Month: August 2004

Categories
Editorial Opinion

EDITORIAL

Many are mystified as to why the recently concluded Democratic convention in Boston did not give the party’s nominee, John Kerry, the customary postconvention “bounce” that newly crowned presidential prospects normally get from such conclaves.

Despite the fact that Kerry, whose platform style normally ranges from the dreary to the merely ordinary, gave a fairly spirited oration at last Thursday night’s concluding convention session, the polls taken afterward show that the Massachusetts senator has dropped, not risen, in the polls vis-à-vis his Republican opponent, President Bush.

Pundits everywhere are asking themselves, What doth this mean? And so far no one has a satisfactory answer. Unless …

Unless skeptics like ourselves were right all along in suggesting that more trouble was ahead if Democrats repeated the cautious electoral tactics of their congressional races in 2002 — a year which saw the party lose seats in the House and surrender control of the Senate to Republicans, defying the normal off-year pattern.

Although here and there, Kerry, his running-mate John Edwards, and other notable Democrats uttered some trenchant criticism of the Bush administration last week, it is no secret that convention speakers were advised by party officials and spokespersons for the Kerry campaign to soft-pedal their dispraise. Such advice was carried out to the point sometimes that a visiting Martian political scientist might have been perplexed as to just whom the party orators were finding fault with in their warnings about the current national course and in their urgent proposals for change. The names Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, and Rumsfeld almost never passed the lips of speakers at the podium — not even to mention such lesser potential foils as Perle and Wolfowitz, those industrious under-the-radar neocons whom many assign a significant role in engineering the nation’s military involvement in Iraq.

Insofar as the Iraq quagmire got referred to at all, it was usually in connection with purported failings in the nation’s intelligence apparatus. The nation’s spies, not their masters in the executive branch, have been asked to take the rap for Iraq. That’s the bottom line. Never mind the abundant evidence — supplied by former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, among others — that the administration applied considerable pressure on the intelligence agencies to find “evidence” of nonexistent WMD and of illusory collusion between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Democrats on the 9/11 Commission said to put such evidence in; Republicans said to leave it out. In the interests of harmony, the Democrats graciously acceded to the GOP.

That seems to be the rule in today’s national politics. It was certainly the pattern in 2002, when Democrats tried so hard to adapt themselves to Republican economic and military policies. It is an irony but no accident that Kerry and Edwards both voted in 2002 for the congressional resolution giving President Bush a blank check for his Iraq venture. Both also voted for parts of the president’s economic package — even though the growing deficit and the fiscal insecurities resulting from it have become significant national agonies.

Once upon a time, Democratic maverick Howard Dean was chastised for hollering out loud about such circumstances. Last week, he and every other Democrat who spoke to the nation minded their Ps and Qs. All but one — erstwhile demagogue Al Sharpton, a third-tier pretender to the presidency this year. That only Sharpton dared to toss aside his assigned script and improvise some honest critical commentary is a telling commentary on the Democratic establishment’s enduring timidity in election year 2004.

Categories
Book Features Books

EP In Style

Elvis Presley:

The Man. The Life. The Style.

By Pamela Clarke Keogh

Atria Books/Simon & Schuster,

268 pp., $35

In the words of Diana Vreeland, Vogue editor and arbiter of high style in the 1960s: “Give me anything. Just don’t bore me!”

It’s a quote that crops up in Pamela Clarke Keogh’s new biography, Elvis Presley: The Man. The Life. The Style., but it does so in a paragraph devoted to Elvis’ girlfriend and future wife, Priscilla. According to Keogh, Priscilla was 18 and fresh out of Immaculate Conception High School when, in 1964, her “inner Elizabeth Taylor” went into overdrive.

There’s no telling what Vreeland made of Priscilla’s look back then. (If it’s on record, it’s not in this book.) But bored Vreeland couldn’t have been by the two pairs of false eyelashes Priscilla sometimes wore, her jet-black eyebrows penciled to match and her hair back-combed to “Brobdingagian proportions.” “The big boomba” is what Patti Parry called her friend Priscilla’s hairdo, and Parry should know, because she was in on the big tease. “Make it bigger” is what Priscilla kept telling Parry. “It’s too big” is what Elvis told Priscilla when he saw it, which brought Priscilla to tears with Parry to blame. Who did Parry have to blame? Nobody. According to Keogh, “Eventually, Patti tired of the hair imbroglio and decided to let Cilla fix her own damn hair.”

No one, however, told Elvis Presley what to do with his hair (save one time: the U.S. Army), because no one knew better than Elvis that, in addition to talent, style makes the man. In the early 1950s, that instinct for style had already made the teenager — Elvis’ hair: whipped into shape with an amalgam of three brands of grease; the shirts he’d sometimes wear to Humes High: lace. As Keogh writes, “Elvis had no damn interest in any Ivy League look.”

Bernard Lansky, of Lansky Bros. on Beale, knew that appearance counts too when Elvis, age 18, walked into the store, “shy beyond belief” but inspired by the truckers he’d seen barreling down Highway 78 and the big-screen gunslingers he’d watched in Memphis’ downtown theaters. That look was about to be replaced, with Lansky’s help, by pegged, no-back-pocket pants or maybe “a raw silk number with an ivory button blouson cuff.” But that look would change too — from “Hillbilly Cat” (mid-’50s) to “Euro Elvis” (late ’50s) to “Rat Pack Elvis” (early ’60s) to leather-suited Elvis (1968) to jumpsuited Elvis (’70 and beyond). You know the looks.

But maybe you don’t know that Elvis’ inseam was 31 inches. That a pair of women’s opera gloves was the inspiration for Bill Belew’s leather duds for Elvis in the ’68 “Comeback” special. That Graceland’s first interior decorator, George Golden, was a former Lipton ice-tea salesman. That Graceland’s Jungle Room is “unerring in the overall cohesiveness of its design.” That, by the mid-’70s, Elvis kept more than 80 pairs of size-12 shoes “with nary a lace-up in site.” That Elvis didn’t wear Creed’s Green Irish Tweed scent but, according to Joe Esposito, he did wear Brut. That only 5 percent of Elvis memorabilia can be displayed to the public at any one time — stuff that includes his sixth-grade report card, his favorite Yahtzee set, a box of Crayola crayons, and some oxygen tanks. That Richard Nixon favored cottage cheese and ketchup for lunch and that Diana Vreeland (her again) daily dined on a peanut-butter-and-marmalade sandwich, a shot of scotch, and a pack of Pall Malls. That Elvis’ peanut-butter-and-banana-sandwich fixation is largely a myth. (“He didn’t eat that many,” Esposito clarifies for us here.) That Elvis liked his meat burned to just this side of smithereens is no lie, however. “I like it well done,” Elvis once said. “I ain’t ordering a pet.”

Keogh’s coverage of Elvis’ career may not be groundbreaking, but she’s had the endorsement of Elvis Presley Enterprises, which makes it a first for a full-length biography of the man. She’s had access to unpublished photographs and reprints them here. She knows her stuff when it comes to style, having writing on Audrey Hepburn in Audrey Style and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in Jackie Style. And she can get absolutely ga-ga over Elvis, be it early, middle, or late in his career.

This month, for her part, Priscilla Presley (plus daughter, plus granddaughter) gets the cover of Vogue.

Pamela Clarke Keogh signs Elvis Presley: The Man. The Life. The Style. at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on Tuesday, August 10th, at 6 p.m.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

[City Beat] Lies, Damn Lies, etc.

Suddenly everyone’s into numbers.

Mayor Herenton started the latest round by proposing to withdraw Memphis tax support for public schools. Since then, members of the Shelby County Commission and the city and county school boards have struggled to balance their budgets while claiming, in so many words, that residents of Memphis and Shelby County are being taxed to the breaking point.

Are they? Dramatic statements make great quotes and sound bites, but just how high are taxes in Memphis and Shelby County?

The breaking point, of course, varies from one person and one family to another. What can be compared with reasonable accuracy, however, is the tax burden and cost of living in Memphis and other cities. The findings are surprising, as the following little true-false test shows. Thanks to Larry Henson, part-time geography instructor and full-time ace researcher at the Memphis Regional Chamber of Commerce, for supplying the numbers.

“Standardizing local taxes is the absolute, hardest thing on the planet to do,” he said. On the other hand, “our taxes here are blessedly simple” because there are relatively few exemptions and hidden taxes.

With those thoughts in mind, away we go:

Tennessee is a low-tax state. True, mainly because there is no state income tax. The federal government pays for a nationwide comparison of taxes in Washington, D.C., and the largest city in each of the 50 states, which Henson said is widely used. A handout distributed by the school administration at the Memphis Board of Education meeting this week claimed that Memphis has “the fifth-lowest tax burden in the United States.” Studies like the one Henson uses back this up. Memphis ranks either 44th or 46th for tax burden on a family of four with income of $50,000 to $150,000. There is a major exception, however: The tax burden is greater on poor people. When low-income households are compared, Memphis ranks 30th in the same survey.

You want low taxes? Move to Wyoming, Nevada, Alaska, or South Dakota. High taxes no problem? Try New York, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania.

Well-to-do people get a tax break in Memphis. True. The more you make, the more you benefit from the tax structure in Memphis and Tennessee. At $100,000 in family income, a Memphis family pays $5,847 in property, sales, and auto taxes, compared to $8,427 in Birmingham, $9,050 in Jackson, and $11,550 in Atlanta. Again, the kicker is the lack of a state income tax. Mississippi has a 5 percent state income tax, and Arkansas has a 7 percent state income tax.

Poor people are screwed by the current tax system. True. It’s called regressive taxation, meaning overreliance on the sales tax and gasoline taxes. Poor people pay a greater percentage of their disposable income on such things. Many other states exempt food and clothing from sales tax, but without a state income tax, “we can’t afford to,” said Henson. The sales tax rate is 9.25 percent in Memphis and Shelby County, compared to 7 percent in DeSoto County and 5.13 percent in Crittenden County, Arkansas. The last Tennessee governor who tried to do something about this was Don Sundquist, a Republican. He failed and was shunned by his own party.

Memphis has relatively low property taxes. False. Depending on income level, Memphis ranks near the middle of that survey of the biggest city in each state. Our property taxes are higher than those in Birmingham, Nashville, Denver, Charlotte, Washington, D.C., and Louisville, among others.

People are fleeing Memphis for low-tax Mississippi. False, at least as far as tax comparisons are concerned. It is true that compared to Southaven, Memphis has higher property taxes. The owner of a $150,000 home pays $2,726 in Memphis and $1,898 in Southaven. But the overall tax picture favors Memphis. Mississippi has the highest auto taxes in the country, plus that 5 percent state income tax. At every income level, Memphians pay lower total taxes than residents of Jackson, Mississippi’s biggest city.

Memphis has higher taxes than other cities in Shelby County and neighboring counties in Tennessee. True. The combined city and county property tax rate in Memphis is $7.27, while the next highest municipality is Germantown at $5.79. The lowest rates are in Covington in Tipton County ($3.87) and Somerville in Fayette County ($2.38). If you live in Tipton County, as Henson does, you have to figure the cost of commuting, which in his case takes him about 45 minutes each way.

Memphis has a low cost of living. True. The chamber calculates the cost of 59 consumer goods and services in different cities across the country. Memphis is lower than the metropolitan average and lower than all but two other cities surveyed, Knoxville and Jonesboro, Arkansas. But the difference between Memphis and other Southern cities is small. In fact, all of them are lower than the national average. The most expensive places to live are New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and no city in the South is even close.

This stuff matters. True. Granted it’s his livelihood, but Henson said numbers make a difference early in the game when Memphis is competing against other cities for new businesses. “The first part of a site sale is data-driven,” he said. The impact on individuals is harder to measure. Homebuyers probably aren’t running around with surveys and calculators, but an annual tax burden of $5,847 in Memphis compared to, say, $9,419 in Little Rock could well be a consideration for a family of four with $100,000 annual income.

Henson’s personal view is that flight from urban problems is less of a factor for Memphis than the positive attractions of green spaces and bigger lots in the neighboring counties. Whether they’re in northern Mississippi or Tennessee, employers don’t care because “they’re all using the same work force.”

Categories
Music Music Features

sound advice

The Starvations are a rootsy punk band from Los Angeles that taps into a distinctive City of Angels tradition that you can trace back through anthemic mid-’90s alt-country band the Geraldine Fibbers to ’80s icons X. With its galloping rhythms and raw vocals, the band’s latest album, Get Well Soon, presents music that is certainly ragged but marked with a desperate energy that’s invigorating. The band should make an interesting double-bill this week with locals Mouse Rocket, where scene stalwarts Alicja Trout (Lost Sounds) and Robby Grant (Vending Machine) unite bubblegum garage-rock with post-punk noise. See the bands at Young Avenue Deli Thursday, August 5th.

Thursday is an unusually busy music night this week: Over at Handy Park, one of the year’s most compelling new acts, Nashville duo Big & Rich, will give a free show as part of radio station KIX 106’s Country on Beale summer concert series. The duo’s genre-mixing, downright confrontational debut, Horse of a Different Color, has scaled the upper rungs of both the pop and country album charts, while the over-the-top video for their second single, “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy),” has been a ubiquitous highlight on Country Music Television for a couple of months now. Ostensibly a novelty act, the smarts and musicality of Horse of a Different Color run considerably deeper than the raucous Kid Rock wittiness of “Save a Horse” suggests. I’ve come to think of the album as a Nashville equivalent of Beck’s Odelay, only better more intelligent, more soulful, more culturally momentous. Can they duplicate the effect live? I have no idea, but I sure plan on finding out.

And finally, if rock and country don’t provide enough options, the Thursday-night lineup also boasts an intriguing hip-hop show at the Complex: Up-and-coming local acts such as the Iron Mic Coalition and True Head Camp will join artists from the New Orleans-based hip-hop collective Media Darling Records.

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We Recommend We Recommend

The Reel Elvis

Malco’s Karen Scott, the organizer of Memphis’ first Graceland-approved Elvis film festival, being held August 11th at Malco’s Paradiso, doesn’t have any firsthand Elvis stories to relate. But her grandparents attended school with Presley, so she grew up hearing all about the boy-king. As a result, she’s formed some pretty strong opinions concerning the relationship between Elvis and his hometown.

“The only way to know if somebody is a real Memphian,” she says, “is to ask if they have an Elvis story. If you don’t have an Elvis story, you can’t be a real Memphian.”

Scott wanted to put on an Elvis film festival since joining Malco in late 2003. The idea came to a head when she discovered that Hollywood Casino in Tunica had artifacts from Jailhouse Rock on display.

With Malco’s support, Hollywood’s sponsorship, and Graceland’s blessing, the show was on. The lineup, Jailhouse Rock, Viva Las Vegas, and That’s the Way It Is, features some of Elvis’ most memorable screen moments.

In an interview with the Flyer last year, Ann-Margret said that Viva Las Vegas was the greatest rock-and-roll film of all time. That may be a bit of an overstatement, but it’s impossible to deny the heat generated between the sassy singing sex kitten and the original rocker. Viva Las Vegas‘ gratuitous “booty shots,” filmed nearly 30 years before the video for “Baby Got Back,” are also well ahead of their time.

When it comes to the spirit of early rock-and-roll, nothing can hold a candle to Jailhouse Rock. This is Elvis at his pre-Army best: sulking, snarling, and exploding like James Dean but with better dance moves. In Jailhouse Rock, Elvis plays a dangerous man with honorable intentions who learned to play a mean guitar during a stint in prison. Once he’s sprung and his star is on the rise, driving ambition and greed threaten to destroy him. Scored by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Jailhouse Rock‘s soundtrack is far superior to the second-rate pop songs that became the staple of later Elvis films.

That’s the Way It Is captures Elvis in concert during a period of transition. He’s entered the white jumpsuit period, but he’s not yet given in to the kung fu dance moves. Fit and in top vocal form, Elvis, in this performance, is the perfect mix of Elvis — The ’68 Comeback Special fierceness and Aloha from Hawaii finesse.

No film festival is complete without at least one celebrity guest, and Celeste Yarnall will be available to sign autographs and talk to fans about her on-screen love affair with Elvis. For those who may not recognize the name, Yarnall was the 1960s actress and cover girl who saucily spurned Elvis’ advances in 1968’s Live a Little, Love a Little, the film that spawned the Billy Strange/Mac Davis song “A Little Less Conversation,” which became the King’s last charting single when it was remixed by Junkie XL in 2002.

Yarnall’s story is like a page torn directly from the big book of Hollywood mythmaking. She was just walking through Tinsel Town one day, minding her own business, when she caught the eye of Ozzie and Rick Nelson, who invited the young stunner to appear on The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet show. Her television appearances led to a role as a student in Jerry Lewis’ The Nutty Professor, alongside such budding starlets as Stella Stevens and Julie Parrish. She would also star alongside Jack Lemmon in Under the Yum Yum Tree, Paul Newman in A New Kind of Love, and as part of the ensemble cast in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. But for all of these high-profile appearances, Yarnall is probably best known by Star Trek fans for her appearance as Yeoman Martha London, Ensign Chekov’s love interest in “The Apple,” an episode about repressed societies, environmental disaster, and the hazards of making a computer into a god.

Though not an official part of Malco’s festival, there will also be screenings of the ’68 Comeback and Aloha from Hawaii concert films August 7th-12th in the Walk a Mile in My Shoes Theater at Graceland.

Aloha from Hawaii captures, for better and worse, Elvis the icon. Here he is in 1973 in all of his sweaty, jumpsuited splendor, doing karate kicks and crooning his heart out. The magnificent vocal performances of “See See Rider,” “Burning Love,” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” become inextricably tangled in the kitsch of “My Way,” “Johnny B. Goode,” and, of course, “The American Trilogy.”

The ’68 Comeback Special, originally titled Elvis, is everything anybody could ever want from the King. From un-self-conscious gut-bucket yowling and sexy moves to gentle whispers and unplugged instruments when unplugged instruments weren’t cool, this concert film has it all. It proved beyond any doubt that Elvis, who had spent the better part of the 1960s as a prisoner to Hollywood, hadn’t become musically irrelevant.

If you want to get your Elvis on without leaving home, Turner Classic Movies will be running Elvis films all day long on August 16th and 17th. The lineup features Live a Little, Love a Little; Stay Away, Joe; Follow That Dream; Kid Galahad; It Happened at the World’s Fair; Kissin’ Cousins; Girl Happy; Double Trouble; Jailhouse Rock; Viva Las Vegas; Elvis on Tour; Spinout; and Frankie and Johnny. n

Malco’s Elvis Film Festival runs from 1 to 9 p.m. on Wednesday, August 11th at Malco’s Paradiso. Admission is $8 per film. For more information, check out Malco.com.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

The “No” Play

So what’s the big deal about Circuit Playhouse’s production of No Niggers, No Jews, No Dogs that has the Memphis theatergoing public all abuzz? Could it be the fact that it’s called No Niggers, No Jews, No Dogs? The play by John Henry Redwood takes its double-take-inducing name from signs that could be found on the outskirts of tiny racist towns throughout the Jim Crow South. The story it tells, stripped from the backwoods of North Carolina in the days before the civil rights movement, is bleak indeed, filled with brutal rape and bloody murder. That said, it’s not nearly as “in your face” as the title might suggest. If anything, No Niggers, No Jews, No Dogs‘ kitchen-sink acting and dysfunctional-family dynamic are a throwback to the mid-20th-century dramas of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams — plays that were full of hardscrabble poetry and social commentary, all wrapped up in traditional melodrama with just a hint of the modern.

The “No” play, as it is often called by those who don’t have a stomach for speaking (or typing) the title, has a rather antiquated message as well: Silence is a vote of complicity. It is relevant nonetheless.

No Niggers begins with the image of a woman dressed entirely in black making her way down a hill. She carries a kerosene lantern. Her face is veiled, and her hands are gloved. No identifying feature is visible. She hums an old gospel song but is otherwise mute. As soon as she reaches the bottom of the hill, she’s gone again like a mirage. This is Aunt Cora. Her ghostly image and redundant actions are immediately reminiscent of the Madrecita in Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real and the silent specter of Death that stalks the doomed characters in Eugene Ionesco’s The Killing Game. Like her theatrical predecessors, Cora is both a protecting and an avenging angel. A white man raped her when she was young and newly married. Her husband sought revenge and was lynched as a result. Silence is the penance Cora pays daily for having told her husband the truth, sending him off to his death. But this is not Cora’s play. Her story is merely the backdrop and her lurking presence a device to create tension.

The play begins in earnest when Cora’s niece Mattie, a loving wife and devoted mother of two precocious girls, is raped and impregnated by a white man while her husband is away working as a gravedigger. Too many people know the truth, and she fears that when her husband finds out he’ll end up swinging from the end of a white man’s rope. She’d rather have her husband leave her thinking she’s a whore than follow in her Aunt Cora’s footsteps. Ann Perry Wallace resists the urge to overplay Mattie and comes off as a portrait of strength and near-fatal stubbornness. She is upstaged only by Ash Taylor as daughter Joyce, a bookish young girl on the verge of womanhood, and an astonishing Briana Jenai Miller as daughter Matoka, a sassy but good-natured brat with all the show’s best lines.

Like his real-world wife Ann, the always-solid Darius Wallace cleaves to the subtle path. As Rawl, a hardworking family man who can neither abandon his family nor live with his wife’s alleged infidelity, he is entirely believable and completely sympathetic even at his most abrasive.

It’s hard to see what purpose the role of Yaveni serves other than to provide a Jewish character to serve the play’s title and a voice to point out that black folks don’t have an exclusive on oppression. The haunted, guilt-ridden character is given the play’s most grating and pedantic lines, but Marler Stone manages them with quiet dignity. He makes his character’s simple, liberal platitudes sound downright profound.

Redwood, a known fan of August Wilson, has, in the Wilsonian tradition, attempted to end his tragic play on a hopeful note. But all this forced hopefulness does is slap a smiley face on top of some otherwise gruesome violence. The rapist in this story gets what he deserves, and we are expected to embrace it as “good killing” and move on to the happy ending. But it’s neither that simple nor that easy.

This past Saturday, the audience thundered to their feet applauding as the last light faded on the “No” play. I can’t say that I have ever seen an audience response that was so positive, forceful, and united. Redwood’s play has its inconsistencies, and director Tony Horne has done little to hide them. But the tight ensemble performances, and the powerful message more than made up for any deficiencies in the dialogue.

Through August 22nd

Categories
News

Big Night in Hoonah

Hoonah, Alaska, is not where you’d expect drama. It’s a typical Alaskan fishing village: mountains and forests and water, a few houses and boats along one paved road. It was a one-bar town, and after three days at sea, that’s all we cared about.

We came in late, and the only thing of interest we saw was the M/V Whale coming out of port. We’d been following her since Seattle, and as we passed starboard-to-starboard on flat-calm water, our skipper teased theirs on the radio, saying if it wasn’t for all the halibut we caught, we would have caught them a long time ago.

We tied up at the dock and hadn’t even changed clothes for town when our engineer came into the galley, opened the engine room door, and said, “I’m gonna hand you a pump and some hoses, and you’re gonna put them on the stern.”

“You feelin’ okay?” I asked. “That was a whole sentence without cussing!”

“We got an emergency call,” he said. “The Whale is sinking.”

Sinking? It hadn’t been 10 minutes since we talked to those guys, and the water was so flat you could skip rocks on it. But when you hear a boat is sinking, you don’t stop to think. We got the pump out and then gathered around the radio. Our skipper said something about a rock, then I heard the Whale‘s skipper on the radio, the same voice I heard laughing just a few minutes ago.

“Uh, Coast Guard Juneau,” he was saying, “we’ve got water up to the main deck.”

“Have you left the vessel?” came the response.

“We are preparing to do so,” he said.

“I just need to confirm,” Coast Guard said, “that the engine room is full of water.”

“That’s correct,” Duke said. “Took about seven minutes”

That threw a hush over our boat. The Whale is 75 feet long with an engine room seven feet tall — a pretty big place to fill with water in seven minutes. The Whale was actually going to sink. Disappear from the surface and go to the bottom.

Within a few minutes we were less than a mile from her, all looking into the darkness to try to find her. She was upright but looked like somebody had cut off the bottom six feet or so. We could see the house, some of the cargo on the deck, and the bow. It was a calm, beautiful night — not what I thought a shipwreck would be like.

The crew was in their skiff, four orange survival suits in a silver boat, emergency light flashing in the bow. They threw us a line and started handing things over: a pair of shoes, a leather cowboy hat, and a briefcase. That was it.

They shuffled into the galley, and I made them coffee. I made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for one of them. Flailing around for conversation, I said to one of them, “I always wondered if I had five minutes to get off a boat what would I take with me.” He looked around at his sock-footed companions and said, “Well, this is it.”

We got them back to the dock, then headed back out to the Whale. We figured we’d drop anchor next to her and watch her for the night, mark the exact spot where she went down.

We anchored up about 100 feet away from her, and it was quite a sight. The water was over the rail around the main deck, but the boat seemed perfectly stable. She was a dark, ghostlike thing sitting there in the water. No wind, no sound, nothing. We got closer, and we could see that some of the cargo on the deck was under water as well. It was like the ocean had half-swallowed the boat but couldn’t take any more.

We were getting closer to the Whale all the time, but we figured we were swinging on our anchor. But then our skipper said we weren’t swinging at all — the Whale was turning towards us. The tide had come up enough that she had cut loose from the rock and was floating free. “I think she’s gonna come over here and join us,” he said. And by George, she did. She came right over and put her bow on our starboard stern and left it there, like she had gotten lonely out there in the dark and wanted to be with another boat.

“Well, let’s see if we can get a line on her and tow her in,” he said. “We’ll be the heroes of the night!”

Incredibly enough, it was as simple as that. Joe got a two-inch thick line, Albert jumped on the Whale and threw the line over her anchor, we tied the other end off to our center bit, and off we went. The heroes of the night, I suppose.

Joe, Albert, and I stood on the stern and talked about how much money we had saved the company, between the boat and all the stuff on it, and how the guys in the crew would be able to get all their stuff back, and how the poor old boat would have wound up drifting off to who knows where and scattering itself onto some rocks had we not been in the area to get her. We felt mighty good about ourselves.

I was just starting to settle down when I noticed a weird light in the sky, right above the darkened Whale behind us. It was like somebody was shining a huge light from one end of sky to the other, only it didn’t go all the way across. As I watched it, I saw shapes form in it, like hanging curtains. The little curtains appeared and disappeared a few times over, looking like holograms in the sky.

My first shipwreck and the Northern Lights, on my only night in Hoonah.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Harm’s Way

Last Wednesday night in Boston was John Edwards’ big night. But it was not his best one.

After the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee’s acceptance speech, I ran into one of his aides, who reminded me that the first rule of speechwriting is “First, do no harm.” And by that standard, the text Edwards worked with was a rousing success — moving, direct, colloquial, and right on track with the evening’s theme of security. But harm, it should be recalled, can come in many forms.

Edwards’ words may have been burnished to an unassailable brightness, but nothing could disguise the fact that he looked tired. His voice had been threatening to give out earlier in the week, and aides worried that he wouldn’t even last on Wednesday as long as he did. On the podium, he licked his lips between phrases while his eyes flashed a calculated look. Sometimes, he made a kind of sour-lemon face, like something was paining him. Conscious of the need to finish during the prime-time television hour, he didn’t pause for applause to die away naturally and spoke rapidly over the crowd, making him hard to hear at moments and also making him seem a bit disconnected from the audience.

I was unpleasantly reminded of all the times Edwards has not measured up to his star billing: His unimpressive Meet the Press performance of 2002. His months of flat polling and fine but bland speeches before his last-minute meteoric ascent in the primaries. The way it took him months and months to figure out how to grasp and hold the attention of voters. The fact that despite all the hype about his oratorical skills and the “two Americas” speech — which I praised in January, like many others — he was still beaten in every state but South Carolina and Oklahoma by the man whom commentators continue to suggest he overshadows.

Many of the phrases in the presentation were culled from stump speeches past; others are likely to be part of stump speeches future; and some of the material was likely specific to the convention venue. Give Edwards another two weeks with this new speech and new material, said one of his aides, and you’ll see that primary-season star again. That sounds about right.

In the end, though, what Edwards laid out in his speech will matter much more in the weeks ahead than will his performance Wednesday night. Edwards’ words were striking. The most memorable line of the evening, Edwards’ direct challenge to al-Qaeda — “You cannot run. You cannot hide. We will destroy you.” — struck me with particular force.

Edwards barely mentioned Iraq during his primary speeches, and he rarely mentioned terrorism. But with that formulation, he stepped across a line between the politician he had been and the one he may yet become. Which is to say, a leader in a time of war. For if Edwards is to be America’s vice president during this time of threat and uncertainty, that is what he will have to be. He will have to be comfortable with the use of force. The power of American might will be deployed partly under his influence, and it will be among his responsibilities to protect the nation from harm. Men and women will die under his watch. Our nation will possibly face, foil, and weather attack.

“We are approaching the third anniversary of September 11th,” said Edwards on Wednesday night, “and one thing I can tell you: When we’re in office, it won’t take three years to get the reforms in our intelligence that are necessary to keep the American people safe.”

The words are all there. Now all Edwards has to do is figure out how to say them.

Garance Franke-Ruta is a senior editor of The American Prospect, where a longer version of this essay first appeared.

Categories
News News Feature

BOARD TAKES BACK BENEFITS BOOST FOR TOM JONES

There was a flurry of activity in Shelby County government last week involving Tom Jones, a top aide to three former county mayors who pleaded guilty last year to federal embezzlment charges.

Jones is scheduled to report to a federal correctional institution in Forrest City, Arkansas, this month to begin serving his one-year term. But the latest controversy, which featured the personal intervention of Shelby County Mayor A C Wharton, was over Jones’ retirement benefits and his reinstatement to a county job for three days earlier this year.

The details are complicated, but the bottom line is that Jones was put back on county employment roles for three days in May and, because of that, was in a position to double his retirement benefit from approximately $1,595 a month to $3,090 per month. Wharton apparently became aware of this in the last two weeks and decided that the matter needed to be presented to the Shelby County Retirement Board at its monthly meeting on August 3rd.

Following presentations by Wharton, Chief Administrative Officer John Fowlkes, and board chairman and attorney Susan Callison at the meeting, the board voted 7-1 to rescind Jones’ higher benefits package.

Jones was notified this week that the Retirement Board “has determined that an improper determination was made in the processing of your pension benefit.” He can request an appeal hearing. There is no indication of any deception on his part, and all the rights he invoked are available to county employees. The error appears to be on the part of the Retirement Board.

Fowlkes said Wharton didn’t know what was going on until about a week ago. And it was not until Monday evening that Wharton decided to bring up the issue at the Retirement Board meeting the next morning. Jones’ paperwork was processed by Human Resources Administrator Janet Shipman, and Manager of Retirement Waverly Seward.

“In the mayor’s view, it was not an administrative act,” said Fowlkes. “It was significant enough to require the board to review the facts.”

Jones worked for the county from 1976 until 2002 and was a participant in the county retirement system for nearly 24 years. For most of that time, he was head of public affairs and dealt with reporters and wrote speeches for mayors Roy Nixon, Bill Morris, and Jim Rout. He took on more responsibilities under Morris and Rout and served on numerous boards. He was heavily involved in the planning of the FedEx Forum, among other projects.

In August of 2002, one week before the end of his second term, Rout announced that Jones had been suspended for questions involving his use of county credit cards. Wharton did not reappoint Jones. In 2003, Jones pleaded guilty to federal and state charges of embezzling an amount between $50,000 and $100,000.

In the county pension system, 55 is an important age threshold for a higher pension. Jones was not yet 55 when he was suspended in 2002, but he was over 55 when he was “rehired” this year. Early in his career with county government, Jones held a Civil Service job. Under Civil Service provisions, he applied this year for reinstatement to his Civil Service job, exercising what is known as fallback rights.

Documents show Shipman wrote to Jones that she would “being the process of identifying a position for your return to employment within Shelby County government.”

She also wrote that due to his federal and state convictions, the county would move to suspend him immediately upon his return to employment.

Jones was placed back on the employment roles on May 28, although Fowlkes said he did not report to work or draw any pay. On June 17th, Seward notified him by letter that the Retirement Board “has approved your application for service retirement benefits” of $3,090 per month, less deductions for insurance.

On Monday, Wharton received a four-page letter from attorney Susan Callison regarding Jones’ status in the retirement system and whether a change in his status should have been submitted to the board for a vote. It isn’t clear when Wharton asked for the legal opinion.

“It is my opinion that Mr. Jones’ pension should have been calculated based upon the type of pension that the Board approved for him– the deferred vested pension, and that, therefore, an error was made and should be corrected,” Callison wrote.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Together Again

Richard Linklater s Before Sunset is quite simply one of the most beautiful films I ve ever seen.

In 1995, the director paired Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise as two traveling college students eager American Jesse (Hawke) and cerebral Frenchie Celine (Delpy). They meet on a train to Vienna and decide to spend a night together roaming the city before Jesse s flight home the next day. They share a magical, romantic night and make a pact the next morning to meet again at the train station in exactly six months. Nine years later, Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy revisit these characters, who never kept that appointment in Vienna and whose lives have developed on separate tracks.

Before Sunset opens with Jesse conducting a book signing at a Paris shop. His debut novel, a minor bestseller in the U.S., is a fictionalized account of his night with Celine. Toward the end of his signing, he spots Celine at the back of the store. They haven t spoken since saying goodbye in Vienna a decade earlier, and with only an hour or so between Jesse s book signing and his flight out of Paris, he and Celine go for a walk to catch up.

Linklater stages this simple scenario with a rhythmic grace that is subtle yet overwhelming. Tracking shots endless, gorgeous tracking shots through winding Paris streets alternate with static scenes in a cafÇ and on a riverboat as Jesse and Celine get reacquainted in one unbroken conversation.

Before Sunrise was a youthful, romantic film, but time has deepened the emotional impact of this relationship. Hawke and Delpy know each other and their characters better now. Because Before Sunrise was so open-ended, it feels as if these actors have been carrying the characters around with them in the intervening years, as Linklater clearly has, his ardor for Jesse and Celine apparent when he gave them a scene in Waking Life.

I don t want to give too many details away, because learning about these characters as they learn about each other is one of the central joys of the film. Needless to say, their conversation this time is more reflective than anticipatory and perhaps more moving as a result, though the pair are certainly less earnest and more experienced now. (Jesse s book leaves the question of whether the two meet again open, just as the first film did. But Jesse does confess that he wrote a fictional ending he decided not to use: We make love for 10 days straight and then realize it isn t going to work, he says. I like that. It s more real, Celine replies.)

There are physical differences, which Linklater underscores with a flashback scene that reminds viewers about the younger Jesse and Celine. (Or informs them. You can love Before Sunset even if you haven t seen the original film.) Hawke has such a deeply furrowed brow that Celine mistakes it for a scar, while Delpy is considerably thinner, a fact that Jesse comments on. ( You thought I was a fatty! You wrote a book about a fat French girl! Celine exclaims.) And recent events have added more subtext to the pair s French/American courtship. ( I m glad to find you re not one of those freedom fries kind of Americans, Celine says when the conversation turns to politics.)

But the primary difference comes simply from an extra decade of life experience and the way the lingering memory of their earlier meeting has stayed with them, and haunted them, through subsequent life changes. Celine sums it up: I remember that night better than I do some years.

Richard Linklater has quietly become one of America s best and most versatile filmmakers. Just look at his last three films: the animated formal experiment Waking Life, the ostensibly conventional studio comedy School of Rock, and now this radiant romance. Three entirely different films, each fully realized. Is there another filmmaker in America who could match such a string?

Though Linklater s films reveal a startling variety, they also exhibit a set of recurring themes and formal strategies. Linklater s characters are the most loquacious in American movies, but the talkiness of his films isn t at all like the hipster spiels you ll find in the work of similarly chatty directors such as Quentin Tarantino or Kevin Smith. Linklater s talk isn t a form of showing off but is instead very natural, and it isn t grounded in cultural riffing but in life as experienced and examined; it s the sound of smart, sometimes pretentious (and intentionally so) people struggling to grasp the world around them. To give form to the wonder and desire and aggravation and anxiety that fuels them.

Linklater is also interested in compressed forms and spare, continuous narratives. Think of Slacker s chain-linked conversations and Waking Life s similarly connected musings, of the tight timelines of SubUrbia and Dazed and Confused, of the real-time structure of Tape, which also stars Hawke and which takes place entirely in a hotel room. Before Sunset may well be the ultimate expression of these career-long concerns.

The structure of Before Sunset is much more focused and thought out than that of its predecessor and works perfectly with the film s story and dialogue a flawless, riveting connection of form to content, which might be the one thing that all great films have in common. (And I don t make that claim lightly. I think that Before Sunrise is a lovely, lyrical film, but Before Sunset is a full-blown great one.)

Before Sunset s tightly controlled structure of alternating static and moving scenes sitting and walking, constantly talking doesn t draw attention to itself but is crucial to the film s success. This structure keeps the film-long conversation moving. (Imagine if the entire conversation had occurred in a coffee shop; viewers might be more likely to grow visually bored and disconnect from the material.) But this deliberate structure (compared to the relatively scattered, wandering Before Sunrise) hones one s attention on the conversation and on the details of Jesse and Celine s interaction.

Working in conjunction with this visual strategy is the fact that Before Sunset runs in real time. Before Sunrise was a 100-minute film covering a deadline-limited 12-hour date. Before Sunset is an 80-minute film covering a deadline-limited 80-minute catch-up session, and because we experience this meeting under the same time constraints as the characters, our sense of the gravity and delicacy of the situation is heightened as well.

If Beyond Sunset is sparer structurally, it is also less cluttered with characters. In the earlier film, Jesse and Celine meet a string of colorful passersby. Here, there is no time to focus on anyone or anything other than each other. Because the clock is always running on Jesse and Celine, their words tumble out with hurried, excited desperation. Every second every moment, every look, every utterance is intensified, both for the actors and the audience.

Before Sunrise was written by Linklater along with partner Kim Krizan. The screenplay here is credited to Linklater and his two leads, implying an investment and improvisation from Hawke and Delpy deeper than that in the first film, and this difference is palpable in every frame of Before Sunset.

Jesse and Celine s conversation intensifies as their time begins to run out, becomes rawer and more agitated. There s a terribly moving, excruciatingly beautiful moment as Jesse has his limo driver drop Celine at her apartment on the way to the airport. Jesse turns his head to look out the window and Celine reaches up to stroke his hair, only to pull her hand away before he notices. (This also rhymes with perhaps the most memorable scene from Before Sunrise, when Jesse and Celine stand inside a record-store listening booth and exchange furtive glances, desperately, helplessly trying to steal glimpses of each other without the other noticing.)

But there s no way Linklater will let this story end with such certainty. A magical detour sets up an appropriately mysterious finale and one of the great snap endings in film history, up there with Vertigo or Some Like It Hot. Has Before Sunset been a long walk to forever or just to the airport? I m giving nothing awayn