Month: August 2005

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Harold Ford Jr. for Senate?

Current opinion polls suggest that the Republican Party may be in trouble going into the 2006 mid-term elections, largely as a result of the public’s increasingly acute perception that the administration’s Iraq war follies are, well, just that. But the numbers also show that the Democratic Party is getting virtually no benefit from the fact that President Bush’s approval rating is sinking like a stone.

Why are we not surprised? Since 2002, when then-leaders Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt lined up a majority of their colleagues to join with Republicans in giving Bush war-making powers in Iraq, the Democratic Party has been badly split between those who continue to “go along to get along” and those who believe that forthright opposition to the Bush administration’s illegal and immoral Iraq war is not just the party’s only ethical alternative but its only long-term path to electoral success.

Democratic Party pragmatists have managed to hold the upper hand, but indications are that reality is finally catching up with them. Two crushing national election defeats have proven the eternal wisdom of Harry Truman’s observation that “When voters are given a choice between voting for a Republican or a Democrat who acts like a Republican, they’ll vote for the Republican every time.”

Now the public is restless. The negativity extends directly to every member of Congress, Republican and Democrat, who lacked either the intestinal fortitude or the common sense to stand up to this administration’s mad rush toward war.

Here in Tennessee, Democratic candidate for senator Harold Ford Jr. not only supported the Iraq War Powers Act, he was one of the co-sponsors! To his credit, Ford has stuck to his guns. (“I support this war in Iraq,” he reiterated last week. “I supported it from the beginning for one reason: Saddam Hussein was a bad guy.”) And since that 2002 vote, Ford has continued to ignore Truman’s dictum. He has been the very model of a “Democrat who acts like a Republican” by supporting the Terry Schiavo bill, by failing to show up to vote against this year’s heinous budget, and by voting for the administration’s corporate-friendly bankruptcy and energy bills.

Cynics suggest that Ford is simply trying to strike the kind of “moderate” pose that enhances his chances in Republican East Tennessee. The facts suggest otherwise. Indeed, the vehemence with which Congressman Ford defended the administration last Friday (“I love my president. I love him personally,” the congressman avowed) inclines us to suggest that Ford take President Truman’s advice to its logical conclusion:

Congressman Ford, we suggest you immediately declare your candidacy for the Republican nomination for the Senate. Your words, your political contributors, and your votes make it clear that’s where you belong. As the Republican nominee, you would become the favorite to be Tennessee’s next senator. And you could go before the voters as what you are: a centrist who believes in the war in Iraq and who favors the budgetary, economic, and environmental policies of the Bush administration.

Best of all, your move to the Republican Party would clear the air in state politics. In 2006, the voters of Tennessee might be given a real choice at the polls: between a Republican candidate who stands on his record and for the status quo and a real Democratic candidate who might have the political courage to articulate a viable alternative to the mess in which we presently find ourselves at home and abroad.

Let’s make Harry Truman proud and give Tennessee voters a real choice.

Categories
News The Fly-By

The Cheat Sheet

1. Harding Academy, a landmark near the corner of Park and Cherry for half a century, wants to move part of its campus to Lakeland. School officials apparently couldn’t resist the chance to have such a classy address as Huff ‘n’ Puff Road.

2. Open auditions are held at The Pyramid for Craig Brewer’s next film, Black Snake Moan, which will be filmed in Memphis. Let’s see. District attorney Bill Gibbons made an appearance in The Firm, Memphis City Schools board member Michael Hooks Jr. showed up in Hustle & Flow. Looks like quite a few Memphians would rather be in the movies than doing their day jobs.

3. City officials once more turn up a $10 million budget “shortfall,” as they call it. We guess that sounds better than admitting, “Uh, we lost $10 million.” Even so, they assure citizens that the money can be made up without cutting services. Didn’t we hear this last year? And the year before?

4. A Harley-Davidson police motorcycle stored at the West Precinct is discovered stripped of just about everything but its frame. This is the first time we’ve heard of someone operating a chop shop out of cop shop.

5. Mechanics go on strike at Northwest Airlines. There were two horrific airplane crashes last week, neither of them involving Northwest, thank goodness, but this is not exactly news a nervous flyer wants to hear.

Categories
Music Music Features

local beat

Memphis is a city mired in its own history. Local disputes over the Confederate parks have drawn national interest, and in the case of Forrest Park, some would like to see the grave of Nathan Bedford Forrest moved. But when the All Memphis Soul Night happens Saturday, August 27th, at the Hi-Tone Café, a different kind of digging will be on display, and the exhumed history will be a lot funkier.

The event unites the local DJ team Buck Wilder & The Hook-Up with DJs from local label Memphix. All told, there will be five DJs performing, drawing on personal collections of more than 10,000 LPs and 45s. For these guys, “digging” – the art of record collecting – is more than a pastime.

When I ask Andrew McCalla and Eric Hermeyer – Buck Wilders and the Hook-Up, respectively – how long they’ve been collecting records, both laugh. “You mean how long have I had the disease?” McCalla muses. The two share a passion that transcends pleasure. For these collectors, digging is part archaeology, part obsession. “That’s a big part of why I live in Memphis,” McCalla explains, “to be close to all this amazing music.”

Memphis is home to a treasure trove of locally produced records, many recorded on small independent labels. To find obscure, one-off recordings involves tracing producers and arrangers. “There was this guy Style Wooten who had a studio at Park and Highland,” McCalla says. “We keep finding more and more labels he created – the Designer, Jace, Camaro, Styleway. Anytime I see that guy’s name, I snap the record up.”

Collecting these records means never going a day without trying to make some acquisition. “I get up every day, get out to my dealers, go to all my stores, surf the Web,” explains Chad Weekely, one of the founders of Memphix.

The Internet has had a profound impact on the way records are collected and, more importantly, valued. “Prices have skyrocketed with the Internet,” Hermeyer explains. “A record that in 1990 was valued at $5 now goes for $200 on the Internet.” The Web has created a collectors’ paradox, because the records are now much easier to find and much harder to afford.

The deep funk and soul records these DJs collect – much of which comes from Memphis – have found audiences worldwide. In fact, these DJs have found as much if not more acceptance overseas. “A record that goes for $1 here can fetch as much as 30 euros,” Hermeyer says. “When I’m [overseas] I’ve used records as currency, basically paying to stay in hotels in 45s.” McCalla and Hermeyer both work at Midtown’s Shangri-La Records, whose owner, Jared McStay, estimates a third of his shop’s sales are mail-order, with the majority of those going to the U.K. and Japan.

It was eager funk fans in England who helped turn Memphix from a one-off project into a label. “We didn’t have any intention of having a label,” Weekely says. “We slapped down $600 to press a 45. Memphix was just a name we made up so we could have something on there. I went to the 2000 DMC Championship,” a worldwide DJ competition held annually in London. “I just hustled the record there, and we got a break because DJ Klever used it in the competition.”

The record was a success, and in 2001, Weekley and Luke Sexton (aka Red Eye Jedi) were was on a 10-city European tour, followed by three shows with the touchstone of digging, DJ Shadow. Since then, Memphix has released a dozen vinyl singles, gaining notoriety among DJs and funk aficionados. Their releases have been all limited runs, usually around 500 copies. In a way, Memphix is unearthing sonic gems, but at the same time, their records restart the process, becoming rarities in and of themselves, sought after by the next tier of diggers.

Memphix used to deejay funk shows at the Hi-Tone on a regular basis. Weekely left Memphis almost two years ago, and in his absence Buck Wilder & The Hook-Up have picked up the torch, putting on shows together for six months now. Weekely, who is old friends with McCalla, recently returned to Memphis, and the stage was set for a DJ extravaganza. The show on Saturday, sponsored by Shangri-La, will begin with 45 minutes of archival footage from the Stax/Volt tour of 1967.

All Memphis Soul Night, with Memphix and Buck Wilder & The Hook-Up, is Saturday, August 27th, at the Hi-Tone Café. Admission is $3, and the show starts at 10 p.m.

Categories
Music Music Features

Suiting Herself

Shelby Lynne’s new album, Suit Yourself, is dotted with bits of studio banter – conversations and instructions caught on mic and spliced here and there, into and between the songs. It’s nowhere more noticeable than on “I Cry Everyday.” “Let’s get the claps in,” Lynne commands after the bridge, and sure enough, hands start clapping on the beat. As the song fades out, she orders, “Take out the claps,” and sure enough, they fade out and are gone. This curious technique is not just a behind-the-scenes glimpse of Lynne’s recording process. It’s also a strong reminder that she is producing this album herself, that she is calling the shots, that she is in control. She who giveth the handclaps taketh them away.

This small display of power is revealing: Lynne thrives when she has complete control over her output, from writing to arranging to recording. That was the hallmark of her 2000 album, I Am Shelby Lynne, which would have been called a comeback if more people had heard of her. Lynne had spent over a decade in Nashville, with five solid, if not exactly spectacular, albums to her name. Apparently tired of the Music Row rigmarole, she took the reins of her career and reinvented herself. Produced by Bill Bottrell, I Am Shelby Lynne sounds like someone going for broke: It’s full of laid-bare songs that updated Phil Spector’s wall-of-sound and Dusty Springfield’s soft-focus soul and recalled a time when rock-and-roll, R&B, and country were more or less synonymous – all in service to a woman who introduced herself to a new audience as unafraid and even willing to expose or embarrass herself.

I Am Shelby Lynne was a transformation of such Madonna magnitude that it was considered by many to be a debut album, and Lynne even won a Grammy for Best New Artist. It seemed genuinely odd, then, that for her hastily recorded 2001 follow-up, Love, Shelby, Lynne handed the reins over to professional hit-maker Glen Ballard, who had helped turn Wilson Phillips, Alanis Morissette, and the Corrs into stars. He not only produced Love, Shelby but also received co-writing credit on more than half of the tracks. The result was an album as slick and calculated as its predecessor was insistent and empowering; Ballard’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach made Lynne sound like all the country singers she’d been trying to show up.

Lynne regained her footing with the aptly titled Identity Crisis, which she produced and wrote on her own, but it’s Suit Yourself, her fourth album as the new Shelby Lynne and her ninth overall, that finally fulfills the promise of I Am Shelby Lynne. She gets sole writing credit on most of the songs, and her airy production gives her rough country songs a Brill Building polish while creating an airy sound that counterbalances her bravado vocals. Wanting a comfortable, live feel for the album, she corralled a backing band that includes drummer Bryan Owings, former Wallflower guitarist Michael Ward, and bassist/engineer Brian “Brain” Harrison, along with Benmont Tench and pedal steel player Robby Turner, whose guitar illuminates almost every track. But perhaps the most crucial presence here (besides, of course, Lynne herself) is Tony Joe White, who contributes two songs to the album: the chestnut “For Old Times Sake” and the closer, “Rainy Night in Georgia” (which Lynne renames “Track 12,” presumably because she can).

Even as Lynne oversees every aspect of the album, her songs make clear that life is uncontrollable and the future unseeable, an admission that makes Suit Yourself hardier and more conflicted than its predecessors. On “You Don’t Have a Heart,” she takes action and leaves an emotionally stunted lover. Conversely, on the Bush-bashing “You’re the Man,” she realizes she can’t take action against war, sprawl, or general corruption, even though she still presents her Southern liberalism as back-porch common sense.

But death looms larger than romance or politics on Suit Yourself, especially on tracks such as “Where Am I Now” and the lullaby “Sleep.” Even so, Lynne stalwartly tempers her fears of mortality with intimations of faith. “Turn the noise up, make it louder,” she sings on “I Won’t Die Alone,” “I can’t leave here as a coward/I won’t die alone.” She sounds alternately resigned and relieved at the thought of death, knowing that the brave-face lyrics are not a statement of fact but a hope that’s tentative at best. The song loses none of its impact for being so upbeat.

In an act of awkward sequencing, “I Won’t Die Alone” is followed by a trifle of a song (the less-than-a-minute “You and We”) before Lynne launches into the album’s best track, “Johnny Met June,” which was inspired by the death of Johnny Cash. (Lynne must feel particularly close to the couple: She plays June’s sister Carrie Carter in the upcoming biopic Walk the Line.) The two songs address two sides of the same enormous issue: If “I Won’t Die Alone” is about having people in life to send you off, then “Johnny Met June” is about having loved ones waiting for you when you finally get where you’re going. Shelby Lynne may not know where she’s going, but she’s definitely making her own way.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Aristocrats and Brothers Grimm

Ten minutes into a local promotional screening of The Aristocrats a few weeks ago there was nervous laughter echoing around the theater, quickly followed by squeals and gasps, and then a few walkouts.

Produced by comics Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette (the taller, talking half of Penn & Teller), The Aristocrats is essentially a document of more than 100 comedians of different types and levels of fame telling variations on the same joke. Jillette has said – warned, really – that the film contains no violence or nudity but does contain “unspeakable obscenity.” And if you think that’s an exaggeration, trust that it isn’t. I’ve seen people walk out of movies before – from boredom or outrage – but never in response to language.

The title of the film is also the title – and punchline – of the joke each comedian tells, an old vaudeville set-up about a family act being pitched to a talent agent. Between premise and punchline, the joke is a blank slate meant to be filled with the vilest content (scatological, transgressive, whatever) the teller can imagine. Because the content is too blue for most audiences, the joke is most often told backstage among comedians, a “secret handshake” between pros.

The argument being made by The Aristocrats is that the blank slate and the improvisation required to fill it make the joke akin to jazz. It’s a basic melody that anybody can riff on. Watching so many comedians spin their variations on the same set-up is, the film suggests, an ideal way to demonstrate the jazzlike virtuosity and individual expression of stand-up comedy.

The problem with this assertion is that most variations on the joke aren’t funny, just shocking. And the shock factor detracts from the ostensible point of the project: The audience is too taken aback by the what that’s being said to notice the how, to notice the personal nuance each comedian brings to the telling. The content obscures the artistry.

What The Aristocrats – the film and the titular joke itself – seems to really be about, though none of the film’s participants directly acknowledge it (George Carlin comes close), is overcoming the self-censorship impulse. It’s this negation of self-censorship that drives the best and most important stand-up comics, from Carlin to Richard Pryor to Chris Rock. The willingness to say anything at any time to anyone, to violate any verbal taboo, is often more important than the simple act of doing so. And this explains why “The Aristocrats” (the joke) is largely a backstage exchange. It’s the equivalent of a singer doing vocal exercises to keep his or her performances sharp.

Unless you’re into prurience or transgression for its own sake, the joke itself soon ceases to be interesting, but there are still variations and elements tangential to the premise that satisfy: Relatively unknown comic Wendy Liebman gently inverts the joke, while Kevin Pollak tells it in the form of a Christopher Walken impression. There’s the pure spectacle of the dirtiest language coming from the most unlikely sources: a very pregnant Judy Gold, the Smothers Brothers, or ostensibly wholesome Full House/America’s Funniest Home Videos star Bob Saget.

The discussion of the joke – its parameters and politics – is often more interesting than its telling: that there seem to be different rules for women comedians; that it isn’t quite the same shibboleth among black comics. (As Rock explains, black comedians never dreamed of mainstream success, so they just told their dirtiest stuff on stage.) And there’s a very funny discussion of alternative punchlines: The Sophisticates, The Royalty, The Republicans.

But other pleasures are more incidental. The Aristocrats offers an irresistible tour of a clubby comic subculture, one that admits not only stand-up practioners from the well-known to the unknown but also writers, magicians, jugglers, and mimes, the staff of The Onion and the animated cast of South Park. Where these participants are filmed is almost as interesting as why they care. Shot over the course of two years on consumer-quality video cameras, The Aristocrats documents these comics wherever they can be corralled: homes, offices, backstage dressing rooms, empty sets, cafes, even – in the case of Robin Williams – the beach.

There’s a fascinating documentary in here somewhere, but “The Aristocrats” gets in the way. The film is meant to be an exhibit of the musical notion “it’s the singer, not the song.” But in this case, the song too often obscures the singer.

– Chris Herrington

In following his doomed attempt to adapt Don Quixote to the big screen, the documentary Lost in La Mancha proved there may be no figure more quixotic than Terry Gilliam himself.

The Brothers Grimm, Gilliam’s latest feature, confirms him as a director who has lost control of an overeager imagination. The film features Matt Damon and Heath Ledger as brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, respectively, who make a business of eliminating monsters and ghosts at the behest of spooked villagers. Jacob truly believes in the folk tales, while Wilhelm sees them as a way to fleece the populace. The movie careens through the Brothers Grimm catalog, occasionally pulling out interesting visuals but failing to maintain any sense of coherency.

Part of the issue is Gilliam’s obsession with mise-en-scène. A look at Gilliam’s other films reveals that plot is often secondary to spectacle.

Gilliam got his start as a cartoonist for Monty Python, coming to define their zany style of animation. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which is either the best or worst film Gilliam has made so far, is similar to The Brothers Grimm – an over-the-top amalgamation of fairy tales and wondrous set pieces in which the narrative feels mostly like an excuse.

The Brothers Grimm, like many Gilliam films, is dedicated to protecting the imagination and resisting the specters of the Enlightenment. In this film, the theme takes the form of nationalist conflicts between the rational French and the superstitious Germans. The film begins by acknowledging the danger of this conflict. A young Jacob is sent to get medicine for his sister. Instead, he returns with magic beans and his sister perishes, a mistake the older Wilhelm will never forget.

Gilliam does not seem interested, however, in heeding his own warning. The film is keen on presenting a series of fascinating and refreshingly dark snippets from the Grimm catalog. The film does have some memorable moments, such as when a demon horse swallows a young child whole. The enchanted forest is wonderfully done, with trees that creep and shift.

Yet the film also has major continuity errors, which are jarring to the viewer. At one point a young girl is kidnapped by the evil forces in the woods, then is somehow present in the village the next day, when she is kidnapped a second time.

The three main characters, the brothers Grimm and their shared love interest, a sexy German woods-woman played by Lena Headey, are all interesting and well played. The supporting cast, however, which includes an Italian torture expert and a stuffy French general, never really find their place in the story. The malevolent Italian, Cavaldi, is especially frustrating, spewing stilted jokes and whining, as I imagine Gilliam would, for a chance to play with his exquisitely intricate torture machines.

The film, while dark, might appeal to children. Gilliam’s flights of fancy have always had a childish bent, and the plot difficulties that bother an adult probably wouldn’t distract a younger viewer from the eye-candy. It is frustrating to see this film, knowing that if Gilliam could only rein himself in he might be able to make a work that is simultaneously imaginative and dense but also coherent. – Ben Popper

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Plante: How It Looks

Plante: How It Looks

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly On the Wall

TOMMY LEE PARK

If indeed we end up reconfiguring three downtown parks because of their unfortunate connections to a racist past, let’s go ahead and do a clean sweep. A lot of people used to complain about the tall, phallic-shaped obelisk in Tom Lee Park, or at least the vintage inscription on it, “To a Worthy Negro.” (That was how, once upon a time, a hero like the African-American Tom Lee, who saved several people from drowning, could be referred to.) Solution: keep the obelisk (which is due to be replaced by a more fitting memorial for Lee) and reassign it – and one end of the riverside park – to a near namesake, Tommy Lee, the Motley Crue drummer whose group has favored our city with its playing, even recently, and who is perhaps best known for the sex video with then wife Pamela Anderson that exposed his his heroic, er, dimensions. Proposed new inscription: To a Very Worthy White Boy.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

COMMENTARY: ON THE ROAD AGAIN — AND AGAIN

LUCERO’S ROY BERRY HAS A POSSE

You want your band to make it in the music biz? Tour. Tour constantly. In light of today’s (lack of) radio play, touring is the answer. If you have a good band and you can get past the first 4 or 5 completely awful tours, then you have a decent chance of making it on the road. The odds are against you, but you can square up the odds when you take the plunge over and over again.

Two of the most successful bands from Memphis in the last 5 years have been the North Mississippi All-Stars and Lucero. Why? Incessant, constant, and ad nauseum touring. Both bands have committed to sleeping in stinky vans, sharing fan’s floors or shabby hotel rooms, and playing, playing, playing. Neither band would have reached the level of popularity that they now have without such a strong touring ethic. It is what separates each of those two bands from “local” bands who do not make the commitment to the road.

Constant touring has unforeseen and unpredictable consequences that can help propel a band to new levels of fans. Touring helps bands make their own breaks. One never knows what dj, film director, blogger, or music biz folk are in a crowd when a band takes the stage. More playing increases the odds that more good things can happen to a band. Certainly bands on the road today benefit from increased promotional tools of the internet including web sites touting their tour dates, streaming music, and fan chat rooms. Pictures (or recordings) from a live show can be quickly or even simultaneously posted on the internet, enhancing the chances that new fans can be reached efficiently on the internet. With websites, fans can become fulcrums to propel bands to new levels of notoriety quickly and cheaply.

Lucero’s drummer Roy Berry is currently a recipient of a promotional fan(atic)’s viral campaign. The campaign has been created by a Lucero fan with the name “Royninja” on the Lucero chat board. The campaign promoting the “Roy Berry Army” will soon be taking the awareness of Roy Berry (and Lucero) to a whole new level in a hilarious viral marketing campaign.

The “Roy Berry Army,” “Roy Berry is Your Hero,” or “Royninja” campaign is not dissimilar to the one that revived the long dead image of Andre the Giant in the mid-to-late ‘90s. The “Andre the Giant has a Posse” sticker campaign, created by skaters in Rhode Island who had access to some silk screen and sticker equipment, quickly took over the U.S. first and then spread to Europe and the rest of the world. Their program quickly disseminated stickers and spray-painted images of Andre the Giant in clubs, on street poles and sidewalks, on subways, and everywhere else. Incredibly this image campaign around Andre the Giant was one of the most cost effective and successful worldwide marketing campaigns of all time, even inspiring copycat stickers and several lampoons.

The RBA campaign differs slightly in that the medium of the message has Roy Berry Army members taking pictures while wearing an oversized mask of their hero, cut-out and worn over their face. They then upload the picture, which was ideally taken in a high profile location—the more high profile, the better. The RBA will be very hard to stop as this catches fire. Royninja currently sends the masks he makes to other Lucero fans, but he has no monopoly on the process: he lays out instructions on his website on how other fans can create their own Roy Berry masks.

Berry, who has been a monster drummer in Memphis for over a decade in bands like Royfood, Bobslead Hyena, and the Simple Ones and produced many of the early Grifters tracks, is enjoying some of his biggest success with Lucero these days, recently playing to almost 400 people in Lubboch, Texas on a Tuesday night. It could be the army that’s propelling Lucero to a Japanese tour in September. Who knows what Japan will think of the burgeoning Roy Berry Army?

Images of the Roy Berry Army can be seen here.

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Categories
Opinion

CITY BEAT

UNDERPERFORMERS

It looks like the bull market in giant pandas is over.

Since pandas LeLe and YaYa arrived in Memphis April 7, 2003, with great fanfare, 1.2 million people have seen them in the China Exhibit at the Memphis Zoo. But attendance has fallen well short of the expectations of zoo officials, who predicted an additional 400,000 visitors in the first year. Instead, the increase was 177,590, and, as expected, attendance has continued to decline since 2004.

“We wish we could have made that number, but we had who we had come and we were glad to have them,” said Memphis Zoo spokesman Brian Carter.

Attendance is only one source of revenue for the zoo, along with memberships, donations, and public funding. On a recent visit, the zoo and China Exhibit were spotlessly clean, and the pandas were sleeping in their air-conditioned day rooms behind a wall of glass while a handful of weekday visitors snapped photos.

The Memphis Zoo has a good reputation for frugality. Charity Navigator, which rates charities on spending efficiency, gives the zoo its highest rating of four stars. But pandas are high-maintenance celebrities. To borrow them from the Chinese government, the Memphis Zoo and three other American zoos with giant pandas each agreed to pay $1 million a year. If attendance continues to decline, it could eventually put a strain on zoo finances, especially since a key corporate donor, Northwest Airlines, is facing bankruptcy.

A panda cub would be good for business. LeLe, 7, and YaYa, 5, are just now at reproductive age, but pandas are anything but rabbits and monkeys when it comes to amour. Should a cub be born, the zoo would have to pay a one-time fee of $600,000 to panda conservation programs.

In hindsight, it is beginning to look like the zoos paid Google-like valuations for the much-hyped pandas. A preliminary report mentioned in The Washington Post this month said the four U.S. zoos with pandas — Washington, D.C., San Diego, Atlanta, and Memphis — are sharing attendance data “so they can use them to lobby China to lower panda rental fees when they try to renew their leases.”

Dennis Kelly, the chief executive of Zoo Atlanta, is compiling the figures. He told the Flyer the study will not be complete until September. He is adding data for 2004, which will make it more relevant to Memphis, since the pandas didn’t arrive here until 2003.

Carter said the $16 million China Exhibit is fully paid off, mainly from private funds. As far as renegotiation of the lease, he said “that is something that the Giant Panda Conservation Foundation is working on with the Chinese government.”

“Panda-monium,” as it was hyped by media sponsor The Commercial Appeal and others, crested in 2003 with all the fanfare of the arrival of the Memphis Grizzlies NBA team. Visitors originally paid an extra fee to see the pandas, but now the regular $13 adult admission covers pandas and all other exhibits.

An economic-impact study in 2004 by researchers Jeff Wallace and Andrea Orchik of the Sparks Bureau of Business and Economic Research at the University of Memphis said the pandas would be well worth the investment even after the predictable decline in attendance after the first two years. The study said the zoo had been averaging about 687,000 visitors a year from 1992 to 2002, running neck-and-neck with Graceland as the most popular attraction in Memphis. The authors predicted 400,000 extra visits in the first panda year and an average of 187,500 extra visits each year through 2013. Panda power, the researchers said, translated to $270 million in extra goods and services in the local economy and 4,962 additional jobs.

There were less than half that many additional visitors. Attendance in the first year of the pandas was 820,223, an increase of 177,590 or 27 percent over the previous year. The following year, 2004-2005, attendance declined to 779,007. With temperatures of near 100 degrees and children back in school this week, the gift shop had marked down panda merchandise such as stuffed bears and a photo of Elvis with a panda. LeLe and YaYa, who like a cool climate, were sleeping on rocks with their backs to the windows.

The zoo is moving ahead with its next new attraction, Northwest Passage, which Carter said is 80 percent complete and will open in March 2006. Northwest Airlines, which is battling striking mechanics and has stopped providing free snacks and magazines on its flights to save money, made a financial contribution of an undisclosed amount to the exhibit but is not the title sponsor. The name is geographical and historical, Carter said. “And the red-and-white lettering on the sign [Northwest’s colors] is coincidental, believe it or not.”

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Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

POLITICS

FRIST COMES TO LISTEN — AND TO SHOW AND TELL

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, looking into a year, 2006, in which he intends to vacate his Senate seat and, as everybody understands, seek the presidency of the United States, came to Memphis on Tuesday as the last stage of what he has been calling a statewide “listening tour.”

No doubt he is interested in hearing what’s on his constituents’ minds. He is also interested in telling them what’s on his mind. And, as he addressed the downtown Memphis Rotary Club at the Convention Center on Tuesday, he saw to both purposes.

He told the members frankly that he’d used his influence to get a variety of projects funded that were of interest to Memphis. He told them that he had three main concerns that he intended to deal with in what was left of his second Senate term: (1) China, and the trade and job issues associated with that long-term colossus; (2) the cost of health care; and (3) the War on Terror.

Frist, a renowned transplant surgeon before his election and a physician who still plies his trade in pro bono missions to the Third World, also took a poll of his audience on the question of embryonic stem cell research. How many people thought the government should keep hands off and not contribute additional funding to such research? he asked. And he got a sprinkling of hands. How many thought that the government should indeed get behind embryonic stem cell research with accelerated funding?

This latter was precisely the course he had recently recommended, of course – to the dismay of the social conservatives whose support he had been courting for most of the previous year, and to the satisfaction of his medical peers and, if the polls are to be trusted, to the majority of his fellow citizens.
Certainly an overwhelming majority of the Rotarians present on Tuesday supported Frist’s statement of support – which represented a direct break with the Bush administration, whose main man he is in the Senate. It was clear that Frist took satisfaction in the outcome of his impromptu poll – one which, it is said, he has taken at every stop on the Tennessee tour, and with the same net result.

After the speech, Frist was asked about two other issues. What about the new book Herding Cats by former Majority Leader Trent Lott, whose job he inherited through what Lott, in the book, calls a “betrayal”? The Mississippian alleges that Frist had undermined him to get the job after the flap over Lott’s ill- birthday praise in late 2002 of now deceased centenarian Strom Thurmond’s segregationst past.

(Lest it be thought that the ambitious Frist was propelled only by the immediacy of that scandal, he had told the Flyer as far back as 1998 that “a lot of us are not really satisfied with how things are going” on Lott’s watch. The Tennesse senator said then that if and when “20 or so” Republican senators were prepared to support him, he might launch his own leadership bid.)

Frist: “I’ve not read the comments, I’ve not read the book. I have tremendous respect for Trent Lott. I’ve worked with him very closely. I have lunch with him two days a week. He helped me on the energy bill. He helped move America forward on the highway bill, on the recent CAFTA bill. I look forward to working with him constructively. And that’s pretty much where it sits. I know that it was very difficult in the past when he, uh, sat down, and I respect his interpretation of the events that led to that. I’m really looking to the future and to my continued close work with a man who I respect remendously, Trent Lott, who’s served the people of Mississippi in a very positive and constructive way.”

And what about the resolution of the filibuster battle some months back, which was ended in a compromise solution proposed by his likely presidential rival, Senator John McCain? Did he regard this alternative as a defeat for his own hard-line position

Frist: “You know, being the elected majority leader of the United States Senate means you do certain things, and I have led on principle. I have led on the basis that I say I’m going to do something, and then I go ahead and do it. I feel strongly on behalf of that principle that nominees deserve and up or down vote. It is our responsibility to treat these nominees with respect, all these nominees, and with advice and consent, and in doing that, I stood on principle to give them an up or down vote. Other people felt that not all candidates deserve an up or down vote, and I, you know, respect that, but I don’t agree with it. In terms of was I successful or not, in standing on principle, six nominees who were filibustered in the last Congress by the other side of the aisle, who thought that they had no chance in the future, because of my standing on principle are now sitting federal judges serving the American people.”

‘Put that foolishness to rest’:

The name of A C Wharton keeps turning up on this or that political blogster’s Web site in connection with a possible race for the presumably soon-to-be-vacant 9th District congressional seat of Rep. Harold Ford Jr..

Forget about it. Asked about it this week, the Shelby County mayor made about as clear-cut and definitive rejection of the idea as it is possible for a politician to make in this day and age.

“Let me be as clear and unequivocal as possible,” Wharton said. “I have not had any intention, do not have any intention, plans, whatever, to run for Congress.”

Even the place itself had no charm for Wharton. “I’ve been there and done that,” he said. “I was a trial lawyer with the EOC [Economic Opportunity Commission], and I worked with another firm there. I get in there once in a while to testify and do some business. No, I have no interest.”

No interest, no plans, no intention: Out of the mouths of other politicians, anyhow, these can be political wiggle words. Would the mayor eliminate all doubt by making his renunciation of a congressional race absolute and categorical? “Yes,” he answered firmly, maintaining that he had owned only two objectives politically. “One I accomplished when I won in 2002. And I want to run again. That’s it.”

Wharton continued to nail the door shut. “We already have an excellent congressman, and whether he runs [for the U.S. Senate] or not, and I’m confident he will, I have absolutely no interest in that job. And look, I’m 61 years old. I just started this career. It’s rough enough to have to run every four years. The way Congress is, I’d be lucky to say at about age 85 [here Wharton assumed a creaky, codger’s voice], ‘By George, I finally got something passed.’”

The county mayor went on to note the post-9/11 searches and restrictions on one’s movements on Capitol Hill and to contrast that with the freer and easier atmosphere of 30 years ago when he first experienced Washington as a visitor. “I have a better job here,” he concluded. A final comment concerning the speculation about his running for Congress: “I wish you’d do me a favor and put that foolishness to rest.”

Deed done. Read it and weep, bloggers.

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