This week, just after the Grizzlies’ have finished their season — will officially mark shopping season for our favorite NBA franchise.
SI.com’s Chris Ekstrand breaks down which names will headline this year’s free-agent market, and which players will be seeking greener pastures.
A 10-year-old case that originated in Tennessee was heard in the U.S. Supreme Court last week. It all began in 1997 when football coach Carlton Flatt of Brentwood Academy — a private school south of Nashville — sent letters to a dozen eighth-graders inviting them to attend Brentwood’s summer football camp.
The Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association (TSSAA) argued that the gesture violated their athlete recruitment policy. Brentwood countered that said policy restricts freedom of speech.
Back in 2001 the high court ruled in favor of Brentwood, saying that the TSSAA behaved in a quasi-governmental fashion. An appeals court also ruled in favor of the school, saying that the First Amendment protected the recruiting letters as an act of free speech.
The Court decided to reopen the case, however, and hopes to have the matter resolved by late June.
Hooray tax dollars!
“In the decade between 1988 and 1998, Lucinda Williams was perhaps the most accomplished pop musician on the planet, if not the most prolific. Three albums, 1988’s Lucinda Williams, 1992’s Sweet Old World, and 1998’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, completed a far-too-long and arduous journey from mysteriously underrecognized critics’ fave to honest-to-goodness star.
“A subsequent trio of records, completed by this year’s West, has proven Williams to be an artist different from the one she was before the gold rush of Car Wheels. …”
So begins music editor Chris Herrington’s take on rock icon Lucinda Williams in this week’s Flyer.
To create your own take, check out Williams at the Michael Rose Theatre at the U of M tonight. Call 575-1515 and lay down your $30 if they’re not sold out yet.
Why should owner Michael Heisley be smiling? Or Grizzlie fans, for that matter, when they start to think of the team’s current uncertainties in ownership, management, coaching, and in the status of the team’s one (count him, 1) star? Ah, but Frank Murtaugh sees a silver lining.
To find it, go to “Sports Beat?.
“Seldom had there been the quiet beauty and happiness I had now,” writes novelist Darcey Steinke (Suicide Blonde, Milk, Jesus Saves) in her new memoir, Easter Everywhere (Bloomsbury, $24).
It was 1999, and Steinke was spending a year at the University of Mississippi on a Grisham Fellowship. She’d never lived in the Deep South, but that year gave Steinke some peace of mind and some much needed freedom from the difficulties she was having in Brooklyn with her music-loving boyfriend (and the father of her child). In addition to that quiet and happiness in Oxford, Steinke writes, she was also, for the first time in her adult life, “master of my own stereo,” and she filled it with the sounds of R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, Fred McDowell, and Memphis Minnie. The voice of Elvis drew her to Graceland. But Elvis as bona-fide religious icon? Read about it in Easter Everywhere.
Steinke is back to living and teaching in New York now, but on Monday, April 23rd, she’s back in Memphis for a reading and booksigning at Burke’s Book Store from 5 to 6:30 p.m. It’s the store’s first author appearance since moving to its new location in Cooper-Young. Call 278-7484 to reserve a copy of Easter Everywhere or for more information on Darcey Steinke’s booksigning.
If it’s better to give umbrage than to receive it, this year’s Gridiron Show earned a few Good Conduct medals for its cast, who, er, took no prisoners in satirizing corruption in local government.
This year’s show, “Oh My!” got its title from local FBI agent-in-charge My Harrison, who was an attendee on Saturday night, the second of two nightly performances.
As always, the show — featuring skits in musical-revue style — raised money for journalism scholarships and other student grants for deserving students at Mid-South colleges and universities.
Honorary chairman of the 2007, which was presented Friday and Saturday nights at the Al Chymia Shrine Temple on Shelby Oaks Drive, was Sheriff Mark Luttrell.
Reipient of this year’s Headliner Award was 9th District congressman Steve Cohen, and Saturday night’s performance was dedicated to the memory of the late Larry Williams, arguably the most stellar performer in the show’s history .
–j.b.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights will open the Cannes Film Festival in May.
The road film, starring Norah Jones and Jude Law, was shot partially in Memphis and is Wong Kar Wai’s first English-language feature.
Via perezhilton.com comes this video of a contestant on Nouvelle Star, France’s version of American Idol. Julien performs an English-mangling, almost unbearable “Heartbreak Hotel.” Enjoy!
Close to the end of every legislative session in Nashville, House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh adjourns to home-town Covington, where, on the grounds of the local country club, he plays host to a teeming crowd of pols and pol-watchers. So it was again on Thursday.
BY
JOHN BRANSTON
|
APR 20, 2007
Jurors got a civics lesson Friday as prosecutors began wrapping up their case against former senator John Ford at the end of the second week of the trial in U.S. District Court.
Meanwhile, Ford’s attorney, Michael Scholl, was laying the groundwork for a “consultant defense” next week that will also be important if and when Ford is tried in Nashville on more corruption charges in a different federal case.
Most of Friday’s testimony was far less dramatic than the guns-and-tapes action earlier in the week. Prosecution witness Russell Humphrey, the clerk of court for the Tennessee Senate, explained the legislative process and the actions that would have been necessary for E-Cycle Management’s pet legislation to become law. Jurors heard an audiotape of Ford introducing the bill in committee and members voting to approve it. The FBI made sure the bill was scuttled before it could be voted on by the entire Senate, however. In the afternoon session jurors heard a long explanation from an official with the General Services division of what the costs would have been had the bill gone through.
As part of its sting operation, FBI agents posing as E-Cycle executives paid Ford $55,000 to introduce, amend, then withdraw the bill.
Also Friday, U.S. District Judge Daniel Breen ruled that prosecutors may use a chart and timeline when they question their final witness to help summarize their case.
In his cross-examination of Humphrey, Scholl focused on Ford’s consulting work. Like Roscoe Dixon and Kathryn Bowers, who were also indicted in Tennessee Waltz, Ford listed his occupation as “consultant” in the 2005-2006 edition of the Tennessee Blue Book. He also added “consultant” to his 2005 financial interest statement along with funerals, insurance, and real estate as a source of income.
“There is nothing illegal about a senator being a consultant is there?” Scholl asked Humphrey, who replied, “correct.”
Earlier this week, assistant U.S. Attorney Tim DiScenza asked undercover FBI agent L.C. McNeil a series of questions aimed at refuting suggestions by the defense that Ford was being paid for anything related to movies, music, or office decorating.
Ford’s consulting work for United American Health Care and Doral Dental is at the heart of the indictment filed against him by federal prosecutors in Nashville in December of 2006. That case is set for trial in May but will obviously be pushed back.
The cases are separate, but the math favors the government. To keep his liberty, Ford must win twice. To send him to prison, the government only has to win once.
The consultant defense appears to be one of two prongs of Scholl’s strategy along with the argument that Ford was targeted without predication and entrapped by overzealous prosecutors who were out to get him.