Month: September 2003

Categories
News The Fly-By

My Girl

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.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Scare Tactics

Helmed by first-time director Catherine Hardwicke, who co-wrote it with co-star and real-life 13-year-old Nikki Reed, the Sundance fave Thirteen has benefited from some pretty undeserving media hype — sober, dutiful approval that seems to come from the conclusion that if it is actually written by an actual 13-year-old (Reed is now 15), then it must be realistic.

But as appealing as Thirteen‘s back-story may be, the result is basically an artfully directed after-school special, as much a scare film as Reefer Madness, if not quite as entertaining. The difference, of course, is where films like Madness were aimed at teens themselves, the group meant to be frightened by Thirteen is parents (or potential parents), who may be inspired to ransack their child’s room or invest in some pop-psychology best-sellers.

Thirteen opens with two girls –bony, blond Tracy (Evan Rachel Wood) and curvaceous, brunette Evie (Reed) –doing whip-its and giggling as they punch each other in the face. The scene ends with wild-eyed, bleeding Tracy staring devilishly out of the screen at the cowering adults in the theater, an image of child-as-object-of-parental-horror equal to, if less considered than, the ones that haunt John Cassavetes’ domesticity-fleeing Husbands.

If that image weren’t bad enough, the film leaps back four months to show an angelic, regular-kid Tracy, walking her dog while wearing plain-Jane T-shirt and jeans and smiley-face sneakers, and then shows how things fall apart.

Not a girl but not yet a woman, Tracy gets a rude introduction to teendom during her first day at middle school, when she and her sweet, nerdy friends are ignored by boys (including Tracy’s big brother) busy salivating over junior sexpot Evie (who “grew up over the summer,” as one boy observes). Evie and her friends flaunt low-cut designer jeans and skimpy tops that reveal belly-button piercings; chat on cell phones; walk in confident, intimidating phalanxes; and seem to know far more about sex than any seventh-grader has a right to.

Seeing the two social options before her, the pretty Tracy trades up, gently abandoning her old friends and transforming herself –with much awkwardness and a little law-breaking — into a creature that meets Evie’s approval. Evie, a parentless girl who lives with a model/actress/bartender guardian (Deborah Kara Unger) who lets her drink beer from the fridge, is as intrigued by Tracy’s loving, if messy, homelife as Tracy is by Evie’s bad-girl lifestyle, and soon the girls are inseparable. The too-predictably drawn Evie is part Eddie Haskell and part The Bad Seed, worming her way into Tracy’s family life by courting Tracy’s too-eager-to-please mom (Holly Hunter) and leading Tracy down a path that includes drugs (using and selling), alcohol, shoplifting, sex, etc.

The film’s early scenes are its best — the way it catalogs the accessories of teen hipness and tracks the desperate steps Tracy takes to find acceptance, particularly a scene in which the two girls confront each other and the camera zooms back and forth, highlighting the random accoutrements that demarcate the lines of an adolescent caste system. But while the pain of Tracy’s tortured immersion into teendom feels real, the film soon descends into the abyss with no-stone-unturned predictability.

Who’s to blame for this social crisis? There’s plenty to go around in this cautionary tale: our sex-obsessed popular culture; an advertising industry that bombards us with images promoting materialism; an educational system too ready to give in to these base values (there’s one subtle reference to school projects about J.Lo and Usher); parents who are either absent (Evie’s), distracted (Tracy’s dad), too busy dealing with their own problems (Tracy’s mom — a recovering alcoholic dating a recovering drug addict), too permissive (Evie’s guardian), or too eager to be their child’s buddy rather than a strong authority figure (Tracy’s mom again). In other words, any parent seeing this film is liable to feel helpless in the face of overwhelming forces and find something that they’re doing wrong.

Thirteen is certainly harrowing (the expert handheld camera, which peers over shoulders and darts around corners, might be the best thing about the film), but it seemed too boilerplate to me. Like those Larry Clark flicks (Kids, Bully), it advertises itself as a generational portrait, but its provocations and titillations are more than a little suspect. Tracy is presented as an Everygirl but doesn’t seem to be much of a stand-in for every girl: The case here is extreme, though not unrealistic. Ultimately, I found myself aching for something less overdetermined, for the film to veer off into the lives of the friends Tracy leaves behind, whose own transition into teendom may be less sensational but surely no less painful, real, or relevant.

— Chris Herrington

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Editorial

Changing Our Tune?

Is our governor tone-deaf or, alternatively, keen of hearing? Or does he merely listen to other drums that, say, his predecessor in office, Don Sundquist, could not discern? In any case, Governor Phil Bredesen made his opinions heard loud and clear at a conference on tourism in Gatlinburg last week: He wants a new state slogan. The existing one, “Tennessee Sounds Good to Me,” sounds just plain lousy to Bredesen. “I’ve never liked that phrase,” the governor said. “There’s nothing that brands Tennessee in a phrase like that. … You would like a phrase not just to rhyme but to do work — to explain what is different, what is unique about Tennessee.”

Elaborating in a phone chat with Tennessee reporters this week, former health-care executive Bredesen boasted that he was “somebody who has done some marketing” and decried the existing slogan again as “a white-bread sort of solution” to the state’s image problem.

We don’t mean to sound a discordant note here, but the current governor may have missed the point. “Tennessee Sounds Good to Me” may be a tad over-subtle — we don’t doubt that — but its meaning as a phrase summing up the three rather disparate grand divisions of Tennessee seems fairly clear to us: It denotes the state’s capacity for generating influential strains of popular music that end up captivating the nation (and which would presumably also lure the visitor to Tennessee). From bluegrass in the east through that commercial country stuff they do in Nashville to the Grand Ole Boogie which has, in so many forms, always emanated from Memphis, the state excels at music. It, er, sounds good. Get it?

Governor Bredesen doesn’t. And maybe he’s right that it’s time for a change. But what else other than music actually connects the separate parts of this somewhat disjointed state of ours? Good luck, governor. Changing the tune isn’t going to be easy, but, if it helps, we’ll ask our readers to sound off on the subject.

Still Out of Step

In his latest speech to the United Nations, President Bush was considerably more conciliatory in his rhetoric than in his previous appearance, just before he ordered a “pre-emptive” invasion of Iraq. Though he still maintained that “the regime of Saddam Hussein cultivated ties to terror while it built weapons of mass destruction,” Bush also recognized “that some of the sovereign nations of this assembly disagreed with our actions” and spoke of “unity among us on the fundamental principles and objectives of the United Nations.”

The president made an effort to embrace several commendable — and universal — goals. He spoke against child abuse and the international “sex trade” and on behalf of nuclear anti-proliferation. He even threw into the goodie-bag a pitch for international AIDS efforts in the manner of his State of the Union address of earlier this year. As many pundits observed, the moderating hand of Secretary of State Colin Powell was much in evidence.

But there was no apology for the Iraqi adventure itself, no admission of error, and his call for other nations to “contribute … to the cause of Iraq self-government” fell far short of the need, as many see it, to turn over jurisdiction of affairs in Iraq to the U.N. itself.

The president made at least an effort to catch up with world opinion, but he still has a way to go.

Categories
Music Music Features

Local Beat

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.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Full Ostrich

The administration is now in the Full Ostrich on Iraq: Dick Cheney put on a fabulous performance a week ago on Meet the Press, in which he insisted everything in Iraq is right as rain and cheery-bye. I haven’t heard anyone lie with such gravitas since Henry Kissinger was in office.

But for the complete up-is-down, peace-is-war mode, you have to check out this administration on the environment. The latest brass-balls moxie episode was President Bush’s recent visit to the Detroit Edison power plant in Monroe, Michigan, which he actually touted as a “living example” of why his dandy Clear Skies (gag me) initiative is so good for us all. “You’re good stewards of the quality of the air,” Bush told the plant’s pleased workers.

The Monroe plant is one of the worst polluters in the country: In 2001, it sent 102,700 tons of sulfur dioxide, the leading cause of acid rain, into the atmosphere, along with 45,900 tons of nitrogen oxide, 810 pounds of mercury, and 17.6 million tons of carbon dioxide. A study done in 2000 by ABT Associates, which the Environmental Protection Agency has used to measure the health effects of pollution, says the plant annually causes 293 premature deaths, 5,740 asthma attacks, and 50,298 lost work days. Under Clear Skies (these people are going to kill irony), the plant will continue to shed this gentle beneficence on us all for the next 17 years. According to environmental groups, the administration’s relaxation of clean-air rules, known as the “new source review,” will allow the plant to increase its emissions by 56 percent.

Bush told the happy Monrovians, “Lights went out last month — you know that. It recognizes that we’ve got an issue with our electricity grid and we need to modernize it. The quicker we put modern equipment into our power plants, the quicker people are going to get more reliable electricity.” Asked what Clear Skies had to do with the aged electricity grid, according to The Washington Post, “A senior Bush aide later said that Bush was not asserting that the old clean air rules led to the blackout.” That guy must have listened to a speech different from the one I did.

Clear Skies is not to be confused with the “new source review” rules, under which dirty plants can buy “pollution credits” from clean plants and keep polluting. “New source review” is a glitch in the Clean Air Act passed in 1977, which “grandfathered in” more than 16,000 aging industrial facilities in the happy expectation that they would gradually be in compliance in a few years. These dirty plants could perform routine maintenance without having to install cleaner technologies, but any major changes leading to more pollution have to meet Clean Air standards. An excellent article in the current issue of Mother Jones points out, “For nearly three decades, these facilities have gotten around the new source review rules by continually expanding and calling it ‘routine maintenance.'”

In 1999, EPA’s director tried a novel approach: enforcing the law. The EPA filed lawsuits against eight power companies that together produce one-fifth of the nation’s sulfur dioxide. By the end of 2000, two of the largest polluters had agreed to cut emissions by two-thirds, and others were lining up to negotiate settlements. Then Bush brought in Christine Whitman at EPA, who told Congress that if she were an attorney for one of the sued companies, “I would not settle anything.” Presto, the two settlements disappeared, and so did the other offers.

A nice little example of the under-the-radar technique was recently uncovered by Greenpeace via a 2002 e-mail from Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a group heavily funded by Exxon-Mobil. “Thanks for calling and asking for our help,” begins this chipper memo to the White House Council for Environmental Quality (CEQ). Ebell goes on to describe his group’s plan to discredit an EPA study on climate change. “We need to drive a wedge between the president and those in the administration who think they are serving the president’s interests by publishing this rubbish.”

Two state attorneys general have asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to investigate, because the memo “reveals great intimacy between CEI and [the administration] in their strategizing about ways to minimize the problem of global warming. It also suggests the CEQ may have been directly involved in efforts to undermine the United States’ official report, as well as the authority of the EPA administrator.”

Of course, John Ashcroft is too busy to check it out because he’s now out on a “charm offensive” to convince us all that the new Patriot Act is good for us. I always think of John Ashcroft and charm in the same sentence.

By the by, I’m sure The Washington Post was making no editorial comment when it closed its story on the president’s Monroe visit with this additional fact: “After his speech in Michigan, Bush flew to Philadelphia to a fund-raiser that brought in $1.4 million for his reelection effort.”

Molly Ivins writes for Creator’s Syndicate and the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Prime Time

Memphis will be in the national spotlight beginning Sunday, September 28th, when PBS premieres The Blues, the long-awaited documentary series overseen by executive producer Martin Scorsese. The series consists of seven individual films, each helmed by a different director (including Clint Eastwood, Wim Wenders, and Charles Burnett). While many of the episodes touch on the local scene, it’s “The Road to Memphis,” which airs at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, September 30th, that focuses on the city’s reputation as a blues hub.

According to Richard Pearce, director of “The Road to Memphis,” the episode is “the story of a generation — musicians who came all the way from the cotton fields of Mississippi to this extraordinary stage.”

Pearce, a resident of Los Angeles, first came to Memphis in the ’90s, when he directed Robert Duvall and James Earl Jones in A Family Thing. “Memphis is a deep place with deep history and deep roots,” Pearce says. “Being chosen to direct “The Road to Memphis” was a real gift.”

No stranger to music documentaries (he served as a cinematographer on Woodstock), Pearce nevertheless faced some interesting challenges on this project. “We were shooting in several different mediums,” he explains, “so the program could be shown in a wide-screen theater format as well as on TV.” Capturing the bluesmen onstage was an added problem. “We learned that the audiences were just as important as the performers, which was another tricky issue,” Pearce says. “You couldn’t just put up a camera and point it at the stage.”

Case in point: chitlin’-circuit star Bobby Rush, who is featured throughout the episode. “When they came to Larry’s Place [in Nesbit, Mississippi] to shoot me, they weren’t prepared for the Bobby Rush show,” boasts the 65-year-old Jackson, Mississippi-based entertainer. “They underestimated who I was.”

As Pearce tells it, Memphian Robert Gordon, who served as writer and associate producer on the project, said, “You’ve gotta meet this guy. He’s perfect. He’s not from Memphis, and he’s not even a real bluesman.” Pearce adds, “We met Bobby at a gas station near Jackson, then detoured up Highway 61. He swept us up in his wake.”

Rush dominates whenever he’s onscreen, although the episode also includes footage of B.B. King, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Ike Turner, Calvin Newborn, Rev. A.D. “Gatemouth” Moore, and the late Rosco Gordon.

The filmmakers’ initial plan was to concentrate on King — “a character who could take us to the Delta cotton fields, to Sam Phillips, and to the world stage,” Gordon explains. Yet in the documentary, the focus inevitably turns back to Rush.

“We didn’t want to make The B.B. King Story,” Gordon says. “More important was the road he’d traveled. While B.B. represents the dirt farmer who achieved world success, Bobby is the guy who succeeded but on a lower level — someone whose drive and desire have diminished not one whit over decades in the business.”

“I’ve prayed for this kind of thing to happen,” Rush says. “My antenna went up when I heard about it. I was enthused about doing something with the other ‘B’s [King and Bland]. We’ve been friends for 50 years. God put me at the right place at the right time.”

Rush, who first made a name for himself in 1952, gigging in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, with the late Elmore James, has more than 240 records to his credit. He moved back south 15 years ago after spending several decades in Chicago. While his biggest hit, “Chicken Heads,” was released in ’68, Rush has spent the last 35 years honing his reputation as a live performer. “I can go to Beale Street and sell out B.B. King’s club,” he says, “or I can play for the president at the Kennedy Center or I can play for 100 people in the Mississippi Delta.”

“The entire series is gonna draw a lot of people back to the blues,” says Rush, who serves on the boards of the Blues Foundation and the Blues Music Association and also heads his own label, Deep Rush Records. “But if you look at this series and wonder who’s talking about yesterday and today, the Memphis episode has the future. When you see my film, you’re looking at tomorrow’s entertainment,” Rush continues. “To the public, I’m a youngblood, a crossover artist.”

“I was hoping we’d make a show about jug bands, and [Pearce] was thinking that the piece would tell how blues became soul,” Gordon says. “The final result was like nothing either of us had envisioned. Bobby Rush is the show’s secret star, though it’s hardly a secret.”

The Memphis & Shelby Co. Film and Television Commission, the Blues Ball, and Malco Theatres will host the free, world premiere screening of “The Road to Memphis” 3-6 p.m. Sunday, September 28th, at the Paradiso. Pearce will participate in a post-screening Q&A. On Tuesday, September 30th, WKNO is hosting another free screening at the Hard Rock CafÇ at 8 p.m. The station will also rerun the documentary All Day and All Night: Memories of Beale Street Musicians at 9:30 p.m. on Sunday, September 28th and the 24th Annual W.C. Handy Awards (presented in partnership with the Blues Foundation) at 10:30 p.m. on Friday, October 3rd.

The cornerstone of the 2003 Year of the Blues campaign, The Blues will also include a comprehensive Web site and education program, a companion book from Amistad Press, a CD box set, soundtracks for each episode, and individual artist CDs released by Sony Music and Universal Music Enterprises, as well as a 13-part series on National Public Radio. Locally, September 20th-27th has been declared Blues Week on Beale Street. Listen for free CD giveaways on WDIA-1070 AM and 107.5 FM The Pig.

Martin Scorsese Presents: The Blues

WKNO-TV Channel 10

Airing nightly at 8 p.m.

Sunday, September 28th, through Saturday, October 4th.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Amateur Hour

At the moment, the political firmament twinkles with amateurs. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the most famous of them, by virtue of a movie career. Arianna Huffington is another, by virtue of little ideological virtue. They are both running for governor of California where, should either win, neither would have the slightest idea of what to do next. That’s not because they are dumb. It’s because they have never done anything remotely similar in the past.

Something comparable can be said about Wesley Clark and, to a degree, Howard Dean. Clark has never campaigned for anything — and already his inexperience has shown. He stepped all over his overriding message — that he’s the antiwar candidate who has actually been to war — by saying, and then retracting, that he would have voted for the congressional resolution authorizing the Iraq war. With his first campaign shot, Clark got himself right in the foot.

This game of politics is complicated. From time to time, the gifted amateur comes along — Eisenhower, Reagan — but it is no accident that the two are often likened to each other. They were enormously appealing presences, and they both had more than a smattering of political experience — Ike as supreme commander in World War II, Reagan as a union and anti-communist activist.

More important, both Ike and Reagan had important constituencies that urged them to run — and when they did, they won big. Reagan beat his first gubernatorial opponent by almost a million votes. Ike swamped Adlai Stevenson. No one is predicting that kind of win for Schwarzenegger, and no one is predicting anything for Huffington who, nonetheless, has the backing of some very smart people.

What are these people thinking? Huffington could not govern. The Democratic-controlled legislature is not going to play ball with someone who once swooned for Newt Gingrich and helped run her former husband’s Republican senatorial campaign. As for Schwarzenegger, that same legislature is going to be there for him, too. Maybe he can be persuasive, but that’s impossible to say from his record. He has none.

Look at Jesse Ventura, a relative amateur who became governor of Minnesota on the basis of straight talking and a to-hell-with-politics persona. It turned out a big mouth was not enough. Ventura could not get along with the legislature — actually, with almost anyone — and is now back in show business, from which, it can fairly be said, he never left.

I can appreciate the yearning for the outsider, since too many politicians become so burdened by experience they can’t say anything straight. But the tendency to see all issues as contemporary Gordian knots — one slash of the sword will do it — severely underestimates the complexity of governing. After you win, you actually have to do something.

In California, the swallows come back to Capistrano and the chickens come home to roost. The state has term limits, which means it has an ineffective legislative leadership and lobbyists hold enhanced power. It is increasingly ruled by propositions, which means by voter snit. It confuses celebrity with political talent because, somehow, all fame is the same. It has made a mess of itself.

Wes Clark plunged into the presidential race without the foggiest notion of what he thinks on a range of domestic issues. Schwarzenegger mutters “details, details” while reading up on what he should already know. Huffington would govern from the left — or maybe the right. The Candidate was a drama. What’s happening now is a farce.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

Categories
News The Fly-By

GARDEN PAR -TAY

Ricky Nelson, the 1950s teen idol and rockabilly pioneer responsible for such hits as Hello Mary Lou, Travelin Man, and Lonesome Town, is slated to be inducted into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame on October 11th. The ceremony will take place at the world-famous Overton Park Shell, where Nelson s sons Matthew and Gunnar (collectively known as Nelson) will perform a tribute set to their father by singing his greatest hits. Mercifully, they won t be singing their own.

Categories
Music Music Features

Sound Advice

If you read the publicity on Toronto’s Broken Social Scene, you’ll find that the band is more of a collective, with a rotating cast of members who filter in and out and swap duties from song to song. If you listen to the band’s sophomore effort, You Forgot It in People (which won a Canadian Grammy equivalent for Best Alternative Album), you’ll find that the band sounds like that too — and in a good way.

You Forgot It in People (which lists 10 band members, along with other guest players) is a sprawling, relaxed record with a friendly vibe, one that shambles from one indie-rock style to another with a feel that attests to the spontaneity that the band’s PR claims. It has some (but only some) of the Holy Grail quality of Pavement’s first recordings, that sense of people accidentally and furtively tapping into a kind of off-hand grace. Like most of the best indie rock it evokes, its belly-button-gazing is a source of strength rather than weakness — the sound of people so fixated on their own musical messing around that they’re immune to trends or fashion. Sometimes they sound like Dinosaur Jr. (“Cause = Time”), sometimes they sound mysterious and ineffable (“Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl”), most of the time they sound like Sunday afternoon.

Broken Social Scene will be at Young Avenue Deli Wednesday, October 1st, with fellow Canucks Jason Collett and Metric. Collett is also a guitarist/bassist for Broken Social Scene, and Metric is made up of Scene-sters as well (including Emily Haines, who I believe sings “Anthems”), so here’s betting that the show replicates the communal feel of the record.

As part of this year’s ongoing blues celebration (particularly this week’s debut of The Blues documentary series on PBS), B.B. King returns to his namesake Beale Street club this week for a couple of shows, Thursday, September 25th, and Friday, September 26th.

And I can’t get out of here without giving a shout-out to The Drive-By Truckers, who’ll be at Proud Larry’s in Oxford on Thursday, September 25th. The Truckers’ latest, Decoration Day, is classic-rock that works equally well for people who love classic-rock and people who don’t quite trust it. It’s also my favorite guitar-rock record of the year.

—Chris Herrington

The Hi-Tone CafÇ’s recent package show featuring the best of Memphis’ garage bands from the ’90s must have gone well for The Grundies. The long-broken-up art-rock/novelty band will be playing the Young Avenue Deli on Thursday, September 25th, with the wonderful Tim Prudhomme (formerly of Fuck) and teen garage sensations The Mutant Space Bats of Doom. Grundies’ frontman, Trey Harrison, used to perform a song his son wrote when he was only 2. The lyrics were, if memory serves, “Cowboy song, cowboy song, cowboy song, pow, pow, pow.” That should give you some idea of what to expect. It’s good, goofy, and occasionally groovy.

When you are looking at Loretta Lynn, you are looking at country. Kitty Wells may have been the first major female honky-tonker, and Patsy Cline the most popular, but Loretta Lynn is, hands down, the most outspoken. Offhand, I can’t think of another artist who has ever offered to take “the other woman” on a one-way trip to “Fist City.” Though her own politics lean conservative, her song “The Pill” became an anthem for warriors in the sexual revolution. Her duets with Conway Twitty were very nearly a sexual revolution unto themselves. And then, of course, there are classics like “Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind),” “You Ain’t Woman Enough,” and the autobiographical “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” If you miss Lynn’s show at the Mid-South Fair on Friday, September 26th, you’ve missed the undisputed first lady of country music. —Chris Davis

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Love & Death

I don’t know how many times A.R. Gurney’s romance Love Letters has been performed in Memphis. The U of M most recently performed it with Touched by an Angel star Jerry Dye and Little House on the Prairie alum Melissa Gilbert. Theatre Memphis did it a few years before with Martha Graber and Michael Fortner. Playhouse did it with a rotating cast of actors. Playwrights’ Forum produced it with Memphian-turned-superstar Kathy Bates. It has played The Orpheum at least once, perhaps more. And now Sleeping Cat, the tiny theater in the Edge, takes a swing at Gurney’s most frequently produced work with John Malloy and Rosemary Falk in the leading roles.

Since local playhouses don’t think anything about reviving Love Letters again and again, I don’t feel the least bit guilty about reaching back in the vault, pulling out an earlier review, and printing it nearly verbatim. Here goes:

“In his introduction, playwright A.R. Gurney states that Love Letters is a play about writing; a claim that the epistolary nature of the script only superficially supports. As the two characters fall in and out of love (with each other), trouble, and marriage (to other people), they do occasionally debate the virtues of letter-writing. But this supports Gurney’s claim only to the degree that Blanche’s death wish makes A Streetcar Named Desire a play about unclean grapes. If Gurney is correct and Love Letters is about writing, then there must be something independent of the script — some external agent — that makes it so.

“That elusive agent to which I refer is the performance. While the actors in [Sleeping Cat’s] production of Love Letters give lively and animated performances, director [Jim Esposito] never explores the possibility of a relationship between the characters and the letters they write. Without this element, the play’s focus shifts from writing to reading. The actors read us the story of their characters. It is a good reading — but that is not the same thing as good acting. In a letter excusing their coital incompatibility, Melissa Gardner (played by a well-spoken [Rosemary Falk]) says, ‘This letter-writing has messed us up. It’s made us seem like people we’re not. There were two people missing in the Hotel Duncan that night: namely, the real you and the real me.’ Ah, the rub. Communicating only through letters, the actors must work together, all the while making the letters their scene partners.

“There are so many ways people relate to the words they scribble on a page. A well-turned phrase might lead the author to take up the paper and marvel at the shape of a favored scrawl, while an ‘I’ dotted in anger can put a hole clean through the desktop. Sometimes the right word never comes. And sometimes, when the right word does appear, it releases an avalanche of ideas and passionate verbiage that had been trapped inside the author until that first lucky word escaped the pen. These giddy highs and excruciating lows in the action are necessary to save Gurney’s cleverly crafted script from its movie-of-the-week storyline.”

I’m fairly certain that should another performance of Love Letters crop up in the next few years I could use this same review yet again as every single production of this show is staged exactly like the one before it. Just once I would love to see the female character read the male character’s letters, and vice versa. Just once I would like to see the actors memorize their lines rather than read them from the script. Just once I would like to see a production of Love Letters where the actors weren’t glued to their chairs but were allowed to find physical means to express themselves. But chances are none of this will ever happen. Theaters choose to perform Love Letters because of its form, not because of its content. It requires no set to speak of, making it very inexpensive to stage. And because the actors are allowed to read, rehearsals are minimal. Theaters choose Love Letters because they think that it is easy to produce. The fact is, nothing could be further from the truth. The very things that make Gurney’s script seem so simple to perform are actually the things that make it so very difficult. Fortunately for Sleeping Cat, the actors aren’t particularly well-suited for the roles they play. I say this is fortunate because both actors are more colorful and interesting than the script’s whitebread characters, and some of that color rubs off.

John Malloy, a local thespian who teaches acting at the U of M, has had a long career as a character actor, his most famous role to date being one of the bums in the wonderfully giddy film version of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row starring Nick Nolte. He brings a good-natured gruffness to Gurney’s terminal preppy whose vanity, combined with a sense of obligation, compels him to go into politics. Rosemary Falk, however, is Sleeping Cat’s biggest surprise. In the past, Falk’s acting has been limited to timid readings of the nightly curtain speech. Who knew she had a truly great performance in her? Falk’s honesty has a certain naive charm that makes the trust-fund brat she plays genuinely sympathetic. The intimacy of Sleeping Cat also helps this production succeed where others have failed. In a larger space, this little play can disappear in a hurry.

Showing September 26th-27th.