Month: August 2007

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Fancy Footwork

Chromeo’s second album begins with a sample of “The Oompa-Loompa Song,” which would have been a better trick if Da Backwudz hadn’t used it on “I Don’t Like the Look of It” two years ago. Dave 1 and Pee Thug, the duo behind Chromeo, are certainly no trailblazers: Fancy Footwork borrows processed vocals from Daft Punk, cowbell from LCD Soundsystem, cheesy synth sounds from your pick of ’80s pop duos (Nu Shooz? Linear?), and, on “Momma’s Boy,” yacht-rock chops from Hall & Oates. But the album’s genial, low-key vibe forgives a lot, and while dance music typically doesn’t benefit from modesty, these songs have no other goals than catchiness and danceability, which they handily achieve. (“Opening Up (Ce Soir on Danse),” “Momma’s Boy”) — SD

Grade: B

Categories
Music Music Features

Willie Hall’s Journey

While the official 50th anniversary celebration of Stax Records might be winding down, several of the label’s alumni are getting together for a group show Wednesday, August 8th.

Bar-Kays trumpeter Ben Cauley and Soul Children vocalist J. Blackfoot will join Queen Ann Hines, The Total Package Band, and others for Willie Hall‘s birthday blowout at the Executive Inn.

“I’m turning 57,” says Hall, a former Stax session drummer who will also perform with The Bo-Keys on Wednesday night.

After developing his chops in the marching band at Hamilton High School, Hall contributed to Isaac Hayes‘ Oscar-winning “Theme From ‘Shaft'” and provided the backbeat for The Blues Brothers.

“We were in the studio, with everyone squeezed in front of a small monitor,” Hall says of working on Hayes’ trademark song. “Isaac said, ‘Watch Richard Roundtree‘s steps and give me those 16th notes.’ That gave us the tempo for ‘Shaft’.”

The job offer from John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd — aka Jake and Elwood Blues — came at an admitted low point in the otherwise unflappable drummer’s career.

“It was the summer of ’79,” remembers Hall. “Stax had closed, and Hot Buttered Soul, Isaac’s studio, had closed, so I was driving a popsicle truck. After I got off work one night, I picked up my kids and, with what little money I had, I took them to McDonald’s. Paul Compton, who worked as an engineer for Shoe Productions, lived around the corner, and I decided to stop by. He said, ‘Hollywood’s looking for you.'”

Universal Studios was ready to begin filming The Blues Brothers, but the original band (Tom Scott, Paul Schaeffer, and Steve Jordan) was tied up with a Gilda Radner project, so Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn — who’d just wrapped up a tour of Japan with Levon Helm — were hired instead.

“Duck said, ‘I know a son-of-a-bitch we can get on drums,’ and as fate would have it, I just happened to pull into Paul’s house, and he gave me the message,” Hall says.

Ironically, he didn’t approve of the act at first. “I thought it was a farce. Even though they were playing Stax songs, I’d turn the TV off because I thought they were mimicking us in a bad way,” he says of the Blues Brothers’ Saturday Night Live appearances. “Little did I know. During the nine months of filming the first movie, I got a chance to hang out with John and Danny in their camper. They had a Rock-Ola jukebox with every soul and R&B record I’d ever heard in my life. That’s when I knew they were serious about music.

“I didn’t have to pretend. We just had fun,” Hall claims of his work in the 1980 film and its ’98 follow-up, Blues Brothers 2000. “When John was sober, he was one of the greatest people to be around. Everything he did was funny. And because I knew Duck and Steve personally, John and Dan took me in and made me feel welcome.”

After relocating to Atlanta for several years, Hall and his wife Deborah (she’s a veteran of the Isaac Hayes Movement and KC and the Sunshine Band and a current minister of music at Eastern Star Baptist Church) moved back to Memphis in October 2000. He signed on as a teacher at The Stax Music Academy and joined the Bo-Keys soon after, returning to the silver screen with Craig Brewer‘s Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan.

Since returning to Memphis, Hall also has reconnected with his eldest son Patrick, better known as rap pioneer Gangsta Pat.

“I remember when he was just 3 years old, and we were living in Whitehaven,” Hall says. “Patrick had fallen in love with KISS, and he’d put on a wig and pantomime in the mirror. Then I came home one day, and he was playing the drums. I’d take him on the road and to recording sessions. His mother and I separated when he was 9, and I didn’t see him again ’til he was 16.

“He grew up in the business,” Hall says, “although I was frightened for him in his early days as a rapper. I thought that style of music would lead to his ruin, but he’s prolific and an excellent musician and producer. Patrick’s been working with Eric Gales and David Banner, but we haven’t had the chance to get into the studio together. I hope we get to do that this fall.”

Willie Hall’s Birthday Party

The Executive Inn, 3222 Airways Blvd.

Wednesday, August 8th

7-11 p.m., $10

Categories
Book Features Books

In Focus

In 1976, William Eggleston was the first artist granted a one-man show of color photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But earlier in the ’70s and back in Memphis, where Eggleston lived, he was redefining black-and-white portrait photography in a series that is only now being published — a series of lightning-quick shots made using a large-format, 5 x 7 camera.

The subjects were friends and acquaintances. The setting was the T.G.I. Friday’s that once anchored Overton Square. And the book based on these portraits is 5 x 7 (Twin Palms Publishers; www.twinpalms.com). There’s some signature color shots here too, but it’s Eggleston’s razor-sharp images in black and white that, thanks to Twin Palms, are the new focus of attention.

An essay in 5 x 7 by writer/filmmaker Michael Almereyda sets the scene: In 1973, in the wee small hours, and with Eggleston’s friend Randall Lyon using a “bounce flash” to light the subjects, the photographer took a spontaneous approach and turned it to his advantage: night owls caught in the act — sometimes looking straight-face into the camera; sometimes off in their own thoughts — but captured, as Almereyda writes, with “laconic clarity.” Then Almereyda summarizes the results — results that are trademark Eggleston: “The knowing simplicity, the deadpan irreverence, the imaginative treatment of mundane detail, the uncanny mix of slyness and sweetness, intimacy and detachment — it’s all there in black and white” — images Elmereyda goes on to describe as still “joltingly fresh.” And they are.

The images also serve as a corrective, if, back in 1976, you took John Szarkowski’s word for it. He was the influential MoMA curator who wrote in William Eggleston’s Guide that Eggleston was “perhaps never fully committed to black and white.” Stranded in Canton, Eggleston’s 30-hour, black-and-white video shot during the early ’70s, contradicts that claim. 5 x 7 does too.

But leave it to Eggleston to recognize the full import of his work. Recalling a meeting with Szarkowski over these very nightclub photographs, Eggleston asked the curator, “Have you ever seen anything like these before?” Szarkowski: “No.” Then Almereyda to Eggleston: “That’s all he said?” Eggleston, with laconic clarity, to Almereyda: “I thought that was a lot.”

The Writer Within

A chime sounds. Everybody’s quiet. Then your assignment is: to write … right off the top of your head, for the next two minutes, anything goes. And at the end of those two minutes, you can read aloud what you wrote. Talk about it. Hear from others. Rid yourself perhaps of your own worst enemy: your inner critic.

That was the case at a recent one-night writing workshop conducted by Valentine Leonard, Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Memphis and author in the spring of 2008 of Bergson-Deleuze Encounters: Transcendental Experience and the Thought of the Virtual (State University of New York Press).

But if that title sounds forbidding, Leonard is not. Last year, she left academia to focus on the creative life and entered into … well, you name it.

In addition to conducting writing workshops, Leonard has taken to the stage as a member of the Our Own Voice theater troupe. She teaches guided meditation. She leads exercises in “past-life regression” and dream interpretation. Her goal, according to her Web site: “to create and communicate new, healing and empowering ways of seeing, feeling and thinking.” And that includes drumming.

On Sundays in Overton Park, you can catch her playing in an Afro-Cuban drum circle, this after she studied Haitian voodoo drumming in Paris, the city where her family moved (from Lyon) when Leonard was 17 and where she began her college career in, of all things, pre-law. No surprise, she says, she “hated it,” and no surprise, after teaching for three years in the philosophy department at the U of M, she saw that her opportunities in Memphis, a city she loves, were limited. Instead, as she puts it, “I wanted to explore creativity rather than talk about creativity.”

You can do your own exploring too when Leonard, along with Diane Brandon, conducts a two-day workshop, “Exploring Your Creativity and Inner Voice,” in Leonard’s Midtown home on August 25th and 26th. To register or for more information, contact Valentine Leonard at valentineleonard@mac.com or by phone at 239-9919.

Categories
Art Art Feature

From Darkness and Light

For his exhibition of recent work at Perry Nicole Fine Art, John McIntire transforms smooth, cool stone into sexual icons, fertility fetishes, and sacrificial gods. Many of McIntire’s marble sculptures are complex syntheses of primal power and grace.

Voodoo Something to Me turns Belgian black marble into a two-foot-tall Venus of Willendorf with fertile bellies carved on her truncated body. Aztec Dreamer is a haunting composite of desert mystic, abstract masterwork, and sacrificial god. This large, supine figure with curved spine could be a yoga devotee practicing an advanced pose, a Buddha kicking back for a good belly laugh, or one of Henry Moore’s reclining figures. The title and posture of the piece also evoke Chac Mull, the Toltec god on whose belly humans were sacrificed.

In one of the most poignant and powerful works of his career, McIntire embodies Marilyn Monroe in white Georgia marble. Beneath a luminous floor-length sheath, we can just make out the sleek contrapposto figure with arched right foot on the verge of spinning across the gallery floor. Marilyn wraps her arms around her upper torso and forehead — an attempt, perhaps, to comfort herself or to better integrate mind/body/heart. With five feet of curvaceous white marble, McIntire brings to life the complex blond bombshell who counted playwrights and presidents as confidants, the comedienne who starred in some of the classics of American cinema, the aging ingénue who overdosed on drugs, and the Hollywood sex symbol who needed more.

At Perry Nicole Fine Art through August 15th

Anthony Lee’s American Out-Caste

Another visionary artist, Kurt Meer, immerses himself in alchemical and esoteric texts. Instead of turning dross into gold, in the exhibition “Voyage” at L Ross Gallery, Meer accomplishes something more personal and profound. He takes us downriver toward sunset in a body of work that attunes us to the subtlest of stimuli, baptizes us with light, and at the end the journey, eases us into night.

In Voyage I, river mist acts as a prism turning sunset into rainbow. Melon bleeds into teal into indigo into violet. White-hot yellow radiates from the center of the painting, creating a bowl of light that washes over and through the viewer.

In Voyage II, we move closer to the winding river, whose surface mirrors the sunset. No neons, no street lights, no strobes — above and below we are immersed in soft halos of light. The painting Solace brings us to the final bend in the river where Meer’s shadows are as nuanced as his colors. Earth’s edges dissolve into mist and darkening sky, palest peach streaks across the middle of the painting, and our own edges begin to blur. Still moving downriver, the last trace of color fades, as Meer enfolds us into the soft blanket of night.

At L Ross Gallery through August 31st

Anthony Lee’s vibrant colors, splashes of paint, and glossy surfaces bring to mind carnivals and the sunny beaches of Hawaii and St. Croix, islands where the artist has lived. In his exhibition “Under the Sun” at the Memphis Brooks Museum, Lee’s strongest paintings don’t depict tropical playgrounds but are, instead, scenes of hard labor, broiling suns, and the endless cycles of poverty.

In American Out-Caste, three large men lumber toward a livery stable that stood on Main Street in Memphis in the early 1900s. A fiery glow illuminates horses, wagons, and the stable, which are back-dropped by splatters of red paint and a silhouette of Memphis’ current skyline. A white-hot sun shines above the stooped right shoulder of one of the men. We can’t see his face. He could be looking for work, any kind of work, or this could be a showdown at high noon by men armed only with rakes and hoes.

Another punishing sun hovers above the heads of sharecroppers, circa 1930s, toiling with crude tools beneath skyscrapers in Work Ethic. The only thing unrestricted in Unrestricted are broiling temperatures. In this Dante-esque painting, faces floating in saturate red look stupefied by the heat.

In Mary and Son, 19th-century cotton pickers are also backdropped by heat and 21st-century architecture. Acrid greens glow around the heads of a mother and her son, who is strapped down with a large sack of cotton. The fetid halos suggest both polluted environment and tainted sacrifice. As more Americans fall below the poverty line, as generation after generation of the urban poor, undocumented migrant workers, and subsistence farmers are consigned to lives of quiet desperation, Lee’s 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century field hands become powerful portraits of poverty repeating itself.

At Memphis Brooks Museum of Art through August 12th

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

A Fresh Attitude

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Stephen Hassinger, chef de cuisine at the Inn at Hunt Phelan, was strolling around the downtown Memphis Farmers Market with his wife Kathleen Hall, when they began to crave something that would make the heat more bearable. Inspired by the fresh produce, they decided to make homemade ice cream to sell at the market. Thus was born De La Creme.

“It all started on the Fourth of July, with a White Mountain Ice Cream Freezer, a bunch of rock salt, ice, and lots of hot coffee because my wife and I were standing in the restaurant’s freezer, making ice cream for our first weekend at the market,” Hassinger remembers. But the couple soon discovered that the old-fashioned ice-cream maker wasn’t up to the task.

“This thing was a wooden bucket with an engine of a half horse power that’s moving the scraper blade,” Hassinger says. “After wearing out three of those, we moved on to a better ice-cream maker, which looks more like a front-loading washing machine.”

With the kinks worked out and with the help of their two kids, who are responsible for taste-testing and quality control, production is now running full-force. Best-sellers include honey vanilla, mint chocolate chip, and pecan praline. A couple of weeks ago, the couple offered its first sorbets: blueberry, blackberry, ginger/peach, and lemongrass/wild blackberry. Most of the ice-cream and sorbet flavors are based on what’s available at the Farmers Market.

“We typically buy what looks good to us that day, eat some of it, and make ice cream from the rest,” Hassinger says.

The ice cream costs $4 to $5 for a 12-ounce container. However, biodegradable packaging is an important concern. Hassinger and his wife will soon be using a smaller, eco-friendly container. When available, they try to use organic ingredients, inclucing whole milk from Rock Springs Dairy in Wildersville, Tennessee, about 100 miles east of Memphis.

“Of course, the ingredients we use have a big impact on how our ice cream tastes,” Hassinger says. “But another reason why homemade ice cream tastes so much better than even the premium ice cream at the store is because it’s made a few days before it’s sold. It doesn’t have to be shipped halfway across the country, and it’s kept at a constant temperature, which affects taste and consistency.”

De La Creme ice cream is available at the Memphis Farmers Market.

Two of Hassinger’s co-workers from Hunt Phelan are also selling their wares at the Farmers Market. Pastry chef Sherri McKelvie and sous chef Russell Casey have recently teamed up to create La Cucina, which sells European-style breads and freshly made mozzarella. McKelvie, who once ran her own wholesale bakery, La Morinda, finally gave in to the market’s plea for artisan bread.

“I don’t think I would ever want to have my own full-blown bakery again, even though I still love baking bread,” McKelvie says. “This is really the best of both worlds. I can bake some bread once a week, and I can meet the people who buy it.”

At the market, McKelvie sells a honey whole-wheat loaf with sunflowers, rosemary olive oil and jalapeno cheddar breads, baguettes, and tomato Parmesan focaccias. The breads cost from $3 to $5 each. Casey’s mozzarella sells for $5 for five to six ounces.

La Cucina products are available at the Memphis Farmers Market.

On August 7th, several downtown restaurants will be participating in the “Moveable Feast,” which will feature produce from area farmers. For this progressive dinner, chefs from Felicia Suzanne’s, Grill 83, McEwen’s on Monroe, and

Stella will prepare dishes using four main ingredients: Bonnie Blue Farm’s goat cheese, Mississippi striped bass, local suckling pig, and Delta pecans. Wines will be provided by Grateful Palate Imports.

Cost for the dinner is $95 per person, all-inclusive. Dinner begins at 7 p.m., with a seating for 40 at each restaurant. Reservations are required.

A Moveable Feast, August 7th, 7 p.m. For reservations, call Felicia Suzanne’s at 523-0877.

The Memphis Farmers Market, located at the Central Station Pavillion at Front Street and G.E. Patterson, will be open every Saturday from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. through October 27th.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

City Lights

Paris, Je T’aime (French for “Paris, I Love You”) is described as “a collaborative film,” and because of the high quality of its 18 short segments, shot by 22 directors in 18 different Parisian neighborhoods, it’s much more than the scrapbook-style collection of sentimental imagery and trite storytelling you might suspect. Through its wide range of tones, places, faces, and tales, the film offers a remarkable, exhilarating vision of urban life.

Because of the large number of directors and actors involved in this project, none of the short films lasts more than a few minutes, and none of the stories are directly linked, even though there are two or three brief shots at the end of the film where characters from one story recognize characters from another story. Surprisingly, such strict spatial, temporal, and narrative limits invigorate many of the bigger-name filmmakers: The Coen brothers’ darkly comic two-reeler, set in a Metro station and starring Steve Buscemi, is the most vibrant, exciting thing they’ve done in years. Wes Craven’s short, set in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, is the best-looking segment of the bunch, and it’s also one of the most whimsical; it’s a romantic short about a humorless man’s encounter with the ghost of Oscar Wilde.

Other filmmakers contribute their usual excellent work: Alfonso Cuaron’s graceful, single-take evening stroll with Nick Nolte and Ludivine Sagnier offers an antidote to the poisonous dystopia he envisioned in Children of Men, while art-house favorite Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep, Clean), whose main subject is the mixing of cultures, nations, and languages in our new global village, presents another relaxed, sad portrait of a woman (Maggie Gyllenhaal, superbly naturalistic and effortless, as always) adrift in an unfamiliar locale. Only Sylvain Chomet’s excruciating tale of two mimes in love and Christopher Doyle’s avant-garde hairstylist fantasy are less than compelling.

As this symphony of a city moves from arrondissement to arrondissement, the film takes shape as a meditation on the ways in which urban anonymity creates opportunities for reinvention. Some residents, like Bob Hoskins and Fanny Ardant in the “Pigalle” section, wander the streets at night, trying on new identities in an attempt to reawaken their old selves; others, like Catalina Sandino Moreno’s nanny in the poignant working-class vignette “Loin du 16ème,” won’t quite let their bland, thankless supporting roles entrap them. Accidents, collisions, and sudden memories also offer chances for personal and spiritual renewal.

In a lovely touch, a homely, middle-aged American tourist (Margo Martindale) best expresses not only Paris’ sense of possibility and excitement but the possibility and excitement promised by all foreign travel. Her segment, written and directed by Alexander Payne, starts out as a joke about simple-minded sightseers before blossoming into a deeply moving comment about the unlikely roots that world travelers unearth when visiting new places. As she sits on a Parisian park bench, Martindale (in impeccably bad, honking Yankee French) says, “I felt, at the same time, joy and sadness. But not too much sadness, because I felt alive.” At its frequent best, Paris, Je T’aime inspires the same response.

Paris, Je T’aime

Opens Friday, August 3rd

Ridgeway Four

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Simpsons dumb down from boob tube to big screen.

Ever since it debuted in the late ’80s, The Simpsons are what you use to prove that you’ve got good taste to people who don’t know you. Proclaiming fanship of the show gives you street cred from the pop-culture intelligentsia, and it’s always a good idea to keep a funny quote from an episode or some other proof of bona fides handy, just in case. For example: I named my daughter Maggie in part after The Simpsons character. See, I just proved to you that I’m smart — or lame, your reaction depending on if you yourself are smart.

So it’s curious that with The Simpsons Movie, the eagerly awaited, long-in-development big-screen version of the beloved boob-tube show, the final product isn’t the screamingly sharp, layered comedy of the smaller format writ large. Instead, the series’ cleverness has been watered down for mass consumption — it’s the dumbing down of a formula that was smarted-up mainstream humor in the first place. And this comedy by committee (15 people get writing credit for a script that reportedly went through over 100 drafts) doesn’t draw nearly enough blood.

If nothing else, the breadth and scope of The Simpsons Movie plot is suitably large. After years of environmental abuse, Springfield — the home of the Simpsons and a microcosm for all things American — is considered the most polluted town in the history of the world. This is thanks in part to Homer (Dan Castellaneta), whose dumping of a silo full of pig crap in Lake Springfield turns the water from toxic to gene-altering. On the advice of Environmental Protection Agency head Russ Cargill (Albert Brooks), a glass dome is placed over Springfield so that the city and its citizens can’t contaminate anything else. After escaping a lynch mob and the dome, the Simpsons relocate to Alaska — before the call of duty compels the family back home to save the town from destruction.

With broadsides against people of any political, religious, or cultural bent, The Simpsons Movie is suitably snarky in taking no prisoners. And by giving preference to the talents of the TV show’s regular ensemble cast of voice actors instead of bringing in a series of flash-for-flash’s sake celebrities (Albert Brooks in a significant role and Tom Hanks and Green Day in cameos are the only exceptions), the film pays tribute to the folks who got them there in the first place.

But The Simpsons Movie is written mostly for the uninitiated, with occasional insider nods to the fanatic. Tellingly, Arnold Schwarzenegger-spoof Rainier Wolfcastle, a recurring character on the TV show, has been replaced — with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Simpsons has always been a kitchen-sink comedy effort, with gags that can cross from high- to low-brow and back in the space of a joke. Accordingly, not every goof is guaranteed to hit your particular funny bone. But by casting a wide net, each episode promises a whole slew of chuckles and usually a number of real bellybusters.

The Simpsons Movie underwhelms. Those expecting a laugh riot will likely be disappointed. It’s still The Simpsons, and that still carries with it a certain level of quality. But expect more bemused smiling than anything else. And it must be said: Flat jokes are much more forgivable when they’re free.

The Simpsons Movie

Now playing

Multiple locations

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: (AP Photo/USAF)

The evolution of excuses for blundering into and maintaining the Iraq war is becoming comical. The first excuse was weapons of mass destruction. Do you remember the constant talk about weapons of mass destruction, “the worst weapons in the hands of the worst dictator”? Do you remember how President Bush said the sole reason for the war was to disarm Saddam Hussein? Do you remember how we were warned about a smoking gun that could be a mushroom cloud? Do you remember how Iraq was an “imminent” threat to the world? Do you remember how a 65-year-old dictator, widely acknowledged as not the smartest guy in the world, was compared to Hitler, who had put together a regime and an army that conquered Europe?

Well, oops. Not a single weapon of mass destruction was found in the country. Furthermore, the Iraqis had said there were no weapons of mass destruction. To cover their behinds, U.S. officials started peddling the story that Saddam wanted people to believe he had weapons of mass destruction. That U.S. lie didn’t fly because Saddam and his government repeatedly denied that the weapons existed. Furthermore, Iraq had invited in U.N. inspectors who were verifying the absence of weapons, which was one reason Bush forced the inspectors out by going to war. He had to start his war before the inspectors proved his bogus intelligence amounted to a pack of lies.

Enter the second excuse: Bush wanted to spread democracy in the Middle East, starting with Iraq. That never progressed past elections because, as everyone familiar with the country knew or should have known, a vote would elect a Shia majority with two fractious minorities, Kurds and Sunnis. This is the government that has proven to be totally ineffective. It also greatly increased the influence of Iran. It has sparked the civil war in Iraq.

Bush lately has hinted that his faith in democracy is weakening by implying that a reasonable authority would be acceptable. Trouble is, the U.S. can’t even find a dictator willing to take the job, given the present situation.

Now, when the issue has become getting Americans home from a war that has lasted longer than World War II, the final excuse is to trot out the empire’s favorite ambiguity: stability. If we leave Iraq, instability will result. It’s hard to believe anyone can say that with a straight face. Iraq is unstable already. It’s in the midst of civil war, with a million refugees and displaced people, hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded, its economy a total wreck, and virtually all work on repairing the infrastructure at a standstill.

Ironically, the last time Iraq was stable was when Saddam was in power. Iraq is unstable because we made it unstable. We destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure, its economy, and its government. We did. One of the most shameful lies peddled by the Bush administration has been to blame the poor state of Iraq’s infrastructure on Saddam. We destroyed that infrastructure with wars, bombings, and medieval sanctions. The miracle is that with all we were doing, Saddam managed to produce more electricity and more oil than our occupation has been able to produce.

Finally, how is it the U.S. can claim that after four years, there is no trained Iraqi army and police force able to handle security? We send kids into combat with about 16 weeks of training. And why is the U.S. building the largest embassy in the world in a Third World country that is in chaos?

What “Herbert Hoover” Bush has done is destroy the credibility of the U.S., sully our reputation almost beyond repair, demonstrate the weakness of our leadership and the vulnerability of our military, and convince many people in the world that we are an evil nation of idiots led by fools. Let’s at least hope that he destroys the Republican Party, too. It deserves a zero existence.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 50 years.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

No Ice Cream for You!

If this week’s Food News column got you pumped up about trying Stephen Hassinger’s homemade ice cream at the Memphis Farmers Market, too bad! Because of Department of Agriculture regulations, Hassinger will no longer be selling his dairy-based frozen treats.

In order to make ice cream for retail the Department of Agriculture demands that the producer pasteurizes his own milk. Also affected by this regulation is Russell Casey who was selling freshly made Mozzarella.

“We would have to get an on-site pasteurizer, which has a price tag in the six-figure range,” Hassinger explains.

And because that’s not really an option, Hassinger is planning on changing de La Creme to Tutti Frutti and focus on sorbets. Before he can do that, however, the Department of Agriculture will have to inspect his kitchen to make sure it complies with the standards.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Morris Gets Leg Up from Former A C Boosters

CREDIT: jb

Mayoral candidate Herman Morris’ campaign got a tangible boost Thursday as the two principal co-founders of the now defunct “Draft A C” movement — the Revs. Bill Adkins and La Simba Gray — explained they had now “recovered” and were giving their support to Morris as Memphis’ best hope for the future.

Another veteran of the draft movement, restaurateur Tommy Boggs, was on hand at the candidate’s headquarters for the announcement, while yet a fourth — former county mayor Bill Morris — was said to be on board, though absent at a University of Memphis official function.

“This is a new day for the campaign for mayor of the city of Memphis,” said Morris as he accepted the endorsements of the former “Draft A C” principals, along with several others from prominent African-American ministers.

Adkins, who said after county mayor Wharton’s disavowal of a candidacy last month that he wouldn’t be endorsing anyone else, said he changed his mind after getting three visits from Morris that convinced him of the former MLGW head’s mayoral qualities.

In a press release accompanying the press conference, Adkins coupled Morris with Wharton as potential city/county colleagues: “Just imagine what the dream team of Herman Morris and A C Wharton could do for our city.”

At the press conference, Morris renewed his call for other candidates to follow his example by taking a drug test and demonstrating they were additive-free.

He repeated an assertion he had made last week at a meeting of the Germantown Democratic Club that he was the one candidate drawing equally from both blacks and whites, but he declined to say again, as he had then, that Mayor Willie Herenton and city councilwoman Carol Chumney appeared more to specific racial voting blocs.