Month: September 2007

Categories
Music Music Features

Jason Isbell at Proud Larry’s Saturday

When Jason Isbell was recruited to play guitar for the Drive-By Truckers early in this decade, he was a recent college grad joining an established band. He was expected to be a bit player. Instead, Isbell provided eight songs across the three Drive-By Truckers albums he appeared on, most memorably his first, “Outfit,” an instant DBT standard on 2003’s Decoration Day.

But the partnership wasn’t meant to last. Isbell had always wanted to be a solo artist and, more than a decade younger than Hood and Cooley, had different goals. So, Isbell left the band and launched a solo career earlier this year with Sirens of the Ditch, a sharp record that continues the Southern rock sound the Truckers are known for but expands Isbell’s palette with dabs of swamp rock, blues, and torch-song soul.

Isbell plays Proud Larry’s in Oxford, Mississippi, on Saturday, September 22nd. Doors open at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10.

— Chris Herrington

Categories
Sports Sports Feature

Will UM/UCF Game Be All Wet?

University of Central Florida will host the University of Memphis in their brand-new stadium on Saturday. Will our city officials be paying attention? You can bet theirs will be, as a situation with opening-day concessions has caused an uproar.

From the Orlando Sentinel: “UCF President John Hitt today blasted the concession contractor at Bright House Networks Stadium for failing to stock enough bottled water for sale at last Saturday’s inaugural game, saying the firm must do better ‘or their successor will.’

Fans were angered when bottled water ran out during the third quarter of last week’s game. There were no public water fountains installed at the stadium. Officials plan to ramp up the number of bottles — from 30,000 to 135,000 — to be sold for this week’s game and to have at least 10 water fountains working.

To read more, go here.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Let’s Hear It for Austria

On a recent Monday night, 26 Memphis wine aficionados came together for a night of food and wine at Tsunami. The reason? Austrian wine.

Austrian wine and Chef Ben Smith’s Pacific Rim cuisine might not be easily connected in most people’s minds. More than likely, Austria doesn’t cross people’s minds at all when it comes to wine. But after that dinner, every single person was a convert.

Austria produces less than 1 percent of the world’s total yearly wine output. That beautiful trickle is finally making its way down to Memphis thanks to Chicago-based importer VinDiVino. Known more for their Italian portfolio, VinDiVino only recently began importing Austrian wines. Back in 1993, they started with only one, the dessert-wine superstar Alois Kracher. Today, they import wines from 28 different Austrian wineries.

Prager, one of Austria’s best-known wineries, has taken Riesling’s sullied reputation as a cloying, syrupy wine and transformed it into something astonishing. Credit master winemaker Toni Bodenstein, who handcrafts fruit from the Wachau district into the purest dry Rieslings in the world.

“We are blessed with three distinct climates within the Wachau region,” Bodenstein says. “The steep hills, nearly 1,000 meters high, provide different sun exposures and micro-climates. [Also] in the ’80s, the Austrian government adopted strict wine laws, which forced winemakers to cut yields. These laws forced the level of quality up considerably.”

Prager wines offer a bounty of citrus and stone fruit flavors and aromas, along with vibrant minerality and racy, mouthwatering acidity. Those who fancy full-bodied whites will be blown away by the weight and texture of Bodenstein’s Rieslings. Tasting one that has been left out on the counter for two hours is eye-opening. Never before has a room-temperature white wine been so beautifully alive, balanced, and beckoning. Pork, something most Memphians are religious about, is a wonderful match for Prager Rieslings.

The Achleiten vineyard in Central Wachau is a steep, sloped vineyard, terraced with ancient stonework that dates back to medieval times. Kersten Klamm of Freie Weingartner Wachau coaxes very modern, rich Grüner Veltliner and Riesling from this historical vineyard.

“It’s the specific soil climate and the steep terraced vineyards that determine the unique style of our wines,” Klamm says. “Wachau wines are always very mineralic with lots of finesse and a great aging potential. Our main white grape, Grüner Veltliner, combines the finesse and elegance of a Riesling with the structure and complexity of a Burgundy.”

In the Wachau, there are three distinctive levels of ripeness. Steinfeder wines, named after an indigenous grass, are fairly light in alcohol and very fresh and fruity. Wines with the Federspiel designation are fuller in body and ripeness with an alcohol level between 11 and 12.5 percent. The term “Federspiel” was the name of the leather whip used to call back falcons in the old days. Smaragd, named after a lizard that lives in the vineyards, is the designation given to the ripest and most precious wines.

The important thing to remember is that no matter how ripe the wines, they are always dry.

Whether quenching a thirst induced by triple-digit heat or pairing an incredible meal with a perfect wine, Memphis wine drinkers should look to the small country of Austria to provide wines for both occasions.

Recommended Wines:

FWW Domane Wachau Federspiel Terrassen Grüner Veltliner 2006, $16.99

FWW Domane Wachau Smaragd Achleiten Riesling 2005, $35.99

Weingut Stadt Krems Sandgrube Grüner Veltliner 2006, $17.99

Loimer Kamptal Grüner Veltliner 2005, $19.99

Prager Federspiel “Steinriegl” Riesling 2005, $30.99

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

After Violence

A subterranean favorite best known for “body horror” flicks (They Came From Within), coal-black comedies (The Brood), squishy remakes (The Fly), and outré exercises (Crash — the car-wreck sex-cult movie, not the platitude-packed Oscar winner), the superb Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg went mainstream a couple of years ago with A History of Violence. A director-for-hire studio product, the film boasted Cronenberg’s biggest budget ever and marked his first film set in the United States since 1983’s The Dead Zone. But as mainstream entertainment, A History of Violence was a bit of a Trojan horse. It honored Hollywood convention but only in the service of interrogating it.

On the surface, Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises is an aesthetic sequel to A History of Violence. Both films open with bloody, unsettling pre-credit sequences. Both cast Viggo Mortensen as an outwardly calm man capable of great violence and pair him with a striking blonde (Maria Bello in Violence, Naomi Watts in Eastern Promises). And both films chart the disruptive intersection of a seedy criminal underworld and middle-class domestic normalcy.

But where Violence only seemed old-fashioned, Eastern Promises really is. Emotionally and morally, A History of Violence left the viewer in an uncertain, unsettling place. Eastern Promises‘ denouement is more abrupt and less tidy, but it sets the moral world in order in the manner Hollywood films are expected to.

But if Eastern Promises is a less ambitious film than is the norm for Cronenberg, it’s still a fine one. A filmmaker of great technical skill and visual economy, Cronenberg hooks the viewer from the beginning with a crisp opening sequence that sets the entire plot in motion with two deaths and a birth. You can further sense his sure hand with the way key bits of back story are parceled out.

Eastern Promises was written by Steven Knight and covers the same London-immigrant-underworld milieu as his Dirty Pretty Things. Here, Watts plays Anna, a midwife of mixed British and Russian ancestry who pockets the diary of a hemorrhaging, unidentified 14-year-old who dies while giving birth. Attempting to translate the diary in order to find the newborn’s family, Anna is pulled into the world of the London-based Russian mob, led by menacing restaurateur Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) and his weak, erratic son Kirill (Vincent Cassel). Kirill’s mysterious driver/bodyguard Nikolai (Mortensen) takes a protective interest in Anna.

Mortensen’s Nikolai is a classic screen creation. A brooding, mysterious, and dangerous figure, Nikolai’s body is covered in prison tattoos that are markers of experience within the Russian mob. These tattoos take on a key narrative role when they’re used by a couple of revenge-seeking Chechens to (mis)identify Nikolai in a bathhouse. The ensuing savage, two-on-one knife attack is the film’s centerpiece, with Mortensen’s full nudity ratcheting up the vulnerability and queasiness of the scene.

Though Mortensen’s Nikolai is iconic, Watts also functions as part of the visual design, seen often riding a motorcycle through the London streets in a constellation of black — jacket, boots, helmet, sunglasses — broken up by blond hair and tight blue jeans.

If this visually striking, expertly directed film falls short of Cronenberg’s usual standards, it’s because of a script that’s too conventional, something underscored by a key revelation about Nikolai’s motivation that suggests a lesser, more procedurally oriented crime film than what Eastern Promises strives to be.

Eastern Promises

Opening Friday, September 21st

Multiple locations

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Homefront wounds exposed.

How am I to feel about Paul Haggis? The creative force behind two of the last three Best Picture Oscar winners (writer of Million Dollar Baby and writer/director of Crash), Haggis is hotter than anybody not named Apatow in Hollywood. But Million Dollar Baby left me feeling sucker-punched with melodrama in the last act, and Crash left me feeling bullied into a corner and browbeaten with lofty message.

But Haggis is also the guy who helped breathe life into James Bond in Casino Royale and acquitted himself admirably as co-author of Clint Eastwood’s WWII diptych (Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima).

And now he’s made In the Valley of Elah. Inspired by actual events, the plot is about a soldier, just back from Iraq, who has gone missing, and the concerned father, Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones), who investigates his disappearance. The movie kicks up all kinds of dust about combat stress, the horrors of war, the loss of patriotism, and parents coming to grips with the wages of their convictions. This was, I told myself going in, the exact kind of movie Haggis would ruin for me. I’m pleased to report I was wrong.

The bulk of the film is dressed up like a mystery. Hank is a classic red-stater, of the strong and silent mold: former military investigator, pickup-truck driver, prays before meals, drinks Beam. When Hank gets the call from the Army that his son has gone AWOL, he doesn’t believe it: The son he raised would never have been derelict in his duties. Hank’s wife Joan (Susan Sarandon) is a bundle of nerves over it. In the course of Hank’s search, he enlists the aid of Detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), a townie cop near the army base.

Jones is perfectly cast. The script fails him in tracing Hank’s growing disillusionment with his country and its institutions, but Jones sells each moment he’s given. Also, apparently, when Theron tries to look plain and not ethereally beautiful, it means she’s serious about a role. It’s the equivalent of Robin Williams’ beard. In Elah, her acting’s mostly fine, but some of the dialogue is too tin for her ear.

In the Valley of Elah is solemnly anti-war (little “w”). Its depictions of soldiers broken by the experience are universal. But Haggis sets the film very specifically — November 1, 2004 — making it a historical drama. American flags fly in front of every house and on cars. Bush’s voice echoes on the radio, and the Iraq War fills TV screens. One character says, “They shouldn’t send heroes to a place like Iraq.” In this sense, the film is anti-War (big “W”). Haggis doesn’t successfully spell out what makes Iraq different from any other war, especially with Vietnam looming a generation ago. But I believe that he believes it. And, in 2004, the cuts were fresh enough to wound faith.

In the Valley of Elah

Opening Friday, September 21st

Multiple locations

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: (AP Photo/Troy Maben)

“Idaho senator Larry Craig quit his Senate seat,

saying that he wanted to spend more time not being gay.”

— David Letterman

The arrest of Senator Larry Craig (Perv-ID) in an airport bathroom sex sting and his vacillations about resigning make writing a column just plain fun. Craig said he kept the incident quiet so he could consider his options. It was yet another good decision by bathroom-stall enthusiast “not gay” Craig, deftly avoiding a media circus.

The mix of politics and religion has always been a hypocrite-magnet and brings to mind my award-eligible column about the Rev. Ted Haggard (who opposed gays even as he was hiring a male hooker and buying drugs with church money in a hotel room) entitled, “Ministers Should Do More Than Lay People.”

But this story floors me. At first, I thought Craig was like many of our grandfathers and dads — an out-of-touch old man who did not know the gay signals. After all, he was caught in this sex sting in a state that elected a pro wrestler as governor. Perhaps they took a hard line on bathroom-stall toe-tapping for fear it would lead to more musicals. Then, when his fellow GOP leaders did not defend him, and he did not even get a “you’re doing a heckuva job” out of President Bush, I figured that Craig probably had a history of such conduct.

The Democrats were handed yet another election-year gift and thought they had seen the last of yet another GOP right-winger. There they were, standing around Craig’s twitching body, poking him with a stick (which I bet he likes), when suddenly the Craig camp (a camp you do not want to send your son to) said he might not resign. Dems, who were afraid they might actually have to come up with a reasonable alternative agenda to defeat the GOP in the fall, fretted.

Gays were torn over whether to be happy that Craig was forced to reveal his actions or offended that this creep is gay.

Craig’s June guilty plea in Minneapolis and rumors that he had done this before in a train station in Washington, D.C., created a dilemma for Democrats. On one hand, they had a great chance to embarrass a Republican, but they had to do so by condemning a gay guy who supports public transportation. When events defy logic, you can rest assured politicians are involved.

Craig said that he is not a guy who will go down easy. I bet the arresting cop disagrees. Standing beside his wife and adopted kids, he said that he wanted a do-over on his guilty plea. His defense is going to be — and I am not kidding — that his plea was not intelligently arrived at. Now if you ever wonder why our legal system is messed up, look no further than Senator Craig — a “lawmaker,” remember.

I would argue that, unlike openly gay males, closeted ones like Craig hurt their families by perpetuating a fraud about their sexual orientation. For you homophobes out there, you should be more supportive of those who come out. Richard Simmons is not going to sneak up on you in a bathroom in his candy-striped short-shorts. He’s out. It’s the guys with secret sex lives who are the problem.

I have long said that the GOP is misguided when it espouses minimal government and individual freedom yet seems obsessed with pushing laws to make it difficult for consenting adults to do what they want as long as no harm is done to anyone. We haven’t caught bin Laden. We’re running massive federal deficits. We have bigger problems than persecuting people for what they do in private with a consenting partner.

It is hard for Craig to think about the surge when he is constantly fighting an urge.

Incidentally, what sort of cop signs up for sitting in a toilet and tapping his toe in hopes that a gay dude will hit on him? The cop from the Village People?

It is comforting to know that our phones, e-mails, and bathroom stalls are now monitored by our government. It seems the only two things they are not watching are their spending and our borders!

Ron Hart is a Southern libertarian who writes about politics and life. His e-mail address is RevRon10@aol.com.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

2 Days in Paris

2 Days in Paris, Julie Delpy’s intimate, exhilarating new film, doesn’t have much in common with genteel, starry-eyed rom-coms like Before Sunrise or Before Sunset. Warm, fuzzy memories of those two chatty but precious Richard Linklater films, which paired Delpy’s French intellectual fantasy chick with Ethan Hawke’s pretentious, scheming American backpacker, are effectively obliterated when we get our first glimpse of Marion and Jack (Delpy and Adam Goldberg, well-muscled and well-wrapped in a blanket of Cape Fear tattoos), a couple in their mid-30s who are taking the overnight train from Venice to Paris; Marion is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a gun that’s pointed at her boyfriend’s chest.

In interviews, Delpy has compared Marion’s impulsive, surprisingly confrontational behavior to Robert De Niro’s actions in Raging Bull, and, at times, the movie plays like an extended verbal prizefight between a sharper Jake LaMotta and an early Albert Brooks-style wiseass. Jack and Marion are older and freer with their insecurities and jealous barbs than most young lovers would ever dare, and they give in to sudden outbursts of frustration and hostility more often than couples of any age probably should. Their struggles and confessions provide most of the forward momentum of the film, which is loose, awkward, nosy, and, in the finest French New Wave tradition, dotted with eclectic movie allusions, from Last Tango in Paris to Voyage in Italy to M.

Delpy, who also wrote, produced, and directed, is as good as she’s ever been, but Goldberg is quick and vulnerable enough to match her throughout. The supporting cast largely stays in the background, although the exuberance and high spirits of Marion’s parents (played by Delpy’s real-life parents) are like something out of Renoir’s later movies, as is the fat, bored housecat whose expressionless gaze steals a scene or two.

Opens Friday, September 21st, at Ridgeway Four

Categories
News

Local Rally for the Jena 6 Thursday

A “wear black” vigil is scheduled for Thursday September 20, from 4:30p.m. to 6:30p.m. on the corner of Central Avenue and East Parkway to show support for the “Jena 6.”

A series of conflicts between black and white residents of Jena, Louisiana began in September 2006 when a group of black students at Jena High School sat beneath a tree on campus that local custom had reserved for white students. The next day, three nooses were seen in the tree.

Fights between students in the aftermath of that event led to the arrest of six African-American students on attempted murder charges. One of the six has already been found guilty of aggravated second-degree battery, and a conspiracy charge.

The case has brought national attention due to the lack of charges against whites who participated equally in the violence following the noose incident. Rallies are planned across the country on Thursday.

Categories
News

Monthly Flyer “Third Thursday” Party at Celtic Crossing Today

Today (Thursday) from 5 to 7 p.m., you’re invited to join Flyer staffers and friends in the Flyer‘s monthly Third Thursday celebration.

This month, the venue is Celtic Crossing in Cooper-Young. There will be drink specials, free hors d’oeuvres, and live music.

Be there and get your Irish on!

Categories
News

Tomeka Hart Elected Foreperson of Federal Grand Jury

Memphis school board member Tomeka Hart has been chosen as foreperson of a federal grand jury.

Hart’s name appeared on an indictment released by the clerk’s office this month. The foreperson routinely signs indictments. She confirmed to the Flyer that she has been serving since July and expects her term to last another year and a half. Typically, there is more than one grand jury operating at the same time. Grand jurors hear prosecutors present evidence in criminal cases and decide whether or not to indict.

Hart is the second prominent Memphian to serve recently as a foreperson in the federal system. In 2005-2006, former Commercial Appeal editor Angus McEachran did the job.

Former Memphis school board member Michael Hooks Jr. was indicted on federal charges several months before Hart began her jury duty. His case is scheduled for trial later this year.