Month: November 2006

Categories
Music Record Reviews

A great Memphis music festival captured in sight and sound on two impressive discs.

A collaboration between Goner Records and Live From Memphis — two do-it-yourself organizations that have done as much for Memphis music as anyone over the past few years — Gonerfest 2: Electric Goneroo DVD/CD is a really impressive two-disc, two-hour collection that captures the garage-rock and punk chaos that ensued when like-minded bands (and like-minded fans) from all over descended on Memphis last September for the multi-day, multi-venue music festival organized by the Cooper-Young record store.

The DVD contains 26 performances from 18 bands while the CD contains 27 performances from 27 bands — captured at the Hi-Tone Café, the Buccaneer, and the Goner store — with very little performance overlap between the two discs.

I’ve always been leery of live albums since, as pure aural art, they’re rarely as interesting or sound as good as the studio recordings of the same bands. They’re snapshots of an immediate experience with the immediacy removed. So, as good as the audio disc is, I’m more impressed by the DVD, which inherently brings you a step closer to the actual experience. And it helps that this concert film is so well put together.

The Gonerfest 2 DVD was directed, produced, and shot by Sarah Fleming and Christopher Reyes of Live From Memphis and edited by Reyes and Claudia Salzig. And it isn’t rooted in the stale, dim stationary camera visuals you might expect. The crew uses multiple hand-held cameras to capture different angles and perspectives on the same performances and bring you so close to the action you sometimes feel yourself heaving along with the crowds.

The editing is sharp and witty and frequently as dynamic as the music without ever being incoherently overactive. And, in a very smart move, the Live From Memphis crew veers into the crowd and outside the clubs (or the Goner store’s hot-dog cookout) between performances for a sort of Gonerfest version of Heavy Metal Parking Lot. The disc could have even used more of this material.

Musically, there are no outright weak links on either disc, but I’m pretty confident it’s not just a local bias that makes the Memphis (or Memphis-connected) bands stand out. The local bands are the ones most likely to push through the bare basics of noise and energy and attitude into something more substantial. (Biggest non-Memphis exception: Probably Killer’s Kiss, whose “Shine It” brings a Byrds-y vibe to the garage-rock template.)

Playing songs on both the DVD and CD with his band Knaughty Knights, former Oblivian Jack Yarber conveys a wisdom, sardonic sense of humor, and emotional depth few performers here can touch. And if it wasn’t already clear, Yarber’s old bandmate Greg Cartwright is some kind of rock-and-roll savant. Opening and closing the DVD with performances of “We Repel Each Other” and “Bad Man,” Cartwright’s the Reigning Sound is fierce and soulful, but they may the one band that’s even better on the audio disc: It’s almost unfair to the 24 bands who come before that they have to share disc space with the Reigning Sound blasting through the whiplash rock-and-roll of Too Much Guitar‘s “I’ll Cry.” On a collection that pays loving testament to a musical genre and cultural scene, this band transcends both.

Other Memphis-connected highlights abound: The Persuaders, with Memphian Scott Rogers on guitar, boast a seductive, menacing, bluesy low-end guitar roar, especially on “Hot Stix.” And though an onlooker raves about Jay Lindsey’s Reatards at the Hi-Tone (“the only real punk show I’ve seen in 10 years,” he proclaims, marveling that he got hit in the head with a full bottle of beer), his poppier band the Angry Angles are more impressive with an electric set at the Buccaneer. The Memphis band that relies the most on noise, energy, and attitude, the Final Solutions, also make the most of those qualities, barely holding together the anthemic “This Is Memphis Underground” and “I’m a Punk” before a surging, joyous crowd at the club.

Other Memphis acts here push the boundaries of the Goner musical continuum: Harlan T. Bobo’s more reserved songcraft and Impala’s instrumental, atmospheric movie music. (Both, sadly, are missing from the DVD.)

— Chris Herrington

Grade: A-

Categories
Music Music Features

II Black II Strong

One of the hardest working, best unsung artists on the streets, rapper II Black is celebrating his birthday by rolling out a pair of brand new singles, “Love Handles” and “Buck Jumpin’,” at Off Beale, located at 616 Marshall Street, Thursday, November 2nd.

“I just got a new team of producers, Frozen Tracks and Fire Tracks, and I am ready to roll,” says II Black, a Mitchell Heights/Orange Mound veteran who recently broke away from Hoodoo Labs after dropping mix tapes Da Representa and II Black: Da Heartstopper, volumes 1 and 2.

“A lot of women are ashamed of what nature has given them, but it’s cool, II Black loves ya,” he says of “Love Handles,” a dark dance track that ups the ante of Chingy’s “Dem Jeans” for plus-sized girls.

Of “Buck Jumpin’,” which is the latest in a series of gangsta-walk songs made popular by the likes of Three 6 Mafia and 8Ball & MJG, II Black says, “Al [Kapone] started it with ‘Lyrical Drive By,’ and we’re gonna continue it. Hopefully, Three 6 opened the door and we can slide in.”

II Black and his rap partner Keno Da Don have been together, he says, “as long as 8Ball & MJG. We’ve been trying to put it down since Gangsta Pat and Reggie Boyland were doing their thing. It’s tough and rough in Memphis. The DJs just don’t want to play new groups, and there are guys out here like Nasty Nardo who have been trying to get their songs played for the last four years. Then you’ve got guys in the door who are politicking the game. Right now, the best thing to keep my spirit going is to make a good song.”

With his wife, Lady Thug Passion, and his best friend, Keno Da Don, at his side, II Black will ring in his birthday with a 30-minute performance. Doors open at 9 p.m. $7 cover; free for ladies until 11 p.m.

Diamond-D label owner Cody Dickinson also credits Al Kapone for a leg up in the rap game. The North Mississippi Allstars drummer launched Diamond-D, a digital-only label, last fall with Da Midsouth, a CD compilation that featured Kapone and Yo Gotti alongside veteran rappers DJ Squeeky and DJ Spanish Fly and newcomers such as Big Money Ballers and Miscellaneous. Since then, Dickinson signed rock groups Snowglobe and Dixie Hustler to the label, which is distributed by digital giant IODA.

After working with movie producer Martin Shore on Snoop Dogg‘s feature film Hood of Horror (the Allstars scored a segment of the movie), Dickinson and Shore have become partners in Diamond-D.

“All of a sudden, I have a West Coast connection,” says Dickinson, “and I’ve hired a full-time marketing correspondent, Jim Hanft.”

“We’ve signed Crystal City, [son of Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh] Grahame Lesh‘s pop-rock group. We had to go through negotiations with the Dead’s lawyers, which was crazy. We’ve signed Tangled Thoughts, which features Kurupt from Tha Dogg Pound.”

Just last week, Dickinson inked a deal with Oakland Raiders fullback Justin Fargas, a Bay Area rapper and son of actor Antonio “Huggy Bear” Fargas. “Imagine how intimidated I was sitting on Young Hug’s couch,” says Dickinson. “The one thing I’ve learned over the last year is how to close a deal.”

IODA executive Pierce Stacy was in town last Wednesday participating in the Memphis Grammy workshop about digital distribution, part of NARAS‘ yearlong Indie Impact lecture series. “I think record labels realize they screwed up and missed the boat,” Stacy told a rapt audience at Studio on the Square. “The company I work for is filled with techies who are all about change and innovation. Until recently, major labels weren’t thinking that way.” Wes Phillips of Select-O-Hits, a national music company based in Memphis; Scott Robinson, founder of Nashville roots music label Dualtone Records; and filmmaker Joel Rasmussen (The Day the Music Died) were also on hand for the panel discussion, moderated by journalist/musician Bill Ellis.

Mark your calendars for Tuesday, November 14th, when NARAS presents the next installment of Indie Impact, a How to Mix Records discussion with famed producer Paul Ebersold. Admission is only $5.99, but space is limited, so RSVP by calling 525-1340 or emailing Memphis@Grammy.com.

Categories
News

Summer Bummer

Seeing the Cardinals in the World Series brings back a painful memory. No, I don’t mean when they got swept in the 2004 series by the Red Sox. And I don’t mean their clinching loss, at home, to the Astros in last year’s National League Championship Series. And I don’t mean when the 2002 team was taken out by the Giants. Or when Arizona scored in the bottom of the ninth in Game 5 of the 2001 playoffs to eliminate them.

What I’m referring to is one of those experiences that, even 13 years later, still makes me shudder. Almost every time I see a Cardinals player in their home white uniforms, a part of me winces at what could have been.

It was the summer of 1993. I was on the road a lot back then. I had decided that, wherever I was, life was more interesting somewhere else — no doubt prime material for a therapist to work on, but my way of dealing with it was to keep moving. Travel was among my myriad addictions, many of which I pursued at my favorite destination: Grateful Dead concerts.

The great thing about a Dead show, other than that they were my favorite band and there were thousands of other people there for the same reason, was the collective sense of craziness. It was the safest place in the world to get loaded and weird, because nobody among the throngs could ever look at you and say, “Dude, you’re high” or “Dude, you’re weird” — not when there are naked people walking around, and people dressed as clowns, and people sucking balloons of nitrous oxide, and people offering to adjust your chi for a hit of pot, and … well, you get the idea.

I was in the middle of one of these manic scenes, somewhere in the Midwest, possibly Indianapolis. Details are a bit fuzzy. And somewhere in the surging sea of insanity I saw a familiar face, an old St. Louis friend from my college days. Let’s say his name was Bill, because it just might be that he’s now an elected official somewhere in these great United States who doesn’t want everybody to know that he once roamed the Midwest in search of places to get loaded and weird.

We were all talking about how great it was that very soon the Dead would be playing in St. Louis, and I mentioned that I might go to a ballgame while I was there. One of Bill’s buds says, “Hey, you should give me a call. My sister knows Ozzie Smith. I can set you up with some tickets.” (Ozzie Smith, for you younger folks, was the Derek Jeter of his day, and if you don’t know who Derek Jeter is, please stop reading now.)

The thing is, somebody you’ve never met saying to you, in a Dead-show parking lot, that they know Ozzie Smith and can hook you up with tickets is really no more weird, or even memorable than, say, somebody running a disco in the parking lot after the show, or a school bus painted in Day-Glo colors, or people passing around an invisible “energy ball,” or … well, again, you get the idea.

In other words, it didn’t occur to me that, upon arriving in St. Louis, I should actually call this guy and say, “Gimme those tickets!”

We got to St. Louis on a Sunday, and some friends and I went to the game. We got cheap seats in the outfield, and the Mets killed the Cards, 10-3. We were so far away from the action (and so, um, loaded and weird) that just now I looked up the game on baseball-reference.com and realized Dwight Gooden pitched 7 innings for the Mets — which makes the story even worse, as you’ll soon see.

The next night at the St. Louis show, out of all the freaky faces flying around, the first one I see is the Ozzie guy, and he is pissed. “Dude!” he says, “What happened to you? I had Ozzie’s tickets for you at will call!”

Even now, after writing that, I have to stare at the words: Ozzie’s tickets. At will call. For me.

Turns out his sister was Ozzie Smith’s agent, and apparently in my foggy behavior I had told the guy I’d call, and so four seats, Ozzie Smith’s seats, front row, right behind home plate, under my name, with Dwight freaking Gooden on the mound … went unclaimed. With me, the idiot, loaded, sitting in the bleachers watching little mini-baseball players (mostly Mets) run around the bases.

The Cardinals won the World Series this year, with me rooting for them. But it was difficult to watch their home games with some peace of mind. I kept thinking about Ozzie Smith and those seats behind home plate.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

What a Site

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Craig Blondis and Roger Sapp, owners of Central BBQ, are getting ready to open a second location. It’s the same name, same concept, same food just in a different part of town and much, much bigger.

Blondis and Sapp are taking the new Central BBQ to the next level by transforming the former Red Lobster on Summer into a barbecue paradise. The restaurant can seat 200 people, and the kitchen, part of which will be designated for catering, appears to be larger than all of Central BBQ number one. Inside, you’ll find a bar that serves beer and wine, flat-screen televisions, and a labyrinth of booths and tables.

Another holdover, besides the food and name, is the ordering system. You walk up to the counter, place your order, take a number, and find a seat. Then you’ll wait for the food runner to bring you your goodies.

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

Central BBQ, 2249 Central (272-9371), 4375 Summer (767-4672)

For those of you who’ve been waiting for the Blue Monkey downtown to rise from the ashes, it’s not going to happen. Instead of rebuilding the pub at G.E. Patterson and Front, where the building was destroyed by fire in September 2005, Mike Johnson and his partners have decided to go with Plan B. Blue Monkey is moving into the space that once housed Alice’s Urban Market and eventually expanding into the Blue Sky Couriers space.

“It looks like the guys from Blue Sky are looking for a bigger place and won’t renew their lease,” says Johnson. “We just don’t know when that’s going to happen. So for right now we started renovations on the side that’s vacant but hope to have the whole thing up before Memphis In May.”

“The whole thing” — Alice’s and Blue Sky — is about 3,500 square feet, a bit bigger than the former Blue Monkey location.

Blue Monkey, 513 S. Front Street (527-6665)

The first Jim ‘N Nick’s Bar-B-Q was opened in Birmingham in 1985 by father and son Jim and Nick Pihakes. Jim recently passed away and has left Nick the task of making a legendary barbecue restaurant “world famous.” Toward that end, the 19th Jim ‘N Nick’s just opened on Germantown Parkway.

While you can find Jim ‘N Nick’s in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Colorado, it’s still a family-owned enterprise that prides itself on quality ingredients and food that goes straight from “pit to plate.”

“Southern hospitality and foods made from scratch are something we emphasize here,” says general manager Stephen Williams. “The restaurant doesn’t have a freezer, so you know that everything here is really, really fresh.”

Jim ‘N Nick’s Bar-B-Q is open 10:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 10:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Jim ‘N Nick’s Bar-B-Q,2359 Germantown Pkwy. (388-0998)

This weekend at the Memphis Botanic Garden you can drink with purpose at the 12th annual Sip Around the World wine tasting, which will benefit the National Kidney Foundation of West Tennessee. More than 100 wines will be available for sampling, and featured wineries include Stag’s Leap, Patz and Hall, Hess Collection, Robert Hall, and others. Live music, silent and live auctions, as well as hors d’oeuvres are part of the evening. Tickets are $55 in advance and $65 at the door.

Sip Around the World, Memphis Botanic Garden, Friday, November 3rd, 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. For more information and tickets, call 683-6185.

Encore Restaurant will host an Australian wine dinner with Chris Fennett from the Australian Premium Wine Collection on Wednesday, November 8th.

The three-course menu includes warm asparagus with morel mushrooms, beef tenderloin with roasted winter vegetables, and warm tapioca pudding with Grand Marnier, marinated strawberries, and pistachios. The price for the dinner is $65 per person. Call the restaurant for more information and to make a reservation.

Encore, 150 Peabody Place (528-1415)

siba@gmx.com

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Keeping Up Appearances

I’ve always had a loyalist’s fondness for the English decision to have both a prime minister and a royal head of state. It seems to make a ton of sense: The prime minister takes care of the ugly business of politics, and the king or queen ensures a regal and dignified image to the rest of the world. Such a system might improve American politics. A split role definitely would have helped Bill Clinton at home during his presidency, and a split role would certainly boost George W. Bush’s international popularity. Of course, this ain’t England. So an examination of the uneasy truce between the English head of state and the English symbol of state is best left to director Stephen Frears, whose new film The Queen is one of the finest fall releases.

I’m pretty clueless about English royal history, so I’m not sure whether other American viewers will find the premise of the film flimsy. But the setup pays off handsomely. The Queen begins in the spring of 1997, when Queen Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren) ceremoniously receives newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen). After an awkward conference — Blair and his wife favor “modernization”; understandably, the royal family seems just fine where they are, thank you — the narrative flashes forward to the death of Princess Diana on August 31st of that year. As the queen and her family resist Blair’s image-savvy counsel, the royals gradually realize that their true enemy is the same ravenous media culture that devoured “the people’s princess.”

As Blair and the queen negotiate these unprecedented circumstances, Frears emphasizes the class differences between Elizabeth and the new PM. Blair conducts his business on a cordless phone in a study cluttered with paperback books and domestic detritus, while the queen receives the prime minister on a rotary phone surrounded by walls of hardbound books. Blair steps among childrens’ toys and electric guitars as he negotiates with his wife, while the queen marches everywhere with purpose; even her obedient corgis trot along at a princely clip.

But Blair knows where the public heart is and that the great force that unifies queen, prime minister, and British citizenry is television. The royal family watches the news with increasing dismay, whereas Blair’s moves to protect the family bolster his own public image. The presence of continuous television coverage and media scrutiny also leads to some fascinating rhymes within the film. One suggestive shot of Elizabeth alone in thought on the banks of a river rhymes with an earlier paparazzo photo of Diana contemplating the water beneath her from the diving board of an expensive yacht. And the opening sequence of the film, where the queen sits for an oil painting and muses about “the joy of being partial,” is evoked again as she “sits” for her televised address to the British people about Diana’s death.

Mirren is extraordinary throughout, and she controls the last third of the film; her palace-side mingling with Diana’s mourners unearths unexpected feelings of heartbreak and compassion. But as she assures Blair in the film’s final minutes that his moment of public excoriation will come, she emerges bitter yet triumphant. How apt for this neoclassical filmmaking gem to side with tradition over modernization as well.

The Queen

Opening Friday, November 3rd

Studio on the Square

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Evangelical doc preaches a scary sermon.

The first children we see in Jesus Camp, a documentary about youth ministries on the far-right end of white, evangelical Christian culture, are adorned in camo and war paint. They’re performing a play at the Christ Triumphant Church in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, promising their God, “I’ll do what you want me to do,” and readying themselves to “radically lay down their lives for the gospel” as children “in Pakistan or Palestine” are doing for Islam, in the words of Pentecostal youth minister Becky Fischer. War analogies, we quickly learn, are legion in this little corner of the religious world.

Fischer is Jesus Camp‘s hero or villain, depending on your perspective, and though filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (whose Boys of Baraka screened in Memphis earlier this year) have apparently made pains to get their film shown in evangelical-friendly communities, if you’re seeing Jesus Camp at all, you’re probably preconditioned to see Fischer as a villain.

Though it may not want to be, Jesus Camp is an art-house horror movie for secular liberals, a bias telegraphed by the odd, unnecessary inclusion of Air America radio host Mike Papantonio in a framing device that gives urban libs a mirror to reflect their horrified reaction back at them.

At the heart of the movie are Fischer and three elementary-aged kids who attend her Kids on Fire summer camp in North Dakota, where kids clutch tiny plastic fetuses, pray about (not, crucially, to) a cardboard Dubya, and sing and dance to evangelical hip-hop (“kickin’ it for Christ”) at sessions that evolve into admonishing, tear-filled confessions. (There are, apparently, “no phonies in God’s army.”)

One boy, Levi, is an aspiring pre-teen preacher who was saved at age 5 because, he says, he “just wanted more out of life.” Tori is a Christian heavy-metal fan, first seen break dancing in her bedroom. Most compelling is Rachael, a mousy, excitable, and preternaturally self-possessed 9-year-old. She explains that she’d like to be a manicurist because it seems like a great opportunity to proselytize to the unconverted all day.

Jesus Camp likes these kids, and you probably will too, even as Rachael strolls up to strangers at the bowling alley or on the street to attempt a conversion. And because you like them so much, it’s painful to watch them manipulated or discouraged from thinking. It’s rattling to watch small children coaxed into tears of religious ecstasy over matters they can barely understand. And it’s infuriating to watch a kid as bright as Levi being home-schooled from a book called Exploring Creation with Physical Science and learning that creationism provides “the only possible answer to all the questions” and “science doesn’t prove anything.”

Which is why, though Ewing and Grady might like their film to be an evenhanded examination (and, if so, why spike it with monologues from an Air America host?), it’s really an exposé — shoddily filmed and poorly thought out but helplessly riveting.

Jesus Camp

Opening Friday, November 3rd

Ridgeway Four

Categories
News

Memphians Sued for Movie Piracy

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed four lawsuits yesterday against individuals in Memphis and Jackson, Tennessee. The civil suits allege that the defendants — two Memphians, one person from Bartlett, one from Selmer — illegally swapped movies over the Internet. The MPAA states that $7 billion in revenue was lost due to Internet movie piracy. Fines can be as high as $150,000 per downloaded movie.

Categories
News

Borat Ends Career in Jackson, Mississippi

Borat, the “Kazakhi journalist” created by Sacha Baron Cohen, is upsetting people both near and far. His movie, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, has already angered Kazakhstan officials and now it seems it has upset a former television producer for WAPT in Jackson, Mississippi.

According to Newsweek, Dharma Arthur is claiming that booking Borat on a live noon news show cost her job. While on the show — and subsequently in the movie — Borat makes scatological references, kisses the male anchor, stands up so he’s out of the screen, and then disrupts the weather report. Arthur, as quoted in Newsweek: “Because of [Baron Cohen], my boss lost faith in my abilities and second-guessed everything I did thereafter.”

It must be one hell of a movie.

Categories
News

Sex Offenders Nabbed in Federal Round-Up

Officials from the U.S. Marshal’s office announced today that 103 sex offender registry cases in the district were closed after arrests were made during a federal round-up, Operation FALCON III. More unregistered sex offenders were arrested in West Tennessee than anywhere else in the nation.

“That number doesn’t mean we have more offenders, but it does mean we were more aggressive in pursuing them,” said U.S. Marshal David Jolley at a press conference in Memphis Thursday afternoon.

From October 22-28, the round-up targeted outstanding warrants for failure to register as a sex offender, gang members, homicides, narcotics violations, and more in 24 eastern states. The operation netted 1,659 sex offenders nationwide and cleared a total of 13,333 warrants.

Locally, the Memphis Police Department, the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the Tennessee Highway Patrol, and the U.S. Marshals participated in the weeklong dragnet.

Said Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin: “The more folks we can put in the sheriff’s jail, the better I feel.”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Ford Gets Help from Clinton

CREDIT: jb

The visit to Memphis Wednesday of former president Bill Clinton was intended, it would seem, to ignite the Get-Out-the-Vote fervor among local Democrats on behalf of U.S. Senate candidate Harold Ford Jr., a rising political star who is locked in a back-and-forth struggle with Republican Bob Corker with less than a week to go before the November 7th election.

Clinton, who was governor in next-door Arkansas for more than a decade before becoming president, has a stout following in Memphis – especially in the city’s majority black population, key to the kind of large home-town turnout that Ford, an African American, needs to balance Corker strength elsewhere in red-state Tennessee. Taking no chances, Ford plans a series of joint appearance in Nashville on Sunday with Illinois senator Barack Obama – arguably the Democratic Party’s best sure-fire draw these days (after, perhaps, anybody named Clinton.).

The former president’s appearance in Memphis was at the COGIC (Church of God in Christ) Temple of Deliverance in downtown Memphis, before a mid-morning crowd of several thousand that, however, failed to fill the cavernous church sanctuary that Bishop G.E. Patterson jested (partly in response to criticism of possible church-state conflict) was “the best venue” in town.

As expected, Clinton hailed Rep. Ford’s Senate bid as an opportunity for the country to move “beyond race.” Acknowledging possible differences of opinion with the increasingly conservative Ford on some issues, Clinton said, “If we agree on everything, one of us isn’t thinking.”

Also on the stage with Clinton and Ford were Tennessee congressmen John Tanner of the nearby 8th congressional district and Lincoln Davis of the 4th District, which snakes through all three grand divisions of the state. Tanner and Davis, like Ford himself, are members of the conservative “Blue Dog” caucus, a fact which prompted Clinton to tell the trio that, collectively, they had “taken race out of redneck.”

In an allusion to the controversial Republican National Committee TV ad which played off Ford’s attendance at a Playboy magazine-sponsored Super Bowl party, one in which a scantily clad woman says flirtatiously, “Call me, Harold,” Clinton (who had a problem or two along these lines during his presidency) voiced approval of Ford’s response: “‘I plead guilty. I like football and girls.'”

Sounding notes of moderation consistent with the Memphis-based candidate’s markedly conservative stump rhetoric, Clinton said Ford’s victory was necessary as a part of an overdue political shift away from the control of the “ideologues” now in charge in Washington to what the former president foresaw as a coalition between “legitimate” progressives and conservatives in Congress. On Iraq, Clinton disputed Republican allegations that Democrats wanted to “cut and run,” saying, “What we want to do is stop and think.”

A significant backstory to Clinton’s visit was some palpable tension involving the race to succeed Ford as representative from Memphis’ 9th Congressional District. The winner of the 15-strong Democratic primary in August was state Senator Steve Cohen, a brash but effective longtime legislator who has been endorsed by the two local African-American mayors, Willie Herenton of Memphis and A C Wharton of surrounding Shelby County, along with various other prominent black officials and civic leaders.

But Cohen, who is white and Jewish, was never cottoned to by a local ad hoc group of black ministers who insisted that the district should be represented by an African American and maintained that Cohen, who polled some 20 percent of the black vote in August, won only because of the plentitude of black candidates running against him.
As it happens, Rep. Ford’s brother Jake Ford, a political unknown quantity supported by the family patriarch, former congressman Harold Ford Sr., has mounted an “independent” campaign – creating a three-way race between Cohen, himself, and Republican Mark White. The congressman himself has affected a posture of public neutrality, angering some Democrats who believe that party loyalty requires Rep. Ford to reciprocate Cohen’s own support of his Senate bid.

All this came to a head Wednesday when Cohen, escorted by the two mayors as well as by actress Cybill Shepherd, a native Memphian, took front-row seats for the Clinton event. Rep. Ford publicly introduced the two mayors as a group and Shepherd separately but made no mention of Cohen, a public supporter of the congressman’s Senate candidacy. . When Clinton took the dais for his own remarks, however, he made a point of acknowledging Cohen, who received considerable applause.

Meanwhile, Jake Ford was never introduced by name, either by Rep. Ford or by Clinton, but both acknowledged the presence of the Ford “brothers.” All of this was the sum total of some complicated behind-the-scenes maneuvering, whereby Cohen had been assured by mutual friends of himself and the former president that Clinton would see to it that Cohen got recognition appropriate to his status as Democratic nominee.

When Clinton did so, introducing Cohen by name, it served as a de facto resolution to this almost Jamesian subplot, which earlier had seen members of the Ford organization working the event attempting to minimize media attention to Cohen, even to the point of heading off photographers who tried to get snapshots of him.

And, in yet another of several personal confrontations that have marked his congressional race, Jake Ford, also in a front-row seat along with brother Isaac, had declined a handshake and aimed harsh words at local Democratic Party chairman Matt Kuhn, who happened by before Wednesday’s program began. Kuhn said later that Ford (who, among other problems, has had to acknowledge a youthful arrest record) was apparently miffed at remarks the chairman had made in support of party nominee Cohen during an East Memphis Rotary Club debate last week.

Beyond the burlesque of it all were serious political issues, most of them relating to an ongoing local power struggle between, on one hand, the extended Ford organization (several family members and supporters hold public office of various kinds) and, on the other, various Democrats and unaffiliated activists, both white and black, who think it’s time to brake the influence of the family, one of whose prominent members, former state senator John Ford, will shortly be tried on charges of bribery and extortion as part of the FBI’s “Tennessee Waltz” sting operation.

For clear and obvious reasons, this simmering drama could also have some effect on the outcome of the touch-and-go Senate race, one in which Rep. Ford has campaigned impressively, with both his own future political power and possible Democratic control of the Senate very much at stake. Ominously, Ford’s GOP opponent Corker has already made several references to the “Ford family dynasty” as a potential threat to the state’s political welfare.

Especially in the last several days of intense, campaigning for both the Senate seat and the 9th District congressional seat, an overlap between the two could generate some serious combustion.