On a sad note, Mitzi Purvis, the sister of local guitar legend Shawn Lane, reports that Lane is in serious condition at Baptist Hospital, suffering from a lung condition. Purvis says that fans and friends wishing to send their regards to Lane can do so c/o Purvis, at 1654 Smokehouse Drive, Cordova, 38016.

You can e-mail music-related tips and comments to Local Beat at localbeat@memphisflyer.com.