Month: February 2006

Categories
News The Fly-By

Back to the Future

In the world of thrift, there are the casual devotees, and then there are the self-described junkers: collectors like Kristen Rutschman and Dale McNeil.

Rutschman and McNeil are co-owners of Light Years Vintage, a store on South Cooper near Nelson that opened last November. Both Memphis natives have experience in vintage clothing and, perhaps more importantly, the courage to go beyond the call of duty.

“We go everywhere: podunk towns, rag houses where you can buy by the pound,” says McNeil. “And then there was that one time in Los Angeles.”

The couple, following an Internet lead, found themselves at a suburban home.

“As soon as you stepped inside, the smell hit you, like something here is really wrong,” says Rutschman. The homeowner had vintage clothes in her house, but she also had several hundred snakes.

The duo has dealt in vintage clothes for over six years after a trip to Japan (where a pair of vintage Levis can sell for $600) inspired them to try Internet sales. “We started out buying for clients overseas,” says McNeil.

The couple considered opening a store in Los Angeles but found the market saturated and the real estate pricey. “Memphis, by comparison, didn’t really have anything that was selling to the youth market,” says McNeil. After the Cotton Exchange, a vintage store in Cooper-Young, closed last year, the couple felt there was a vintage void in Memphis.

The two acknowledge that there is some competition, but they are not worried. “We’re trying to do something that is very different from the aesthetic of a store like Flashback, which has an older, very definite period feel,” says Rutschman.

The store gives the couple a home base, but they still act as buyers for independent clients.

“There are certain items we have that wouldn’t sell in Memphis. This isn’t the kind of town where you can sell a T-shirt for $400,” says Rutschman. However, they encourage customers to make requests because of their experience in acquiring specialty vintage items.

Light Years features a wide selection of clothes and accessories, but specializes in vintage rock T-shirts. “The stuff that designers like Marc Jacobs and Chloe are selling is basically borrowed from exactly the kind of stuff we have, except we charge one-tenth the price of designer clothes,” says McNeil. “Plus, if our stuff has lasted 30 years, you know the quality has to be pretty good.”

Categories
News News Feature

Courtroom Round-Up

As she awaits a ruling from U.S. District Court judge Bernice Donald, Ophelia Ford has emerged from obscurity to become a fixture on local television and a household name in Memphis and, to a lesser extent, across Tennessee. Not an easy thing for a late-starter like Ford, who is 55 years old. And not a bad thing in politics, where name recognition is vital. She went from Ford family also-ran (in 1999 she was disqualified for a Memphis City Council election because her qualifying petition did not have 25 valid signatures) to political celebrity in six months, thanks to a 13-vote special election victory in which the turnout was 6 percent.

Had Ford won the election going away last September, she would have merely been one of 33 senators and 132 members of the Tennessee General Assembly. Instead she has been on television and in newspapers almost daily for more than a month. Newspapers in Jackson and Chattanooga have editorialized about her and called for a new election. Whether or not Ford retains her Senate seat after the current election controversy ends, her fame and political future are assured.

n It will be at least two more months before any of the Memphis political corruption cases comes to trial. On January 27th, a federal judge gave Calvin Williams two more months to prepare for his next court appearance. Williams, the former chief administrator for the Shelby County Commission, was indicted on federal charges last year. Assistant U.S. attorney Tim Discenza told the judge the case is “complex” with “a lot of proof,” and the trial is expected to last five days. Williams declined to do an interview but said his long-awaited book about his experiences in county government is coming out “after this is over.”

The next scheduled court appearance for a defendant in the Tennessee Waltz cases is Michael Hooks’ appearance on March 20th. Former Senator Roscoe Dixon got a 90-day extension in January when he changed attorneys. John Ford’s case is expected to be the headliner in the group and will probably come last.

n Call it “Not Facing History and Ourselves.” It is always interesting to see how official government publications handle government scandals. The 2005-2006 edition of the Tennessee Blue Book came out last week. In it you will find lots of information about state history, symbols, honors, songs, and the hobbies, professional affiliations, and vanities of 132 legislators but nothing about Operation Tennessee Waltz.

Ex-senators John Ford and Roscoe Dixon are pictured along with notes in fine print which say they resigned in 2005 for reasons that are not specified. Both were indicted in the Tennessee Waltz along with Senator Kathryn Bowers, whose occupation is listed as “contractor consultant,” and Senator Ward Crutchfield of Chattanooga, whose biography includes a full page of honors dating back to 1985 but nothing about his recent notoriety.

Controversy has no place in the Blue Book, unless it happened during or before the civil rights era of the 1960s. Former Governor Ray Blanton’s biography says nothing about his prison term or his forced removal from office in 1979. The whitewashed history of state government refers to “questionable acts” by the Blanton administration. A government that can’t distinguish between questionable acts and illegal acts is a government that will be hard pressed to deal with ethics reform.

n Accused bogus wedding planner Rafat Mawlawi was in federal court last week for a change of plea hearing. Mawlawi, who has been jailed since April because the government considers him a flight risk and a possible terrorist sympathizer, pleaded guilty to four counts of immigration violation and one weapons charge during a one-hour hearing. He was returned to prison until his sentencing hearing April 27th.

Assistant U.S. attorney Fred Godwin, who is prosecuting the case, made no mention of the terrorism angle during the hearing. Videos, photographs, passports, and more than $30,000 in cash, which the government considered suspicious, were seized when federal agents with the Joint Terrorism Task Force searched Mawlawi’s home near Craigmont High School on April 4, 2005.

Godwin did provide one new detail about the case. An alert customs agent at Detroit Metro Airport identified both Mawlawi and codefendant Tamela Bracey as possible immigration violators in separate searches in May 2003 and tied the two together. Mawlawi and another codefendant, Janet Netters Austin, recruited others to engage in sham marriages or engagements with Middle Eastern men to help them enter the United States. Before he was arrested, Mawlawi worked as a part-time interpreter for the immigration office in the federal building in Memphis.

n One year after his celebrated trial and conviction in federal court, University of Alabama football booster Logan Young Jr. remains free pending appeal. His attorneys have asked the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to move the appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court because they believe it is an issue of state law rather than federal law. Young received a six-month sentence for his conviction for paying $120,000 to high school coach Lynn Lang in the Albert Means recruiting case.

n Headline in last week’s Detroit News: “Milder weather cuts heating bills.” The story explained how a mild Michigan winter and lower rates for natural gas — down as much as 21 percent at some Michigan utility companies — are reducing heating bills by 25 to 30 percent. Headline in last month’s Nashville Tennessean: “Natural gas bills to shrink as utility cuts rates again.” Nashville Gas customers get a 36 percent reduction effective February 1st, on top of another reduction in January. Memphis Light, Gas and Water has offered no such relief from gas bills up 70 percent or more. Any consumer savings are the result of lower usage due to January temperatures in the 50s.

Categories
Opinion

Deferred Gratification

If you’re going to college, plan to go to college, or paying for someone else to go to college, a recent report on endowments might surprise you.

College endowments are loaded, and they’re growing as much as 25 percent each year. The increase is due to a combination of exceptionally large gifts and investment gains. The University of Memphis has been one of the big winners, with a $175 million endowment and a gain of nearly 16 percent last year.

Other colleges and universities in Tennessee and the Mid-South saw gains ranging from 5.2 percent at Rhodes College to 23 percent at Mississippi State University. A bigger endowment means more financial aid for students, said David Easley, chief financial officer of the Mississippi State University Foundation, where about half of the endowment income goes toward scholarships.

The National Association of College and University Business Officers publishes a report each year on endowments of 746 colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. Their Web site, nacubo.org, has the full report.

Harvard, with $25.5 billion, has the largest endowment. The only university in Tennessee with an endowment of more than $1 billion is Vanderbilt, with $2.6 billion.

The big gain at Mississippi State was due to fulfillment of a $25 million pledge from a private donor. The university earned a return of 8.4 percent on its investments, which is slightly below the 9.3 percent average return for all colleges in the 2005 survey. At the University of Memphis, three gifts of more than $1 million boosted the endowment, said Julie Johnson, vice president of Advancement.

For students, parents, and donors, endowment surveys point out things that may not be heralded in the institution’s alumni publications or fund-raising appeals.

Endowment gifts, as opposed to, say, gifts to the athletic department, don’t get spent right away. Donors are helping future generations of college students live off the interest. College financial officials say that, on average, they spend only 4 to 5 percent of the endowment each year. If inflation takes 3 percent and management fees another 1 percent, a 9 percent return keeps the endowment at roughly the same level.

It’s never a good thing to lag one’s peer group, and endowments are no exception. The difference between a 5 percent gain and a 10 percent gain on $200 million is $10 million. That translates to thousands of dollars per student at a time when tuition exceeds $5,000 a year at public colleges and $25,000 at some private colleges.

The rich get richer. Yale, with an endowment of $15.2 billion, also consistently has one of the best investment returns of around 16 percent. Stanford, with a $12 billion endowment, grew 19 percent last year thanks to investments in the stock of Google and emerging companies in Silicon Valley. On the other hand, size can be a disadvantage. Givers may wonder how much is enough? What difference does a $100 gift make to a university with an endowment of more than $1 billion as opposed to a similar gift to the local food bank or high school?

Endowment growth, coupled with the Tennessee Lottery, is good news for college students. Lottery proceeds, constantly replenished by gamblers, are projected to be $240 million this year, and most of it gets spent. By statute, the lottery reserve fund is only $50 million. Some 70,000 students will get a $3,300 scholarship if they attend a four-year in-state college.

Here’s a summary of the national rank, size, and growth of endowments of colleges and universities in the Mid-South:

Vanderbilt University, 23rd: $2.6 billion, 14.5 percent.

University of Tennessee system, 81st: $714 million, 7.3 percent.

University of Arkansas system, 83rd: $691 million, 10.4 percent.

University of Mississippi, 135th: $397 million, 8.3 percent.

University of the South, 187th: $253 million, 5.4 percent.

Rhodes College, 202nd: $223 million, 5.2 percent.

Mississippi State University, 207th: $211 million, 23 percent.

University of Memphis, 236th: $175 million, 15.8 percent.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Record Reviews

The Greatest

Cat Power

(Matador)

With a dose of Memphis soul,

an indie songwriter makes her old sound new again.

In 2005, Chan Marshall recorded The Greatest, her seventh record as Cat Power, in town at Ardent Studios. She recruited an impressive roster of local musicians that included Mabon “Teenie” Hodges and Leroy “Flick” Hodges of Al Green’s Hi Rhythm Section, among others. However, unlike other artists who’ve made local records — John Hiatt and actor/eyebrow cultivator Peter Gallagher, to name two recent examples — Marshall is no mere tourist in Memphis, nor has she made a nostalgia record. The Greatest features her typically accomplished guitar work, artfully rudimentary piano playing, and deeply questioning and compassionate songwriting. In other words, it sounds recognizably like a Cat Power record but with a much richer sound, greater scope, and flashes of sophisticated horns.

However, in this new setting, Marshall’s vocals sound more soulful and assured, which is no real surprise. On “I’ve Been Thinking,” her 2004 collaboration with Handsome Boy Modeling School, she showed a surprising new side, eschewing her usual folksy wallflower vocals for a low, smoky coo. The Greatest lives up to that track’s considerable promise, showcasing a singer still finding new ways to use her instrument. Marshall layers her backing vocals throughout the album, chanting the title on “The Greatest” like a Greek chorus and adding doo-wop filigrees to “After It All.”

This performance is matched by songwriting that flirts with autobiography through a veil of metaphor and insinuation. The title track recasts her as a pugilist, but the violence and hostility, not to mention the push-and-pull between indefatigable hopes and dashed expectations, are definitely applicable to her music career, which has been tugged along by her brittle persona and famously awkward live shows. She briefly addresses this aspect of her reputation on “Willie.” Over her ace backing band, she examines pop music’s primary subject matter — romance — and delves into what inspires her music and sanity, namely generous friends and lovers. We’ve come to expect this type of deeply personal, slyly coded song from Cat Power, but she still finds ways to make it sound new. — Stephen Deusner

Grade: A-

Look for more on Cat Power’s Memphis-based band in next week’s Flyer.

The Moon Was Blue

Bobby Bare

(Dualtone)

Bobby Bare boomerangs back after a 20-year retirement for a standards album that’s nobody’s idea of standard and crazy great. Bare scored Nashville hits from the mid-’60s through the mid-’70s but is probably best known now as father to rocker Bobby Bare Jr., who co-produced this album. Filled with songs Bare always wanted to record, The Moon Was Blue pairs known quantities (“Shine on Harvest Moon” and “Everybody’s Talkin'”) with out-of-left-field choices (Shel Silverstein’s heartbreaking “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan”). Bare’s heavy baritone anchors tunes that sometimes threaten to float away on quirky instrumentation. No matter. Once this sinks into your skin, you’re likely to follow Bare anywhere he cares to roam. (“Are You Sincere,” “Everybody’s Talkin’,” “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan”) — Werner Trieschmann

Grade: A-

Healthy White Baby

Healthy White Baby

(Broadmoor)

Taking its name from a line from Raising Arizona, Chicago-based Healthy White Baby is Laurie Stirratt and Danny Black’s new band, their first following the break-ups of Blue Mountain and the Blacks. This debut, released on Stirratt’s Broadmoor label, is no-frills country-blues-rock that makes a virtue out of a lack of ambition or pretension. But the band shows just how durable that equation is with songs like “Look You in the Eyes” and “I Was Trying” aiming for the gut. Stirratt and Ryan Juravic form a tight rhythm section, but the band’s real vigor lies in Black’s guitar and surprisingly catchy, pop-song melodies. (“Soul,” “It’s Over,” “Home”)

— SD

Grade: B+

Healthy White Baby plays Proud Larry’s in Oxford Saturday, February 4th. Showtime is 10 p.m.; cover is $8.

Categories
Music Music Features

Looking for the Blues

First things first: a hearty congratulations to the winners of the 22nd Annual International Blues Challenge, which took place over the weekend in and around Beale Street. South Florida bluesman Joey Gilmore, along with his band, won first place in the band contest Saturday night. Earlier in the day, Memphis-connected singer Eden Brent, representing the Mississippi Delta Blues Society of Indianola, Mississippi, won in the solo/duo category. The Albert King Award for “most promising” guitar player went to Zack Weisinger of the third-place band Jill West & Blues Attack. San Diego’s Aunt Kizzy’z Boyz took home second prize in the band contest. The prize for best self-produced CD went to Back in Bluesville by New Jersey’s Roxy Perry.

Unfortunately, this year marked the second straight year I missed the IBC finals. Last year, paternity leave and family obligations provided the excuse. This year, a sudden sickness waylaid me, and I spent the night in bed instead. Even culled down to the finals, the IBC showcases a lot of pedestrian bands (an earlier finals inspired a taxonomy of contemporary blues bands: Blues Brothers, Kid Jonny Wayne Vaughan, Blues Hammer, Available For Your Next Corporate Function, etc.), and the wait from the final band’s set to the announcement of the winner feels endless. But all that aside, I regret missing it, because I sincerely believe that the International Blues Challenge is one of the city’s very best music events.

This year, the Memphis-based Blues Foundation drew more than 130 acts from 33 states and seven foreign countries to Beale Street, each act sponsored by a blues society affiliated with the foundation and many of the acts bolstered by the support of society members also making the trip. Those numbers swelled even more by the scores of journalists, record-label representatives, publicists, and established blues musicians in town for the weekend. Is there any better use of Beale Street as a showcase for the city?

Though I missed the finals, I didn’t miss the weekend entirely. Friday night, I judged a semi-finals round at B.B. King’s on Beale. As a generalist amid a sea of blues specialists, judging these contests always makes me a little uncomfortable. But in each of the two previous years I’ve served as a semi-finals judge, the band I’ve awarded the highest marks has gone on to win the whole contest. I could tell Friday night that my little streak would end this year. For starters, there were no clearly outstanding bands on the bill. But I also detected that I wasn’t seeing things the same way as my fellow judges, one a West Coast blues journalist, the other a Midwestern label owner.

Both were nice, smart guys who knew and cared more about contemporary blues than I do. But as blues specialists, they clearly were looking and listening differently from me. They were investigating the details, plumbing the minor variations that genre specialists tend to fixate on. “He peaked too early on that first solo,” the label owner remarked to me during one set. I didn’t notice. I was just looking to see if there was any there there. And I saw it — no, felt it — once on Friday night. The band was Ron Teamer & Smokin’ Gun, from Kansas City.

For his second song, Teamer pulled up a chair and sat down, strings of beads falling from the end of a V-shaped guitar made functional for how easily it lodged onto Teamer’s knee. A slight African-American man, he sang as slowly and deliberately as he played, the soulful grain of his voice working against the utter ease of his delivery. It was a simple soul-blues number — at first I mistook it for a cover of Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” — and Teamer’s drummer drove it along with a steady, hypnotic beat that crept up my spine and shamed his flashier counterparts from other bands.

I felt his beat, felt Teamer’s song, felt something for the first and only time all night. My West Coast journalist companion went to find out if Teamer had any physical ailments that would require him to sit. My Midwest label-owner colleague allowed that “he sings with great feeling” but concluded — fairly — “there isn’t much of a band there.” I looked down at my score sheet and tried to put them in the finals. They didn’t get there and wouldn’t have won if they did. But for that one song out of the 40 or so I heard that night, the blues was most definitely alive.

Categories
Book Features Books

A Time To Kill

When Tristan Egolf’s new novel, Kornwolf, opens, there’s already big trouble in Stepford County in the great state of Pennsyltucky in 1992. This is farming country, the “Amish Basin,” due west of Philth Town (think Philadelphia), and to add to rising property taxes, rapid commercial development, a brand-new Sprawl Mart, and ongoing tensions between the “Dutchies” (aka the “Plain Folk,” the Anabaptists, which include the Amish) and the “Redcoats” (aka the “English,” which means reglur Amercuns), there’s a werewolf wreaking havoc. Or so it seems based on the widespread cases of breaking and entering, criminal trespassing, destruction of property, arson, and livestock killings in the towns of Blue Ball, Lamepeter, Laycock, Intercourse, and Paradise.

There’s even a blurry photo of the beast doing the dirty work, but how to describe it? Sort of a dog seen from the back, on its hindlegs, skin sores running. A mud-thrown kangaroo with a scorched pompadour. Richard Nixon with clotted fur and mange. Or is it, in the words of Owen Brynmor — a 30-year-old reporter newly returned to the area after a string of firings from two-bit newspapers, a prodigal son suffering from monster-size nicotine withdrawal and now working for the Stepford Daily Plea — “something right out of a waste dump in Jersey” or “up from the depths of a portable toilet”?

Looks to be, then, most anything taking the form of any body, so long as it’s hideous, ravenous, murderous, and a throwback to the Thirty Years War, when the legend of the “kornwolf” first came on the scene, the scene being 17th-century Germany when the country was rocked by sectarian bloodshed, religious persecution, its lands laid waste, its heretics burned at the stake, “The Time of the Killing.”

Sort of like what’s happening in Stepford County. Sort of, and to the tune of “Angel of Death” by Slayer off their album Reign in Blood — the very tune that sends an 18-year-old boy by the name of Ephraim Bontrager, son of an abusive, alcoholic Amish minister named Benedictus (who’s also operating a puppy mill) into fits of superhuman violence. (The flip side? To calm himself, Ephraim plays “Possum,” aka George Jones, to the tune of “A Good Year for the Roses.”)

Is Ephraim suffering from Maple Syrup Urine Disease (don’t ask), a condition prevalent among the Amish of Stepford? Or is it Glutaric Aciduria One, equally common among Pennsyltucky’s “Dutch”? Or is it a mix of schizophrenia, rabies, porphyria, psychomotor epilepsy, and manic depressive psychosis with hysterical neurosis of the dissociative type? Maybe it’s simply lycanthropy.

Grizelda Hostler knows. She’s Ephraim’s creepy aunt, Benedictus’ sister … Benedictus who married Maria Speicher, who died giving birth to Ephraim but whose brother, Jacob, went to “the Nam” and came back Jack Stumpf, the owner of a boxing gym and training ground for a junior welterweight champ named Roddy Lowe. Owen Brynmor gets to serve in Lowe’s corner (when he’s not investigating the history of werewolves) during a prize fight in Philth Town, but what Lowe has to do with this story, dunno, because the real fight occupies the gruesome, closing 70 pages, during which all hell breaks loose: Teenagers go nuts, a policeman gets a candle up his rectum, Grizelda loses her head, and the Blue Ball Devil reigns in blood. And yet, as the last line of Kornwolf reads, “this story never ends … .”

But it does. It’s Tristan Egolf’s third and final novel. At the age of 33, on May 7, 2005, he shot himself, leaving a fiancée, a daughter, and us with a book that starts satirically wicked good, gets midway confusingly, needlessly sidetracked, and ends up, sad to say, haywire.

Categories
Art Art Feature

In a Snap

For two decades, beginning in the late 1920s, photographer Margaret Bourke-White went where no other woman — and few men — dared to go. She perched atop a construction crane over ladles of white-hot metal, balanced on scaffolding 1,000 feet above the Manhattan sidewalk, and shimmied through narrow mine shafts hundreds of feet underground.

While on assignment, earning an average of $100 per day, she risked life and limb, traveling by horseback through the Caucasus Mountains, surviving a torpedo run, accompanying an Air Force crew on a bombing raid, and photographing Holocaust survivors during the emancipation of Buchenwald. Always an intrepid journalist, she interviewed Gandhi mere hours before his assassination, photographed the devastation of postwar Germany, and chronicled the fate of sharecroppers here in the American South.

One of few females in an elite, male-dominated world, her work was published by leading magazines of the day, such as Fortune, PM, and Life, drawing comparisons to gifted photojournalist Walker Evans. Along with Charles Sheeler and Lewis Hine, she received commissions from fast-growing corporations such as Eastern Airlines, Otis Steel Mill, the Chrysler Corporation, and Lincoln Electric Company. Like those of Paul Strand and Alfred Steiglitz, her photographs — admired as much for their artistic qualities as for their journalistic integrity — hung in the Museum of Modern Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Rockefeller Center’s vast rotunda.

A selection of Bourke-White’s industrial photographs, curated by Stephen Bennett Phillips of The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., is currently on display at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens.

Some 70 years later, these iconic images still bristle with vitality and movement:

Twin crescents of perforated metal flicker in a fireworks bath, an interactive sculpture Bourke-White found at an International Harvester plant. A Chaplinesque scene at Chrysler shows a trinity of colossal gears, dwarfing a worker toiling away below. An overhead shot of New York’s garment district resembles a set of pushpins, assembled willy-nilly on a bulletin board; the effect is startling, dizzying, and glorious. The curlicue gates intersecting the camera’s view of Cleveland’s Terminal Tower juxtaposes fanciful swirls with the no-nonsense architecture that rises, unimpeded, to pierce the sky. A close-up of women’s shoes becomes abstract art, a contrast of shadow and light.

“She was truly fearless, and she had an incredible sense of design,” Phillips says of Bourke-White. “I think people will be amazed that she took photos like these and surprised by the beauty of these images.”

Phillips credits a single photo, a circa-1935 image titled Steps, Washington, D.C., for piquing his interest in Bourke-White’s early, design-oriented work. The 11-by-13-inch photograph, donated to The Phillips Collection in 1996, is an astonishing study in black and white. Shot from the lower right side of a wide, stone staircase, which undulates like a gray ribbon across the paper, the image is a geometric tour de force — even including a black-suited man who hurries downward near the top of the frame.

“As a curator here, I’m responsible for understanding the collection,” Phillips says, “so it became my quest to understand Bourke-White’s concepts.” Captivated by Steps, he traveled to Syracuse University to peruse the photographer’s archives, which include her cameras, diaries, business and personal correspondence, and thousands of images. After an initial survey, he compiled 150 early photographs that highlighted her fascination with industrial design. In 2003, The Phillips Collection displayed the selected works and published a dazzling 200-page catalog, augmented with essays, historical transcripts, and extensive notes.

“People who have seen these photos love the fact that they illustrate American history,” Phillips notes. “Most people who know of Bourke-White think of her Dust Bowl-period photos or picture her in a flying suit right after the concentration camps were liberated. From the response we’ve gotten, people are very excited to see a different side of Bourke-White.”

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

New Kid on the Block

Twenty-six-year-old Reinaldo Alfonso, who recently replaced the celebrated chef Jose Gutierrez at The Peabody’s grand eatery Chez Philippe, grew up in a busy Cuban kitchen in Miami. It was a flavorful world that revolved around good food and frequent family get-togethers. Inspired by the women in his life, his grandmother and mother, and “the whole Latin community,” he became fascinated with kitchen life and the special relationships that form over cutting boards and boiling pots. Every major event (and most of the minor ones) in the young chef’s life revolved around food.

“The family got together all the time, and we would cook and eat all day,” he says, allowing that Sunday feasts were particularly memorable.

“We always had rice and beans, tostones [fried plantains], vacca frita, which is different kinds of shredded beef, or maybe a chicken fricassee,” Alfonso says. “But no matter what we had, the table was never set until there was a good bottle of wine and lots of Cuban bread on the table. The wine and the bread, that was my dad’s thing. There had to be lots of bread for him to soak up all of the juices with.”

When he was 8 years old, the budding cook sat down beside his grandmother who was turning stale bread into pudding. He asked if he could help.

“She did the cutting. I did all the mixing and all the other messy work that kids love,” Alfonso says of his first kitchen duties. At 14, he took a job in a Spanish restaurant in Miami, washing dishes, mopping floors, peeling potatoes, and taking careful note of how the food was prepared.

“I started early, and I’m glad that I did,” Alfonso says, holding up his hands as if to say “look where it got me.”

The journey from his grandmother’s kitchen to the revered galley of Chez Philippe wasn’t terribly long. Alfonso’s commitment to fine dining and his desire to learn took him from Florida to New York and from the tutelage of one great chef to another. Although you can still hear Havana in his voice, Alfonso’s food took on a decidedly French accent.

“My food is 95 percent French, and my presentations are French,” he says. “But I use a lot of Asian ingredients — Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and even Indian — to heighten the flavor. I try to blend a little bit of everything I’ve learned, but I focus on simplicity and try to highlight ingredients for what they are. People are starting to realize that you don’t need to mess with food too much. They are coming back to the classics because the classic way of preparing food has been lost in the last few years.”

Alfonso likes simple pleasures. He likes to buy a pack of mini-Oreos, pour them in a bowl of milk, and eat them like cereal. He loves to fish and to scuba dive. There was even a time when his love for the water led him to consider a career as a marine biologist.

“I love fish. I love seafood. And I’m really happy about flying in the best, freshest seafood from all over the world,” Alfonso says. “Everything has to be extremely fresh and extremely well-done. I’m a stickler for details.”

At present he’s most excited about the yellowtail tuna — a buttery, fat-laden fish he’s shipping fresh daily from Japan. But that’s only the beginning.

“I will be using sea urchin soon,” Alfonso says. “I’m doing things slowly. I can’t bring out certain ingredients that might scare people off right away.”

With sweet and spicy appetizers like the “Lobster Cigar” (a spring roll stuffed with Maine lobster and daikon radish with Thai chili sauce) and entrées like roasted wild striped bass with peekytoe crab and leek ragout, Chez Philippe’s new menu already smells like a fresh ocean breeze. Steaks, ribs, and a miso-brazed lamb shank with cauliflower couscous and haricot verts (green beans) ensure that meat lovers won’t be disappointed either.

Chez Philippe’s desserts include ginger, pistachio, and star anise crème brûlée, an apple tart, and a banana spring roll with a heart of peanut and chocolate, as well as a variety of homemade ice creams.

“Over the past four years I’ve turned down several positions because I didn’t feel like I was ready for them,” says the young chef. “But this time it was different. This time there were more people motivating me to do this. There’s a little bit of weight on my shoulders, but I’m confident in what I do.”

Chez Philippe in The Peabody (529-4188)

davis@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Full of Beans

If restaurant openings were a disease, the number of new Mexican restaurants downtown and Midtown might be considered an epidemic.

The Complex is chiefly known as a bar and live-music venue, featuring the city’s hippest alternative acts. But it’s also the site of El Pollo Grille and Mexican Cantina. Bert Jamboa opened the Complex three and a half years ago and since then has worked on adding a kitchen. Although he says that the restaurant is still a work-in-progress, it’s open and serving standard Mexican fare — burritos, tacos, enchiladas, and the like — as well as all-American and all-Mexican breakfasts, which means you can get your short stack or L.A.-style huevos rancheros. The restaurant is open daily from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.

El Pollo Grille and Mexican Cantina, 704 Madison (692-9211)

Another hidden treasure can be found inside the Comfort Inn on Front Street. Sgt. Jalapeno’s Tortilla Factory Co. is a Tex-Mex family affair. Melissa and Victor Ortiz opened the restaurant in mid-December, temporarily abandoning Ortiz Tortilla Company, their Southaven restaurant.

“We are still making our own tortillas. We only closed the restaurant in Southaven temporarily,” says Victor.

It’s not just homemade tortillas at Sgt. Jalapeno’s. It’s homemade everything. The Ortizes moved here from Brownsville, Texas, where they operated Zelda’s Bakery, which specialized in Mexican pastries. When they came to the Memphis area in 1999, they brought along the flavors of South Texas and their concept of “food fast fare.”

Food fast fare? It’s hard to explain but mouth-watering nonetheless. Try Sgt. Jalapeno’s smothered burrito, a 12-inch flour tortilla filled with Spanish rice, lettuce, tomatoes, your choice of meat, smothered with red sauce and topped with olives. It’s yours for $7.95.

The restaurant is open 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Sgt. Jalapeno’s Tortilla Factory Co., 100 N. Front St. (526-0583)

Transplanting a little patch of their Mexican hometown of Guadalajara to Memphis is what Andreas Flores Jr. and his dad had in mind when they opened Quinto Patio on Beale Street across from the New Daisy Theatre. The restaurant serves traditional Mexican food for lunch and dinner, as well as Italian standards — a holdover from the restaurant’s former tenant, New York Pizza. A full bar will be available once the liquor license is in place, and a patio for outdoor seating is in the works as well.

The restaurant is open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 11 a.m. to 3 a.m. Friday and Saturday.

Quinto Patio, 345 Beale St. (523-7288)

Rio Loco’s opened last week in the old Buckley’s space about a block west of The Peabody. You can try their jumbo lime margarita for $6 during happy hour from 4 p.m. until 7 p.m. Or you can stop by for one of the daily lunch specials and get a demi-margarita, the jumbo lime’s little brother, which costs only $3.

Rio Loco’s is open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and until 10:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Rio Loco’s, 117 Union (523-2142)

Also opening: Las Margaritas Mexican Bar and Grille next week inside America’s Best Inns & Suites at 1837 Union; Garcia Wells Southwestern Grill in Overton Square this month; Happy Mexican Restaurante & Cantina next month at 385 S. Second St.; and Qdoba Mexican Grill at Poplar and Holmes in April.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Double Fault

Woody Allen has always struggled with a desire to write high drama. I say struggled because as an artist he is inarguably more successful, not to mention universally recognized, as a comedian. His own life has taken its tragic turns, and Allen has been successful with dramatic films such as Crimes & Misdemeanors, a work that bears no little resemblance to his newest, Match Point. In the former film, however, Allen was present as the comic relief, while in his new work the tone hews closer to Crime & Punishment. The strain of a full-on tragedy results in a film that is ambitious and enjoyable, if ultimately flawed.

The protagonist of Match Point is Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), a former tennis pro who has come to London to try and make his way. He takes a job as a tennis instructor and, between backhands, befriends one of his pupils, a wealthy society lad named Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode). Chris is soon introduced to the whole Hewett clan, begins dating Tom’s sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), and seems to be on his way to ingratiating himself into the good life. The catch: Tom’s bombshell fiancée, a struggling American actress named Nola played by successful American actress Scarlett Johansson.

I have to stop here and say a word about the acting in this film. I don’t know if Allen was trying out some kind of self-reflexive gag here, casting Johansson as a sexy American who can’t act to save her life, but despite my best efforts to focus on her attributes, her performance is downright miserable. Rhys-Meyers is not much better, while all the Brits and supporting characters do an outstanding job. (Note to Allen: Please, please get a better casting director!)

Nola and Tom break up, Chris and Chloe get married, and then, in a spot of bad luck, Chris and Nola meet again, rekindling his irrepressible lust for her. The film is best here, playing back and forth across the affair and marriage, intertwining British society humor with the domestic sphere that Allen has always captured so well.

The problem is that Allen goes too far. If he wants to write a tragedy without paying lip service to his comic past, fine with me. Here, though, that desire overrides Allen’s attention as a director. Chris is supposed to be a charming character, but Allen only shows him as a moody schemer. Many of the conversations between Chris and Nola sound less like dialogue than recitations of character motivations, the sort of from-the-heart claptrap that Allen should never let himself write.

Despite its flaws, I did enjoy Match Point. The tension builds palpably until you find yourself squirming for a way out. The film ends with a bit of finesse, and Allen’s philosophical musing on the role that luck plays in life doesn’t feel heavy-handed. With a better cast and sprinkle of levity, this could have been a brillant film. As it stands, I would say Allen has hit this one just out of bounds.

Match Point

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