Month: March 2006

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

We Recommend

thursday March 9

Lewis Center for Senior Citizens Books, Etc. Sale

Preview Sale & Supper

Lewis Center for Senior Citizens, 1188 North Parkway, 4-7 p.m., $5

Get a sit-down dinner and first dibs on the 10,000-plus items — books, records, CDs, and more — in this fund-raiser for the senior center.

Dora’s Pirate Adventure

The Orpheum, 10:30 a.m. and 7 p.m., $13-$37.50

Dora and her crew — cousin Diego and monkey friend Boots, among them — roll into town this week for a new musical adventure in search of treasure. Runs through Sunday.

friday March 10

Opening Reception for “Blondes Times Three”

Painted Planet Artspace, 8-11 p.m.

Exhibit of paintings by Donna Bowers, Brian Holmes, and Liz Lee, who all happen to be blond.

Memphis Vocal Arts Ensemble 15th Anniversary Reunion

Buckman Performing and Fine Arts Center, 7:30 p.m., $10-$20

The Memphis Vocal Arts Ensemble celebrates with this concert of songs from their performances of the past 15 years. There will be an encore performance on Sunday at the Buckman at 3 p.m.

saturday March 11

Gather the Women Event

Shelby Farms, 9:30 a.m.,

donations welcome

In honor of National Women’s History Month in March, Gather the Women are holding a Native-American purification/thanksgiving ceremony and potluck open to both men and women. Between 3 and 7 p.m. at Shelby Forest, there will be an Honoring the Great Mother ceremony with chanting and stories. This one will cost you $75.

Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens

Circuit Playhouse, 8 p.m., $20

Somebody’s been killing the cabaret acts on planet Frottage III. Leave it to Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens to save the day — all to a booty-shaking disco beat.

sunday March 12

Sunday on South Main

South Main District, 11 a.m.-4 p.m.

Check out the shops on South Main. At 3 p.m., there will be a tea dance at Jack Robinson Gallery.

Signs of Spring Garden Walk

Memphis Botanic Garden, 1-2:30 p.m.

Has spring sprung? Sierra Club member Judith Hammond will lead this nature walk, happening rain or shine.

sunday March 12

Talk by Steven Biel

Dixon Gallery and Gardens, 2 p.m.

Part of Dixon’s fine-arts book club, BooksmART. Harvard professor Steven Biel, author of American Gothic: A Life of America’s Most Famous Painting, discusses the cultural reach of Grant Wood’s stern overalled farmer and his equally stern wife in his iconic painting American Gothic.

monday March 13

Lenten Noonday Preaching Series

Calvary Episcopal Church,

12:05-12:40 p.m.

The annual month-long Waffle Shop and speakers series at Calvary is in full swing. Today’s guest is Dr. Marcus J. Borg, a professor of religion and culture at Oregon State University. Borg, one of the series’ most popular speakers (this is his 12th consecutive visit), is a biblical scholar and the author of Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time.

wednesday March 15

Cirque du Soleil: “Delirium”

FedExForum, 8 p.m., $69-$110

The world-famous Cirque du Soleil troupe brings its “Delirium” show to Memphis. The emphasis is on music, and for the first time, there will be lyrics to Cirque’s songs. Eleven musicians and six singers will be among the 44 performers on stage. There will be a repeat performance Thursday night.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Fred vs.Wilma

You know how men behave when they’re alone together, right? They don’t talk about trivial things like their feelings or about how much they like each others’ outfits. Instead, they sit quietly in a strong manly fashion contemplating strong and manly things like fixing manly cars and fishing mannishly. The communal silence is broken only when some guy feels the urge to call his best friend an obscene name or to fart. Women, on the other hand, never fart. They chatter like coke-addled magpies, shop compulsively, go to the bathroom in groups, and take forever choosing an outfit. These comedic observations may not smell particularly fresh. They’ve been the reliable cornerstone of gender-based humor since sometime in the late Mesozoic era. Nevertheless, they are also the cornerstone of author/actor Rob Becker’s Defending the Caveman, the longest-running one-man show in Broadway history.

Defending the Caveman comes off like the blue-collar comics’ answer to Joseph Campbell as Becker considers the power of the remote control and theorizes that men and women haven’t changed all that much since the days when we were short, hairy, club-swinging brutes.

Men had to be quiet when they were hunting so they wouldn’t scare away the prey, Becker postulates. As the tribe’s gatherers, women had to communicate frequently in order to accomplish complicated tasks. Talking loudly was a plus because it would frighten off predators. From Becker’s point of view, everything that one gender finds annoying about the other can be explained away with a little amateur anthropology.

Chris Sullivan, who took on Becker’s role three years ago, describes the show as “life-changing.”

“When I started doing Caveman, I was just doing comedy. Now it has become more a philosophy for me — more a way of life.”

Sullivan is a classically trained actor who had never done comedy until three years ago when he was handpicked by Becker to perform the show.

“At first I was just doing a Rob Becker impression,” Sullivan says. “But now it’s nothing like that. Rob came to a [recent] show and said, ‘Well, now you do it better than me.'”

From the beginning of its long run, Defending the Caveman has been cast as the men-are-from-Mars, women-are-from-Venus of solo theater. Shortly after its New York debut, the author credited his show’s “surprise” success to the fact that he’d invited so many marriage counselors to see the previews, and they turned around and recommended it to their clients.

“The show can be life-changing,” Sullivan says. “Every night the theater will be full of 30- and 40-year-old couples, and all of them think that the issues they have in their relationship are unique. Then halfway through the show, they look around and see other couples elbowing each other. They discover that the issues in their relationship aren’t unique, and they realize they’re not alone.

“The hardest thing about performing this show is keeping both genders on your side all the time,” Sullivan adds. “The first half is all about how men are assholes. The second half is about reminding men that women are magical. It takes jabs at both men and women, but it’s never patronizing … and in the end men feel defended and women aren’t offended.”

There’s one problem with Becker’s theories about Fred, Wilma, and the whole Bedrock gang. The idea that primitive men were exclusively hunters and that primitive women were exclusively gatherers is a pretty primitive generalization. There’s plenty of evidence suggesting that all of our furry little ancestors did a little of both.

“There are a lot of people who won’t believe in the theories,” Sullivan says. “But you don’t have to believe in the theories to appreciate the humor and the perspective. Comedy deals in generalities. If you try to make comedy too specific, then it doesn’t apply to anybody.”

When Defending the Caveman opened in 1992, it was savaged by critics for being an anthropological study in gender clichés, but audiences poured in to see the show.

“What happens is this,” Sullivan explains. “A group of women get together for girls’ night out, and they come see the show. Then they go home and they drag their husbands out to see the show, and the husbands like it too.”

Categories
Music Music Features

Exchange Program

Later this month, over 1,300 bands — most of them some variation on indie rock or alt-country — will gather in Austin, Texas, for the annual South By Southwest Music Festival, perhaps the biggest showcase for emerging music in the country.

Memphis will have a healthy contingent at SXSW this year, with Midtown’s Goner Records hosting their own showcase event, which will include local acts the Dutch Masters, Harlan T. Bobo, and the Final Solutions along with non-local Goner bands. In addition, several other local acts — the Tearjerkers, Lucero, the River City Tanlines, the Angry Angles, Ron Franklin, and Viva L’American Death Ray Music — are scheduled to represent the city in Austin.

But don’t worry if you don’t have the time or money to make the trip. We’ll have full coverage of the festival — focusing on the Memphis bands — in our March 23rd edition. As for the non-Memphis bands, as always, Memphis’ proximity to Austin leads to a portion of the festival coming to us in the form of bands stopping in town on their way to or from SXSW.

Here’s our annual cheatsheet to the season’s most notable SXSW-connected Memphis shows through the end of the month. (All descriptions are written by Chris Herrington unless otherwise noted.)

The Headlights and The Metal Hearts (with Augustine)

Young Avenue Deli

Sunday, March 12th

The Headlights are a gentle, atmospheric three-piece indie-rock band from Champaign, Illinois, set to release they full-length debut later this year. Metal Hearts are an indie duo from Baltimore that have been compared to bands like Cat Power and Arab Strap.

Healthy White Baby

Hi-Tone Café

Sunday, March 12th

This straightforward three-piece rock band from Chicago boasts a regional connection in the form of bassist/singer Laurie Stirratt, formerly of Oxford faves Blue Mountain. Here she’s joined by fellow alt-country notable Danny Black (of Bloodshot band the Blacks), but the result is more roots- and garage-rock than any kind of country.

Crimson Sweet (with Mouse Rocket and The Black)

The Buccaneer

Sunday, March 12th

Although the band is named for a particularly succulent variety of watermelon, there’s nothing sugary about Crimson Sweet. On the other hand, fans of ragged rock-and-roll in the spirit of X, Joan Jett, and T-Rex will find this New York-based band plenty juicy. Crimson Sweet’s mildly transgressive nature mimics the early Stones, although their sound is informed by gritty Detroit punk and lots and lots of glam. Guitar player and lead vocalist Polly Watson sings like she has multiple personalities, at one moment shrieking with the raspy intensity of Iggy Pop doing a Rod Stewart impersonation then cooing like a nightingale over big glam guitars and manic percussion. — Chris Davis

Zombi and The Apes

Murphy’s

Sunday, March 12th

Pittsburgh isn’t just Steeler country: It’s also the land of the living dead. Zombie-film innovator George Romero started a gruesome trend when he shot his classic horror tale Night of the Living Dead there in 1968. Inspired by their hometown’s long and illustrious legacy of undead cinema, the Pennsylvania duo Zombi play guitar and synth soundtracks for epic monster movies that have yet to be written. — Chris Davis

Creative to the point of musical de(con)struction, the Apes are a four-piece who have been rocking out of the nation’s capital since 1999. Their unique sound is due in part to their atypical line-up — double bass, Moog, organ, and, behind it all, crushing drums. The organ lines rise cleanly above the chunky thrum of the rest of the band, creating sounds at times reminiscent of the French electro-punks Suicide. This is a good show for those who like their rock brilliant and occasionally difficult to swallow. — Ben Popper

Dr. Dog, Hopewell,

The Reputation

Young Avenue Deli

Monday, March 13th

Elizabeth Elmore’s college band, Sarge, was one of my faves: a nifty little pop-punk answer to the sharp-fanged, male-centered relationship analysis of early Elvis Costello or a less grandstanding alternative to Exile in Guyville. Elmore’s lyrics are only slightly less distinct in her grad-school band, the Reputation, but she still rocks out with a surly Chrissie Hynde flair.

Also on tap is Hopewell, a Brooklyn art-rock band featuring brothers Jason and Justin Russo, who also play in Mercury Rev and whose own band has a similar psychedelic bent. Rounding out the bill is Dr. Dog, a Philly-based collective that blends indie and classic rock elements.

Cheater Slicks (with The Dutch Masters and Jeffrey Evans & Ross Johnson)

The Buccaneer

Monday, March 13th

The Cheater Slicks are a noisy, three-piece garage-rock band from Columbus, Ohio. They record for the Californa-based garage label In the Red, home to former Memphis bands the Reigning Sound and the Lost Sounds. The addition of SXSW-bound locals the Dutch Masters and Memphis rock royalty Evans & Johnson make this a must for garage-rock fanatics.

Film School, The Cloud Room, Ambulette

Hi-Tone Café

Tuesday, March 14th

Film School is a San Francisco buzz band whose arty indie-rock drew rave reviews at 2005’s SXSW festival and who released their eponymous debut on venerable indie Beggars Banquet earlier this year. The sound is tough, echo-y alt-rock that evokes the ’80s (Psychedelic Furs, maybe?) without sounding retro. Brooklyn’s the Cloud Room are very similar. Their sound is a little looser and a little catchier, but the tone and bundle of influences are otherwise identical. Chicago’s Ambulette, the new project of singer Maura Davis, formerly of indie notables Denali, rounds out the bill.

DC Snipers and Live Fast Die (with The Six String Jets)

The Buccaneer

Tuesday, March 14th

Despite their name, the DC Snipers are actually from New Jersey and play grimy, energetic proto-punk reminiscent of the Count Five, the Sonics, and the Stooges, except with keyboards. Brooklyn’s Live Fast Die, by contrast, fit their name with a thrashier brand of garage rock.

The Ponys & The Detachment Kit (with Vending Machine)

Young Avenue Deli

Saturday, March 18th

While the Detachment Kit and locals Vending Machine give plenty of impetus to show up early, the payoff here is the headliner, currently one of the most durable and pleasurable rock bands in the land. Though their splendid recent albums Laced With Romance (truth in advertising, there) and Celebration Castle came out on garage-rock label In the Red, Chicago’s the Ponys are a simultaneously arty and poppy guitar band whose appeal is far broader than any subgenre. With their open-hearted personality, chiming-and-chugging dual-guitar attack, dance-worthy beats, and yelping vocals that blend an entire generation of punk-era New York frontmen (Tom Verlaine/Richard Hell/David Byrne/Joey Ramone), they’re one of the freshest-sounding bands around.

The Minus Five and The Silos

Hi-Tone Café

Saturday, March 18th

The Minus Five was first formed in 1993 as a side project led by Scott McCaughey of the Seattle band Young Fresh Fellows. The band is a rotating collective with McCaughey joined by a different batch of collaborators for each record, with R.E.M.’s Peter Buck as the most frequent member. On McCaughey & Co.’s latest album, contributors include Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and John Stirratt, the Posies’ Ken Stringfellow, and alt-country singer Kelly Hogan. Live, McCaughey will be joined by Buck, among others. Roots-rockers the Silos, who were at their peak in the late ’80s and early ’90s make a simpatico opener.

Dirty on Purpose and The End of the World (opening for The Lights)

Young Avenue Deli

Monday, March 20th

Dirty on Purpose is a crisp, shoe-gazey indie-pop band from Brooklyn with a low-key male/female vocal interplay reminiscent of Yo La Tengo. They’re set to release their debut album later this year. Fellow Brooklynites End of the World play a harder-edged, more anthemic brand of indie-rock, albeit with some new-wave undercurrents. Local rockers the Lights, led by former Eighty-Katie frontman Bret Preston, round out the bill.

Deadstring Bros.

Hi-Tone Café

Wednesday, March 22nd

Chicago’s Bloodshot label is known as a purveyor of alternative country, but on recent Bloodshot release Starving Winter Report, Detroit’s Deadstring Brothers are a straight-up “classic” rock band, with guitars both bluesy and rootsy, horns and piano punctuation, and a lazily insouciant vocal personality that all evoke early-’70s Stones.

Marah

Hi-Tone Café

Friday, March 24th

Philadelphia’s Marah plays classic-rock tropes with a devotion few modern bands can match. Sometimes (see the best cuts on 2000’s Kids in Philly) their Springsteenian anthems connect. Other times they sound too much like attempts to cultivate respect from gatekeepers who’d prefer the planet stop spinning. But live, they’re capable of putting all those quibbles aside in an ace display of bar-band basics.

Categories
Music Music Features

Last (?) Stand for Band

The Coach & Four/Arma Secreta show that’s scheduled for The Vault Friday, March 10th, is more than just a regular weekend gig. Shortly after unplugging his guitar and leaving the stage, Coach & Four guitarist Brad Stanfill will board a plane headed west, to his new home in Hawaii. It will be the group’s last show for a while: Although Stanfill confirms plans to return to Memphis at some point, he can’t commit to a date.

Right now, Stanfill and his bandmates — co-singer and guitarist Luke White, drummer Daniel Farris, keyboardist J.D. Lovelace, and bassist Tony Dixon — are cloistered inside Midtown studio Unclaimed Recordings, putting the final touches on an EP that they plan to release on the Makeshift label in late summer.

“It’s the first time we’ve been able to go into the studio with someone else footing the bill,” Stanfill says, “which is really nice.”

The past couple of months have been active for the Coach & Four: Their 2004 debut disc, Unlimited Symmetry, is slated to go into a second pressing, and tracks from that album were picked up by XM Radio and broadcast via its (un)Signed station, Channel 52. The band recorded a cut, “Hearts & Arrows,” that was included on the Makeshift #4 compilation released in February. And Stanfill recently released Nest, a disc of home recordings from his side project with collaborator John Garland, which is currently available at Shangri-La Records.

“People called and e-mailed us from all over the country after hearing us on XM,” says White. “It was an amazing response, considering that because of school and work schedules, we never got out on the road.”

“Every band has dreams of doing the whole tour thing — the stadium dream,” Stanfill says, “but all of us are ordinary working people who can’t afford [the luxury of] playing music for a living.”

Still, the Coach & Four managed to parlay the satellite radio airplay and MySpace networking into a bona fide success story, selling 1,000 copies of Unlimited Symmetry to a national audience.

While the band’s on hold, White says that he plans to refocus his attention on a solo career and collaborations with other musicians on the Makeshift roster, including a possible songwriters tour similar to the Undertow Orchestra (featuring Vic Chesnutt, David Bazaan, Mark Eitzel, and Will Johnson) that hit the Hi-Tone Café last month.

“My agenda is completely open-ended,” Stanfill says of his Hawaiian sabbatical. “I’ll be blowin’ in the wind, so to speak.”

Mark your calendars for Monday, March 20th, the next meeting of the Musicians’ Advisory Council, a spin-off of the Memphis & Shelby County Music Commission. While the MSCMC has proven wholly ineffectual, MAC — led by chairman Richard Cushing, frontman for FreeWorld — has managed to provide a positive forum for local musicians since its inception in early 2004. So far, the organization has run circles around its bogged-down-in-bureaucracy, government-subsidized counterpart, establishing a free parking initiative for Beale Street musicians, building a functioning Web site (at Memphis-Musicians.org), and launching a summer concert series in Court Square.

Attend MAC’s monthly meetings, held in the boardroom at Emerge Memphis (516 Tennessee St.), and you can help pound out the details for the 2006 Court Square concert series, plot the creation of an annual, local music-awards show that will supersede the Premier Player Awards, and rub shoulders with industry professionals like Nashid Madyun, executive director of Discoveries of Gibson, a nonprofit division of Gibson Musical Instruments. Madyun will be delivering the details on an upcoming educational outreach program geared toward local players.

For more information, go to the MAC Web site or check out its MySpace page, http://groups.MySpace.com/MemphisMusicians.

After a successful first month, Hope Clayborn and the Broken String Collective are continuing their Thursday night residency at the Full Moon Club. Hip-hop group the Tunnel Clones, neo-soul singer Valencia Robinson, Solstice/Public Enemy guitarist Khari Wynn, and jazz-meets-soul vocalist Lynn Cardona have all jammed with Clayborn in sets that start at 9:30 p.m. For details, visit MySpace.com/HopeClayborn or BrokenStringRecords.com.

Categories
News

Dive Bar

Watching the recent winter Olympics has reminded me of one of the weirdest days of my life.

I used to work on fishing boats up in Alaska, and one of our annual highlights was stopping off in Ketchikan on our way back to Seattle. Not that there’s much to do in Ketchikan, but after four months on a boat with three other guys with your only connection to civilization being a tin-and-plywood cannery, you get excited about any place with paved streets — and bars.

On this particular August day we rolled in for our annual homebound bender under the usual foggy, rainy skies. We started in the Sourdough, a legendary stop on the Alaska drinking circuit. The first time I went in there, half the place was drunk at 10 a.m.

I sat down at the bar and told an old-timer sitting next to me, “Well, I better get started. I only get drunk a couple times a year!”

“Me too,” he said, “but each time lasts about six months.” With a wave of laughter around the bar, we were off.

I struck up a conversation with another guy, just in from packing yellowfin sole off Russia. As I was talking, I noticed he was keeping an eye on the TV screen. And on that screen was Olympic platform diving. At one point, we stopped talking and watched a dive, and as soon as the diver hit the water, this fellow harrumphed, “Well, that won’t do him no good. That wasn’t but an 86, maybe an 87.” I contemplated the odd things Alaskan drunks will think they know something about … then the diver’s score flashed up: 86.79. My companion mumbled, “See ya in four years, pal.” Then he took another swig of his beer.

Next up was a Chinese diver, and while he was standing on the edge of the platform, my compatriot informed me that “this guy, last time, totally nailed a triple-lutz tuck” or somesuch, and after the Chinese diver had thrown himself through 11 different positions in a tumble to the pool, my guy said, “Well, that was good, but not like last time. Probably an 89.” The score flashed: 88.64.

Now this guy had my attention. I asked him what was what, and he casually said, “Oh, I used to do some diving back in school. You learn to see what the judges are looking for.” He pointed down the bar and said, “Him too.” Another large, unshaven man in Carharts waved a Budweiser at me, then all eyes went back to the TV for another dive.

When this one was over, there was a collective grunt from the Alaskan judges, and beers were lifted to lips without comment. I asked how that dive went — all I can ever judge is the splash — and my new friend said, “Well, he didn’t do a thing right. He tucked too soon, his rotations were all off, and he went way over on the bottom. That was an 82 at the most.”

I checked for the score, and it came up 91.65. Several calls of “WHAT?” went around the bar. “A NINETY-TWO?” my new friend screamed. He looked all over the bar, searching for understanding. Patrons were shaking their heads and ordering more beers, presumably to wash away the disbelief. When word spread that the diver was “a Russkie,” there was more grumbling.

The madness peaked a few minutes later when an American diver, needing to nail something for a medal, stepped to the edge of the platform, and all around the Sourdough there were shouts of “Okay, now!” and “All right, Bobby, nail this one!” And then silence — followed by disaster.

No, he didn’t hit his head on the platform. I don’t remember what he did, actually, but it was so bad the announcer let out an “Oh, dear,” and the Sourdough started emptying slowly, like a football stadium when the home team has clearly lost.

My crew was leaving too, heading for the Pioneer Bar, where I hoped they’d have something else on TV.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Extra Helpings

Mark your calendar for a star-studded benefit dinner at Wally Joe restaurant on Sunday, March 26th. The dinner benefits Share Our Strength’s program to fight childhood hunger.

Chef/owner Wally Joe has invited five nationally acclaimed chefs who will each be in charge of one course, leaving two courses to Joe and his pastry chef Jorge Noriega. The lineup for that night includes Johnny Iuzzini, pastry chef at Jean Georges in New York City. Iuzzini was voted one of America’s top-10 pastry chefs by Pastry Art & Design magazine in 2003 and 2004 and is known for surprising diners with desserts that are outstanding and different. Chocolate goat cheese, anybody?

Shawn McClain owns three highly renowned restaurants in Chicago. He serves up high-end Asian-infused Continental food at his restaurant Spring; inventive, mostly vegetarian, small plates at Green Zebra; and modern American cuisine with an emphasis on artisan meats at Custom House.

Kevin Rathbun of Rathbun’s and Krog Bar in Atlanta has worked in upscale kitchens around the South since he was 14 years old. His preparations are modern American, and his menu offers items such as sea scallop Benedict and Hamachi crudo.

Bob Waggoner, executive chef at Charleston Grill in Charleston, South Carolina, fuses low-country cooking with his own French-influenced technique to create contemporary “Southern haute cuisine,” such as Maine lobster tempura over lemon grits and roasted venison tenderloin over sawmill gravy.

Last but not least: Don Yamauchi, executive chef at Tribute restaurant in Farmington Hills, Michigan, where he prepares dishes that are contemporary French with global accents. On his menu, this translates into soy-marinated cod and herb-crusted Kumamoto oysters.

Seats will go fast for this seven-course food-and-wine extravaganza. The cost of the dinner (complete with wine pairings) is $175 per person, including tax and gratuity. All proceeds will go to Share Our Strength. A champagne reception begins at 6 p.m. at L Ross Gallery; dinner at Wally Joe begins at 6:45 p.m.

Wally Joe, 5040 Sanderlin. For more information and reservations, call 818-0821.

If the benefit at Wally Joe is too rich for your taste buds and your budget, Miss Cordelia’s Lazy Sunday Jazz Brunch on March 12th might be more your style. Among the menu items are artichoke, prosciutto, and goat-cheese strata, hash-brown casserole, New Orleans French toast, and cheese-grits cakes. Live jazz will be provided by local musicians. Brunch will be served from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. and is $16 per person.

Also new at Miss Cordelia’s: executive chef Nancy Kistler’s weekly Healthy Options Menu, featuring three meals that are less than 550 calories, low in fat, sodium, and all the other bad things that we usually load onto our plates. Kistler makes them high in fiber and essential nutrients. Why not give it a try? Among this week’s dishes are Chicken Limone with olive whipped potatoes, pasta with pomodoro sauce, and fish Armandine over spinach.

Cordelia’s Table, 737 Harbor Bend Rd. (526-4772)

Ever wondered how Southern Jews manage to keep a kosher diet, when the sweet, the greasy, and the barbecued lurk at every corner? Marcie Cohen Ferris explores those foodways in Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South. The book includes numerous photographs, anecdotes, oral histories, and more than 30 recipes from friends, family, fellow Southerners, and fellow Jews.

Cohen will sign copies of the book on Thursday, March 9th, at 6 p.m. at Davis-Kidd Booksellers.

Davis-Kidd Booksellers, 387 Perkins Ext. (683-9801) Home chefs, keep an eye peeled! The Viking Culinary Arts Center is moving its cooking school to Park Place Mall at Park and Ridgeway in late spring. The retail store will remain downtown. While the setup for the cooking school will stay the same, more classes might be offered at the new location, which will also feature a small retail store. For more information, call 578-5822.

Vikingrange.com

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

How We Got Here

Political documentaries have been a Bush-era cottage industry, with Michael Moore’s much-kvetched-about Fahrenheit 9/11 sitting atop a heap that has also included Errol Morris’ heady The Fog of War, media doc Control Room, war docs Gunner Palace and Occupation: Dreamland, corporate corruption exposé Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and many more.

One of the first films in this stretch of wonky cinema was Eugene Jarecki’s The Trials of Henry Kissinger, based on critic Christopher Hitchens’ book-length condemnation of the former U.S. diplomat. It was a sober, probing, persuasive film, traits it shares with Jarecki’s newest, Why We Fight, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival (the same fest that launched Hustle & Flow and Forty Shades of Blue), but it has taken more than a year to show up on a local screen.

An essay on the past 45 years of American militarism, Why We Fight certainly has the Bush administration’s current misadventures in Iraq in its crosshairs, but it isn’t a polemic. Unlike the messier, more emotional Fahrenheit 9/11, it isn’t a partisan film.

Why We Fight takes as its hero Republican war-hero president Dwight Eisenhower, who warned against the growth of what he famously dubbed the “military-industrial complex” upon leaving office in 1961. And in tracing how Eisenhower’s dark prophecy (“God help us in this country when someone sits in the White House who doesn’t know as much about the military as I do,” he’s also quoted as saying) has come to fruition, Why We Fight implicates administrations both Democratic and Republican. The villain in Why We Fight, to the extent there is one, isn’t a man but a system that has been corrupted and manipulated over decades.

The sober tone of the film acts as a needed corrective to current national debate. There’s no rational reason why matters of war and peace should be a political football. Unlike tax policy or cultural politics, sending our kids to war shouldn’t be a matter of party loyalty or political philosophy. But that’s what it’s become in an intensely politicized era, and Why We Fight seeks to unpack some of the politics surrounding the use of the American military.

Along the way, Jarecki’s camera focuses patiently and respectfully on thinkers from across the political divide, from hawkish conservatives such as Senator John McCain and neo-cons Richard Perle and William Kristol to skeptical liberals as disparate as Texan Dan Rather and expatriate Gore Vidal. The most compelling “expert witness” may be CIA veteran Chalmers Johnson, author of the book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. Chalmers defines “blowback” as the “unintended consequences of foreign operations kept secret from the American people” and implies that the attacks of 9/11 were an example of blowback despite attempts to dismiss the bombers’ motives by tautologically labeling them “evil-doers.”

But the most compelling figure in the film might be retired New York City cop and Vietnam vet Wilton Sekzer, who lost a son in the 9/11 attacks. His journey from sorrow to vengeance to disillusionment is one that an awful lot of Americans have or are still experiencing.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Gonzo horror import Night Watch is must-watch.

Any cultural phenomenon has its progeny, and The Matrix is no exception. That trilogy mixed science fiction, kung fu, and water-cooler philosophy into an intoxicating blend spiked with the latest in computer graphics. Fans were hooked, and even as the films tapered off toward dismal, they kept coming. Recently, a rash of movies have come out with clear ancestral links to The Matrix, some of which we could have done without and others, like the recent Russian import Night Watch, we should all be very grateful for.

Night Watch was adapted from a trilogy of novels by Sergei Lukyanenko, who also co-wrote the screenplay. It opened in Russia in the summer of 2004 and went on to become the highest-grossing film in post-Soviet history, earning over $15 million at the box office.

The film actually bears more resemblance to the ongoing Underworld series than to The Matrix, more neu-school horror film than science fiction. Both series are also plotted around a war, one that has raged for millennia, in which neither side is necessarily good or evil. This is deep stuff, people!

Night Watch opens looking sort of like a Capitol One commercial — a lot of armor and smashing amid whirling cameras — but it quickly displays wonderful wit and innovative special effects, which are doubly astonishing when you consider the film was done on a $5 million budget by director Timur Bekmambetov. What stands out is the way Bekmambetov mixes low-key interior cinematography with playful and imaginative FX, even turning the subtitles into part of the mise-en-scene.

The plot? Okay, there are these “Others,” which is a catchall for any magical being, from seer to vampire to shape-shifting bear. When you find out you’re one of them, you get to choose between Dark and Light, basically high-stakes kickball with the future of the world. Our hero Anton (Konstantin Khabensky) makes a big mistake early on in the film, which leads to his discovering he is an Other, and while he decides to side with the Light, it quickly becomes clear he is still expected to do dirty work.

While Anton struggles to get his act together, we are introduced to a series of larger-than-life prophecies, but the film always manages to stay in the moment. It has humor and a host of excellent supporting characters, especially the nefarious Zavulon, leader of the Dark Others, who spends his time at home endlessly replaying the film’s final scene on his PlayStation until he gets it right.

Toward the end of the film, there is moment when Night Watch‘s central plot is suddenly and anti-climatically resolved. This momentary letdown is a ruse, however, a reminder that the film knows both scope and attention to detail. Like those nifty Russian dolls, it opens up even as it comes to a close. The sequel, Day Watch, opened in Russia in January and is due in America later, but this movie is so good that I’m hoping to use the magic of eBay to shorten that wait.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Thank goodness for Google. I thought maybe I had dreamed this, since my dreams are so vivid I can rarely separate them from reality. So I was going to beg that one of you out there tell me if this really happened, but then the good ol’ Google news search engine found it for me. I was just waking up the other morning and glanced at the television and saw a cheerleader at a basketball game being taken off the court on a stretcher.
She was practically bolted to the thing from head to toe, neck brace and all, but she was still cheering. The band was playing and she was flailing her arms about, I guess using them to make the shapes of the letters of her school’s name. I thought it was a skit on Comedy Central, but it was CNN Headline News. Now, did anybody else see that and did anybody else fall off the sofa laughing? I know, it’s not funny she was hurt, but the quintessential cheerleading moves were absolutely hilarious. There she was, strapped to a stretcher but still filled with school spirit. As it turns out, it was Kristi Yamaoka, and she was cheering for Southern Illinois University. Two pompons up, Kristi! And it was a good thing because, despite the 37 or so episodes of The Andy Griffith Show I had watched during the previous days’ Andy Griffith marathon (featuring the best of the late, great Don Knotts), I needed a light moment. I touched on this briefly last week, but I have discovered a new network that I can’t stop watching, and you might want to check it out. I don’t know how long it has been on the air, but it’s called Link TV. For those of you with Direct TV, it is channel 375. There are no advertisements and it receives no government funding (it’s financed by viewers’ contributions), so they can pretty much show anything they want, which is a really fresh idea these days. You won’t find any stories on Botox, breast implants, diet supplements, or designer shoes. You certainly won’t find any stories on the $55,000 goodie bags given to Oscar nominees, including makeup for your arms that contains 24-karat gold and ground gemstones. Yes, I’m still idealistic enough to think that money might be just a tad bit better spent feeding hungry children, but then, that’s just the old hippie in me. No, this station shows mainly documentaries made by journalists and filmmakers from other countries, with a strong emphasis on what the United States is doing in the way of torture in the war on terrorism. And while it can sometimes propagandize things a bit, the station does show facts — photo and video documentation — that can’t be disputed by any of the liars in Washington, and they conduct interviews with people who have been subjected to the torture, even those whose photos appeared during the Abu Ghraib fiasco. As is pointed out regularly, when you cordon off a block in an Iraqi city, arrest all of the men, take them to prison and torture them, find out they are really innocent and have no knowledge of terrorists, then release them back into the population with their stories of what happened to them, the military probably hasn’t really made great friends with the people we claim to be there to liberate. And we wonder why there’s so much hostility. But I am certainly not going to try to explain all that has gone wrong in Iraq. Even here at home, if you haven’t heard the story of James Yee, you should look into it. Yee was the U.S. military chaplain at Guantanamo, who was arrested in the Jacksonville, Florida, airport while attempting to go on vacation a couple of years ago. Whatever the case was — I think the military was afraid he might talk about what they’d been doing down there — he was arrested, shackled, subjected to sensory depravation, locked in solitary confinement for 76 days, and threatened with the death penalty. Then, when it was found that there was no evidence against him, he was released and all charges were dropped. He was reassigned to another base, told not to talk about it, and never received an apology. All of this got plenty of press while he was in jail, but now Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s baby is due, and we’ll just have to depend on Link TV and Yee’s new book to get the truth. Like I said, I needed a light moment.

Categories
News

THOMAS GOES TO BALTIMORE SUN

Commercial Appeal
Commercial Appeal’s Thomas named Sun metro columnist

Romenesko Memos

Wendi Thomas (left) has been a columnist at the Commercial Appeal in
Memphis since August 2003. The Baltimore Sun memo on her hiring says: “Her
columns — known for their flair and humor — include taking on a prominent and
controversial political family and calling for elected officials to sign ethical
codes of conduct. She has examined potential budget cuts to after-school
activities in Memphis and told stories of redemption among ex-gang members. And
she has challenged a ballet teacher who won’t let a pupil with dreadlocked hair
perform in a recital.”

“The same people
who hate her on Tuesday love her on Sunday” (Letters

from Romanesco (http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45)

And thanks to Leftwingcracker.blogspot.com for the tip.

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