Month: December 2003

Categories
News News Feature

A Journalistic Gift

Reuters is one of the more independent wire services. So, a recent news story from Reuters — flatly describing American military activities in Iraq as part of “the broader U.S. war on terrorism” — is a barometer of how powerfully the pressure systems of rhetoric from top U.S. officials have swayed mainstream news coverage.

Such reporting, with the matter-of-fact message that the Pentagon is fighting a “war on terrorism” in Iraq, amounts to a big journalistic gift for the Bush administration, which is determined to spin its way past the obvious downsides of the occupation.

Here are the concluding words from Bush’s point man in Iraq, Paul Bremer, during a November 17th interview on NPR’s “Morning Edition” program: “The president was absolutely firm both in private and in public that he is not going to let any other issues distract us from achieving our goals here in Iraq, that we will stay here until the job is done and that the force levels will be determined by the conditions on the ground and the war on terrorism.”

Within hours, many of Bremer’s supervisors were singing from the same political hymnal:

On a visit to Europe, Colin Powell told a French newspaper that “Afghanistan and Iraq are two theaters in the global war on terrorism.”

In Washington, President Bush said: “We fully recognize that Iraq has become a new front on the war on terror.”

Speaking to campaign contributors in Buffalo, the vice president pushed the envelope of deception. “Iraq is now the central front in the war on terror,” Dick Cheney declared.

Whether you’re selling food from McDonald’s or cars from General Motors or a war from the U.S. government, repetition is crucial for making propaganda stick. Bush’s promoters will never tire of depicting the war on Iraq as a war on terrorism. And they certainly appreciate the ongoing assists from news media.

For the U.S. public, the mythological link between the occupation of Iraq and the “war on terrorism” is in play. This fall, repeated polling has found a consistent breakout of opinion. In mid-November, according to a CBS News poll, 46 percent of respondents said that the war in Iraq is a major part of the “war on terrorism,” while 14 percent called it a minor part and 35 percent saw them as two separate matters.

A shift in such perceptions, one way or another, could be crucial for Bush’s election hopes. In large measure — particularly at psychological levels — Bush sold the invasion of Iraq as a move against “terrorism.” If he succeeds at framing the occupation as such, he’ll get a big boost toward a second term.

Despite the Bush administration’s countless efforts to imply or directly assert otherwise, no credible evidence has ever emerged to link 9-11 or al-Qaeda with the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Now, if “terrorism” is going to be used as an umbrella term so large that it covers attacks on military troops occupying a country, then the word becomes nothing more than an instrument of propaganda.

Often the coverage in U.S. news media sanitizes the human consequences — and yes, the terror — of routine actions by the occupiers. On November 19th, the U.S. military announced that it had dropped a pair of 2,000-pound bombs 30 miles northeast of Baghdad. Meanwhile, to the north, near the city of Kirkuk, the U.S. Air Force used 1,000-pound bombs — against “terrorist targets,” an American officer told reporters.

Clearly, the vast majority of the people dying in these attacks are Iraqis who are no more “terrorists” than many Americans would be if foreign troops were occupying the United States. But U.S. news outlets sometimes go into raptures of praise as they describe the high-tech arsenal of the occupiers.

On November 17th, at the top of the front page of The New York Times, a color photo showed a gunner aiming his formidable weapon downward from a Black Hawk helicopter, airborne over Baghdad. Underneath the picture was an article lamenting the recent setbacks in Iraq for such U.S. military aircraft. “In two weeks,” the article said, “the Black Hawks and Chinooks and Apaches that once zoomed overhead with such grace and panache have suddenly become vulnerable.”

“Grace” and “panache.” Attributed to no one, the words appeared in a prominent mash note about the machinery of death from the Times, a newspaper that’s supposed to epitomize the highest journalistic standards. But don’t hold your breath for a correction to appear in the nation’s paper of record.

Norman Solomon is co-author of Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Ho Ho Ho

Bad Santa is less a miracle on 34th Street than a bender at O’Hara’s Pub, which is where we first meet department-store Santa Willie T. Stokes (Billy Bob Thornton) drowning his sorrows and contemplating suicide before heading to the back alley to puke his guts out. Little Natalie Wood may have held out hope that her jolly friend in that earlier holiday film was the real Santa, but Willie Stokes doesn’t allow his young followers much room for romantic embellishment, telling one tot on his lap that he’s “living fucking proof that there is no Santa.”

Stokes is the kind of mall Santa who sneaks swigs of whiskey between kiddies and kicks the crap out of the reindeer mannequins in Santaland. And this comic incongruity is the constant sight-gag that Bad Santa is built around. It’s a one-note film, but Thornton plays that note with bravura commitment. (Why can’t we get Thornton’s Santa and Will Ferrell’s wide-eyed elf in a movie together? Is this too much to ask?)

Needless to say, Stokes doesn’t perform this hated seasonal job out of Christmas cheer. He’s a safe-cracker who uses the Santa job for after-hours access to the mall, where he and his diminutive, all-business sidekick Marcus (played by Tony Cox as, yes, Buddy, an angry elf) perform a heist in a new city every season.

For Stokes and Marcus’ latest scheme, they’ve set up shop in Phoenix, where they’re surrounded by an entertaining supporting cast that includes the late John Ritter (in his final film role) as the store manager and Bernie Mac (underused but still flaunting his trademark comic menace) as an opportunistic security chief. And then there’s Lauren Graham as a bar maid with a rather convenient sexual fetish. (Let’s just say she demands that Stokes keep his hat on when they’re in the sack.)

Unsurprisingly, Bad Santa ends up being a somewhat traditional tale of Christmas redemption masquerading as an act of seasonal sabotage: Stokes eventually befriends a sad, creepy little boy named Thurman Mermen (Brett Kelly) who lives with his comatose grandmother (Cloris Leachman in an incredibly thankless role) while his father is away on an extended vacation that the audience understands much better than the boy does.

After first taking advantage of Thurman, Willie eventually takes up for him, bonding through his own peculiar parental gestures, including cooking (a fried bologna and white bread “tostada”) and battering neighborhood bullies (which inspires a particularly memorable soliloquy: “I beat the shit out of some kids today. It was for a purpose. I felt like I did something constructive”).

Bad Santa is directed by Terry Zwigoff and inspires the following question: Is Zwigoff the worst director to ever have two great films to his credit and no bad ones? Zwigoff previously helmed the documentary Crumb, one of the most memorable films of the ’90s, and then his first narrative feature was the Crumb-related Ghost World, one of the current decade’s very best. But Bad Santa establishes what Crumb and Ghost World hinted at: that Zwigoff is a filmmaker who is completely uninterested in visual style.

Despite its rather dull look, Zwigoff still would seem to be a perfect choice for Bad Santa, since both Crumb and Ghost World were also devoted to misanthropic protagonists. But Crumb and Ghost World were also embedded with piercing but still movingly conflicted social critiques. One of the things that made Bad Santa look so promising was the assumption that this same worldview would be applied to the crass consumerism of the Christmas season. No such luck. Beyond a few incidental displays of conventional holiday product-lust –Marcus and his wife’s looting of the malls and the stream of kids asking for toys —Bad Santa doesn’t have much on the brain beyond its central shock-effect conceit: a department-store Santa spouting profanities and engaging in any number of “depraved” behaviors.

The film is so in love with its premise that it shows us the same scenes over and over again –Santa verbally attacking children, going on alcoholic benders, and boinking that enthusiastic Santa fetishist –and each of these activities loses a bit of its comic appeal with each iteration.

If you aren’t predisposed to automatically flinch at such profanity and bad behavior or to automatically applaud its transgressiveness, then Bad Santa is neither the condemnable travesty or daring button-pusher the film’s many extreme reviews have claimed. Rather, it’s a refreshingly sour if sometimes needlessly tasteless comedy that provides plenty of yuks but doesn’t add up to what it could have been. — Chris Herrington

E-mail: herrington@memphisflyer.com

Bad movies can be fun but only if their badness is glorious. While Timeline is gloriously bad, I can’t pinpoint any good reason anyone should see it unless they think Paul Walker is a honey or they’re big fans of Billy Connolly from TV’s Head of the Class. I can’t imagine any of this cast sitting through the world premiere without dreading the polite smiles and changes of subject at the after-party.

So, Connolly is a grizzled, adventurous archaeologist in the tradition of Michael Crichton grizzled archaeologists. Spirited and Scottish, he leads a team of students in the excavation of ruins called Castlegard in France — the site of an important victory for the French in the long war against England centuries before. His disappearance while on a hushed mission prompts his son (Walker) and a crack team of dedicated protégés to demand answers from a devious, nerdy, corporate mastermind (David Thewlis, à la Bill Gates) who has — oops — lost the grizzled adventurous archaeologist via a teleportation machine that — oops — sends things back in time instead of to other places like a fax.

The fax comparison becomes important (kinda) later, as we come to realize that being teleported repeatedly is like sending a fax of a fax and then sending that — the document becomes blurry and incorrect. Dum dum dum! The Bill Gates character amusingly notes of the machine that does the faxing, “I’ll explain the mirrors later.” Of course, he does not, and we must take it on faith that time travel is possible without so much as a Flux Capacitor to take the credit. So, Walker and his gang are sent back to 14th-century France to find Dad and try not to screw anything up. Oh, did I mention that the Walker kid has an aversion to history? It’s illustrated at length prior to their trip back but never wrapped up nicely to show that he’s learned anything. There’s also a hint of romance at the beginning, with Walker pining unrequitedly for his father’s best pupil (Frances O’Connor), but the pining doesn’t last long. Within 20 minutes she grants him a kiss just before making the first of several trips through roofs made of hay. There is, then, nowhere for the romance to go for the lengthy 80 more minutes of the film, leaving them undistracted in their mission to get back to the future.

Yawn. So, there’s no romantic tension. The film’s coupling is established early on, and if it were a better film we might be held in suspense over whether one key romantic interest survives the climactic battle (did I mention that they went back to the day of that significant battle?), but we aren’t the least bit worried about it. There’s also no historical tension either, since — apparently — you can do whatever you want in the past and it won’t change the present. (In most time-travel movies, characters are advised not to touch anything lest they change destiny forever.) There might be some dramatic tension, but all the secrets of the film (like the identity of the rogue 20th-century guy who has been living in the past as a self-serving nobleman or the fact that the Bill Gates-y guy is — gasp — a villain!) are out in the open by the first half and we are never in doubt of the success of our protagonists. And the most lovable character we meet, a shy French lad, is killed at the beginning of the mission. Au revoir, Francois. Another neat character is felled near the end by being pushed through a rack of coats.

Richard Donner, the director behind the Lethal Weapon franchise, the first Superman movies, and Scrooged, is responsible for this mess. Hell, this man directed episodes of Gilligan’s Island. He’s been at this long enough to hold a movie together with, if not a great story, good cinematography and set pieces. The film quality resembles ’60s adventure-TV like Land of the Giants or episodes of Star Trek, and 14th-century France looks a whole lot like a Renaissance fair, and not once did I get to peruse a medieval gift shop or enjoy a giant turkey leg.

Mr. Donner, I submit that you look to your own work in The Goonies for an example of swashbuckling, nonsensical fun and then get in the 21st century with the rest of us. — Bo List

Categories
Music Music Features

The Stripper

Cymbals hiss and the bass starts walking. Tassels spin this way and that in a crowded, smoky bar full of traveling salesmen and rowdy conventioneers. Somebody tells a dirty joke and everybody laughs. Exotic women dance with wild abandon in the tight, hot spotlight.

That’s burlesque the way it used to be. On Saturday, December 6th, John Michael McCarthy, Memphis’ king of underground rock-and-shock cinema, has arranged to bring a little of that old-time Minsky-madness to the corner of Cooper and Young.

“The Broad Daylight Block Party” begins at 7 p.m. at the screening room of First Congregational Church (of all places) with a showing of McCarthy’s new stag film, Broad Daylight, and The Velvet Hammer Burlesque, a revealing documentary about the burlesque revival by L.A. filmmaker Augusta. At 10 p.m., moviegoers will be invited to take a trip down the street to see indie-pop innovator (and frequent McCarthy collaborator) Poli-Sci-Clone at Do (the corner’s new sushi bar). Then New Orleans’ retro-rockers the SophistiCats (think Impala at their most Las Vegas grind) play the Young Avenue Deli until closing time. Kitten DeVille, a six-foot-plus burlesque queen featured in both films, will join the SophistiKittens to demonstrate the fringe-shaking shimmy that brought her the coveted title of Miss Exotic World 2002.

“I guess I’m a little more mellow these days,” McCarthy says, reflecting on the irony of screening his striptease film in the basement of a church. “People know what I do,” he says. “And everybody gets it now. At least I think they get it. But I’m still waiting for that call, you know? The one that says I can’t do it.” It’s a fairly predictable response from an underground director whose primary rules for filmmaking are: “One, don’t ask permission. Two, shoot until they make you stop. And three, deny everything.”

Broad Daylight is a sequel (or, as Herr “Direktor” puts it, a “shequel”) to McCarthy’s 1998 stag film, Shine On Sweet Starlet, a grainy black-and-white homage to classic stag loops and party films. Shine On was shot piecemeal with thrift-store cameras, and the whole tawdry affair was set to a nasty garage-rock beat. When asked to compare the two films, McCarthy says, “This new one’s in color. Short on plot, long on [censored]. Keep it simple.”

“The goal is always to make features,” he says. “But in between the features, why not take the opportunity to work on your chops, have a little fun, and shoot some cuties?”

Broad Daylight features striptease numbers by burlesque performers from all over the country. The garage-punk soundtrack has a retro flair and includes tracks by Memphis bands the Reigning Sound, the Grown-Up Wrongs, Viva L’American Death Ray Music, and Mr. Airplane Man, along with cuts by the Woggles, the Demolition Doll Rods, the Dirtbombs, and the SophistiCats.

The roots of burlesque can be traced back to Aristophanes, but the form as we know it began in the 19th century as a bawdy, musical send-up of traditional theater. It evolved alongside vaudeville and quickly established itself as a kind of parasitic twin. It took on a variety-show format: Comedians, magicians, animal acts, singers, and acrobats performed alongside the striptease artists. In the 1920s and ’30s, burlesque became increasingly sophisticated thanks to innovative performers like Sally Rand. America’s top comedians — W.C. Fields, Mae West, Bert Lahr, and Eva Tanguay — cut their teeth in burlesque. The lowbrow form became very nearly respectable when playwrights like Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett began to appropriate the vulgar tone, naughty songs, and absurd slapstick of the “burley houses.”

Sometime in the mid-’90s, L.A. hipster Michelle Carr was hanging out in strip clubs wondering why the pole dancers didn’t put on more of a show. Inspiration struck. She began to recruit friends, dancers, actors, and artists interested in reviving the lost art of the striptease. She eventually found her cast, and in 1995 the Velvet Hammer troupe was born. Velvet Hammer the documentary begins as a glamorous romp through the glitter-laden history of the burlesque revival, but toward the end it takes on an almost apologetically feminist tone.

“Strip clubs are a man’s idea of what’s sexy,” one burlesque queen opines, pointing out that the Velvet Hammer is put together almost exclusively by women.

And what is it that the girls find alluring? To begin with, the Velvet Hammer girls are all-natural. Some are rail-thin, others are nearly perfect, while others sport their share of love handles. One dancer known as “The World Famous Bob,” a full-figured Jayne Mansfield type known for mixing cocktails between her cleavage, offers prospective dancers one bit of advice: “Never say no to dessert.”

Many of the acts are pure retro glamour; other acts call to mind classic pinup girls of the 1940s and ’50s. We are shown women as cowgirls, nurses, spies, exotic islanders, spiders, genies, dancers, aristocrats, kitty cats, and goddesses. At least one act, however, carries a political theme. A female escape artist, naked except for requisite pasties and G-string, is bound head-to-toe in heavy ropes. Unlike most escape artists who affect ennui, her struggle is obvious and painful-looking. When at last she breaks free, instead of wiggling around like a go-go girl, she makes one unmistakable gesture: the universal sign for “kiss my sequined behind.” That message, with all its various meanings in play, seems to be the Velvet Hammer’s mantra: “You can kiss my sequined behind.”

The Velvet Hammer is just one of many burlesque revival troupes to spring up in the last decade. It’s good news for McCarthy, who has always been a filmmaker looking for an audience.

“I premiered Broad Daylight at this year’s Tease-O-Rama festival,” McCarthy says, referring to the third-annual international burlesque convention, which was held this year in L.A. “It was a sold-out crowd. People even laughed at the editing decisions. There have always been people who have liked my movies,” McCarthy says. “Now it feels like there is a movement.”

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Short Cuts

Indestructible

Rancid

(Hellcat Records)

Rancid’s game plan on Indestructible is misdirection. Pick a track, any track, and everything sounds like you would expect from the world’s greatest trad-punk band. The forcebeat drums snap and crackle along at high velocity, Lars Frederiksen’s guitar rages and blathers as he pins the melody down or chases it around, Matt Freeman’s bass makes funny little asides like Dub Jones, Tim Armstrong’s garbled manifestos slip and squirm through the roar, and the Clash comparisons loom up at high speed like glowing Wal-Mart signs from the highway. Then the tough-guy lyrics take a sharp detour from pose into poetry — “I keep on listenin’ to the great Joe Strummer/Cuz through music, we can live forever,” say, or “I was an atheist, you wore the crucifix/We put our differences to the side” — and the bait-and-switch is complete. It’s punk rock all right — punk rock with a head and a heart! Building on the community aesthetic of Armstrong’s Transplants with a friendlier but uncompromising focus, Rancid melds crazy guitars, real political concerns, and emotion recollected in tranquility better than anyone since the Minutemen.

But unlike the sometimes difficult, goofy Minutemen, Rancid has worked hard to refine pure So-Cal punk rock — loud-fast-rules, guitars set to stun, 19 songs that barely stop for a second’s rest. On Indestructible, the exception to the barrage is the gorgeous, catch-your-breath ballad “Arrested in Shanghai,” which makes a government critique take flight with help from a punk choir that shows up elsewhere and turns joyous winners like “Start Now” and “Back Up Against the Wall” into genuine anthems. Like every Rancid record, Indestructible is a little too long, but the tough optimism and generosity compensate for the occasional moments when the band merely treads water.

They work wonders with their simple, straightforward game plan. They seldom step wrong and never step falsely. They make me want to believe in a warts-and-all subculture that they’re unwilling to romanticize but happy to show off. They also make me want to jump around during at least a dozen tracks. And they prove for the umpteen-millionth time that punk rock can change our lives. —Addison Engelking

Grade: A

It Still Moves

My Morning Jacket

(ATO/RCA)

The third album from Louisville’s My Morning Jacket floats along on a sea of reverb and echo. Although they’re usually labeled an alt-country band, the songs on It Still Moves rarely sound like they originated in Nashville –the band only shifts into full-fledged honky-tonk mode on “Easy Morning Rebel.” Sometimes, as on “Golden,” the band sounds like what might have happened if the Replacements had stayed together and traded in the booze for high-quality Kentucky weed. “Dancefloors,” on the other hand, sounds like the Rolling Stones’ “Loving Cup” as produced by Daniel Lanois. The almost-classical finger-picked guitar that punctuates the album comes to the forefront on “One Big Holiday,” the intro to which mines the unlikely source of the Police’s “Bring On the Night.” The factor that unifies these disparate sounds and influences is the warm production; one can imagine the band messing around onstage in a big, boomy, half-empty dance hall, following the Crazy Horse riffs wherever they lead. The emotional center of the album is “Run Thru,” where a stately, ascending Ragged Glory-style riff builds into a frenzied, fuzz-bass-driven climax.

But the easygoing, meandering atmosphere that is so engaging in the first half of the record bogs down into a muddy mess in the album’s closing tracks. Part of the problem is excessive length; just about everything is in the five-minute range with longer excursions like “I Will Sing You Songs” stretching three minutes’ worth of ideas into 10 minutes. The result is 12 songs that play like a double album. Still, singer-songwriter Jim James’ talent is undeniable, and if you’re in the mood for down-to-earth roots-rock played kind of spacey, you could do a lot worse than It Still Moves. — Chris McCoy

Grade: B

The Civil War

Matmos

(Matador)

Matmos injected the mid-’90s laptop-music quasimovement with enough individuality to alienate electronic purists and win over the “post-rock” underground at the same time. Using such unorthodox sound sources as the amplified brain activity of a crawfish (on their 1997 eponymous debut) and an entire album of liposuction-surgery sounds (2001’s breakthrough A Chance To Cut Is a Chance To Cure) have catapulted Matmos into an unclassifiable realm of electronica, but the thing is, the music often eschews harshness or disorientation in favor of melodic elegance.

Admirable trailblazers in their (left) field, Matmos have outdone themselves with The Civil War. Even those who are generally averse to electronic music stand to get turned on their rockist ears with this one. Finding thematic and sonic influences from both the American Civil War and the English Civil War of the 17th century, the album samples fireworks and uses pre-electricity instrumentation (flutes, acoustic guitar, banjo) in conjunction with a laptop artist’s usual arsenal of beats, swirls, and techie wizardry. There’s myriad activity on each track — no minimalism here — with plenty of little intricacies to ferret out upon each listen. The opening track, “Regicide,” is elating — the perfect pop song hiding behind the perfect weird techno song hiding behind the perfect, er, battle hymn. It only gets better and weirder from there. David Grubbs/Gastr Del Sol fans, take note: Grubbs’ trademark John Faheyesque guitar pluckings are the dominating presence on the epic “Reconstruction.” —Andrew Earles

Grade: A-

All Got Our Runnins

The Streets

(Vice)

All Got Our Runnins, the new EP from Brit-hop artist the Streets (aka Mike Skinner) is an Internet-only release with one instrumental track, three new originals, and four remixes of tracks from his debut, Original Pirate Material. It’s hard not to criticize this kind of offering: At worst, it’s a shameless money-maker designed to milk every last dime out of a hit album; at best, it’s a mere stopgap to please diehards until a follow-up drops.

The remixes fall squarely in the filler category. The Mr. Figit take on “Don’t Mug Yourself” and Ashley Beedle’s Love Bug vocal mix of “Weak Become Heroes” are particularly unimaginative as remixes go. Only the Streets remix of “Let’s Push Things Forward,” featuring Roll Deep and boy of da moment Dizzee Rascal, is worth the price, a glorious mishmash that barely resembles its source material and suggests that Britain might be the next hip-hop hotbed.

The original tracks, however, are what make the release worthwhile, reminding you how revolutionary Skinner’s debut sounded last year. The title track especially showcases Skinner’s gift for street realism: “You know things are bleak when you’re telling the birds you asked out last week that things are busy/When really you got no dough in the piggy.”

But the amazing disparity between the new material and the remixes only makes listeners all the more impatient for Skinner’s follow-up, which is becoming more and more long-awaited.

—Stephen Deusner

Grade: B

E-mail: herrington@memphisflyer.com

Categories
News The Fly-By

Checks and Balances

Whenever Republican leaders complain about the power of money in politics, the source of their concern is always the same: Somewhere, a Democrat of means has just written a substantial check.

So imagine their outrage at the news that George Soros, the billionaire financier and philanthropist, will spend millions next year to defeat President Bush. Actually, no imagination is needed to hear the squealing and squawking from the right. From the commanding heights of the Republican National Committee and House hearing rooms all the way down to the lowliest Web sites, George Soros is an object of vilification.

Leading the anti-Soros chorus is Ed Gillespie, the new R.N.C. chairman and former lobbyist. His clients notably included the late Enron Corporation, a firm where criminal book-cooking paid for promiscuous political palm-greasing.

According to a former Enron executive interviewed by The Washington Post, “whenever we had to get in to see a Republican, the first call was to Gillespie.” While churning out press releases about the nefarious Soros, the R.N.C. chief continues to hold an ownership stake in Quinn Gillespie, the lobby shop he founded in 2000 with former Clinton White House counsel Jack Quinn that has reported fees totaling $27 million from its corporate clientele.

Now Gillespie accuses Soros of seeking to empower “special interests” and of undermining campaign-finance restrictions that the Republican Party has traditionally opposed and subverted. He frets that the Soros donations may not be “disclosed to the public.”

On the Web site run by GOPUSA — a commercial entity that attracted major Republican legislators, lobbyists, and commentators to its Washington conference this month — the Jewish financier was recently described as “a Hungarian-born descendant of Shylock.”

For the vast majority of right-wing whiners, however, what rankles is not his ethnicity but his determination. Soros, they say, is a hypocrite because after endorsing campaign-finance reform, he’s now violating the spirit of the McCain-Feingold law that banned soft-money donations. The Wall Street Journal warns that liberal “fat cats” like Soros will be “less accountable” than the old soft-money donors and that “his views will follow his cash in influencing Democratic policy.”

The Journal editorial sniffs that Soros will give money through so-called 527 committees (a reference to the section of the I.R.S. code that regulates such groups), whose “disclosure patterns have been full of holes and evasions.” And any Democrat who defeats the president will have no choice but to answer to the Soros political “machine.”

Exactly what has Mr. Soros done to provoke this reaction? He has given $3 million to a new liberal Washington think tank, the Center for American Progress. And yes, he has publicly pledged $10 million to Americans Coming Together, a liberal voter-registration effort, and $5 million to MoveOn.org, an Internet-based group that is raising millions of dollars in small donations for liberal candidates and causes.

That sounds like a lot of money, except when contrasted with the enormous amounts pumped into organs of conservative propaganda every year by such truly prodigious spenders as Sun Myung Moon, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Mellon Scaife and literally dozens of other obscure but rich Republicans. The corporate leaders and K Street lobbyists who “bundle” these donations include an individual “tracking number” on every check — to ensure proper “credit” by the White House.

The results can be traced in nearly every important item of White House legislation. Its energy bill brimmed with billions in favors to the oil, nuclear, coal, and auto industries. Its Medicare “reform” will dispense billions to the insurance, pharmaceutical, hospital, and nursing-home industries.

Meanwhile, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay oversees his own array of Republican 527 committees, which funnel millions of dollars into various advertising campaigns and legislative races. He has long since mastered the “holes and evasions” of this system and is constantly drilling new ones.

According to The New York Times, his latest is a “charity” that would suck huge, undisclosed contributions from anonymous Republican donors who desire access to Congress. Supposedly intended for the benefit of neglected children, this money’s real purpose is to pay for “late-night parties, luxury suites, and yacht cruises” at next September’s Republican convention.

But it is Soros who threatens the integrity of the political process. He wants to register more voters. n

Joe Conason writes a weekly column on politics for The New York Observer.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Clock Problem

Time is running out for dissidents who question details of the FedExForum, now entering the final several months of construction in downtown Memphis. So concedes Shelby County Commissioner John Willingham, chief among those who have consistently questioned the contract between local governments and Hoops, the umbrella organization representing the ownership of the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies and local NBA supporters.

Until recently, Willingham and other arena skeptics held a majority on the commission ready to approve a $50,000 contract with the local engineering/consulting firm of Barnett Naylor/Hanscomb to vet arena arrangements. That consensus vanished after a visit to the commission last week from Public Building Authority executive director Dave Bennett, who apparently convinced several commissioners to hold their fire.

Project consultant John Hilkene is on tap for a special meeting Thursday of Willingham’s Public Service and Tourism committee, and the commissioner was of two minds about the impending visit. “I’ll be pleasantly surprised if he shows up. Their attitude has been, ‘Don’t bother us. We’ve got an arena to build,'” said Willingham, who added, concerning the pending watchdog contract, “If he [Hilkene] doesn’t show up, you can bet your ass the vote will be there to go ahead.”

· On the same day that President Bush told a Las Vegas audience that things were “getting better” for the United States in Iraq, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist hedged that bet after a Memphis speech last week, responding, “No, it’s as bad as it looks,” when asked if there was “light at the end of the tunnel” in Iraq.

Otherwise, Frist, just concluding two weeks of intense labor in Washington, offered a relatively rosy scenario at an installment of the “Frontline Politics 101” series at the Park Vista Hotel — particularly concerning the final passage of what Frist described as a “bipartisan” Medicare reform bill.

Frist described the enacted measure, which includes subsidies to drug companies that extend prescription benefits to seniors, as superior to the more “bureaucratic, big-government, more costly” version favored by Kennedy and other Democrats. He said the Medicare bill had succeeded in three aims: “It was bipartisan, it is voluntary, and it will transform Medicare.”

Also making a local stop last week was 7th District U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who toured Iraq recently. Before addressing members of the East Shelby Republican Club last week, Blackburn acknowledged that “the way will be hard” in Iraq but, like Frist, offered her full support to the president’s current policies.

· Spirited races are shaping up next year for two local countywide offices:

General Sessions Court Clerk: The Republican incumbent, Chris Turner, faces one possible GOP challenger, newcomer Charles Fineberg, and certain Democratic opposition. Among the known or likely Democratic challengers: Becky Clark, who served as chief administrator under former clerks Gene Goldsby and John Ford; former broadcast personality Janis Fullilove, who lost a close race to incumbent City Court clerk Thomas Long this year; state senator Roscoe Dixon, who ran unsuccessfully for the office four years ago; and O.C. Pleasant, longtime chairman of the Shelby County Election Commission.

Shelby County Assessor: The Democratic incumbent, Rita Clark, faces opposition from within her own party ranks. Former assessor Michael Hooks Sr., who held the job from 1988 to 1992, is gearing up for a primary challenge to Clark. Republicans include former Lakeland mayor Jim Bomprezzi, real estate appraiser Grady Frisby, who ran for the office four years ago; Bob Kahn, another former aspirant; and John Bogan.

A special case is frequent candidate Jesse Elder Neely, who has drawn petitions to run for both assessor and General Sessions clerk. Neely is certain to be disallowed as a candidate until he pays accumulated fines owed the state Election Registry for past failure to file financial disclosure statements in previous races.

· Several Democratic presidential campaigns have taken root in Shelby County. Local supporters of both Wesley Clark and Howard Dean held meet-ups this week, and there was a similar turnout for John Kerry (whose chief Memphis-area supporter is U.S. Rep. Harold Ford) last week. Both Richard Gephardt and Joe Lieberman also have some prominent local supporters. John Edwards has had a fund-raiser or two in these parts. Even Dennis Kucinich, widely considered an also-ran, is attempting to set up a local organization, having recently sounded out local activist Jay Sparks, who has at least one other iron in the fire, about setting one up. ·

E-mail: baker@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Music Music Features

Sound Advice

The Central Standards, a folk-rock duo composed of Jeff Capps and Ted Horrell, have been gigging around town for the past year or so, mixing literate originals with a record geek’s panoply of sharp cover tunes (Velvet Underground, Kinks, Stephen Malkmus, etc.). But this week they’ll step out with the release of their solid debut disc, Refrain, a collection of 14 smart, catchy original songs on the folk side of the alt-country vein, music reminiscent of artists such as the Jayhawks and Freedy Johnston.

Recorded at Memphis Soundworks with Posey Hedges and Kevin Cubbins at the controls, Refrain fleshes out the duo’s acoustic-guitar sound with an added rhythm section and a few other instrumental flourishes. The more dynamic backdrop helps flesh out the duo’s sharp collection of downbeat love songs, including standouts like “Still Stay,” “Otis Redding Song,” and “Secrets To Sing.”

The Central Standards will hold three record-release parties for Refrain this week: the first, on Friday, December 5th, at the Full Moon Club above Zinnie’s East, a 21-and-over show that starts at 10 p.m. The duo will follow that show with two appearances the next day — a 3 p.m. set at Cat’s Music in Midtown and an 8 p.m. show at Borders Books & Music. — Chris Herrington

If The Iguanas (and no, I don’t mean Iggy Pop’s first band) are in the house, you know it must be a party. This New Orleans roots/fusion combo has been playing in some form or another since the late ’80s when singer and guitar/accordion player Rod Hodges moved from San Francisco to the Big Easy. The Iguanas are musicians’ musicians and a slightly less-brooding answer to Brave Combo, blending classic R&B grooves with funk, zydeco, tejano, and — yes — polka. Their sound can shift in an instant between sweet, haunting Mexican soul to full-throttle, horn-driven Stax madness. Very few groups can cram so many influences into a single, cohesive sound. Check out “Flame On,” a driving Stax-inspired number vaguely referencing Marvel Comics superhero the Human Torch and you’ll see what I mean. The Iguanas have many Memphis connections. Several members have played with Alex Chilton and Tav Falco’s Panther Burns. Drummer Doug Garrison even played on Charlie Rich’s last recording, Pictures and Paintings. The Iguanas play Automatic Slim’s Tonga Club on Friday, December 5th. At $12, the cover is a little pricey, but the Iguanas are worth a dozen dollars and then some. And speaking of parties

Nobody does it better than Shangri-La Records. There have been a few record shops to come into the market catering to the punk/Memphis-centric/vinyl-lovers crowd since Shangri-La opened its doors in 1989, but none of them has been able to really compete for the hearts and minds of local musicians and audiophiles. Why? There’s Shangri-La’s record label/publishing house for starters. Between their great new-music releases in the ’90s, the CD/documentary/autobiography of beloved bluesman Wilroy Sanders, and the label’s more recent garage-rock anthologies, Shangri-La has become a multigenerational touchstone for Memphis musicians and music lovers. And then there are the parties! When Shangri-La throws a shindig, you know your shins have been thoroughly dug. This year’s Christmas party lineup includes Memphis’ premier instrumental soul group, The Bo-Keys, and Tyler Keith & The Preacher’s Kids. Since I’ve recently spilled quite a bit of ink on the former, let’s forget about the BKs for a minute and concentrate on Tyler Keith. Who could have ever imagined that when Keith left the Neckbones, an amazing semi-local trash-rock band in the spirit of the Oblivians, that his sound could actually get nastier? With more than an occasional nod to ’70s-era New York punk, Keith is almost single-handedly reinventing a style of music called “Southern rock.” That is to say, Keith’s lyrics are decidedly Southern, almost rural at times, but the screaming guitars fly between traditional urban punk, crazed honky tonk, and something a little swampier and lot more dangerous. When Romeo Hood first came out, I ranked it as one of my favorite local records of the year. It has since become one of my favorite local records of all time. Check into what Keith’s doing these days at The Shangri-La Christmas Party on Saturday, December 6th, at the Hi-Tone Café.

— Chris Davis

Categories
News News Feature

CITY BEAT

FEES, FEES, AND MORE FEES

We’re doing great, says MLGW.

You can do better, says Mayor Willie Herenton, and you’re not the only one with budget problems.

The city is also in critical need of a sewer rate increase next year and faces a very real probability of a property tax increase of 25 to 35 cents in fiscal year 2006. Depending on how the economy does, the city might even need a 10-cent increase next year (about $2 a month for a $100,000 home). In light of that, Herenton asked MLGW and the Memphis City Council to consider delaying part of the utility’s requested seven-percent rate hike for another year.

The proposed sewer rate increase, the first in 22 years, would raise the average residential sewer bill by $2.17 a month. Rather than present it separately, Herenton put it in context with property taxes and utility fees in a personal presentation to the City Council Tuesday.

It was Herenton’s first specific warning of a property tax hike during his upcoming fourth mayoral term. He apparently decided to lay out all his cards while the council was examining MLGW s budget and getting the public stirred up about their utility bills.

While it may be a monopoly, MLGW would like to be seen as both more compassionate and efficient than those corporate monoliths in the Internet, cable television, and telephone sectors who raise rates whenever they feel like it.

Your hometown utility wants to be your trusted friend.

MLGW took out a full-page newspaper ad and President Herman Morris wrote an opinion column for The Commercial Appeal‘s Sunday editorial page. The average residential customer increase, it was helpfully noted, was projected at $10.35 a month, or 35 cents a day, or less than the cost of a postage stamp.

The mayor, noting a number of service complaints, was not entirely sold nor, according to aides, appreciative of Morris for pressing ahead.

In addition to his comprehensive look at taxes and fees, Herenton presented plans for a call center for city government and its affiliated agencies. FedEx will lend its expertise.

If the mayor gets his way, MLGW will get a rate increase but not all at once. The utility has proposed the seven-percent general rate increase to compensate for increased costs of anti-terrorism measures and the extraordinary costs of the summer wind storm — not all of which have been reimbursed by the federal government.

Political decisions have also raised MLGW’s costs. One year ago City Council members, not wanting to play Scrooge, ordered the utility to defer winter cutoffs and reduce home deposits and reconnection fees to assist cash-strapped customers. MLGW says the measures, coupled with other programs to help the poor, cost $9 million a year.

Two years ago city officials agreed to finance $30 million worth of bonds for the FedEx Forum with MLGW’s annual $2.5 million payment in lieu of taxes from the water division. Otherwise that money could have been used to lower rates or offset costs.

The last time the utility raised its water rates was in 1995. Gas and electricity have been steady since 1993. There were small rate reductions in 1998-2000.

In a letter to council members last week, Herenton said MLGW appears to spend an unnecessary sum on advertising even though it is a monopoly and has invested $30 million in an automated billing system he says has problems.

The call center is in part a response to growing concerns about customer service complaints regarding MLGW that got worse after the July wind storm. Herenton is well attuned to citizen complaints from community and business leaders. Like most Memphians, he lost power himself for days after the storm. The mayor appoints Morris and the five MLGW board members, including the mayor’s pastor, the Rev. James Netters of Mt. Vernon Baptist Church, and his longtime political supporters CME Bishop William Graves and minority business consultant Franketta Guinn; television executive Olin Morris; and businessman L. R. Jalenak.

They oversee an operation with 2,800 employees, nearly 400,000 customers, a $250 million annual operating budget and a $112 million capital improvements budget. Utility financing is a complex entity in itself. MLGW uses 12 percent of TVA s total electrical output. Earlier this year, MLGW struck an agreement to prepurchase $1.5 billion worth of electricity, a move the utility says will save it $15 million a year for 15 years.

All in all, a lot of numbers to digest, but Herenton decided that citizens deserve to see them all at once and prepare for the worst.

Categories
News News Feature

HERENTON TO MLGW: CHANGES ARE COMING

In a blistering critique, Mayor Willie Herenton all but gave MLGW President Herman Morris and five board members their walking papers Tuesday.

The surprise announcement, coupled with an admission that a property tax hike is likely within the next two years, came at an executive committee meeting of the City Council, which is weighing MLGW’s request for a seven-percent rate hike.

Conceding that he does not know the utility’s fiscal situation as well as he knows city finances, Herenton said MLGW needs its first rate increase in eight years.

“I fully support MLGW’s request for additional revenue,” he said.

He suggested, however, that it be phased in over two years, with the increase in gas rates postponed until October of 2004. And he said the question of utility rates was secondary to the city’s overall financial needs and to MLGW’s performance.

He then proceeded to rip MLGW for “costly mistakes in technology,” wasteful construction of a facility on Whitten Road, low morale, bloated salaries and benefits, “self-aggrandizing” advertising, top-heavy executive ranks, and “a number of employees who have bad attitudes” particularly in customer service.

Herenton appointed Morris, an attorney formerly with the NAACP, and the five board members, including his pastor the Rev. James Netters. Their terms have expired but it is not uncommon for board members to continue to serve.

Herenton said his management style is to give subordinates freedom to do their jobs until they mess up.

“I’m into MLGW’s business because there have been some bad decisions,” he said, speaking firmly but without anger or sarcasm to a packed committee room. “We’ve allowed MLGW to operate as an island unto itself.”

He said, in all apparent seriousness, that he intends to nominate “private citizen Willie Herenton” to the boar, triggering a predictable round of “King Willie” outrage on local talk radio stations. He did not mention Morris or any board members by name. Morris was in the committee room and listened carefully but declined to comment afterwards.

Herenton has had a testy relationship with MLGW since he made an aborted proposal to sell it in 1998. Two events apparently set off his critique. First came the devastating wind storm last July and MLGW’s response to it. Herenton said service complaints spilled over into the mayor’s citizen’s service center because callers could not get through to MLGW. More recently there was an MLGW non-response to a letter that Herenton took as something of a snub. The mayor said he informed MLGW officials of his thinking two weeks ago and “they made no attempt to meet with me.”

“I guarantee you in the future MLGW will have management that will not hesitate to meet with the mayor,” he said.

Herenton said council members should consider the proposed utility rate hike in the context of a a sewer fee hike he said is vital and the strong probability of a property tax hike of 25 to 35 cents by 2006.

Council members will decide on the rate hike while Herenton gets to make the calls at MLGW’s board and presidency. The mayor had sharp words for councilman Joe Brown as he got up to leave the room. He reminded councilmen that he had worked with 12 (out of 13) of them as chairman. Brown’s turn is coming next.

“You’ve got one vote, Joe, one vote,” he said. Then, for good measure, “you don’t run nothin’” as he strode out of the room.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

POLITICS

CLOCK PROBLEM

Time is running out for dissidents who question details of the FedEx Forum, now entering the final several months of construction in downtown Memphis. So concedes Shelby County Commissioner John Willingham, chief among those who have consistently questioned the contract between local governments and Hoops, the umbrella organization representing the ownership of the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies and local NBA supporters.

Until recently, Willingham and other arena skeptics held a majority on the commission ready to approve a $50,000 contract with the local engineering/consulting firm of Barnett Naylor/Hanscomb to vet arena arrangements. That consensus vanished after a visit to the commission last week from Public Building Authority executive director Dave Bennett, who apparently convinced several commissioners to hold their fire.

Project consultant John Hilkene is on tap for a special meeting Thursday of Willingham’s Public Service and Tourism committee, and the commissioner was of two minds about the impending visit. “I’ll be pleasantly surprised if he shows up. Their attitude has been, Ô.Don’t bother us. We’ve got an arena to build,.’” said Willingham, who said, concerning the pending watchdog contract, “If he [Hilkene] doesn’t show up, you can bet your ass the vote will be there to go ahead.”

  • On the same day that President Bush told a Las Vegas audience that things were “getting better” for the United States in Iraq, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist hedged that bet after a Memphis speech last week, responding, “No, it’s as bad as it looks,” when asked if there was “light at the end of the tunnel” in Iraq.

    Otherwise, Frist , just concluding two weeks of intense labor in Washington, offered a relatively rosy scenario at an installment of the Chamber of Commerce “Frontline Politics 101” series at the Park Vista Hotel Ð particularly concerning the final passage of what Frist described as a “bipartisan” Medicare reform bill.

    Frist described the enacted measure, which includes subsidies to drug ompanies that extend prescription benefits to seniors, as superior to the more “bureaucratic, big-government, more costly” version favored by Kennedy and other Democrats. He said the Medicare bill had succeeded in three aims. “It was bipartisan, it is voluntary, and it will transform Medicare.”

    Also making a local stop last week was 7th District U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who toured Iraq recently. Before addressing members of the East Shelby Republican Club last week, Blackburn acknowledged that “the way will be hard” in Iraq but, like Frist, offered her full support to the president’s current policies.

  • Spirited races are shaping up next year for two local countywide offices:

    General Sessions Court Clerk: The Republican incumbent, Chris Turner, faces one possible GOP challenger, newcomer Charles Fineberg, and certain Democratic opposition. Among the known or likely Democratic challengers: Becky Clark, who served as chief administrator under former clerks Gene Goldsby and John Ford; former broadcast personality Janis Fullilove , who lost a close race to incumbent City Court Clerk Thomas Long this year; State Senator Roscoe Dixon, who ran unsuccessfully for the office four years ago; and O.C. Pleasant, longtime chairman of the Shelby County Election Commission

    Shelby County Assessor: The Democratic incumbent, Rita Clark, faces opposition from within her own party ranks. Former assessor Michael Hooks, Sr., who held the job from 1988 to 1992, is gearing up for a primary challenge to Clark, while Republicans former Lakeland mayor Jim Bomprezzi , real estate appraiser Grady Frisby, who ran for the office four years ago; Bob Kahn, another former aspirant; and John Bogan.

    A special case is frequent candidate Jesse Elder Neely, who has drawn petitions to run for both assessor and General Sessions clerk. Neely is certain to be disallowed as a candidate until he pays accumulated fines owed the state Election Registry for past failure to file financial disclosure statements in previous races.

  • Several Democratic presidential campaigns have taken root in Shelby County. Local supporters of both Wesley Clark and Howard Dean held meet-ups this week, and there was a similar turnout for John Kerry (whose chief Memphis-area supporter is U.S. Rep. Harold Ford) last week. Both Richard Gephardt and Joe Lieberman also have some prominent local supporters. John Edwards has had a fundraiser or two in these parts. Even Dennis Kucinich, widely considered an also-ran, is attempting to set up a local organization, having recently sounded out local activist Jay Sparks, who has at least one other iron in the fire, about setting one up.