Month: April 2005

Categories
Music Music Features

Royal Treatment

It took more than 25 years — from 1976’s Have a Good Time to 2003’s I Can’t Stop — for old partners Al Green and Willie Mitchell to collaborate on a secular soul record. And now it’s taken only two years for them to follow it up.

The new Everything’s OK (Blue Note; Grade: A-), recorded last summer at Mitchell’s Royal Studios with mostly the same cast of Hi-connected characters as I Can’t Stop (guitarist/collaborator Teenie Hodges a notable absence), doesn’t have quite the vintage Hi Records quality as the initial step in Green and Mitchell’s reconstituted partnership.

If I Can’t Stop sounded like a perfect recreation of one of Green and Mitchell’s second-tier ’70s albums, Everything’s OK is slightly less impressive but slightly more distinctive. There are more blues here, from the chitlin-circuit-ready “Perfect to Me” to the funky “I Can Make Music” (featuring Bobby Rush on harmonica).

The vocals on Everything’s OK don’t have the ease or subtlety of Green’s best ’70s work, but the slight strain of the vocal performance is only a minor problem and only then in contrast to what were perhaps the greatest studio albums in soul history. The richness of his mid-range slightly diminished, Green relies more on dynamics that swing low with guttural groans or up high to the soaring improvisations no one else has ever matched. There are many moments on Everything’s OK when Green sounds like a man who has come to reclaim the falsetto shriek that inheritor (and future Blue Note label mate?) Prince took to the bank.

One difference between Everything’s OK and I Can’t Stop is that whereas the earlier record was all original compositions, here Green and Mitchell slip in a ringer that reminds — and confirms — the artist’s supernatural ability as a cover artist. The deathlessly mawkish “You Are So Beautiful” may be the last thing in the world you want to hear, but a singer of Green’s genius can change your mind in a hurry, and his slow-burn performance of the song might be the most compelling on the album. Memories of Joe Cocker fade away as Green merely uses the song as a template for his repertoire of purrs, sighs, groans, shivers, and high-register flourishes.

That pattern continues for much of the album. A lot of the best tracks here (“Be My Baby,” for instance) seem barely written as songs. They exist as vehicles for Green and Mitchell to work their aural magic.

But Mitchell’s Royal Studios isn’t just a place for revisiting the past, as another new local album recorded at the famed studio attests. Singer/songwriter/guitarist Ron Franklin has been cutting some ace records in town over the past few years with a rotating cast of collaborators he’s dubbed the Ron Franklin Entertainers. With the eponymous album from The Natural Kicks (Miz Kafrin; Grade: B+) he’s now leading a more concrete band, a three-piece where’s he’s joined by bassist Ilene Markell and Tearjerkers frontman Jack Yarber on drums.

Like so many other Memphis bands past and present, the Natural Kicks play garage-rock with blues and rockabilly roots, but Franklin lends that sound a pop-soul brightness that sets him apart. You can hear it on the compelling mix of originals and covers (where the covers sound like originals and the originals sound like covers) on The Natural Kicks: the Bo Diddley beat that helps the original “Leiden Girl” motorvate along or the way Franklin & Co. turn Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor” into a swinging sock-hop-ready jam.

Franklin’s a talented singer/guitarist, but his real gift might be as a conceptualist, and the harder-rocking, real-band setting here dampens the playfulness that made Franklin’s previous records so enjoyable. Even in more conventional form, however, he still sounds like no one else on the local scene. •

The Natural Kicks play the Young Avenue Deli Saturday, April 23rd, with Viva Voce.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Bucking the Tide

State senator Rosalind Kurita of Clarksville, as of now the only declared Democratic candidate for U.S. senator in 2006, released a statement on Friday that was highly critical of both the bankruptcy bill passed Thursday by the House of Representatives in Washington and, by implication, those members of Congress who voted for it.

One of those, of course, is her likely rival for the Democratic nomination, 9th District U.S. representative Harold Ford of Memphis. Ford, who had signed a letter asking for the bill’s consideration, joined other members of the Tennessee delegation, both Democratic and Republican, in casting a vote for the measure, which passed by a margin of 302-126. It had previously passed the Senate by a 74-25 vote on March 10th, with both Tennessee senators, Bill Frist and Lamar Alexander, voting for it. President Bush is expected to sign the measure into law in short order.

The bill had been stoutly opposed by the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives. “This bill seeks to squeeze even more money for credit-card companies from the most hard-pressed Americans” and turn bankrupt consumers into “modern-day indentured servants,” said House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California on Thursday.

In a statement condemning the bill as having been based on a false sense of “crisis,” Kurita termed it “an early Christmas gift to big credit card companies and a lump of coal to a number of Americans who are working hard and struggle to get by.” She added pointedly, “[W]e need a few more members of the U.S. Senate experienced at caring for patients and not caring about the special interests.”

The bill essentially closes certain long-established loopholes on individual bankruptcies and keeps filers who make more than a poverty-level income from escaping their indebtedness by requiring them to employ Chapter 13 remedies and to arrange for installment payments with creditors.

Critics of the bill have said that it would seriously jeopardize middle-income households, especially those subjected to economic stress as a result of unforeseen medical costs and unemployment. A study conducted at Harvard University of 1,771 personal bankruptcy filers in five federal courts pinpointed heavy medical costs as the factor that forced about half of the filings.

That study was introduced into congressional testimony by opponents of the bill, as was a letter from 104 bankruptcy law professors who said that hardship would be greatest in heartland states where bankruptcy filing rates are highest. The academics listed Tennessee prominently among the states cited.

Kurita’s complete statement is as follows: “More leaders in Congress should have worked to improve this bankruptcy bill or stop this bill. It is an early Christmas gift to big credit card companies and a lump of coal to a number of Americans who are working hard and struggle to get by.

“While I have always been an advocate of personal responsibility and condemn anyone who manipulates the system, it is clear we do not have a crisis of people wrongly filing for bankruptcy.

“We do have thousands of families wiped out due to the skyrocketing cost of health care and we have a culture where credit card companies nearly entrap people into signing up for more cards and incurring more debt so they can profit from high interest payments. A number of reports have shown that a huge percentage of people who file for bankruptcy do so because of health care expenses that insurance companies have refused to pay.

“We have seen no proposals to reform health care, but we have seen this proposal to hurt families wiped out by the high cost of health care.

“This is why as a registered nurse I believe we need a few more members of the U.S. Senate experienced at caring for patients and not caring about the special interests.”

• Kurita will bring her Senate campaign to Memphis next week, appearing at a luncheon meeting of the Memphis Women’s Foundation for a Greater Memphis at The Peabody on Thursday.

It is uncertain whether she will also be involved in a local Democratic Party fund-raiser, to be held Thursday evening, from 5 to 8 p.m. at party headquarters at 2400 Poplar Avenue.

Invitations for the affair, e-mailed and otherwise, were sent out under the auspices of the party and the city’s local Air America outlet, WWTQ, AM-680, a financial sponsor. The invitations mention prominently Representative Ford and Shelby County mayor A C Wharton, who are expected to be on hand.

Other Democratic elected officials are invited to share in the “hors d’oeuvres, beverages, and great conversation” at costs ranging from $25 (“members”) to $50 (“patrons”).

• State senator Steve Cohen, who is never shy about taking on potentially contentious issues nor concerned, evidently, about whom he might offend in the process (including Governor Phil Bredesen, a frequent nemesis), has two new causes on the front burner — both involving local political figures.

One of them concerns the membership of the five-member Shelby County Election Commission — currently up for reappointment. At issue, at least for Cohen, is whether Maura Black Sullivan, one of the commission’s three Democratic members, is eligible to serve.

Sullivan is director of planning for the Shelby County school system, and there, says Cohen, is the rub. The senator says that state law clearly prohibits elected officials or governmental employees from serving on the election commission and maintains that state Election Commission director Brook Thompson has backed him up in that contention.

The issue came up last week during a meeting of the Shelby County legislative delegation’s Democrats to vote on members of the county election commission. The delegation’s Republicans had already renominated members Nancye Hines and Richard Holden. When the Democrats convened, several names were put in nomination, including those of Sandra Richards and Taurus Bailey, both of whom are employed by Shelby County.

It was at that point that state representative Ulysses Jones, a friend of Richards, made a disclosure to his fellow legislators about the requirements of the up-until-then obscure provisions of the statute and concluded regretfully that Richard was ineligible to serve. Further debate among the delegation suggested that Bailey was also governed by the prohibition.

After perusing a copy of the statute, Cohen then insisted that Sullivan should have been ruled ineligible for her first term, to which she was elected in 2003, and was in any case precluded from serving a second two-year term. Sullivan and various defenders emphatically disagreed, citing ambiguously worded exceptions regarding teachers and other school-system officials. The outcome of the voting put her and the commission’s other Democratic holdovers, Chairman O.C. Pleasant and Greg Duckett, ahead of the other contenders.

Cohen is pressing the case and has asked for a formal opinion from the state attorney general’s office — one that presumably will come before next month’s meeting of the state Election Commission, which normally ratifies the selections of the two party caucuses.

On another front, Cohen is pushing a proposal to redefine state law so as to extend pensions and other member benefits only to those legislators who have been elected to office. Cohen says his measure to that effect has won the approval of the Senate’s State and Local Government committee, which he chairs, but has been bottled up in the House State and Local Government committee, chaired by Jones.

Interim state senator Sidney Chism, who earlier this year was chosen by the Shelby County Commission to succeed former Senator Roscoe Dixon, now an aide to Wharton, says the measure is aimed at him. “I don’t know why he’s singled me out. I haven’t actively sought a pension or any benefits from being a legislator. I’m just here to serve,” says Chism.

Cohen, who, along with several other legislators, had opposed Chism’s appointment, insists that his bill merely concerns issues of equity, as does his position regarding the reappointment of Sullivan, whose husband Jeff Sullivan unsuccessfully opposed state representative Beverly Marrero in a special House election for District 89 last year.

In that race, Cohen maintained that Jeff Sullivan did not live in the district and sought at one point to have felony charges brought against the candidate. •

Homage in Bartlett

The overflow turnout at last Sunday’s funeral services at Memphis Funeral Home for Velda “Louise” Bodiford Byrd, widow of Madison Arthur Byrd, was testament not only to the graces of the late Mrs. Byrd, who died last week at the age of 89, but a tribute as well to the extended Byrd family — one with profound influence in Shelby County through the family-owned Bank of Bartlett and through the political and community activities of various family members.

Two of the several successful children of Louise and Madison Byrd, Harold Byrd and Dan Byrd, served as members of the state House of Representatives, representing Bartlett as Democrats — no small accomplishment, given what in recent years has been the overwhelming domination of that sprawling community by the Republican Party. Harold Byrd also launched campaigns for Congress and for Shelby County mayor. Brother Bob Byrd served as a member of the state Board of Education, and various other family members have pulled their oar in a variety of causes, notably in advancement of the University of Memphis.

Today’s Bartlett, a bustling suburb, would be unimaginable without the efforts of the Byrds and the family bank. And it remains to be seen whether the political community has seen the last run by a family member. — J.B.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Editorial

It was 60 years ago this month that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States, died while on a badly needed vacation in Warm Springs, Georgia. It was somewhat of a second home for the genial aristocrat from Hyde Park, New York, and a haven for himself and other victims of the once virulent scourge of poliomyelitis.

Though maimed in body, FDR was a paragon of mind and spirit and, most importantly, of conscience. At the time of his death of a cerebral hemorrhage in that spring of 1945, Roosevelt had overseen the recovery of his country from the bleakness of the Great Depression and was on his way to leading it to victory over fascism in World War II. On the eve of American involvement in that crusade, Roosevelt had set as our nation’s war aim the securing of what he called the Four Freedoms: freedom of speech and expression; freedom of all persons to worship God in their own way; freedom from want; freedom from fear.

FDR elaborated on those ideas a few scant months before his death, when he delivered his fourth inaugural address, in which he enumerated the following rights:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.

The right of every family to a decent home.

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to enjoy good health.

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.

The right to a good education.

It is the tragedy of our time that almost all these rights, like the previously espoused Four Freedoms, have either been abrogated or are under siege in the current governmental clime in which the few are rewarded at the expense of the many. But these rights, and the animating ideas behind them, remain the legacy of all Americans.

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News

GOVERNOR NAMES STOKES TO SUCCEED JUDGE BROWN

Jerry Stokes of Memphis, a 49-year-old attorney and former divorce referee, was appointed by Governor Phil Bredesen Monday as the successor to retired Circuit Court judge George Brown. The governor’s office released the following statement announcing the appointment:

NASHVILLE– Governor Phil Bredesen today announced that Memphis attorney Jerry Stokes will fill a vacancy in division six of the 30th Judicial District’s Circuit Court, created by the retirement of George H. Brown, Jr. The 30th Judicial District Circuit Court covers Shelby County.

“Jerry Stokes has more than 20 years experience working in private practice and is highly regarded in the Shelby County legal community,” said Bredesen. “Through his years practicing law, Jerry has proven himself committed to the improvement of the legal system in Tennessee and has worked diligently to represent those who may not otherwise have had access to the courts system in Shelby County. I have great confidence that he will serve the citizens of the 30th Judicial District with fairness and integrity.”

Stokes has been practicing law since 1981, working in private practice with Stokes, Wilson and Wright Law Firm. The firm handles mostly personal injury, debtors’ bankruptcy, criminal defense and plaintiff cases. Stokes has also worked as a part-time assistant divorce referee for Shelby County since 1998, when he was appointed by then Mayor Jim Rout. He has also served more than 100 times as special judge in the General Sessions Criminal Court of Shelby County.

“I’m overwhelmed and honored that the Governor has appointed me to this position,” said Stokes. “I certainly appreciate his confidence in me, and will do all I can to serve the citizens of the 30th Judicial District to the best of my abilities.”

Stokes, 49, holds a bachelor’s degree in radio, television and filming from the University of Memphis and earned his doctor of jurisprudence degree from Southern University, Baton Rouge. He is a member of the National Bar Association’s Ben F. Jones Chapter and the Memphis and Shelby County Bar Association. In 2003-2004, Stokes received the highest rating among divorce referees (8.9 out of 10) in a survey commissioned by the Memphis and Shelby County Bar Association. From September of 2003 to February of 2005, Stokes served on the Speedy Trial Plan Committee Task Force at the request of Judge James Todd, Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Western Division of Tennessee.

Stokes’ appointment is effective immediately, and he will stand for election to a full 8-year term in 2006.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

C’mon, Get Happy

On a recent Friday night during happy hour at Molly’s La Casita, 2006 Madison, a friendly raccoon was greeting visitors in the back parking lot. Meanwhile, a woman in a business suit was walking through the lot, headed for dinner. She elected to take the front door to avoid the animal, however genial.

The point: It takes all kinds to make up a good happy hour, and those kinds — singles, couples, groups, families, suits, slackers, and raccoons — seem to fit right in at Molly’s.

Molly’s celebrated its 30th anniversay last month. Founder Molly Gonzales opened her first casita in Memphis at 1910 Lamar and then partnered with now-owner Robert Chapman to move to the present location in 1982. Gonzales died in 1997 at age 95.

When happy hour starts at 4 p.m., there are just a handful of customers. But by 6 p.m., the place is nearly filled. At the bar there are conversations about work and conversations about travel. Two patrons are discussing a washing machine they either have or wish they did. No one, however, appears to be meeting each other for the first time.

“It sounds cheesy, but this is their Cheers, where everybody knows your name,” says bartender/manager Conan Robbins, who has worked at Molly’s for 12 years. When one regular walks in, Robbins starts pouring a strawberry margarita and then puts in a request for chicken enchiladas — the regular’s usual. As for the Cheers thing, Robbins says he knows about 100 customers by name.

And everybody knows Phil Brown. In fact, says general manager Kelly Johnson, “If he’s not here, he better tell us he’s out of town, or we worry.” Brown shows up almost every day and has been for about 15 years. “Camaraderie” is how he sums up the appeal of Molly’s happy hour.

Caribbean Queen Bee (she did not want to give her name) is dressed in bright red and is sitting at the corner of the bar. She’s another 15-year veteran of happy hour. She comes for the tamales, shrimp, and hot wings, she says, and, of course, for the company of the staff and other regulars.

At one of the tables, Reggie Whitney is sitting with three friends. He remembers when he first became a regular — yep, 15 years ago. “That’s when we came into the knowledge of Molly’s margaritas,” he says.

But it is more than margaritas and tacos at Molly’s. Staff and customers go beyond the standard business relationship. Manager Johnson says it is not unusual for the customers and staff to send each other Christmas cards and to invite each other to parties. Robbins says many meet up to go to baseball games, and he once went on a trip to Europe with some of his customers. Patron Gene Lee invited the staff to see him play guitar with his band at Printer’s Alley a couple years ago. About nine of the staff showed up.

The regulars have memories good and bad. Brown remembers the day when an intoxicated woman broke a glass and cut her hand. She refused to let anyone help her and then tried to attack the employees. She was gone before the police arrived. On Halloween night 2003, Beckii Lee, Gene’s wife, helped bartender Robbins get into his Joan Crawford/Mommie Dearest costume. “He had a cocktail in one hand and a wire hanger in the other,” she recalls.

When Gene started coming to Molly’s in the mid-’80s, he would bring a book to read during happy hour. But not anymore. “The thing turned into a party,” he says.

Others regulars say they have vivid memories too, but those stories aren’t fit to print. •

Molly’s, 2006 Madison (726-1873). Happy hour is 4 to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays. Margaritas are $4; well drinks are 75 cents off.

Categories
News News Feature

A Cornucopia of Death

Faint the last month black. It’s been an orgy of mourning, a cornucopia of death. We’ve had Terri Schiavo, Pope John Paul II, Prince Rainier, and Charles and Camilla’s wedding — which felt as grim as any funeral. All brought to us in no-longer-living color. If nothing else, the media have outed themselves as the ultimate necrophiliacs. I expect CNN and Forest Lawn to announce a sponsorship agreement any day now.

The pope’s interminable interment was the magenta-colored cherry on the death sundae. The television coverage was so over-the-top and utterly uncritical, it was as if John Paul had been, well, the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Now, I’m certainly not suggesting that the last week should have been spent trashing the late pontiff. His many achievements — taking on communism, embracing the Third World, speaking out for the poor, and standing up against war — surely deserved recognition and praise. But you’d think the wall-to-wall coverage would have included some serious discussion of the two tragic failures of his reign: his woeful mishandling of the church’s child-molestation scandal and how his archaic position on condoms contributed to the deaths of millions of people, especially in Africa.

The molestation outrage is a black mark that can’t be whitewashed.

More than 11,000 children were abused and close to $1 billion in settlement money was paid out, but the pope did not go much beyond decrying “the sins of some of our brothers.” He didn’t meet with any victims or offer solutions to dealing with the problem or address the decades-long cover-up. He even rejected a “zero tolerance” policy calling for the immediate removal of molester-priests because of concern that it was too harsh.

Too harsh?! This is a man who wouldn’t allow a priest to become a bishop unless he was unequivocally opposed to masturbation, premarital sex, and condoms. So, in his perversion pecking order, priests had to be dead-set against “self-love,” but when it came to buggering little kids, there was some wiggle room.

And let’s not forget that John Paul appointed Cardinal Bernard Law, who was one of the architects of the sex-scandal cover-up and who even faced potential criminal prosecution for his role in the concealment. But instead of making an example out of Law, the pope gave him a cushy sinecure in the Vatican. Adding insult to the grievous injury suffered by abuse victims, Law was one of the nine cardinals specially chosen to preside over the pope’s funeral masses. It is a disgrace — and an indication of how detached the Vatican became under this pope.

The other stain on the pope’s legacy is his tireless opposition to the use of condoms — even in places like Africa, where AIDS killed 2.3 million people last year and where the disease has driven life expectancy below 40 years in many countries.

But even in the face of that kind of suffering, John Paul fought against condoms. Any time a church official even suggested that people infected with HIV should use condoms, they were either removed from office or censured.

On the other hand, the pope’s passing might have saved the political skin of one of his culture-of-life cohorts, House majority leader Tom DeLay. If you have a series of looming ethics scandals about to come crashing down on your head, having the media focused 24/7 on something else is a very lucky break indeed.

The presence of DeLay at the pope’s funeral in Rome, along with President Bush, the first lady, Condoleezza Rice, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and George Bush Sr., was a stark reminder of our perverted priorities. The pope dies, and it’s Must Holy See TV; 1,547 American soldiers die in Iraq, and President Bush has yet to attend a single one of their funerals. Not a single one. •

Arianna Huffington writes for AlterNet and Ariannaonline.com.

Categories
Cover Feature News

river of dreams

On Tuesday, Mayor Willie Herenton presented his annual budget to the City Council, including a recommendation of a 54-cent property tax increase to restore some slashed services and continue the city’s $86 million contribution to schools.

The visible evidence of reduced services includes the overgrown parks, understaffed golf courses, and weedy boulevards around the city and the reduction of recycled garbage pickup to every two weeks instead of every week.

But one area of Memphis has never looked better and is seemingly immune to budget cuts: the riverfront, which has been under the jurisdiction of the Memphis Riverfront Development Corporation since 2000. From Martyr’s Park to the Bluffwalk to the Mud Island Greenbelt, parks are as neatly manicured as a country club golf course. Million-dollar homes line the South Bluffs and the main drive on Mud Island. Construction of new homes and apartments is booming. Riverside Drive has been turned into a boulevard with median strips of flowers, crosswalks, and two new stairways up the bluff.

And despite the budget shortfall that threatens schools, hospitals, and law enforcement, the flow of public money to the riverfront continues as steadily as the flow of the Mississippi River. This summer, construction will begin on Beale Street Landing, a $27.5 million boat landing on Tom Lee Park at the entrance to the harbor. A total of $17 million of that amount is coming from city of Memphis funds, the rest from state and federal governments. The main customers for the boat landing will be two tour-boat companies that bring, at most, about 20,000 out-of-towners to Memphis each year, or about the number of people downtown for a sold-out Grizzlies game. The Delta Steamship Company paddle-wheelers and the long, blue River Barge Excursion Boat now dock in the harbor on the east side of Mud Island, and passengers are transported to or walk to downtown.

On the horizon — long term or not-so-long term, depending on whom you talk to — is the granddaddy of all riverfront projects, the development of the Front Street Promenade and the construction of a land bridge to Mud Island. That project could bring the total cost of funding the RDC’s master plan to as much as $340 million over several years.

The contrast between the Memphis haves and have-nots illustrates several things about urban politics and pressure groups. The RDC, created with Herenton’s blessing during his third term as mayor, has an embarrassment of riches in staffing, funding, and business support. Its board includes former city chief administrative officers Rick Masson and Greg Duckett, Cybill Shepherd, Jerry West, Pat Kerr Tigrett, Kristi Jernigan, John Stokes, Barbara Hyde, and former Commercial Appeal editor Angus McEachran. Its president is Benny Lendermon, director of the city’s Division of Public Works for several years. His assistants include former City Engineer John Conroy.

Unlike the Memphis Park Commission, the RDC all-star team and their consultants only have to focus on the front door of Memphis. The Park Commission and Division of Public Works and their bureaucrats can’t rely on that kind of clout, but they must maintain hundreds of public facilities, streetscapes, and parks in out-of-the-way places used by Memphians who rarely visit the riverfront.

The result is a cityscape that suggests the homeowner who happily pours money into landscaping his front yard while the trash piles up in the attic and the backyard.

The riverfront improvements under the RDC and, in fairness, the Park Commission and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before it are obvious and have helped create the downtown apartment and condo boom. But agencies and projects tend to take on a life of their own. Beale Street Landing was funded years before Herenton proposed his latest property tax increase. The land bridge has been approved in concept by the City Council but not funded.

The RDC was not invented to keep the grass trimmed. It is all about big deals and grand visions. With an empty Pyramid and an underused Mud Island River Park and monorail staring them in the face, some Memphians are wondering if the RDC is gilding the lily while the garden withers.

“Why spend $360 million [sic] on a really crummy plan,” asked Lisa Snowden at a meeting of Friends For Our Riverfront Monday evening at Cafe Francisco, attended by about 30 people. Members of the group generally support less expensive options that would emphasize parks, sidewalks, and greenspace.

Other speakers aimed their fire at the Beale Street Landing and its “floating islands” to provide pedestrians access to the river.

“They’re going to start school at 7 a.m. (to save money) but we’re going to have the floating islands,” said Mimi Waite. “We don’t need the floating islands.”

John Gary, a founder of the Friends group, noted that the steamboat companies have other options besides Memphis. “We’ve got competition that we didn’t have before,” he said. “I think Tunica has some pretty good enticements to lure steamboats away from here.”

Gary said the placement of the floating islands and bridges near the mouth of the harbor is “unfortunate” and could interfere with barge traffic. The group passed out a letter from Terry Martin, terminal manager for Lafarge North America, opposing any project that would affect the entrance of the Wolf River.

Lendermon said the RDC is not gilding the lily or building something that will become obsolete or underused. Pending approval of some permits by the Corps of Engineers, the RDC hopes to have contractors begin dredging the entrance to the harbor in July in preparation for “River Outlook,” the name given to the boat landing. When it is complete, it will not only give tour boats a place to dock but will also tie the cobblestones to Tom Lee Park, provide a new site for festivals, and give pedestrians a place to walk between the man-made islands and scoop up a handful of river water.

“You still have no place for people to get to the water,” Lendermon said. “If you were going to touch the water, where would you go? You have the ability to do that here.”

The city, he noted, was going to redo the cobblestones and reshape the northern tip of Tom Lee Park at the entrance to the harbor anyway. The work actually started several years ago but was aborted because the necessary permits had not been obtained.

The RDC annual report calls River Outlook “a grand civic ending.” It notes that one heavily traveled thoroughfare to the riverfront, Poplar Avenue, dead-ends at a parking garage while another, Union Avenue, unceremoniously abutted a metal guard rail before the cobblestones project was completed.

Lendermon said riverboats that carry tourists are pressing for the project to be completed.

“The Delta Steamship Company is close to refusing to dock at Mud Island,” he said, even as a boat was unloading Monday afternoon across from his Front Street office. Delta Steamship and the River Barge Excursion Boat carry 350-450 passengers each and make 50 stops a year in Memphis, Lendermon said. Tunica, he said, has only gotten one visit from Delta Steamship since its $20 million museum and river park opened last year.

As for the land bridge, Lendermon said Memphis must cross that bridge when it comes to it, but that might not be for quite a while. The RDC and the Corps of Engineers are looking at industry relocations and navigation issues in the harbor, which is also a concern of the developers of the Uptown neighborhood who would like a water connection.

“In 15 years, as downtown starts developing to its fullest, someone’s got to sit down and make a decision,” he said.

Meanwhile, Gene Carlisle, a veteran downtowner who has seen the highs and lows of the riverfront, might change the picture if he follows through on plans to develop a condominium tower and a hotel on the corner of Beale Street and Riverside Drive, where an old building was just demolished.

Instead of being an American icon, the corner where the street that birthed the blues meets the Mississippi River has instead been the pits for 25 years, the place where busted dreams and struggling restaurants come to die. Tenants have included a shopping mall called the Emporium, Pyramid huckster Sidney Shlenker, and such forgettable restaurants as Armadillo Jack’s, Number One Beale, and Wang’s. In 2003, the big wind storm did Carlisle a favor and blew away enough of the building that he could tear the rest of it down and start over.

Carlisle, who grew up poor in Mississippi and made his fortune in Wendy’s restaurants, was inducted into the Memphis Society of Entrepreneurs last week. In the next few weeks he said he will unveil plans for a condominium tower at least 20 stories tall and, if he can find a partner, a luxury hotel and four-star restaurant in a second building. The combined investment would be over $300 million, making it the biggest downtown project since FedExForum.

Lendermon said Carlisle’s project is “something we would support.” Carlisle said it is not being driven by construction of Beale Street Landing and might even have some parking issues.

But that’s a problem for another day. The rest of Memphis should have such troubles.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Stranded in Music City

The Memphis Film Forum’s sixth annual International Film Festival, which gets underway on Thursday, April 21st, will showcase a pair of documentaries assembled by Memphis writer and filmmaker Robert Gordon. Gordon, the author of It Came from Memphis and Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters presents Shakespeare Was a Big George Jones Fan: Cowboy Jack Clement’s Home Movies. Also making its Mid-South debut: Stranded in Canton, a challenging nonnarrative collection of black-and-white video portraits shot in 1973 by William Eggleston, the Memphis artist universally acknowledged as the father of modern color photography. The former is a lighthearted feature that Gordon describes as a mix between traditional documentary and an episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Stranded in Canton, by comparison, is a brooding, sometimes violent, drug-addled exercise in excess and tedium. It’s gorgeous, dangerous, soulful, and genuinely shocking.

“I’ve been actively working on Stranded in Canton for two and a half years,” Gordon says. “I’ve been knowing the material for 20 years. I made the first cut 10 years ago, and nobody knows this material better than I do. But there are still things about it that I don’t understand, and that’s why I like it.”

Gordon suspects there will be walkouts during the Thursday-night screening. There are always walkouts whenever it’s been screened, and he’s even considered making T-shirts for those who make it through to the end: “I Survived Stranded in Canton.” But for viewers interested in Eggleston’s artistic process or the delicate seam where Memphis’ starched upper-crust and its ragged, creative underbelly merged in the dazed and confused 1970s, the Eggleston/Gordon account is as intriguing, if not quite as suspenseful, as a back-lot potboiler.

“I started to realize that this [film] was all about ways of seeing. It was an opportunity to hitch a ride on [Eggleston’s] eyeball and to see the world the way he sees it,” Gordon explains. “And now, every time I watch [Stranded in Canton], I get more out of it because it’s real vérité recording. It’s real people doing real things — things that are often fictionalized or sensationalized but that you never really get to see [on film].”

Gordon was also attracted to Eggleston’s footage because it reflected the drugged-out but creatively fertile mood of Memphis’ music scene in the early 1970s, a scene the author vividly chronicled in It Came From Memphis.

So what do you see when you take a ride on Eggleston’s eyeball? You see delirious bikers, musicians, bizarre transvestites, family squabbles, skeletons, guns, cigarettes, drinks, anger, more drinks, confusion, drinks, and a total failure of logic. You see a vintage performance by Jim Dickinson that is shot in such extreme close-up you can see the storied musician’s dental work. There’s footage of Furry Lewis playing an upscale garden party and playing for friends in his humble apartment. It all adds up to an intriguing portrait of Eggleston, the one character you never actually get to see.

“Stranded in Canton is a number of things at once, which has complicated Robert’s work considerably,” says Cotty Chubb, director of the Eggleston Artistic Trust. “It is at once a portrait of a time and place [and] of specific people acting utterly in character, revealing themselves in sometimes shocking, sometimes lovely ways, and a portrait of an artist then very much in command of his art working in an unfamiliar medium but with the same eye and hand that distinguished his still photography and brought him such deserved renown.”

When Chubb first came to Memphis in 1974, Eggleston’s garage on Central was littered with electronic equipment: cameras, recorders, and high-end Tektronix oscilloscopes. The portable video camera Eggleston used to shoot the video for Stranded in Canton was outfitted with an infrared-sensitive vidicon tube made by a company called Impossible Electronic Techniques and was attached to a fixed-focal-length Canon lens for maximum sharpness. “None of this [equipment] was off the shelf,” Chubb adds. The modified video recorder allowed Eggleston to get crisp shots even in low lighting, because it read heat as well as light. The infrared tube makes cigarettes seem to smolder and revelers to glow.

Stranded in Canton moves like a vivid dream always threatening to go nightmarish. This is one of the film’s greatest strengths and weaknesses. Anyone who’s ever had a friend try to explain a deeply personal and detailed hallucination knows that nothing on earth can be so excruciatingly pointless. But in this instance, the dreamer happens to be one of the most important American artists of the 20th century and watching what his eye glances at and what it lingers over is an education in spontaneous composition.

Mixing animation with live action, Shakespeare Was a Big George Jones Fan tells the story of the hyperactive English-lit major from Memphis who discovered rock icon Jerry Lee Lewis and country superstar Charley Pride. Jack Clement in Nashville produced artists ranging from Johnny Cash to U2, and his songwriting credits include “Ballad of a Teenage Queen,” “I Guess Things Happen That Way,” “Someone I Used To Know,” and “Dirty Old Egg Sucking Dog.” A true renaissance man, Clement has taught ballroom dancing, filmed but never finished several made-for-TV specials, and produced Dear Dead Delilah, one of the worst slasher films ever made. In the meantime, he made home movies.

According to Gordon, Morgan Neville, a fellow documentarian whom Gordon had collaborated with for Shakespeare Was a Big George Jones Fan and for a show about Muddy Waters, “was always on the lookout for subjects who had great big piles of videotape lying around. Clement turned out to be a gold mine with rooms and rooms of home movies that had been stored in no particular order.

“Jack makes everybody he’s around feel comfortable,” Gordon says, attempting to explain why Clement could get footage of Johnny Cash wearing a toy crown and a pig’s nose, doing absurd improvisational comedy.

“Jack inspired us to push the boundaries and to be silly,” Gordon says. “It’s like [Kris] Kristofferson says in the [documentary]. He likes to make a circus out of life. That was what we were looking for. Jack once wrote four chapters of an autobiography. And [he wrote it] in a way — not entirely dissimilar from the documentary — where you never knew what to expect. Suddenly [in the autobiography], Jack’s having this conversation with Shakespeare. Well, we took that and we went from there.” •

Stranded in Canton plays 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 21st, at Malco Paradiso. There will be a Q&A session with Robert Gordon, Cotty Chubb, and others involved in the project after the screening. Shakespeare Was a Big George Jones Fan shows at 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 22nd, at Malco’s Studio on the Square and will be followed by a Q&A with Gordon.

See below for more information about films showing at the Memphis International Film Festival. For the full schedule, see MemphisFilmForum.org.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Studio on the Square

Saturday, April 23rd, 2:30 p.m. and midnight

In its own way, this sprightly 1972 French masterpiece from Spanish director Luis Buñuel is as much an assault on traditional storytelling conventions as his surrealistic silent-era provocations (Un Chien Andalou).

In following three well-to-do couples who keeping trying — and failing — to have a dinner together, Buñuel uses the notion of the meal as social ritual to dissect and skewer the artificial constructions –the small talk, the class biases, the codes of behavior — that hold together his protagonists’ upper-class world.

But Buñuel’s tone isn’t derisive so much as slyly comic. His work had never allowed villains or heroes, but in this late film (his last would follow five years later) there’s a bemused serenity noticeably removed from the harsher tone he struck in earlier satires such as Viridiana and Simon of the Desert.

A series of interruptions, digressions, and asides that suggest Buñuel’s roots in surrealism, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie builds up a considerable spread of chewy ideas and evocative incidents. But if you come into it expecting the narrative it constantly hints at and just as constantly denies, it can be rough going.

Nights of Cabiria

Studio on the Square

Saturday, April 23rd, 7 p.m.

For a generation of American cinephiles in the ’50s and ’60s, Italian director Federico Fellini was one of the names (along with Bergman, Antonioni, Godard, and few others) that became synonymous with cinematic art.

Fellini’s reputation bloomed with his heavily symbolic 1954 film La Strada then exploded with such zeitgeist-y touchstones as 1960’s ennui epic La Dolce Vita and 1963’s 8 1/2, an unparalleled experiment in stream-of-consciousness filmmaking.

Nights of Cabiria (1957) is a key transitional work: Its ostensibly simple visual style and focus on “common” characters are in keeping with neorealism, but its concerns are as much personal and philosophical as social and political. Fellini’s developing sensibility reveals itself in a mise-en-scène that frequently gives way to pure spectacle. But it’s also simply better than the preceding, more celebrated La Strada, a parable that now feels overburdened with self-significance where Cabiria‘s profundity is more real, more natural.

A series of vignettes from the life of an aging Roman prostitute (played, ferociously, by Fellini’s wife and muse Giulietta Masina), Cabiria traces an trajectory from hope to disillusionment but turns the corner with a deeply felt, fully earned final grace note. An underappreciated classic from an acknowledged master.

Searching for Angela Shelton

Studio on the Square

Sunday, April 24, 7 p.m.

Searching for Angela Shelton isn’t the most polished documentary you’ll ever see, but it might be among the most harrowing and moving. Director Angela Shelton started with a concept: to attempt to contact and interview every woman in the country who shared her name as a means of examining a cross-section of American women.

But what she discovered is that 24 of the 40 she eventually tracked down had been victims of abuse. An incest survivor herself, Shelton took that as her theme and personalized the film, culminating in an on-screen confrontation with her abusive father.

The film, which profiles a fascinating and diverse array of women from all over the country, has been featured on Oprah and 48 Hours and has become something of a touchstone work among groups working to help victims of domestic abuse.

As a tour guide, Shelton can be a little too earnest or awkward (to one of her subjects after a gospel-singing demonstration: “I wish I could be a black woman!”), but her story is a terrible and compelling one and is matched by the memorable women she captures on her journey.

The General

Studio on the Square

Friday, April 22nd, 9:30 p.m.

Sunday, April 24th, noon

A fictionalized account of real-life Irish criminal Martin Cahill (Brendan Gleeson in his biggest, maybe best role), who stole more than $60 million during a string of daring robberies in the 1980s before being assassinated by the IRA for not spreading the wealth, The General won British director John Boorman (Deliverance, Hope and Glory) the best director award at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival.

Entertaining and accessible, this handsome film balances the tension between artistic impulses and commercial aspirations, which marks Boorman’s career. It’s essentially a large-scale art film that functions effortlessly as mainstream entertainment, but it also rhymes nicely with Boorman’s best film, the small-scale color noir Point Blank (1967). Both films are about violent protagonists, outsiders in conflict with society. And both films open with moments of violent certainty, which lend the unfolding narratives a tragic mythic air.

The General is both entranced by Cahill’s outsized persona and critical of his actions. Cahill is a murky, not entirely sympathetic figure who lords over his tight-knit gang as a sort of tribal chieftain. The notion of the criminal gang as a tribal order in opposition to the complexities of modern society is central to gangster movies from The Godfather on down. With The General, Boorman delivered a film worthy of the genre’s short list.

The Wind Will Carry Us

Studio on the Square

Sunday, April 24th, 2:30 p.m.

In international film circles, contemporary Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami has a reputation on a par with Kurosawa, Godard, and Bergman a half-century ago. What he lacks is the popular audience to go with his critical acclaim, at least in the U.S. Despite the increased presence of Middle Eastern — particularly Iranian — films on local screens in recent years, there has never been a public showing of a Kiarostami film in Memphis –until now. The Memphis Film Forum corrects that with this screening of 1999’s The Wind Will Carry Us, which follows a TV camera crew from Tehran into the remote mountains of Iranian Kurdistan, where a 100-year-old woman awaits death. The camera crew wants to film the funeral ritual that awaits.

I haven’t seen The Wind Will Carry Us (only the early And Life Goes On and the 1997 Cannes winner Taste of Cherry), but I would tend to trust critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, perhaps the most enthusiastic and knowledgeable American critic of international cinema, who calls The Wind Will Carry Us Kiarostami’s “richest and most challenging work.” There has also been a counter-argument that the film borders on self-parody. Regardless, the stillness of Kiarostami’s work is always in danger of being labeled dull by viewers unaccustomed to his style. •

Categories
News The Fly-By

Altered Perception

I recently said goodbye to a friend who’s moving to New York. I won’t get started about how all my friends keep moving away—that’s a different column—but I started thinking about all the ways that 1,100 miles are going to change her life.

There’s the cost-of-living difference, the crazy real-estate values, and how she’ll be selling her car and riding the subway or taking cabs. Cabs! I mean I see them drive by sometimes, but I’ve never actually seen anyone here in the process of hailing one.

But maybe it’s not as different as I think.

A few weeks ago, I said to her, “You’re going to have so much fun. There will be lots of single people for you to hang out with.”

You see my friend is in her late 20s—as, to be fair, am I—and she’s never been married. Assuming that the South is a little more matrimonially inclined, I thought New York would be a good place for her.

And then, on a lark, I checked the stats from the latest census data. According to those numbers, there are roughly 179,000 people in Memphis (over 15 years of age) who have never been married. In New York, there are 2.4 million people in the same category.

In the Big Apple, that’s 37 percent of the population. In the Bluff City, it’s 36 percent of the population. New York might be a bigger pond, but the number of fish in the sea is almost statistically equivalent. Which pretty much blows the theory that Southerners couple up sooner and more often.

In fact, it may be time to forget the idea that the nation is culturally divided along the Mason-Dixon Line. I have to confess: I didn’t go to the Southern Women’s Show a few weeks ago or maybe I’d understand what Richard Simmons and a doggie fashion show—two of the events—have to do with being a Southern woman. Maybe the entire idea of regionalism is more antiquated and less authentic than we think.

During the last presidential election, we divided states into “red” and “blue,” and in some ways, it worked out regionally. However The Stranger, a Seattle weekly, printed an interesting idea after the election: The most important factor politically wasn’t geography but urbanism. Red states typically are more rural, where voters tend to go for the GOP, while blue states have large urban centers with more Democratic voters. Think about the heartland state of Illinois—mostly red, but it’s blue at the top where Chicago sits, and it’s blue enough population-wise to color the entire state.

Have we become a nation culturally divided into country and city mice? People more comfortable around skyscrapers against those more comfortable under open sky? People who shop at Target versus those who shop at Wal-Mart?

In Dallas, a city of 1,188,580, the percent of people who have never been married is a little higher than 34 percent. In Chicago, that number is about 41 percent.

Compare those numbers to those of the sleepy burgs of Joliet, Illinois (population 106,221) or Abilene, Texas (115,930) or North Tonawanda, New York (33,262), or our own neighbor Fayette County (32,289). In these pastoral places, roughly 28 percent, 26 percent, and 24 percent of the population has never been married.

This is only an idea and certainly not a scientific analysis. I’ve simply picked places I’ve been or lived. But if marriage is a significant cultural institution, it’s worth noting how the percentage of “I do’s” differs.

Does the metropolitan marriage divide correlate to other cultural aspects? And where do the suburbs fit in? Could we split ourselves into “Urban cowboys,” “Burbers,” and “Bumpkins”? I don’t know but it would certainly explain the whole city-versus-county thing.

Categories
Opinion

It’s In There

In spite of its name, Karaoke Kafe offers a lot more than singing. “We’re like Sun Studios meets American Bandstand,” says co-owner Brian Leviticus. Leviticus, who only uses his stage name, has a black goatee braided into two inverted horns on either side of his chin and looks more like the lead singer of a death-metal band than the owner of a karaoke club.

Karaoke Kafe, which opened a couple weeks ago at 26 South Main, is a recording studio with full CD and DVD capabilities, a restaurant offering lunch and finger foods, a coffee shop, a wireless Internet cafe, a late-night music store, an art gallery, and, obviously, a karaoke bar. You can even bring items to post on eBay, and Leviticus and co-owner Dan Graves will do the selling.

But the cafe’s specialty remains karaoke. Patrons can get onstage and sing their favorite tunes from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. from a list offering about 134,000 songs.

“You name it, we’ve got it,” says Graves, a Vietnam veteran-turned-rocker with long, gray hair and a beard. “I’d say we probably have the largest selection in the nation. It would take 3,000 pages to print our catalog.”

Many other Memphis bars offer regular karaoke nights , but what sets Karaoke Kafe apart is its ability to record and produce CDs of faithful karaoke fans singing their hearts out. Anyone can come in, choose ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” and walk out with a CD of themselves doing their best Anni-Frid Lyngstad.

Graves says they’ll also record original songs performed by individuals, bands, or choirs, or if you’d rather see yourself sing, he can record the performance onto a high-definition DVD.

“You can have the audience watch you as you’re recorded, or we do have an isolation booth if you’d rather not be watched,” Graves says.

Graves also hopes to produce television shows of the venue’s Friday- and Saturday-night performances. The shows would feature mostly live music performed by people who audition to be included.

A live band plays every day during lunch, and although the cafe offers pub grub, such as chicken wings, mini-pizzas, jalapeno poppers, and cheesesticks, patrons are welcome to brown-bag it.

“We’re not just here to make a buck,” Graves says. “We’re here because we love music, and we want people to come in and see bands play.”

Karaoke Kafe also sells artwork by local artists, along with guitar strings and drum sticks. In addition, there are several computers, where customers can use the wireless In-ternet service for an hourly fee. Patrons with laptops can log on for free. As for the eBay service, all Graves and Leviticus ask for is a little commission when the items are sold.

“Everybody has junk they want to get rid of, but many people don’t do it correctly,” Graves says. “It’s a hassle to take the pictures, post them on eBay, and then try to squeeze the money out of the buyer. But you can come in here with an item, tell us a minimum price, and we’ll put it on eBay for you.”

Graves says he and Leviticus spent two years developing the concept for the cafe, “where the audience could participate” rather than just sit back and watch bands play. The Memphis location is the first of 10 Karaoke Kafes planned nationwide within the next two years. •

Karaoke is featured at the Karaoke Kafe (26 South Main) from 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. daily. Bands play lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. daily.