Month: May 2004

Sound Advice

Post author By
Post date May 6, 2004

Standing alongside Pavement, Guided By Voices, Superchunk, and Memphis’ own Grifters among the top tier of indie-rock bands during the genre’s early/mid-’90s heyday, Sebadoh may have been the scene’s most direct major players. In another time or another place, frontman Lou Barlow might have been his generation’s James Taylor, the sensitive singer-songwriter who makes the college girls swoon. Sebadoh got its start as a low-fi, home-recording outfit in the late ’80s but hit its stride in the mid-’90s, first with the relationship-spanning conceptual song cycle Bubble & Scrape (told backward, like an indie-rock Irreversible) and then with the crystalline Bakesale, which jettisoned indulgent noise entirely for a near-classic batch of tightly wound relationship songs. Barlow has since hit it bigger with his other band, the Folk Implosion, but is back on the road with longtime Sebadoh collaborator Jason Loewenstein for a reunion tour of sorts. They’ll be at the Hi-Tone Café Sunday, May 9th, with ace local indie inheritors The Coach and Four.

I’ll swear on a stack of 45s that “All the Kids Are Right,” by Illinois hard-rock duo Local H, is one of the greatest anthems in rock-and-roll history — sardonic, poignant, hilarious, and driven heavenward by the crunchiest power riffs since Kurt Cobain blasted off this mortal coil. On that alt-rock equivalent to “The Dream Is Over,” singer-songwriter/guitarist Scott Lucas gazes out at the increasingly bored, ever-shrinking group of kids in the audience at the crappy club he’s playing (apparently, they found out that girls show their tits at Limp Bizkit shows and headed for the door) and sings a hymn to the end of an era: “You heard that we were great/But now you think we’re lame/Since you saw the show last night/Thought that we would rock/Knock it up a notch/Rockin’ was nowhere in sight/And it’s never good when it goes bad.” Elsewhere on the same record, 1998’s Pack Up the Cats, Lucas acknowledges another hard truth: “I’m in love with rock-and-roll/But that’ll change eventually.” Or maybe not. The band is still on the road, still playing presumably before sparse audiences, and will be at the Hi-Tone Café Wednesday, May 12th, with Detachment Kit.

—Chris Herrington

I’ve always been leery of any band a club promotes with the line “featuring former members of [insert 1980s college-radio band here].” I was especially skeptical when I saw that The Low Budgets, “featuring members of the Dead Milkmen,” were coming to Murphy’s. If there were ever a band that got more credit than it deserved, it’s the Dead Milkmen. Oh sure, the first time I heard the line “It’s a boring day/I’ve got nothing to do except/Get a load of retards and drive ’em to the zoo,” I laughed until milk came out of my nose, but I was maybe 16 and susceptible to mistaking gross pre-Farrelly Brothers humor for pure genius. Musically speaking, the Milkmen were pretty inept, and once you stripped away the comedy (as the Dead Milkmen did on later releases), it became pretty obvious. The Low Budgets (who have dubbed themselves “value rockers”) only boast one of the original Milkmen, Joe Jack Talcum (also of Joe Butterfly). He’s the talented one. Better still, their songs owe less to the Dead Milkmen than to bands such as Pavement and the Ramones. Giddy indie-rock hooks adorn basic three-chord punk songs with lyrics that are silly without being sophomoric. Considering you can’t drive a block without hearing some hip-hop tune about how good it is to be rolling in money, there’s something really swell about blasting a song that repeats the line “Your card has been declined.” Talk about keeping it real. The Low Budgets hit town on Monday, May 10th. —Chris Davis

Art Art Feature

Larger Than Life

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date May 6, 2004

A bit of conventional wisdom for what it’s worth: Anyone who claims “it’s not the size of the boat, it’s the motion of the ocean” is, most likely, the captain of a skiff. Would the “Great Pyramid” of Giza be nearly so great if it were only the size of a shed? A whisper makes for good drama, sure, but if you really want to capture someone’s attention, isn’t a bullhorn better? Could Big Macs ever eclipse the Whopper by sporting only one all-beef patty?

“Size matters.” This catchphrase once used to promote Godzilla’s Hollywood makeover (and now owned by spammers out to supersize America’s genitalia one e-mail at a time) is the fundamental assumption behind “Big,” an exhibit of larger works culled from the Brooks Museum of Art’s permanent collection and peppered with some largish loans.

But does size really matter? As the exhibit’s wall text aptly points out, Phidias’ statue of Athena — the colossal centerpiece of the already colossal Parthenon — was the big bang for artists who see a bigger picture. Rubes by nature, humans have always been suckers for size: Visit the Grand Canyon; climb Mt. Everest; put your money down, boys, and see the fat lady sing. In art (as in nature), size is a novelty that overwhelms, stops us dead in our tracks. And size is an essential consideration, especially if the artist’s goal is “education.” (Or, as some fifth columnists might suggest, “propaganda.”) So, yes, size matters. But so does context.

“Large” might be a better name than “Big” for the Brooks exhibit. Or “Big on Personality.” There is no statue of Athena here. There’s no Richard Serra, Claes Oldenburg, or Chuck Close either. There’s nothing that, through sheer size, makes jaws go slack with wonder. But for Brooks, a museum that seems much larger than it actually is, these pieces, which include works by pop artist Red Grooms and chameleon photographer Cindy Sherman, are fairly gigantic.

“It just happened that the downstairs galleries we usually use for touring exhibits were open,” says Marina Pacini, Brooks’ chief curator. “It’s rare when that happens, and these are all works that don’t just fit anywhere in the museum.

“Think about [Deborah] Butterfield’s Horse,” Pacini says, referring to a life-sized sculpture of a horse that, though covered in mud and straw, appears to be constructed from pure manure. “Sure, it’s only a life-sized horse, but we’re not used to seeing a life-sized horse in a gallery. The only place we see a life-sized sculpture of a horse is outside, and some general is sitting on top of it.

“Look at the Veda Reed,” Pacini says of Across the Mississippi, a long, narrow triptych. “Can you imagine seeing only one of those paintings without the other two?” she asks. “You just couldn’t get any sense of the piece.”

“Big” is the first big example of Pacini’s goal to showcase more works from the museum’s permanent collection.

“We’ve got 7,000 objects,” Pacini says, “and it’s pretty standard for a museum that only 3 to 5 percent of a collection is on view at any one time.”

There are many reasons that, like icebergs, the bulk of a museum’s mass remains below the surface. There are conservation issues. Works on paper, for example, have to be taken down regularly. And then, of course, there are also issues of space, content, and context.

“And only so many square feet!” Pacini says, noting that museum boardrooms out of use for years were recently converted into gallery space. The ultimate goal is to get more pieces from the permanent collection, large and small, into circulation.

“‘Big’ was a great opportunity to do something quirkier, weirder, and more fun,” Pacini says. And that is a fine summation of an exhibit that is more likely to charm than overwhelm. Dennis Oppenheim’s whimsical animatronic Spinning Shark launches into action so unexpectedly that Pacini may post warnings so visitors don’t faint from surprise. Marisol Escobar’s Family, a modern creche constructed of plastic, glass, wood, and neon, sits opposite Laura Simmons’ oversized black-and-white photograph Walking Cake, a birthday cake standing on shapely female legs. Richard Bosman’s 1944 woodcut The Fall, a post-expressionist image of a man in a head-first free fall, resonates nicely with propaganda-inspired works by Barbara Kruger and Tim Rollins.

“You wouldn’t normally be able to see a lot of these pieces,” Pacini says. “The Elizabeth Murray piece, for example, has such an irregular canvas, it explodes off the wall. Where do you put something like that? We’ve got to do something to get more [art] out there for our visitors; to help them learn more about contemporary art history.”

“Big” may not make any large statements about size and art, but it does suggest that some of the most interesting works in the Brooks collection spend too much time in the vaults. The bigger news is that Pacini hopes to change all of that.

Through the end of July

Theater Theater Feature

Ants in Their Pants

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date May 6, 2004

The short list: missing fathers, overprotective mothers, warring siblings, wholesome-looking hussies, and morally ambiguous men who are fugitives because they just can’t stop running away from the ghosts of their own imagination.

These are the principle images inhabiting the landscape of rural American drama. From Eugene O’Neill to August Wilson, these have been the stock players. Tennessee Williams puts them together for Orpheus Descending, a play about a drifting musician in a snakeskin jacket who pops in on a town not partial to folks who are different. Sam Shepard has used every imaginable permutation of the formula, most notably in his epic family drama A Lie of the Mind, where the lead character runs off drunk in the night wrapped only in an American flag, looking for the love he killed and the wife he battered. But nobody has used these classic tropes of small-town tragedy more effectively than William Inge in his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Picnic. Inge’s characters seldom confront one another head-on. It’s a passive aggression boiling over into the real thing that fuels Picnic, a quaint old-fashioned play in three acts that seems like it was written with contemporary audiences in mind.

Set between two all-female, lower-middle-class homes in the 1950s, Picnic may be all-American, but it also has all the makings of a Jane Austen redux. Two fatherless sisters — Madge Owens, a simple beauty, and Millie Owens, a sassy tomboy with more brains than a proper lady should have — live with their mother and an old-maid schoolteacher who rents the extra room. Mrs. Potts, the elderly neighbor who, apart from a single fling, has spent her entire life celibate caring for her invalid mother, has become part of the Owens household. Hopes are high all around that Madge will marry into the country-club set and that college will open doors for poor Millie. And things go pretty much according to the script until a strapping young stranger, Hal Carter, starts doing odd jobs for Mrs. Potts and turning every female head in the neighborhood.

With Inge, truth is often the victim of expectations. Hal (convincingly played by a chiseled Michael Ingersoll) is cast by preconceptions as a no-account rascal, and over time he becomes every bit the monster he’s thought to be. Well, at least in the minds and ultimately in the lies told by the women who crave him but despise their craving.

Hal begins the play with the sincere desire, but only a ghost of a chance, of gaining respectability. He grew up like a weed, abused by an alcoholic father, who died in jail after the last time the cops scraped him off the street. The hustle is the only life Hal ever knew until his athletic abilities took him to college. He’s got white-collar fantasies with no-collar skills. His handsome face and overt sexuality are his worst enemies, and women ogle him like horny construction workers, instantly converting their lust to negative fantasies and ill will. Picnic is, if nothing else, a play about tragic inevitability. Children must forever repeat their parents’ mistakes; scapegoats and monsters must be created in order to distract us from our own pains and perversions. From the moment we meet Madge the angel, we know she will fall, and from the moment we meet Hal, we know he was born to die running.

Under the direction of Michael Detroit, Playhouse on the Square’s Picnic is fine, if a little antiseptic. The ground-kicking, “aw shucks” dialogue, which dates the play, is given an over-the-top treatment that comes on like too much of mom’s apple pie. As Millie, the tomboyish sister, the typically wonderful Angela Groeschen trips along like the sassy soubrette in some 19th-century operetta. You expect her to burst into song at any moment. While it is a beguiling performance, there are times when it seems to belong to some other play entirely. Jo Lynn Palmer is spot-on as Mrs. Potts, a woman who’s found some peace in a life lived vicariously. Irene Crist makes a virtue of understatement as Flo Owens, a concerned single mother. As the perfect life she’s planned for her perfect daughter goes to hell, she falls to pieces while keeping the better part of her dignity intact.

Inge’s name may not carry the same weight as other middle and late 20th-century writers who dealt with this same kind of subject matter. But Picnic holds up surprisingly well and is especially appropriate at a time when our culture, with all its xenophobic hang-ups, is desperately trying to reclaim the virtues of some idyllic past that never existed in the first place.

Through June 6th

Opinion Viewpoint

Losing the Peace

Post author By Molly Ivins
Post date May 6, 2004

For all I know, we may have done something smart in Fallujah by hiring ex-Iraqi troops to take over, but it’s sure not what we said we were going to do when we started to go in. Then, the photos from the Abu Ghraib prison horror hit. Let’s hear it for privatization again. We just cannot get a break over there.

I think we’re at a point when it’s useless to continue the argument over whether the glass is half-empty or half-full. Things are going very badly in Iraq. I’m sure some of our professional patriotic bullies will denounce this as unpatriotic pessimism, harmful to the morale of the troops, etc. I think it’s more important to recognize reality.

Even though I still consider getting rid of Saddam Hussein an unmitigated good, we may have lost the peace very early on. Peter Galbraith, writing in The New York Review of Books, reports that the initial looting right after the war “ended” was unbelievably costly in both monetary terms and Iraqi support. Others have concluded that the corruption, so familiar under Saddam Hussein and now again in full flower with the private contractors, has so wiped out respect for our efforts that Iraqis are concluding we are “just like Saddam.” For us to continue killing Iraqis for their own good is not a policy likely to redound to our benefit.

Galbraith recommends a federation in which the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds are each allowed to choose pretty much their own form of government. The Kurds could keep their own governing council, the Shiites would choose an Islamic republic, and who knows what the Sunnis want.

“These republics would be self-governing, financially self-sustaining, and with their own territorial military and police forces,” Galbraith recommends. “The central government would have a weak presidency rotating among the republics, with responsibility limited to foreign affairs, monetary policy, and some coordination of defense policy.”

Anyone have a better idea? A countrywide election will yield a Shiite government, in turn leading almost inevitably to civil war.

I am so depressed and disgusted with this misbegotten occupation, I’ve resorted to trying to figure out how we got here in the first place. I read Bob Woodward’s book Plan of Attack. I consider Woodward a superb reporter, but he has the oddest inability to sort the wheat from the chaff or to put either of them into context. One point on which I found the book quite helpful is the issue of whether Bush & Co. lied about the weapons of mass destruction, were fed bad intelligence, or engaged in self-deception. It seems to have been a combination of self-delusion and cherry-picking from some very unclear intelligence.

It is quite possible the final lesson of the Iraq debacle will be that the military is the wrong tool for the terrorist job. This brings us back to the original rhetorical trap we got ourselves into by talking about “the war on terror.” Wars are fought by the military, but the tools needed include a huge intelligence operation as well as criminal investigation.

To this end, how stupid is it that we have two dozen treasury agents chasing Cuban embargo violators and only four tracking terrorist money? As Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., put it, “We’re chasing old ladies on bicycle trips in Cuba when we should be concentrating on the significant tools against shadowy terrorist organizations.”

When the Bushies came in, they abandoned the multilateral efforts Bill Clinton had set up to track offshore money. Even after 9/11, they only reluctantly endorsed increasing the Treasury’s power to follow the money. It is not conspiracy-mongering to point out that this reluctance stems from the unhappy habit of so many American rich people to keep their money in offshore accounts in order to avoid taxes.

Politics Politics Beat Blog

MORE FLAK FOR BREDESEN ON COMP ISSUE

Post author By Jackson Baker
Post date May 6, 2004

NASHVILLE — He may have public approval ratings upwards of 70 percent, but Governor Phil Bredesen continues to pick up flak from partymates. He might even — though it’s a longshot — be headed for a surprise legislative rebuff of sorts.

When Lebanon attorney William Farmer encountered fellow Democrat Bredesen on the grounds of The Hermitage last weekend at the state party’s annual Jackson Day dinner, he buttonholed him thusly: “Governor, I wish I had voted for Van Hilleary two years ago instead of working to get you elected. He couldn’t have done the damage to us that you’ve done.” (This is the G-rated version of that part of the conversation.)

Perhaps understandably, Bredesen, who has been known to hold grudges, considered the approach “rude;” Farmer, the immediate past chairman of the state Democratic party, shrugged that off. “I wasn’t trying to offend him. I was just trying to be honest and get him to understand. We don’t have any business acting like the Democratic wing of the Republican Party.”

What Farmer meant was that Republican Hilleary would have been unable to get bipartisan support for legislation pushed by Bredesen — ranging from some reasonably Draconian budget cuts to the item that really sticks in trial lawyer Farmer’s craw, a bill that would redesign state workmen’s compensation procedures and trim existing benefits.

That bill is ready for House action Thursday morning — one day after Bredesen’s TennCare reform bill, another potential hot potato, passed the House handily, with only eight Nay votes. The workmen’s comp bill won’t do that well, but the governor probably has enough Democrats lined up in the House — notably including Speaker Jimmy Naifeh — to go with the body’s receptive Republicans and ensure passage.

That’s if a vote takes place — and even if it does, there’s no guarantee that the Senate will follow suit. In point of fact, Sen. Jerry Cooper (D-Morrison), chairman of the senate’s Commerce Committee and an opponent of the legislation, declined to convene his committee to consider the administration bill Wednesday after Cooper, other Commerce members, and members of a special workmen’s comp oversight tommittee had sat through an afternoon session in which various amendments to the bill were, one after another, voted down.

Technically, the Commerce Committee, charged with reporting the bill to the Senate floor, was “adjourned until the call of the chairman” — a formulation normally used when a committee closes down for good at the end of a session. It would take a two-thirds vote of the entire Senate membership to force a Senate vote without the committee’s referral. The membership of the Commerce Committee could overrule chairman Cooper, for that matter, but that course, too, is considered problematical.

Opponents of the administration bill are not optimistic about halting it in the House, where Democrats are by no means unified on the matter. As one example, State representative Mike Turner (D- Nashville), a labor official and severe critic of the workmen’s comp measure, took some shots in an afternoon party caucus Wednesday from fellow Democrats who chastised him for his public anti-abortion positions.

But there could be further surprises on the Senate side. There was serious speculation late Wednesday that House passage of Bredesen’s workmen’s comp bill, should it occur on Thursday, would be met not only with Cooper’s passive resistance but with a rival bill, based on a formula more congenial to organized labor and the trial lawyers’ lobby — one which might raise the Bredesen bill’s “multiplier” cap of 1.5 (the ratio beyond which doctors’ estimates of compensation could not be raised legally). Such a strategy could in theory derail any bill at all for the remainder of this session, scheduled to end within a calendar week or two.

(Republican Sen. Mark Norris of Colliervill was meanwhile floating a compromise whereby a raised multiplier would be coupled with a stricter definition of injuries.)

On the score of late-breaking legislation, Memphis Democrat John DeBerry, a state representative who has opposed both measures, remarked bitterly, “It isn’t fair, keeping the two most important bills of the session [TennCare reform and workmen’s comp reform]until the very end like this!”

Naifeh and other allies of the governor may have their way in the House. But, in the words of a no doubt apochryphal saying attributed toYogi Berra, It Ain’t Over Until It’s Over. One member of the lobbying team opposed to the Bredesen bill offered a local variant of that when he draped an arm around the Senate’s presiding officer, Lt. Gov. John Wilder, on Wednesday, and cajoled him with one of Wilder’s own favorite sayings. “Governor,” he said, “let the Senate be the Senate!”

News The Fly-By

PRODUCT REVIEW

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date May 5, 2004

While cruisng the aisles of his neighborhood convenience store looking for something to wet his whistle, the Pesky Fly was stopped in his tracks by a product he had never seen before: Diet Rockstar Energy Drink. The white callboy-style container ws emblazoned with the product’s slogan, “Party Like a Rockstar.” The drink was delicious, if you go for such things. Colored a tramission-fluid red, it tasted like someone had melted down a package of sweet tarts, and a few minutes after consuming the drink, the Fly felt a noticeable burst of energy. Still, no recording contract was offered and no stripper came by to share her blow. So much for truth in advertising.

Plante: How It Looks

Politics Politics Beat Blog

POLITICS: The Honeymoon’s Over

Post author By Jackson Baker
Post date May 4, 2004

THE HONEY MOON’S OVER

NASHVILLE — Phil Bredesen has had more comfortable times.

Last Saturday afternoon, Tennessee’s first-term governor was standing on the lawn of The Hermitage near Nashville and talking about the commencement address he had given that morning to the graduates of the University of Memphis at The Pyramid.

“That’s an uncomfortable venue,” the former Nashville mayor said. “There’s a bad echo, and when you’re talking, you have to pause every three words or so just to hear what you’re saying.”

An interloper told the governor that, where discomfort was concerned, he should try sitting up in the steep and cramped cheap seats of the now obsolescent facility, soon to be replaced by the new FedEx Forum as Memphis’ premiere arena.

“Oh, I know. I know,” Bredesen answered.

Discomfort is not geographically bound, however, as both Bredesen and selected members of his audience gathered Saturday under a big tent on the grounds of The Hermitage, site of Tennessee Democrats’ 2004 Jackson Day Dinner, would soon discover.

Primary speaker at the event was former U.S. Senator Max Cleland of Georgia, the gallant Vietnam veteran who lost three limbs fighting for his country in that Asian war and who devoted much of his time to excoriating President Bush for getting the nation into another tight spot in Iraq.

Cleland’s address was completed just before the onset of torrential rains that complicated departure plans for the record 1,650 Democrats in attendance — many of whom wrapped themselves in table-cloths as they scurried to get to their cars. But there had already been an uneasy moment or two.

One had come when the governor, who spoke before Cleland, got to that part of his remarks that concerned current legislation before the Tennessee General Assembly, scheduled to adjourn sometime this month.

“He better watch what he says about workmen’s comp,” mused Nashville state representative Mike Turner, sitting at one of the back tables with his wife Dinah. “I might have to boo or walk out on him.”

For the fact is that the political honeymoon is finally coming to an end for Democrat Bredesen, who up until lately had been able to avoid the kind of storms that characterized the second term of his predecessor, Republican Don Sundquist.

Sundquist had come to grief in a futile quest to enact what that governor and his allies had called “tax reform” and which their opponents, who included a good many aroused ad hoc activists around the state, called the income tax. Or sometimes “IT,” for short.

Bredesen had gone the other direction in his own efforts to resolve the state’s fiscal crisis — insisting on drastic, across-the-board cuts in state spending, a strategy that Democrats seemed comfortable with and that Republicans had to go along with, since, in essence, it accorded with their own platform.

Indeed, there had been serious speculation that Bredesen, who barely nosed out Republican opponent Van Hilleary in 2002, might get to run unopposed in 2006. But, as is demonstrated by the grumbling from Turner, a state AFL-CIO executive, and other prominent Democrats, Bredesen now has problems within his own party ranks.

Rep. Mike Turner frowned. “Sundquist wouldn’t try to pull this!”

What the governor wants to do, in response to prompting from such legislators as Republican state senator Mark Norris, a Shelby County Republican, who has one of several bills to that effect, is reduce the levels of state workmen’s compensation coverage so as to keep Tennessee’s industrial recruitment competitive with that of its neighbor states.

As Bredesen got to that point of his speech, Turner was denying the need for such reductions to his tablemates. “We’re already doing better than they [adjoining states] are,” he said, citing statistics to make his point. He frowned. “Sundquist wouldn’t try to pull this!”

Finally Bredesen got to the subject of his workmen’s comp proposals. “I know some of you are unhappy,” he said. “But this is about jobs.”

It may, for better or for worse, turn out to be about Bredesen’s job. Because Turner, who said he was determined to fight this week in committee to restrain the governor’s cuts in workmen’s comp, had heard enough. Shaking his head in disgust, he turned to his wife and said, “Let’s go, babe.” And the two of them rose and pointedly strode out of the tent — just ahead of the storm clouds.

Present at the Democrats’ weekend fest were all the state’s Democratic congressmen save one. Absent was Memphis’ 9th District congressman Harold Ford Jr., who had an emissary or two on hand at The Hermitage but himself opted to attend the Beale Street Music Festival.