Month: September 2005

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Strike Two

When George W. Bush rose to the presidency in 2001, many of us expressed dismay that his well-documented lack of familiarity with policy issues would be a detriment to his performance. Since his previous record included a history of consistent failure, both personal and professional, and a rise to political prominence based almost entirely upon his father’s name and powerful political connections, we were concerned that the younger Bush lacked the leadership skills necessary to perform well in the nation’s highest office.

But in 2001, most Americans were willing to give the new President the benefit of the doubt. After all, our economy was thriving; we had large budgetary surpluses; the United States was the one remaining super-power in a world that appeared to be increasingly democratic and increasingly more stable.

 Then along came 9/11, destroying that stability in the matter of a few frightful hours. At first, Bush displayed forceful leadership in this new kind of war, smashing al-Qaeda strongholds in Afghanistan and ramping up our security efforts both at home and abroad. 

But soon, Bush’s war on terrorism began tilting toward Iraq, a country that, as we all now know, had no real links with the groups that bombed New York and Washington. 

Today, two-plus years after our ill-conceived invasion of Iraq, we are bogged down in the quagmire of guerrilla warfare so many of us feared. We have achieved few if any of our pre-invasion objectives. While initial victory on the battlefield was easily obtained, the post-war struggle for stability has been an abject failure. Incompetent leadership and incompetent execution have become the trademarks of our Iraq misadventure.

 That same adjective can so far be applied to Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina, the second great domestic catastrophe of his presidency. The president fiddled (actually, he played the guitar) while Rome burned, in this case ignoring for days the post-hurricane traumas of New Orleans and coastal Mississippi. And as is becoming increasingly clear, the Bush administration’s preparation for the impact of this Category 4 hurricane roaring across the Gulf of Mexico was woefully inadequate.

 Sadly, this Strike Two against our nation will result in considerably more fatalities than the Strike One of 9/11. Katrina’s overall impact — the million-plus people from all walks of life, for example, now made refugees in their own country — will far surpass that of September 11th. Can we even contemplate what might happen if another enemy, natural or man-made, throws us another fastball at 98 miles per hour?

Now, when America needs real leadership, we find it sorely absent at the top of the political pyramid. We hope and pray that President Bush can change, and change quickly, becoming the “uniter not a divider” he once promised us all he would be. For we can ill afford to have Captain Queeg at the helm of our ship of state during these most perilous of times.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

“My Pet Goat” II

While a rising chorus in the press has taken the White House, FEMA, and the Pentagon to task for performing miserably in their response to the human disaster on the Gulf Coast, few have focused on the most telling aspect of the entire failure. It’s not just incompetence. It’s a shameful lack of concern: the 9/11 “My Pet Goat” dithering on an administration-wide scale.

Simply stated, the president and his top advisers chose vacation over action.

While the media has done a good job portraying the overall failure of leadership, it has not focused enough on this deadly dereliction of duty.

President Bush, in his weekly radio address last Saturday, said: “In America, we do not abandon our fellow citizens in their hour of need.” But Bush, and his top aides, quite frankly, did just that.

I was reminded of this again on Saturday, seeing pictures of VicePresident Dick Cheney finally showing up at the White House after riding out the storm of the century in Wyoming. Perhaps he brought back with him a couple dozen trout to throw on the grill for the White House staffers.

This follows Bush himself remaining on vacation for more than two days after the storm hit, despite acknowledging this was the worst disaster in the nation’s history. He did take a trip during those days, not back to Washington but out to San Diego to deliver a political speech comparing his Iraq war to World War II. It got little play because nearly everyone else in the country, beyond his inner circle, was focused on New Orleans.

What that trip did produce was a picture of Bush laughing with a country singer and strumming a guitar. But at least the president did start heading back to Washington late Wednesday. As he did, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was still enjoying her vacation in New York.

In fact, that night she enjoyed a few good yucks while attending the goofy Broadway play Spamalot. Ironically, the Bush team’s performance this week did indeed seem like something out of a Monty Python skit. Each, in his or her own way, took a bunch of “silly walks.”

Condi also played tennis with Monica Seles and on Thursday went on a shoe-shopping spree on Fifth Avenue until a fellow customer yelled at her for not doing her job and bloggers exposed all of this. Then she hurriedly headed back to Washington. Whoops, we then discovered she was overdue in getting a grip on offers to help that were pouring in from overseas governments and organizations.

And what of FEMA chief Michael Brown? He was so out-of-it that he didn’t even know about the 10,000 evacuees living and dying at the Convention Center, even after they had received wide TV coverage for a solid day. The next day, the president greeted him with, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” A medal is surely on the way.

At a press conference on Thursday, the fourth day of the disaster, with newspapers and TV reporting tens of thousands stranded at hospitals, homes, and a highway overpass, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff was asked by a reporter if he thought only hundreds or maybe many more needed to be rescued. He replied: “I’d be guessing. I mean, a thousand seems like a very large number, but we have already rescued several thousand. Hopefully, most people have gotten themselves onto roofs and have been picked up.”

At the same press briefing, Chertoff was asked if he thought there were enough soldiers on the ground to control the situation. His answer: “I’m satisfied that we have not only more than enough forces there and on the way. And frankly, what we’re doing is we are putting probably more than we need in order to send an unambiguous message that we will not tolerate lawlessness or violence or interference with the evacuation.”

While the 9/11 “My Pet Goat” episode was certainly illuminating, it’s not certain what might have worked out better that day had the president dropped the book and taken action. But his failure to grab the reins in the hurricane catastrophe for three days last week probably doomed hundreds, or more, to death.

This is not mere incompetence but dereliction of duty. The press should call it by its proper name.

Categories
News News Feature

Public Enemy Number One

Just before dawn on September 26, 1933, a dozen men armed with shotguns and machine guns crept up to a small brick house in South Memphis. Inside was a ruthless killer who had slaughtered four policemen in Kansas City, a man so skilled with a machine gun that he could stitch his name in .45-caliber slugs.

The FBI agents kicked in the front door and burst inside. Cowering in a corner of the living room was their quarry, his face white with fear, his raised arms trembling. “Don’t shoot, G-men,” he pleaded. “Don’t shoot.” Without firing a shot, the agents had captured the man feared throughout America as Machine Gun Kelly.

At least that’s the story most people have heard — the stuff of legends and grade “B” movies. What a shame that very little of it is true. Here’s the real story of Machine Gun Kelly, the Memphis boy who grew up to become Public Enemy Number One.

Memphis Days

The gangster era brings to mind today frightening scenes of smoke-filled speakeasies, blazing machine guns, gangland massacres, and hoodlums like Baby Face Nelson, John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Al Capone. But the notorious outlaw who became known as Machine Gun Kelly — the guy with the toughest-sounding nickname of them all — was in reality George Francis Barnes Jr., the son of a well-to-do Memphis insurance agent.

Barnes was born in Chicago in 1900 (some sources say 1896). When the boy was 2, the family moved to Memphis and bought a pleasant two-story home, still standing today at the corner of Rembert and Cowden in Central Gardens. He attended Idlewild Elementary School, then Central High School, but he could hardly be called a model student. His teachers, who talked to reporters about him years afterward, felt he never “applied himself,” as they put it.

After graduating from Central, Barnes briefly studied at Mississippi A&M College in Starkville, where he met a pretty coed named Genevieve Ramsey. They eloped and were married in Clarksdale in 1919. The young man’s new father-in-law, a wealthy levee contractor, gave Barnes a good job as commissary clerk with his company. Barnes’ respectability, however, was short-lived. His father-in-law died in an accidental dynamite explosion, and his marriage ended in divorce a few years later.

Barnes came back to Memphis and drifted from job to job — selling used cars, driving a cab with the 784 Taxi Company, even running a goat farm out on Poplar Pike. But he soon discovered a more lucrative means of making a living, and one day in 1923 he was caught operating a still near present-day Ridgeway and sentenced to six months in the county workhouse. He turned up a few years later in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he was arrested for bootlegging and fined $250. Another arrest in Tulsa for selling liquor on an Indian reservation sent him to the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, for a three-year term.

The Birth of Machine Gun Kelly

It was after his release from Leavenworth that Barnes met his second wife, Kathryn Thorne, an attractive brunette with a quick wit and friendly smile. Kathryn had actually been born Cleo Brooks in Saltillo, Mississippi, but decided “Kathryn” sounded more glamorous. She had been married three times before she met Kelly. According to Stanley Hamilton, author of Machine Gun Kelly’s Last Stand, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover liked to cite a man who dated Kathryn a few times, describing her like this: “She took me to more speakeasies, more bootleg dives, more holes in the wall than I thought were in all of Texas. She knows more bums than the police department. She can drink liquor like water.” And as we’ll see, she could play fast and loose with the truth.

About this time, stories began to surface around the Southwest of a fearless robber calling himself “Machine Gun Kelly,” a deadly master of the tommygun, who “signed” his holdups by blasting his name across billboards and bank walls.

It’s true that after one bank job in Texas, Barnes — who by now was calling himself George Kelly — used a machine gun to shoot his last name on a signpost as he and Kathryn raced out of town, but this lone act of bravado would hardly account for his widespread reputation. And he certainly didn’t look or act very menacing. After the robbery of a bank in Tupelo, the teller tried to describe Kelly as “the kind of guy, that, if you looked at him, you would never think he was a bank robber.”

No, it was Kathryn who bought Kelly his first machine gun, picking up a .45-caliber Thompson at a pawnshop, and coached him to shoot walnuts off fence posts. (She would later smile sweetly in court and protest, “Why, if I’d ever seen a machine gun, I’d be afraid of it.”) It was she who passed out used cartridge cases in underworld haunts, saying, “Have a souvenir of my husband, Machine Gun Kelly, who’s off robbing banks somewhere.” And police say it was Kathryn — not Kelly — who had the necessary underworld connections, and the brains, to pull off a really bold stunt that would make them the most wanted couple in America.

The Urschel Kidnapping

On the night of July 22, 1933, Kelly and an accomplice calmly walked into the living room of millionaire oilman Charles F. Urschel while he and his wife were playing cards with friends at their Oklahoma City mansion. They blindfolded him, dumped him in the back seat of their roadster, and roared off into the night. A few days later, the Urschel family received a ransom demand for $200,000, the largest ransom ever demanded up to that time. Among other things, the typed note explained: “Remember this — if any trickery is attempted you will find the remains of Urschel and instead of joy there will be double grief — for someone very near and dear to the Urschel family is under constant surveillance and will likewise suffer for your error.” The money was dropped off outside a hotel in Kansas City, per the instructions, and nine days later Urschel was back with his family, unharmed.

By present-day standards, that doesn’t seem enough cause for newspapers of the day to proclaim Kelly “the most dangerous man in America.” But in the 1930s, gangs had discovered that kidnapping was a profitable business. Such enterprises may have continued relatively unchecked but for the abduction and murder of famed flyer Charles Lindbergh’s baby, an atrocity that shocked the nation. The resulting Lindbergh Law, enacted in 1933, made kidnapping a federal offense, punishable by death or life imprisonment More importantly, the law no longer restricted kidnapping investigations to local police agencies. Now the feds could be called in.

It was simply bad timing for Kelly. The Urschel case was the first gangland kidnapping under the Lindbergh Law, and police officials were determined to set an example. FBI director Hoover announced he was taking personal charge of the case and promised to catch the “dirty yellow rats” responsible.

A nationwide manhunt began immediately, but it was actually Urschel’s excellent memory that led authorities to his captors. Although blindfolded much of the time, he had noticed the sound of oil pumps working in a nearby field, and he recalled that a twin-engine airplane had flown directly overhead, except for one day when it rained. A quick check of all flight schedules around Oklahoma City, combined with other details Urschel provided, led detectives to a lonely farmhouse outside Paradise, Texas. The arrest of the farmhouse occupants provided the cops with their first link to a major suspect. The farm was owned by Robert and Ora Shannon — the parents of Kathryn Kelly.

Kathryn and her husband had fled, but the net was fast closing around them, and they knew it. Their only hope was to lay low for a while. After burying their split of the ransom money on other farms nearby, they drove for weeks throughout the Southwest. Kelly died his dark hair blond, Kathryn wore a red wig, and to complete their disguise, they even “borrowed” 12-year-old Geraldine Arnold from a friend, to pose as their daughter. But time was running out, and they both knew they needed a safe place to stay.

The Memphis Hideout

Early in September 1933, the Kellys turned up in Memphis and contacted Langford Ramsey, Kelly’s brother-in-law from his first marriage. Ramsey directed them to a bungalow at 1408 Rayner owned by John Tichenor, a used-car salesman, and Seymour Travis, a grocery clerk. There, on this quiet street off South Parkway, the Kellys would hide until — well, they would think of something.

But Kelly could run no farther without money, and lots of it. His only hope was to retrieve the thousands of dollars they had left behind, buried in Thermos jugs at different farms and ranches in Texas. He persuaded Ramsey to fetch it, taking along the Arnold girl, who could show him the location.

It was a desperate gamble that failed. Federal agents had already traced the money to one farm and dug it up. When Ramsey heard this, he sent the girl back to her parents in Oklahoma. How was he to know that the authorities were waiting for the girl as soon as she stepped off the train? She innocently told them what they wanted to hear: Machine Gun Kelly was stranded in Memphis.

FBI director Hoover instantly dispatched special agents here with a federal arrest warrant charging Kelly with “kidnapping and massacre.” Since the Urschel kidnapping, four policeman had been slain in Kansas City while transporting a gangster to jail, and another officer was killed in Chicago during a bank robbery. Machine guns were used in both crimes, and authorities concluded that only one man in America could be responsible — Kelly. Hoover went so far as to say that “Kelly and his gang of desperadoes are regarded as the most dangerous ever encountered.”

Ramsey’s failure to get the money meant Kelly was trapped, and radio reports told him the dragnet was closing swiftly. It was but a matter of time before a showdown, so he sent Travis out to buy a pistol. Kelly, it seems, had left his machine gun behind in Texas. As he ruefully admitted later, “I didn’t think I would need it here.”

A Morning Raid

On the night of September 25, 1933, Kelly stayed awake by reading a Master Detective magazine. He was halfway through “My Blood-Curdling Ride With Death” when a soft thump outside startled him. Peeking through the windows, he saw the noise was only the newspaper tossed onto the porch by the paper boy. Kelly stepped outside in his underwear and picked up the paper. When he came back inside, he walked down the hallway to the bathroom — and forgot to lock the door behind him.

At that moment, two cars pulled up quietly outside the house. Special agents from the FBI leapt out, followed by Sergeant William J. Raney and other detectives from the Memphis Police Department. Raney gingerly tried the front door. To his surprise, it was open. Sawed-off shotgun at the ready, the detective stepped into the living room and found it empty. Through an open doorway he could glimpse Tichenor and Travis asleep in a front bedroom. But where was Kelly? Would he come out shooting?

Raney moved quietly down the hallway. Just then, Kelly stepped out of the bathroom, the pistol in his hand. With a shotgun aimed at his heart, he knew the game was up. “Okay, boys,” he said, dropping the gun to the floor. “I’ve been waiting all night for you.” The other men entered the house and found Kathryn asleep in a back room. The hunt was over.

A Sensational Capture

Memphians were astonished by the Press-Scimitar‘s banner headline that afternoon: “MACHINE GUN KELLY CAPTURED IN MEMPHIS.” Kelly and Kathryn were taken to the county jail and charged with kidnapping. Bond was set at $100,000 apiece. At a news conference that morning, chief of police Will D. Lee gave reporters the details of the capture, adding, it seems, a few points of his own: “When Kelly looked into the muzzle of a sawed-off shotgun in the hands of a Memphis detective sergeant, there was a thin yellow fluid that began to rise up the canal of his spinal column, in much the fashion that mercury rises in a thermometer on an exceedingly hot day, and he immediately dropped his revolver and submitted quietly to arrest.”

(The story always told by J. Edgar Hoover, that Kelly was the first to use the term “G-Man” when he shouted, “Don’t shoot, G-Men!” is certainly false. For one thing, Kelly recognized Raney from earlier run-ins with him, and the term had already been in use for some years. Besides, Kelly himself always denied saying it: “No, I never said that, but if they say I did I won’t argue about it.”)

Behind Bars

Kathryn’s public-relations campaign had certainly succeeded. She had made her husband into one of the most famous criminals in America. Both she and Kelly seemed to relish their notoriety when first arrested. He even joked with his guards (“Say, lend me that machine gun for just a minute, will you”) and complained lightheartedly about the jail accommodations: “This cell’s not big enough to swing a cat in. But that doesn’t matter; I won’t be in here long.”

Kathryn cheerfully smiled and posed for newsreel cameramen from Fox, Paramount, and other agencies, who had flown to Memphis, eager for just a glimpse of the fugitives.

Within days, though, the Kellys’ attitude changed. Kathryn grew tired of the relentless questioning and whined that she was just an innocent victim. “I don’t want to say anything about that guy Kelly,” she told reporters, “but he got me into this terrible mess and I won’t want to have anything more to do with him.”

Kelly was disgusted with the incessant photo sessions and was outraged by the leg shackles placed on him: “What do they have to put these things on for? Do you think I’m going anywhere, with these guards watching me and these bars?”

Memphis authorities hoped not. Elaborate security precautions were taken. Kelly was moved to the top floor of the jail, where he was the sole prisoner, watched around the clock by machine-gun-toting guards. There was also great fear of a gangland reprisal — someone shooting Kelly to keep him from testifying — so no reporters or visitors were allowed near him.

On Trial

In the meantime, the Urschel kidnapping trial was already under way in Oklahoma City, with the Shannons and other minor figures in the case in the courtroom. The authorities had decided that the Kellys would remain in Memphis until it was time for them to testify, for fear that their presence at the trial would intimidate potential witnesses. The newspapers, including The Commercial Appeal, helped strengthen this fear: “Kelly is a ruthless killer in any light in which he is viewed. If he has ever shown the slightest degree of mercy for the victims of his criminal records, it is not on record.”

But it was on record. Charles Urschel, the kidnapping victim himself, testified that he was treated “with consideration” before being released unharmed. And Kelly, though confessing to the kidnapping charge, strongly denied taking part in any murders. Ballistics tests proved him right, eventually linking the Chicago policeman’s murder and the Kansas City “massacre” to others. In The Encyclopedia of American Crime, author Carl Sifakis notes, “The fact is that Kelly never fired a shot at anyone and he certainly never killed anyone, a remarkable statistic for a public enemy dubbed ‘Machine Gun.'”

It didn’t matter. The newspapers had their story, and they didn’t worry about the facts. The police “had their man.” When the Kellys finally arrived at their own trial, Kathryn testified briefly, again claiming that she knew nothing about any kidnapping, but Kelly remained silent. The prosecution summed up the feelings of the nation: “Shall we have a court of law and order, or shall we abdicate to a reign of machine-gun gangsters?” The jury responded with the expected verdict: guilty. The Kellys and Shannons, in the first conviction under the Lindbergh Law, were sentenced to life imprisonment on October 9, 1933.

According to author Hamilton, “This iconic case, breathlessly followed by a fascinated public, was so quickly and effectively concluded that it was largely instrumental in bringing about the end of the short-lived but intriguing time in America known as the Gangster Era.”

Kathryn Kelly and her mother were shipped to the Women’s Federal Prison in Alderson, West Virginia. She remained there until she was paroled in 1958 and faded into obscurity. She worked for a nursing home in Oklahoma before dying in Tulsa in 1985.

Kelly served his sentence at Leavenworth, then became one of the first prisoners transferred to the brand-new federal prison at Alcatraz. He was always considered extremely dangerous, though his easy-going ways earned him the nickname “Pop-Gun Kelly.” When he first arrived at prison, he bragged, “I’ll be out by Christmas.” But that Christmas came and went, as did many others, and he stayed behind bars for the rest of his life. In the early 1950s, he was returned to Leavenworth. There, he complained to one writer, “How the hell did I ever get myself into this fix? I should’ve stayed with what I knew how to do best — robbing banks.”

Machine Gun Kelly died in prison on July 7, 1954, on his 59th birthday. His father-in-law, paroled from prison a few years earlier, brought his body back to Texas. A simple poured-concrete gravestone marks his final resting place in Cottondale Cemetery, close to the Shannons’ old farm. More than half of the ransom money — some $100,000 — was never recovered. It may still be buried on a lonely ranch somewhere in the Southwest.

Sources: Machine Gun Kelly’s Last Stand, by Stanley Hamilton; The Encyclopedia of American Crime, by Carl Sifakis, and Memphis Press-Scimitar and Commercial Appeal files.

Categories
Music Music Features

In the Footprints of Giants

Mississippi bluesman R.L. Burnside died last Thursday morning, September 1st, at St. Francis Hospital. The 78-year-old guitarist hadn’t played in years, save a few impromptu back-porch performances for friends and family at his home near Holly Springs, Mississippi. But he was still a vital component of the hill-country music scene.

Burnside, along with Junior Kimbrough and Othar Turner, who died in 1998 and 2003, respectively, were the holy trinity for Memphis blues fans who traveled up and down the highways of north Mississippi to party at Junior’s Place, where Kimbrough and Burnside boogied all night long, and to Turner’s legendary goat barbecues, which could stretch on for days. Their music was both timeless and out of time, a primal, chaotic force that seemingly swirled out of the muddy ground and into their bodies, released through guitar chords or fife blasts into the humid air. Hearing Burnside tear through “Jumper on the Line,” sipping moonshine to Kimbrough’s “You Better Run,” or bending and swaying to Turner’s “Shimmy She Wobble,” you knew: This is Mississippi.

Luckily, their music lives on through their children and grandchildren — people like David Kimbrough, Jr., who’s back playing after a stay in prison on a parole violation, Duwayne Burnside, who can’t seem to keep a juke joint open for more than a week but nevertheless plays circles around more business-minded musicians, and Sharde Turner, who has been playing fife for nearly all of her 14 years.

Other regional musicians too have taken up the cause. Since inception, the North Mississippi Allstars — formed by brothers Luther and Cody Dickinson, along with bassist Chris Chew — has served to showcase dozens of hill-country blues talents. The band has recorded with Othar Turner on numerous occasions, and Duwayne Burnside became a full-fledged member for a few years. When the Allstars performed at the Bonnaroo festival last year, they took the entire Burnside clan — R.L. and his wife Alice Mae, sons Duwayne and Garry, and grandsons Cedric and Cody — with them. They’ve turned countless jam-band fans on to Kimbrough and Burnside’s Fat Possum recordings, and Luther himself produced Turner’s two albums for the Birdman label.

It’s fitting that the group is celebrating the release of its fourth studio album, Electric Blue Watermelon, this week. The album, initially conceived as a tribute to the late Lee Baker, serves as a perfect homage to the forefathers of the north Mississippi sound. From the album’s opener, “Mississippi Boll Weevil,” on through “Horseshoe,” hill-country blues and driving rock music merge into a stunning, earthy sound. Slide guitar and thumping bass compete with Cody Dickinson’s electric washboard and propulsive drumming as a bevy of special guests — including Lucinda Williams, Al Kapone, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band — weave in and out of the mix.

There are so many glorious moments on this album — the tear-your-shoes-off-and-shake-your-ass party anthem “Bang Bang Lulu,” the over-the-top wah-wah song “Stompin’ My Foot,” and the funereal “Mean Ol’ Wind Died Down” (which features the Tate County Singers, Othar Turner’s daughters and granddaughters). But the real show-stoppers on Electric Blue Watermelon are “Horseshoe,” “Moonshine,” and “No Mo,” exquisitely detailed songs that document the history of the entire hill-country scene through music.

“Horseshoe” opens with a measure of music played by the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, which quickly fades to Luther Dickinson’s stripped-down guitar chords and husky voice as he takes listeners from pastoral Horseshoe Lake, where Memphis musician Lee Baker was murdered in ’96, to a funeral outside Gravel Springs, where Turner and his daughter Bernice Turner Pratcher (who died of different causes on the same day) are laid to rest. Dickinson’s descriptions are spare but all-knowing as he zooms from location to location, lovingly looking down on his people.

On “Moonshine,” the band travels to Junior’s Place, still a holy site although it was torched nearly a decade ago. “Cracked cymbals and the queens of Africa/Ashes to ashes and dust to dust/The club burned down to the concrete floor/The old jukebox won’t play anymore,” the Allstars sagely note, before taking us to a scene where “Old Gabe used to blow up and down the picnic ground/With Bobby Ray Watson and young Kenny Brown.”

“I miss the moonshine and the old times/Sitting in with the house band/And the bootleggers of the bottomland,” Luther, making his bid for poet laureate of north Mississippi, laments in a elegiac tribute to his former stomping grounds.

With rapper Al Kapone in tow, the Allstars also revisit one of their earliest songs, “No Mo.” “It just ain’t the same/It ain’t like it used to be ’round here,” Luther sings before Kapone blasts off a series of rhymes that place “No Mo” firmly in the 21st century.

To be in your early 30s — or in Cody Dickinson’s case, late 20s — and already feel nostalgic for “the old days” might be a sad state of affairs. But the Allstars’ songwriting skills are so great that beauty somehow manages to transcend the gravity of the situation. These lyrics are pure poetry, breathing life into long-lost scenes that a fortunate few were able to witness. This is Mississippi, these songs proclaim. This is Mississippi.

Categories
Music Music Features

Sam in the Studio

Last week, as the remnants of hurricane Katrina descended on Memphis, Black Snake Moan screenwriter/director Craig Brewer, music supervisor Scott Bomar, editor/engineer Kevin Houston, studio engineer Matt Martone, assistant Curry Weber, and actor Samuel L. Jackson, who stars as “Laz,” the movie’s central character, holed up at Midtown’s Ardent Studios to produce several songs for the movie, which begins production later this month.

The rural atmosphere of Black Snake Moan marks a departure for Brewer, whose first two projects, The Poor and Hungry and Hustle & Flow, were based in contemporary Memphis. While its story also takes place in the present, Black Snake Moan is staged in the shadows of the big city, in some anonymous, outlying town where juke joints and honky-tonks still reign supreme for weekend partygoers.

As Laz, an out-of-practice bluesman, Jackson performs a handful of acoustic and electric songs within the movie. He has spent more than a month preparing for the role: In late July, he traveled to north Mississippi’s hill country and the Delta, where he spent a day at Fat Possum Records in Water Valley and an evening watching Robert Belfour bend the strings at Messenger’s Café in Clarksdale, before staying at the Shack Up Inn just outside of town.

In August, Bomar and musician Alvin Youngblood Hart flew to Vancouver, where Jackson was completing another project, the upcoming Pacific Air Flight 121, for practice sessions. By the time he walked into Ardent’s Studio C with his brand-new, purple ES-335 guitar in hand (custom-painted by the crew at the Gibson Guitar Factory in downtown Memphis), he had his moves down pat.

While a pair of homegrown pop stars — Memphis’ own Justin Timberlake and Mississippi-based rapper David Banner — have also been cast in leading roles, Jackson portrays the only musician in the bunch.

He sang a handful of songs during the three-day sessions, including a riveting version of the title track, which was originally made famous by Blind Lemon Jefferson. Here, local guitarist Jason Freeman — who pulls double-duty in Amy & the Tramps and The Bluff City Backsliders — laid down a series of raw and haunting riffs, while Jackson howled ominously. Outside the studio, the storm clouds rose on the horizon.

Hill-country musicians Kenny Brown and Cedric Burnside collaborated with Jackson on a number of tunes, including a variation on “Stagger Lee” that Bomar penned for the film. North Mississippi Allstars guitarist Luther Dickinson came in to play a mean solo, while Hart laid down an acoustic guitar track for another song, which features vocals by Jackson and co-star Christina Ricci.

After an eight-hour session, Jackson himself sat down in the main room to cut his own version of R.L. Burnside‘s “Bird Without a Feather.” (Burnside would pass away only a few days later.) Jackson’s practicing had clearly paid off. The actor delivered an emotional take that had even Cedric Burnside, R.L.’s grandson, nodding in approval.

When he wasn’t sequestered in the vocal booth or comparing notes with Brewer and Bomar, Jackson told jokes, visited with Stax songwriter David Porter, and delivered a dead-on impersonation of Clarksdale guitarist Big Jack Johnson, who arrived on Tuesday to play a frenzied arrangement of “Catfish Blues” for the sessions.

Portraying Laz in the studio proved to be an easy transition for Jackson, who has played characters such as spies, detectives, hit men, drug addicts, lotharios, and Jedi knights but only one musician: classical connoisseur Charles Morritz in the ’98 Canadian drama The Red Violin.

His voice would slip down into a lower register as some syllables would bend and stretch and others would entirely disappear, Brewer instructing Jackson to “watch his diphthongs.” After a take, he would quickly revert back to “Sam,” checking his Blackberry for messages and cracking up the control-room crew with anecdotes about the movie biz.

“Samuel makes it easy,” Bomar remarked after the sessions ended. “He’s a consummate professional, the easiest person I’ve ever worked with.”

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Being a Brat

The man identifies himself as the “Bratmeister,” and his self-proclaimed expertise is why I’m in Wisconsin. The way a bratwurst absorbs the beer in which it simmers, I hope to absorb the Bratmeister’s knowledge in the ways of beer brats.

This can be risky territory, especially around members of that Midwestern tribe whose holy land is Sheboygan, Wisconsin, home of the Bratwurst Hall of Fame. Wisconsinites presume the right to hold forth on brats the way Memphians claim the right to lecture on barbecue. Bratwurst and beer are two things you don’t want to argue about with a Wisconsinite, especially as they relate to each other.

Wait, vegetarians, come back! This applies to you at least as much as to the meat-eaters. The technique described below will actually make tofu sausages edible.

Unlike hot dogs and many other cylindrical presentations of ground meat, bratwurst is a fresh sausage, which means it must be thoroughly cooked before serving. The time they spend in beer means less time for the brats on the grill.

“Simmer” is a strong word for the amount of heat the Bratmeister uses. Little bubbles form on the bottom of the pot, occasionally letting go and rising. Meanwhile, the volume of beer in the pan drops noticeably as it is absorbed by the swelling sausage.

“Since it’s already cooked when you take the brats from the beer,” explains the Bratmeister, “you could just serve it as-is and skip the grill altogether. But that would be gross.”

The grill’s job is to add flavor and browning to the already cooked bratwurst. On the grill, the brats lose their gray pall and come back to life with a juicy vengeance.

Some people speak of “parboiling the brats,” but this, I’m told, has never been done in Wisconsin. Such business can cause the brats to split, which is the ultimate no-no in bratology. A bratwurst is ready to serve when it’s cooked to the bursting point, swollen with juices but with the casing still intact. Never poke a brat, they say, to test for doneness. A gentle squeeze with the fingertips is all it takes. After grilling to the bursting point, most beer-brat chefs will place the brat in a fresh pot of hot beer and onions, often with butter, and hold it there until serving time.

Serving the brat on a hot dog bun can get you exiled from Wisconsin. A “hard roll,” crusty on the outside, soft and moist on the inside, is required. If you want to order real hard rolls, go to www.bratwurst.net. To order the current champion bratwurst of Wisconsin, go to www.miesfeldsmarket.com.

For dressing, don’t even think about yellow mustard. Only Dijon-style, please. As for the type of beer … well, these people are set in their curious ways.

“I like to use a high-end Budweiser,” says the Bratmeister. “You know, like an Old Milwaukee or a Miller Genuine Draft.”

My inner gourmet, however, rebels against the use of lesser beer in such an elegant preparation, so I bring an empty growler to my local brew pub and hand it to the bartender. When I tell him what it’s for, he hands my growler back, still empty.

“You need Old Milwaukee,” he says.

Only when I promise to run a side-by-side comparison with Old Milwaukee does he agree to fill my growler with the closest thing to a local equivalent, a light pilsner.

After lightly simmering my brats in separate pans of Old Milwaukee and microbrew pilsner along with black pepper, garlic, and onions (considered the holy trinity when cooking brats), I put my dueling bratwursts on the grill.

The Old Milwaukee brats have an appealing flavor that I could see getting attached to. I might need to join the Bratwurst Witness Protection Program for saying this, but the microbrew pilsner brats are richer, more complex, and a completely viable option as well.

I did not stop there. For many days, I simmer different brands of bratwurst in different brands of beer, always with the holy trinity. After this research, I feel confident in saying that different kinds of bratwurst will behave differently in different types of beer, and it’s definitely worth experimenting. Simmering in a dark, sweet porter, for example, might seem like sacrilege to someone from Wisconsin. But those of us not bound by tradition are free to play around with the options. Just be careful who you tell.

www.bratwurstpages.com

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Paging Mr. Smith

In 1998, Memphis native Ben Smith and his wife, Colleen, opened Tsunami, specializing in Asian cuisine from the Pacific Rim. The dishes were a hit, and the restaurant is consistently packed. Now, Smith has written his first cookbook, Tsunami Restaurant Cookbook: A Wave of Flavors Inspired by the Pacific Rim, which features many of the most popular dishes from Tsunami’s menu as well as Smith’s insight into Asian ingredients and cooking techniques.

The book is scheduled to be released September 15th by Pelican Publishing Company and will be available for purchase at the restaurant, area bookstores, and through Amazon.com. A preview party and book signing is being held at Tsunami, located in Cooper-Young, Sunday, September 11th, from 4 to 6 p.m.

“The cookbook is a greatest-hits collection,” Smith says. “Our menu changes often, and it includes the items that have had the greatest success.”

Much of the inspiration for the restaurant and the book came from Smith’s experience traveling and cooking in the South Pacific region. Although Smith was educated in traditional French cooking methods at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, he was attracted to Asian cuisine.

“I left the CIA with a growing interest in Asian food, and I went out and experienced it more and gained a lot of respect for the Asian style of cooking, ingredients, and health aspects,” Smith says.

Following graduation, he moved to San Francisco, where he worked for about three years for Jeremiah Tower at Stars restaurant. In 1989, he embarked on a self-guided tour of the South Pacific, working and living in Australia, New Zealand, and other islands in the region. He returned to the United States to work with a friend in Hawaii.

In the early ’90s, Smith returned home to Memphis, with the idea to open a restaurant and eventually write a cookbook. A few years ago, a friend asked if he’d like to co-write a book. Although Smith declined, it wasn’t long before he was writing his own.

“It was important to establish credibility and name recognition for the restaurant first,” Smith says. “Once I took the leap to open my own restaurant, it was an opportunity to create the environment I wanted to be in and cook the food I like to cook. Rather than create a restaurant that appealed to Memphians, I took a chance and created something that appealed to me. Luckily, Memphians took to it and have been supporting it for seven years.”

Tsunami, 928 South Cooper (274-2556)

The Dixon is celebrating its 10th annual Art on Tap beer-tasting Friday, September 9th, from 6 to 9 p.m. Boscos Squared has created a special Hefeweizen beer for this year’s fund-raiser.

Art on Tap will also feature a variety of domestic and import beers, including batches created by the Bluff City Brewers and Connoisseurs. Central BBQ, Holiday Deli and Ham, and Blue Coast Burrito will provide food. Venus Mission will be performing on the lawn of the museum. The festival is the largest beer tasting in Memphis. Last year’s event drew 1,000 people and tickets sold out. Advance tickets for Art on Tap (purchased by 5 p.m. Thursday, September 8th) are $15 for Dixon members and $20 for nonmembers. All gate tickets are $25.

The Dixon is also gearing up to reopen the Terrace Café, which is an opportunity to enjoy lunch while enjoying the view of the museum’s 17-acre grounds and gardens. September 27th through 30th and October 4th through 7th, lunch will be served inside the European-style Hughes Pavilion. The meal, prepared by Just Catering, will be accompanied by a table-side fashion show from Laurelwood Shopping Center. Cost is $20 per person and includes admission to the exhibit “Mary McFadden: High Priestess of High Fashion.” To reserve a seat, call Juliana Bjorklund at 761-5250, ext. 121.

The Vegan Sisters, a nonprofit group that provides education and support for people interested in living a vegan lifestyle, has created a festival exclusively for the herbivores in the community. The Vegan & Raw Food Serve will be held 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturday, September 10th, at the Cultural Connection, 2288 Dunn Ave. Lion’s Bread International will serve vegan and raw meals and play roots-reggae and dance-hall music. For more information, call 744-7313.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Ozu and Opie

When his debut feature Junebug premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, North Carolina filmmaker Phil Morrison suddenly found himself — alongside Memphians Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow) and Ira Sachs (Forty Shades of Blue) and fellow North Carolinian Tim Kirkman (whose Loggerheads will open the IndieMemphis Film Festival next month) — at the forefront of a makeshift “movement,” a group of new Southern films and filmmakers that became the story of the festival.

Morrison’s film, about a prodigal son bringing his new art-gallery-owner wife home to rural/suburban North Carolina to meet his family, is both palpably Southern and yet wary of the Southern clichés that tend to animate art both about and of the region. It’s a film that establishes the thirtysomething Southerner as one of the country’s most interesting new directors. (See capsule review, page 53.)

With Junebug opening in Memphis Friday, September 9th, Morrison spoke with the Flyer about the Sundance experience, the burden of being a Southern artist, and the under-recognized connections between Japanese art cinema and The Andy Griffith Show.

Flyer: I have to ask you about Sundance, which is of particular interest to people here because of Hustle & Flow and Forty Shades of Blue.

Phil Morrison: Well, I knew Ira before Sundance, and I met Craig the first day, when we were both registering. We were all on a panel together about movies and the South, in which we all struggled to say we’re not trying to define the South with our movies. You can tie your brain in knots trying to talk about that.

I really loved both of their movies. It’s so clear in Forty Shades of Blue and Hustle & Flow that they are the same place, even though the perspective on that place is so completely different. They both do this thing that I love in movies where the experience of them is different from just following a story. Instead, you get this rush from certain moments, when every aspect of the movie suddenly clicks and becomes almost a mystical experience. When [the Hustle & Flow character] Shug covers her mouth when she first hears her voice played back? Oh my God. To me, that’s what movies are for.

Totally. People complained about the narrative being so familiar, but the pleasures are in the details and the textures.

I love familiar narratives. If you’re setting out to devise a completely new story, then unless you’re a genius you’re going to get caught up in trying to be clever instead of discovering a moment like that one in Hustle & Flow. I would much rather experience that moment than a story with a trillion twists and turns that I didn’t expect.

Was the collective attention you all got as Southern filmmakers a positive or did it get to be a drag?

It really did have a lot of both. There’s a cool feeling you get when you feel like you’re part of a cohort. But I think for all of us it felt more like an accident than a movement. People talked a lot about regionalism. I’m from North Carolina, so I feel comfortable making a story that takes place [there]. I think that absolutely makes the story different than if it had been set in another place.

Most Hollywood depictions of the South are driven by the same series of familiar clichés and stereotypes. But as a Southern artist working outside the studio system, was the danger for you more about not indulging the more flattering stereotypes we tend to give ourselves?

Sure. That was as important as avoiding the ones that are pushed on us. It’s a hard question to answer because a lot of artists and musicians that I really love also, I think, fall into that trap. And I’m not ready to call anybody out, because I have no business doing that. But I do think it’s easy to fall into that trap of romanticizing the peculiarities of the South.

In Junebug, I think of the church supper scene, which is so realistic probably because of how understated it is. I would think that would be a hard scene to pull off, to get right without overdoing the “Southernness” of it.

I think you can only figure that out decision by decision. For instance, I talked to my friend Amy a lot about that scene because her dad’s a preacher. I told her that I felt the need to resist the temptation to have a beautiful Southern dinner at this church supper. And she said, “Well, yeah. It’d be much more likely they’d serve spaghetti.” And I just said, thank you, Amy. And that’s what it was. But other questions might not be answered as easily as “spaghetti.” So you just do the best you can, decision by decision.

It seems that beyond the Southern issues, it’s really more a film about family and class tensions in a broader sense. With those themes and the slow pace and periods of stillness and silence, it almost feels like a Southern take on [the Japanese classic] Tokyo Story. Was that intentional?

Yes. It’s simply that, when I started to see [Tokyo Story director Yazujiro] Ozu’s movies, the way he depicts the environments and the way in which people, especially family members, behave with each other, it reminded me of where I grew up. I just really related to it — the way in which people, even within their own families, are very polite to each other. And how arguments are a big deal and not a part of regular life. When I moved to New York, I met a lot of people for whom arguments were just part of everyday family life. But not in the families that I knew. And so these Japanese movies were to me a sensible template for what I was doing. For making a movie about family as I understood it.

And that [filmmaking style] really feels like when I’m home in Winston-Salem, though it’s certainly nothing new to equate the South with slowness, right? But this movie really was not intended to walk in the path of difficult art movies. It just kind of made sense in this story. I’ve said this before, and I know it sounds dangerously cute, but the rhythms and the shooting style is actually similar to The Andy Griffith Show. Ozu and The Andy Griffith Show have a similar vibe. A low-angle shot of Andy and Barney sitting on the porch, talking about going to the Snappy Lunch? It’s actually not that different.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Late Registration

Kanye West

(Roc-a-Fella)

Don’t believe the hype: College dropout’s sophomore album sounds great, less filling.

When Eminem began to bland out a couple of years ago, Kanye West was there to step into his place as the most interesting mainstream rap artist. Jay-Z had the flow, but West, like Eminem, had the content. West was conflicted, prickly, and self-deprecating like Eminem, but he wasn’t an outsider. He was an insider, pulling mainstream rap and bohemian counterparts together in a third-way path he alone was creating.

It took Eminem three albums to sound ordinary, but West has gotten there in two. On The College Dropout, West was a conceptualist, confessor, provocateur, and idea man. On this so-far overpraised follow-up album, he’s become something close to what his mildest doubters always suspected: an ace producer moonlighting behind the mic.

West is still a brilliant producer. The best, most immediately memorable parts of Late Registration are musical: the rubbery beat and watery piano loop on “Heard ‘Em Say.” The languid Dirty South goes jazz-hop groove of “Drive Slow.” The pairing of Ray Charles sample and stomping beat on the single “Gold Digger.” The way West slices and dices a sample from Otis Redding’s version of “It’s Too Late” across “Gone.”

But lyrically, despite the late-blooming conscience of “Diamonds From Sierra Leone (Remix),” this is hardly the same guy who pulled an entire genre into new territory with singles like “All Falls Down” and “Jesus Walks.” Instead, this is West working genre tropes, seeing how much interest he can pack into a standard-issue hip-hop mama tribute, littering the album with accomplished but purposeless guests rather than orchestrating them for cumulative effect. — Chris Herrington

Grade: A-

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Spotlight

You know you’re watching a great character study when the physical minutiae of the actors onscreen become as fascinating to you as their motivations. In Taxi Driver, it was Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle, clenching his fist above an open flame, whose form burned itself into the memory. In The Beat That My Heart Skipped, the new film by French director Jacques Audiard (Read My Lips), it is the roving hands and tormented posture of Thomas Seyr, played with fiery charm and saving cynicism by Romain Duris.

The film is a remake of James Toback’s 1978 film Fingers, starring Harvey Keitel. The plot involves a young man caught between a world of crime and a passion for art. The difficulty is how to merge these two worlds — in Audiard’s case, updated to the seedy underworld of Paris real estate and the highbrow landscape of concert halls — without making the character’s emerging struggle too contrived.

Because all the relationships Thomas develops along the way seem so genuine, the film is able to transition back and forth between the violent world Thomas has inherited from his father and the realm of concert piano, a musical legacy of his mother. Most satisfying is that the film does not end predictably, with a droll success. Rather it maintains its razor edge past the point of comfort. Like its predecessor, The Beat That My Heart Skipped culminates in bloody failure, but unlike Toback, Audiard does not conclude with his protagonist’s solitary disintegration. His epilogue attests to a film that is elegiac without being hopeless.

Opens Friday, September 9th, at Studio on the Square