Month: August 2004

Back at You

Post author By Andria Lisle
Post date August 20, 2004

Pop culture has always been an amnesiac. Every up-and-coming band hyped as the next big thing turns out to be a blast from the past. Recently, Pat Benatar has been repackaged as Ashlee Simpson, while Read Yellow “channel” Fugazi, and the Ponys reinvent the CBGB’s scene, circa 1975.

But with the crop of original ’80s bands currently working on comebacks, these new kids on the block have some stiff competition: Devo and Blondie spent this summer on the road, while Duran Duran just put the finishing touches on a new album for EMI. Boxed retrospectives from Roxy Music and the Clash are about to hit record stores, and the Cure’s latest is already in the bins. Meanwhile, Berlin, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, the English Beat, and A Flock of Seagulls have all succumbed to host Aamer Haleem on VH1’s Bands Reunited. Now, the Psychedelic Furs are throwing their hat in the ring.

When bassist Tim Butler — brother of the Furs’ gravely voiced lead singer — calls, it’s just one day into the current leg of their tour. Already, more than a few things have gone wrong. The Furs missed their flight from New York to Tempe, Arizona, the day before. Guitarist John Ashton came down with a rash (poison ivy, Butler says helpfully). The weather in Tucson, where they’re scheduled to perform in an amphitheater along with Berlin and fellow ’80s alumni Missing Persons, is downright dismal. And it’s Friday the 13th. Butler, however, couldn’t be more upbeat.

“Hopefully, this will all be sorted out by the time we get to Memphis,” he says. “Tonight, we’re playing for 5,000 people — in Tucson, of all places! Our fans seem to come out of the woodwork!”

It feels like déjà vu for the Psychedelic Furs, who were at the top of their game in the middle of the Reagan decade. Back then, frontman Richard Butler’s sneering face loomed from the pages of the New Music Express nearly every week. In Memphis, new-wave kids had to trek to Tobacco Corner to score a copy, with “Love My Way” blasting from the cassette deck in mom’s car.

Sounding like a cross between the Velvet Underground and Public Image Ltd., the Furs’ intelligent lyrics and subtle musicianship was a delicious secret for young Brit-obsessed music fanatics until movie director John Hughes wrote a plot around their “Pretty In Pink” single, pushing the band to American stardom.

“If we’d just stuck in the direction we were going after Mirror Moves, we would’ve been fine,” Butler says, remembering the hype surrounding the band after Pretty In Pink, a 1986 release starring Brat Packers Molly Ringwald and Andrew McCarthy.

“We were under pressure from the record company to come up with a similar hit,” Butler admits. “We came out with Midnight To Midnight, which was such a glossy sounding album. We liked the success and the screaming fans, but halfway through that tour we thought, What are we doing? This is so fake! So we reexamined what we were all about, which wasn’t the big hair or all those things! We came out with Book of Days afterward in an attempt to get back to our roots.”

By 1992, the Psychedelic Furs were ready to call it a day. “Although we were tired of the whole tour/album/tour grind,” Butler confesses, “we just wanted to take some time off. We never said, ‘This is the final tour.’ We decided to play again when we could do it on our own terms.”

And, Butler adds, the band has a new CD in the works. “We’re taking our time with it,” he says. “Hopefully, we can lay it down at the end of the year. But we’re not gonna come out with an album that’s gonna topple Britney Spears or anything.”

Nevertheless, fans can expect to hear some of the fresh material live. “Of course, we play all the hits — ‘Pretty In Pink,’ ‘Love My Way,’ ‘Heartbreak Beat.’ Otherwise, people would complain,” Butler says good-naturedly. “We also try to make it interesting for us with some obscurities and new stuff.

“People always put down the ’80s, but there was a hell of a lotta good music made back then,” he continues. “Our albums could come out tomorrow, and they’d still sound relevant. It’s grown a bit stale now. Music isn’t clicking with younger people. There’s no Sex Pistols or Nirvana out there.

“It’s a strange thing,” he says. “Our crowd includes fans from 16 to 60. We get older people showing up with their children and kids. We even have people recording our shows with their cell phones. That’s something we didn’t see in the ’80s!

“We’re enjoying playing together again,” Butler concludes. “Onstage, we tend to look at each other and smile. We’ve been doing this for 25 years, and we’ve still got something.” n

The Psychedelic Furs perform at the New Daisy on Thursday, August 19th.

Film Features Film/TV

The Others

Post author By
Post date August 19, 2004

It s hard to believe that 14 years have passed and the spirit of Pretty Woman is still very much alive and well. Beloved by audiences, liked by critics, and reviled by many sociologists, Pretty Woman endures as a very specific but widely held fantasy by many men and women: that if she can look right and talk right and eat right and walk right, that if she changes sufficiently, then she can find her Prince Charming.

Social messages aside, Pretty Woman is a superlative romantic comedy. It s funny, charming, well-acted, and well-directed, and it introduced Julia Roberts as America s sweetheart while re-introducing Richard Gere as one of its most appealing, if pensive, leading men. But beneath the veneer of romance and love at first bite, Roberts character was a prostitute, and Gere s character fell in love with a woman he initially paid to have sex with him. That she blossomed into a woman of carriage and propriety is almost beside the point. It s damningly irresponsible to market a movie to teenage girls that makes hooking look like a great way to land a handsome and rich husband.

Director Garry Marshall, who must have a thing for princess stories, brings much of the Pretty Woman joie de vivre to his set of teen fantasies, The Princess Diaries and its sequel, The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement. Both Pretty Woman and Princess Diaries feature classy Hector Elizondo as a discreet watchdog who maintains appearances while gently bolstering the self-esteem of the female lead. Both feature comedian Larry Miller in a funny cameo as a fabulous stylist. And both Pretty Woman and Princess Diaries relay the message that a young girl must change who and what she is to deserve riches, respect, and, in the case of Princess Diaries, royalty. Never mind that Mia, played by comely Anne Hathaway, is intelligent and interesting and neat in her own way. In Princess Diaries 1, she still must have her eyebrows plucked and her posture adjusted if she is to be granted the company of her own grandmother. In short, it is insufficient for a neat and talented girl to be herself. She must be a princess. How unfortunate that there aren t more movies like Shrek, which sends the message that it s okay to be weird and green so long as you ve got a good heart.

Anyway, let me catch you up: In the first, 2001 installment of The Princess Diaries, awkward 15-year-old Mia Thermopolis is visited by her long-lost grandmother Clarisse (Julie Andrews), who turns out to be queen of a small but beautiful country called Genovia. (We are told that it is nestled snugly between Spain and France.) This makes Mia a princess, and in order to take her rightful place at the throne, Mia undergoes a transformation from, well, herself, into a more glamorous, better groomed young-model type. Now, in the next Princess Diaries, it is five years later. Mia has just finished four years of collegiate political science in her preparation to govern Genovia when her grandmother steps down (which, according to Genovian tradition, is imminent).

Genovia is a curious little country that looks like I imagine Dollywood to be if you threw in Pepperidge Farm, the Swiss Colony, and the It s a Small World ride at Disneyland. Its citizens are every color imaginable and sport accents from France, England, the U.S., and a number of in-betweens. They are also a town of broad slapsticks. People in Genovia fall down a lot, and I can t quite tell if they are all very clumsy or if they overwax their floors. In any case, there is a great deal of pratfalling going on, and the fact that Princess Mia is enormously clumsy herself should make her perfectly qualified to rule.

But there is trouble afoot. A greedy parliamentarian, the Viscount Mabrey (John Rhys-Davies, the dwarf in Lord of the Rings and Indiana Jones fez-topped pal) has a plot to get his nephew onto the throne instead of Mia. Seems that there is an obscure Genovian law that dictates that in order to be queen, Mia must marry. The dreamboat nephew, Nicholas (Chris Pine) goes along with this reluctantly but finds that while Mia tries to beat the clock and marry a princely type fast, he actually cares for her.

Like Pretty Woman, The Princess Diaries 2 is a handsome fairy tale given comic legs by talented young comedienne Hathaway and a true queenly radiance by the astonishingly beautiful Andrews. But this unnecessary and sloppy-looking sequel tarnishes the charm of the first, even while its message sexism is bad is worthier than that of the first: Princesses are pretty.

Call me new-fashioned, but shouldn t everyone be able to be a princess?

Bo List

The video-gaming forum is just enough under the pop-culture radar screen to allow for outlandish fantasy without affecting our understanding of the icons. However, while Alien vs. Predator has been a successful video game since 1999, now that the movie is out, the stories and traditions of both worlds are irrevocably entwined. Drat!

There is no reason to revisit these stories except for crass moneymaking. Or, rather, whatever interesting things that could have been done with either story have been squandered on the combination. What made Alien great 25 years ago was the original look of the most terrifying monster in recent memory the phallic, vulvic, mechanical/organic nightmare alien and the film s Jaws-like employment of suspense. Aliens, the 1986 sequel, was great for its action and for Sigourney Weaver s indelible reprise as the pumped-up powerhouse Ellen Ripley. The next two, 1992 s Alien 3 and 1997 s Alien: Resurrection, are not great and are even considered heretical by some.

Predator, from 1987, was extraordinary because of its visceral, heart-pounding, primal terror the zenith of xenophobia, combining a war in a foreign jungle and the invasion of a hunter/alien. (Also extraordinary about Predator: It featured two men who would, against all expectations in 1987, be American governors in the next century: Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger). The follow-up, 1990 s Predator 2, isn t great, but it s interesting and is anchored by the unconventional but effective replacement of Das Arnold by Danny Glover.

Alien vs. Predator is neither great nor interesting.

Picture it: 2004. A crack team of scientists and adventurers has been assembled by billionaire Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen) to investigate a newly discovered pyramid beneath the ice in Antarctica. Among them: Scottish techie Graeme (Ewen Bremner), ancient-cultures specialist Sebastian (Raoul Bova), and team leader Alexa (Sanaa Lathan), a seasoned climber/mountaineer. The discovery of evidence of an ancient civilization on Antarctica is enough to make the terminally ill Weyland famous for all time, but there s more to be found in the pyramid than just a place in history. There s history itself.

It seems that three different civilizations started there: the Cambodians, the Aztecs, and the Egyptians. (Basically, the societies that built pyramids.) But why would all three have been located here? Because they were slaves! Slaves to a master race of Predators that once ruled the earth! And, being hunters, the Predators would breed Aliens (who incubate in, and then erupt from, the chests of host victims, in case you didn t see what happened to poor John Hurt in Alien) to practice their predation. This would happen once every 100 years, and the last time such a battle royal occurred was, you guessed it, 1904. Get ready to rumble! Unfortunately, the Dream Team of Puny Humans has been lured here for the incubation part, and now they must somehow avoid getting bred, stop the Predators, kill the Aliens, and make sure this never happens again, all while stuck in a mousetrap of a pyramid that reconfigures its internal shape every 10 minutes (since, you see, the ancients used metric time).

Shame Number One: It s PG-13. This stylistic dud would have gone over like the last Police Academy movie if its core audience of video-gaming adolescent boys couldn t see it. So, the violence is muted down from adult level but still way more gruesome than should be seen by young teens. Shame Number Two: Only Henriksen is around from the previous incarnations of either film. (He was the android Bishop in Aliens, and his character here is implied as the prototype.) He s a welcome sight, but it would have been nice to have at least a cameo from Sigourney or Arnold to lend some extra gravitas. No such luck. Lathan heads the way here but without their panache or vim.

Regardless, fans of the video game who don t care about gravitas, panache, or vim won t be disappointed. There s plenty of punch to go around for the under-17 set. BL

I used to laugh when I d pass them on the street. I d think, Silly missionaries with your three-piece suits in the sweltering summer heat. I m so much cooler than you in my tank-top and flip-flops. And while that seems completely insensitive of me, I ve got friends who have done much worse. One friend gave a missionary who knocked on his door a list of his responsibilities as a loyal servant to Satan. And the saddest part is, this irreverence happens to missionaries all the time. Even when they do mission work in foreign countries.

The Best Two Years, a film that depicts four American Mormon missionaries serving in Holland, is probably good medicine for people like me and my friend. After watching this film, it s hard not to gain an appreciation for their passion and commitment to their work. Whether you agree with their message or not, it can t be denied that these guys put themselves through hell on a daily basis in order to help others get into (their) heaven.

The film features four American guys Elders Rogers, Calhoun, Johnson, and Van Pelt living together in a Holland flat and trying desperately to convert people to Mormonism. Calhoun, the newest missionary in the pack, is a bumbling nerd-type, whose overzealous passion for his work inspires the burned-out Rogers. Meanwhile, Johnson and Van Pelt bicker like a married couple.

Originally written as a play based on writer/director Scott Anderson s real-life mission work in Holland, The Best Two Years serves as a behind-the-scenes look at the lives of missionaries. No scandalous sex scenes or hardcore boozing here. These characters are good Christian boys, even when the doors of their flat are closed. Besides a little pining over girlfriends back home and the occasional use of the word flip (Elder Johnson s substitute for fuck ), these guys could wear wings and halos. It s the same difference.

Much of the film takes place in the apartment, but the scenic shots of Haarlem are absolutely breathtaking. Since it was originally written as a play, the outdoor shots had to be added to the script, and I would like to have seen more. It s hard not to feel a little stir-crazy during parts of the film where apartment scenes drag on and on. Nonetheless, the film s worth watching, whether you re trying to open your mind to new things or just looking for lovely shots of tulips and windmills. ; Bianca Phillips

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GOING AWAY

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date August 18, 2004

I’ve been a stand-up guy for two years. Tell me how it has benefited me. I’ve let politicians with agendas and media reporters with focus group headlines talk about me without saying anything for way too long.

When I talked about the “culture of entitlements” back in February, I wasn’t just talking about staff members and perks. I was talking about developers and their ownership of county government. I was talking about the hiring of relatives of political allies. I was talking about the things that are not even criticized but shape this culture. They continue.

I’m not the one investigating [former Shelby county mayor Jim] Rout and his contracts for friends and his conflicts of interest in pension investments. I’m not trying to trash him or anyone else. I think in fact I’ve been pretty fair in trashing myself. Policies applied to me have never been applied to anyone else although they were doing the same things, and the internal audit of the commissioners criticized no-bid contracts, etc., and applied policies never applied to Rout.

My recent action to get my pension has nothing to do with being caught in the act of trying to enjoy the culture of entitlement again. Actually, this time it is simply employee entitlement. I followed the rules, the county attorney said it was proper, and [Shelby County Mayor A C] Wharton politicized it for whatever purpose he had in mind. He knew this was my plan and he had approved it two years ago. I consider him my friend just as much as [recently resigned mayoral aides] Susie [Thorp] and Bobby [Lanier]. Otherwise, I would not have co-authored his campaign web site, platform, position papers, etc.

I asked for the pension to which I am entitled, and [attorney] Robert Spence suggested the way to maximize it. As I have said, I am in fact taking a 25 per cent smaller pension than I would get in only a few years in order to get health insurance for my wife’s heart condition.

Policies applied to me have never been applied to anyone else although they were doing the same things, and the internal audit of the commissioners criticized no-bid contracts, etc., and applied policies never applied to Rout.

I’ve always said that government does three things. First, it has to be right, and it will never admit it is wrong. Second, after being right, it must be winning. And third, it will destroy those who seek to show that there is another side of the story. Because of the futility of it, it is almost easier to take the beating than to be ground into the dirt. But I’m tired of everyone acting like it was a one-person culture of entitlement.

I guess that’s why, at the end of the day, my confidence is in the FBI. Maybe, eventually, someone in the media will begin to have at least a passing curiosity of what really happened in the Rout Administration.

I move ahead to Forrest City with curiosity and peace of mind, looking forward to writing the book about the tornadic nexus of politics, media and criminal justice. While I was moved as punshment (but the story will have to wait for the book), I gain great strength from being moved to Forrest City, because it is my birthplace, my family homeplace, and I spent every summer with my blessed grandmother who is buried with my father, aunts and uncles in the cemetery next to the camp.

As my best friend Carol Coletta always says, it’s your life, it’s the only one you have, embrace it and make something positive of it. That’s my plan.

(This is an edited and condensed version of responses to an earlier version of this week’s “Politics” column made by Tom Jones, who was an aide to former Shelby County mayor Jim Rout. Jones pleaded guilty to federal and state charges alleging improper use of county credit cards and began serving his one year’s federal sentence this week.)

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POLITICS

Post author By Jackson Baker
Post date August 18, 2004

ENTITLEMENTS

The following column first appeared last week on the Flyer website, Though overtaken somewhat by events, it speaks for itself:

We live in strange and, in the Churchillian sense of the word, wonderful times. Whoever is adept at doing astrological charts should get busy and tell us just what planets are now aligned with what others and how long this disorder in our planetary house is expected to last.

I am not going to rehearse here the history of the Iraqi Visitors Fiasco, nor am I interested in the Who-Shot-John of competing chronologies. The basic issue is clear enough — that representatives of the new government painstakingly installed in Baghdad by the Bush administration came to Memphis with the full backing of the State Department and were, at assorted venues, stood up, robbed, and turned away at the door of local government. Many reasons have been given for the latter circumstance, but there can be no excuse.

And now, against a backdrop of budgetary and educational crisis that requires the serious attention of everybody in either portion of our two-headed government, we find that both parts of it may be addled to the point of derangement. Memphis mayor Willie Herenton, who is but barely reconciled with the members of his city council after a long and seemingly gratuitous feud, is now in conflict with the director of his own police administration after intervening on the street in what would seem to have been a routine arrest of a drug suspect. Don’t expect this one to go away.

And in county government…Wow! Mayor A C Wharton gave a convincing representation on Wednesday of a man shocked, shocked at the perfidy of two trusted aides who, he indicated, had connived to shuffle papers and trim corners so as to improperly enhance (double, actually) the annual pension of buddy Tom Jones, a longtime denizen of Shelby County government who has copped to state and federal charges and is awaiting imprisonment for embezzlement via his county credit cards. Right. More public money for a man who has pleaded Guilty to — wrongfully taking public money.

Like I said, wonderful — in the Churchillian sense.

I have always liked Bobby Lanier (as who cannot?), am grateful to Tom Jones for his good will and supportive attitude at crucial points of my journalistic career, and have maintained an on-again/off-again cordial relationship with ex-columnist Susan Adler Thorp , a former colleague and rival whose hard edges co-existed with a soft heart (though there were those who would reverse the adjectives). And, like most people who know A C Wharton, I have regarded him with utmost fondness and respect — as well as an admiring regard for his well-said and deceptively acerbic commentaries on his political contemporaries.

Well, now it’s his time to be regarded. Either A C is being disingenuous to a fault (and a rather large fault, at that), or he is astonishingly na•ve and uninformed about what goes on in his office.

Like all his mayoral predecessors, the current county mayor virtually wore Bobby Lanier like a pair of pajamas. You never saw one in a public place — or many private ones, for that matter — without the other. They lunched together, had adjoining offices, could not have been closer. When I interviewed Lanier two years ago for a profile, he made it clear that he had in essence drafted A C for the role of mayoral candidate. We’re talking tight as ticks, folks. How likely is it that a loyal right-hand man like Bobby Lanier would not, out of that very loyalty, cue his boss in as to what was going down with their longtime mutual friend Tom Jones? Well, A C certainly looked convincing in his profession of shock Wednesday and seemed for all the world to be close to tears.

As for the others, there was Jones over on Action News 5 at 10 o’clock Wednesday night, dishing more dirt on his old boss, former county mayor Jim Rout, and on News Channel 3, Thorp sort of acknowledged her own involvement in — or awareness of — the Jones pension mess and sort of didn’t, meanwhile allowing as how her latest old boss, A C, must have known about the whole deal. Only Lanier, who took a fall in 1994 for one of his serial bosses, then county mayor Bill Morris, was being a stand-up guy; the others were busy doing stand-ups

Thorp was heard from again the next night on Action News 5, maintaining straight-facedly that she shouldn’t be regarded as a “scapegoat,” rather as “collateral damage.” She once again seemed to contradict her boss and his chief of staff, former prosecutor John Fowlkes, on two of Wharton’s premises — that she was conversant with what went down and that he, the mayor, wasn’t. Just the other way around was bystander Thorp’s line

Thorp probably would have been pleased to hear one reporter at Mayor Wharton’s Wednesday press conference ask a question about “Bobby and Susie,” the two-way familiarity conferring an ease of acquaintance on himself and a sense of innocence on them. Well, maybe so, but I’ve been a staffer myself, at the congressional level, and one taboo that is surely universal in all government offices is that you don’t invoke the boss’ authority without permission, actual or implied. Another is that, if trouble comes, you take the bullet yourself, you don’t duck out of the way. Still less do you turn around and shoot at the boss yourself. Then or later.

The boss is the elected one, not yourself. Your authority, such as it is, is entirely borrowed and vicarious. If you can’t toe the line, then get out. Thorp managed to imply in her TV interviews that she wasn’t forced out but resigned for such honorable reasons. If so, good for her, though that surely isn’t what Wharton and Fowlkes were saying.

Back when Jones first got himself in such terrible trouble — and it was he who did so, not Rout — he came up with the exculpating phrase “culture of entitlement” to describe the climate of Jim Rout’s mayoralty. In this he was fully supported by his friend Thorp, who may have had a hand in the coinage. Jones, though, was a right smart wordsmith, himself — smart enough to have known better about a lot of things.

It defies reason that two years later, having named the pathology himself, Tom Jones came back to the trough and prevailed on old friends Lanier and Thorp to help him dip for more. Culture of entitlement, indeed. What were they thinking? Of whom and of what? Certainly not the public and certainly not the public interest.

The two sad and irrefutable facts: Right up until the end, they regarded themselves as entitled. But at the end, as in the beginning, they weren’t.

Afterthoughts as of this week: Upon the initial appearance of this article on the Flyer website last week, I received — and responded to — several emails from Tom Jones, the last of which was written only minutes before he departed for Arkansas to begin serving his prison term. Since Tom authorized me to do with these as I would, I have condensed and edited them into a single commentary; it appears elsewhere on the site and amounts (for the time being) to his last word on the subject at hand.

In general, I found Jones to be gallant — nay, courageous — about his fate, if still somewhat defiant in his interpretation of the reasons for that fate. Both in his years of generally superb public service and in the quality of his friendships, Jones had much to commend him, and I hope to stay in touch with him, as he suggested.

Be not mistaken: I regret what happened to Tom Jones, and, for that matter, to the other characters in the tale.

Further developments: Mayor Wharton’s report on the Jones affair was released Monday by mayoral aide Fowlkes. Among the findings: Lanier and Thorp both took active roles in expediting an elevated pension that they presumably saw as their longtime friend’s just desserts. (One of the tales that got told of school concerns Thorp’s attempt to get Circuit Court clerk Jimmy Moore to hire Jones.) Several other county officers took a role in the process, but not, says the report, Mayor Wharton himself.

On the cityside, Mayor Herenton went ahead and fired police director James Bolden. That was almost inevitable, given his statement last week that he was “disappointed” in Bolden, who had defended his men. “Disappointing” this mayor is as fatal as doing so to John Gotti.

This naked city is getting closer and closer to being full frontal.

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CITY BEAT

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date August 17, 2004

FADED GLORY

Item from The Clarion-Ledger, the daily newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi: The “Dresden” exhibition could wind up with a $1 million deficit and spell the end of future projects.

What, you might ask, is the “Dresden” exhibition and what relevance does it have to Memphis?

The “Dresden” exhibition Ñ the full name is “The Glory of Baroque Dresden” Ñ is Jackson’s answer to the Wonders series at The Pyramid, now showing “Masters of Florence: Glory & Genius at the Court of the Medici,” which, as we shall see, is facing its own problems. The pride of Jackson includes jewels and cultural treasures from Dresden, Germany, and has nothing to do with the firebombing of that city during World War II.

Memphis was the inspiration for the Jackson exhibition and similar ones in other cities, having spawned both the general idea and the apostles to carry it forward 15 years ago.

The mother of all modern American cultural exhibitions was “The Treasures of King Tut.” In the late 1970s, a time of less media clutter, “King Tut” captured the imagination of the media and public in a big way. “King Tut” begat lots of children. In 1987, Memphis was early on the bandwagon, pulling together an Egyptian exhibit called “Ramesses the Great.” It was also a big hit. Four years later, the Wonders series of cultural exhibitions was formed and kicked off with “Catherine the Great,” followed by “Napoleon” and “Titanic,” among others.

Dick Hackett, the current director of Wonders, was mayor of Memphis when “Ramesses” and “Catherine” came to town. Two of his aides, Jim Broughton and Jack Kyle, noticed how “world-class culture” could bring some sizzle to tourist-hungry towns, and they took the idea to St. Petersburg, Florida, and Jackson. Kyle is now executive director of the Mississippi Commission for International Cultural Exchange in Jackson. He recently warned that “there’s no way we can sustain having these with lack of support from the Jackson metro area.”

If you haven’t seen “Dresden” or the “Medici,” go if you like, but spare yourself a guilt trip if you don’t.

High culture had a pretty good run, but now appears to be going the way of Toys R Us, the Harlem Globetrotters, Disney on Ice, the circus, Friends, Seinfeld, and Ñ judging by all the empty seats Ñ the Olympics. The grand idea has run its course, the public is getting bored, sponsors are getting soaked, and the appeal of the exhibitions is declining.

There is less of a “wow” factor and a scarcity of blockbusters. Next year’s Memphis offering in the Wonders series will be an exhibition of motorcycles. Cool, if you’re into motorcycles, but of limited appeal otherwise, and some bike buffs may already have seen it at the Guggenheim Museum in New York where it opened. One of the attributes of being a cosmopolitan city, after all, is that people get on airplanes and read out-of-town newspapers.

Hackett told me last week the “Medici” exhibition, which got good critical reviews in Birmingham and Little Rock, is about 75,000 visitors below projections, at $15 a ticket. He’s hoping attendance will improve when school groups come back next month. He says people aren’t traveling like they used to, but I wonder if they’re just traveling somewhere else.

The glories of this or that culture are fighting for attention in a crowded field.

When “Ramesses” was king, there were no casinos in Tunica, no NBA team in Memphis, no FedExForum, no AutoZone Park, no Cannon Center for the Performing Arts, no suburban performing arts centers in Germantown, Bartlett, and DeSoto County. Now the greater Memphis area is crammed with entertainment venues, many of them starving for big crowds. It’s self-serving for promoters to blame locals for failing to support something that is on its fourth installment in eight years in Jackson Ñ and pays the promoter’s salary. To their credit, the Wonders folks have not played the blame game.

Culture isn’t the only casualty. The same thing is happening in music and the blues in particular. Cities in the Mississippi Delta from Greenville to Leland to Clarksdale to Itta Bena to Helena now have a blues festival and museum. Memphis, of course, has at least five music museums or music-related attractions.

The Civil War fad, revived with the Ken Burns PBS documentary back in 1991, seems to be running out of gas as well. Last weekend, I visited the new $9 million Civil War Interpretive Center in Corinth, Mississippi. It’s a commendable multimedia attempt to get away from cannonballs and muskets under glass, but it’s a struggle. History as something that you can package and sell to visitors may itself be history.

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FROM MY SEAT

Post author By Frank Murtaugh
Post date August 16, 2004

A HAPPY ENDING?

Two summers ago, it was hard not to feel sorry for the St. Louis Cardinals. When Hall of Fame broadcaster Jack Buck and pitching ace Darryl Kile died within a week of each other in June 2002, you had to be the worst kind of Cubs loyalist not to carry a bit of a lump in your throat for the proud old franchise suffering such a one-two punch of tragedy in so short a period of time. Between tears, I for one found myself thinking Cardinal Nation — and in particular the Buck and Kile families — had something very, very good coming. For it would take a lot to deaden this kind of pain.

Well, I may have been right. There’s a lot of baseball to play before a champion is crowned for 2004, but with two-thirds of the season almost complete, St. Louis is having a season for the ages, one that would make a couple of fallen heroes smile so much it hurts. Who saw this coming?

Through Sunday, the Cardinals have gone an astounding 58-23 since May 14. Since early June, they have put together seven winning streaks of at least five games. They have a better road record than every other team’s HOME record, except for the Yankees and A’s. In Scott Rolen, Albert Pujols, and Jim Edmonds, they may well have three of the top four vote-getters for this season’s NL Most Valuable Player. Their starting pitching — the team’s Achilles heel in the eyes of every expert last spring — has been so solid that exactly two starts have been missed all season long (Memphis ace Dan Haren having filled in both times). In that sad season of 2002, 14 starting pitchers were used for a team that somehow still won its division.

Sailing along with the best record in the game in early August, what do the Cardinals do? They grab a former MVP, three-time batting champ, and seven-time Gold Glove winner in a deal consummated after the rest of the baseball world had stopped paying attention to the market. Larry Walker managed to clear waivers before he was sent to St. Louis two weeks ago. He probably feels like it’s the last hurdle he’ll see for months.

Time to celebrate? Be careful. Time to enjoy, to savor, to soak up? Heck yeah. The year was 1968 the last time the Cardinals enjoyed such a phenomenal record this late in a season. That club had four Hall of Famers (Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Steve Carlton, Orlando Cepeda) and three other players worthy of consideration (Curt Flood, Ken Boyer, Roger Maris). Twenty-five years from now, we may look back at the 2004 Cardinals and find merely two Hall of Famers (Pujols and Rolen), but at least three others worthy of consideration (Edmonds, Walker, and Edgar Renteria). Those ‘68 Cardinals were managed by a Hall of Famer (Red Schoendienst) and the ‘04 bunch is skippered by a shoo-in for Cooperstown (Tony LaRussa).

Those Ô68 Cardinals, it should be remembered, lost the World Series to Mickey Lolich and the otherwise undermanned Detroit Tigers. So no, there’s no guarantee that a parade is in the near future for Market Street in downtown St. Louis. The quintet that makes up the Cardinals’ starting rotation (Matt Morris, Woody Williams, Chris Carpenter, Jason Marquis, and Jeff Suppan) is not going to strike fear in the hearts of any big-league lineup, much less that of an American League champion. And should the Cubs earn the NL wild card, they’ll prove a formidable matchup in the NLCS (as division rivals, the two clubs can’t meet in the first round).

With appropriate perspective, though, this is a great time to be part of Cardinal Country. The Memphis Redbirds rode a second-half wave to reach the .500 mark, just as Walker was landing in St. Louis. For the first time in four years, the Redbirds won’t finish in their division’s cellar. The vibe, it would seem, has reached at least 280 miles south of the Mound City.

Need further proof of just how favorable the Cardinals appear to be in the eyes of the baseball gods in 2004? Two weekends ago, this team built around three — no, four! — of the biggest sluggers in the game swept a three-game series from the New York Mets . . . without hitting a single home run. After a day of travel, the same club managed only two hits against the world champion Florida Marlins . . . and won the game. Both hits were home runs. Means and method don’t seem to matter so much when the fates are on your side. Thinking back to the sad summer of 2002, the emotional scales of Cardinal Nation just may be finally balancing.

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saturday, 14

Post author By Tim Sampson

Post date August 14, 2004

If you want even more blues in Mississippi, head down to Greenville today for the Robert Johnson Blues Festival, with performances by Luther Tatum, VooDoo Hounds, and SmokeHouse Potter. If you re one of those yard salers, you don t want to miss all the finds at today s Great Highway 51 Yard Sale, an outdoor sale with items from churches, businesses, clubs, and individuals from Graceland to Senatobia, Mississippi. Mississippi just seems to be the place to be, especially if you re a fan of Melissa Etheridge, who is playing tonight at Sam s Town Casino. And here at home, The Gamble Brothers Band is at the Hi-Tone. And there s the annual Dead Elvis Ball at the P&H CafÇ with Elvis impersonators and music by The Rhythm Hounds.

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