Month: December 2005

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Uncertain Terms

Clearly, the political waters have been roiled by last week’s state Appeals Court decision invalidating the two-term limits provision voted for by 81 percent of participating Shelby County voters in a 1994 referendum. The two-to-one decision by the three-member court, in response to a suit by three affected members of the Shelby County Commission, will alter the course of next year’s elections.

Within hours of the decision, local Republican chairman Bill Giannini was denouncing it to a meeting of the East Shelby Republican Club at the Pickering Center in Germantown. In his audience, however, was at least one loyal Republican who greeted the ruling, which overturned a previous Chancery Court decision, with satisfaction.

That was Juvenile Court clerk Steve Stamson, who privately pointed out the obvious: Two potential future opponents of his — litigating commissioners Walter Bailey and Julian Bolton — would most likely run for reelection instead.

Not only that: Commissioner Marilyn Loeffel, also affected by the decision but not an active litigant, might be brought to rethink her commitment to run against Stamson’s wife Debbie in the GOP primary for the open Shelby County clerkship. Or so Stamson hoped.

Watch this space for an elaboration of some of the likely consequences of the ruling, currently under likely further appeal by county government — a circumstance which makes it difficult for any number of political hopefuls to do their eeny-miney-moes. Senatorial hopeful Ed Bryant unveiled a campaign strategy Monday night that will lean heavily on West Tennessee, home base for current Jackson resident Bryant — who served both as U.S. attorney for the state’s Western district and as 7th District congressman. And Bryant left little doubt that Memphis would be the lynchpin of that strategy.

Stressing his “electability” at a fund-raiser hosted by supporter David Pickler in Collierville, Bryant noted that in his 1996 reelection bid against then Clarksville mayor Don Trotter, his Democratic opponent, he polled enough votes in Shelby County alone to beat Trotter in the 15-county district by more than 100 votes.

The former GOP congressman named John Ryder, John Bobango, and Steve West as de facto local coordinators.

Bryant said he expected current 9th District congressman Harold Ford Jr. to be the Democratic nominee and said Ford would be a “formidable” and heavily funded opponent. Apparently discounting what some Republicans see as baggage the Memphis congressman might carry into a race, Bryant added, “I’d be running against him, not the Ford family.” Two contenders for the 9th District congressional seat which Ford would vacate had formal coming-out affairs this week. One was Ralph White, pastor of Bloomfield Full Gospel Baptist Church and a former Democratic candidate for several offices. Another was businessman/consultant Ron Redwing, a longtime former assistant to Memphis mayor Willie Herenton and a onetime candidate for county register.

In a field which so far boasts no heavyweight names from the pool of local officeholders, White and Redwing, both well-known members of the Memphis political community, have to be reckoned as serious entries. Last week another verse was sung in the ongoing duet between Memphis state senator Steve Cohen and Governor Phil Bredesen. The two issued overlapping and competitive press releases, both announcing the bestowal of more than $3.8 million in unclaimed lottery prize money on state after-school programs.

Cohen, who attributed the outcome to earlier legislative efforts by himself and former state representative Chris Newton (R-Cleveland), also said he was still considering a Democratic primary challenge to Bredesen. The state senator has also indicated he is looking at a race for district attorney general. In an e-mail this week, Carl “Two Feathers” Whitaker, a leader of the state’s Minuteman movement, which makes a point of opposing illegal aliens, stressed the fact that so far he remains the only declared Republican candidate for governor. Former GOP legislator Jim Henry recently dropped out of the running, and current Nashville state representative Beth Harwell continues to hold back from announcing. But Ryder, a GOP strategist, said he thought that someone else would be “drafted” as a candidate. Ryder suggested Republican Senate leader Ron Ramsey of Blountville and state senator Mark Norris of Collierville.

Categories
Sports Sports Feature

Tiger Highs

If it wasn’t the greatest 24 hours in University of Memphis sports history, it belongs in the conversation. Last Friday night in New York City, the Tiger men’s basketball team fell four points shy of beating the top-ranked team in the nation. Then Saturday afternoon, the football team rose to the occasion for a must-win that extended the collegiate career of DeAngelo Williams, the greatest player in the program’s history. Have you exhaled yet?

I can’t stand labeling a defeat as “a good loss.” It’s like describing a blind date as having a good personality. That said, it’s hard not to use the backhanded qualifier in reflecting on the U of M’s narrow loss to Duke in the championship of the NIT Season Tip-off at Madison Square Garden. My favorite image of the game? Believe it or not, it wasn’t Joey Dorsey’s summary rejection of a Josh McRoberts dunk attempt early in the first half. (Not only did this play set the tone for how Friday’s game would be played, it may well serve as the season’s performance marquee.) No, my favorite image was that of freshmen Chris Douglas-Roberts and Robert Dozier on the bench late in the second half, arms linked in tension, rooting interest and hope. It’s the kind of image you expect to see on the bench of, yes, Duke, in late March. But on the Memphis sideline, the day after Thanksgiving? Coach John Calipari has spoken often about this team’s enthusiasm for playing together, for “buying in” as the cliche has it. Friday night, in America’s most famous arena, against college basketball’s most famous program of the last quarter century, Memphis fans saw a team on the launching pad of greatness.

With chatter about the previous night’s basketball game filling the Liberty Bowl Saturday afternoon, the Tiger football program took the field for perhaps the most significant Senior Day in school history. As if saying goodbye to the greatest Tiger of them all weren’t enough, there were 15 other seniors — including such notables as Maurice Avery, John Doucette, O.C. Collins, Andrew Handy, and Marcus West — who will now be remembered for being the class that took a sleepy program to three consecutive bowl games. (Among the possible December destinations for the Tigers are Fort Worth, Detroit, Honolulu, and — and if you listen to Coach Tommy West — Memphis’ own Liberty Bowl.)

Williams would be the first to sing the praises of a class that met cynicism and adversity with stubborn flexibility (the team’s top returning receiver at quarterback for the last six games?).

Appropriately enough, Williams shared the spotlight in the 26-3 win over Marshall with senior kicker Stephen Gostkowski, who drilled four field goals from distances of 42 yards to a school-record 53 yards. Gostkowski established a new Conference USA record with 67 career field goals and moved his U of M scoring record up to 357 points (a mere 13 ahead of Williams, who with two touchdowns Saturday now has 57 for his brilliant career).

The 2005 Tiger football team was not as good as the ’03 or ’04 squads. Their defense was second-tier in a second-tier conference. Offensively, they were carried by Williams and picked up by the midseason promotion/rescue of Avery at quarterback. But when measuring the impact of this team for posterity’s sake, listen to West for a dose of perspective.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen as much fight in a football team,” said West after Saturday’s win. “I told them today that if they could win this game, they’d be special, more special than the nine-win team or the eight-win team. To go through what they’ve gone through, and find a way to win six . . . it’s almost incredible. This has been the most frustrating season I’ve ever been through, and now it’s been one of the most gratifying. It meant a lot to those 16 [seniors]. For these guys to go to three straight bowls — we’d only been to two [in history] — that’s a sizable accomplishment.”

A basketball program in the top 10 and a football program making bowl preparations. Right here in Memphis. Happy holidays.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Changing the Culture

A season or two back, the phrase “culture of entitlement” got some decent mileage in Shelby County — thanks to a scandal involving the free and easy use of credit cards by officials in county government. It was probably no coincidence that former state Attorney General Michael Cody, a Memphian, invoked the phrase again this week in detailing the case for a “sea change” in state ethics legislation.

Cody, who served as co-chairman of Governor Phil Bredesen’s special task force on Ethics in Government, made it clear in an address to downtown Rotarians this week that the “deeply cynical” attitude toward ethics reform in government and in much of the media was not shared by the public at large.

Members of the task force were “not moved to make excuses, to backpedal, or to quibble,” said Cody. Neither were the citizens they heard from. Some version of the panel’s tough recommendations, as channeled through a six-member legislative leadership group, are almost certain to be enacted when the General Assembly convenes in January. The three essential needs, as outlined by Cody, were “to set new limits” on outside funding sources, “to enhance disclosure” of such sources, and “to tighten enforcement.” In particular, the previously untrammeled influence of lobbyists should be curbed and regulated.

To those who imputed naiveté about the way government works to his group, Cody said, “We do understand the political process in Tennessee. We don’t like it, and we want to change it.” So do we.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

The Better Part of Generosity

To put it mildly, we were taken aback by recent reports that FEMA and the Red Cross had given up to $2,000 apiece to thousands of Katrina “victims” in the Jackson, Mississippi, area for spoiled food and the inconvenience of lost power.

The stories in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, CNN, and The New York Times reported that up to $60 million might have been given away for such purposes. An emergency-services director said there were more people claiming to be displaced than were homes destroyed. Federal investigators are looking into possible cases of fraud.

There are two issues here. One is greed and misallocation of funds to people no more inconvenienced than Memphians were by the windstorm of the summer of 2003.

The other is the impact of Katrina on charitable giving. There are only so many charitable donations to go around.

“Groups ranging from homeless shelters to symphonies are finding their donors tapped out in a season that’s traditionally the year’s most generous,” The Wall Street Journal noted last week.

Non-disaster nonprofits are especially at risk of getting short shrift. A survey of 3,900 nonprofits in October indicated that 80 percent expect their donations to be flat or down this year.

It isn’t realistic for donors to play Scrooge and audit every cause or agency that solicits funds, but it may be a good time to focus more on giving to local groups with non-emergency needs and track records of spending money wisely. Be generous but be wise. Discretion is the better part of giving too.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Slipped His Moorings?

I fear Vice President Cheney has had one too many heart attacks. His mind seems to have slipped its moorings and is drifting out into the sea of fantasy.

Cheney was the misleader in chief prior to the war in Iraq, and in a recent speech in which he chastised people for suggesting such a thing, he made yet another whopper of a misleading statement.

“Those who advocate a sudden withdrawal from Iraq should answer a few simple questions,” Cheney said, such as whether the United States would be “better off or worse off” with terror leaders like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Osama bin Laden, or Ayman al-Zawahiri in control of Iraq.

Dearly beloved, that is akin to saying that if Eliot Ness hadn’t come along, Al Capone would have been the dictator of the United States. Zarqawi is a miserable little terrorist with a small band of fanatical followers and a life span that is shrinking by the day. To suggest that there was even a remote possibility of him taking control of Iraq is, well, grossly misleading. Zarqawi is a Jordanian, not an Iraqi; he has been denounced by his tribe and his family, and he has killed more Iraqis than Americans. It is just a matter of time before some Iraqi drops a dime on him, and he’s packed off to Islamic hell.

As for bin Laden and his Egyptian adviser — assuming they’re still alive — they are probably hiding out in some cave or rat-infested village in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. They could not control a small town, much less a country of 25 million people of which neither of them is a native.

I don’t know who the vice president’s speechwriters are, but he ought to fire them all. What he said was so far off the map of reality that it is embarrassing. He might as well have said that if Americans withdraw, Martians will land in spaceships and take over the country. If he himself believes what he said, then he has displayed an ignorance of the Middle East that is embarrassingly gargantuan. A 12-year-old street vendor in Baghdad could tell you that those three men have zero chance of ruling Iraq.

I’m beginning to feel like a crew member of the doomed ship Pequod, with mad Captain Ahab stumping about on the quarterdeck and cursing the heavens in his fanatical pursuit of the white whale that crippled him. One likes to believe that the leaders of one’s country are, at a minimum, sane, no matter how flawed their policies might be.

Whether we leave or stay, we probably won’t like the man who emerges from the December elections as the leader of Iraq. There are no Thomas Jeffersons over there. Twenty-five years of brutal dictatorship do not produce either idealists or democrats. But he will not be a terrorist, and he will not be a man who will welcome terrorists. Least of all will he be a foreigner.

The Iraqis are desperate for security and stability, and once they have the power, woe to anyone who challenges them on those points. The Bush administration, in order to maintain a never-ending war, has greatly exaggerated the power and influence of terrorists. From the way Cheney is acting and talking, he seems to have been taken in by his own propaganda.

Just keep in mind that no terrorist has a real army; no terrorist controls a country or even a city. Terrorists are nothing more than criminal gangs scattered about and perpetually on the run. When they draw blood, it is usually at the cost of their own lives. However magnified they might be in Cheney’s murky mind, they are in reality losers, doomed to die for lost causes.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Satan es Verdadero

On a learning trip to Mexico several years back, Rhodes theater professor David Jilg was disabled by a common gastrointestinal disorder.

“I had ‘the revenge,’ and it was bad,” he says. “You can write that however you want to write it.”

Exiled in his hotel room, Jilg picked up a book of Pastorela — traditional Spanish-American Christmas plays. In spite of his condition, he was particularly charmed by La Caja Misteriosa (The Mysterious Box), which tells the biblical story of the nativity while reimagining the Greek myth of Pandora. In this case, Satan, hoping to prevent any pilgrims from making it to Bethlehem, has changed all the road signs, thrown up a dark mist, and imprisoned the “spirit of light” in a box, which he leaves in the charge of a curious, less-than-competent devil-in-training.

For the past three years, Jilg and a cast of bilingual students have performed this Spanish-language play in churches with large Hispanic communities. This year, they’re staging the play at the McCoy Theatre on the Rhodes College campus and inviting the Spanish-speaking community to come to their free performances.

The church and the stage have a complicated history. Roman theaters weren’t only temples to the god of wine and debauchery. They were places where the dour Christ-followers were regularly mocked for their dourness and their Christ-following. As Christianity spread, so did a healthy mistrust of secular entertainments, and as the church costumed itself more elaborately and ritual passed into pageantry, drama was deemed unclean and discouraged until medieval priests discovered it could be a valuable tool for teaching scripture to the illiterate masses.

The early “miracle plays” were parochial affairs performed in Latin and reasonably dull, but when priests were forbidden to take part in dramatic productions and the sacred pageants became a secular tradition, little profanities crept in and humanized the genre. Audiences were treated to comical devils who danced and prodded sinners with their forks and avenging angels who knew the meaning of the word smite. The plays were quickly translated into native languages, and clownish stock characters from street-theater traditions began to appear. As the form expanded, literal interpretation of the Gospels were replaced by farcical, extra-biblical plots that kept the audience laughing while they learned about the wages of sin and the rewards of faith.

The Spanish-American tradition of Pastorela descends from European “shepherds plays,” which retell the Christmas story from the perspective of simple country people who are content tending their sheep and feeding their appetites until an angel announces the Messiah’s birth, and their comical pilgrimage to Bethlehem begins. From the start of their journey, the shepherds are set upon by devils out to thwart prophecy by keeping the absurd rustics from bringing their trivial, generally foolish gifts to the newborn king of kings.

“It’s always the same basic story,” Jilg says of the Pastorela. “It’s always about shepherds going to Bethlehem. There are always characters like [the shepherd] Bato, who is always hungry. There is always a devil like Satan. But what happens to the shepherds on their way to Bethlehem is different in every play.

“There’s another Pastorela I’d love to do, but we want to be able to do these shows for churches, and I don’t think it would be appropriate,” Jilg says, explaining that some of the bawdier plays wouldn’t be entirely out of place at a burlesque show.

After the Pastorela tradition passed from Spanish-born missionaries into the hands of conquered native Mexicans, the tone changed, with some of the religious plays taking on a distinctly political tone.

“It wasn’t uncommon to have Satan dressed as a Spanish don and for him to speak with a Castilian accent,” Jilg says. “The devils would be Spanish, and the shepherds would always be played like good Mexican peasants.”

Much of the slapstick comedy in Pastorale is based on anachronism, but according to Jilg, the form’s temporal distortions aren’t just for laughs. “These stories aren’t about shepherds searching for Bethlehem 2,000 years ago. It’s about how we’re always searching for Bethlehem, and sometimes we get lost. And there are characters like ‘the poor devils’ who are souls in pain but they can live again after they’ve found the light.”

Categories
Art Art Feature

Think About It

In order to access “On Others,” the current exhibition at Rhodes’ Clough-Hanson Gallery, you must first get past two seven-foot-tall sentinels made by Steven Thompson. One, Aegis of the Green and Bold Cooperative, is a vision of patriotic, nationalistic impulses gone terribly awry. A leather hood and robe obscure Aegis’ face and body. Attached to his sewn-up eye sockets are long leather thongs that hang down and wrap around the figure’s arms. This sightless, endlessly looping, relentlessly self-absorbed sentinel suggests that getting past habitual thinking and embracing others’ points of view are not easy tasks.

Melody Owen echoes this notion in her video installations. Instead of roaring, Owen’s version of a Hollywood trademark, MGM Lion, hiccups a series of art nouveau baubles. These brightly colored, quickly dissappearing hiccups read like droll commentary on formula movies spit out by Hollywood during the 1950s.

From the back of the gallery we hear pervasive, undulating sounds. This chorus comes from 22 tiny speakers Greg Pond has placed in an aluminum web that supports dead branches and artificial flowers for a piece titled Sugar Candy Mountain: The Final Resting Place for the Soul of Saint T. Poignantly and fittingly, Saint T, in part, probably refers to the 16th-century mystic Saint Teresa, whose beautiful descriptions of mystical experience have helped others access a more passionate spirituality.

Jack Dingo Ryan explores the full spectrum of awareness with Kaczynski Monument (graphite on mylar). In Ryan’s psychological portrait of the Unabomber, lines of energy rush across a blank landscape toward the viewer and an owl appears to grow out of the top of Kaczynski’s head. In this spare, skilled drawing, the surreal looks real, and Ryan captures the intense certainty, focused energy, and single-mindedness of obsession. Skull Shelf broaches the ineffable as Ryan considers whether death is a dead-end or an all-embracing awareness.

Know-how and a passion for life are present in Patrick DeGuira’s Precarious Stack, a mixed-media assemblage in which 20 tea cups are stacked end-to-end on top of a red-bound copy of The Joy of Sex, which in turn sits on a small white folding chair. Social interactions, including tea parties and sexual relations, are balancing acts, DeGuira seems to be saying.

DeGuira explores another example of conscious living with Life Flower, a mixed-media installation which fills the 11-by-14-foot gallery within a gallery inside Clough-Hanson. Here DeGuira pumps chirping bird sounds and covers the floor with faded paper grass. Just as faded is the large photograph of a man about to cut into his shoulder-length white hair. He’s pushing 60, and the plastic love beads he may have worn in the 1960s stream like tears down both sides of his face. There is no bitterness, no irony in his stoic expression, just resignation — perhaps because the challenges we face now are so different from the transcendence we believed was just within reach some 40 years ago.

“On Others” is a trip — covering the ground of death, delusion, disappointment, sex, and patriotism. These artists have put together a nearly seamless meditation on the mind and its foibles, taking you about as deep into consciousness as you are willing to go.

“On Others”

Clough-Hanson Gallery

Through December 7th

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Have Bar, Will Tend

You know him as Parks. Everybody does. After tending bar for almost 20 years, David Parks could be the best-known bartender in Memphis. In a city where the shelf life for bartenders is usually short, Parks is the regular’s regular.

But according to him, he had a tough time getting started.

“It’s difficult to get into the business here, because Memphis is very cliquish when it comes to bar jobs,” he says. “You’d have to sleep with someone’s evil stepmother or agree to give somebody 10 percent of your income for the next year to get hired.”

When Parks first arrived in Memphis by way of Jackson, Mississippi, he was young, cocky, and already bar-savvy.

“I had probably more experience than a lot of the general managers who interviewed me, which isn’t good when you’re the new kid on the block,” Parks says.

It took him two years and a polygraph test (which he didn’t exactly pass) before he finally got hired as the bar manager for Alfred’s on Beale Street. Parks worked at Alfred’s only a few months, but that’s all it took to get him in the loop. Now his résumé reads like a laundry list of local hot spots — Wellington’s, Bistro Hemmings, Maxwell’s, Mélange, the Beauty Shop. His next stop will be the bar at The Inn at the Hunt-Phelan Home, scheduled to open this month.

He began his career essentially by accident. He was 16 years old, trying to make some money working at a gas station, a tire store, and a grocery store. A friend asked him to fill in as a bar-back — “the kid who does all the grunt work, hauls the beer and ice, restocks, and cleans the bar,” Parks explains — at a redneck biker bar in Jackson. His first night there, he made more money than he did during a week of working his three jobs.

He went on to the well-known Jackson restaurant George Street Grocery, where he learned the ropes from a Yugoslavian bartender in his mid-60s. “I just knew him as Cotton. His name had at least eight syllables, and nobody could pronounce it,” Parks remembers. “Cotton would quiz me on mixed drinks. Out of the blue he’d ask me to name the ingredients of a Bloody Mary or a Mojito, and if I didn’t know them, he made me give him a dollar.”

Twenty years in any business is a long time, but it’s an eternity in bartending. It’s a job in which it’s not unusual for your boss to accuse you of stealing, your customers to accuse you of being stingy with the booze, and your wife or husband to accuse you of cheating.

Parks’ secret to longevity? He and his wife of 17 years have three children who provide regular reality checks.

He also happens to be very good at his job. He is nice but doesn’t overdo it. He knows his customers but doesn’t favor the big shots. Plus, he can mix a martini that will make even your evil stepmother look good.

Most importantly, Parks takes the job seriously. “Slinging whiskey and making a mixed drink are two different things. It’s like being a great chef. When somebody walks into the bar and says, ‘I kind of feel like mango,’ a good bartender will mix a good drink.”

Shaken or Stirred?

Five elements of the Memphis drinker.

How does Memphis drink? We asked bartender David Parks, who has picked up a thing or two about Memphis drinkers. Here are five:

1. Memphians are becoming more sophisticated drinkers.

Beer, mixed drinks, and straight-up hard liquor are slowly feeling the threat of Sidecars and Manhattans.

2. Wine is more popular than ever.

When it comes to wine, a lot of people are still experimenting, so what they’re looking for is good taste for a good price.

3. Memphians don’t necessarily get wasted when they’re out drinking.

The “waste” factor depends on where the drinking is done.

Lounge: Drinking with a purpose — to be seen or to break the ice before a dinner meeting. The “waste” factor: low to moderate.

Restaurant: It’s all in the pacing and the tolerance. A drink at the bar before dinner, some wine during the meal, maybe another with a cigarette after dinner, can you handle it? The “waste” factor: low to moderate.

Nightclub: The conveyer belt of drinking. Purpose is to get drunk efficiently. The bartender might rarely see the face of his customers, just a subtle hand gesture to indicate that it’s time for another — and make it fast. The “waste” factor: high to extremely high.

4. Memphians don’t talk any more than anybody else.

The rule: Anyone who lingers around the bar has something to say — no matter where they’re from. What gets said is another story.

5. Memphis’ bar crowd is very disloyal.

Booze tastes essentially the same at every watering hole, so what’s the difference, really, between Bar A and Bar B? Memphians tend to leave the old watering hole behind as soon as the new place opens. It’s nothing personal. — SW

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Rent Overdue

Rent takes place in the New York City of myth. A place where archetypes run free. Where well-scrubbed people of different ethnicities and sexual orientations get along just fine, thank you very much, until the outsiders come in and mess everything up. A place where everyone has AIDS but no one seems very sick. A place where, when bar tables are pulled together, someone — probably several someones — is going to dance on them. A place where beautiful young people proclaim their love with white cornflake snow in their hair. A place where junkies mournfully shoot up in gloriously back-lit alleys. A place that kind of looks likes Streets of Fire. It is, in short, the New York that the middle of the country believes in. And that’s director Chris Columbus’ target audience for this film adaptation of the long-running Broadway musical, which was itself an adaptation of Puccini’s La Bohème with New York gentrification taking the place of Parisian class struggle.

The irony of a story where selling out to corporate interests intent on creating “Cyberworld” is the ultimate mark of weak character being told in a $40 million movie financed by a multinational corporation best known for making consumer electronics is apparently lost on the director of Home Alone. Or, if it did occur to him, there’s no sign in his film, which bears every mark of being a piece of intellectual property leveraged for maximum profitability, its ideal cultural moment allowed to pass because theater seats are more expensive than movie tickets.

Despite the fact that the audience’s viewing experience is similar, film and theater are two very different mediums. Adapting one to the other — and, increasingly, it’s a two-way street these days, as evidenced by the upcoming film of a musical of the film The Producers — is tricky. Doing a well-known stage musical on the screen requires either totally abandoning realism for artifice, like Baz Luhrmann’s superior Moulin Rouge, or attempting to shoehorn the ludicrousness of people bursting into song into a more realistic setting, like Fiddler on the Roof. Columbus takes the middle ground, creating huge but obvious sets for some street scenes and occasionally venturing into the real New York City (or a Canadian equivalent) and a postcard New Mexico desert for others. The result is jarring, especially for a movie that works so hard to smooth out any rough edges.

But really, we’re here for the singing and dancing. How is it? Well, it’s pretty darn good. With the exception of Rosario Dawson and Tracie Thoms, most of the Broadway cast has been retained, and they clearly know their stuff. Jesse L. Martin and Wilson Jermaine Heredia are exceptionally well-rounded for characters in a musical. It is their story, rather than Dawson’s Mimi, that provides the emotional core of the movie. Not faring so well in the celluloid transition is Idina Menzel as Maureen, a performance artist whose badly staged and downright stupid protest piece gets more attention than Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” ever did.

But, as a whole, the cast is clearly working its collective butt off. Rent won a Pulitzer for bringing the subject of AIDS onto the musical stage, and one can’t help but wonder what the result would have been had a more adventurous director attempted to take the game cast in a more risky direction. But with Columbus in the driver’s seat, the film meanders for two and a half hours, occasionally hitting a high point but mostly just slogging through, leaving an audience who has not so much enjoyed as endured the experience.

Rent

Opened Wednesday, November 23rd

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

I don’t know whether to throw up, throw my arms in the air, pass out, laugh, cry, or bang my head against the wall. So I’m doing them all — at once. After 30-odd years of being a heavysmoker, I decided recently that it just might be time to try to quit. And so I am trying. And let me tell you, not onlyis it not easy, it is as downright strange as any acid trip. Things that used to be upsetting now make me laugh out loud, and things that would normally make me laugh out loud are upsetting. Things that normally don’t matter at all suddenly matter, and things that normally matter don’t matter at all. It’s hard to keep up with this stuff! Take my favorite person, George Bush. I’ve been so mean to him all these years, and now I feel sorry for him. I saw him twice on the news this morning: once, holding a cute white turkey and the other time, getting off a plane holding his little dog. I guess it’s gotten so bad for him that he thinks that as long as he’s holding an innocent little animal no one will throw anything at him. And what about that look on his face when he tried to sneak out of that press conference in Beijing through the doors that were locked. Dear Lord. Then I heard a report that the Vatican released a new document stating that gay men and those who support or condone the “gay culture” are officially banned from the priesthood but that “ex-gays” who have not been gay for at least three years may start the process of becoming a priest. See, normally this would make me puff all up and be angry with them for discrimination, but now I can’t stop laughing. The men who control one of the largest religions in the world actually think a gay person can be ex-gay for three years? Again, dear Lord. Those wild and crazy Vatican Catholics! Perhaps if they would stop running around in floor-length robes and sparkly hats they wouldn’t worry so much about this and could go on with what religious people are supposed to do: help people. But it doesn’t really matter. They’ll still never have a chess club because they’ll never be able to tell the difference between a bishop and a queen. Besides, who cares what they do when I can’t have a cigarette? Well, I get to have one a day. I probably shouldn’t have read the little book that came with my patches because there’s a section in there that tells you that you have to reward yourself for not smoking. So at the end of each day, I reward myself with … a cigarette! It doesn’t say not to do that! But one a day, compared to I won’t tell you how many packs, is certainly a step in the right direction. Only now, I can’t watch any television commercials. I guess I’ve been on the front end of bullshit so often that I can see it 10 miles away, and let me assure you that any company that “promises” you anything in a television commercial is flat-out lying to you. Swiffers will not make your life perfect. Ambien will not solve all of your problems. All of the low-interest loan companies that claim they will take away all of your debt and all of your problems have put so much evil in the fine print that they will own your ass for life. Despite what Dana Carvey and the rest of those morons tell you, Capital One does say “no.” And drinking a glass of Florida orange juice every day is not going to keep you from catching the occasional cold. I love it that the actor on that commercial thinks it would be a bad thing to be stranded on a tropical island away from other humans to keep away from germs. I’d give a million bucks to sling up on a beach in the sunshine for six months with no one yakking in my face and just some monkeys and pretty birds to keep me company. Yep, all commercials are lies. Vatican officials are nothing but a bunch of hypocrites. George Bush better keep holding those pets in front of him. And I’d better hope this day comes to an end soon so I can have my one cigarette. If not, I might start saying what I really think.