Month: June 2005

Categories
Music Music Features

local beat

After a decade on Beale Street, the Memphis chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences (aka the Recording Academy, aka the Grammy folks) has set up new digs on South Main. The Recording Academy moved to 493 South Main, Suite 101, over Memorial Day weekend, setting up shop at the new address on Wednesday, June 1st.

“We’d been admiring the development in the South Main historic district, and we wanted to be somewhere where we can help a neighborhood develop,” says project manager Katherine Sage. “That’s what we did on Beale Street 10 years ago, and it was time for a change.”

The Recording Academy inhabits the bottom floor of a three-story building, in a space designed by South Main neighbors, architecture firm Archimania. The second and third stories of the building will be sold as condos. The building, located between Central Station and the entrance to the National Civil Rights Museum, offers a different vibe from the noisier, people-packed atmosphere of Beale Street.

Sage says the organization’s sign was beginning to get lost amid the neon on Beale. “We’re looking forward to this being a more accessible location for our members and customers to come and see what we’re all about. We like that this space is more user-friendly.”

The Recording Academy plans an open house for their new location on Friday, July 29th, which will coincide with one of the neighborhood’s Trolley Tour nights.

In the meantime, the academy will sponsor a screening of the musical documentary Make It Funky! Thursday, June 23rd, at Malco’s Studio on the Square in Midtown. The documentary focuses on the evolution of the funk and R&B sound in New Orleans, featuring artists such as the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the Neville Brothers, and Allen Toussaint. Director Michael Murphy will be on hand to speak about the film, while artist Kermit Ruffins will provide live music. The event will be catered by famed New Orleans restaurant Galatoire’s. The event starts at 6 p.m. with a $20 admission. Recording Academy members get in free.

Local Music News and Notes: After being delayed by this spring’s Easley-McCain Studio fire, local rockers The Glass have finally finished recording their third album with producer Kevin Cubbins and have rescheduled a canceled May record-release show. The celebration now takes place Friday, June 24th, at the Young Avenue Deli. After the show, the band will head out on a month-long tour alongside fellow locals Lucero, whose new Nobody’s Darlings was recently reviewed in Spin. The Lucero/Glass tour starts Thursday, July 7th, in St. Louis and will hit Western cities such as Denver, San Francisco, and Portland … Alvin Youngblood Hart’s Motivational Speaker, his first electric album since 2000’s great Start With the Soul, is due out this week on Tone Cool/Artemis … Other Memphis-connected records due out in the coming weeks include singer-songwriter John Hiatt’s Master of Disaster on June 21st. Recorded at Ardent Studios with Jim Dickinson at the helm, the record also features back-up from North Mississippi Allstars Luther and Cody Dickinson … Also on June 21st, a couple of interesting collections are on tap. Local label Ecko will release On the Chitlin Circuit: Southern Soul Hits and historic local radio station WDIA will release a two-disc collection of music and station history/soundbites, WDIA-AM 1070: The History, The Music, The Legend … You may have to wait awhile longer for the upcoming Big Star album, but newest members Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow will have a new album from their other band, The Posies, out June 28th. Titled Every Kind of Light, the album is on Rykodisc, the same label that will release the Big Star record … June 28th also sees the start of another round of Al Green reissues. The ongoing reissue series picks up with Green’s 1975 classic Livin’ for You, but the feature attraction will be 1977’s self-produced The Belle Album. Other titles include Al Green Is Love, Full of Fire, Have a Good Time, and Truth Time … A couple of weeks later, on July 12th, Arista/Legacy will reissue a real rarity, Green’s pre-Memphis 1967 album Back Up Train, recorded under the name Al Green & The Soul Mates … That date should also be a big one for local rap, as Three 6 Mafia cohort Frayser Boy releases Me Being Me on the group’s Hypnotize Minds label. But the big story will be the arrival, just ahead of the film, of the soundtrack to Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flow. The final track list for the record hasn¹t been released, but you can hear instrumental samples of some of the tracks on the film¹s Web site HustleandFlow.com, which also features a ?Memphis Insider? link where Brewer waxes romantic about such Memphis haunts as Black Lodge Video and Cozy Corner barbecue shop.

Categories
News The Fly-By

A Quickie with the

When recent White Station grads Alice Buchanan, Katherine Dohan, Alanna Stewart, and Brock Terweilleger were in the ninth grade, they got their kicks from vandalizing school property. The friends began writing messages to one another on the chemistry desk they shared during different periods, and it wasn’t long before they had a name, the Scandaliz Vandalistz.

When they formed a band for the school’s Battle of the Bands competition, the choice of name was obvious. These days, Buchanan (guitar), Dohan (bass), Stewart (back-up vocals, handclaps), and Terweilleger (back-up vocals, hand-claps) play occasional shows at art galleries, theaters, and the Full Moon Club. They’ve gained a small following, mostly because of one comical hit song, “Hey Mr. Beifuss,” about the Commercial Appeal‘s movie critic, John Beifuss.

It goes like this:

“Hey Mr. Beifuss

I didn’t like your Moulin Rouge review

But what you wrote about Ghost World connected me to you.

It made me so glad when you visited my English class

Even when that one kid said that you’d been smokin’ da grass.

Ooh Beifuss Joe

You’re such a cool bloke

I want to get to know you

Hey Mr. Beifuss

I can be your Frankenstein Bride

We’ll make homemade horror movies

We’ll be screaming side by side

I’ll sit with you in dark theaters when it’s really late at night

And if you can’t see to make your notes, I’ll have brought a flashlight

Hey Mr. Beifuss

I respect all that flows from your pen

How long is it ’til Saturday?

I can’t wait to read your column again

I know that you are not a slob

I know that you are sometimes wrong

I know your favorite movie …”

With the summer movie season upon us, we decided to ask them about Beifuss, film, and their other, non-Beifuss-related music.

Flyer: What inspired the Beifuss song?

Stewart: We had this English teacher in ninth grade at White Station, and we had a project where we were supposed to be writing movie and music reviews. She thought it would be good to have a real live critic come to class. So he came and he gave a speech, and Katherine and I thought he was great. He was so strange.

What was wrong with the Moulin Rouge review?

Stewart: I liked [the movie], and he didn’t like it. I like Baz Luhrman movies. But Ghost World, that was a really good review.

Buchanan: It connected me to you.

In the song, you mention that you know his favorite movie. What is it?

Stewart: Bride of Frankenstein! We were thinking about making a music video for it because Katherine and I make films also. He told us he’d loan us his Bride of Frankenstein doll.

Has Beifuss heard the song?

Stewart: Yes. He loves it! I think he really likes it because it’s about him, but also he’s like, ‘It’s a really great song.’ He plays our other songs on his WEVL show. He came to a show at the Full Moon Club, and he just kept talking and he bought a shirt.

What are your other songs about?

Buchanan: We sing a song called “You’re Too Cool” about hipsters. We also have a song called “Geek to Chic” about geeks that go chic.

Dohan: I wrote a song about my two old English sheepdogs. It’s called “I Wish I Were an Old English Sheepdog,” and it’s about days when you wish you were a dog and you could lay around the house and have people pat your head and stuff.

So what does Beifuss think? He describes the song as “very clever and insidiously catchy.”

“Now I know how Alex Chilton felt when he heard that Replacements song,” he says.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Red Meat

This being a theme issue of the Flyer, I have weighed in elsewhere with a tongue-in-cheek take on the nature of political “cool.” (As always: Don’t shoot the messenger.)

The fact is, however, that politics — local, statewide, national — is headed in the opposite direction from cool. It’s hot and will get hotter:

It seems clear that the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate seat that Bill Frist is vacating next year will pile on the hot coals, rhetorically.

Three GOP Senate hopefuls were on hand for the annual Shelby County Republican Party picnic Monday at the conference grounds on Cherry Road. And all — former congressmen Ed Bryant and Van Hilleary and former Chattanooga mayor Bob Corker — cooked up some red meat.

Bryant began by saying that at election time in Tennessee there are “no moderate Republicans and no liberal Democrats.” And not only did he lay out the litany of standard Republican issues — traditional marriage, abortion, the Pledge of Allegiance, federal judges, the Second Amendment — he went to the right of President George W. Bush on one issue, that of “illegal immigration and border security.”

“I think he’s misjudged on this one,” said Bryant of what he considered Bush’s over-lenient immigration proposals.

Hilleary, who finished a close second to Democrat Phil Bredesen in the 2002 governor’s race, noted frankly that, among Republicans anyhow, “Everybody will be making the same speech, saying the same thing.” He emphasized the need for a “conservative, sincere Republican,” stressed his background as a Desert Storm pilot, blasted “wobbly-kneed Republicans,” gay marriage, and the federal judiciary as “the last bastion of liberalism.”

Corker came off as the relative moderate, focusing on his background as construction executive, provider of low-income housing, and mayor. But he began with this catechism: “I believe in free markets, limited government, low taxes, balanced budgets, the entrepreneurial spirit, the power of prayer, and the importance of faith.” And he too took issue with “judicial activism.”

Absent from the picnic was state representative Beth Harwell of Nashville, another prospective Senate candidate. One of the attendees, however, flashed a bumper sticker (reportedly provided by Chattanooga-area state representative Chris Clem) that read, “Harwell/Governor.”

Even as two of the three GOP Senate candidates chose at this year’s party picnic to reference some variant of the gay issue, a test case of sorts was under way at a camp being run by the group Love in Action at a former church site on Yale Road in Raleigh.

Demonstrators turned up last week and this to protest against the camp’s attempts to convert gay youths to a heterosexual lifestyle. (See also Viewpoint, page 13.)

Then, of course, there was the arraignment last week of Bowers and others arrested in the recent FBI sting — including state senator John Ford, who in a post-arraignment press conference suggested that the fact and timing of his indictment might have something to do with A) nephew Harold Ford Jr.’s formal announcement for the U.S. Senate; and B) governor Phil Bredesen‘s paring of the TennCare rolls, which Ford had opposed.

In other words, Ford plans a political defense — one not calculated, need we note, to lower local temperatures.

Categories
Opinion

Five-Yard Penalty

The criminal prosecution of football booster Logan Young Jr. was one of the costliest, most time-consuming, and possibly ill-advised efforts in the history of the federal prosecutor’s office in West Tennessee.

And it isn’t over yet. When it is, the government will have spent at least five years to get a five-yard penalty against Young — who received a six-month prison sentence — and strip two former high school football coaches of their jobs.

There was a heroic search for principle and meaning by the prosecutor, judge, and daily newspaper during the sentencing phase, but the best that any of them could do was to proclaim that the corrupt “underbelly” of college sports had been exposed — something that must be obvious to any sports fan over the age of 10.

On the eve of Young’s sentencing last week, the case was right back where it started, with a former Memphis high school football coach making broad accusations not subject to cross examination in the newspaper about illegal recruiting and a bidding war for defensive lineman Albert Means.

A bidding war, by definition, presumes that there were multiple bidders, but the investigation of Young did not produce a single piece of evidence leading to the indictment and prosecution of another booster, coach, or athletic administrator.

Nor did it clean up recruiting in Memphis or, as assistant U.S. attorney Fred Godwin suggested, restore faith in “the integrity of the public school system in Memphis.” The only high school head coach to take the stand during the trial was Lynn Lang, Young’s accuser and Means’ former coach. Only one other Memphis player was brought to court as a potential witness, and he was withdrawn after a discussion out of the presence of the jury.

Lang is unemployed and living in Flint, Michigan, Godwin’s home town. He is in violation of the terms of his probation, which require him to maintain employment. Unknown to the judge and possibly the attorneys, Lang was unemployed at the time he was sentenced to no prison time based largely on Godwin’s plea for leniency. He is spending his time talking to reporters about the recruiting of Means in 1999 and 2000 by Alabama and six other schools. Most of what was reported last week, minus the names of specific coaches, was in the August 29, 2001, indictment of Lang and Milton Kirk.

Then there is Means, the crux of the whole case. In his opening statement to the jury, Godwin said, “This case is about the buying and selling of a young man.” Others went so far as to call it “slave trading.” Now Lang says Means and his family got roughly $60,000 of the $150,000 that a jury determined Young paid Lang. Means also cheated by having someone take his college-entrance exam for him and lied about it to a federal grand jury. When Means and Lang testified during Young’s trial, there was no mention of any amount close to $60,000, only small favors such as Christmas presents and a tuxedo for the prom.

Young’s light sentence said a lot about the case. Over two days, U.S. District Court judge Daniel Breen listened carefully to almost 10 hours of argument from Godwin, Young’s attorneys, and several witnesses. Godwin wanted a prison term of at least the 24 to 30 months called for in federal sentencing guidelines. He argued that Means was a “vulnerable victim” who suffered “loss of freedom of choice of what to do with your life.” Breen didn’t buy it. The judge also ruled against Godwin’s requests for a longer sentence based on Young being an organizer of the scheme and obstructing justice. When Breen brought the day to a close by ruling that Young could remain free on bond pending his appeal, the government was 0 for 4.

“I’m happy with what I got,” said Young, who has never admitted guilt and wasn’t about to start Monday. He made his plea for mercy based strictly on his nonviolent nature, lack of a criminal record, ties to the community, and poor health.

After the sentencing, Godwin declined to comment, stopping only to scold a reporter for Sports Illustrated for bringing a tape recorder into the courtroom, which is against the rules. Look for an indictment any day now.

I for one am glad the federal government has bulldogs like Godwin on their side. As noted in court, the decision to investigate the Means case was made in January 2001 by former U.S. attorney Veronica Coleman. Godwin was doing his job, and he did it well, more than holding his own against defense attorney Jim Neal, one of the best in the business. The time and talent spent concocting a case of public corruption against Logan Young will be put to a more worthy test in the ongoing Operation Tennessee Waltz.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Short Cuts

1988 — Blueprint (Rhymesayers): Ohio-based indie lifer multithreats like Kanye West, with a surer flow if fewer ideas. The over-arching one here is a tribute to hip-hop’s late ’80s pinnacle, which means Public Enemy samples, human beat-boxing, and a song inspired by Do the Right Thing‘s Radio Raheem. Hoping for the cultural impact of any of that is a pipe dream, though. And Blueprint understands the reality all too well: Here’s “another good album with bad distribution.” (“1988,” “Trouble on My Mind,” “Inner City Native Son”)

Grade: A-

This Right Here Is Buck 65 — Buck 65 (V2): A white guy from rural Canada with a gruff voice and literary sensibility, Buck 65 is hip-hop’s Leonard Cohen and only slightly more funky than that sounds. But if the beats on this U.S. major-label debut aren’t exactly club-worthy, the songcraft keeps you coming back, a dynamic the artist explains with the moral of his densely detailed, first-person shoeshiner’s tale ?Craftsmanship?: ?Craftsmanship is a quality that some lack/You have to give people a reason to come back.? A more substantial marriage of hip-hop and folk rock than the records that made Beck famous. (?Wicked Weird,? ?Cries a Girl,? ?Craftsmanship?)

Grade: A-

Be — Common (Geffen): Mainstream hip-hop’s ultimate boho wet dream delivers his most cohesive album ever thanks to producer Kanye West and a lean 11-track, 42-minute length. Even better than West’s soul-based grooves: an almost heroic interest in other people’s lives. (“Be,” “The Corner,” “Chi-City”)

Grade: A-

Black Dialogue — The Perceptionists (Definitive Jux): The presence of golden-age icons Guru (Gang Starr) and Humpty Hump (Digital Underground) on this indie-rap near-classic isn’t an act of nostalgia. It’s the embrace of a culture in exile. Fifteen years ago, Black Dialogue would have stood beside Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions in the hip-hop mainstream. And if this Boston trio’s beats aren’t quite a match for BDP, much less Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad, the Perceptionists present a vision of hip-hop humanity that shames those cultural forebears as much as it does any present-day gangstas. KRS-ONE and Chuck D. could never have penned a love song as real as “Love Letters” or an ode to the workweek as knowing as “5 O’Clock.” Song of the Year candidate: “Career Finders,” job counseling for gangsta rappers. (Fave moment: “State your name. Mighty Dolla. [pause] HAHAHA.”) Album-opening line unlikely to be forgotten: “Hard tracks remind me of blacks with scarred backs/These are facts.” (“Let’s Move,” “Black Dialogue,” “Career Finders,” “People 4 Prez”)

Grade: A

Felt 2: A Tribute to Lisa Bonet — Slug & Murs (Rhymesayers): A summit meeting of sorts between two indie heavyweights, SoCal alt-rap Everyman Murs and Slug, the Midwest’s bard of complicated sex and regional color. Not really about the most transgressive Cosby kid, just as their first pairing didn’t have much to do with ostensible honoree Christina Ricci. Just a reflection of the loose spirit and simultaneously brainy and horn-dog attitude of the project: Not only are their lust objects left-of-center, their sex songs are as much about giving as receiving. (“Early Mornin’ Tony,” “Breaker Down Like a Shotgun,” “Woman Tonight,” “Gangster Ass Anthony”)

Grade: B+

Run the Road — Various Artists (Vice/679): This collection of British grime (essentially a hip-hop variant with echoes of techno and dancehall reggae) isn’t quite at the level of The Harder They Come or The Indestructible Beat of Soweto. But then again, grime isn’t quite golden-age reggae or South African mbaqanga either. Breakout scene stars Dizzee Rascal and the Streets are here, but it’s the names you’ve never heard of that stand out: rugged voices spitting hardscrabble tales over cheap, gritty beats. It doesn’t have the ease or command of the first wave of American gangsta rap. But it might have more energy and spirit. (?Let It Out? — Roll Deep; ?P’s and Q’s? — Kano; ?Cha Ching? — Lady Sovereign)

Grade: A-

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Married with Livestock

Let me tell you a tragic story about a kid I knew in middle school. He was different from the rest of the kids: painfully unattractive with mangled teeth and an ugly speech impediment. One afternoon, a group of barely pubescent boys surrounded him on the playground and called him “queer” and “faggot” and other terrible things. They shoved him and spit on him and tried to provoke him into a fight. But he wouldn’t defend himself. “I’m not a faggot,” he cried out at last. He told the assembled ruffians that he regularly had sex with a female goat, and as innocently as you please, he described the lovemaking. He was proud of his masculine conquests and honestly thought his story would give him some cred as “one of the guys.” He didn’t get beat up at least. Nobody wanted to touch him, and a few years later he hanged himself in his closet. Maybe this is why I’m not terribly shocked by playwright Edward Albee’s dirty literary joke The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?, which is currently running at Circuit Playhouse. Maybe that’s why I only experience it as a cruel, if brilliant, joke on the audience and on modern theater.

Martin (played by an imminently likable Jonathon Lamer) is a 50-year-old architect at the peak of his career. He’s been honored with prestigious awards and tapped to plan a utopian city in the Midwest. After 20 years of marriage, he’s still crazy in love with his wife, and although he’s still reeling a bit from his 17-year-old son’s “coming out,” his life seems perfect and enviable. One problem: He’s truly, madly, and deeply in love with a big-eyed goat. When his bestial secret is revealed, things get ugly and things get broken. Woe to the theatergoer who sits in the first two rows as shards of Martin’s gorgeous life begin to fly — quite literally — off the stage.

There’s a secret punch line to The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia?. The play is cleverly subtitled “Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy,” and “tragedy” is derived from a Greek term meaning goat song. Albee’s play, though fully contemporary, is cookie-cutter Greek in the spirit of Euripides. You could easily perform it by substituting the word “sister” for goat and “incest” for bestiality, but to do so would make the play trite, unfunny, and entirely unwatchable. Albee’s larger point exists outside the plot: Tragedy is constructed around actions that “can’t be ignored,” and in this day and age, it takes a good goat-diddling to get our attention. For all the blood and the shouting, The Goat isn’t so much a tragedy as it is a dark and bitter satire on the state of modern tragedy and on a culture where the only true crime is being caught.

Sara Morsey, who last appeared in Memphis in Playhouse on the Square’s award-winning production of Wit, is sassy, strong, and attractive as Martin’s wife Stevie. Even in her rage, she charms with her detached wordplay. Her revenge, however, is as horrible and freakishly bizarre as it is obvious and inevitable. Barclay Roberts is solid as Ross, the family confidant who betrays his old friend Martin in a fit of self-righteous outrage, and Jordan Nichols, taking a break from his studies at NYU, is effective in the chorus-like role of Billy, a young man who thought he knew who he was until the day he finally met his real parents.

Circuit’s production is top-notch until it devolves into a screaming and whining match somewhere around the middle of the play, subverting a lot of humor and making Albee’s redundancies that much more redundant. After all, a person can only hear “You’re fucking a goat” shouted so many times before it loses its impact. The good news is that the excellent cast pulls things back together in the play’s final minutes, making The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia? the most intense and unforgettable production to appear on a local stage since Lanford Wilson’s Book of Days.

Through July 9th

Everything Is Beautiful

Kay Cole, the actor and dancer who created the role of Maggie in A Chorus Line, almost never sings in public. When she does, it’s not likely that she’ll revive “At the Ballet,” her signature song. “I discovered I don’t have the same need to perform,” Cole says. Since turning her attention to directing and choreography, she has performed only rarely and for what she describes as special occasions.

Cole teamed with Memphis pianist and composer David Troy Francis to mount Bark!, a musical about dogs that has been running for 10 months in Los Angeles and which will open in Chicago and New York later this year. Cole and Francis will be in Memphis for a workshop with teachers in the Memphis City Schools system.

Cole will teach dance master classes at Theatre Memphis on Saturday, June 18th, and Cole and Francis will perform together at Bartlett United Methodist Church on Sunday, June 19th.

“I want everybody to experience this wonderful woman,” Francis says. Cole says she’ll break her rules for the occasion and break out songs she hasn’t done in years, including selections from A Chorus Line.

For more information on Kay Cole’s master classes, call 682-8601.

Categories
Music Music Features

Sound Advice

Hard-touring Dallas rockers The Graham Colton Band have spent the past couple of years opening for the Counting Crows, Dave Matthews Band, Wallflowers, and John Mayer and will be returning to town in August on an opening slot for Kelly Clarkson.

Stylistically, the band sounds like those bands stripped of the facets that make them most annoying to detractors: self-involved singers, overwrought songs, jam-band tendencies without commensurate chops or imagination. Strip all that away from the Counting Crows/Dave Matthews template, and you’ve got a solid, professional, but pretty unexciting rock band. And with name producer Brendan O’Brien (Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam) overseeing the band’s current major-label debut, Drive, the result sounds pretty good on the surface. Drive is a collection of straightforward, surging, vaguely anthemic rock songs of a type you might expect to hear over an emotional montage on a UPN teen drama. There’s also a subtle roots sound that makes the band sound like a more bland version of fellow Texans the Old 97’s. The Graham Colton Band will be at Newby’s Saturday, June 18th.

The Young Avenue Deli boasts an interesting lineup this week. New Orleans bluesman Mem Shannon hits the Cooper-Young watering hole Thursday, June 16th. Shannon typically plays more blues-oriented venues when he comes to town, so it will be interesting to see how he sounds (and draws) at a more rock-oriented club. A strong writer and performer, Shannon recently followed up his locally recorded 2001 album Memphis in the Morning with a new album, I’m From Phunkville, which features a blues cover of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” and some more Memphis-inspired blends of B.B. King-style blues and Stax-like horns.

The next night, Friday, June 17th, the Deli hosts Lynn Cardona, a young local singer who spins a beguiling mix of neo-soul and vocal jazz (think Jill Scott, with a little more rock influence) on her recent debut album Lovin’ You and who is an engaging live performer. Cardona will be joined by Iron Mic Coalition/Kontrast DJ Capital A. Cardona has also been working on a collaboration with Iron Mic producer/MC Fathom 9, so look for the hip-hop influences to become more prominent in her music.

Finally, one of the most interesting up-and-coming local bands, This Is Goodbye, headlines the club Wednesday, June 22nd, with Illinois’ the Headlights opening. This Is Goodbye has been in the studio down the street from the Deli at Young Avenue Sound working on a debut EP that should be out soon. In the meantime, you can hear this band’s Coldplay-esque sound on the Web at ThisIsGoodbye.com. Or, better yet, you can see them live this week at the Deli.

— Chris Herrington

As far as I’m concerned, there are only two questions worth asking: Did the president lie America into Iraq, and is Augustine the best band in Memphis? This quintet of peach-fuzzy art rockers have a gigantic sound rooted in (but not ruined by) the more commercial end of the goth-rock spectrum. It’s not exactly retro, but it’s impossible to hear Augustine without thinking about the Cure in their Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me days or Cities in Dust-era Siouxsie & the Banshees. The guitars drone, flirt with surf, minimalism, and murder-jazz, then explode in monster hooks matched with smart and infectious, if not necessarily cheery, lyrics. If you think I¹m overstating the point, go see Augustine when they play the Hi-Tone Café on Wednesday, June 22nd, with the Color Revolt and Stellamarris. If they¹re not your new favorite band, go see the doctor. There¹s clearly something wrong with you.

— Chris Davis

Categories
Book Features Books

Trade Secrets

If you’ve read Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, you may recall Twain writing to his wife about a conversation he’d heard between a boat captain and a “frock-coated Tom Thumb.” The dapper, four-and-a-half-foot gentleman was telling the captain about an odd, biologically based theory on race in America and an even odder, biblically based theory involving “renegade angels” and the country’s slave population.

When asked for his opinion on these matters, Twain, dumbfounded, was “incapable of rational speech.” But that same afternoon, Twain learned something else: The pint-sized gentleman he’d met the morning of June 7, 1860, was none other than Thaddeus Murel, a onetime horse thief, sometime preacher, and “notorious slave bandit.” Murel’s grim stock-in-trade: “The Trade,” a business — involving henchmen and investors both above and below the Mason-Dixon Line — that made money, lots of it, freeing Southern blacks, reselling them to interim owners, and collecting the bounty when those slaves were returned to their original masters. Or they weren’t returned. Maybe they were murdered, the bodies dumped without a trace into the Mississippi River.

With an eye to writing a novel about the Mississippi in the 19th century, prize-winning author John Wray (The Right Hand of Sleep) found Twain’s passage “bizarre, grotesque, shocking,” an episode whose tone set it apart from the rest of Life on the Mississippi. A month later, Wray was more surprised to find a near-paraphrase, in Spanish, of Twain’s material on Murel in a story by Jorge Luis Borges. Wray read more: contemporary accounts of Murel; a fictional account in a short story by Eudora Welty. Then Wray set to work on his own account.

The result is Canaan’s Tongue (Knopf), a tour de force of period re-creation delivered in a half-dozen or so first-person narratives set from 1856 to 1863. The reader’s main guide is the half-Jewish, semi-blind false-seer Virgil Isaiah Dante Ball, a young drifter who prides himself on being a son of the Enlightenment but who lets himself be guided into the Trade by a “plain-faced dumpling of a man” named Thaddeus H. Morelle (aka the Redeemer) and his gang of abolitionizers-for-profit: an epileptic landowner’s son; a stuttering sodomite; a lisping “nigger-runner”; a kidnapping mulatto; a cool-headed colonel; and, at the real root of these various evils, an unholy, kabala-inspired mystery man named Parson.

Clementine Gilchrist, the New Orleans whore who wins Ball’s heart, is the lone female voice, but the pivotal setting for Ball’s undoing isn’t the Crescent City. It’s the Bluff City, half in ruins when Ball arrives to deliver a cargo of black men — the city’s streets littered with victims of yellow fever and Ball determined to rid himself of Morelle.

It’s a horrific vision of America that Wray describes, and it’s a history not without its 21st-century variant he believes: this national appetite for the irrational and the violent; for belief systems and profit systems; for election and the language of the elected (aka “Canaan’s tongue”).

“I wrote this fantasy of 19th-century America as a way of talking about today’s America,” Wray says, “as a way of understanding the forces at work: ambition, opportunism, the use of religion. The Bush administration is a good case study — its cynical exploitation of people’s failings and weaknesses and, at the same time, its almost mystical belief in its own election, in both senses of that word.”

Life on the Mississippi? Consider Canaan’s Tongue to be life, yesterday and today, in these dark United States.

John Wray will read from and sign copies of Canaan’s Tongue at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on Monday, June 20th, at 6 p.m. and at Square Books in Oxford on Tuesday, June 21st, at 5 p.m.

Rollin’ on the River

Say you’re an author, and say you’re on tour. Why fly when you can float from booksigning to booksigning?

That’s what John Wray is doing this month to promote his new novel, Canaan’s Tongue, which is set in mid-19th-century New Orleans, Memphis, and points in between.

The Mississippi River is the book’s great waterway, and Wray means to travel it too, from Memphis to New Orleans, on a raft he’s built in Brooklyn, where he lives. A raft made out of materials from Home Depot. A raft in eight sections, each section weighing around a hundred pounds. Sections that Wray is going to load inside a U-Haul and drive to Memphis, where he’s launching the Southern leg of his book tour. Then he’s going to launch the raft (some assembly required) into the Mississippi to reach his booksigning dates in Vicksburg, Natchez, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. What about his signings in Oxford and Jackson? Some driving required.

A wild idea? Not according to the author.

“I’m very excited,” Wray says. “It’s something I’ll have some control over, as opposed to waiting around for book reviews to happen. I’ve done things similar in spirit — some backpacking, some mountain climbing. And I’ll have a friend, a merchant marine, to act as the token expert on the trip. We’ll be pitching a tent on the bank at night.”

But to be on the safe side, the U-Haul won’t be somewhere nearby?

“No, no, no! The truck is only to get the raft from New York to Memphis,” Wray explains. “Nobody’s following us. [pause] Actually, having that U-Haul might be a good idea.”

Another good idea, before Wray’s raft even hits the water: some barbecue, Memphis-style.

Wray got to know the city years ago when he was dating a girl from Memphis. He got to know The Peabody, and he got to know some good eating.

“Whether I like a city or not generally has to do with my stomach,” he admits. “I’ve had too much great barbecue in Memphis to not love the place.

?My sister lives just outside of Nashville. Will this article be read in Nashville? No? Good. I’m free to speak my mind. I don’t like Nashville. It’s got a wonderful history. I grew up on country music. But Opryland, downtown Nashville … They’ve been Disneyfied. Memphis is more like Buffalo, where I went to high school: a grand old city with its own culture, its own charm. I’m planning on a table at the Rendezvous right now.?

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Editorial Opinion

Editorial

What on earth can be wrong with the chairman of the Democratic National Committee? Despite the recent party tradition of attempting to split all middles with the Bush administration and the governing Republican majority, Howard Dean dares articulate a decisive and different point of view. He ventures to call out the GOP on a number of issues, ranging from their relative indifference to the economic predicament of the working classes to the party’s culturally homogeneous nature.

Dean has even gone so far as to suggest that the Republicans have a “darker” social vision than his own Democrats. Worse, he insists on saying these things in the American heartland, where he encourages Democrats to rise and rally and actually try to compete for votes in the so-called red states.

Shhhhhhhh. Does the chairman not know that it is now the accepted custom among Democrats to disguise their views and try to pass themselves off as quasi-Republicans and to avoid impolite discord? Worthies ranging from Senator Joe Biden to our own ambitious Blue Dog congressman Harold Ford Jr. have proclaimed that Dean does not speak for them in these assertions.

Thing is, Dean seems to speak for a growing number of Democrats and independents who do want some diversity in the national dialogue. Listen up, is what we say.

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News The Fly-By

F-Stop

Last week, the Land Use Control Board (LUCB) indefinitely postponed a vote to allow a nuclear waste incinerator to operate on Presidents Island. But employees of Radiological Assistance, Consulting, and Engineering (RACE) — the company that wants the permit — as well as members of Memphis Truth, the Riverview Collaborative Community Association, and the Sierra Club turned out in droves.

The opposition held placards that read “No Nukes” or “No Space for RACE,” while employees of the company wore stickers that said, “My job is at stake,” in reference to a recent lawsuit filed by the opposition declaring RACE a public nuisance.

The Flyer was on hand asking people from both sides how they felt about the LUCB’s decision to postpone.

Horacito Johnson, RACE employee

“They need to go on and get this over with, ’cause, like this sign says, my job is at stake. We ain’t bad enough to shut down.”

David Frederick, RACE employee

“It’s good because everyone does not know why they’re here. I promise that. … This will give them more time to learn so they’ll be better able to make an informed decision.”

Patrick Parker, Riverview Collaborative Community Association

“How long has this been going on? Basically, what it is is a stall tactic. We’ve got a major billion-dollar corporation that just wants more time to figure out what they can do.”

Carolyn Pierce, vice chair of the Sierra Club

?I certainly want them to have the information that they need to make the final decision on this. It¹s a little bit of a hassle for me to come down here because I live out in Germantown, but if we can keep nuclear waste out of our air, it¹s worth the effort.?