Month: November 2004

Categories
Music Music Features

Ray of Sunshine

Gray days and another four years of George W. Bush: It’s enough to kill the most optimistic of liberals. Mosquitos, I think, are arriving in Memphis just in time. Nope, I’m not referencing those pesky insects that plague the Bluff City from May to November. I’m talking about Mosquitos, the sugary New York-meets-Brazil musical trio — a band capable of piercing the gloom with a superhero-strength ray of sunshine.

Mosquitos’ eponymous debut, released in the summer of 2003, was borne of guitarist Chris Root’s attraction to Brazilian singer Juju Stulbach. “I was acting in a film, and one of Chris’ friends was directing it,” Stulbach relates in her breathy, girlish voice in a recent phone interview with the Flyer. “Chris was blowing up balloons, and I was sitting on the stairs with half my body outside, smoking and humming some songs. Apparently, he fell in love with my feet.”

Root, a guitarist with the rock band AM60, was intrigued. “He told me he’d always wanted to hear Brazilian music, and I happened to have a few CDs with me,” Stulbach says with a laugh. “My visa was running out, and I was on my way back to Brazil.”

After she returned to Rio de Janeiro, however, Stulbach received a call from Root. “He said he wanted to write music with me, but I told him I’m not a singer — I’m an actor,” Stulbach recalls. “I thought the guy was nuts. A week later, I was picking him up at the airport. We wrote six songs together.”

Back in New York, Root got another friend, Jon Marshall Smith, to add keyboards to the material. In a letter to Stulbach, he also proposed a name: Mosquitos. “I said okay, do whatever you want,” she says, “and then on the way to the meeting with [record label] Bar/None, I met Jon.”

Root had pitched the band to the indie label before they’d even performed together. Then, one of the songs off that first CD landed on an episode of The O.C., and Mosquitos performed a sold-out show at Austin’s South by Southwest music festival. Next, they toured with the French electronica duo Air. Before the release of their second album, Sunshine Barato, Root, Stulbach, and Smith found themselves a legitimate group.

“I actually came to New York to be a dancer. Then I got involved in theater, and now I’m a singer,” Stulbach says, still a little surprised at Mosquitos’ success.

“When my parents heard the first CD, they were like, ‘That’s cute. It’s nice that you did that.’ I don’t think they knew that Chris was that serious.

“It’s all his fault,” she says with a mock groan. “It’s a very sweet story of how life just happens.”

Sunshine Barato means, literally, “cheap sunshine.” Its lyrics — half in English, half in Portuguese — provide clues to Stulbach and Root’s personal relationship in incomplete sentences that loosely sketch the truth. “A song about a telephone/I’m alone and I’m thinking of you,” Root sings on the title track before Stulbach answers him, charmingly, in her native language. Part bossa nova and part indie rock, the tune draws equal parts of Yo La Tengo’s “My Little Corner of the World” and Astrud Gilberto’s “The Girl From Ipanema,” with a sampling of the Velvet Underground’s “Stephanie Says” thrown in for good measure.

“I could already hear the love for bossa nova in the rhythms of AM60,” Stulbach claims. “Then Chris showed me some Beach Boys, and we went into a whole Beatles thing. He was a Paul fan, and I was a John fan, but we switched. I fell in love with Bowie, the Kinks, and the Velvet Underground too, and I showed Chris more Brazilian stuff like Rita Lee and the fathers of bossa nova.”

Mosquitos’ influences don’t stop there: Although it’s sung entirely in Portuguese, “Avocado” is flavored with rootsy, Americana-based music, while “Domesticada” thumps and wails. A handful of songs, including “No Fim Do Pais” and “So Voce E Eli,” harken back to the beaches of Rio and Gilberto’s whispered vocal style.

Root’s love-song-cum-lullaby “Dream Awake” is a joyful low-fi ballad which marks its time with castanets, while on the electronica duet “Free As Love,” the young lovers list the items that make their world go ’round (“Wasted times, rainbows, and sunshine”) with an earnestness that sounds as extreme as it is enjoyable.

“Love and sunshine, hugs and kisses — those are positive things that people really need,” Stulbach says. “We just provide a couple of minutes that aren’t devoted to death and destruction.” She pauses to choose her words carefully. “We want to fill your heart.”

The last track on Sunshine Barato hammers that point home. “Everybody’s left the beach/Summer is over, but we’re not going anywhere,” Stulbach sings on “27 Degrees.” “We’re just waiting for the sunshine to come back again.”

Categories
Book Features Books

American Know-How

The wonders of affordable low-tech gadgetry:

You can buy a handy microcassette tape recorder for 40 bucks, and it’ll do if the setting for an in-person interview approximates a sound-proof booth. Inside the noisy lobby of the hotel Peabody, however, a recorder’s apt to also pick up every tourist yakking, piano tinkling, and duck quacking. In other words, the recorder’s worthless.

Scribbling quotes, however, turns out worse than worthless. It’s impossible given that the subject of a recent interview with the Flyer is Harold Evans — “Sir Harold” if you want to acknowledge his knighthood earlier this year, but “Mr. Evans” will do. What won’t do if you don’t know shorthand is thinking that you’re up to speed and can capture Evans’ soft-spoken but enthusiastic English-accented delivery. The solution: You forget scribbling; you lean in to listen; and you count on your lousy short-term memory. It isn’t your job to ask Evans to keep it simple, slow it down, and would you mind repeating that. You’re talking to the former editor of the Sunday Times of London, former president and publisher of Random House, former editor in chief of the Atlantic Monthly, former editorial director of U.S. News & World Report, and author of numerous books, including 1998’s best-selling The American Century.

Members of the audience who heard Evans inaugurate the first of the John Burton Tigrett Innovators and Entrepreneurs Lecture Series at the U of M’s FedEx Institute of Technology on November 3rd surely didn’t have these problems. (Evans, in fact, praised the institute’s state-of-the-art lecture facilities.) Readers of Evans’ new 480-page, coffee-table-size book, They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine; Two Centuries of Innovation (Little, Brown), won’t have a problem at all. And if they should for some reason, they can turn to PBS on Monday nights this month for a four-hour series based on the book, a series that began November 8th and continues on the 15th and 22nd.

They Made America borrows from the proven success of The American Century: highly readable essays and sidebars by Evans supplemented by photographs (some famous, some seldom seen) and contemporary illustrations (from ads to diagrams) assembled by photographic historian Gail Buckland. David Lefer was Evans’ chief researcher, and design kudos go to Wendy Byrne.

The subject of the book is innovation, not invention: those men and women, 70 in all, be they rebels, revolutionaries, newcomers, or gamblers, who took an invention (their own or someone else’s) and found its maximum application. “Their distinctive quality is not that they filed a patent or elaborated a formula,” Evans writes in his introduction. “It is that somehow they got their hands on the most important ideas and turned them into commercial realities with enormous impact.”

Thus, Alexander Graham Bell, an inventor not innovator, discovered how sound waves could be converted into electric current. Thus, Thomas Edison, an inventor and innovator, produced an effective transmitter to solve the problem of indistinct and muffled sound. But it was Theodore Vail who foresaw a national long-distance phone system and overcame all the technical and bureaucratic obstacles to get such a system in place.

Thus too in recent times: Ted Turner of CNN, Ruth Handler of Barbie-doll fame, Fred Smith of Federal Express, and Russell Simmons of hip-hop.

But, for the record, back to The Peabody, where memory does sometimes serve: Evans grabbing a pen and paper to rapidly sketch the rise and leveling-off (and future decline?) of America’s genius for innovation. (The big question? The quality of education.) Evans recalling his affection for the father of the transcontinental railway: Theodore Judah. Evans proud to have (somewhat) mastered the programming language devised by Gary Kildall, father of PC software. Evans unimpressed by an uncooperative Bill Gates. Evans recalling Ted Turner’s answer to his greatest failure: “My marriages!” Evans relieved to learn that Raymond Damadian, father of the MRI, objected to only a couple of minor technical errors in the book’s profile. (Evans calling Damadian “relentless, egocentric, paranoid, abrasive, excitable and easily angered”: no problem.) And Evans, in his mid-70s, eager to see advances in medical, not digital, technology.

This personal note now: Having interviewed Harold Evans in 1998 (by phone; on tape; no problem; thanks, Mssrs. Bell, Edison, and Vail!), I can tell you, sitting down with the man was a pleasure and a privilege. You heard it here.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Costume Dramas

I can’t remember the last time I was as ambivalent about a movie as I am about The Incredibles, the latest witty, well-made, box-office-busting animation feature from Pixar studios. I’m generally skeptical about the flat look of computer animation (the lovingly handmade Triplets of Belleville and the wavy, organic Waking Life are more my ideal), but the last Pixar product, Finding Nemo, was so smart and funny and adventurous and humane that I fell in love with it. As epic adventures go, it deserved to knock The Lord of the Rings off the Oscar stage.

The Incredibles is getting some Oscar talk too, but this feels more like a function of a film industry desperate to find a match of art and commerce to champion. Directed by Brad Bird, who helmed the acclaimed animated feature The Iron Giant, The Incredibles is a confidently staged and entertaining long-form cartoon, but it doesn’t rise above its station like Finding Nemo or Triplets of Belleville.

The film focuses on a family of superheroes — the barrel-chested Mr. Incredible (voiced by Craig T. Nelson) and his saucy, Southern-accented wife Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) along with their three kids –who once roamed the city saving kittens and nabbing thieves but have since been banished by a suddenly hostile society to the suburbs through the Superhero Protection Program, where they lead lives of quiet desperation. Until, of course, a new super-villain draws them back to their destiny.

The Incredibles is crammed with wit: The film opens with sepia-toned documentary-style interviews of the borderline arrogant heroes animatedly discussing their lives as crimefighters while an off-screen camera person struggles to keep them in-frame and in-focus. And the sequences dealing with how this family of superheroes tries to fit into a life of suburban normalcy are quite funny and inventive. Elastigirl, now simply Helen, uses her super-stretch arms not to round up bank robbers but her three unruly moppets. Most pleasing of all is a black-bobbed fashion designer (think Edith Head meets Louise Brooks) who answers the rarely asked comic-book question: Where do those colorful, skintight costumes come from? This character also steals the movie with a sharp little monologue on the occupational hazards of caped crusading.

But all this good stuff feels obscured by the big, noisy Michael Bay-esque action movie at the center. The Incredibles is vastly superior to all but a few of its live-action counterparts (and the only superior rivals are other superhero flicks, particularly the Spider-Man and X-Men franchises). But the negatives of the form — the chaotic noisiness of crashes and explosions –are more regrettable for a cartoon movie aimed at kids. Instead of aping the live-action form, one wishes The Incredibles had provided more of an alternative.

This is the first Pixar film to get a PG rating and the rattling machine guns and intimations of violent death are entirely unnecessary for a kids’ movie. I miss the more gentle wit of previous Pixar blockbusters such as Toy Story and especially Finding Nemo. There are other, more subtle, aftertastes here. The early vilification of both the French (a thick-accented, bomb-throwing baddie) and trial lawyers (whose opportunistic lawsuits send the superheroes underground) are too topical to be accidental. Equally reactionary is the film’s seemingly uncomprehending endorsement of the “comedic black sidekick” stereotype (a jive-talking iceman named “Frozone” whose alter-ego is “Lucious” — you keep waiting for him to exclaim “Dyno-mite!”). Finally, the “moral” about letting your kids embrace their individuality might have been refreshing in the conformist 1950s — the decade which The Incredibles borrows from most for its sleek visual style — but with parents now more likely to indulge their kids and with the communal good being privatized out of existence, it feels a little less righteous.

So, as much as I appreciated the best of The Incredibles, this might be where I hop off the train. Judging from the noisy NASCAR-esque preview for the next Pixar product, Cars, the studio is getting with the think-piece-approved program: Girlie men are out; macho men are back.

— Chris Herrington

Ned Kynaston (BillY Crudup) is the toast of the 1660s London stage. Before there were actresses in England (they were illegal), there were men like Ned — pretty young men trained from boyhood in the ways of female representation. (Back in ye good olde days, it was more seemly to have men dressed as women onstage than to have actual women. Go figure.) Ned is as famous as actors back then became, and like the similarly androgynous or otherwise ambiguous castrati of Italian opera tradition, actors who “played the girl parts” were desired by men and women alike. Ned’s signature role: Desdemona, doomed damsel of Shakespeare’s tragic Othello.

Ned’s lovelorn female dresser, Maria (Claire Danes), is only clued into his sexual preference when the deed is being done in front of her, and Ned’s fickle lover, George Villiers, the duke of Buckingham, is more allured by Ned than in love. Ned’s Desdemona, Cleopatra, and other Shakespearean heroines beguile him more than anything Ned is as a man.

Things get shaken up a bit when King Charles II’s mistress, Nell Gwynn (Zoe Tapper), decides she wants to try acting. Charles (Rupert Everett) proclaims that forever more, men will play men, and women will play women. Seems like an easy enough transition for Ned, right? Acting is acting, isn’t it? Not quite.

See, in England back then — and now — acting was considered a craft, requiring years of training and instruction, unlike the more American tradition of anybody-with-a-look-can-do-it celebrity. This switch is like asking a tobacco farmer to plant a more health-conscious crop. It’s different. Ned is, predictably, adrift. He’s played women for years and, in fact, identifies himself as more of a woman than a man. Maria, however, who has been starring in a secret, underground tavern production of Othello herself, rockets to Ned’s former place of superstardom merely by being the first “actress.” To make matters worse, Ned is beaten savagely by the lackeys of a nobleman he once insulted, who later becomes Maria’s patron. The duke leaves him. Battered and without his livelihood, Ned despairs.

Stage Beauty is based on Jeffrey Hatcher’s play Compleat Female Stage Beauty, and I suspect that it works much better as a theatrical experience. At the very least, it might as a play avoid comparison with the superior Shakespeare in Love, which follows a similar plotline, shares in its study of gender as it relates to society and Shakespeare, and shares actors Rupert Everett as a historical icon and Tom Wilkinson as a fellow thespian.

The first third of the movie is very interesting, setting up the conflicts and showing obligatory slices of life, and the second third intrigues because it requires Ned to get off his laurels and try to make his life work. There is one fascinating scene as he auditions the role of Othello to prove to King Charles that he can act the man. Charles, incidentally, is in full drag for a court masque, and the scene — not played for laughs — shows just how fluid gender is. Charles can play a girl because he’s the king, and it’s fun. Ned can’t play Othello to save his own life.

But the last third of the film fails because it tries to solve all of Ned’s problems by merely requiring him to take a good stab at the role of the murderous Moor. The performance is straight out of 20th-century American naturalism and doesn’t resemble at all what might have been seen on an English stage at that time. It also results in an implied heterosexuality for Ned that, truly, no role this side of Stanley Kowalski can bestow on any man. Chemistry between stars Danes and Crudup might have helped (although Crudup left seven-months preggers Mary-Louise Parker for Danes during filming of this). Brisk at an hour and 45 minutes, more time could have been spent on Stage Beauty‘s rushed ending.

If there is a thesis statement to this film, it might be “Clothes make the man.” Or it might be “He’s not gay; he just hasn’t found the right girl yet.” Stage Beauty would submit that both statements are true, and are, in fact, interchangeable: “He’s not gay; he just hasn’t found the right clothes yet.” “A girl makes the man.” Well, good luck to anyone who thinks any of those statements is ever true. — Bo List

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Miles of Belly

M iles Copeland, brother of the Police drummer Stuart Copeland, has lived a life most folks would consider positively surreal. His father was an American spy and his mother was a British spy during World War II. He spent the first 20 years of his life moving back and forth between America, Great Britain, and the Middle East. He started his career as a music promoter during psychedelia’s last hurrah in the early 1970s but distinguished himself pushing punk rock and new-wave music. In the 1980s, he founded IRS records and hit it big again promoting a bubblegum punk act called the Go-Go’s. Now, as unlikely as it seems, Copeland is promoting the Bellydance Superstars, a Riverdance-inspired stage show featuring Middle-Eastern music and miles and miles of undulating tummies.

Flyer: Before we start talking about belly dancing and Middle-Eastern music, I have to know what it was like growing up in a family of spies during the Cold War?

Miles Copeland: Back in those days, the spies were all friends. My father knew the Russian agent, and the Russian agent knew my father. It’s not like what you see in the James Bond movies. [All the spies] related to each other because they had the same job. They were just working for different governments with different agendas, and since foreign policy reflects domestic policy, there was a lot of stupidity on both sides. It wasn’t as “us vs. them” to the degree that one imagined.

And now the obvious question: How does someone known for promoting acts like Sting and the Police, the Sex Pistols, and the Go-Go’s end up pushing Middle-Eastern music and belly dance?

Well, it’s not so strange really. Rock-and-roll has always sought new influences and absorbed the sounds of other cultures. It all started with white folks getting into black music in Memphis. Elvis’ music was cross-cultural. Now rap artists sample Arabic music. Rock-and-roll’s just a big sponge soaking up everything it can. It’s always looking for a new vibe or a fresh inspiration. The Police, for example, brought punk energy to a pop sensibility and added elements of reggae. Why reggae? Because there was a vibrant Jamaican culture in England, and so English musicians naturally ripped off bits and pieces.

Did you develop an affinity for Arabic music while you were living in the Middle East as a kid?

I grew up with Arabic music playing on the radio, but when I went to buy records, I was buying Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and the Doors. But I do think it made me more interested in Arabic music.

You started promoting more world music after the success of Sting’s Desert Rose album. How did you move from focusing on world music and world-music hybrids to promoting a belly-dance revue?

I had to ask myself, How the hell do I promote Arabic music to Americans? The answer was to spice it up: to bring in belly dancers. Whenever Michael Jackson or Madonna put a show together, there are always lots of dancers involved, right? Well, once the dancers were involved I saw the music differently. Immediately I thought of Riverdance. That’s an example of a small world-music thing transcending ethnicity and going mainstream.

Are Americans — who don’t seem particularly inclined to embrace Middle-Eastern culture these days — lining up to see the show?

What I discovered was that belly dance is a phenomenon among American women. It’s become a way for them to celebrate their femininity, and it’s also a health-related activity.

It turns out that 90 percent of the belly-dance paraphernalia in the world is sold in America. In fact, it’s almost an American form now. It’s sort of like how the Beatles adapted American musical styles, regurgitated them, and sold them back to the world. That’s what’s happening with belly dance in America.

And I’m guessing that’s why you’ve also developed a line of belly-dance costumes and supplies.

The U.S. has the best belly-dance teachers and dancers in the world, but it’s under the radar and a little amateurish. The best a dancer can hope for is doing one big show a year and dancing in restaurants. My aim was to make a high-end product to help expand the form.

Have you felt comfortable moving from rock-and-roll to wiggle-and-jiggle?

[Gaining credibility] was my first job because I could just hear people saying, “God, Miles is doing belly dance, and he’s going to pervert the art. He’s only looking for pretty girls.” Yes, we have a requirement that all of our girls look good, but that’s a secondary consideration. The first consideration: Are these the best dancers we can find?

So when [British punk impresario] Malcolm McLaren was throwing you out of his office for actually getting live gigs for his bands, did you ever once think, Hmmm, maybe I should consider belly dance?

If somebody had told me two-and-a-half years ago that my life would be immersed in belly dancing I’d have said, Whaaaaaaa? But now it all seems perfectly natural. n

The Bellydance Superstars take the stage at the New Daisy Theatre on Beale Street on Friday, November 12th, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $25 in advance and $30 at the door.

Categories
Music Music Features

Sound Advice

The husband-and-wife duo of Val and Mike Joyner, also known as Bella Sun, have been a local fixture for a few years now, performing at Midtown bars and coffee shops such as Java Cabana and Sip. With Val’s scratchy, earthy, idiosyncratic vocals matched up with Mike’s active, soulful acoustic-guitar accompaniment, the duo has a distinctive sound. But that successful sonic strategy gets a boost on No Crystal Stair, a debut album the couple will celebrate this week with a record-release party at the Hi-Tone Café. Recorded with a fuller band sound, No Crystal Stair embellishes the duo’s vocal-and-guitar foundation with punchy horns, Latin drums, wistful cello, bluesy electric leads, and sighing organ.

The result is a mix of funk and folk and rock and soul that never sounds less than natural. The music evokes contemporary acts from Erykah Badu to Tracy Chapman, but it also has some of the organic spirit of early Seventies post-hippie acts such as Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell.

Bella Sun will celebrate No Crystal Stair Friday, November 12th, at the Hi-Tone Café. Another local original, Ron Franklin, will open the show.

Another interesting duo, punk-blues tag-team Mr. Airplane Man, whose locally recorded C’Mon DJ is one of the year’s best Memphis albums, will play the Buccaneer Lounge Friday, November 12th.

— Chris Herrington

Somebody needs to hang a special medal around the necks of those rowdy boys in Chapel Hill’s Two Dollar Pistols, a band that fuses the rocking spirit of Faron Young with the lean honky-tonk sounds of Earnest Tubb. For the past eight years, they have clung to tradition, ignoring all progressive trends in alt-country without ever seeming like they were living in retro-world. But most important, the Pistols, whose critical acclaim exceeds their record sales, introduced America to Tift Merritt, one of the purest, most precise voices to roll down the Hillbilly Highway since Emmylou Harris joined the Flying Burrito Brothers. The 1999 release Two Dollar Pistols and Tift Merritt is a seven-song EP filled with beautifully executed tearjerkers and an absolute must-have for fans of classic country music. It showcased Merritt’s natural twang and her ability to shift gears from gutsy to gorgeous, and it earned her a lot more attention than the Pistols have ever gotten on their own. Since then, Merritt has gone mainstream, and with every new release, she moves further and further away from the high-and-lonesome, mixing elements of Memphis soul and classic rock with beautiful melodies that can only be described as lullabies.

Merritt plays the Hi-Tone Café on Sunday, November 14th, with Split Lip Rayfield, a hit-and-miss bluegrass band that’s been described as, “equal parts Carter Family and American Chopper.” Their four-part harmonies are wonderful, and their arrangements for banjo, mandolin, and guitar should appeal equally to metal heads and bluegrassaholics. Unfortunately, their self-consciously clever lyrics tend to be of the “outside the trailer park looking in” variety and that’s too bad, because these guys have too much talent to be relegated to the ghetto of novelty acts. — Chris Davis

Categories
Music Music Features

Short Cuts :: Record Reviews

The Delicate Seam

The Bloodthirsty Lovers

(Frenchkiss)

The Grifters and Big Ass Truck were the two biggest Memphis bands of the Nineties, but beyond that they didn’t seem to have much in common. The Grifters had a cohesive, less varied sound; Big Ass Truck was eclectic. The Grifters were strictly guitar-bass-drums; Big Ass Truck was one of the first rock bands to sport a full-time hip-hop DJ. The Grifters played punk clubs on the indie-rock circuit; Big Ass Truck drew big crowds at colleges.

But all that aside, the fact that two of the driving forces behind those seminal local bands — the Grifters’ Dave Shouse and Big Ass Truck’s Steve Selvidge –have now joined forces isn’t that surprising. Shouse and Selvidge are from an odd-couple pairing. Strip away the bluesy grit and punk aggression of the Grifters and the hip-hop and jam elements of Big Ass Truck and you’re left with something quite similar: a rock sound rooted in Seventies prog and glam and oddly divorced from the city’s blues heritage.

Shouse and Selvidge form a fruitful partnership on The Delicate Seam, the second album released under the moniker the Bloodthirsty Lovers but the first to include Selvidge. The band’s eponymous 2001 debut was essentially a solo effort from Shouse, who has collaborated under the Lovers rubric over the past few years with other notable local musicians, including drummer Paul Taylor, the Clears’ Shelby Bryant, and the Satyrs’ Jason Paxton.

The squiggly electro opening on the lead track, “The Mods Go Mad,” suggests more of the out-of-character dance-rock that made the Bloodthirsty Lovers such a rewarding departure, but it’s a red herring. Despite programmed beats, this is a rock record conceived in the image of such velvet goldmine gods as Bowie and Eno, Ronson and Bolin. You can hear this in the sculpted psychedelic guitar forays of “The Conversation.” There are departures. “El Shocko,” which effortlessly combines elements of country and doo-wop and Beatlesque into a swinging, humming whole, sounds like nothing from either player’s previous oeuvre, while “Happiness” is an exceptionally pretty bit of alt-pop. And the album-closing “Medicated” subcontracts lead vocals to guest female singer Katie Eastburn.

But most of The Delicate Seam is dramatic, urgent art-rock. Those looking for contemporary references might think of alt-rockers such as the Flaming Lips or Built To Spill, but the Bloodthirsty Lovers are less loopy than the former and less direct than the latter. Chances are you won’t quite know what these cryptic, impressionistic songs mean, but hooked up to Shouse and Selvidge’s swooning atmospherics and asteroid-trail guitars, you’ll feel them.

—Chris Herrington

Grade: A-

The Late Great Daniel Johnston:

Covered Discovered

Various Artists

(Gammon)

While certainly of interest to longtime fans, The Late Great Daniel Johnston: Covered Discovered seems intended specifically for the unconverted who may have dismissed Johnston either as a cause celebre among indie musicians or as an eccentric songwriter with a cartoon voice. Or it may be for those who simply have never heard of him before. Not only does the set feature a disc of covers by an impressive array of artists, it also includes a disc of the originals (including one new track, “Rock This Town,” from Johnston’s upcoming collection, Lost and Found).

Overall, these two discs are a triumph of packaging. Listeners can readily compare the covers with their respective originals and more effectively discern what these varied artists take from Johnston, who, in fact, is not dead. For the most part, they work hard to preserve his sense of innocence, some even improving on the originals. Bright Eyes turns the resigned paranoia of “Devil Town” into a lilting sing-along, while Sparklehorse and the Flaming Lips add new dimensions to the ballad “Go” but keep the simple directive intact: “Go go go go go you restless soul/You’re gonna find love.” Many artists, most notably Clem Snide, TV on the Radio, Vic Chesnutt, and even Guster, excavate the melodies from the originals’ muddy production and arrange them to sound like their own.

Only a few tracks sound ill-considered: Calvin Johnston covers the self-aware “Sorry Entertainer” with a big, knowing wink, Death Cab for Cutie make “Dream Scream” deadly dull, and E of Eels can’t manage to wipe that smirk off his face on “Living Life.” Regardless of such missteps, which are almost obligatory for any tribute, The Late Great Daniel Johnston is the most accessible and arguably the best collection of the singer’s simple, amiable, unassuming songs. — Stephen Deusner

Grade: B+

Categories
News News Feature

CITY BEAT

CHARTER COMMISSION TUNEUP

The charter commission is really very simple.

Think of city government as a car. The car has 14 drivers, also known as the mayor and the City Council. The car squeaks and rattles. It has always squeaked and rattled. It always will squeak and rattle because that is what cars do.

The city charter is the operator’s manual. It is 507 pages long, plus a 108-page index. There are sections on elections, lawsuits, police, firemen, private detectives, zoning, subdivisions, taxes, purchasing, pensions, streetlights, massage-parlor operators, prisoners, parks, sidewalks, and a lot of other things too numerous to mention, unless, of course, you plan on being on the charter commission, in which case you will be tested on all of them, assuming you don’t get bored with the whole thing.

The idea behind the charter commission is that seven do-it-yourself mechanics can rewrite the operator’s manual and stop the car from squeaking and rattling.

Thirty-five self-styled mechanics think they are qualified to do this because they each gathered 25 valid signatures from their friends, and they live in Memphis, and they can print their names, and they are not in jail or a mental institution. Those 14 hacks down at City Hall, on the other hand, run every four years in well-publicized, regularly scheduled elections.

The field will be reduced to seven mechanics in an election.

The election will be held on December 2nd or December 7th or three years from now. The Shelby County Election Commission might set the date this week, or it might not.

Some judges might intervene and overrule the election commission, or they might not.

The candidates will run by position, determined by geographic districts of the city. Each mechanic/commissioner must live in the district in which he/she is running. But their 25 nominating signatures could come from anywhere in the city.

Oh, and each mechanic/commissioner is actually an at-large representative. So each voter will choose seven mechanics/commissioners. By district. But they will all be at-large.

For Position 1, there is one certified candidate. For Position 2, there are six. For Position 7, there are nine.

One candidate, Myron Lowery, is a member of the Memphis City Council. Another candidate, Ulysses Jones, is a member of the Tennessee General Assembly. Name recognition often determines the outcome of elections. Lowery and Jones could both finish in the top seven, but only one of them would win since they are both running for Position 7.

Veteran Democratic Party operative Sidney Chism is a candidate. So is John Malmo, co-founder of the Archer/Malmo ad agency and one of the brains behind the charter commission.

Horace B. Jones, on the other hand, is the lone certified candidate for Position 1. Welcome to the charter commission, Mr. Jones, and congratulations. Feel free to scratch anywhere it itches.

The charter commission of members to be named later exists because the people who think it is a good idea gathered 10,485 signatures. That is sort of impressive until you realize that 15,000 people run in the New York City Marathon, which is harder.

All the petitioners had to do was write their names. Mad about Willie Herenton? Sign. Mad about city pensions? Sign. Mad about MLGW? Sign. Mad about property taxes? Mad about black people or white people? Sign. Mad about Bush? Sign. Mad about Kerry? Sign. Mad about the Yankees or the heat or your piles? Sign.

Unless the judges get involved, the election probably will be held on December 7th because that is the date of the runoff election in the District 7 school-board race.

That is an excellent time to choose people to reinvent city government because there is nothing that energizes voters and puts democracy in action like a school-board runoff election, especially a month after a presidential election. The last two such elections had turnouts of 4 percent and 2.5 percent.

After the mechanics/commissioners cut their greasy deals and form their alliances and are elected, they will meet for a year or two to figure out how to tune up the charter and thereby stop the squeaks and rattles. Their proposals will go before voters in the form of referendum questions like the two that were on the ballot in the election last week.

They might want to ponder these lines engraved in stone outside City Hall in 1968 in commemoration of the mayor-council city charter:

“Not by her houses neat, nor by her well-built walls, not yet again,/Neither by dock nor street. A city stands or falls but by her men.”

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

POLITICS

HUSTLE & FLOW

Now that Tennessee is increasingly tinted red on the political color map, what do Democrats in these parts do? Well, like they say, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody some good. But it’s still an ill wind. Which is to say, it creates opportunities for some, dilemmas for others.

Out of nowhere, Governor Phil Bredesen is on the short list of White House Democratic possibles for 2008. In the morrow of President Bush’s reelection victory — predicated on his control of electoral votes in the American heartland — Bredesen’s name has turned up in surveys of potential Democratic candidates prepared by the mainline national media.

Putting together a potential 2008 presidential-candidate list in Sunday’s LA Times, Peter Wallsten and Nick Anderson included Bredesen among a small group of governors “seen widely as effective communicators of a populist Democratic message in GOP-leaning states.” Adam Nagourney put Bredesen on his short list of Democratic prospects in the Sunday New York Times, and USA Today had the Tennessee governor on its list in a Friday story.

Which leads to a hypothetically possible (but unlikely) Bredesen-v.-Frist scenario. It’s surely no secret that Bill Frist, the state’s senior senator intends to vacate his seat in 2006 so as to organize a 2008 presidential run unemcumbered by a legislative saddle.

By the way, the name of Harold Ford Jr., the 9th District congressman who intends a run two years from now for Frist’s seat has itself turned up in a 2008 presidential preference survey of potential candidates by the national polling firm McLaughlin & Associates. Ford (who will be 38 in 2008) weighed in at 1 percent among respondents.

Republican candidates for the Senate seat are getting serious. Chattanooga mayor Bob Corker has started organizing a campaign, and former 7th District congressman and unsuccessful 2002 Senate candidate Ed Bryant sent out a letter last week notifying potential supporters that he would be running .

At a pre-election rally ion Memphis, Bryant had said this about Corker’s efforts: “He shouldn’t be starting his fund-raising now, when we have the Bush effort going and various other races important to the party. I’ve heard a lot of complaints about that.”

For State Rep. Beth Harwell, who has been doubling as state Republican chairman and who also is mulling over a Senate race, Bryant had this left-handed praise: “I think it’s great if Beth runs.” He said the possibility reminded him of the 1994 Republican primary for the 7th district congressional seat, which he eventually won. “You remember? It started out with me and [then Germantown mayor] Charles Salvaggio and [former local GOP chairman] Maida Pearson. If Maida hadn’t been in, there probably would have been a congressman Salvaggio, and I’d probably have been shoveling trash in Jackson for the next several years.”

Other than this intimation that a split in the 2006 congressional race would benefit him in the same way that the one in 1994 presumably had, Bryant did not elaborate.

Yet another attendee and possible Senate candidate at that Memphis rally was former 4th District congressman and ex-gubernatorial candidate Van Hilleary. “I’m ahead right now,” said Hilleary, referencing a statewide poll showing him in the lead over other potential GOP contenders, “but I’ve got to worry about Corker.” Going on with tongue presumably in cheek concerning the wealthy Chattanoogan, he asked rhetorically, “How much money do you think he’ll raise before the end of the year? $18 million? Anyhow, I’ve got to worry about the money he’ll have.”

Urged by a GOP well-wisher to consider running in 2006 against Governor Bredesen, the Democrat who defeated him two years ago, Hilleary replied, “I don’t think he’ll be easy to beat.”

Also on hand at that pre-election rally was another potential Senate candidate, current 7th District Rep. Marsha Blackburn. “Wait and see” was her take on the Senate race.

The new one-vote Republican majority in the state Senate has created a lot of pre-session hustle and flow among members of that body.

First, Lt. Governor John Wilder of Somerville, a nominal Democrat who survived a Republican challenge from Ron Stallings of Bolivar, has acted swiftly to nail down the vote of GOP Senate colleague Curtis Person of Memphis, a Wilder loyalist, along with enough other GOP members to apparently insure his re-election as Senate speaker.

But the new lineup of committee chairs will surely number one less Democrat, leaving two Memphians, John Ford (chairman: General Welfare, Health & Human Resources) and Steve Cohen (chairman: State & Local Government) among the vulnerable.

Next, Democratic caucus chairman Joe Haynes of Nashville faces a challenge for his post from Dresden’s Roy Herron and Clarksville’s Rosalind Kurita. And Memphis Senator Jim Kyle, a Bredesen confidante, is reportedly interested in the job of Senate Democratic leader, a position now held by Ward Crutchfield of Chattanooga.

Former city attorney Robert Spence’s school board race for Position 1, At Large, was widely regarded as a trial run for a 2007 mayoral bid. If so, his lackluster third-place finish behind incumbent Wanda Halbert and second-place finisher Kenneth Whalum Jr. may have set him backwards on the track.

Categories
News The Fly-By

DO YOU DESERVE A BREAK TODAY?

Tristian Wilson, who was jailed on charged of theft, forgery, and burglary, in Marion, Arkansas, escaped after his loving wife forged a letter authorizing his release and faxed it to the jail from a local McDonald’s. Tristian was captured and will now be standing trial alongside his wife for a first-degree Big Mac attack.

Plante: How It Looks

Categories
News News Feature

BARNSTORMING

CROSSROADS BLUES

The Democratic party is at a crossroads. At least that’s what I keep hearing on the idiot box, and reading in the editorial pages of the New York Times. After presidential hopeful John Kerry was handed his ass by America’s new moral majority last Tuesday a number of deep Democratic thinkers suggested that, in order to remain viable, the party needs to move a little bit further to the right by softening its views on wedge issues like abortion, gay marriage, and the separation of Church and state.

On the front end it seems like a reasonable proposition, but as Banquo said to Macbeth, “Oftentimes, to win us to our harm, The instruments of darkness speak truths. Win us with honest trifles, to betray us In deepest consequence.” Cousins, a word I pray you. President Bush’s mandate is non-existent. And while the white Christian population can’t be taken for granted, this new evangelism sweeping the nation is a Chimera, and not to be trusted. There are changes that need to be implemented within the Democratic policy, but they have precious little to do with altering the basic party platform.

Before getting into all the why’s and wherefores, let’s consider President Bush’s 3-million vote “mandate.” To put things in perspective, Bill Clinton, deep in the throes of BJ-gate beat Bob Dole in 1996 by 8-million votes though he was denied a popular majority thanks to the candidacy of eccentric conservative Ross Perot who garnered–yes–8-million votes. In 2000 Gore, an “unpopular candidate,” received more votes than Clinton did in both 1992 and 1996, though he only beat George W. Bush by half-a-million votes with nearly 3-million additional votes going to the extremely liberal Green party candidate Ralph Nader.

Given the GOP’s general hegemony, and undeniably superior organizational skills it appears that in 2000 America was shifting left. But as they say, 9/11 changed everything, and it’s hard to ignore that things were looking pretty peachy for the underdog Kerry until Osama bin Laden decided to “endorse” the poor Democrat in his pre-election video.

In terms of the Electoral College the Bush “mandate” is based on the second smallest margin since Woodrow Wilson beat Charles Evans Hughes in 1916. The honors for smallest margin of victory go to George W. Bush for his Supreme Court-assisted defeat of Al Gore in 2000.

If you look at the overwhelmingly red electoral map, marred by only a few specks of blue, it looks like all of America is Bush country. But that’s not true. For every 53 Republican who made it to the polls there were 48 Democrats. If you added red and blue pigment to each state in direct proportion to the votes cast rather than color-coding the entire map according to the winner-take-all standard of the Electoral College what you see is a big purple country — a bicoastal bruise. Also, in spite of the hype about a gigantic voter turnout in 2004, the actual percentage of eligible voters who made it to the polls was lower than it was in 1992. Since the Democrats far outstripped the Republicans in terms of voter registration it can be assumed that they were less successful than the Republicans at getting their voters to the ballot box.

Jakob Nielson, an expert in the field of interactive technology, did a comparison of content from the Bush and Kerry e-mail campaigns during the last week of the election. This isn’t what swayed the election in the president’s favor, but it does suggest that the Democrats made some major tactical mistakes.

Bush Kerry

Give Money 8% 57%

Get Out the Vote 38% 29%

Issues/Events 54% 14%

In his veiled plea for a more conservative Democratic party former Clinton advisor Harold Ickes told the New York Times, “I think that we ignored in large measure the three big cultural issues of this election: guns, abortion and gay rights, epitomized by gay marriageÉ These are very, very big issues. They really, really motivate people“

And he was correct. But in the last week, under the shadow of Osama, and the threat of an orange alert Kerry wasted a valuable resource begging for money instead of getting out the vote while Bush reminded his more religious constituents of the horrible fate that befell New York -- and Sodom. This wasn’t a faith-based victory; it was a fear-based victory.

Any Democratic fool who thinks his party is going to win over Evangelicals by softening its views on issues like abortion, gay marriage is living on Fantasy Island. The only thing such a shift would accomplish is breeding dissent in the ranks while sending a message to the masses that the Democrats are a waffle-loving party with their fingers in the air and no courage to back their alleged convictions. The first rule of winning is don’t act like a goddamn loser. The second rule of winning is never forget the first rule.