While stumping for President Bush when she should be doing her job, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, “We are purchasing security at the price of liberty.” No punch line required.
Plante: How It Looks
ST. LOUIS — Oh, you sweet, innocent, carefree citizens in non-swing states. You have no idea how much fun and slime you are missing.
In the swingers, wolves stalk us mercilessly. (As the pro-wolf lobby points out, no one has ever been killed by wolves on U.S. soil, but try arguing that in the face of the relentless new Bush ad campaign.) Breaking news is everywhere — 380 tons of high explosives in Iraq gone missing, stock market down to year’s low, leading economic indicators down, more tragedy in Iraq, the Swift Boat Liars are back, more Halliburton scandal, George Tenet says the war in Iraq is “wrong.” It feels like we’re dodging meteorites in the Final Days.
It seems the majority of Bush supporters, according to recent polls, still believe Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaeda and even to 9/11 and that the United States found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Many of you are asking how that could possibly be, since everybody knows
But everybody doesn’t know. There it is. And if you are wondering why everybody doesn’t know, you can either blame it on the media, always a shrewd move, or take notice that the administration is still spreading this same misinformation.
Both Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush have publicly acknowledged there is no evidence of any links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. However, as Dick Cheney campaigns, a standard part of his stump speech is the accusation that Saddam Hussein “had a relationship” with al-Qaeda or “has long-established ties to al-Qaeda.”
He makes this claim up to the present day. The 9/11 Commission, however, found that there was “no collaborative relationship” between the two.
Cheney, of course, also has never given up his touching faith that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, recently referring to a “nuclear” program that had in fact been abandoned shortly after the first Gulf War.
Bush and Cheney misled the country into war using these two false premises, and it turns out an enormous number of our fellow citizens still believe both of them to be true. It’s not because they’re stupid but because an administration they trust is still telling them both phony propositions are true.
Those Kerry volunteers earnestly engaging Bush supporters on the latest outrage are way off base. They need to go all the way back to the Great Lie that got us into this: Many American soldiers marching into Iraq believed it was payback for 9/11.
A third, slightly blinding fact (to me) is that more people now think Kerry behaved shamefully in regard to Vietnam than did Bush. Incredible what brazen lying will do, isn’t it?
A friend of Bush’s dad got him into the “champagne unit” of the Texas Air National Guard, a unit packed with the sons of the privileged trying to stay out of Vietnam, and he failed to complete his service there. Kerry is a genuine, bona fide war hero. The men who served on his boat are supporting him for president, but those who didn’t serve with him, who weren’t there, and who don’t know what happened have been given more credence. Wolves will get you!
The great triumph of the political right in this country has been the creation of a network of alternative media. There are people who listen to Rush Limbaugh for more hours every day than the Branch Davidians listened to David Koresh. Watch Fox News, read The Washington Times — hey, that’s what the Bush administration does, according to its own words.
But it’s not just the right-wing media purveying lies — they are quoting the administration. These misimpressions come directly from the Bush administration, still, over and over. ”
Molly Ivins writes for Creators Syndicate and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
When I was in high school, waaay back in the mid-1980s, “Hell on Earth” — Misty White‘s annual Halloween party — provided a great excuse for suburban kids to venture into Midtown. Disguising our ages in clever costumes, we’d venture across East Parkway — a boundary line for us suburbanites — and head down Monroe Avenue to the Bluff City Body Shop, which White transformed into a party space for the weekend.
“I was president of the philosophy club at Memphis State University, and my friend Allison Smith was president of the student body at the Memphis College of Art,” White remembers. “I was hanging out with Tav Falco back then [White played drums for The Hellcats, a “sister” band to Falco’s group, The Panther Burns], and he was always having parties — Counter Fest, Sin Fest, and stuff like that — which made me want to have one. Allison got $500 from MCA for a student party, and I got some money from the philosophy club. We joined forces in 1986 for the first “Hell on Earth.”
“We were focusing on religious classics in philosophy class, so the first year, our theme was Dante’s Inferno — ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,'” White explains. “We moved all the cars out of the body shop, put straw on the floor to soak up the motor oil, and ordered 13 kegs of beer. The place got trashed,” she says with a laugh, “but it was really totaled before the party even started.”
Over the last few decades, dozens of Memphis groups — including the Hellcats and the Panther Burns, The Country Rockers, and Neighborhood Texture Jam — and out-of-towners such as Rev. Horton Heat and The Gibson Bros. have performed at “Hell on Earth.” The party has also witnessed some notable debuts, including Steve Selvidge‘s first band, Fetzer, which followed Unnecessary Surgery, a NTJ side-project that featured a chainsaw and an inflatable doll stuffed with dog food at one memorable event in the early ’90s.
“The second year, our theme was ‘Hell on Earth Part II — The Homecoming,’ White says. “We had everyone put their names into a hat, and we crowned a prom king and queen at the end of the night. Our third year, we passed out 3-D glasses, and for our 10th, the theme was ‘Ten Years of Decadence.'”
According to White, Mike Todd eventually bought the building at 629 Monroe and turned it into a full-time party facility, The Premier Palace. “I recommended he do it. I knew he could make money,” she says. “It was great for us too. We went from building a bar out of two sawhorses and a door to having real fixtures. But over the years, the old place got too nice. I hoped to get it for free this year, but he wanted to charge us $600 — plus a promise not to mess the place up! So,” White explains, “the theme for this year’s party is ‘On the Move.’ We’re relocating to Earnestine & Hazel’s downtown.”
Rapper Al Kapone, rockabilly queen Amy Kudela and her group The Super Tramps, The Rock It Scientists, and Austin, Texas’ The Swishbucklers will perform at “Hell on Earth,” which will begin at 10 p.m. Friday, October 29th. Monsieur Jeffrey Evans — who, as a member of the Gibson Bros., played the event 18 years ago — will emcee.
While it’s arguable that any of this year’s Halloween-related events can hold a candle to last year’s Oblivians reunion, there are several more rock-and-roll shows for partygoers to choose from. At The Buccaneer this Friday night, The Secret Service
are playing along with Chicago’s Miss Alex White and the dubiously titled VeeDee. The show is billed as a stop on the Red-Headed Stepchildren Halloween Tour 2004. The following night, Saturday, October 30th, The Six String Jets, The Angel Sluts, and The Antique Curtains are playing at Midtown’s only pirate-themed tavern.
Also on Saturday night, hardcore heroes Pezz are playing a Halloween-themed reunion show at The Riot, which is located at 296 Monroe. Bury the Living, the Angel Sluts (pulling a double-header), and FUT are also on the bill for this show, which will begin at 8 p.m. That same evening, The Gamble Brothers are headlining an R&B-fueled costume bash at Young Avenue Deli, while The Tunnel Clones, Kontrast, and DJs Leroy and Red Eye Jedi are hosting their own party at the Hi-Tone Café.
Finally, on Halloween night, Eldorado & The Ruckus, Monsieur Jeffrey Evans & The Memphis Roadmasters, and one-man-band Jeffrey Novak are performing at Murphy’s. If you’ve got stamina, this is one show you won’t want to miss.
As I put the last of the pots and pans up on the shelf, the head cook asked what I wanted for breakfast. That was the deal: work graveyard doing the dishes and we’ll pay you eight bucks an hour, then feed you when you’re done. It wasn’t much, of course, but I was just barely hanging on in Santa Barbara. Besides, in those days, most money was cash to me, and the purpose of cash was to leave town.
The whole idea of moving to California had been to take a shot at settling down. I’d been out of school for a few years, most of them spent kicking around the country, working here and there, going with the motto “Don’t pay rent — pay bus fare.”
The point had always been to keep moving. Don’t get a full-time job. Go visit people. Do stuff. See things. Work can wait.
I had struggled along in Santa Barbara, trying to make it work. One job had dried up, another was intolerable, and then along had come the dishwashing gig. Just for a couple of nights, the guy had said, and then we’ll see. Suited me perfectly.
It was a Friday morning, October 30th. There I was, working on a big breakfast, with $64 cash in my pocket, and the Grateful Dead was playing Halloween the next night in Oakland.
Today I sit in a cubicle job, wondering what happened. Life was simpler then, easier now. All I needed that Halloween was a ride up the coast and a funny hat to go with my borrowed clown costume.
“We need to talk about this rack of pans,” the manager said to me. “It looks like you just tossed them in here with no idea what order they’re supposed to be in.”
I looked at him, bleary-eyed from the night before, trying hard to find a place within me where I gave a damn what order those pans were in. I allowed that he was right, that I wasn’t really paying attention to where they went, and that I’d be happy to fix them after I was done eating.
“Fine,” he said. “So, you lookin’ for full-time work?”
Well, that was the question, wasn’t it? Did I want to work? Hell, do I want to work even now? No, not really.
“I’d rather not wash dishes all night,” I said.
“How about mornings cooking?”
How about mornings cooking. Well, let’s see. Eight bucks an hour, a free meal every shift, theoretically learning a few things about cooking and the business, a job that can be re-created all over the country
“Sure, that sounds good,” I finally said.
“Great. You can start tomorrow. My morning guy just quit.”
He started to walk off, and I spoke a simple truth before I took time to think about it.
“Actually, I can’t start tomorrow. I’m going out of town.”
“Going out of town?” He didn’t seem familiar with the concept of unemployed people leaving town rather than accepting job offers. “Look, do you want to work or not?”
Again with the fundamental question. I looked at the guy, then I looked around his restaurant. A counter with a couple of truck drivers sipping coffee and half-listening to us. A few tables occupied by businessmen on their way to work. The cook scrambling eggs and frying potatoes. The out-of-order pan rack.
Then my mind wandered up Highway 101. I saw myself reading a book with the ocean on my left and oak-covered hills on my right. I saw the rest stop in Salinas, where I face west and try to smell the ocean breeze blowing in from Monterey. I saw the gritty Greyhound station in Oakland, saw myself sorting through the drifters and homeless people to find the hippies who’d give me a ride to the show. I saw myself in full clown costume, wandering among friends, bartering for a buzz, feeling the excitement of the pending hoedown. I heard the music and felt the energy of the crowd. I wondered what the opening song would be.
“Well,” I said. “The thing is, the Dead is playing Halloween tomorrow night, and I have to go to that, so I could start on Monday, if that’s cool.”
Made perfect sense to me. Work can wait.
Not in the manager’s world. “Look, if you can’t work when I need you, you can’t work,” he said.
Then we looked at each other for a moment, two worlds colliding. Behind the counter, holding a towel, was stability, a regular paycheck, knowing where you’ll be five days every week. Just outside the door was chaos, mystery, drifting with currents. I knew exactly what would happen in the restaurant. I had no idea what would happen up 101 when the $64 ran out.
Looking back on it all now, more than decade older and as fully employed as a guy can be, with health insurance and an excellent credit rating, I can tell you one thing I am absolutely certain of:
That show rocked.
In his groundbreaking documentary Sherman’s March, filmmaker Ross McElwee stumbles into his parents’ house half-drunk after attending a costume party. He’s dressed like a Civil War general. His parents think he’s wasting his life trying to be an artist, and he doesn’t want to wake them. So he sits and whispers into the camera a long, sympathetic monologue about General William T. Sherman.
In 1986, it was unusual for a documentary filmmaker to put himself in front of the camera. It was even more unusual for a documentary to shift its focus between its stated subject and the personal obsessions of the filmmaker. But McElwee did both, and the result was hilarious, heartbreaking, and, yes, even educational.
McElwee’s latest film, Bright Leaves, opens at the Malco Ridgeway this weekend. It takes an uncharacteristic look at tobacco farmers in North Carolina filtered, as always, through the filmmaker’s obsession du jour.
Flyer: If I went to pick up one of your films at the video store I’d go to the documentary section. But your films frequently are referred to as “subjective meditations.” What do you call your films?
Ross McElwee: That phrase [subjective meditation] seems appropriate, but I’m afraid that it also might put a viewer to sleep. I’ve tried to make documentaries that are closer to essay writing and literature. Bright Leaves is an exploration. It’s a journey across geographical, psychological, and emotional landscapes. Maybe I should call it an action-packed documentary.
You put yourself in these films as a sort of genial, somewhat confused tour guide. You show us around like a native, but at the same time you’re trying to figure out exactly what it is you’re showing us.
I try to lure people into a film and then periodically abandon them. [In the case of Bright Leaves], it begins with a personal introduction about my cousin in North Carolina who’s discovered an old Hollywood melodrama [also called Bright Leaves] that he thinks is based on the life of my great-great grandfather [who first marketed the tobacco brand Bull Durham]. And then I step aside and let the film be about tobacco for a while, and I let the viewers decide how they feel about tobacco. The film also becomes a meditation on what it means to make home movies, documentaries, and Hollywood films.
Would you say that Bright Leaves is a film about denial?
Denial is a major theme, although I was determined not to make an anti-tobacco film or a film that says tobacco is BAD. One tobacco grower told me point-blank that tobacco has never hurt anybody. His mother had just died of lung cancer. So, yes, denial is one component. But I’m a former smoker, and at one point in the film I do acknowledge all of the social pleasures of smoking. Smoking is bad in general, but it’s not as bad for everyone as it seems. One guy [in the film] smoked four packs a day into his 90s.
A doctor once prescribed menthol cigarettes for my grandmother’s sore throat.
That sort of thing used to happen more than you might think. There was a time when doctors used to prescribe cigarettes to ease discomfort in pregnant women.
But this film’s not so much about tobacco as it is about the families who raise tobacco and their relationship to the region.
Generally speaking, it’s not large businesses that control the growth of tobacco in North Carolina. It’s not the big corporate farms like you see in the Midwest. It’s small family farms of five or 10 acres. When you look at tobacco in terms of these families, it makes it harder to pass judgment. And there’s also a paradox in the way the state and federal governments treat tobacco. Every pack of cigarettes has a warning label on it. And anti-smoking ads are produced with money from legal settlements [against tobacco companies]. But the federal government also hands out “allotments” which make it possible to grow tobacco in the first place.
Attitudes toward tobacco and smoking are changing. How will this change the lives of the tobacco growers?
At the end of the film I go to the 50th and final Tobacco Day Parade in a small town in the eastern part of the state. After half a century, they have decided to start calling it the Farmer’s Day Parade. Even the farmers in these towns are beginning to acknowledge that tobacco has image problems.
Again, obviously, you’ve returned to your native South, and to some degree your family, for subject matter. But how does Bright Leaves fit in with the rest of your films?
The film does depict smoking and cancer and death, but it’s also very funny. It focuses on all of these somber issues, but it manages to find humor, even hilarity.
Well, it’s not a war exactly. It’s more like one one-billionth of a war. But it’s escalating, right here in my own quiet, tree-lined all-American neighborhood in Nashville, Tennessee. People are fighting over political yard signs.
For weeks now, signs have been getting yanked down, torn up, defaced, and relocated. Best I can tell, it has been good old cold-war-style mutually assured destruction. For every dead Kerry sign, a Bush sign has to pay the ultimate price, and vice versa. That’s okay with me, since all the signs are bound for the landfill in a week anyway. Ironically, though, in the last few days, people have started acting like their signs are critically important. They’re defending their signs with weapons.
Last week, The Tennessean reported that a woman had booby-trapped her two Kerry signs by gluing thumbtacks on them, pointy-ends out. Seems she’s willing to give a dose of tetanus to the next sumbitch who touches one of her precious signs.
“Those thumbtacks are just going to fall off and end up in her family’s feet,” said my wife Brenda’s co-worker, Mrs. Schwartz.
“Yep,” I said, “or they’ll get sucked up into the lawn mower and shot out at mamas pushing baby strollers down the sidewalk or innocent dogs and cats. Maybe I missed something, but I thought the Democrats were all compassionate and peaceful. I didn’t think they’d be the ones willing to rip somebody’s flesh over a yard sign.”
Meanwhile, in my own neighborhood, a man who’s become known as Moped Guy (MG for short) has been prowling the streets on a little blue motor scooter, putting homemade anti-Kerry signs on telephone poles and starting up shouting matches with Kerry supporters. Apparently, he’s been really busy at it, because virtually every Democrat neighbor claims to have had a confrontation with the Moped Guy.
My teenage buddy, Hannah, told me that she and MG were stopped at a neighborhood intersection, and he started yelling at her about her Kerry bumper sticker. “So I yelled back, ‘Bush sucks!'” she said. “Then he gave me the finger, and I responded with the two words that mean exactly the same thing as the finger.”
“How old a man are we talking about?” I asked.
“Looked 60-ish to me,” Hannah replied.
“And he’s giving the finger to teenage Democrat girls?” I pondered.
“All I know is he gave one to me,” she responded.
Up until today, Moped Guy has mostly gotten notice by screaming at neighbors and deploying homemade anti-Kerry signs on utility poles. The signs feature a caricature of Kerry, wearing a business suit and a pair of flip-flops. They’re labeled “Mr. Flip Flop.”
Today, a neighbor who chooses to remain nameless is telling people that Moped Guy rigged at least one of his signs with explosives. She says that as she did her patriotic duty and snatched a Mr. Flip Flop sign off its pole, a little explosion went off behind the sign. She said it was like a firecracker.
Well, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on an exploding sign, so I spent all afternoon cruising the neighborhood and snatching down every Mr. Flip Flop I could find. I got excited when I found one with a bump behind it, but it turned out to be a half-walnut, probably dropped by a squirrel.
I’ve never been much of a yard-sign or bumper-sticker kind of guy. I don’t want to mow around a yard sign, and I don’t want to hassle with folding it up and putting it in the trash can after the election. As far as bumper stickers go, the only one on a Jowers car says “Everyone Poops” and has pictures of several creatures — men and beasts — answering the call of nature.
Best I can tell, political yard signs serve two purposes, neither of which appeal to me. First, they’re pure statements of vanity. Like Hummers and Manolo Blahniks, they make their owners feel special. Second, they’re a passive way of giving the finger to folks on the other side. It’s a perfect one-two punch: I’m special, you suck.
These signs, like duct tape, are useless for their intended purpose. Surely nobody’s thinking, “People are going to drive by my house, see my fine yard sign, and vote for my guy.” If I ever find out yard signs have that kind of power, I’m going to throw up a bunch of signs that say “Leave a duffle bag full of crisp hundreds on Jowers’ porch.”
Right now, though, let me gently suggest that you folks with yard signs just pull the things up and throw them in the trash. You’re cluttering up the landscape, and you’re not changing any minds. You’re wasting perfectly good paper and ink. Worst of all, you’re getting the psychos all worked up. Nobody’s yard sign is worth an injury. A thumbtack could cut somebody’s finger to the bone, and even a little party-popper firecracker could throw some debris into somebody’s cornea.
Put down the signs. Put down the little weapons. Just go vote. •
Dead Wood
To the Editor:
Regarding Denise Parkinson’s article, “Respect Your Elders” (October 21st issue): Anyone doubting Central Gardens’ commitment to the preservation and renewal of trees in our neighborhood need only be aware of the following: Since 1999, the Central Gardens Association (CGA) has purchased and planted 195 native hardwoods and a few select ornamentals valued at over $35,000. These trees were provided to homeowners at their request and at no charge. Another 10 trees have been donated by CGA and planted at businesses along Union Avenue to beautify our northern boundary.
The neighborhood association has spent several thousand dollars on maintenance, pruning, and removal of dead wood from trees in the Belvedere and York medians.
Central Gardens residents annually volunteer hundreds of hours planting and cleaning the common areas and streetscape. Beautification and planting efforts in Central Gardens have been recognized by the preservation organization Memphis Heritage.
We consider trees vital to our neighborhood, and the loss of a century-old tree to save an equally old house is clearly a last resort in an extraordinary situation. The citizens of Memphis can be assured that we will continue to preserve Central Gardens and help it live up to its name.
Ted Morton
Chairman, Historic and
Beautification Committee
Central Gardens Association
To the Editor:
As a resident of Central Gardens, I wish to commend and support Ben Duke for undertaking the precedent-setting project of moving the house at 1792 Peabody to the now-vacant lot at Peabody and Rembert. Duke’s action will enable the district to retain a one-of-a-kind home. The house would have faced demolition but for Duke’s willingness to take such an innovative step.
Lila Beth Burke
Memphis
A Party of Intolerance?
To the Editor:
When I was growing up in north Alabama, my father was an electrician, my grandfather was a machinist, and most of the people we knew were blue-collar workers. We, like the majority of people in our small town, were middle-class, Christian Democrats.
The Democratic Party back then was the party for the working stiff; the party that stuck up for the little guy who struggled to provide for his family; the party for the women who dared to think for themselves; and the party for the people of color who were, at best, relegated to second-class status.
Republicans were the guys my dad and grandpa hated — insurance salesmen, lawyers, and a few business owners. “Republican” was a bad word in our house.
As an adult now, having lived in Memphis for 13 years and currently residing in Mississippi, I’ve seen a big cultural transformation take place. The South has become more and more Republican, to the point where no Southern state is expected to go for John Kerry.
What has happened? Even though George Bush has given break after break to the rich and has lost more middle-class jobs than any other president since the Great Depression, poor Southerners are voting Republican. Why are they seemingly voting against themselves?
I’ll tell you why. Some people do not want social progress. Some “good Christians” would prefer not to breathe the same air as a gay couple in the supermarket. Some people want to go back to the days when the white way was the right way. And that’s a large part of George Bush’s foundation. A vote for Bush allows you to discriminate with a clear conscience in the name of Jesus and Bush’s own particular brand of patriotism. Exclusivity and intolerance have become acceptable policy.
Somehow I think Jesus might respectfully disagree.
Kevin Mitchell
Gulfport, Mississippi
No Spanking
To the Editor:
We need to keep violence out of education (“Final Report,” October 21st issue). If the teachers and guardians of children cannot demonstrate an ability to effectively solve problems without resorting to violence, how can we expect our children to learn to do so? Corporal punishment disavows the use of constructive nonviolent means for resolving conflicts and differences of opinion.
We need to demonstrate the trust and respect we wish others to learn. Those who are hit, learn to hit. Those who are listened to, learn to listen.
Patricia R. Robinson
Weddington, North Carolina
Editor’s Note: Next week’s Flyer will come out a day later than usual (on Thursday, November 4th) so that we may provide complete coverage of the 2004 election.
— Bruce VanWyngarden, editor
The Memphis Flyer encourages reader response. Send mail to: Letters to the Editor, POB 1738, Memphis, TN 38101. Or call Back Talk at 575-9405. Or send us e-mail at letters@memphisflyer.com. All responses must include name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters should be no longer than 250 words.
Having first introduced himself to the world in 1985 in the seminal hip-hop film Krush Groove, a chiseled, bare-chested 17-year-old man-child bursting into a record-company office with a Radio Raheem-sized portable stereo on his shoulder and a sneer on his face, LL Cool J is probably the most senior hip-hop artist to retain a viable career. With swaggering hits like “I Just Can’t Live Without My Radio” and “Rock the Bells” and his entertaining public feud with older-school MC Kool Moe Dee, LL Cool J was probably hip-hop’s first solo star and first true sex symbol (sorry, Kurtis Blow). He peaked with the 1990 classic Mama Said Knock You Out, where the hit single “Around the Way Girl” not only established a classic hip-hop-culture archetype but boasted pop-poetry on a par with Chuck Berry himself: Listening to the song, you can practically see LL’s honey-complected muse standing by that bus stop, sucking on that lollipop, a New Edition/Bobby Brown button pinned to her sleeve. She’s like an update of Berry’s Nadine, forever walking toward that coffee-colored Cadillac as her pursuer runs behind, campaign-shoutin’ like a Southern diplomat.
LL Cool J never reached those heights again, focusing as much on his respectable acting career as on his music over the past decade or so. But he remains a more viable performer and recording artist than such still-active contemporaries as KRS-ONE, Chuck D., and Rakim. His latest album, The DEFinition, is a collaboration with genius producer Timbaland. Ladies who love cool James can see him up close and personal this week at the Premier, where he performs Monday, November 1st. Doors open at 8 p.m. and the cover is $20.
Or, if you want to see some hip-hop at less expense and probably less hassle, check out locals Tunnel Clones and Kontrast at the Hi-Tone Café Saturday, October 30th. The last time I saw these acts perform was as part of the local opening contingent for Dead Prez last month at the Complex, surely one of the best local shows of the year. Both groups were in fine form (and both have been in the studio working on debut recordings): The Tunnel Clones — MCs Bosco and Deverachi backed by DJ Red-Eye Jedi — stand in pretty stark contrast to what people typically recognize as local rap, owing a lot more to Native Tongues acts (Tribe Called Quest) or indie hip-hop than Dirty South rap. Kontrast — MCs Empee and Jason Harris backed by DJ Capital A –split the difference. They don’t sound that different from, say, Eightball & MJG, but they bring a smart, funny, everyman sensibility to their songwriting.
—Chris Herrington
When Shabadoo played the Hi-Tone Café a few months back it was supposed to be a one-off event. The band is strictly a recording project for Joey Pegram, a local drummer and guitar player whose musical history might only be described as peripatetic. But the show was so well-attended and so well-received that Pegram and his posse of Memphis all-stars are returning to the Hi-Tone for a command performance on Friday, October 29th. Over the years, Pegram has played bluegrass, punk, folk, metal, and just about any other style you can imagine. None of that has had any influence on Shabadoo, a relatively quiet, slyly psychedelic band that’s all about texture and melody, with smart (and occasionally smart-ass) lyrics on love and love’s less savory by-products. Tripp Lamkins (the Paper Plates) won’t be sitting in with Shabadoo this time around, which is unfortunate since his keyboards add so much to the sound. But in the end, Pegram could pull it all off solo if he had to. In a nutshell, Shabadoo is easy on the head, disarmingly clever, and worth checking out sooner rather than later. This isn’t a stable live band, and it’s hard to know which show will be their last.
Going on tour with Kiss and Aerosmith didn’t quite work out for the Porch Ghouls. It might even be said that that little taste of success led to their ultimate demise. But there’s good news for folks who’ve missed that garage-blues caterwaul: Porch Ghouls frontman Eldorado Del Rey is back with a brand-new band called The Ruckus, featuring the Bluff City’s chief Backslider, Jason Freeman, on guitar. The Ruckus is a somewhat more rocked-up version of the Porch Ghouls minus the endearing loungey extras. The Ruckus plays Murphy’s on Halloween night with Jeffrey Evans & The Memphis Roadmasters. All you roots-punks know you can never go wrong when Evans is in the house telling jokes as nasty as his guitar riffs. —
At last Saturday’s formal opening of the E.H. Crump Collection at the Central Library, a number of historians — including the eminent Kenneth Jackson of Columbia University — spoke, as did several local descendants of the legendary Memphis political boss.
Betty Crump McGeorge, a granddaughter, concluded her remarks with a highly topical invocation of “Mr. Crump,” as even she referred to him: “Being the Democrat that I’m sure he still is, I’m sure he would say, ‘Go vote for Kerry.'” This from a lady who — gracing her bouquet with inadvertent irony — was using a walker festooned with NASCAR emblems.
During a break in the program, Robert Smithwick III, who had also spoken sentiments in praise of his great grandfather, mused to a visitor concerning his aunt’s declaration, “I’m not so sure Mr. Crump would have said that!”
Nor was Dr. Marius Carriere of Christian Brothers University, one of a quartet of local historians who followed in Jackson’s wake. Carriere chose to remind the audience that Crump had broken with the national Democrats for the 1948 election and had supported States’ Rights Party candidate Strom Thurmond, whose views were famously segregationist.
Who indeed knows in what direction that famous wide-brimmed hat would have nodded this year? The man who was Memphis’ most influential political figure ever, and, almost by definition, the city’s most important Democrat ever as well, is most certainly keeping his peace.
His descendants — and that includes all of us, not just the family members on hand for Saturday’s event — have been at political cross purposes in recent years. As George W. Bush, a Republican president seeking a second term, squares off Tuesday against Massachusetts senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, it is certain that Kerry will prevail in Shelby County — even if the outcome in Tennessee at large, where Boss Crump’s fiat also ran, is more problematical.
In a year in which many of the major polls have been at odds with each other, Kerry trails Bush by two points (Zogby), is behind by several points in other polls, and is ahead in the latest Rasmussen and Washington Post polls. One thing is certain: The state that was visited several times in 2000 by both Bush, who won its 11 electoral votes, and his Democratic rival, then Vice President Al Gore, had been largely ignored this year, not only by the contending candidates, but by their major political surrogates.
It should be noted that a late Get-Out-the-Vote rally was led in Memphis this week by 9th District congressman Harold Ford Jr., heir to both the office and the organization of his namesake father, the closest thing we’ve had to a Crump figure in modern times, though Representative Ford Sr.’s electoral clout was confined to Memphis’ inner-city precincts. For that matter, the younger Ford, whose future political designs are statewide and national, had himself spent most of the election season going up and down the country.
And Memphis’ other major political force, Mayor Willie Herenton, a sometime Democrat who had gone on the line in the past for candidates Bill Clinton and Gore, as well as for assorted local office-seekers, had not yet been heard from — even as the current election season entered its final week.
This is not to say that local political cadres were not as determined as ever — perhaps even more so. Democrats, led by their chairman, state representative Kathryn Bowers, and Republicans, headed by Chairman Kemp Conrad, were goading their troops to intensive G.O.T.V. efforts — the Democrats so as to match or exceed the 50,000-odd Democratic majority in Shelby County that won the state for Clinton-Gore in 1996 (and held things relatively close four years ago), the Republicans to cut that local majority in half.
This is a year in which in which Tip O’Neill’s famous phrase, “All politics is local,” may apply — but with a difference.
Much of the attention of Memphians was focused on five city school board races (see story on page 14), but stepped-up voter-registration figures and higher-than-normal early-vote totals gave indication that, in both city and county — as well as in neighboring West Tennessee counties — citizens were taking their franchise very seriously indeed.
To begin with the periphery: In Tipton County, voters were girding to decide whether longtime Democratic state House speaker Jimmy Naifeh would keep his job or whether he would be replaced by Dr. Jesse Cannon, a popular African-American internist whose campaign was pivotal to the hopes of area — and statewide — Republicans. And to the east, Lauderdale County’s venerable John Wilder, the state’s even longer-time lieutenant governor, was in danger, some said, of losing his state Senate seat to GOP challenger Ron Stallings of Bolivar.
Either outcome would produce seismic reverberations in the state government of Tennessee, whose Democratic chief executive, Phil Bredesen, was lending his efforts and his prestige (gained from a middle-of-the-road governing style which many said had, in effect, enacted the Republican platform) to these and other beleaguered Democrats in tight legislative races.
Republicans, who own both U.S. Senate seats and are hoping this year to recapture a majority in the state’s nine-member U.S. House delegation, are intent upon gaining control of at least one chamber of the legislature, and potentially both. The Democrats’ current majority is three in the state Senate, nine in the House.
In Shelby County, this has resulted in the GOP’s targeting of Mike Kernell, the veteran (if still boyish) state representative in District 93. The Republicans’ candidate in that race is businessman John Pellicciotti, an earnest and photogenic exemplar who came close to unseating Kernell two years ago on the income-tax issue.
Another contested race is that in District 89 (Midtown, Binghamton) between first-term state representative Beverly Marrero, a winner in last year’s special election to succeed current City Council member Carol Chumney, and Republican challenger Jim Jamieson, who earlier made two determined, if unsuccessful, races against Chumney. Jamieson is trying hard again, though it’s hard to see how he can succeed in a district that, historically, has tilted heavily Democratic — at least in local elections.
But Jamieson is at least theoretically in play. The same cannot be said for Republican Johnny Hatcher, who — along with the perennial school board candidate Mary Taylor Shelby, running as an independent — is challenging District 30 state senator Steve Cohen, whose ability to broker the way for candidates like Marrero is dependent on his unshakeable hold on his own Midtown and East Memphis bailiwick.
In House District 92 (central Memphis), former legislator (and former Democrat) D. Jack Smith, is carrying the Republican standard against incumbent Democrat Henri Brooks, whose refusal to stand for recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance has no doubt infuriated many voters — just not enough of them in her district. And in state House District 86, another forlorn Republican challenge is under way by Republican George T. Edwards III against reigning Democrat Barbara Cooper.
But Republicans are not the only ones attempting the im- possible against entrenched incumbents. Several Democrats are trying to do just that too. For example, there’s the long-odds challenge of Democrat Susan Slyfield, a political newcomer, against state representative Tre Hargett, the House Republican leader, in District 97 (Bartlett). An only slightly better bet is the race of Democrat Julian Prewitt, a businessman/teacher, against heavily favored lawyer Brian Kelsey, the GOP nominee in House District 83, an open seat vacated this year by long-time Republican incumbent Joe Kent.
And the attempt by Democrat Joe Pete Parker to unseat GOP state senator Mark Norris in District 32, encompassing staunchly Republican areas in outer Shelby and adjoining counties, can be regarded as a pro forma effort — especially since Norris, a former congressional candidate, is widely regarded as one of his party’s coming stars.
At the congressional level there are races too — sort of.
U.S. representative Ford has two challengers in District 9 — Republican Ruben Fort (who may be going for the homonym voter) and Jim Maynard, a write-in gay activist who was offended both by the incumbent’s support for the federal Marriage Amendment and by what Maynard perceived as Ford’s creeping conservatism in other areas. Neither challenge has a prayer of deflecting the congressman from reelection and his planned Senate run in 2006.
Another futile race, in the 8th congressional district, is one of James L. Hart against popular Democratic incumbent John Tanner. Hart is an unredeemed racist, and every Republican organization in sight has officially repudiated him.
Two of Memphis’ suburban neighbors are having municipal elections, and some races are hotly contested.
In Germantown, Mike Palazzolo and Kevin Snider are seeking Alderman’s Position 3, while four others — Rick Bennett, Mark Billingsley, Ernest Chism, and Greg Marcom — vie for Position 5. In Bartlett, Alderman’s Position 4 is being contested by Eddie Cody, Terry W. Fondren, Phil Inman, Paula C. (McGehee) Montgomery, and Bobby Simmons, while Position 6 is sought by Rick Faith and Jim “Hoppy” Hopkinson.
One more race of note: On the ballot in Memphis precincts is a “privilege” (read: payroll) tax that is a proposed answer of sorts to the revenue crisis besetting all local governments. City council member Janet Hooks is the chief sponsor of a measure which has collected a formidable array of opponents but, up or down, may become something of a perennial on the ballot in one or another form.
Clarification: The name of state representative Beverly Marrero (D-89) was inadvertently omitted from two recent articles — one listing those legislators who complied with an issue questionnaire from Project VoteSmart and another naming the speakers at a local Democratic rally two weekends ago. Marrero was present and accounted for in both circumstances.
My father was one of the Georgia Tann babies,” says Memphis poet Michael Graber. “Georgia Tann sold 100 babies. Joan Crawford got two of them. Basically, my father was stolen from his country mother and sold to the highest bidder. So the ideas of mistaken identity and abandonment are things that I understand on an almost genetic level.”
Graber, author of the recently released book The Last Real Medicine Show, leans forward, folding his hands prayerfully on the sleek desk where he conducts business as creative director of Lokian Interactive. “Like anybody who chooses to live in their hometown,” Graber says, “I’m haunted by specters. The voices in my poems are Memphis voices. They are [often] Christian voices, because in the South you just can’t get around the cross. And in Memphis you can’t get around Furry Lewis.”
A decade ago, Graber, who also plays mandolin with the Bluff City Backsliders, was not nearly so buttoned down. A fixture of Memphis’ roots-music scene since 1989, he was the yowling heart pumping life and whiskey into Professor Elixir’s Southern Troubadours, a sprawling bluegrass train wreck famous for playing marathon gigs until there was nobody left to listen. When Graber the Dionysian-poet-turned-responsible-executive drops the names of country stars like George Jones, Bill Monroe, or poor murdered Stringbean, it’s at once an act of self-identification and exorcism. He’s not basking in the reflected glory of hotter suns but invoking new gods and begging the favor of a profoundly American muse.
“[All of these artists] have become the stars in our constellations,” Graber says. “They live their lives against the wall, so we don’t have to. We can identify all of our sublimated urges: all the things we want to do and long to do but are scared to do. Putting [these characters] in a dramatic context, where they are challenged at either a peak or valley moment in their lives, informs us of how we might respond in similar situations. They are the heroes of our myths.” They are certainly the heroes of Graber’s exploded sonnets.
The poems in The Last Real Medicine Show consider the “good old days” without succumbing to nostalgia and revisit the bad times without falling into melodrama. In “Howlin Wolf Celebrates Alone at the Hole in the Ground after Making His First Aristocrat Record,” Graber writes of an encounter between the blues man and a waitress, Ruby:
A dead chicken bathes in cream,
but I can’t chew food now.
Phillips just sold me to Chicago.
I should buy a steak the size of Texas
for the backup boys at Sun, who work
harder everyday than Satan does
on Saturday nights
Ruby, shining like gold,
I’m flying. Ruby, I’m falling
in love with the flour in your hair.
When Graber’s characters bend to the temptations of wine, women, and song, they aren’t giving in to weakness but striving toward the transcendental.
“It’s a theme from William Blake who said, ‘The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom,'” Graber explains. “That’s true with all the characters in my book. What you might call weakness I call tools to enlightenment. If these [characters] didn’t live out their passions, they couldn’t become these mythological figures.
“I’m a Romantic with a capital ‘R,'” Graber explains. His poems are all set in a moist, smelly world where rough agrarians are urbanized like horses are broken. But they are most effective when all of the stars go out and the uneventful lives of ordinary folks get blown up as big as the American Dream.
From “My Grandfather Dies Trying to Sell Me a Hat”:
You rise, mistake the hospital
for the pawnshop where you started
selling luggage on the side. You treat
me like an unfamiliar customer.
I beg for a Yiddish saying, or
a word from the long journey,
but you pawned your history
for a storefront and a suit.
Unless I want to buy
“a bike for the kids or
something useful like a hat”
I can ring my questions
“on Epstein’s empty register
next door. He’s a talker.”
You die trying to make a buck
The title The Last Real Medicine Show alludes to the legendary scam where traveling con men went from town to town selling watered-down booze as a universal panacea curing everything from baldness to “female trouble,” while musicians played, comedians told jokes, and pickpockets worked the crowd.
“You’ve got it all wrong,” Graber says. “These people weren’t selling snake oil. You can’t sell snake oil.”
Holding his arms outstretched over notebooks, stacks of paperwork, and the ubiquitous bits of technology that define a modern workplace, Graber looks every bit the urban professional, but a wild-hillbilly gleam lights his pale lupine eyes. “These guys were selling hope,” he says. “That’s what a medicine show was all about.” •
Michael Graber signs The Last Real Medicine Show Thursday, October 28th, at Burke’s Book Store.