Month: March 2005

Categories
Music Music Features

The Flyer’s music writers tell you where you can go

There can be no denying that Mem Shannon, a Crescent City cabby turned husky-voiced singer and guitar player, has strong chops and a keen sense of sonic heritage. But listening to his unfortunately named CD I’m From Phunkville, it occurs to me that something just isn’t right.

A postulate: If you are a performing artist playing in a blues tradition, it’s not cool to sing about the life and career of any golfer, including the undeniably great Tiger Woods. That should go without saying, but Shannon’s big-band-inspired homage to the Tiger suggests that somebody should have mention this a long time ago. Maybe, just maybe, someone could get away with singing about the exploits of a hard-living, party-loving, borderline scofflaw like John Daly so long as the lyrics never mentioned little white balls or swinging clubs outside the context of gross metaphor. But even that would be pushing the limits of acceptable lyrical content. Golf may be the most popular waste of time in the history of avocation, but it’s just not rock-and-roll. It’s not barrelhouse blues, gutbucket raunch, soul, samba, honky-tonk, or any of the traditions reflected by Shannon’s musical canon. So why on earth would an artist who can summon up the spirit of Professor Longhair and Dr. John and who occasionally channels the great Barry White commit such a dire sin and sing about the swing of a mild-mannered multimillionaire golfer? God only knows. But the band is hot, the bordello-style piano is all over the place, and Shannon’s baritone is always easy on the ears. He’s at Huey’s Midtown on Sunday, March 27th.

As a borderline metal-basher (well nu-metal, anyway), I’m as surprised as anyone by the fact that I’m recommending Cephalic Carnage. After seeing the extraordinarily awful O.C. Smith-inspired posters for the show, my interest was piqued, and I had to give this creepy grindcore band one more chance. What I discovered was a band that was stoned but sophisticated. Their sound is meaty, beaty, big, and anything but bouncy, with guttural, horrorshow vocals and solos that manage to be jazzy yet satanic. If I were at all inclined toward what passes for metal these days, I’d hop on Cephalic Carnage’s bandwagon when they play Zinnie’s Full Moon Club on Thursday, March 24th.

Clem Snide started out playing a kind of chamber country: cello-enhanced hillbilly music designed for listening rather than dancing. They quickly evolved into one of the cleverest turn-of-the-century rock bands going, using a variety of offbeat instruments to augment an offbeat indie-rock sound and lyrics that are as personal as anything from Neutral Milk Hotel and as clever and hooky as Guided by Voices. Clem Snide is at the Hi-Tone on Thursday, March 24th.

Ian Moore is another alt-country cutup who has turned away from the rootsy path by mixing indie rock and folk in equal measures. Moore, whose soaring voice is a true marvel, has drawn comparisons to Nick Drake, Richard Thompson, and Jeff Buckley. He’s at the Hi-Tone on Monday, March 28th.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

As Usual

There is a law of diminishing returns with sequels, alas. The idea behind a sequel
is potentially noble: If the first film was successful, then the things that made
it successful are worth revisiting with new situations, challenges, characters, and
ideas. But since the motive is usually financial, the return of beloved or
captivating characters is more often than not a mere rehash or restirring of the original
rather than a worthy continuation. For every second
Godfather, Star Trek,
Spider-man, or Alien there is a Jaws
2, Bridget Jones 2, or Grease 2.
The Ring Two, which had the potential for an identity of its own, is unfortunately merely a reworking of the
first. There are some new twists but nothing that the original
Ring didn’t do better.

In the first Ring, Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) is an ambitious newswoman for a big Seattle paper, trying to juggle her career
with being a good single mom. When her creepy 10-year old-son Aidan (David Dorfman) is traumatized by the mysterious death of his
best friend/cousin, Rachel’s investigation takes her to a strange videotape that, after watching it, kills you within seven days. (The corpses
that are produced by the killings are among the ickiest things I’ve ever seen on film.) So, seven days pass, and along the way she
discovers that the tape is the curse of a murdered young girl named Samara and that her crazy parents had something to do with it. I will not
spoil the end for those un-Ringed readers out there, but it is worth noting that Rachel and Aidan, though they both view the tape, survive
to make the sequel. The Ring is a classy, suspenseful, and effective thriller based on the 1998
Japanese horror film Ringu. Not everything makes sense in
The Ring — Rachel’s and Aidan’s survival chief among them. But the style and real chills the film provides make
up for the narrative kinks.

In The Ring Two, Rachel has learned to be a better mom and has moved herself and son to a sleepy Oregon village where a cat in
a tree is a big news story and the nightmarish urban sprawl of the previous film is a safe many miles away. But it’s not long before
our plucky newsie catches wind of a strange teen death (just like before!), and the curse, as they say, is back on. But Samara (Kelly
Stables) has a new mission: resurrect herself in the form of Aidan while he sleeps. Rachel, ever the investigator, swiftly hunts down the clues
that will get Samara’s spirit out of the ever creepier Aidan. But the means by which to do so may kill Aidan in the process. What’s a mom
to do?

I sure did like that first Ring. It was spooky, visually arresting, had the excellent Brian Cox, and was even a little romantic.
Great attention was paid to details like color and pacing and symbolism, and the performances were better than what you find
in this genre. And, unlike most horror heroines, Watts’ Rachel was kind of hard to take — abrasive and pushy. Personality! These same
virtues (sans Cox) are all on display in The Ring
Two, but, with few exceptions, they are mere variations and not elaborations or
progressions from the first. This is still, basically, the story of a woman who races against time to save her son from a ghost in a videotape.

One noteworthy bright spot: In a twist on the first film, it turns out that long-dead Samara was adopted and that her young
birth mother had, like the adoptive one, tried to drown her. Twenty or so years later, Rachel must visit Samara’s birth mother in the nut
house, and she is played by none other than Academy Award winner Sissy Spacek! In a sequel that for the most part lacks distinction, this is
a touch of class and terror the film desperately needs: Spacek cut her teeth on
Carrie and knows how to turn the CRAZY on when asked.

The Ring Two is scary but not nearly as tautly drawn as its predecessor. And while a third
Ring has the potential to flesh out this story further, I hope the makers think of something new to do before they start filming. —
Bo List

Imaginary Heroes begins promisingly enough. We see Olympic-bound swimming prodigy Matt Travis (Kip Pardue)
swimming laps at a meet, his coach (Jeff Daniels) barking encouragement from poolside. In a voiceover narration, another young man,
who turns out to be Matt’s brother Tim (Emile Hirsch), explains, with sufficient awe, that Matt is better at swimming than anyone is at
anything else. Then Tim reveals something only he seems to know: Matt hates swimming.

The prologue ends with Matt taking his life and leaving behind a family to sort things out: His coach is also his dad,
who descends into a stupor, insisting on setting a place at the dinner table for his lost son. His sister, Penny
(ex-Dawson’s Creeker Michelle Williams), returns from college, seemingly nonchalant about the situation. The only ones really dealing with it are
Tim and the mother, Sandy (Sigourney Weaver), who seem to share a bond unique in their family.

Imaginary Heroes is the kind of modest indie (or “indie” since, let’s be honest, most of the time when people invoke
that word in relation to the movies they have no idea where the money trail actually leads) that’s supposed to be superior to
Hollywood movies because it’s more real, because it portrays the rhythms and emotions of everyday life. There are plenty of times when
that cliché holds true, and there are moments in
Imaginary Heroes when it does, especially in the interactions of Weaver and Hirsch.

But all too often Imaginary Heroes just evokes other middling indies instead, even in the casting: As the clear-eyed mother to
a teenage son, Weaver evokes her own performance in
Tadpole, while male lead Hirsch earlier starred in the similar
The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys. Williams seems to have wandered over from the set of quintessential understated indie
The Station Agent, especially since her part here is barely written.

Imaginary Heroes also suggests a sleepier (and less entertaining) version of that Hollywood apotheosis of
sick-soul-of-suburbia movies, American
Beauty, right down to the mysterious next-door neighbors and the spectacle of upstanding parents ditching their
jobs and smoking dope. Set in the suburbs of Nowhere, Inparticular, where adults drown their sorrows in booze and pills while their
kids combat their boredom with the same tools, Imaginary
Heroes pulls back the facade to reveal exactly what these kinds of
movies always reveal: that life in those upper-middle-class nuclear families is not as tidy as it appears. Stop the presses.

Weaver and Hirsch infuse their characters with a core of truth that works, but the relationship gets lost amid a crowded orbit of
less believable (and less interesting) supporting characters and an over-weighted narrative arc that meanders in unpredictable yet
familiar ways, piling on one big-subject twist after another. If suicide and the aftermath of familial grief and reckoning weren’t enough to carry
a movie so small, writer and first-time director Dan Harris adds drugs, abuse, infidelity, homosexuality, disease, long-held family
secrets, and probably a few other non-starters I’ve already forgotten about. It’s like Harris doesn’t know which road to take so he takes them
all and almost wastes a couple of strong characters (and performances) that deserve a better movie.

— Chris Herrington

A tale of censorship and sex, in that order, the documentary
Inside Deep Throat carries more than a whiff of
Hollywood self-righteousness. In chronicling government attempts to suppress the 1972 porn-feature-turned-cause-celebre, directors Fenton
Bailey and Randy Barbato (along with producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer) seem to think they’re offering up a cautionary tale.

You can tell this by the way the film ends with a comment from Memphis prosecutor Larry Parrish, who put
Deep Throat actor Harry Reems on trial when the film started making its way around the country. Parrish muses that the climate might be better now to
take on porn and obscenity cases, and then he laments that the Justice Department is too busy dealing with terrorism to do it.

This seems meant to be an aha! moment in the film, proof that the right-wing loonies are coming to take our freedoms away.
But Parrish’s terrorism comment is pretty wry, and he comes off fairly well, a decent, well-intentioned guy whether you agree with him or not.

But even if Inside Deep Throat falters in its attempt to look forward, it’s a fairly engaging look back, one that covers its
chosen ground thoroughly and with a loopy zeal that mirrors the tone of its subject — a tossed-off giggle of a porno movie that is, by some
accounts, the most profitable film ever made, even if very little of that money got into the hands of the people (stars Reems and
Linda Lovelace, writer-director Gerard Damiano) who created it.

Inside Deep Throat conveys more than a little nostalgia for the supposed golden age of porn, when the medium briefly emerged
as a form composed of stories on real film shown in real theaters to a non-raincoat crowd — first Central Park socialites, then
Hollywood stars, then Middle America. Some attention is paid to anti-porn feminists, but the film seems to side with Alan Dershowitz’s highly
arguable assertion that feminists were the most oppressive censors of all. Instead, the film’s head and heart are with Norman Mailer,
who expresses regret that, instead of emerging into a new art form, porn devolved into a mediocre commodity, a lament familiar from
fictional account Boogie Nights.

Some argue (and it’s hard to refute) that the story of a woman who can only get sexual satisfaction from performing oral sex on
a man is a male fantasy. But some pro-porn feminists interviewed here contend that
Deep Throat was significant for making a
woman’s sexual fulfillment the topic of a film for the first time. That argument might be more of a stretch, but it’s bolstered by material from
the film’s initial obscenity trial in New York, where the judge had never heard of a clitoris and the prosecutor argued, “The movie says
that it’s perfectly normal to have a clitoral orgasm and that is wrong.”

Regardless of where you come down on Deep
Throat specifically or porn generally, there’s no denying that the cheap, little
mob-funded blow-job movie is a key bit of film and cultural history — such a colossal media event that it became a subject for Johnny
Carson and Bob Hope jokes, an opening salvo in a culture war that still rages, essential background on the fall of a president, and a
pathway toward the mainstreaming of porn (and maybe even oral sex itself). It’s a terrible movie, a claim no one in this documentary refutes,
but there’s no denying it’s an

Categories
Music Music Features

Seeing the Unlight

Unless you’re plugged into Memphis’ underground metal scene, you may not know Epoch of Unlight. We’re talking about a band that has been active for 12-plus years, has released three full-length albums on a mainstay metal label, and has a highly respectable national and worldwide fan base. Don’t believe me? Google them.

But that’s Memphis. For all of our rich musical history, the city’s independent scene is not exactly nurturing to music styles that don’t fit neatly into garage rock, blues, alt-country, or indie-rock genres. Insularity rules, and members of one scene, whether it’s musicians or fans, generally do not check out local bands with styles that deviate from their comfort level.

“Here, there’s a weird elitism,” says Epoch drummer, Tino LiSicco, who holds both a master’s degree and Ph.D. in biomedical engineering. LiSicco is the band’s principal lyricist, songwriter, and one of its founding members. “Then this past weekend, we go to Fayetteville and draw anywhere from 150 to 200,” he says. “We sell merchandise; we have people that come up and talk to us after the show.”

Epoch of Unlight excel at the genre known as melodic black/death metal. While that description may sound like an oxymoron, it’s not. Death metal, with its guttural vocals and slow, one-dimensional sound, had largely run its course by the early 1990s. Scandinavian black metal emerged around this time, fueled by blindingly fast tempos, evil imagery, and the participants’ criminal activities, including church burning and murder. (These events are thoroughly covered in Michael Moynihan’s book, Lords of Chaos, now a cult classic.)

Then out of Sweden came a sound that combined classic ’70s Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, ’80s thrash metal, and the extreme influences of death and black metal. The style retained black metal’s intensity but also put a strong focus on riffing and song structure that was actually catchy.

Over the past decade, Epoch of Unlight have furthered the advancements made by the melodic Swedes and, in 1998, began a fortuitous relationship with Denver’s The End Records, a mover in metal underground.

The band’s lineup has been through innumerable changes. For the brand-new The Continuum Hypothesis, the band is BJ Cook (vocals, guitar), Joe Totty (bass and the other remaining founding member besides LiSicco), Josh Braddock (guitars), and LiSicco.

“The joke is that we’re the Menudo of death metal, but you do what you can to keep it going,” LiSicco says.

Early incarnations of Epoch were straight death metal. “The early lineups had these egos,” LiSicco says. “Everything had to be intense all of the time. But once we lost those egos, I pushed forward with borrowing from some different styles.”

The Continuum Hypothesis, like its 2002 predecessor, 2002’s Caught in the Unlight, boasts melodic and icy sheets of riffs, vocals that are raspy, and drumming that can only be described by equation instead of words.

Unlike many of their peers, Epoch of Unlight avoid anti-Christian or overtly political lyrics. “It’s basically science-fiction short stories, the type of thing that I enjoy reading,” says LiSicco. “My favorite author is Brian Lumley, a British science-fiction horror writer. He did a series of vampire/horror/murder-mystery books that had everything, an amalgam of every genre imaginable, and I just loved them. Every album has followed at least some of his themes, and our first album title [1998’s What Will Be Has Been] is a common phrase in the books. I wrote him for permission to use it.”

The music media have taken great liberty with the term “metal,” applying it indiscriminately to mainstream acts (beware nu-metal), loud emo bands, and an assortment of hardcore knuckleheads who can play a down-tuned riff. Still, even when a band is blue-blooded metal, there’s still some lack of respect.

“You meet interested people in town,” says LiSicco. “But it’s weird because they sort of pull you to the side secretly. We practiced in the same building as Saliva, and the drummer asked me how to do a blastbeat, and I was thinking, What are you going to need that for?

“One of the hardest things is that people make fun of you for being serious about your music. It’s a no-win situation. We’re not overly serious about it, but the fact that we treat it with some sort of professionalism gets made fun of.”

Epoch of Unlight have toured the country with Norway’s legendary Enslaved and highly successful Dimmu Borgir, plus Switzerland’s critically lauded Samael. After headlining a South By Southwest showcase for their record label, they will return to Memphis for a CD-release show at the Hi-Tone Saturday night, a bill that also will feature Incineration and crossover thrash up-and-comers Evil Army. n

Epoch of Unlight CD-release party for The Continuum Hypothesis at the Hi-Tone Saturday, March 26th

Categories
News The Fly-By

Touched by an Angel

Saul Bozoff doesn’t know what he’s getting into at first, and neither will readers of The Angel of Forgetfulness (Viking), native Memphian Steve Stern’s first work of fiction in six years and his most complex, ambitious book to date.

The novel opens in 1969. Saul, from Memphis, is a lonely freshman at New York University, and his only relative in the city is his aged “Aunt” Keni. Keni is a shut-in living on the dilapidated Lower East Side, and she’s been entrusted with an unfinished manuscript written by her onetime lover, Nathan. But Keni dies. Saul has the manuscript. And in no time the year is 1910. Nathan is a lowly proofreader for the Jewish Daily Forward, and he’s smitten with a youthful Keni. Nathan’s also a storyteller, and the story he tells to seduce an unwilling Keni concerns an earthbound angel named Mocky and his half-mortal son named Nachman. They also live on the Lower East Side, but it’s the turn of the century and they’re in the company of a band of Yiddish-speaking cutthroats and thieves. A chapter later, though, and we’re in Memphis — Midtown, to be exact. It’s 1970. Saul has dropped out of college, and after a short stay in a mental institution, he falls in with a bunch of unwashed dopeheads. Billy Boots is head of the house — on Idlewild, to be exact — until that house goes up in smoke and Billy directs the hippie household to the Arkansas Ozarks, where they start a farm and where … where …

Forget it. Even a thumbnail description of the twisting, time-traveling, high-comedy narratives that make up The Angel of Forgetfulness won’t fit this space. So let Steve Stern do the talking, as he did in a recent phone interview from his office at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he teaches creative writing.

The Flyer: I’m interrupting you at work.

Steve Stern: Yes you are. I thank you. Keep talking.

Speaking of work, you once taught at the University of Memphis.

That was a few years ago. There was a creative-writing chair in the English department. I asked for a settee. They offered me a footstool. So we compromised.

This latest novel has in it the most, if not the first, autobiographical material you’ve written. Care to comment?

Years ago, I wrote a story about an angel named Mocky and his son. But it never touched the ground. I mean, it took place in such a fabulist dimension. I stuck the story in a drawer, where it will remain in perpetuity. Then Mocky sort of gave “birth” to Nathan, who writes about Mocky and his son in The Angel of Forgetfulness. But it seemed to me that the story needed an additional “frame”: me.

I’m not an autobiographical writer. God forbid. But I did feel a perverse impulse to stick myself in the book and try to define my own relationship to the world of this novel. I started writing a little close to home. In fact, there are friends of mine in Memphis who are implicated.

I heard as much from a woman I work with.

Don’t give her the book! Just give her my regards. And my apologies as well.

You took liberties with the scenes set in Midtown and that commune in Arkansas?

Gross liberties! My borrowing from experiences that happened over 30 years ago … It’s all filtered through a pretty distorted lens. The characters are hybrids and largely invented.

Even your character Saul, who seems to be an awful lot like you?

Oh … I don’t know. I don’t think I’m as bad as Saul. I think I’ve got a little more integrity than him. He’s a pathetic fuck. I don’t like him very much. But he learns a bit, grows a bit.

Your prose style is seamless. Have you ever felt like you were, excuse the term, “channeling” these characters?

That’s true! The angel dictated most of it! That’s my problem. I was just the receptacle.

But seriously, I’m a slow writer. For the last five years or so, the writing was pretty choppy. I was doing more traveling than I’m used to, more teaching. So the writing itself was in fits and starts. But one story sort of begat another. They fell oddly into place. There wasn’t a lot of tinkering. It was a natural process.

Jewish immigrants and Yiddish-American literature have had a profound effect on you and your work. What drew you to that literature in the first place?

I’ve been reading this stuff for years, because that immigrant chapter is my favorite chapter in American history. I love the notion of people from a thousand-year exile translating the diaspora experience to America — to a few square blocks on the Lower East Side of Manhattan — and bringing with them all the baggage of tradition, most of which was defined by oppression, persecution, and poverty. The Lower East Side was in many ways yet another ghetto, another kind of poverty and confinement. But it was also a place where creative energies were released in explosive ways. The air was palpable with those energies.

Did your parents or your teachers encourage you as a writer?

No, not at all. Not to malign my mother and father, but growing up, there were no books, no music, no art in the house. My father was a grocer. We had a few Reader’s Digest condensed books, but that was it. And East High in the ’60s … It was not a place that reinforced literary pursuits. I wanted to be an athlete! A pretty forlorn fantasy.

After college I had these wander-years. My friends and I, you know, took too many drugs, found ourselves on a dirt farm in the Arkansas Ozarks. Then I knocked around Europe some, mostly England, and ended up … Where did I end up? I didn’t end up anywhere! I came back to Memphis in my 30s. Got married. We split up in ’86. That’s when I left Memphis pretty much for good.

I went to Wisconsin to teach and then to Saratoga Springs, which has been home going on 19 years. I arrived as a visiting lecturer at Skidmore, and when that ended, I just hung around. After a couple of years, they were embarrassed to see me on the streets all the time.

Have you been at all influenced by Southern literature?

Early on, I had writer friends in Memphis who were working out of that tradition, which I wanted to lay claim to as well but always felt somewhat estranged from. And as much as I admire Faulkner and Welty and O’Connor — you know, “the gang” — it wasn’t my literature finally. I grew up, on the one hand, feeling that Memphis was home, and, on the other hand, reserving the right to feel like an outsider.

But that Lower East Side diaspora mentality … I still have a kind of “poacher’s” attitude toward Jewish tradition and culture and all this material I’m passionate about but at the same time always apologizing for exploiting. Because it’s not something I experienced first-hand. I’ve come to it through the back door, mostly through texts.

Who else is working out of this tradition today?

It’s funny. When I started writing about the Pinch, that old Jewish neighborhood in Memphis — spinning stories out of folkloric motifs and using elements borrowed from Jewish tales, the Talmud, kabbalah, and midrash — I did feel like I was alone. But there’s a generation that’s younger than me and feels comfortable with these materials, writers like Nathan Englander and Jonathan Safran Foer.

I take it you don’t much care to hear your work described as “magic realism.”

It gets slotted that way sometimes, but I’ve never been comfortable with the label. To that extent, the Old Testament is magic realism! My work is the natural marriage of ordinary experience and fable. It’s a tradition that Yiddish literature has been mining or did mine for decades … a literature born out of an oral tradition.

The “accessories” — the concrete details of that literature — are all very real, very much drawn from the grit, the ordinary life of the Pale and the shtetl but always with an affinity for the universal, which is that folkloric dimension, that fabulist dimension.

Are there major plans to publicize The Angel of Forgetfulness?

I know that there are NO major plans. My editor is doing his best to make an “event” out of the book, but it’s a catch-22: If you’re a writer with a track record like mine, publishers don’t spend a penny unless you already have the kind of attention that warrants an expense on their part. But I did talk Viking into paying for my flight to Memphis in late April for a booksigning at Burke’s. So far, that’s it.

I’ve always been better at discouraging people from reading my books than promoting them.

Do you hear from the readers you do have?

Oh, just my friends, who generally say nice things. But I don’t trust them. It would be nice to hear from readers, but, you know, my books have been sort of few and far between, and they tend to be greeted, each one, as the first. Nobody seems to remember I’ve had books before.

That explains why you don’t have a higher profile in your own hometown?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’m a despicable, black-hearted individual. I had my moment of local celebrity back in the ’80s. You leave town, and people forget.

Maybe I can help them not to forget.

Do your worst.

Categories
News The Fly-By

A Sporting Chance?

Sometimes it’s hard to tell who should be going for the ball. Like in doubles tennis or baseball, say, or even quasi-governmental organizations.

The Memphis & Shelby County Sports Authority recently turned its sports-event recruiting duties over to the Memphis Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB).

“It didn’t make a lot of sense to have taxpayers funding two organizations to do the same thing,” Sports Authority chairman Willie Gregory told the City Council’s operation and management budget committee last week.

The CVB plans to add a special sports staffer in June and has recently created the Sports Foundation, to be headed by former Redbirds president and general manager Allie Prescott. The Sports Foundation will be able to solicit funds from private companies and thus help recruit more sporting events to the city.

“You have to have money behind the efforts to go after sporting events, but the economic impact and the return to the city make it well worth the costs,” said John Oros, executive vice president and COO of the CVB.

And the group that won the bid to bring Spring Fling — Tennessee’s high school sports championship festival — to Memphis in 2003, 2004, and 2005 just simply doesn’t have the funds.

The last thing most people want to hear is that the Sports Authority, the entity that issued the bonds to build FedExForum, is broke.

To cover windstorm costs and a shortfall in revenue streams for the project, the authority made a deal last August that netted a $5 million payment from Goldman Sachs. The deal also gave $1 million over five years to the Sports Authority, mostly for operating costs.

Lisa Daniel, senior managing consultant with Public Financial Management (PFM), told committee members that the Sports Authority should have the funds to cover May’s $5.2 million debt service payment.

Revenue from the county car- rental tax, as well as revenue from sales tax on admission to NBA games, arena food and drink, and NBA-authorized franchise goods are pledged to both senior and subordinate bonds. The revenue first satisfies senior bond service; excess goes to the subordinate bonds.

As of November 1, 2004 — before a single regular-season Grizzlies game was played in the Forum — the receipt for arena-related sales tax was $5.57 million. The bond structure assumed that arena-related sales would generate $7.86 million. Luckily, the car-rental tax exceeded expectations by $2 million and covered the shortfall.

PFM projected that after the May 2005 senior debt service payment, approximately $178,000 would be left over.

I know a W’s a W, but to me, less than a quarter of a mil is a bit of a squeaker.

“We expect some [money] left over,” said Daniel. “PFM’s recommendation, since revenue has been volatile in the past three years, is to retain any surplus as a debt service cushion, so you won’t have to come back to the city and the county and ask for more money.”

One way or another, the residents of Shelby County are going to pay for the FedExForum. Let’s hope we can do it with our game-time popcorn and sodas.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Gay in Memphis

On a recent Friday night at the Memphis Gay and Lesbian Community Center (MGLCC), about 20 people are crowded into a small sitting room listening to local singer-songwriter S.J. Tucker. The atmosphere is relaxed. Rainbow-colored candles adorn the mantel just below a painting of two nude women. Some people lounge on couches; others sit at small tables. The aroma of fresh-brewed coffee hangs in the air, as people — gay and straight — walk in and out of the kitchen to refill their mugs.

But outside this small building in Cooper-Young, a battle is raging. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) Americans are facing some scary stuff. The issues of gay marriage and gay adoption are at the forefront of national and regional politics. During the presidential election, the nation was so divided on such “moral issues” as gay marriage that many voters based their decision on that issue alone. Throughout the campaign, President Bush pushed for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would ban gay marriage.

Last Thursday, the Tennessee House of Representatives voted 88 to seven to approve placing a measure on the 2006 ballot that could result in a statewide ban on gay marriage. The Senate approved the same measure 29 to three last month. If approved by voters, the resolution would also prevent the state from recognizing gay marriages or civil unions performed in other states.

Gay adoption was also the center of a statewide debate until last Wednesday, when a House committee finally defeated a bill that would have banned gay couples from adopting children. But the 11 to nine vote to defeat the bill came after it was reworded to give preference to heterosexual, married couples. Currently, only one person from a gay couple can legally adopt. The other person has no legal rights to the child.

“We’ve been fat, dumb, and happy for a while — sitting back, thinking everything was going to be okay,” says Tommy Simmons, who spearheads Initiative: Fairness, a political action group at MGLCC. “I think this has really galvanized the gay and lesbian community. We feel more threatened now than we have since the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic.”

Shelby County is home to 1,821 same-sex households, the most reported in the state, according to 2000 census data. That number doesn’t include gays who live alone or with someone not their partner.

Back in 2003, economist Richard Florida’s book, The Rise of the Creative Class, revealed that cities with the highest populations of “bohemians, immigrants, and gays and lesbians” were also the cities with the highest-paying high-tech jobs. Florida looked at 49 urban areas with populations of at least a million people. Memphis ranked 41st as welcoming to gays and lesbians. Not surprisingly, using Florida’s findings, Memphis ranked 48th as a technology center.

So what’s it like to be gay in Memphis, the buckle of the Bible Belt? Do locals agree with Florida’s theories? Are gays in the Bluff City hiding in the safety of their closets or are they out and proud, basking in the glow of a sweet Southern rainbow?

That all depends on who you talk to and in what part of the city they live.

Midtown Is Gay Memphis

“Midtown is pretty accepting, but outside the 240 loop, I don’t go,” says Don Anderson-Fisher. “I wouldn’t go out there with their mega-churches. I wouldn’t want to expose my child to that kind of hatred.” Anderson-Fisher has an adopted son.

His friend J.B., who asked that we not use his full name, is sitting on a couch with his partner, Matthew Presley. They are also the proud parents of an adopted son. Their toddler is off playing with Anderson-Fisher’s son in the colorful playroom at the Presley home. J.B. speculates on the perceived closed-mindedness in the eastern areas of the city.

“You get one man out in East Jesus and he says people should believe one way, so he convinces his congregation to follow his beliefs,” he says.

J.B. doesn’t name names, but he’s referring to any number of religious leaders at large conservative congregations in Memphis. Certainly, the statement could apply to the Rev. Adrian Rogers, the recently retired pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Cordova. Bellevue hosted a “Battle for Marriage” rally last July, where 10,000 people viewed a simulcast of James Dobson, founder of the conservative Focus on Families group, declaring gay marriage to be an attack on “religious liberty.”

Or he could be referring to the Rev. Alton Williams, apostle of World Overcomers Church in Hickory Hill. Williams’ church purchased a large ad in The Commercial Appeal in October 2003, referencing the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to repeal sodomy laws. The ad read: “Court Says Sodomy (Homosexuality) Is OK, But What Does God Say?”

Anderson-Fisher’s statement could also apply to the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) leader Bishop G.E. Patterson who, in a November 2003 article in The Commercial Appeal, was quoted as saying in reference to the Episcopal Church’s decision to ordain a gay bishop: “The Episcopal Church not only embraced and set an openly gay man at the top, they shamed and disgraced the body of Christ. It’s not right. Nobody has the right to be gay.”

Given the actions and statements of some religious leaders, it’s easy to see why gays might feel uncomfortable outside Midtown. Most of the city’s gay clubs and bars are located in Midtown, along with the city’s only gay gift shop, Inz and Outz, and the only gay-themed video rental store, Family Flavors.

And many churches in Midtown are more receptive of homosexuality. Several churches in the area welcome gays and lesbians without the “love the sinner, hate the sin” approach of more conservative churches. First Congregational Church in Cooper-Young hosted a “Freedom to Marry” celebration on Valentine’s Day weekend, supporting civil marriage for gay couples. Evergreen Presbyterian, located across from Rhodes College, hosted a four-week study program in January on the ordination of gays and lesbians in the Presbyterian church.

According to Presley, even the First Baptist Church on East Parkway was accepting of his nontraditional family.

“We haven’t caught a bit of flack in that place,” says Presley. “As a matter of fact, last year, a teacher put a card together that said, ‘To Papa and Daddy.’ That was just the sweetest thing.”

And there are other gay-friendly churches, such as Holy Trinity on Highland.

“We don’t do civil marriages at all. I won’t sign a license because not all our members are treated fairly and have the same access under the civil code,” says Holy Trinity pastor Tim Meadows. “So we do religious Christian ceremonies for gay people and straight people. One day, when everyone’s treated fairly, that may change.”

But discrimination can still be a problem anywhere in the city, even Midtown. Len Piechowski, president of MGLCC, says the center has been hit with anti-gay graffiti on more than one occasion. Local filmmaker Morgan Jon Fox, whose high school coming-out film, Blue Citrus Hearts, has received national acclaim, says he still gets hassled occasionally.

“I can walk into the corner store at Southern and Cooper and get called a ‘faggot’ by 14-year-olds. The store owner never says anything,” says Fox.

The Visibility Catch-22

Many people the Flyer interviewed said the low profile of gay residents keeps Memphis from being a more gay-friendly city. According to some gay activists, there are too many closeted couples with nice homes and lucrative jobs who fear that outing themselves will disrupt their lifestyle.

“It’s a catch-22, because research shows that the more people you know who are GLBT, the more accepting you’ll be. But when you don’t have protection, it’s a lot to ask of people to be out,” says Sharon Horne, a professor who teaches methods for counseling GLBT clients at the University of Memphis.

“The only gay people that some straight people think are out there are the ones who fit the stereotype and are flamboyant,” says MGLCC vice president Heidi Williams. “If more people would out themselves, it would become an issue that more people would have to deal with. I think some people think there are fewer gay people here than there are.”

Her friend Noel Troxell, former secretary for MGLCC, brings up another point: In Tennessee there’s no legal protection for gays when it comes to job security.

“Right now, you can be fired for being gay, so I don’t know how smart that would be for everybody [to come out] in a city like Memphis,” says Troxell. “If my boss wanted to, he could fire me today.”

That’s the concern of one city school teacher, whose name has been changed to protect her identity. “Kathy Smith” teaches for Memphis City Schools and says she fears she’d “be fired in a New York minute” if she outed herself at work. MCS has a nondiscrimination policy, but it doesn’t name sexual orientation in its protections. Smith is a mother of two, both artificially inseminated, and she makes it clear that she’s not ashamed of being gay.

“At my son’s school, everybody knows us as the family that we are. The kids don’t think anything of it. When my kid said he had two moms, half the class piped up and said they did too. But they meant because of divorce,” she says. A local coalition of gay activists hopes to convince the city of Memphis to offer some job security for homosexuals. The group has drawn up a proposed nondiscrimination clause for the city that would offer equal access in employment, housing, and public accommodations and is going through the necessary legal routes to get it passed.

Dottie Jones, of the city’s office of intergovernmental relations, says the ordinance would “safeguard the right and opportunity of all persons to be free from discrimination, including discrimination based on age, race, color, creed, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, marital status, gender, sexual orientation, and/or physical characteristics.”

The Politics of Homosexuality

According to Piechowski, Mayor Willie Herenton has been supportive of the local gay community. He attended the MGLCC’s ribbon-cutting for its Cooper-Young facility in 2003, and he attended a symposium on gay hate crimes several years back. After the event, Piechowski began talking with the mayor about the need for a nondiscrimination ordinance. He says Herenton expressed support.

“The mayor believes in civil rights for all people, and he believes discrimination in any form is wrong,” says mayoral spokesperson Gale Jones Carson. “When he was approached [about the ordinance], he supported Len on it.”

Piechowski also told the mayor that other major cities had a liaison to the gay community in city government. Herenton created the position and appointed Piechowski to it.

“The last time we talked, I wanted to brief him that we were doing some gay-rights demonstrations on the corner of McLean and Union,” says Piechowski. “He was very supportive, and he assured me that if I needed some type of protection at that location, I should not hesitate to contact him.”

But not all local politicians are as supportive of the gay community. County mayor A C Wharton hasn’t been blatantly unsupportive, but in a New York Times article about Memphis’ creative class, he was quoted by writer John Leland as saying it wasn’t government’s job to welcome gays and lesbians.

Kevin Gallagher, spokesman for Wharton, said that what the mayor meant was that he hadn’t heard a call for county support for gays and lesbians and didn’t believe it was the position of the county to set up programs for them at this time.

On a national level, Representative Harold Ford Jr. hasn’t been a beacon of gay support either. While he originally opposed Bush’s push for an amendment banning gay marriage, he later flip-flopped and voted for it. As a result, local gay political activist Jim Maynard organized a grassroots write-in campaign to challenge Ford in the November election. Maynard’s signs featured a rainbow flag and were mainly placed in gay businesses, bars, and clubs. He only garnered 166 votes.

“My purpose was not to win,” says Maynard. “When Harold Ford Jr. caved in on the federal marriage amendment, I thought it was important to provide an option. I didn’t want to vote for him after that.”

Maynard says he’s thinking about running for the position again in 2006, only this time with a better organized campaign.

There are currently no openly gay or lesbian politicians in Memphis, although state senator Steve Cohen (D-Memphis) is probably the strongest ally gays have in state government. Cohen and state senator John Ford (D-Memphis) were two of three senators to vote against the resolution to ban gay marriage in Tennessee. Cohen even attempted to amend the resolution to allow for civil unions and employee benefits for couples who had entered into such contracts. His amendment was voted down 25 to six.

It Starts in the Schools

Discriminatory attitudes are often formed early, as children adopt their parents’ beliefs. Those attitudes are then carried into the schools. Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools do not include sexual orientation in their nondiscrimination policies. Several gay and lesbian students told the Flyer that their teachers don’t do enough to stop harassment.

Trevor Rush was pulled out of Craigmont Junior High School at age 13 by his legal guardian grandparents after he was beaten by a group of boys because he was gay. A tendon in his leg snapped during the assault. The perpetrators received a three-day suspension, but Rush, now 18, says the beating was an extreme example of the harassment he faced daily.

“People would take stuff from me in the lunchroom and in the hall, and they’d throw it in my face. The teachers literally ignored it,” says Rush. “One told me it was my own damn fault.”

Rush and a few friends tried to put together a school-wide gay/straight alliance, but he says administrators wouldn’t allow it. Vince McCaskill in MCS public affairs says there are no school-sponsored gay/straight alliances in city schools, although he says there may be some student-led groups.

At a recent Memphis Area Gay and Lesbian Youth (MAGY) meeting, an 18-year-old teen who requested anonymity identifies himself as bisexual. He says he occasionally dresses in drag when not in school, and talked about problems he’s seen with administrators at Bartlett High School. He says a couple of his lesbian friends were holding hands outside the school one day when the assistant principal ordered them to her office. School policy prohibits public displays of affection regardless of sexual orientation, but Cox says the administrator told the girls their act was “disgusting.”

Some schools have better reputations. When an 18-year-old lesbian came out at White Station High, she says some kids were “iffy about it,” but she only encountered one student who has said anything hurtful. In fact, the White Station drama department is putting on The Laramie Project, a play that chronicles the 1998 murder of gay Wyoming college student Matthew Shepard. It runs from April 6th to 8th, and the school is donating all the funds from the April 8th performance to MAGY.

MAGY, a social support group for GLBT adolescents, meets every Friday at a Midtown location its adult moderators have asked the Flyer not to reveal. They’ve also asked us not to reveal the names of the youths we interviewed. The moderators say that although the kids may be out, they’re still living with their parents, and they do not want to create any problems for their families. MAGY meetings, which include occasional guest speakers and discussion groups, attract around 30 participants a week.

Support From Within

Outside of Midtown, Memphis may not have much to offer gays and lesbians, but the local gay community has formed an infrastructure that offers support, information, and recreation.

The MGLCC has technically been in existence for 16 years, but up until 2003, it had no permanent building. A few Madison Avenue storefronts were utilized over the years, but the group never really took off until its board of directors secured the converted house on Cooper. The center hosts a number of groups, including the Stonewall Democrats, Mid-South Gay and Lesbian Republicans (formerly the Log Cabin Republicans), Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, and Alcoholics Anonymous.

The center also houses Lavender University — gay-themed public-education classes — for several months a year. During “Sunday Afternoon at the Gaiety,” the center features gay and lesbian-themed films, and Friday nights are coffeehouse nights, with occasional free live music.

Memphis is home to two free gay-themed periodicals –-The Triangle Journal, a monthly GLBT newspaper, and Family and Friends, a monthly magazine. In recent years, both have expanded distribution to include more mainstream locations.

The Triangle Journal includes both regional and national gay news, as well as a what-to-do, where-to-go guide of gay-friendly venues and events in Memphis. It has a circulation of 4,000 copies per month.

Family and Friends, with a circulation of 5,000 copies a month, also boasts regional and national news and coverage of local events. A popular section in the back of the magazine functions as the R.S.V.P. of the local gay community, with several pages of photos of people at bars, clubs, and events. Publishers Anita Moyt and Patty Pair say they pride themselves on offering grittier, harder news than their competitor.

“Some people in the community have some issues with us because we’re not a propaganda magazine,” says Pair. “If somebody in the community screws up, we’ll run a story. As journalists, we have a duty to report.”

Eight bars are listed in Midtown in Family and Friends‘ “Rainbow Directory,” a guide to gay resources. One, the Paragon Lounge, is at an East Memphis location on Walnut Grove; another, Allusions, boasts a North Memphis address. Backstreet, the city’s largest gay nightclub, draws hundreds of 20-to-30-somethings each weekend.

Several people interviewed say the bar scene is the most progressive aspect of gay Memphis. Moyt says many straight people hang out at Backstreet because “the music’s better than in straight clubs.” It’s not uncommon to see about half as many straight couples as gay couples there. But many in the gay community wish that attitude of acceptance wasn’t limited to a trendy bar scene.

“The gay community here is almost in a ghetto of gay bars and gay churches. I’m more interested in politics and civil rights,” says Maynard, who says Memphis lacks gay activism. “It just seems like most people in the community are more interested in socializing in the bars and clubs.”

In the future, the MGLCC hopes to offer much more to the GLBT community. The volunteer board of directors, which currently boasts eight members, drafted a 20-year mission statement, called “MGLCC 2023.” It envisions a number of facilities along Cooper offering specialized support, such as a counseling center, elder-care for gay senior citizens, legal and medical services, and a youth home.

“Youth services would provide counseling and housing services for children who have been put out of their homes by homophobic parents,” says Piechowski. “Every once in a while, a kid will come to our door who has had to turn to the streets and turn tricks just to survive. There’s no service in the Mid-South that can handle displaced or rejected gay youth.”

Meanwhile, the gay community will likely continue to grow and become more visible. Many say they’ve already seen more cohesion in the community since the recent gay marriage and gay adoption issues have gained the spotlight.

“Memphis has come a long way in the six years I’ve been open,” says Ray Casteel, owner of Inz and Outz. “I have a lot of straight people that come in and buy cards and gifts.” Horne says things can only improve as more people come out. She likens the gay rights fight to the civil rights battles of the past.

“There are plenty of countries that have had legalized gay marriage for years,” says Horne. “I think 50 years from now, we’ll look back on this time in shock.”

Categories
News News Feature

Nail “The Hammer”

The Lone Star State has had some doozies in the past, but Representative Tom DeLay is writing a new chapter on dirty.

The John Wesley Hardin Died for You Society has a theme song that goes: “He wasn’t really bad. He was just a victim of his times.” I sometimes find this useful in trying to explain Texas political ethics to outsiders.

Some civilians believe the definition of an honest Texas pol is one who stays bought. But among pols of the old school, the saying was, “If you can’t take their money, drink their whiskey, love their women, and vote against ’em anyway, you don’t belong in the legislature.” Many of our pols have the ethical sensitivity of a walnut. All this has led many to conclude erroneously that Tom DeLay, an alumnus of the Texas legislature, is somehow our fault.

I grant you a certain resemblance to some of our more notorious standards: “Everybody does it” and “They did it first” are actually considered excuses here. But I categorically reject cultural responsibility for DeLay. Real Texas politicians are neither hypocritical nor sanctimonious. A pol does what he must — fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly — but no pol of the Old School, when DeLay served in the state legislature, would add self-righteousness to shady dealing.

This was before the time when religion was regularly dragged into politics. The idea that you were immune from ethical lapses because you had found Jesus did not fly here. Sanctimony stinks in the nostrils of the Lord.

Doing favors for big campaign donors may indeed be an “everybody does it,” but when those favors take the form of laws that directly hurt your people, you’re supposed to draw the line. Over-the-line is where Texas pols would put using a children’s charity as a cover for collecting soft money from special interest groups and then spending it on dinners, a golf tournament, a rock concert, Broadway tickets, and so forth. Because the money was supposedly for a charity, Celebrations for Children Inc., special interests who wanted favors from DeLay were able to give him money without revealing themselves as campaign donors. Cute trick, Tom, but a really cruddy thing to do.

In another example of ethical rot, DeLay took a $100,000 check from the Corrections Corporation of America, a company that runs private prisons in Texas and has a 20-year history that includes mismanagement and abuse. CCA wants the Texas legislature — over which DeLay exercises considerable sway because he’s a money conduit — to privatize the prisons. And that check? Made out to DeLay’s children’s charity, the DeLay Foundation for Kids. Barf.

Another quality that makes DeLay an un-Texas pol is that he’s mean. By and large, Texas pols are an agreeable set of less-than-perfect humans and quite often well-intentioned. As Carl Parker of Port Arthur used to observe, if you took all the fools out of the legislature, it would not be a representative body any longer. The old sense of collegiality was strong, and vindictive behavior — punishing pols for partisan reasons — was simply not done. But those are DeLay’s specialties, his trademarks. “The Hammer” is not only genuinely feared in Washington, he is, I’m sorry to say, hated.

Some of the ethics charges against DeLay are just plain old-fashioned grubby — letting a lobbyist pay for a fancy hotel in London and a golf trip to St. Andrews (DeLay claims he didn’t know it was lobby money, even though he was accompanied by the lobbyist). What sets DeLay apart is his response when his shoddy behavior is exposed.

He has been admonished three times by the House Ethics Committee. So did he clean up his act? Nope. He went after the chairman of the ethics committee, threw him out, got the rules changed, and then stacked the committee with his close allies. “The ethics process in the House of Representatives is in total shambles,” said Fred Wertheimer, a longtime D.C. crusader on ethical issues.

I haven’t even mentioned DeLay’s apparent violation of Texas campaign finance law — quite a feat, since we only have one. Or the whole nasty and absurd redistricting mess, or the dubious donations to his legal defense fund, or the Indian casino gambling saga, or, or, or …

The Houston Chronicle, DeLay’s home paper, has been vigilant about tracking his lapses. The paper recently summed up his M.O.: “When in danger of losing, simply rewrite the rules in the middle of the game to make it impossible for the other side to win.”

This guy smells like a slop jar. Get him out of there.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning/Digital Ash in a Digital Urn – Bright Eyes (Saddle Creek)

Conor Oberst’s decampment from Omaha to New York City placed him in the midst of a bustling scene filled with likeminded people — young, liberal, and feeling politically disenfranchised. Although he’s been dating Winona and singing about parties at actors’ lofts, the move hasn’t gone to his head: He’s still a Midwestern manchild, only now he’s lost in the big city instead of the Nebraska plains. His world hasn’t shifted eastward as much as it has expanded, so much so that it took not one, but two Bright Eyes albums to capture it.

I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning, the more familiar and popular of the two, isn’t too far removed from Oberst’s previous albums, although it adopts a jangly, C&W-informed sound reminiscent spiritually, if not sonically, of 1960s folk rock. The emphasis on politics is altogether appropriate, especially filtered through Oberst’s first-person perspective.

Because he cannot write from any other point of view than his own, every event in Oberst’s life becomes an opportunity for self-scrutiny. “Lua” chronicles a drunken postparty hook-up through its small moments and next-morning regrets, and on “Train Under Water,” he frets about getting lost in Brooklyn. And yet, for all its introspection, Wide Awake is perhaps Oberst’s most extroverted album, evoking a larger world full of pain and confusion greater than his own.

Digital Ash in a Digital Urn sounds atrocious by comparison. It’s a Postal Service album gone horribly awry, pairing Oberst’s distinctive vocals with laptop-generated beats by longtime Bright Eyes collaborator Mike Mogis (under the name Digital Audio Engine) and Post-man Jimmy Tamborello. The darkly claustrophobic production and antiseptic beats of songs such as “Take It Easy (Love Nothing)” and “Light Pollution” change the natural cadence of Oberst’s phrasing, forcing him to draw out some lines while nervously condensing others. As a result, he sounds slightly drunken and careless, not comfortable or confident. A natural bandleader, Oberst is used to controlling the music, but on Digital Ash, the choppy rhythms control him.

Furthermore, this awkward new sound obscures his vision of a world beyond himself. Every song on Digital Ash sounds hopelessly self-absorbed. On “Hit the Switch,” he confesses, “I’m completely alone/At a table of friends/I feel nothing for them/I feel nothing!” But Oberst in fact does feel something, as Wide Awake ably proves. Perhaps it’s time to try a new city.

Grades: Wide Awake: B+;Digital Ash: C-

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Malpractice

Senator Bill Frist last week watched a videotape of Terri Schiavo made by her parents in
2001. He did this in his capacity as Senate
majority leader and as a physician. In both roles, he performed
miserably. As a senator, he showed himself to be an
unscrupulous opportunist. As a physician, he was guilty of
practicing medicine without a brain.

After viewing the tape, Frist felt confident to
question the several courts and many doctors who —
apparently handicapped by first-hand examinations — had
erroneously concluded that Schiavo was in a “persistent vegetative state.”

“I question it based on a review of the video
footage,” he told the Senate. “She certainly seems to respond to
visual stimuli.” Doubtful. What’s more certain is that
Frist and his colleagues were responding to political stimuli.

The unreasonableness of the Republican position —
President Bush hurrying back to Washington to sign the bill
as soon as it was passed — flummoxed speaker after speaker.
Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader,
proved you don’t need a medical degree to make foolish
statements about Schiavo. “It won’t take a miracle to help Terri
Schiavo,” he said, neglecting to cite his source. “It will only take
the medical care and therapy that all patients deserve.”

Someone — no one knows who — committed candor
and truth in Washington (a federal offense?) by circulating a
memo to Republicans alerting them to the obvious: Schiavo was
“a great political issue.” Frist, who is almost certainly
running for president next time out, took umbrage at that: “I
condemn the content of the memo,” he umbraged, “and
reaffirm that the interest in this case by myself (and others) is to
assure that Mrs. Schiavo has another chance at life.”

Bravo! But why not insist that whatever state she’s
in, she keeps getting a chance at life — forever? After all,
a miracle could happen (DeLay) and she recognizes
visual stimuli (Frist) and “she can recover substantially if she
gets the proper rehabilitation” (Frist again, this time citing
another doctor). Almost no one here is a hands-on
doctor, but they don’t hesitate to play one on TV.

Watching the House debate Sunday night, I
wondered why the Democrats — some of them, anyway — even
bothered debating the bill. Representative Barney Frank
(D-Mass.) was eloquent and persuasive, but the GOP had
the votes. Congress was intent on intruding into a family
matter in which the courts had ruled repeatedly in favor of
the husband. The parents felt otherwise, granted, but they
had had their day in court.

Those courts, though, did not rule as Congress
would have liked, and so by pretty close to fiat — no hearings,
no witnesses, and absolutely no thought — the matter
was moved to the federal courts where, probably, the
outcome will be what it was at the state level. A change in
jurisdiction is not going to change Schiavo’s condition.

Schiavo’s husband said she would not want to live the
way she does now — and that she even said so. But she was only
26 when tragedy struck, probably too young to give
serious thought to these matters. Besides, what she once wanted
is not the point. That person is gone — or so say the experts
and so say the courts who have heard from the experts.

What remains is a legal case that no longer is
about Schiavo. Instead, it’s about the politics of abortion —
right to life — and political opportunism. Terri Schiavo lives
so that others, notably Frist, can run for higher office. I
know that by watching the tape.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post
Writers Group.

Categories
Food & Drink Food Reviews

Down From the Mountain

In the 1990s I worked as a waiter, bartender, cook, and occasional dishwasher at La Montagne, a “healthy” vegetarian-friendly eatery on Park, just a block east of Highland. The area was, as it is now, blighted with strip malls, but “The Mountain,” as employees called it with equal parts affection and animosity, was a cozy cottage tangled in grape vines and rimmed with an elegant garden. It was hidden in plain view, out of place, and inviting. Prices were competitive, which made it hard for employees to make much of a living from the bistro-sized, veggie-loving clientele. But for this U of M grad student who only needed rent money, beer money, and all the free beans and rice he could eat, La Montagne was ideal.

In 2003, the famously inconsistent restaurant — which opened in the early 1980s as a progressive vegetarian restaurant supplied by its own garden — finally closed. It reopened, however, in June 2004 with the same name and perfunctory nods to its healthy past. But the new La Montagne is owned by a meat-loving chef who thinks portions should be generous and customers know exactly what they want.

“I decided to keep the name La Montagne for one reason. It’s been around for a long time, and people already know where La Montagne is. They don’t have to go looking for a new restaurant,” says chef/owner John Bragg. “But it’s confused a lot of people who come wandering in looking for a $4 vegetable plate.”

In the old days, La Montagne’s fare consisted of a “spinach fantasy” served over green noodles, assorted seafood, and exotically named bean-based dishes involving shaved coconut, sweet potatoes, eggplant, or an exotic cheese like feta, with the option of adding grilled tofu, chicken, or shrimp. Today, the Mediterranean-inspired menu contains items such as a prime rib chop with red onion confit and mushroom Dijon sauce; beef tenderloin with a truffle-port reduction; and seared tuna with pancetta and lentils — a far cry from the days of the four-veggie special.

“Things that were considered fine dining 20 years ago are commonplace now. I think everybody knows what goat cheese is. You can get a chipotle sauce at McDonald’s,” Bragg says. “I’m [not the kind of chef] who’s going to make some wasabi-crusted whatever. In French cooking you learn that if you eat a potato, you should taste the potato. The first taste going in and the last taste shouldn’t be ‘whatever.’ It should be potato.”

Before reopening La Montagne, Bragg worked for top-notch Memphis chefs such as Karen Carrier of Automatic Slim’s and Cielo, Erling Jensen, and Aubergine’s Gene Bjorklund.

“From Erling I learned that the most important thing you can do is to give the people what they want,” Bragg says. “You can get food service in a hotel, a hospital, or a prison. Dining is about accommodating. It’s about not saying ‘no’ to your customers. It’s about entertainment.”

One thing that La Montagne has kept from the old days is its cozy environment. The rooms are small, simple. During the winter months diners can eat next to a roaring fireplace near the bar. The color scheme has changed, however, from battleship gray and dingy greens to bright ochers that lighten the dimly lit café and contrast nicely with the dark hardwood floors. Murals by David Mah have replaced the giant, crusty map that once hung in the restaurant’s back room, and paintings and photographs by Memphis artists are hung on the restaurant’s walls.

Appetizers range from grilled scallops with prosciutto and asparagus to citrus-marinated olives with hummus. Desserts include fresh sorbets, fruit tarts, soufflés, and a chocolate, coffee rum, and mousse cake called Il Diplomatico. Prices for entrées range from $12 to $36, with salads and appetizers starting at $7. La Montagne provides a full bar, a variety of imported beers, and a solid, moderately priced wine selection. La Montagne is currently open for dinner and for brunch on Sundays but will open for lunch beginning in April.

“What I want is for people to enjoy their food,” Bragg says. “I want them to walk away feeling like they’ve gotten more than they expected.”

For all of its faults, there was something charming about the old La Montagne. It blended bistro ambience with the Memphis-style funk of no-frills “meat and three.” It was suspended in a time when sundried tomatoes sounded like a farming error, pesto was only a myth, and homemade pizza seemed exotic. But it’s hard to look at the new menu and the invigorated interiors and not agree that change can be a very good thing indeed.

La Montagne, 3550 Park (320-9090)