Month: October 2006

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters to the Editor

Pepe and Wilcox

Earlier this year, you printed an interview with Joe Pepe, the newly appointed publisher of The Commercial Appeal. That interview may have left the impression that in the past, The Commercial Appeal‘s strategies and practices were the result of decisions made exclusively by local management and, in particular, by former publisher John Wilcox.

To avoid any confusion left in your readers’ minds, I’d like to make it clear that we at The E. W. Scripps Company, owner of The Commercial Appeal, carried ultimate accountability for strategies pursued in Memphis.

Most important, I’d like to let your readers know that Wilcox kept The Commercial Appeal‘s best interests in the forefront and worked diligently to make the newspaper stronger. He had a long and successful career with Scripps in Florida, California, and West Tennessee. We apologize for any misimpressions the interview may have caused.

John is now off on another adventure, working to prove out a new media model for the San Francisco Bay area. We’re watching his progress, rooting for his success, and wish him well in all future endeavors.

Richard A. Boehne

Chief Operating Officer

E.W. Scripps Company

Editor’s note: The article Man With a Plan by Chris Davis referenced by Boehne appeared in the Flyer‘s April 7th issue. Wilcox was Pepe’s predecessor at the CA.

Twisted Logic

Last week (October 19th issue) the Flyer published a letter from a Corker supporter from Chattanooga (EN: here). In this woman’s twisted logic, a Corker loss in the Senate race could make Nancy Pelosi the Speaker of the House of Representatives. The Senate and the House of Representatives are two separate institutions. If someone is elected to one, it has no effect on who takes a leadership position in the other.

Apparently, they forgot to cover that in Talking Point School. Is there hope for America? Yes there is, but it won’t come from mindlessly regurgitating Republican talking-points or electing Bob Corker to anything.

John Manasco

Memphis

The Links at Taj Mahal

The article about the “Taj Mahal” clubhouse at Riverside Golf Course (October 19th issue) brought back into stark relief the inequities and mismanagement of the city’s golf-course system.

While the city has spent unnecessary millions upgrading and gentrifying courses in the politically connected parts of town, one of the system’s diamonds in the rough has been woefully ignored. I’m referring to the Links at Pine Hill. Located in South Memphis (apparently where politicians don’t have any clout), I have watched that course deteriorate at the hands of an administration that treats it like an illegitimate stepchild.

After years of intense lobbying by patrons, the city finally replaced Pine Hill’s decrepit golf carts, but it has yet to protect those carts with a secure storage facility. And while other courses in the system are teeming with maintenance equipment and workers, Pine Hill is on the verge of going to seed. The parking lot looks like an Iraqi battlefield, and while other courses in the system have had their clubhouses upgraded, Pine Hill’s remains, euphemistically speaking, rustic.

Pine Hill doesn’t need to be Taj Mahhalled to be brought back to its former glory. But it needs administrators who care about it (and its patrons) and are willing to allocate it its fair share of city funds and attention.

Martin H. Aussenberg

Memphis

Bush and Putin

President Bush and his friend Russian president Vladimir Putin seem to be on the same page. Bush signs a bill that suspends habeas corpus, a basic right of Americans since the founding of our nation. At the same time, Putin is using a new law to ban nongovernmental organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

Both presidents have legislative bodies that are full of “yes men” who provide little or no oversight. Both presidents have attacked the press using government agencies or planting false stories. This administration even went so far as to allow a fake reporter (Jeff Gannon) to become part of the White House press corps. 

Its time to stop the erosion of our freedoms by a Republican controlled government full of unethical elected (and unelected) officials. 

Jack Bishop

Cordova

Categories
News The Fly-By

Smart Text

On Monday, October 16th, a text message saved Louise Sowers’ life.

She, her two children, and a friend were sitting in a car at a gas station when Sowers’ ex-boyfriend, Christopher Deener, pulled up beside them. Angry that Sowers was seeing someone else, Deener ordered Sowers into his Chevrolet Impala.

When she refused, Deener grabbed Sowers and forced her and the kids into his car. Once in the vehicle, Deener began driving toward Sowers’ home, threatening to kill her if she didn’t stop dating other people.

Sowers secretly sent a text message to her friend, requesting that she call the police and have them send officers to her home.

“The message she sent to her friend was very [helpful] in the police working fast,” says Joe Griffin, a Memphis Police Department public information officer.

Deener was arrested and charged with simple assault and domestic violence. A handgun was found under the driver’s seat of his car.

Though Sowers owned a cell phone, many domestic-violence victims in Memphis do not. But a new program launched last week will provide cell phones to some of the county’s most high-risk victims.

“Many of these people tend to be a transient population, so we can’t call their homes, and we lose contact with the victim,” says Heidi Verbeek, executive director of the Shelby County Crime Victims Center. “Having a cell phone will ensure that we’re able to make sure they’re okay.”

Traditionally, when victims get protective orders against their abusers, enforcement is difficult. Even when police are called, the abuser usually leaves before officers make the scene.

Last year, while dropping her child off for daycare, Christie Thurmond was shot and killed by her ex-husband, despite a protective order against him. The next day, attorney general Bill Gibbons received a certified letter from Thurmond in which she said she feared for her life.

Domestic violence victims who receive the phones as part of the pilot program are instructed to use them only for emergencies, such as when they come into contact with their abuser, and to check in with the Crime Victims Center twice a week.

For the program, 12 cell phones have been donated by Cricket Communications. Two will be given out each month to domestic-violence victims through April. At that time, the program will be evaluated. If deemed effective in aiding victims and preventing violence, Cricket will donate additional phones.

“Since cell phones are portable, they should be very helpful. A woman may be nowhere near a phone, just like the case where [Sowers] was kidnapped,” says Verbeek.

René Parson, area general manager for Cricket, says the text option can be very helpful in times of trouble and suggests victims use the camera feature on their phones to document abuse.

“We’d also suggest victims dial 911 with the cell phones and leave it on,” says Verbeek. “Then they could use GPS tracking to determine where the call is coming from.”

Categories
News Television

The Gory Parts

Every year a dozen or more new horror movies are made. When they complete their theatrical runs, they go into the stockpile — home video, cable, and syndication to local stations. Thus the number of available horror titles keeps expanding, and the TV screen overflows with blood.

There’s blood money to be made too. Some parents, understandably, are upset to find the airwaves clogged with stabbings, shootings, decapitations, and stranglings — and those are just in the CSI and Law & Order shows that air year-round. In October, TV’s regular weekly killings are supplemented by “festivals” of theatrical horror films choked with spectacularly grisly goop.

Starz, a pay-cable network, has come up with a handy-dandy way to see a couple dozen horror movies in one sitting — and has thoughtfully reduced each of them to just the gory parts, so you don’t even have to sit through their pale excuses for plots. Going to Pieces, which premiered on Starz on Friday the 13th (naturally), is a look at what it calls “The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film,” though basically every fall is followed by yet another rise.

In other words, now that Hollywood makeup and special-effects artists have the technology to slice and dice people on-screen, slasher films will be around for the foreseeable future. Just when you think they’ve gone away, a new one will be a huge smash, the way Scream was in 1996. When that happens, two things are inevitable: Producers of the original movie will do as many sequels as possible, and imitators will crank out copycat versions as quickly and cheaply as they can.

Going to Pieces begins and ends with montages that show in the usual graphic detail the slashing of throats, the lopping off of heads, a girl hung on a meathook (or two), and the old reliable hatchet-in-the-face trick, among many other murders and maimings. There’s also a clip of the late Gene Siskel, summarizing the slasher trend in one word: “disgusting.”

But most of the “experts” assembled for the documentary work in the horror business and find that work to be artful and even pro-social. “There’s a bloodlust in all of us,” says director John Carpenter, whose movies have included Halloween, one of the landmarks of the genre. Cheaply produced — Carpenter says they could only afford to pay big-time actor Donald Pleasence for three days’ work — the 1978 film was relatively low on explicit gore, but it had a point of reference with which the audience could identify: the imperiled babysitter threatened by an unseen menace and unable to leave the house. It was a gigantic hit, and the sequels dribbled on for years.

More influential, really, was the next big movie in the horror mode, Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th in 1980. Cunningham had seen George Romero’s tremendously gory epic Dawn of the Dead (part of a trilogy that began with the now-classic Night of the Living Dead) and admired the hideous makeup effects engineered for the film by Tom Savini. So he hired Savini to create very believable ghastly illusions for his film.

Going to Pieces is filled to the brim — in fact, over the brim — with hideous examples. It is, as the saying goes, not for the squeamish and certainly not for children, though if you’ve seen any of these films with teenage audiences, you know that they tend to laugh at the gore effects as often as they scream in terror. Incredibly, the documentary tries to blame the horror-film boom of the 1980s on the Reagan administration, which is absurd to the point of idiocy, while failing to examine the negative effects such films have on those who see them and on society in general.

Perhaps the horror in horror movies is so grotesque that it still serves as escapism from the real horrors in the news — murder and torture by terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, for example, or the unspeakable horror of innocent children killed at school by maniacs. No matter how horrifying horror films get, it seems, the real world will always come up with the stuff that the ghastliest nightmares are made of.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Holiday Classic

Has Little Shop of Horrors, a 1982 musical featuring bloody murder, brutal dismemberment, a shit-talking plant, a kinky, leather-clad dentist, and a host of adult themes, overcome its laundry list of perversities to become an unlikely family classic? Based on the vast number of children in Theatre Memphis’ audience last Sunday, that would appear to be the case. And why not? Even with its naughty parts Little Shop is no more unsettling than most fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, and its moral is more clearly defined. With an exciting set by Pam Hurley and vibrant staging by director Cecilia Wingate, Little Shop plays out like an animated feature by Tim Burton but with attitude.

Set in a hopeless and broken urban landscape where kids split school in the fifth grade, winos roam free, and “hopheads flop in the snow,” Little Shop touches on addiction, sadistic relationships, greed, and mankind’s infinite corruptibility. Borrowing a principle from the biblical beatitudes, the little musical full of big ideas teaches first and foremost that the meek are “gonna get what’s coming to them.” They’re gonna be eaten by all manner of predators: businessmen, the media, the status quo, and eventually Audrey II, a blood-sucking, limb-chomping plant discovered by supergeek Seymour Krelborn, the play’s mild-mannered florist/hero with no hope of ever leaving skid row.

Of the many Seymours to have played Memphis over the years, Marques Brown may very well be the best. We never see Brown the actor winking at his klutzy character, only an aching soul looking for a ray of hope and possibly the love of a good woman — or at least Audrey, skid row’s B-girl with a heart of gold.

In the ’80s, America was caught up in retromania and enamored of all things ’50s. Sadly, that love affair included Ayn Rand, whose 1957 book Atlas Shrugged turned greed into a virtue and posited that the “good” who offer themselves as sacrifices to “evil” get what’s coming to them. This was the era of trickle-down economics, which is nothing more than a fancy way of saying “let them eat cake.” With a feather-light touch, Little Shop turned these Randian values upside down, quickly becoming a cult favorite.

In “Somewhere That’s Green,” Audrey sings of a beautiful 1950s tract house and her desire to live a more natural life with the aid of plastic furniture covers, TV, and Pine Sol. Miriam Rodriguez, who is 16-years old, pines for this manufactured Utopia like a December bride who wasted her youth going round and round the same rotten block. Her violent dentist/boyfriend Orin is given equally fine treatment by Kent Fleshman, a veteran of productions such as Zombie Prom and Assassins.

Character actor Greg Krosnes puts his exceptional skills as a physical comedian on display as old man Mushnik, the cranky flower-shop proprietor. At times his character — all frustrated arms and supressed anger — seems to dwarf the stage. The 39-year-old actor is thoroughly convincing as a toupee-wearing grump of 60.

Little Shop in narrated by a chorus of three tough chicks whose names — Ronette, Chiffon, and Crystal — are inspired by girl groups of the Motown era. As is the case with any grand tragedy, they are the heart of the production, and Thymia Rogers, Mandy Lane, and Ashley Wieronski throw down enough vocal pyrotechnics to set the house on fire. As the voice of the plant, Steven Tate is equally soulful even if he does seem to be imitating syllable for syllable Levi Stubbs’ definitive performance from the 1986 film.

Theatre Memphis first staged Little Shop of Horrors 20 years ago on The Next Stage, a small black-box theater that’s perfect for intimate performances. Although this Main Stage revival is bigger, brighter, and better in most every way, this is still a character-driven story, and, through no fault of the superb cast or crew, it loses a little something in the much bigger space. Given the near sellout Sunday crowd, that would appear to be the price of popularity and a small price to pay.

As we quickly move into the holiday season — a miserable time for theater critics who are faced with the prospect of watching and writing about stale children’s shows, family affairs, and endless variations on Dickens’ fine but threadbare A Christmas Carol — it’s interesting to consider Little Shop of Horrors as a new kind of holiday classic. Any play this fun and able to say so much without sermonizing deserves to be brought back again and again. So what if the plant says some dirty words? He is the bad guy, after all.

Little Shop of Horrors

Through October 31st

Theatre Memphis

davis@memphisflyer.com

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall

Sea-Span

Numerous sources have reported sightings of a manatee — an endangered aquatic mammal sometimes called a sea cow — swimming in the Mississippi River near Memphis, over 500 miles away from its natural habitat. Animal-protection groups have been trying to decide what action would be appropriate to insure the animal’s safety.

Others have voiced serious concerns that what has been described by experts as a 1,500-pound manatee may actually be Denny Hastert, Speaker of the House, attempting to find peace and quiet in the midst of several scandals in Washington, D.C.

Civic Dootie

According to The Tennessean, Memphis isn’t just the murder capital of Tennessee, it’s also the early voting capital. First day turnout was down 20 percent in Knox County and down over 50 percent in Davidson County. In Shelby County, over 8,000 voters cast ballots. As of this printing, there has been no medical confirmation that any or all of these Shelby County voters were actually alive.

Carousel

Justin Fox Burks

Oh my. There’s apparently a new subdivision under development in Shelby County. We hear the new neighborhood is designed to provide residents a nearly utopian living environment until they turn 30, at which point they are summarily executed.

Categories
Art Art Feature

Desirables

In “Philosophy of Beauty,” the current exhibition at David Lusk Gallery, Tad Lauritzen Wright reveals strong, if not completely serious, feelings about art, life, and beauty.

In 2nd Chance Series: The Fate of Beauty, he invites viewers to play shuffleboard with a game whose point-zones include “hot as a two dollar pistol,” “drop dead gorgeous,” and “ugly as sin,” the kinds of slurs and adulations that start barroom brawls and mark intense infatuations.

In a body of work that contains no sacred cows, no designations between high and low art, no hierarchies of any kind, Lauritzen Wright turns beauty inside out and upside down. Doodles and cartoon characters stand alongside advertising slogans, masterworks, and redheads. In the large grid painting Redhead Discount, redheads include jackrabbits with fuchsia ears, bright-red sunburned faces, and Hershey-brown hound dogs.

Lauritzen Wright’s cosmetically imperfect figures are sassy and alert. A Minute of My Time is composed of 1,440 self-portraits, one for every minute in a day. The artist records almost every expression, body posture, and bad-hair day known to humankind. In Beautiful Headrests, 1 and 2, tall, lean, squat, round, and oval bodies tumble and play on pillowcases embroidered with Kama Sutra free-for-alls.

Mona Lisa’s umber hair and robe have been replaced with a mosaic of cartoon figures, word games, and handwritten lists in the multi-media collage 2nd Chance Series: Mona Lisa. In Lauritzen Wright’s version of the masterwork, there’s a lot going on inside Leonardo’s laid-back, enigmatic icon of beauty. There are things to do, places she wants to go, people she cares about, favorite movies, and favorite recipes.

On scraps of paper, on pillowcases, in colorful grid paintings, and in the face of the artist, we piece together Lauritzen Wright’s philosophy of beauty. His sassy, sexy, all-systems-go philosophy is as hot as a two-dollar pistol. It’s as hot as minute-to-minute awareness of one’s being.

At David Lusk Gallery through October 28th

Leandra Urrutia’s wildly imaginative figurative works in the exhibition “Ceramic Sculpture” at St. Mary’s Buckman Performing & Fine Arts Center record pleasure at the edge of pain, life at the edge of death, and beauty that is all the more desired because it is temporal and uncertain.

Bulbous white orbs in axis x simultaneously suggest voluptuousness, cancer, and pregnancy, and in variable b, the shins and feet of babies (some with missing toes) hang like trophies from what could be umbilical cords, intestines, tentacles of an octopus, or nylons stuffed with dried brown grasses. In axis y, on the far back wall, Siamese twins or a fetus with an encephalitic head and four legs attempt to push through the membrane of an ovum.

If you can stand being ping-ponged between desire and repulsion, birth and disease, ecstasy and pain, you’re in for one of the most daring and original shows of the year.

At the Buckman Performing & Fine Arts Center through October 27th

Jenny Balisle celebrates beauty with meticulously layered paintings that feature surfaces that look wet to the touch, the application of oil paints similar to those used by the 17th-century Dutch masters, color fields and drips of the abstract expressionists, complex surfaces of Art Brut, and semi-abstract landscapes that possess the scale and atmosphere of Chinese scroll paintings.

“Process,” Balisle’s current body of work at the L Ross Gallery, suggests this artist can simulate almost anything on the surface of a painting, including the complex colors and textures of erosion. Chemical blues and iridescent siennas look like patinas of weathered metal in one of her untitled mid-sized oils on panel. In a triptych of oils (each panel measuring 21-by-45 inches), lemon yellows next to deeply scratched sienna and umber surfaces evoke bright sunlight pouring through chinks in walls encrusted with eons of corrosion.

One of Balisle’s most successful works combines the techniques of the modernists with an Eastern aesthetic. While this painting’s drips and color fields can be read as pure abstraction, its large size (5-by-7 feet), layers of paint shot through with sienna, yellow, and light green, and smudges that resemble stands of bamboo also evoke the scale, atmosphere, and images of Oriental landscape.

Thick impastos of umber on the left side of the work look like touchstones through which we might access this ethereal landscape. The desire to rub one’s hand across the weathered rutted earth and bark is almost irresistible.

At the L Ross Gallery through October 31st

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Zhang Yimou’s familial road movie is a long haul.

My math teacher told me the closest distance between two points is a straight line. In the Zhang Yimou film Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, the two points are an old man and his terminally ill, estranged son; the straight line isn’t one, following the elderly gent away from Japan and his son to southwest China as he endeavors to film a mask-opera singer perform the greatest mask opera ever so that he can show it to his son back in Tokyo and be reconciled with him. Warning: This film is more than just geometrically challenged.

Follow me on this one: The old man is Takata (Ken Takakura), a Japanese fisherman whose son, Kenichi, is dying in a hospital. The father and son haven’t talked for 10 years, and Kenichi refuses to see Takata. The dad watches a documentary Kenichi made about a great mask-opera singer, Li Jiamin. In the doc, the singer invites Kenichi to return the next year to film him performing the greatest mask opera, Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles.

Sad that his son won’t be returning to China and wanting to earn forgiveness, Takata goes on his trek to find Li Jiamin, in the process encountering one difficulty after another, including language barriers, Li Jiamin’s imprisonment and abandonment of his own son, broken-down tractors, and being lost in a wilderness.

If the film’s plot was just improbable, much could be excused. But Zhang’s direction, Takakura’s acting, and the script all conspire to keep matters from getting any better.

For a man who made two of the most visually beautiful films of the last few years — Hero and House of Flying Daggers — here Zhang is at his languid worst. This is the kind of Zhang Yimou movie where people on roofs are trying to get cell-phone reception rather than fighting off battalions of arrows. As The Road Home proved, Zhang is capable of handling less fantastical material. But at times, Riding Alone looks like a made-for-TV movie.

Takakura is known for his stoic roles, but as Takata he plays his feelings so far beneath the surface the audience is left without clues as to what’s going on internally until it’s narrated, and by then there’s no emotional weight behind the punch.

The film is about the red tape one man erects between himself and his love for his son. It plays out literally as Takakura encounters one hoop to jump through after another to get his precious film of the opera. Riding Alone isn’t a journey into the heart of darkness but rather the heart of bureaucracy, and while it’s intellectually interesting in a recap sort of way, it plays out only as exciting as, well, people talking about their emotions rather than expressing them.

Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles doesn’t say with a hundred narrated sentences what Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru conveyed in one look and one song.

Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles

Opening Friday, October 27th

Ridgeway

Categories
News The Fly-By

The Cheat Sheet

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Teachers and a parent at four different city schools are victims of broad-daylight carjackings. Police believe three of the crimes are Greg Cravens

committed by the same person, and the cars are usually abandoned nearby. We don’t understand this. Who needs that many cars? We know Mayor Herenton wants to fight crime by adding police officers, but this one may be a job for the Mayor of Covington Pike.

A Raleigh woman gives birth and leaves her baby — umbilical cord still attached — outside her apartment building, where the child is found by another resident. Police somehow determine the mother had not actually abandoned the infant, but the case is turned over to the Department of Human Services. We may not know much about child-rearing, but we know this: You don’t leave kids in parked cars when it’s hot and you don’t leave newborns outside when it’s cold.

Sometime this month, the Memphis Zoo expects to greet its one-millionth visitor. To celebrate, they plan to give away a prize package that includes a trip to Seattle. Gee, that doesn’t really say much for Memphis, does it, when the best prize they can come up with is a trip to another city?

Memphis announces plans to annex three adjacent communities, a move that would increase our population by some 42,000 people. There’s just one problem, and it’s the usual one: Many of those residents don’t want to be annexed. You know, when Andrew Jackson, James Winchester, and John Overton laid out this city back in 1819, do you think they had this much trouble getting people to live here?

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Prestige

In what amounts to an imaginative, thrilling, and mildly creepy movie-length version of Spy vs. Spy, Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman play former magicians’ apprentices in late 19th-century London who become bitter rivals after a disastrous botched trick. Co-written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, Batman Begins), a deft handling of actors and keen sense of pop imagery makes this film superior to the similarly themed The Illusionist in every category. Indeed, The Prestige has more bewildering narrative twists, more fascinating insider information about the magician’s craft (which apparently involves countless cages of dead birds), more surprising double-crosses, more vivid supporting female roles, and more mischievous uses of facial hair than its artier, more ponderous predecessor. As Nikola Tesla, David Bowie cherishes his supporting role as the human MacGuffin around which the main characters orbit. But the show belongs largely to Bale, whose focused monomania causes actors sharing screen time with him to vanish into thin air.

Now playing, multiple locations.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: Daily Paper Doldrums

The San Jose Mercury News will lay off as many as 101 employees to cut costs and make up for declining advertising revenue — including 41 newsroom positions, it was announced Friday.

The same day, owners of The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News told employees that those papers are experiencing one of the worst declines in ad revenue in history.

“Simply put, this dramatic revenue decline will prevent us from meeting our bank obligations if we don’t take absolutely critical actions on the cost side,” an owner said.

I’m just guessing, but I suspect “critical actions on the cost side” will entail more reporters and editors losing their jobs.

The story is the same for daily newspapers all over the country. You’ll read spin about how newspapers have “more readers than ever” because of their Web sites. But those readers don’t come close to paying for the huge costs of producing, printing, and delivering a dead-tree product to your home every day.

Classified ads have almost disappeared from newspapers in many markets, thanks to the success of such free Internet sites as CraigsList.com, Backpage.com (with which our FlyerMarket.com is affiliated), and eBay. And large advertisers are increasingly turning to magazines, TV, and the Internet.

I’m on my computer most of the day, and when news happens anywhere in the world, I get a headline and a link to the story delivered to my desktop. After work, I watch CNN for further news of the day.

Consequently, when I open my Commercial Appeal, the only “news” I haven’t already read is local. I read those stories and the sports, check out the columnists, and do the chess puzzle. Then, I open my laptop to check the “real” national and world news — what’s happened since the paper went to press the night before. This, in a nutshell, is the problem facing daily newspapers — and career journalists.

The Flyer is a different animal. Our circulation department is eight guys with pickup trucks; we don’t come to your house — you find us. We have comparatively few reporters, but they’re focused like a laser on Memphis news, politics, and entertainment. We’re lean and healthy — so far.

That said, I sincerely hope we’re not seeing the end of the daily newspaper. It’s an essential part of our democracy. A strong free press helps keep our leaders honest. Plus, I’d hate to have to start taking my laptop into the john.

Bruce VanWyngarden, Editor

brucev@MemphisFlyer.com