Month: March 2005

Categories
News The Fly-By

Tightening the Belt

I wish you would have come to see me early last week,” says Johnny Rudd. “I’ve taken most of my plaques and trophies home now. On March 22nd, I want this place to be clean.” Rudd’s office in the city’s Division of Park Services building on Avery is still slightly cluttered with sports memorabilia. “After 19 years, you collect a lot,” he says.

Rudd has supervised the Adult Athletics department for the last nine years. Before that he worked in Youth Athletics. When city budget cuts and layoffs were announced last month, Rudd’s position and his department were casualties. The city ended its spring athletic leagues and youth leagues. Field maintenance crews were cut, and the one other employee in Rudd’s department was also laid off. A total of 41 parks employees will soon be unemployed.

Since the cuts were announced, Rudd has received many calls from frustrated players questioning the city’s actions. For the last few years, the Adult Athletics department has run at a deficit. “In the late 1980s and early ’90s, we had as many as 1,400 teams in our leagues,” says Rudd. “Last year, we had only 203.” Those teams accounted for about $82,000 in revenue, but costs exceeded $125,000. “Many of the teams that used to play [in the city] are playing in suburbs which have their own complexes. That has really hurt us,” Rudd adds.

“But the people who are really hurt are the kids,” says Rudd, who also coaches summer youth baseball teams. “About 80 percent of school teams play on city fields. The adult teams can pick up and play elsewhere in the county and Mississippi, but the kids have nowhere to go.

“I was ready for this day. I have always made sure I had a second [employment] option. But I really hurt for all of the other people affected. Most people are devastated.”

Due to the budget cuts, 198 full-time city employees were laid off. Another 1,900 part-timers also lost their jobs. The layoffs, combined with additional budget reductions, are expected to close a $6.4 million shortfall for the fiscal year ending June 30th. City Council members have proposed 26 recommendations to balance the budget, including reviewing MATA operations and even looking into selling The Pyramid. But Mayor Herenton told council members Tuesday that their recommendations came too late to be implemented this fiscal year.

The eight-page layoff report issued by the Human Resources department includes mostly Parks and Public Works employees — crew members, mechanics, and clerks. But some of those laid-off are division directors, like Rudd, and employees directly involved with public services. Human Resources director Lorene Essex says layoffs were determined by classification, seniority, and department budget. “We looked at how an organization could function without those employees,” she says. “Also, would the remaining employees be able to continue operations and provide services? We didn’t make cuts just for the sake of cutting.”

Laid-off employees remain on the city’s health insurance plan for 30 days after March 22nd. After that, they become part of a much more expensive COBRA plan. For Rudd, COBRA means a nearly $600 monthly increase in personal expenses. By law, COBRA plans do not include life insurance.

For some employees, a union contract has granted them a reprieve. Through clauses in their contracts, laid-off employees are allowed to “bump” or replace some employees with lesser seniority. In departments such as Adult Athletics, where all employees have been eliminated, that clause is not in effect.

Shirlean Robertson is number 149, four above Rudd, on the list of 198 full-time employees being eliminated. For the past decade, Robertson has been employed in the Mayor’s Citizen Services Center. She is the current administrator and senior member of that department. “I am just one month short of 11 years with the city,” she says. “I’ll have to find another job. I’ve got to keep working.” Four employees will be left in Robertson’s department. Those positions are appointed, and the “bump” clause does not apply to appointed positions.

Center for Neighborhoods coordinator Vernua Hanrahan, number 89 on the list, is one of two coordinators being cut from her department. Although community advocates have expressed their concern about the layoffs, Hanrahan is slow to discuss her future. “Until March 22nd, I am still employed by the city and wouldn’t want to talk about any of the decisions right now.”

Others have been more vocal, including former part-time Sharpe Planetarium employees Brett Hanover and Diane Heaton, who began an on-line petition to save the planetarium, which has already been closed to the public. Dan Hope, spokesman for the Pink Place Family of Museums, said the organization has lost eight full-time employees and at least 20 part-timers. Planetarium manager Jim Greenhouse, number 83 on the list, has already found another job in Macon, Georgia.

What were the causes for the budget deficit? The city’s finance office and Mayor Herenton have been criticized for their original rosy forecasts on city finances when they presented the budget last summer. “We created the budget on the information we had at that point,” says finance director Charles Williamson. “We had an economy that was on the uptick. FedExForum was opening and would bring in more tourism dollars. And we felt the windstorm was behind us and that people would now be able to pay their property taxes.”

In September, Williamson noticed that things weren’t turning out as planned and notified the mayor. “Because we were already in the fiscal year, all we could do was reduce our spending to not exceed our revenues. It’s like balancing your personal checkbook.”

But balancing the city’s checkbook requires millions, not only to close the budget gap but to replenish reserve funds, which have dwindled to $26 million. To remain in good standing with bond-rating agencies, the fund will have to return to 10 percent of city expenditures, about $48 million.

“We can no longer allow [city administrators] to continue passing these budgets and making these cuts like this,” says council member Carol Chumney. “[Council members] have got to take a stand and make them accountable. I’ve been saying this since I’ve been on the council, but nobody seems to want to ask hard questions.”

Chumney and other council members have criticized the administrators for unrealistic budget projections as well as employee raises. A 3 percent raise for about 6,000 employees accounted for almost $4.5 million in additional expenses.

Williamson says those criticisms are unfair. “Our expenditures have been lower than average the last five years. It’s just that our revenues have been down,” he says. “You can go back to unpaid property taxes that we don’t have and even further, to the $86 million that the city gives to the school system. That’s money the city could have in its coffers.”

Over the past 10 years, the city has contributed $828 million to Memphis City Schools. On several occasions, Herenton has proposed withdrawing those annual funds to MCS. The City Council would have to approve such a decision.

To ensure a better budget analysis for the next fiscal year, Williamson says he and his staff are utilizing better money management. Union-negotiated raises and other salary increases are being factored in advance to better offset expenditures. Williamson is also looking into additional revenue, including the possibility of a commuter tax. Using Pittsburgh as a model, a commuter tax would be paid by employees who work in the city but live elsewhere. Employers would collect the tax and remit funds to the city. “We’re a ways from that,” Williamson says. “We have to check with the legal department to see if we have to check with the state legislature to go forward. If we can, it will come up in fiscal year 2007,” says Williamson.

Until then, laid-off employees can only hope for a budget turnaround that will give them their jobs back. But even if revenues exceed expectations, there is no assurance that the positions will be reopened.

“I have all sorts of fishing equipment at home that has never been used,” says Rudd, as his baseball clock loudly ticks away his remaining hours on the job. “I passed by a lake the other day and saw a group of men sitting out there enjoying themselves, and I said to myself, ‘I’m on my way.'”

Categories
News The Fly-By

Moral Bankruptcy

How to take a horrible bill and make it genuinely loathsome: Look at what they are doing with this bankruptcy bill.

The bankruptcy bill was a gift to big bankers and credit card companies in return for copious showers of campaign contributions to our elected representatives in Congress. Same old, same old.

The big lenders, the kind who can legally jack up your interest rates at any time, have a problem: More Americans are going broke, so they declare bankruptcy under Chapter 7, which wipes out their credit for 10 years but gives them a chance to start over without debt. Naturally, the banks want to make it harder to declare bankruptcy by forcing people to file under Chapter 13, with only a partial diminution of debt.

According to a Harvard study published in Health Affairs, between 1981 and 2001, personal bankruptcies rose by 360 percent, but those caused by medical debts rose an astronomical 2,200 percent. Only job loss now slightly leads medical crisis as the reason for bankruptcy.

Another cause, as well as the usual usury, is that the credit card companies push accounts on people whose credit is only marginal — your teenager has doubtlessly been offered several. Ooops, it turns out many of those with shaky credit can’t pay, so of course the banks want the law changed even more in their favor. Poor little card companies — only $30 billion in profits last year.

If you have not lived long enough to know that anyone can be hit by financial catastrophe, just wait. Your job too can be outsourced. And if you think health insurance can keep you out of financial trouble if you get sick — surprise! Three-fourths of those who filed for bankruptcy because of medical costs had health insurance.

The study in Health Affairs reports that the middle class actually suffers most from the health crisis, accounting for 90 percent of all medical bankruptcies: Drug costs alone drive many into bankruptcy.

In a classic example of moral accounting, Senator Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the bill’s chief sponsor, said, “People who have the ability to repay some or all of their debt should not be able to use bankruptcy as a financial planning tool so they get out of paying their debt scot-free, while honest Americans who play by the rules have to foot the bill.”

That’s a startling example of the “straw-man” school of argument. The Harvard study shows that in the two years before filing for bankruptcy, 19 percent of families went without food, 40 percent had their phone service shut off, 43 percent could not fill a doctor’s prescription, and 53 percent went without important medical care.

So, who are these feckless, irresponsible moochers using bankruptcy to avoid paying legitimate debts? Why, look at this: The New York Times reports “legal specialists say the proposed law leaves open an increasingly popular loophole that lets wealthy people protect substantial assets from creditors even after filing for bankruptcy.”

What, our Republican Congress passing a bill that favors rich people at the expense of “honest Americans who play by the rules and have to foot the bill”? If you have a lot of money, you just put it in an asset protection trust and walk away.

If you don’t like that feature of the bankruptcy bill, try this one: You may have read of the hardship on the families of those who have been called to fight in Iraq, including, of course, severe financial stress leading to many bankruptcies. Democrats in the Senate tried to put an amendment on this bill exempting military personnel. The Republicans voted it down.

Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor, pointed out in testimony before Congress that the bill assumes everyone is in bankruptcy because they’re spendthrifts: “A family driven to bankruptcy by the increased cost of caring for an elderly parent with Alzheimer’s disease is treated the same as someone who maxed out his credit cards at a casino. A person who had a heart attack is treated the same as someone who had a spending spree at the shopping mall. A mother who works two jobs and who cannot manage the prescription drugs needed for a child is treated the same as someone who charged a bunch of credit cards with only a vague intent to repay.”

But hey, that’s the conservative idea of justice: Treat ’em all the same, except for the rich. n

Molly Ivins writes for Creators Syndicate.

Categories
Music Music Features

According to Paul

Paul Westerberg’s not in the best of moods. The iconoclastic rocker — who first rode to fame in the Replacements — is tired of being called a drunk. “I’ve created a reputation,” he mockingly moans. “I’m like Dean Martin when I walk out. You trip on a cord, and it’s like ‘Look at the idiot.’

“People have got the wrong impression,” he continues, more seriously. “I actually hurt myself on the road recently. I’ve got a pulled hamstring, and I’ve had a slight concussion since Vancouver, where I banged my guitar on top of an amp. It came back and hit me in the head, so I was loopy for a couple of days. Other than that, I’m fine. But I don’t like to go out onstage and drop my pants to show [the audience] my bandages and cuts and shit.

“To my recollection, the shows have been excellent, but there’s a camp out there that has to pretend that Paul’s too wasted to stand up. It could never be the fact that Paul’s leg doesn’t work,” he says. “Don’t worry. I’ll probably be feeling fit as a fiddle by the time I get to Memphis.”

“Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.” It’s an expression that Westerberg is all too familiar with.

Back in the early 1980s, the Replacements — Westerberg on lead vocals, brothers Bob and Tommy Stinson (on guitar and bass, respectively), and drummer Chris Mars — were one of the greatest bands to storm out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. From their hardcore debut, Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out the Trash (1981), on through brilliant, rock-based albums like Let It Be (’84) and Tim (’85), they established themselves at the forefront of that decade’s burgeoning college music scene. Critics and fans alike raved about their straightforward approach, which combined equal parts cynicism, irreverence, and melancholy into a gloriously rambling, ramshackle sound.

They came to Memphis to record with Jim Dickinson at Ardent Studios in 1987. The chaotic sessions yielded a beauty of an album, Pleased To Meet Me, which provided the band’s mainstream breakthrough. Two albums later, the band disbanded, and, in ’95, Bob Stinson died of a drug overdose. Paul and Tommy parted ways to pursue solo careers, leaving a maelstrom of broken beer bottles and bad memories behind them.

While Westerberg hasn’t exactly languished in obscurity, his career has suffered from bad promotion, label problems, and an occasional lack of focus. Yet he’s continued to soldier on, self-producing his albums, recording under his own name and the “Grandpaboy” alias, and, most importantly, marrying and fathering a son. Having a family, he says, has changed everything. “For one thing, I’m not trying to kill myself anymore, even though some people are convinced I am,” he says.

Apparently, he’s had to endure plenty of drama over the last few decades — some of it’s self-inflicted, to be sure, but most problems arrive via overzealous fans and foes. “Someone’s currently making a movie where the character comes to Minneapolis to find me, which is too close for fucking comfort,” Westerberg says dispiritedly. “I come home with enough garbage in my mailbox, threatening evil crap.

“If I lived alone, I’d sit here with a .38,” he adds ominously. “I try to tell my son that it’s like you could be the hero of Chicago if you played baseball, but when you go to New York, they’re gonna boo the hell out of you. That’s all part of being famous.”

That sounds like the stuff Memphis antihero Alex Chilton went through after Westerberg penned a song about him on Pleased To Meet Me. With lyrics like “Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes ’round/They sing, ‘I’m in love, what’s that song? I’m in love with that song,'” it was a perfect power-pop paean to the former Big Star frontman. And after the Replacements released it, Chilton was launched into permanent cult fave status.

“I regret it,” Westerberg says with a sigh. “I had no idea what it would do to him. In my naive way, I thought it would somehow help him make some money. I never thought it would last this long or that he’d become this stalkable figure because I used his name in a song. But originally the song was called ‘George From Outer Space.’ I didn’t have any lyrics, and for a hoot one day we threw [Chilton’s] name out.

“I haven’t talked to him,” Westerberg adds, “but I think he forgives me. I apologize for doing anything that may have interfered with his personal life. Other than that, I still admire him.”

Then he lets loose a delicious laugh and lets me in on his current plan: “I think we’re gonna play the Conan O’Brien show one of these nights, and I think I might have Jim [Boquist, his bassist] be the lead singer. No one’s gonna know,” he says gleefully. “The next day in the paper, it’ll say, ‘Did you see Paul last night? Man, was he drunk!’

“I can’t live it down. I’m tired, tired to the point of frustration and saying ‘I don’t ever want to do this again,'” he admits. “I don’t wanna be any more famous than I am. One more speck of fame, and I’m outta here.”

So why the interview? “I want people to come to the show,” Westerberg says firmly. “I like playing. It’s obvious. If I get up there with the right guys, I still like the music as much as I’ve ever liked it. There’s a feeling of doing something illegal, like you’re 15 years old and you’re getting away with stuff.

“If I’m there on the stage, even if it’s a glorified sports bar, it’s still fun,” he claims. “Think what you want, it’s gonna rock like murder.” n

Paul Westerberg and His Only Friends at the New Daisy Friday, March 11th, at 7 p.m. Tickets are $20.

Categories
Music Music Features

localbeat

Last Wednesday afternoon, around 2:30 p.m., a fire broke out at Easley-McCain recording studio in Midtown. Luckily, engineer Kevin Cubbins had just opened the building, and he was able to avoid injury. Likewise, the band room — home to a Mellotron, dozens more instruments, and a handful of vintage microphones and amplifiers — was spared, as was the studio’s archive of master-tape recordings, including Charlie Feathers’ and Townes Van Zandt’s last sessions, classic tracks by the Grifters, the Oblivians, Alex Chilton, Lorette Velvette, and more. While the fire decimated the lobby (even the microwave autographed by Loretta Lynn and Jack White was destroyed), the control room, which sustained some damage, may be salvageable. Right now, studio owners Doug Easley and Davis McCain are just trying to assess the damage. The studio, which was originally called Onyx, was owned by the Bar-Kays, country singer T.G. Sheppard, and several others, before Easley and McCain opened shop there in the early 1990s. No word yet on whether they plan to rebuild.

At 4 p.m. this Sunday, Phillip Dale Durham will be hosting a CD-release party for his first solo disc, Everything I Need, at Neil’s in Midtown. While Durham is hardly a household name, hundreds of Memphians know him by sound. The drummer/vocalist has played with everyone from Jerry Lee Lewis to Ann Peebles. He’s also anchored bands like Moloch, Smokehouse, and the Group, one of the most popular bands on the city’s 1960s garage scene.

“My father was a drummer in the Marine Corps, and music was my thing from the get-go. My first paying job was when I was 16. I played the Lakeland Midway with a group, and we made $27 apiece,” Durham recalls. “It was the late 1950s. From that day on, I said this is what I’m gonna do. Starting out, we did a lot of high school and YMCA gigs, sock hops, and things like that.”

When he was with Moloch, the late Lee Baker’s legendary band, Durham backed bluesmen like Furry Lewis and Johnny Woods at gigs around town, as well as the infamous Dream Carnivals and Memphis Country Blues Festivals held at the Overton Park Shell.

With Moloch, Durham got to perform on a bill in Flushing Meadows, New York, opening a show for the MC5 and the Stooges. “We’d known Bill Barth from the blues festivals in Memphis, and he had a band, the Insect Trust, that had a house in Hoboken, New Jersey. So we stayed there,” Durham told musicologist Ron Hall in Playing for a Piece of the Door: A History of Garage & Frat Bands in Memphis. “They weren’t ready for us! We flat blew ’em away! We got three standing ovations. The MC5 and Stooges were loud as hell, but we stole the show.

“That was a crazy time,” Durham remembers today. “Everyone was experimenting with this, that, and the other, but we were Memphis’ most radical group. We were extreme longhairs, one of the first long-haired bands in Memphis. We were obviously insane,” he says with a laugh.

“But,” he adds, “I’ve been rhythm-and-blues-oriented all my life. That’s the kind of music I grew up hearing on the radio and wanting to play. Don’t get me wrong. I love rock-and-roll too, but my heart’s in R&B.”

Guitarist Brad Webb produced Everything I Need, his solo debut. “Brad’s mother used to bring him to hear me play when I was in the Group, back when he was too young to drive,” Durham explains. “Who would think he’d be my producer today? That’s inconceivable,” he says, chuckling. “But we played together every once in a while, and then some months ago, he called me. He said, ‘I have all these tracks but no lyrics, and I know you’ve got a lot of songs. Why don’t you come over and put ’em down?’ Fifty hours later, we had a CD!

“Without Brad, I’d still be trying to get it out,” Durham acknowledges. “I’ve been waiting a long time for this to happen. I never wanted to give it up.”

“Phillip has one of the most soulful voices in Memphis,” raves local promoter Dennis Brooks, who booked the Neil’s gig. “He’s one of those guys who didn’t walk around poking his chest out.”

Brooks points out that while Neil’s has focused on live music on their outdoor patio, recently a lot of local legends — Don Nix, Van Duren, and Reba Russell — and popular national rock acts — Mountain, Savoy Brown, and Willis Alan Ramsey — have been added to the club’s indoor entertainment roster.

“There aren’t that many live-music venues in Midtown. Most places focus on food and liquor, and entertainment is secondary,” he observes. “Neil [Heins, the club owner] has been there 10-plus years, but only recently has he focused on good live music indoors. Richard Butler brought in sound, and he works as the tech for every show, and now they’re decorating the space and making it look like a music room.

“Whereas a lot of rooms in Memphis tend to stick to a single genre, Neil’s is open to anything,” Brooks adds. “A Flock of Seagulls are playing there in a couple of weeks. Who’d have thought Neil would’ve done that?” he asks. “Of course, he doesn’t know who they are, but he thought it would make an interesting show.” n

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

postscript

Repeating Falsehoods?

To the Editor:

Regarding the debate over medical malpractice insurance rates and the effect of malpractice suits and judgments (Letters, March 3rd issue), it is apparent that the medical-insurance complex has learned a lesson from its principal apologist, President Bush: If you repeat a falsehood often enough, eventually people will start believing it.

In a February article, The New York Times came to the following substantiated conclusions: 1) legal costs are not at the root of recent increases in medical malpractice premiums; 2) payments for malpractice claims have fallen sharply; 3) spikes in insurance premiums are directly related to insurers’ practices, including underpricing coverage in the 1990s to get greater market share and poor performance on their investments; 4) between 1993 and 2003, the total paid out by insurance companies for claims against doctors and other medical professionals rose, on average, 3.1 percent annually (roughly the rate of inflation), whereas in 2003 alone, the cost of coverage rose between 10 and 49 percent; 5) the average payment for malpractice fell in 2004, as did the number of payments made for medical malpractice; 6) there is little or no correlation between the cost of coverage and the institution of damage caps.

According to the watchdog group Public Citizen, all of the other bases touted by Bush and his “reformers” for limiting malpractice cases (e.g., defensive medicine, junk lawsuits, exodus of doctors, etc.) have been thoroughly debunked, many by the federal government itself.

The same people who are trying to deceive the public about the true causes of the malpractice “crisis” are using that deception to hide the facts about medical mistakes, which have escalated alarmingly. The government estimates that upwards of 100,000 people die from medical mistakes annually. The Harvard Medical School has estimated that less than 50 percent of malpractice is ever discovered; hospitals rarely, if ever, suspend or revoke the privileges of incompetent doctors; and the rate of physicians impaired by drug abuse is alarmingly high.

It’s a lot easier for the medical and insurance industries to contribute to the reelections of legislators willing to do their bidding than it is to solve the problem of malpractice or regulate the pricing practices of insurance companies, but the public should not be fooled.

Malpractice “reform” will only shield those industries at the expense of the improvement of medical care and the lives of the innocent victims of malpractice.

Martin H. Aussenberg

Memphis

Thanks A Lot

To the Editor:

I would like to thank Barry Chase for his letter (March 3rd issue) regarding my recent trip into the occupied territories and post my public apology for misusing my time while there.

His suggestion that we should have carried our message of peace to Hamas and the Al Aqsa Brigades was both stirring and insightful. We were invited to “bomber belt” workshops by militant Islamic factions but could not muster up the “courage” to attend. And I once passed a Vegas-style sign that read “Suicide Bomber Hideout,” but, alas, in my cowardice I continued to drive. Another time, a few men offered us “guide to where the terrorists live” maps, but I cowardly opted to buy two cups of Arabic coffee from a street vendor instead.

I now see how foolish my original goal of meeting with ordinary Israeli and Palestinian Jews, Muslims, and Christians who are committed to finding a nonviolent peaceful solution to the conflict was. You have taken me from a journey of pipe dreams to pipe bombs. Wish me better luck than the Bush administration in actually finding them.

Joey Noffsinger

Memphis

Flim-flam Man

To the Editor:

The president comes to Memphis to ask for the people’s support in his quest to make America the greatest debtor nation in history. This time, the flim-flam man wants to save Social Security by using false costs to fool Congress and the American people.

Let’s look at some facts: Since Bush became president, the national debt has soared; the tax cuts that were supposed to lower the debt are a sham; American jobs that used to pay into Social Security are now in China and other low-wage countries; and the pension benefit guarantee has a $23.3 billion deficit.

The president is now pitting the young against seniors with his several trillion-dollar scheme to start private investment accounts. Guess who gets to pay off this added debt? The young workers he claims to be looking out for. Bush, like Nero, is fiddling while America becomes a debtor nation the likes of which the world has never seen.

Jack Bishop

Cordova

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Wonderland

Even before you enter the WINCHESTER Farmer’s Market, you get an idea of what’s inside. Next to the big green letters spelling out “farmer’s market” are small signs. “Mercado Internacional,” reads one.

“The other signs are in Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean,” says Ben Park, one of the market’s owners. “For everybody else, we’re just the Winchester Farmer’s Market.”

Winchester Farmer’s Market opened three months ago in the site of a former Seessel’s at the corner of Kirby and Winchester. Owners Park and John Kang took the concept from super-sized international markets such as Buford Highway Farmer’s Market in Atlanta and the K&S World Market in Nashville.

“John and I were small-business owners — he in Nashville, I in Atlanta,” Park says. “We thought it was time to start something big together, so we came back to Memphis, where we went to college together 20-something years ago, to open this store.”

The resulting market is big and colorful, a culinary wonderland. There is no rabbit wearing white gloves and fretting so about being late, but there is rabbit meat for sale. And the aisles aren’t labeled 1, 2, 3, 4 for crackers, coffee, cereals, canned fruit. Instead, they’re organized by country, so you might find Mexican soda and refried beans in one aisle, live fish tanks filled with lobster, crab, and tilapia in the next, and then just a few seconds later be in front of cans of Spam in the American aisle.

In the background, it’s mostly Mexican music, though it’s Jimi Hendrix in the meat department. The common language among the customers of myriad nationalities is some sort of English.

“During the weekend, most of our customers are from the Hispanic community,” Park says. “But during the week we usually have a good mix of nationalities and locals who come to buy groceries.”

Currently, the store is stocked with approximately 30,000 products. Not all of them are exotic, but most are different from the merchandise mix at a more typical American store. Beef tongues are lying next to a cow’s head in one of the freezers. Small beef intestines are next to beef tripe, liver, and “Chorizo Mexicano.” In the produce section, beside the apples, potatoes, bananas, cabbage, and okra, you’ll see green Thai eggplant, which looks like a small green tomato, and fuzzy squash, banana leaves, Taiwanese bok choy, gai choy, a choy, yu choy, and baby bok choy, among other hard-to-find foreign produce and herbs.

The store carries more than 20 varieties and 50 brands of rice. “People from different countries prefer slightly different types of rice,” Park says. “Africans, for example, prefer broken rice. We didn’t really know that, but customers told us and now we carry it.”

Park sees the store as a work-in-progress that will evolve with help from its customers. For instance, Park knows that products from countries such as India, Africa, and the Middle East are underrepresented.

There is room to grow too. The market has enough space for independent vendors and retailers. A jewelry store and a custom-order auto-accessories shop have just opened in the front of the store. Yung Kim owns and operates Glory Video, a small Korean video rental that also carries lingerie, Korean cosmetics, and magazines. A coffee and smoothie bar is set up opposite the deli, which offers “Quick Fixin’ Ideas” with what appears to be seaweed and sprouts salads (no English signs here) as well as fried rice to-go. A sushi bar, a Mexican deli, a check-cashing place, and a Latin American clothing store are in the works.

Park says Winchester Farmer’s Market is filling a void.

“A lot of our customers come from out of town,” he says. “Those from Arkansas usually drive all the way to Dallas to find what they need. Now that this market has opened, they might find it here.” n

The store is located at 6616 Winchester. Store hours are 8:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday-Thursday and 8:30 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday-Sunday.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Bad Medicine

On the night I saw The Jacket, I had a fitful sleep filled with strange dreams, all variations on the film. So filled was my head with loose images (some from the movie, some from my ill sleep) of psych-ward terrors, time travel, and Adrien Brody’s huge, expressive face that I could scarcely sort them out; fact from fiction from science fiction.

The Jacket is a mind trip with moments and imagery and language that continue to haunt and disturb. After a night of tossing and turning and waking and thinking that I too was confined to a straitjacket, I can’t help but afford John Maybury’s chiller at least a few good words.

Brody is Jack Starks, a veteran of the first Gulf War, who, in 1991, briefly experienced death on the battlefield when shot in the head by a scared child he was trying to help. A year later (1992, remember), Jack is a drifter, walking long, lonely, snowy highways and hitching for rides with nowhere in particular to go. One fateful day, he helps a drunken mother and cutie-pie daughter with their stalled truck, only to be shooed away by the intoxicated shrew. But before he leaves, he gives the young girl, Jackie, his dog tags. Soon after, his next hitch goes awry when the driver shoots and kills a police officer and sets the scene to look like a wounded Jack did it. Jack maintains his innocence, but psychiatrists testify that his war trauma must have pushed him to the act. So, to the asylum we go. It’s not pretty. There are TVs, but they all seem to be showing strange, hallucinogenic programs and patients shuffle about meaninglessly. Worst yet, it’s run by Dr. Becker, played by Kris Kristofferson in his not-nice mode. Becker has an unconventional treatment that involves intense antipsychotic drugs and confinement while straitjacketed in a morgue drawer. This is all kept on the down low, since these methods, we are told, were banned in the 1970s.

A curious phenomenon occurs while Jack is in the drawer. He finds himself able to travel 15 years into the future to 2007. Is this a hallucination? A dream? Or is he really traveling? It doesn’t matter because he’s able to score with the little girl who took his dog tags and who grew up into a pert but grungy Keira Knightley (who went medieval on us as Guinevere in last year’s King Arthur). With her help in 2007 and that of a kindly, sensible shrink back in 1992, Dr. Lorenson (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Jack is able to piece together enough information to learn that, in 1992, he’s about to die. The only questions now: how and why, and how to stop it.

In my dream, there was a bunch of extra doctors running around, each with different motives for imprisoning and deluding Jack. And I guess, now that I am awake, I realize that this is a valid concern on my part. Why? Why do Dr. Becker and his associates think this cruel and unusual treatment is useful, especially on a rational, well-spoken patient like Jack? We are asked to believe that they really are doing this in the patient’s best interests, but they scowl and laugh like movie villains and abuse Jack almost gleefully. I guess that in a world of Abu Ghraib, motiveless, well-intended atrocities committed by supposedly “good guys” shouldn’t surprise me, but in a film without a strong narrative, I wanted some explanations.

The Jacket is an effective, if bland, thriller; well-acted on the whole (though Knightley works awfully hard at wounded and dark, in a role that Jason Leigh might have played 15 years ago) and well-paced as it unravels its sordid mystery. Hollywood doesn’t quite yet know what to do with elegantly attractive Oscar-winner Adrien Brody, what with his leading-man smile but gaunt frame and gi-normous nose. The Jacket reaffirms him as ideal for roles as tortured, bedraggled survivors. It will take a good romantic comedy to further test his mettle.

I just wish that, with the time-jumping and psychological hoo-ha, The Jacket were more clever. No M. Night Shyamalan twists and turns. Nothing Hitchcockian here. You would think that a movie about dementia and traveling through time would offer at least one shocking revelation. But no. Like Jack, we too wander this movie’s highway looking for a ride.

Categories
Opinion

Dark Night

Walk into the Full Moon Club above Zinnie’s East restaurant on a Wednesday night, and you’ll find yourself in a world of darkness where the smoke from clove cigarettes fills the air and guys and girls dressed in leather, spikes, and chains dance to the sounds of Bauhaus and My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult.

It’s Industrial Goth Night, and as soon as you reach the top of the stairs, you’re greeted by a friendly doorman wearing a fishnet shirt and a dog collar. A crowd of black-clothed patrons are hovering near the bar, and a couple of spiky-haired guys in heavy eyeliner and trenchcoats are shooting pool.

Around the corner on the dance floor, a woman with Elvira-style hair is being pulled by her chained collar by a slim guy in a tight-fitting black sportscoat. Next to them, an older man, who bears a striking resemblance to Riff-Raff from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, dances with a younger man whose slick black hair is shaped into two hornlike spikes. Up in the curtained DJ booth, Dev “Sameal” Deval is spinning Depeche Mode.

It’s Memphis Industrial Goth Project’s first night at the Full Moon Club after the crowd outgrew the Liquid Lounge on Highland. The only goth/industrial-themed night in the city, an average Wednesday night at Liquid Lounge drew about 150. It began in December, and before long the club became so crowded that many patrons were left with nowhere to sit.

The popularity of the Wednesday nights showed that Memphis has a decent-sized goth scene that up until recently had no place to call home.

“I came to Memphis about six months ago [from Detroit], and I noticed there wasn’t any type of industrial goth night or club anywhere in the city, so I put some feelers out to see who might be interested,” says Sameal, founder of the entertainment collective called MIG Project.

Sameal recruited a team of four others to form the MIG Project: DJs Brad “Totenkopf” Allison, Jonas “The Plastic Citizen” Stoltz, and a guy who simply goes by St. Faust. Faust, doubling as a photographer, walks around shooting patrons and then posts the pictures on the group’s Web site, MIGProject.com. The doorman, the nice guy in the dog collar, is Levi.

Totenkopf, a longtime fixture in the Memphis goth scene, put on a few goth parties at Red Square, a defunct downtown dance club, back in 1997 and then again at the Spot in 2002, but he says the MIG Project is the largest revival of goth in Memphis that he’s seen.

The group is striving to create a safe place for the goth crowd to gather — a place to be entertained without having to worry about being gawked at. That’s why they’ve enacted a dress code requiring an excess of black clothing. Bondage, fetish, Renaissance, punk, and metal attire are also acceptable.

“When somebody comes in dressed in mainstream attire, they’re immediately gawking,” says Sameal. “This is a very nonviolent, nonconfrontational crowd, and they have no desire to be harassed for wearing makeup and leather pants.”

So, what is goth?

“There’s a huge misunderstanding in the mainstream community,” says Sameal. “They tend to think the black clothing and the dark music is all about death and morbidity.

“But like the hippie movement, the goth movement is actually about life and freedom. Yet the goth still wants a constant reminder that life isn’t always pretty and perfect. Even in the most sorrowful, horrible things in life, beauty can still be found.” n

Industrial Goth Night at the Full Moon Club (1718 Madison) runs from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. every Wednesday. For more information, go to the Web site MIGProject.com.

Categories
News The Fly-By

F-stop

Chicken livers, anyway. So said Annette Bursey about the snails she ate last week at Hollywood Elementary school. Bursey and other school administrators ate snails and dog food while students cheered from cafeteria tables.

About 250 kids spent four weeks selling $1 candy bars for the school’s annual fund-raiser. The goal was to raise $12,000 for an outdoor marquee, a new PA system, and library books. When students exceeded the goal by $1,000, teachers had to deliver their end of the bargain: a reality-show-inspired scenario in which Bursey and Principal Carla Franklin promised to eat snails, and building engineer Charles Childress said he would eat a can of Alpo.

A professional chef served up the eclectic menu on fine china with linen napkins.

Whatever happened to celebrating fund-raiser achievements with pizza parties? “We thought the Fear Factor challenge would be a great incentive for the kids. We didn’t expect them to sell this many,” said Bursey. Oh, but they did. Mmmm-mmm! n — Janel Davis

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Editorial

Having just succeeded in passing legislation imposing restrictions on class-action lawsuits, the Republican-controlled Congress is fast about seeing to the rest of President Bush’s real agenda — one that would impose severe constraints on the rights of Americans to seek legal redress.

We refer to the president’s “real” agenda, because in the judgment of many, Bush won reelection last November based on the voters’ sense that he saw things their way on a whole host of moral and social issues — none of which, as it turns out, were prominently featured in the president’s State of the Union address, and none of which ended up on the congressional calendar for immediate action.

It is difficult to disagree with those who see Bush as having played bait-and-switch with the so-called Red States. What is obvious, in any case, is that the issues that are on the calendar at the president’s behest have never commanded much public support, in the heartland or anywhere else. Besides several misnamed “tort reform” measures, these include: “tax reform” of the sort we have already seen several times over, creating new loopholes for the wealthy; Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security; and, on the docket as of this week, his intent to strike away those provisions in the bankruptcy laws that protect ordinary Americans.

The bankruptcy measure would even take away those provisions of existing law which give a modicum of protection to citizens whose debt has become uncontrollable because of medical emergency or loss of job. Democrats in Congress also proposed an exception for those on active duty in the military, but the Republicans would have none of it. But the bill does reinforce and expand those loopholes which shelter corporate bankruptcies. It’s “compassionate conservatism” at its finest.

It has been observed more than once in recent months that the aim of the Bush administration and its allies in Congress is to reap the New Deal. They’re on the way, not only to that but to the creation of something else to take its place: a Raw Deal.