Month: October 2005

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

With the nimble-minded literacy of a drunken frat boy calling the girl he just date-raped a whore, conservative wit Ned Rice has often praised Tom DeLay’s audacity and sternly cautioned “the Hammer’s” critics not to make fun of the recently indicted congressman’s long career as a professional bug-zapper. “If you’re going to hang a label on Congressman DeLay … you could do a lot better than ‘the Exterminator,'” Rice wrote, thereby identifying those who mock DeLay’s unwavering commitment to a termite-free Texas as latte-drinking liberals who look down their snotty noses at the noble dirt on the sacred, calloused hands of the American clock-puncher.

“It sounds like ‘the Terminator,'” Rice added, “and [Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger] is really popular.” Of course, Schwarzenegger’s high poll numbers were a short-lived phenomenon, buttressed by the widely held belief that the governator’s most conservative urges would certainly be buffered by the availability (or not) of wife Maria Shriver’s liberal poontang. But in recent months the Kindergarden Candidate’s job-approval numbers have tanked like HCA stock, and Rice’s conflation of ethically challenged prison-bait like DeLay with Conan, the invulnerable Martian robot who gave Satan such an ass-whoopin’ in the unwatchable End of Days, has been squashed flatter than a Dallas doodlebug under the star-spangled boot of justice.

It’s a liberal frame-up job, I hear some of you saying. How can a God-fearing man like Tom DeLay with the unwavering blessings of such theologically astute organizations as the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and the Traditional Values Coalition be anything less than a Christian martyr? The point is well taken: Whenever I think of the Bug-Man’s documented fund-raising miracles and his ability to take free swanky golf vacations to Scotland, I’m reminded of Christ’s famous encounter with the money-changers. Like DeLay, Jesus sat down with the temple’s highest rollers and laid out a divine protection racket, offering tax breaks, criminalized abortion, a sword-for-plowshares exchange program, and an end to the scourge of loving homosexual relationships in exchange for a small donation to the war chest. Whenever I hear the inspirational tale of how St. Tom took sizable campaign contributions from Saipan and then blocked a congressional investigation into the Micronesian island’s hellish sweatshops, it calls to mind Jesus’ powerful declaration that on earth — as in the kingdom of heaven — the mighty will be given dominion over the weak (who, if left unexploited, would probably die from sheer laziness). But the clearest proof that DeLay is indeed a man touched by God, and not just another slick song-and-dance man riding high on the D.C. snake-oil circuit, is the brave and selfless work he did to give a voice to the voiceless and to bring a Bill Frist-certified gleam of hope back into the eyes of a terminally brain-dead woman. Like the Big Bird Watcher in the Sky, Tom DeLay’s generous, benevolent, all-seeing eye is truly on the sparrow.

But what about Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle? Isn’t he just a liberal partisan out to destroy the reputation of an innocent lawmaker? That’s certainly the story the DeLay camp is pushing. The fact is, Earle didn’t issue the indictment against DeLay; that service was rendered by a grand jury led by an ex sheriff’s deputy who openly admires DeLay. But in his 24 years as a public servant Earle has prosecuted four times as many Democrats as Republicans, so the man clearly has some sort of partisan agenda.

Ned Rice just doesn’t get it. DeLay’s critics aren’t speaking pejoratively when they call him the Exterminator; they are speaking literally. Before he was the king of K Street, DeLay was in the business of using deadly chemicals to keep East Texas free of rats and roaches. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that, like Saddam Hussein, the infamous Butcher of Baghdad, DeLay gassed his own people.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

All in the Family

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For the Sawars, the restaurant business is a family affair. Mom, Dad, and sons are all involved in the Sawars’ four area La Hacienda restaurants, Soprano’s Italian Restaurant in Southaven, and the newest restaurant, Fino Villa, which opened in Collierville on September 23rd.

“What we did in Southaven, we did 10 times better in Collierville,” says Tony Sawar. “Over the year, we looked at the things that worked and everything that didn’t. We embraced all of the flaws and fixed them.”

Beginning October 23rd, Fino Villa will begin serving Sunday brunch that will include complimentary mimosas, a carving station, and an omelet station. Tony also plans to launch monthly cooking demonstrations.

Both Fino Villa and Soprano’s are traditional Italian restaurants with decors that mix modern (black leather and chrome) with Old World (hand-painted murals and canvases). They bring to mind Chicago eateries from the Al Capone era, which is no surprise because the Sawar family worked in the Chicago restaurant business before Tony and his brother Dino were born.

“My dad attended two presidents [Ford and Carter] in their private suites while he was the maitre d’ at the Hyatt in Chicago,” Tony says.

Since moving to the area, the family has opened seven restaurants in as many years. Mother Maria Guzman Sawar applies her Mexican heritage to making the La Hacienda restaurants a success, while the brothers focus on upscale dining at the Italian restaurants. When planning Fino Villa, Tony and Dino wanted to design a bar area where guests could relax after a meal and enjoy a cigar with a fine cognac, such as the Remy Martin Louis XIII (at $225 an ounce). The bar selection also includes fine wines and aged ports and whiskey.

“Anyone who has a discriminating palate will find something that suits them,” Tony says. “That also applies to our food. We try to be innovative in our high-quality cuisine. I wouldn’t want to serve anything that I wouldn’t eat, so we buy the best meats and bake our own bread from scratch every morning.”

Fino Villa’s general manager is Michele D’Oto, a native of Modena, Italy, and an experienced restaurateur. He evacuated from the Gulf Coast before Hurricane Katrina to stay with his brother-in-law in Collierville.

“I was the chef/owner of Pasta Italia [in D’Iberville, Mississippi, outside of Biloxi] until about four weeks ago, when the hurricane destroyed everything — the restaurant, our home, everything,” D’Oto says.

D’Oto got the job at Fino Villa the first time he visited the restaurant. “I was at the Baskin-Robbins getting ice cream when I saw Fino Villa, and I just walked right in.”

Fino Villa, 875 W. Poplar Avenue in Collierville (861-2626), is open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekdays, until 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Sunday.

Café de France will participate in the “Miracles Begin with Awareness” Show House, a home tour to benefit the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, being held on Friday and Saturday, October 7th and 8th, at 1219 Cherbourg in the Normandy Park area.

The restaurant will offer lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. in a tented pavilion next to the house. Memphis singer Di Anne Price will perform.

Admission to the house is $15 per person, and 100 percent of the proceeds will go to the charity. A portion of the luncheon sales also will be donated.

For information, call 901-226-CURE.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Egged On

Some may remember Helario Reyna — aka “Greek Harry” — from the Kwik-Chek on Madison, where he was well-known for his falafel and muffalettas as well as more imaginative sandwiches, such as the “Pecos Bill,” a club sandwich with habanero sauce and guacamole. Before Kwik-Chek, Reyna had a Greek deli in Overton Square called the Athena Café.

Two years ago, Reyna purchased Elliott’s, the downtown restaurant that has been around for 25 years and is known chiefly for its hamburgers. Reyna decided to stick with what works, keeping Elliott’s menu pretty much the same. (He also intended to preserve Elliott’s appearance, but many of the caricatures that once adorned the walls were damaged when the basement, where Reyna was storing the drawings, was flooded.)

“I wanted to keep the lunch the way it is, because that’s what people expect when they come here,” Reyna says. “And I didn’t want to go back to doing what I was doing. There’s just not enough time to make sandwiches like I used to because we have about 200 people through here every day at lunch, and they expect us to be fast. I mean, we’re faster than McDonald’s.”

But for someone who expressed his creativity through something as mundane as the Kwik-Chek deli counter, the menu was limiting. So a few months ago, Reyna expanded the restaurant’s hours to serve breakfast.

No ordinary breakfast, however, would suit Reyna, who says, “I’ve always been known for making weird things.” While he serves all the regular breakfast sandwiches for on-the-go professionals, for those looking for a heartier meal, Reyna’s also crafted some unusual items with unusual names.

For instance, there’s the “Manic Eggsessive,” a breakfast burrito with scrambled eggs, steak fritters, dirty rice, chedder cheese, and sausage gravy. The “Down N Out” is an omelet with chedder cheese, onions, fried potatoes, steak fritters, and sausage gravy. Either of these can be served in the “AI-1” (all-in-one) bowls, which are edible and shaped from a potato souffle.

“My creativity is in food,” Reyna says. “I never went to school to learn to cook. It’s just something you learn to do to make your life better. For others, it might be writing or pottery — there are various forms of art and art is everything. Everything you create, everything around you is a form of art. A ketchup packet or a simple glass you hold in your hand somebody had to create, so it’s art. Sometimes people lose sight of that.”

Each item on the menu speaks to Reyna’s personality and aspects of his life. He used to serve a frittata called “DrAma” that featured a blend of cheeses and fresh vegetables with rosemary. “I named it DrAma because there’s drama everywhere in life,” he says. Another frittata, “Green Acres Is the Place to Be” — spinach, mushrooms, dillweed, onions, and feta cheese — referred to his desire to return home to New Mexico. (Reyna’s frittatas are written of in the past tense because he no longer serves them. Not enough of his customers were familiar with frittatas. For the same reason, the “breakfast rice” he once served is now called “dirty rice.”)

What keeps Reyna in Memphis is his devotion to his 11-year-old daughter, Alex, who lives with her mother. Alex was the “Baby” of Reyna’s “Baby Bonsai” sandwich that he made when he was still at Kwik-Chek.

“She’s very important to me,” he says. “I try to get her involved over here and teach her things. She helps me with the menu boards and little things. I try to teach her about responsibility.”

Reyna is presently experimenting with a new breakfast pizza that he expects will take the place of the frittatas. The crust is a flattened biscuit smothered with sausage gravy instead of tomato sauce. One variety will have eggs, sausage, and provolone and cheddar cheese. Another will feature bacon, eggs, onion, bell pepper, hash browns, and cheddar and provolone cheese.

“It’s stifling to do the same thing day after day, but it’s hard to make too many changes,” Reyna says. “There’s hardly any parking downtown, so most of my customers work in offices down here, and they’ve come to expect certain things from Elliott’s. Breakfast is my way of changing things up.”

Categories
News

Out of the Woods

e woke up at Twin Lakes to the pitter-patter of rain on the tent. Few things are tougher than getting out of a sleeping bag at such a time. You’re warm, dry, comfortable. If you leave the tent, you will be none of those things for hours. Maybe days.

But the sooner you start walking, the sooner you get to the next camp, and the sooner you get back in the tent. So we dragged ourselves out, started the stove, and stared at the sky. Hopeless. Rain all day. And where we were going, it might be snow. The wind in the treetops didn’t sound helpful either.

We were five weeks into a trek on the Pacific Crest Trail — a leg-stretcher in the grand scheme of things. The PCT runs from Mexico to Canada, 2,600-plus miles of fatigue and inspiration that only a couple hundred or so people manage each year. We were just trying to finish the 460 miles across Oregon. We figured we were four days from the Columbia River. But with this weather and having been out for a week, we were focused on one thing: staying dry.

We had done 25 miles the day before — because we were anticipating showers and laundry at Timberline Ski Resort that afternoon. We were about 4,000 feet up the flanks of Mount Hood, and the resort was at 6,000 feet. We only had eight miles to go, but that’s no gimme even when it’s dry. There’s a lodge at the resort, but rooms are $200. We’d be clean, with clean clothes, but we’d be camping in this crap again.

We started walking around 9 a.m. A slow, steady slog up the hill with nothing to see but trees, clouds, and rain. We crossed a highway and caught a taste of the wind. Grim. We ducked back into the trees and kept climbing, but my mind skipped on ahead, to Timberline. Timberline, as in “line of timber,” as in, beyond which there are no trees. No trees equals wind. Higher elevation equals colder temperatures.

Sitting at a rest break, I looked at Steve. His hair was damp and matted to his head, his pack was saturated, his raincoat was three shades darker than before. His face wasn’t much different.

“You know,” I said, “it seems to me that when we get up out of the trees …” I didn’t have to say the rest.

And that’s when he smiled.

“I know something you don’t know,” Steve said.

“What’s that?” I asked. I looked up at him, and a pellet of rain landed inside my glasses.

His grin got a little bigger, and his eyes lit up. “We’ve got a room at the lodge,” he said.

“A room, for me and you, at Timberline Lodge?”

“Yep. It’s an early birthday present. I wasn’t gonna tell you until we got there, but this seemed like a good time.”

Warmth! Comfort! A bed! A shower! Maybe a couple of showers!

A mile later — a mile of stomping through puddles in the trail, wringing water out of our jacket sleeves, trying to wipe glasses with wet bandannas — we popped out of the trees, and all hell broke loose. The wind was blowing 30 miles an hour, right in our faces. With nothing to see anyway, I lowered my head, pulled my hood down, and strode forward like a robot.

It wasn’t long before I heard Steve yell out, “It’s snowing!” And then it was sleeting. Then it was raining again. Massive bands of cloud were sweeping over us, bending trees, making it tough to even stay on the trail.

Must … reach … lodge … Must … reach … lodge …

We came to a trail junction that pointed to the lodge, and we looked into an angry fog. Then we saw it! A spectral, lodge shape in the cloud, like a pirate ship in a bad movie, beckoned to us — and then disappeared.

We took off for it, into the wind, on a thin layer of snow now but ever toward where the lodge had been. In the parking lot, I tried to run past Steve, and we both took off, giggling, and a minute later he was at the reception desk, with his pack still on, and the collective energy we had brought in with us — not to mention some snow and ice — had captivated some folks in the lobby.

We didn’t care. A shower was minutes away. We’d made it out of the woods.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Cinema’s Optimist

Last year, when local film enthusiast Malcolm Pratt — via his organization Cinema Memphis — staged a retrospective of British filmmaking team Powell and Pressburger at downtown’s Cannon Center, it was so unexpected and grandiose that it was difficult to imagine a sequel.

But Pratt is making good on his promise to turn the event into an annual celebration. This weekend, Cinema Memphis screens seven films from perhaps the greatest of Hollywood directors, Howard Hawks, and brings to Memphis one of Hawks’ foremost champions, respected film critic and author David Thomson.

Chances are, Cinema Memphis will find a larger audience this time around. Even if Hawks might not be that much better known to casual filmgoers than director Michael Powell and writer Emeric Pressburger, the actors who populate his films probably are. The seven films this week star the likes of John Wayne, Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Gary Cooper, and Dean Martin.

The 2002 edition of Thomson’s classic Biographical Dictionary of Film is littered with Hawks: A still from To Have and Have Not is used on the cover. Thomson leads the book with an exchange from Rio Bravo. In the acknowledgments, Thomson lists His Girl Friday among his three favorite films. And his full entry on Hawks is a passionate and perceptive appreciation where Thomson insists that were he forced to choose only 10 films to while away his years, they would all be by Hawks.

One of the oft-cited keys to Hawks’ greatness and why many, including Thomson, call him the quintessential Hollywood director, is his versatility. Most American directors of Hawks’ era and stature are identified with specific styles: John Ford with westerns. Alfred Hitchcock as the master of suspense.

But Hawks did everything. There was perhaps no movie genre he didn’t try: western, screwball comedy, film noir, war movies, action-adventure, historical epic, musical, gangster movies. Everything. But what made Hawks special was his ability to not only impose a personal style and worldview on so many different genres but to use his personal style to play with the boundaries of these genres, sometimes blurring one into another.

“That’s the thing that’s great about Rio Bravo,” Thomson says. “If someone said to you, ‘What is Rio Bravo?’ You would say, well, it’s a western, but … And it’s everything that hangs on that “but” that’s interesting. Because it’s also a bit of a musical. It’s also a comedy. It’s also a love story. It’s got so many things thrown in there.”

Similarly, Hawks’ Bogie and Bacall vehicles — To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep — are more than meets the eye. “They both talk and look and act as if they were film noir,” says Thomson, “but they’re also screwball comedy. They’ve got so many different genres mixed in together.”

“The greatest optimist the cinema has produced.”

That’s the claim Thomson makes for Hawks in The Biographical Dictionary of Film, one rooted in an ethic that’s constant in his films.

“I think he believes that human society can be made better by common sense and intelligence and people being decent and kind to each other,” Thomson says. “But the thing about Hawks is that he’s the most down-to-earth realist there ever was, so it’s a mixture of realism and optimism. ‘Is that all you’ve got? It’s what I’ve got.’ I think it’s a good motto for life.”

This optimistic, open view of life comes through in Hawks’ attitude toward women. Hawks, like Ford, is thought of as a masculine director, with many of his films concerning primarily male subcultures. But in Hawks’ inherently egalitarian world, women could compete — and be embraced — as equals.

“I think Hawks was a true feminist,” Thomson contends. “You get some of the earliest examples of women living by their wits in Hawks’ films, whereas I think Ford sentimentalizes women. Hawks was prepared to be surprised by women, always.”

You see this most in Hawks’ romantic tropes, in the electric back-and-forth between Grant and Russell in His Girl Friday, in the way Bacall and Angie Dickinson are allowed to get the best of Bogart and Wayne, respectively, and in the way Bogart and Wayne adore them for it.

“Business”

Hawks is typically lauded as a “storyteller,” a description that, on the surface, fits a director with such a direct visual style, entertaining manner, and adroitness at so many genres. But the term is also misleading.

Hawks’ films are usually more concerned with characters and situations than stories. His focus was on individual scenes, which he would try to inject with as much fun and what he called “business” as he could.

This is why what’s often most memorable in Hawks’ films are moments that aren’t crucial to the narrative but that help establish character or tone or that are just enjoyable in their own right: Montgomery Clift and John Ireland having a shooting contest with a tin can in Red River, John Wayne rolling Dean Martin a cigarette or Angie Dickinson throwing a flower pot through a window in Rio Bravo, Bogie and Bacall discussing racehorses in The Big Sleep, Katharine Hepburn’s long putt and Grant’s lost intercostal clavicle in Bringing Up Baby.

And Hawks’ interest in character and situation made him a brilliant director of actors. “We’ve got a number of films where very famous star actors are used in quite unusual ways,” Thomson says of the Cinema Memphis slate of Hawks films.

He’s speaking primarily of Wayne and Bogart, who boast perhaps the two strongest personas in the history of the medium. But Hawks found previously undiscovered depths to the Wayne character in Red River, a revelatory role that paved the way for Wayne’s most celebrated performance, in Ford’s The Searchers. And in Rio Bravo, Hawks brought out a modesty and humor in Wayne that had been buried before.

Hawks’ tweaking of Bogart was perhaps even more interesting.

“What Hawks said to Bogart when they made To Have and Have Not is exactly borne out in the film,” Thomson says. “[Hawks] said, ‘You are known as the most tough, insolent, independent guy on the screen, and I’m going to put you in a movie with a 19-year-old girl who trumps you all the time.'”

Hawks today

To most critics and buffs, Hawks is an acknowledged master, but the American film establishment has never really given him his due. Hawks never won an Oscar in his time and places only one film on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 best American films (Bringing Up Baby, barely squeaking in at #97).

“I think to this day he’s not as highly thought of as he should be,” Thomson says. “Here is a man who was recognized as being very good but not outstanding. But we look back on it now — and, you know, some of these films are 70 years old — and his films look as sharp and fresh as if they’d been made yesterday.”

Thomson sees some echoes of Hawks in contemporary movies, citing the chattiness and digressions of Quentin Tarantino and the very Hawksian versatility of Curtis Hanson. But, sadly, today Hawks’ films might be most notable as a reminder of what has been lost in American movies.

“He has the best of that American attitude to movie-making that existed in the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s. That you entertained people, and you did it in as smart and quick a way as you can,” Thomson says. “And I’m afraid that these traits have deserted us.”

At least this weekend, Memphis filmgoers get an unprecedented chance to see what we’ve all been missing.

herrington@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Art Art Feature

Strung Along

Fiber artist Lindsay Obermeyer has a new best friend: a discarded laundry bag from Beijing. She totes the bag and the yarn inside it everywhere — to her French class, to the bus stop, to the porch of her home in northwest Chicago where she enjoys the late afternoon sun, as long as she keeps knitting.

At first, her task seems simple enough. Knit 820 feet of red cord about an inch thick for an art performance in Memphis that will connect 500 people wearing knitted hats of all shapes, textures, and sizes. But do the math, and your fingers start aching.

“I can knit one skein of yarn in about three-and-a-half hours, and I need 50 skeins,” Obermeyer says. So let’s see: If she knits eight hours a day, Monday through Friday, then knitting enough cord for the performance will take an entire month.

“This is power knitting beyond extreme,” Obermeyer admits, laughing a little at her ambitious goal. “I have three different pillows for my lap so I can adjust my hands, but they still hurt.”

Fortunately for Obermeyer, knitters in Memphis are helping with the hats, cranking out designs by the bag full for “The Red Thread Project” to be held on October 8th at the University of Memphis. At St. Jude’s Ronald McDonald House, parents are knitting hats to help pass the time. Storeowners at local yarn shops are participating too, donating materials and teaching quick and easy hat patterns to beginners.

“Most knitters just knit. They don’t think of knitting as an art form,” says Brigitte Lang of Rainbow Yarns in Germantown, who, along with her customers, has knitted almost 50 hats. “So for them, participating in an art project is fun and it appeals to their creativity.”

Dozens of local students are knitting for the project, as well, including the sixth-grade boys in Darla Linerode-Henson’s art class. “They really got into it,” says Linerode-Henson, who teaches at Presbyterian Day School in East Memphis. “I’ve even had boys be late for football practice because they wanted to come by and knit.”

The hats are ready now. How will the performance take shape?

Obermeyer, who is driving to Memphis with her bundles of knitted cord and her 17-year-old daughter, Emily, will attach the hats together and direct their installation on the plaza in front of McWherter Library. On Saturday, participants will find a hat, put it on, and learn a simple choreographed procession.

“The entire performance should only take about an hour,” says Lisa Abitz, the museum’s assistant director. “My only fear is: What are we going to do if it rains?”

Weather aside, a videotape of the performance and the collection of hats will be included in a month-long exhibit of Obermeyer’s sweater art. When the exhibit closes in November, the hats will be disconnected again and donated to MIFA in time for Thanksgiving.

“You don’t have to knit a hat to participate in the performance, and you don’t have to participate in the performance to help disconnect or distribute the hats,” Abitz explains. “One of the great things about this project is how it attaches people throughout the community in so many different ways.”

Attachment is an important theme to Obermeyer who has developed both an academic and an artistic interest in the connections between textile practices and relationships, particularly the relationships attached to motherhood. Her own adopted daughter lost two mothers by the time she was 7 years old. When she came to live with Obermeyer, she was afraid to be alone.

“I needed to extend my arms, so I knitted a sweater with 15-foot sleeves and tied one to her,” Obermeyer says. “That way I could be in another room, but Emily could still feel me.”

Since then, Obermeyer has continued to make provocative knitted garments with names such as Joined Together and Long Distance Hug. She uses luminous shades of mohair, a yarn that is both warm and itchy, much like the parent and child bond.

“If you drop a stitch, your knitting falls apart,” Obermeyer says. “This is a perfect metaphor for our society: If we shun or ignore the people around us, then our families and our communities start to fall apart too.”

Categories
Book Features Books

Detective Work

In her monumental new work of nonfiction, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (Knopf), novelist Jane Smiley spends nearly 300 pages examining the novel as a literary form and another 300 pages examining 101 novels, from Murasaki Shikibu’s thousand-year-old The Tale of Genji to 2001’s Look at Me by Jennifer Egan.

Smiley started this project in the fall of 2001, but as she reveals in an early chapter, she started reading seriously when she was a child, even if it wasn’t reading anything “respectable.” By this she means she loved the Bobsey Twins and Nancy Drew.

That would come as no surprise to Melanie Rehak, who examines the ongoing popularity of Nancy Drew, girl detective, in Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her (Harcourt).

But, strictly speaking, women didn’t create her. The idea belonged to Edward Stratemeyer, the brain behind the Bobsey Twins too (and the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift). And Carolyn Keene, the author behind Nancy Drew (who turned 75 in April of this year), was no author at all but the pen name of Mildred Wirt, a writer hard-up for a living in Cleveland and working under the strict instructions of Stratemeyer’s daughters, Edna and Harriet, who inherited their father’s business in children’s books when he died in 1930. But, as Rehak reveals, Wirt didn’t write all the Nancy Drews. Harriet Stratemeyer took over that job in 1953 — a good thing. Interviewed on her way to yet another academic conference devoted to the girl detective in 1993, Wirt, a seasoned journalist by this point, told a reporter, “I’m so sick of Nancy Drew I could vomit.”

That mystery over authorship solved, there’s the further mystery over why Nancy Drew has seen her series sell in the millions despite every marketing effort to update her (audiences prefer the classic Nancy circa mid-century) and despite the low point reached in 1978 when TV’s Nancy Drew, played by Pamela Sue Martin, did a layout in Playboy. (Harriet Stratemeyer’s reaction, understandably: “fit to be tied.”)

Rehak, writing in The New York Times last April, has this solution to the young sleuth’s appeal no matter the decade: “[Nancy Drew’s] first readers discovered a heroine who was, in addition to being attractive and generous, utterly her own young woman. In that sense she was the most modern of role models — a girl who knew how ‘to think for herself and to think logically.’ Her mother was dead, her adoring father never got in her way and there was no challenge she could not meet, be it putting together the perfect outfit for a tea party or escaping from a kidnapper — sometimes both in the same afternoon.”

A challenge well-met indeed. No challenge however: enjoying Rehak’s well-researched detective work into the business behind Nancy Drew as a publishing phenomenon and into the lives of those responsible for it.

Hear Melanie Rehak speak and have her sign Girl Sleuth when Rehak joins authors Suzanne Marrs (Eudora Welty: A Biography) and Jim C. Cobb (Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity) at this year’s book and author event sponsored in part by the Flyer‘s sister publication Memphis magazine. The evening, organized by Shirlene Cosby, will take place on Thursday, October 6th, at the Bartlett Performing Arts & Conference Center, 3663 Appling Rd. The program begins at 5:45 p.m. and includes remarks from the guest authors, followed by a question-and-answer period, followed by author booksignings. For more information, call 946-5914.

Can’t make it to Bartlett but can make it down south to Oxford this week? James Cobb will also be reading from and signing Away Down South at Off Square Books (a few doors from Square Books) on Tuesday, October 11th, at 5 p.m.

Can’t make it to Oxford but can make it east to Nashville this week? Cobb is among the dozens of writers, publishing houses, and book dealers participating in the 17th annual Southern Festival of Books, October 7th-9th, at Nashville’s War Memorial Plaza and downtown public library. For a list of the writers reading from and signing their works and for the festival’s full program of activities, go to HumanitiesTennessee.org.

• Of Note This Week on the Academic Front: Anthony Grafton, Princeton historian and contributor to The New Republic and The New York Review of Books, addresses “The Library in Western Culture: From Alexandria to Google,” as part of the Barret Lecture Series celebrating the opening of the Paul Barret Jr. Library at Rhodes College. The event on Thursday, October 6th, at 7:30 p.m. is free and open to the public and takes place in the McCallum Ballroom of the Bryan Campus Life Center at Rhodes.

At the University of Memphis, Michelle Feynman, daughter of Nobel physicist Richard Feynman, will inaugurate the Vision Speaker Series at the FedEx Institute of Technology on Tuesday, October 11th, at 6 p.m. Feynman’s topic: her recent book from Basic Books, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman.

And at Burke’s Book Store, former Memphian Cary Broussard goes from fairy tale to boardroom in From Cinderella to CEO. Broussard, nationally known for her work with women’s groups and TV appearances, signs Thursday, October 6th, from 5 to 7 p.m.

Categories
Music Music Features

North Toward Home

Surprise package for Mayor Herenton: This Halloween weekend, the 2005 Voodoo Music Experience, a two-day New Orleans-based music festival, will take over Tom Lee Park. The riverside spread in downtown Memphis is a far cry from City Park in New Orleans, but after Hurricane Katrina hit, staging a fall festival in the Crescent City was not an option. By mid-September, Voodoo organizers decided to relocate to Memphis and refocus on hurricane relief.

With an estimated 60,000 attendees and an eclectic line-up — performers include The Flaming Lips, Nine Inch Nails, Mickey Hart, The New York Dolls, Queens of the Stone Age, Joss Stone, The Decemberists, The Neville Brothers, and Dr. John — the Voodoo Music Experience should raise plenty of cash for the New Orleans Restoration Fund. Meanwhile, the city of Memphis will bank plenty of tax dollars from festivalgoers and net priceless exposure via prime-time Voodoo coverage on media sponsor VH-1. Not a bad haul for Halloween.

But the Voodoo Music Experience isn’t the only New Orleans festival to set stake in the Bluff City: Mystic Knights of the Mau-Mau founder Ira “Dr. Ike” Padnos just announced that the fifth annual Ponderosa Stomp — slated for May 2006 — will also take place in Memphis.

The roots festival, dedicated to “unsung heroes of rock-and-roll,” has, for the last four years, hosted an unprecedented number of blues, R&B, soul, and rockabilly musicians at New Orleans’ venerable Mid City Rock’N’Bowl Lanes. Providing a no-holds-barred forum for songwriters like Dave Bartholomew and Tony Joe White, guitar greats James Burton and Link Wray, gutbucket blues singers like Rev. Gatemouth Moore and Clarence Samuels, the Ponderosa Stomp initially served as a bridge between Jazz Fest weekends but soon drew music fans on its own accord.

“Every time I go to the Ponderosa Stomp, someone I’ve never heard of blows me away,” says Memphian Eddie Hankins, host of WEVL FM-90’s “Down in the Alley” program. “It has something for every music fan — crazed rockabilly artists like Matt Lucas are followed by The Hi Rhythm Section. It’s the best of the last 40 years of American roots music, along with some garage rock, New Orleans rhythm-and-blues, and a little bit of soul.”

Two of Dr. Ike’s biggest fans, original Elvis sideman Scotty Moore and his girlfriend, Gail Pollock, have vowed to do whatever it takes to get the Ponderosa Stomp up and running in Memphis.

“It gives recognition to damn good musicians who haven’t had it in a long time,” Pollock says. Likening the performers to “a bunch of old warhorses,” she adds, “Scotty always has such a good time onstage he forgets there’s an audience out there. He gets to reconnect with old friends like Earl Palmer and Dale Hawkins and play with these truly fantastic musicians.

“Take Lazy Lester,” she says. “Scotty always thought of him as a heavy-duty blues player, but one year, Lester came up and said, ‘Scotty, I want you to play with me.’ Well, Scotty didn’t know if he’d know the material, but Lester asked, ‘How do you like Hank [Williams] Sr.?’ They went out and did a straight country set.”

Memphis is the only city with the same kind of musical history as New Orleans, says Padnos: “Memphis has that feel, the juke-joint atmosphere converging with the barbecue and the record stores. The Stomp had a psychic connection with Memphis. It just feels right.

“We can’t take a chance on New Orleans’ recovery by next spring,” he explains. Padnos, an anesthesiologist employed by Louisiana State University’s hospital system, plans to travel to Memphis in mid-October to nail down a venue for the ’06 Ponderosa Stomp, tentatively scheduled for May 9th and 10th. The event, he says, will be a benefit, with proceeds split between a relief fund administered by the Mystic Knights of the Mau-Mau and the New Orleans’ Musicians Fund. Billy Lee Riley, ? and the Mysterians, Hawkins, and, of course, Scotty Moore, have already signed on for the cause.

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Politics Politics Feature

GADFLY: DeLayed Reaction

In all the brouhaha over the now-multiple indictments of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, two things seem to stand out: first, DeLay expects to continue to run things (and he has said so), no matter what happens with his indictment, and second, Republicans are rushing to the life boats to desert the sinking DeLay ship.

On the first point, DeLay, that loveable curmudgeon whose only crime, if you ask him, is loving the Republican party too much (isn’t that a country music lyric?), announced that he can, and will, do the job of House leader, even without the title, and that he will return, eventually, to resume that post. Republicans were, understandably, quick to pull the rug out from under both those assertions, but the question is how much was their reaction just window dressing designed to placate a public increasingly troubled by government corruption. The answer will depend on how willing they are to go up against the great and powerful DeLay, and I’m afraid that answer will be, not very.

The hubris demonstrated by DeLay in asserting that his involuntary departure from his position as majority leader was, in essence, nothing more than a speed bump in the road of his continued leadership of the GOP was nothing short of a Guinness record for chutzpah, even for a politician. One can only assume DeLay meant that, even if he is convicted, he can continue to serve in the role, if not in the position, of a leader of his party (hey, even if he’s convicted, it’ll be years before he goes to the clink, what with interminable appeals). It put me in mind of Mafia dons, like John Gotti, who continue to wield power over their crime syndicates even after they’re sent to jail. DeLay is nothing if not the don of the Republican party (okay, maybe just a capo). They don’t call him “the hammer” because he knows what to do with a nail.

The distance some Republicans are putting between themselves and DeLay can now be measured in a currency even more important to politics than rhetoric: currency. Several Republicans either already have, or have announced plans to, return campaign contributions they received from PAC’s affiliated with DeLay. That’s unheard of in the annals of political money. And editorial writers are calling for politicians who benefited from DeLay’s campaign finance mastery to renounce the contributions they have received as well. Support for DeLay is continuing to erode as Republicans reel from the multiple whammy of the DeLay indictments, the Frist insider trading investigation, the arrest of the White House insider, David Safavian, the tightening noose around the known associates of the notorious lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, and the Katrina debacle, not to mention the breath everyone is holding waiting for the outcome in the Plamegate investigation, and the increasingly dire situation in Iraq.

Given the PR tsunami suffered by the Republicans in recent weeks (which I suggest is unparalleled by anything since Watergate), and the impending increase in their misery from possible indictments in the Plame case, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the only things Republicans renounced was just DeLay-related money. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that we may see Republicans renounce their party as well.

Party switching has a rich history in this country, and it has occasionally been prompted by the kind of ham-handed (not ham-sandwiched) control exercised by party leaders we’re seeing now. And, whether it was southern Democrats who voted with their feet during the civil rights era, or more recent party defections, the party-changing phenomenon has rarely been motivated by anything as idealistic as a philosophical difference, but has more often been motivated by electability. So, as the GOP becomes increasingly slimed by its own malefactors, if some of the more moderate members of the GOP (Chris Schays comes to mind in the house, as do Susan Collins, Lincoln Chaffee and Chuck Hagel in the Senate), especially as we approach mid-term election season, begin to sense a sea change in the public’s perception of, and tolerance for, Republican shenanigans, I fully expect to see some reinvented Democrats before November, 2006.

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News

DEMS MAY RESOLVE FIELDS ISSUE BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

Thursday night’s regular meeting of the Shelby County Democratic Party’s executive committee is shaping up to be a partly closed affair. That’s due to a proposal – sure to be controversial and requiring a vote of the full committee Thursday night – to exclude non-committee members from the portion of the meeting dealing with the proposed expulsion of Richard Fields.

Lawyer Fields, a newly elected member of the executive committee, is under fire for his pro bono representation of an ongoing election appeal by defeated Republican state Senate candidate Terry Roland. The hot item on Thursday night’s agenda is a pending resolution to expel Fields from the committee should he not resign either the committee or the case, in which Roland and the state Republican Party claim voter fraud gave Democrat Ophelia Ford her 13-vote victory.

But interested Democrats and the media may be excluded from the discussion and vote on that resolution if a recommendation to that effect made Tuesday night at a steering committee meeting is ratified by the full committee.

Meanwhile, sentiment for and against Fields (and, for that matter, for and against the author of the expulsion resolution, Del Gill) has sharply divided committee members.

Both Matt Kuhn, the local party’s new chairman, and Bob Tuke, state Democratic chairman, have asked Fields to resign from the committee, but he has so far resisted their appeals, contending that his efforts on Roland’s behalf are disinterested attempts to insure that the special election process of September 15 was conducted fairly.

”I told Richard he should resign, but he refused,” Kuhn said Thursday. But he defended the steering committee resolution to close off the disciplinary portion of Thursday night’s meeting. “This is the last matter we should be putting on the front burner when there’s so much else we Democrats should be talking about,” Kuhn said, acknowledging that Fields was more to be blamed than anyone else for the publicity so far bestowed on the affair.

Kuhn also defended the effort to find a compromise solution. He did not, however, explicitly endorse a highly controversial “leave of absence” solution that would allow Fields to litigate on Roland’s behalf, reportedly along with name Republicans like attorney John Ryder and ex-congressman Ed Bryant, and to return to the committee once the results of that litigation were clear. (For the record, Ryder says that his only involvement in the case was to recommend Fields, with whom he had worked on previous civil-rights matters, to state GOP chairman Bob Davis and chief Republican litigant Lang Wiseman.)

”There will be other things discussed at the meeting, including the nature of our bylaws themselves,” Kuhn said. One of those bylaws expressly prohibits activity by a committee member on behalf of a candidate opposing a Democratic nominee.

While of the local party’s three major groups, it is clear that the Ford faction is solidly behind the expulsion of Fields, it isn’t certain how the other factions – the one loyal to Mayor Willie Herenton and to political leader Sidney Chism, as well as the looser one composed of new “third force” reformers elected in July – will line up.

”They’re split right down the middle,” said one key Democrat in a position to know how the Chism group feels. And “third force” members from Mid-South Democrats in Action and Democracy in Memphis are also pulled in both directions.

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False Start for a ‘Compromise’ Plan on Richard Fields

Supposin’ a husband should call a meeting of his wife and kiddies, sit them down, and tell them he’s going to be gone for a few weeks, or until he straightens out the personal burdens of a deserving foxy lady he’s taken up with. “We can just suspend the family until then,” he says with his best sincere smile.

Right.

Anybody who thinks this one will fly — or deserves to — is someone who has just come into the world. Born yesterday — and unlikely to see many more days in anything resembling peace and quiet.

But something like that is the nature of the “compromise” proposal being considered by Democratic chairman Matt Kuhn regarding the case of lawyer Richard Fields, who has strayed off the party reservation in order to further a legal appeal by Terry Roland, a recently defeated Republican candidate for the state Senate.

Fields, a member of the Democratic executive committee, has said — sweetly (and perhaps sincerely) enough — that all he’s trying to do is make sure that last month’s special election, in which fellow Democrat Ophelia Ford was certified the 13-vote winner over Fields, was “clean.”

So Kuhn — or some as yet unidentified Democrat who dreamed the plan up — has proposed that Fields be allowed to dally in the service of Roland — who if successful in his appeal would further dilute the strength of Democrats, as of now a one-vote minority in the state Senate. The lawyer would accept a voluntary “suspension” of his committee membership for the duration of the case, which would presumably run right up to the convening of the Senate in January.

Then, whatever the resolution of Roland’s appeal, Fields would resume his membership on the Democratic executive committee.

Right again. Sure. That’ll fly.

Cockamamie as it may seem, Kuhn — or whatever Democrat encouraged him to consider that bizarro plan — appears to think so. That was exactly the nature of the compromise being circulated in party ranks on Wednesday, as a means of resolving a pending resolution to force Roland either off the Roland case or off the party committee.

That resolution, brought by perennial party maverick Del Gill (who is supported this time by a growing number of Gill’s fellow Democrats), gives Fields three options: (1) quit the case and remain on the committee; (2) quit the committee and remain on the case; or (3) be expelled. The appeal is based on a local party bylaw forbidding committee members to support Republican opponents of Democratic candidates.

Maybe there’s wiggle room here (this is a post-election appeal, after all, not a contested election in progress), but the spirit of the rule seems clear enough: If you’re on the Democratic committee, you have to support Democratic election efforts, not those of the opposition.

As news of the compromise got around on the eve of Thursday night’s executive committee meeting, numerous critics took potshots at it. One was Democratic blogger Steve Steffens, who said on his site Monday: “What part of Conflict of Interest don’t you understand?… This is a clear violation of the SCDP bylaws. Period. End of discussion.”

Another blogger, Frank Burhart, scourged the compromise on his site, saying, “What is the Shelby County Democratic Party thinking?… I don’t care what his [Fields’] motivation for attempting to give a democratically elected Senate seat to the republicans is. The problem is, he didn’t come to the Party to try to work out his concerns about the vote. If the Party didn’t take action that satisfied him, then Fields should have resigned and then gone to work with the republicans.”

At this point, it would seem that Fields’ best hopes would be to select one of the first two options offered by the resolution — quit either the case or the committee — or to hope that the resolution will be stalled by residual doubts about Gill, who is thought to be gunning next for Shelby County mayor A C Wharton, a declared supporter of Republican District Attorney General Bill Gibbons.

The catch is: Wharton isn’t a member of the committee – though, in theory, he could be denied the party label in next year’s voting. Another catch: that prospect (presumably, not many committee members want to dis Wharton, certainly not on Gill’s say-so) is easily divorced from Thursday night’s voting by a simple motion excluding from the resolution all other actions save that involving Fields.

In any case, the best bet on Wednesday seemed that both the compromise resolution and Fields were doomed. And Kuhn, who erred in his first official appearance as chairman by appearing to endorse U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr. in a contested U.S. Senate primary and was forced to recant, will probably have distanced himself from the plan by the time a vote is taken.

Interesting question: How will the sizeable number of “third force” Democrats who were elected to the committee last summer vote, and with what degree of unanimity?

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