Month: September 2007

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

I want my f*&king money back. I keep seeing a paid advertisement on television that deeply offends me and probably millions of other red-blooded Americans. It’s the commercial for Positive Changes, the company that swears it can help you lose weight through hypnosis. You may have seen it. It’s the one in which the still-overweight woman is talking about how great the program is and how it gives her so much more energy and, just when she says that, her eyes close and she appears to doze off. It’s pretty spectacular in its badness and to think that they actually paid an advertising agency to create the spot is hilarious. But what offends me about the commercial is that right after she seemingly falls asleep on camera while talking about how much more energy she has, a very loud man appears and makes the statement: “Diets just don’t work. Positive Changes does.” Well, as a person who has been on a diet since the age of 11 and who has had success in some instances (though not lately, as gravity and old age continue to ravage my once sleek physique), I am offended and I am sure millions of other Americans who diet are too. Here we are trying to look better to make the United States of America a more pleasant country and cut down on healthcare costs associated with being overweight, and this man has the audacity to question us. I think the FCC should look into this and I want a portion of my Direct TV bill taken off. No, wait, I have a better idea. Let’s have the U.S. Senate spend a great deal of time debating this paid ad and then spend more time voting for a nonbinding resolution to condemn it, like they did with the controversial MoveOn.org “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” ad that the group ran in The New York Times. And politicians wonder why we don’t trust them. Sure, the ad backfired on them and gave those who live in constant fear of the terrorist bogeymen something to come together about, especially the Republican senators who aren’t so happy with Bush and his war but don’t have the ‘nads to speak up about it because they might lose some of their conservative base. Now they have one extremely important vote under their belts to realign themselves with Bush in some way. Yes, they took the brave step of voting to condemn an ad in a newspaper. And even 22 senators from the Democratic side thought long and hard about this and cast their vote in favor of condemning the ad. What they should be condemning is the fact that The New York Times charges $142,083 for one page of advertising, even though Moveon.org somehow got the brother-in-law discount and paid only $65,575. Chicken feed. And pretty stupid of MoveOn.org to shell out that much money on one ad when they could be using that money on a campaign to get Bush impeached. But they have since said they will step up and pay the difference and the whiny Times issued a letter of apology for giving them the rate, in response to complaints by FreedomsWatch.org, the organization that pushes the war in Iraq and pays to run those horrible commercials about not “surrendering” featuring maimed, legless soldiers from the war talking about how they would like to go back. I went through every link on their Web site the other day, just for fun. Although they claim to be nonprofit, their site informs visitors that donations to the organization are not tax-deductible. Sounds pretty fishy to me. I also registered to become a member and sent them some questions, like: Do you pay these soldiers and their families to drone on and on about how great the war is and how much “progress” we are making? Of course, I haven’t heard back from them, but that might be because I registered under the name Phil McCrackin. But back to the Senate vote — the brainchild of Senator John Cornyn, a Republican from, naturally, Texas. I guess he was bored with all the hard work he’s been doing as the vice president of the Congressional Sportmen’s Caucus, which is dedicated to making sure Americans have the right to hunt, fish, and trap animals. I guess it also gives him the right to trap senators in a room and have them waste their time admonishing a newspaper ad rather than trying to figure out a way to keep more soldiers from having their legs blown off. So, as I mentioned above, I want my f*&king money back. If one red cent of my taxes was used to pay for those senators’ salaries and the time they spent, I want it redistributed to something worthwhile. And while they’re at it, telling me that it is treasonous and unpatriotic and disgusting to ever, ever question or say anything bad about members of the U.S. military under any circumstances? Please. Watch a tape of the Abu Ghraib hearings. Trying to force us to be noncritical about the military is completely and utterly against what the military is laying their lives on the line for in Iraq, even if they are in the wrong country.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Herenton Leads, Barely

With the final poll, the one to be taken of all voters on Election Day, Thursday, October 4th, just around the bend, late sampling taken by established local pollsters provides some clue as to what the portents are.

Berje Yacoubian, whose Yacoubian Research firm has taken the measure of numerous significant elections over the last few decades, has provided the Flyer with exclusive use of the tables and results of a mayoral poll taken over a four-day period, with polling itself undertaken on Thursday night, September 20th, and Monday night, September 24th.

Some 395 respondents across various age, racial, and neighborhood lines were asked a variety of questions, and pollster Yacoubian reckons the degree of accuracy to be plus or minus 4.8 percent.

The bottom-line results: Respondents stated their preferences in this order: Herenton, 30 percent; Chumney, 28 percent; Morris, 21 percent; Willingham, 2 percent; undecided, 18 percent; none of the above, 1 percent.

Chumney, it would seem, is maintaining the viable position, at or near the lead, that she has held in a variety of polls going back to the spring. Morris appears to have broadened his support since those earlier polls, while Willingham has not managed to gain much ground.

Almost as telling are the results in other categories. Asked to evaluate the prior job performance of the candidates on a scale ranging from poor to excellent, Chumney led the others with 40 percent rating her excellent or above average, followed by Morris with 33 percent in that category, Herenton with 31 percent, and Willingham with 15 percent.

Incumbent Herenton was rated as superior to the others on the scale of his ability to foster economic development, with a rating of 32 percent to Chumney’s 28 percent, to Morris’ 20 percent, to Willingham’s 1 percent.

Chumney leads the others as most likely to produce good results for education, with 36 percent, compared to former schools superintendent Herenton’s 29 percent, Morris’ 13 percent, and Willingham’s 2 percent.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Chumney, who has produced a 15-point crime plan, is rated best on that score, with 26 percent preferring her to 24 percent for Herenton (whose Blue Crush plan is now in effect) to 20 percent for Morris and 1 percent for Willingham.

(Willingham’s relatively unimpressive showings may reflect voter uncertainty rather than disapproval, as a whopping 42 percent of respondents recording themselves as “not sure” about his job performance, compared to 22 percent for both Morris and Chumney and only 3 percent in that category for the mayor.)

Interestingly, a resurgent Morris led the other candidates when the question was, Who would be your second choice? He garnered 29 percent to 26 percent for Chumney, 7 percent for Willingham, and only 5 percent for Herenton.

An additional poll question asked voters for their attitude toward amending the city charter to mandate a two-term (eight-year) limit for both the mayor and members of the City Council. A convincing 71 percent approved the change, with 17 opposing it and 12 percent uncertain.

Percentage-wise, the sample of those polled broke down this way: African-American females, 35 percent; white females, 25 percent; and 20 percent apiece for white males and African-American males.

Age-wise, the voters sampled were predominantly in the category of 35 to 64 years old, with 56 percent. Next came those aged 65 or older, 33 percent; and, finally, voters aged 34 and under, 10 percent.

The methodology of the poll assumes these breakdowns to be as close as possible to the ratios obtained in actual elections in recent years.

For the complete results, check links below.

Yacoubian Results
Yacoubian Summary
Yacoubian Addendum
Yacoubian Methodology
Yacoubian Crosstabulation

Categories
Cover Feature News

Down the Stretch!

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Cutting to the chase (and never was a metaphor more appropriate), the city election of 2007 is generating both excitement and suspense as early voting proceeds toward its end this weekend and scarcely a week remains before Election Day itself on Thursday, October 4th.

Overshadowing the other races is that for mayor, which sees four-term incumbent Willie Herenton struggling to hold off major challenges by city councilwoman Carol Chumney and former MLGW head Herman Morris. A new poll by veteran pollster Berje Yacoubian shows just how tight the race has become.

Council races, too, are showing considerable fluidity.

Though issues are approached differently by candidates in the various races, there is a certain sameness in approaches being advanced to resolve key matters like crime and education and economic development. The key battles may be decided on other, more intangible grounds.

How much, for example, are voters influenced by cosmetic factors, like the fact that Herenton — part executive, part Marlboro Man, part street heavy — always photographs well, while Chumney’s visage ranges unpredictably from bland to radiant, and Morris tends always to look like some African-American version of Mr. Monopoly in the board game?

How important are the candidates’ presumed voter bases? When Herenton ran the first time, in 1991, he had the black vote — period. As it turned out, that was enough to overcome then incumbent Dick Hackett, who was likewise restricted to the white vote. The difference in a race that was won by 142 votes probably came down to the few hundred votes, almost exclusively white, siphoned off by professional eccentric Prince Mongo.

This time around, Herenton’s base is again almost exclusively black, but — if a variety of extant polls can be trusted — he doesn’t command the African-American vote with anything like the unanimity of 16 years ago.

Chumney has managed to claim a significant fraction; Morris may finally be making inroads with his fellow blacks; and even former Shelby County commissioner John Willingham insists that he has something in the neighborhood of 13,000 black votes committed to him. Indeed, Willingham has insisted in a variety of forums that Memphis’ African-American population, along with the local Republican Party’s endorsement, together constitute his main base and provide enough votes to win.

That claim is generally regarded as extravagant, considering that the former commissioner has never emerged from the lower single digits in anybody’s poll results — a fact that in most estimations situates Willingham in the role of Mongo this year. If the three-way battle between Herenton, Chumney, and Morris is as tight as it seems to be, even one or two percentage points taken out of play could determine which of the three ends up on top.

To some extent, the reputation of the various candidates — deserved or not — will play a major part. Herenton still has credibility here and there in establishment circles, though his half-million-dollar war chest dates from earlier, more auspicious times.

Given that, in a time of widespread indictments of public officials for corruption, the mayor has been charged with no illegalities and that no one aspect of the city’s government is in irremediable crisis, Herenton’s decline in popularity is something of a mystery.

Perhaps, after an unprecedented 16-year tenure, he is merely seen by widening circles of the population as having overstayed his welcome. Whatever the case, the mayor’s own actions have created the impression of desperation in his campaign.

That was how many saw his disclosure back in June of a still uncorroborated blackmail plot allegedly orchestrated by lawyer Richard Fields and other conspirators characterized by Herenton as “snakes.” Tellingly, the mayor invoked racial solidarity on that occasion and did so again last week when, along with city attorney Elbert Jefferson, he sought to halt early voting on grounds of defects in the Diebold machines being used. Jackson Baker

Candidate Herman Morris greets a supporter at a recent political gathering.

The claims reported by Herenton and Jefferson were minimal and anecdotal, and the mayor demurred when asked if he thought he or any other candidate was being targeted. When Jefferson met with the county Election Commission, he sought no longer to halt the voting but merely to reprogram the machines to minimize the possibility of error.

Not even Commissioner Shep Wilbun, whose own legal claims of machine error were a feature of the 2006 election, would buy the argument whole, however, and the commission ultimately employed some future-tense palliatives that left the current situation and the ongoing early-voting methodology essentially unchanged.

Several days later, Shelby County commissioner Steve Mulroy, who was an early exponent of voting-machine reform, sat in the commission auditorium and ticked off the various safeguards already available to voters, including the wherewithal to enlarge the image on the Diebold screen and to review and alter one’s votes on a final screen.

Mused Mulroy about the mayor’s actions: “It’s hard to imagine that his motive would have been actually to stop early voting, because he must have realized there was no real legal argument for doing that on the merits. So it’s hard to know why we would do it, whether he was trying to mobilize his base.”

At that point, another commissioner asked for his attention on another matter, and when Mulroy returned to the issue, he decided not to offer any further conjecture about Herenton’s motives. Not for the record, anyhow. But he stated flatly:

“There was no valid basis for stopping the early vote.”

Jackson Baker

Mayor Willie Herenton and city attorney Charles Carpenter mounted a challenge to early voting.

Since Herenton had specifically invoked the specter of alleged former machinations against black candidates — Harold Ford Sr. in vote counting for Congress in 1974 and himself in the tabulations of 1991 — Mulroy’s one guess as to the mayor’s motives — solidifying his base — seemed reasonable.

But the prospect of further erosion among white voters was all too possible, and there was above all else an air of desperation to the mayor’s claim. Many who had wondered about Herenton’s vulnerability now saw it apparently confirmed by his own action.

Chumney, a vocal critic of the mayor’s (and of her own council-mates) from the very first year of her tenure on the City Council, had proved her credibility as a candidate in a variety of polls, taken over a period of months, in which she either led or was tied with Herenton. The most recent sampling, taken by pollster Yacoubian and featured in this edition of the Flyer, shows her well within striking distance of Herenton, with 28 percent to his 30 percent.

Meanwhile, Morris, who has spent months playing catch-up, despite significant support among influential Memphians and potential appeal across racial and political lines, would seem to have begun mounting a long-expected climb in the polls, with a 21 percent showing in the Yacoubian poll.

Making the most of their candidate’s belated momentum, Morris’ handlers put out a news release on Tuesday, maintaining that the former MLGW head was actually doing even better with potential voters.

Said the release: “The polls we have seen show Herman Morris, Jr. is in a statistical dead heat with Carol Chumney, who led in early polls. The Morris campaign’s internal poll shows a slight lead over her but the numbers are statistically insignificant because of the margin for error.

“The polls also show both candidates within striking distance of incumbent W.W. Herenton. However, only Morris has shown any significant movement in recent weeks — he is moving up even as Herenton and Chumney numbers are flat, which means they are losing ground.”

All that, of course, remains to be seen. The point is that the race for mayor is very likely a three-way affair, despite late contentions by both Chumney and Herenton — the former’s claims understandable, the latter’s possibly strategic and disingenuous — that it’s a two-way battle.

Meanwhile, races for the 13 City Council positions also showed some significant late action.

In District 1, candidate Bill Morrison, freshly lifted by fund-raising provided by political brokers Karl Schledwitz and David Upton, along with an endorsement by the ambitious new political-action group New Path, saw his chances boosted of ending in a runoff with early favorite Stephanie Gatewood.

Not to be counted out, either, was firefighter Antonio “2 Shay” Parkinson, who could boast labor support and endorsements from a variety of other sources.

In District 2, the main battle still seemed to be between early leader Brian Stephens and longtime political pro Bill Boyd, but newcomer Scott Pearce, buoyed by support from such diverse sources as social conservative Marilyn Loeffel and the AFL-CIO, is making a late charge.

District 3 saw several candidates with realistic chances, including incumbent Madeleine Cooper Taylor, governmental veterans Harold Collins and Coleman Thompson, and Davida Cruthird, getting a boost from the Schledwitz-New Path combine.

District 4 is all Wanda Halbert’s.

District 5 would seem to be solid for lawyer Jim Strickland, though environmentalist Bob Schreiber and Libertyland activist Denise Parkinson still nurse hopes of landing in a runoff.

District 6 is a free-for-all, with the only certainty being that Edmund Ford Jr., son of the currently embattled incumbent, will end up in a runoff with somebody — Reginald Milton, Ed Vaughn, and James O. Catchings being the most likely prospects.

District 7 seems probably safe for incumbent Barbara Swearengen Holt-Ware, though all three of her challengers — Preston Poindexter, Derek Richardson, and, notably, Veronica Castillo, have run energetic campaigns and are hopeful of landing in a runoff.

Super-District 8, Position 1 looks to be safe for controversial incumbent Joe Brown, but a well-supported Ian Randolph still has hopes. (No runoff here, though, or in any of the other District 8 or 9 at-large races.)

District 8, Position 2 is an apparent three-way between Trennie Williams, incumbent Henry Hooper, and Janis Fullilove, with the latter two gaining momentum — Fullilove on the strength of her name as a broadcaster and former secret-service man Hooper via support from the aforementioned angels.

District 8, Position 3? It’s incumbent Myron Lowery all the way.

District 9, Position 1 is equally sewed up for incumbent Scott McCormick.

District 9, Position 2 is an even more crowded, contested affair than the mayor’s race, with Kemp Conrad, Shea Flinn, and Frank Langston all maintaining early strength, and with Joe Saino and Joe Baier both committing significant resources for a late charge.

District 9, Position 3 is another battle royale, with the well-respected Desi Franklin, the well-endorsed Mary Wilder, the well-signaged Lester Lit and Reid Hedgepeth, and hard-working Boris Combest, the only black in the race, all preparing for a late surge.

Categories
News

Memphis Heritage to Hold Architectural Auction in Old Marine Hospital

Anybody who has ever wanted to peek inside the spooky old Marine Hospital, a sprawling government complex that opened in the late 1800s and has been shuttered for almost 40 years, will get their chance in October.

Rumors of ghosts, unexplained sounds and sightings, and tales of medical horrors during the yellow fever epidemics of the 1800s have haunted the site, which stands next door to the National Ornamental Metal Museum.

But now you can see for yourself. The developer of the property (scheduled for conversion into condos in the near future) has donated the main building for one night for the annual Memphis Heritage Architectural Auction, scheduled for Saturday, October 20th.

Among the items for sale this year will be a funky padded bar from the old Chisca Hotel and carved stone elements from the Number One Beale Complex demolished earlier this year.

For ticket information and details about the event, go to the Memphis Heritage website.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Chalk It Up

CREDIT: Michael Flanagan

Memphis’ characteristic autumn tease was definitely over by 10 o’clock Saturday morning. The Memphis Farmers Market downtown was full, and 40 people were there as part of the local American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) annual Chalk Art Festival.

Held in conjunction with the Memphis Heritage Foundation, the festival was part of Architecture Month. Teams created their best tribute to Memphis architecture in five-by-five-foot squares taped off on the ground. The Art Center on Union supplied the chalk, and the teams, already hard at work, consisted of families or members of architecture firms.

“We’re here to have fun,” said architect Rebecca Lee of Askew, Nixon, and Ferguson. “It’s nice to spend the day out.”

Throughout September’s Architecture Month, the Memphis AIA and Memphis Heritage have hosted a series of lectures and films to help Memphians see the city as a growing organism that requires thoughtful planning as well as aesthetic creativity.

“When there are tourists looking for Memphis history, they’re usually just shown Graceland and Beale Street,” said June West, executive director of Memphis Heritage. “There’s a lot a person can see in Memphis that we never show them.”

Under the morning sun, the artists drew and colored with their chalk, racing to finish before the noon deadline. The pieces were judged in four categories: teams, families, individuals, and Best in Show.

All over the pavement, the designs grew from simple sketches and outlines, slowly taking form and color. The pieces included one in which buildings played guitar, a vegetable motif by members of the Farmers Market, and a large likeness of Family Guy fussbudget Stewie Griffin warning the world to love architecture or face the consequences.

“We wanted to do something original,” said Mario Walker of Self Tucker Architects, who, along with associate Rodrigo Garcia, created the Family Guy entry. “We knew everyone else was going to do something appropriate.”

Last year’s winner in the team category, Fleming Associates once again took home bragging rights, winning Best in Show. Their design was a view of a Redbirds game from the right-field bleachers at AutoZone Park.

“Nine out of 10 of our favorite things to do in Memphis involve eating and drinking, and this was a scene that combines the two,” said Fleming’s Richard Wiggs, who, along with Debb and Bob Ross, created this year’s grand winner. “Getting dirty is all part of the fun.”

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Right or Wrong?

My mother-in-law is a classy New Yorker, but I still worried a little when she treated my family to the off-Broadway opening of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, a play about an unyielding nun who questions the relationship between a progressive parish priest and the school’s first black student. Is a play about a possibly pedophile priest appropriate for a family with a young teen?

Did I feel ridiculous after the curtain closed on a gripping drama set in the Bronx that asks moral questions (what is right?), relives American history (the unrest of the 1960s), and makes people think (Father Flynn: guilty or not?). The play, starring Tennessee’s own Cherry Jones as Sister Aloysius, moved to Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre within months, earning two Obie Awards, four Tonys, and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2005.

Doubt makes its regional debut on September 28th at Playhouse on the Square. The play stars local actors Ann Marie Hall as Sister Aloysius and Michael Gravois as Father Flynn, the affable priest trying to soften the strictures of Catholicism in 1964 with an accessible clerical style. Or is he more dangerous?

There are no clear-cut answers in Shanley’s play, rather a finely layered framework for considering faith, relationships, and human behavior.

“Audiences always leave Doubt with divided opinions about Father Flynn,” Hall says, crediting the playwright’s language and complex characters for the play’s thoughtful ambiguity.

“At first, it’s easy to discard Sister Aloysius as rigid, but she’s not that way at all,” Hall says. “She’s a woman caught in a situation who is working very hard to make the right decision, and this gives her character many different dimensions.”

“Doubt,” Playhouse on the Square, 51 S. Cooper, September 28th-October 21st. Call 726-4656 for reservations.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Intelligent Design

Edward Albee, the playwright and contrarian known for such eviscerating visions of American domestic life as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and more recently The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, once said that artists who are willing to fail interestingly also tend to succeed interestingly.

Nowhere is this principle more perfectly illustrated than in Albee’s play Seascape, a theatrical oddity that earned the author his second Pulitzer Prize in 1975, which, to keep things in perspective, was a truly awful year for American playwrighting. Reviews of this bizarre script about a vacationing older couple’s somewhat antagonistic encounter with a pair of giant talking sea lizards, ranged from mixed to terrible, and the show closed after 65 performances. But what’s most interesting about Seascape, in success and in failure, is how well it has held up over the decades. Although there is little rapport between the two principal actors, Theatre Memphis’ production of Seascape doesn’t feel like the revival of a 30-year-old play of dubious merit so much as the risky mounting of a new and vital work.

If Eugene Ionesco domesticated European absurdist drama, Albee fully Americanized it. Several of Albee’s major works, The Zoo Story, The American Dream, and Three Tall Women in particular, could pass for Yankee adaptations of plays by Samuel Beckett. In fact, Seascape‘s first act might easily be viewed as either an homage to or a theft of Beckett’s Happy Days, a play that finds Winnie, its sleepless female protagonist, halfway in the grave and buried up to her neck in sand and talking compulsively to Willie, her laconic, self-interested companion. Seascape, by comparison, finds Nancy (Jo Lynne Palmer) on the beach, halfway buried in the notion that she’s halfway buried.

“If you continue the temporary, it becomes permanent,” Nancy says to Charlie, urging her husband to revitalize their sex life, if only for one moment … and then another. Charlie (Bob Brittingham), who lies about like the dead, wants no part of his wife’s plan, and his ultimate assertion that he deserves “a little rest” brings out a kind of petulance in Nancy, who, after raising three children, thinks she might have earned “a little life” instead.

“In [Happy Days] you have the combination of the strange and the practical, the mysterious and the factual,” Beckett once said, adding that this conflicted condition was “the crux” of both the comedy and the tragedy. And so it is with Seascape. Just at the point when Nancy’s nattering becomes too factual, when emotions threaten to boil over into an unpleasant “Albeesque” confrontation, the fantastical takes over. Sarah and Leslie, a pair of giant lizards, emerge from the ocean because they’ve come to believe that they no longer belong in the water. In a comic and slyly sinister redux of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the two couples engage in a high-stakes battle of wits and instinct, neither party being completely certain that the loser isn’t destined to become the winner’s lunch.

Matt Reed and Erin McGhee shine, literally and figuratively, as the play’s reptilian couple, who are both fascinated and terrified by the world above the water. Their performances, enhanced in no small measure by Luke Hall’s exceptional costumes, strike a perfect anthropomorphic balance between human and inhuman, sublime and ridiculous, as they plod across the soft beige topography of Christopher McCollum’s set.

Seascape director Kyle Hatley is one of Memphis’ most interesting young talents, but an alarming seriousness has penetrated his recent work. His Romeo and Juliet at Germantown Community Theater was conceptually brilliant but completely lacking the giddy joys of young love. As Nick in Circuit Playhouse’s production of Virginia Woolf, Hatley seethed with so much actorly anger that his performance became accidentally comical. Like these previous efforts, Seascape has been robbed of its playfulness and made too heavy by half. Fortunately, much of Albee’s comedy still shines through the dark storm clouds of Hatley’s furrowed brow.

Seascape is often described as Albee’s happiest play. It is also his most visually poetic. It’s a meditation on every possible meaning of evolution, a term we use to describe the gradual changes that alternately hurry and postpone extinction. To that end, the play has less to do with aging (an obvious theme) and everything to do with mankind’s coming-of-age as a species. And like all good coming-of-age stories, it’s a balanced equation of sweetness and regret.

Seascape at Theatre Memphis through October 7th

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Being There, 2007

Recently, various members of the Flyer editorial staff were sounded out by a newly established local political-action group for help on the score of drumming up the voter turnout for next week’s city election. Opinion among us was divided, with some concurring with the local group’s basic goal. Others, however, argued that increasing the number of voters without corresponding increases both in their appetite for voting and in their awareness of the candidates and the issues could be counterproductive.

Which is to say, some of us will gladly take our consistent sub-50-percent turnouts for city elections in preference to the nearly 100 percent turnouts boasted by such enlightened political systems as Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Coincidentally, perhaps, virtually all of the votes recorded in those places went in one direction — which was, generally speaking, the only direction available.

Even so, the basic outlook of the group soliciting our support was sound enough, based on the theory that for a democracy to work, it requires citizens showing up and being there.

There’s a corollary to that: In an age in which direct communication is in danger of being overwhelmed by various forms of P.R., electronic and otherwise, in which truth isn’t served nearly so consistently and so well as is someone’s checkbook, it is necessary for the candidate to show up and be there too.

This is the case even at the presidential level. The reason for tiny New Hampshire’s longstanding pre-eminence as an early primary state is precisely that its distances are small enough that dedicated candidates have a fair chance of encountering most interested voters.

No presidential hopeful would dare try to electioneer in New Hampshire — on in Iowa, another early state, for that matter — without pressing as much flesh and engaging in as much discourse with their opponents and with the public as possible.

Why then should we have had several conspicuous examples locally of candidates eschewing such contact? The best-known example is Mayor Willie Herenton, who forsook any and all give-and-takes alongside his challengers at the several scheduled public mayoral forums. The mayor did, however, conduct public rallies and submitted to media questions here and there. Councilman Joe Brown, another elusive candidate, has been harder to find in his race for reelection, avoiding all forums, but his constituents presumably know where to find him.

More befuddling is the case of Reid Hedgepeth, the intended heir-designate for the seat of outgoing councilman Jack Sammons, who has played shepherd for the well-financed young developer’s campaign, apparently ruling out all appearances by his protégé at candidate forums or before inquiring neighborhood associations. Hedgepeth — who may, for all we know, be God’s gift to the council — is sighted mainly via TV spots and via the medium of his highly proliferated campaign signs. That is unfortunate, especially since the rest of the field seeking Sammons’ super-district seat seems especially talented and willing to lay things on the line.

All three of these worthies may win, and, if so, all three may do well and commendably in office. But they’ve all slighted the process by keeping the people they wish to serve at such a distance.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Blowing Smoke

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Preppie college guys sporting polos and ball caps gathered around blown-glass hookahs inside the University Lounge on a recent Saturday night. Fragrant smoke filled the air as each man exhaled and passed the mouthpiece.

The University Lounge, which opened in April on the Highland Strip, is one of three hookah bars in the Bluff City. The other two, the Caspian Restaurant and Sidi Bou Café & Shisha Lounge, have opened within the past year. Such smoking lounges are part of a growing national trend.

My friends and I have come to the University Lounge for the hookah experience, but it appears there’s nowhere to sit. Nearly every chair and sofa in the place is full.

“I’m sorry, but we’re out of hookahs right now. They’re all being used,” says woman working behind the counter. “If you wait, someone will probably finish up soon.”

Within minutes she’s setting us up with a two-foot tall green water pipe (known as a hookah or shisha) filled with mango-flavored tobacco.

I grab the mouthpiece, inhale deeply, and sweet, tropical-scented smoke fills my lungs. As I exhale, a feeling of relaxation washes over me. The process reminds me of my college days, only back then we weren’t smoking, um, tobacco in our water pipes.

Of course, none of the local lounges allow illegal products, but hookah smoking is intended for relaxation. While cigarettes often serve as a quick nicotine fix for Westerners on the go, the Middle Eastern practice of hookah smoking is meant to be a leisurely process, and because hookah smoke is filtered through a liquid, it’s much smoother than cigarette smoke.

“I’m from Iran, where this is a social thing,” says S.C. Mirghahari, owner of the Caspian Restaurant, an East Memphis Persian eatery. “Here, people go down to the local watering hole. But there’s no alcohol in my country. Instead, people use hookah as a chance to get together.”

Mirghahari decided to add the hookah lounge to his restaurant last fall after noticing such establishments in larger cities, like Atlanta and New York.

“I wanted to offer a place to hang out and smoke, and I was also looking to draw a younger crowd into my restaurant,” Mirghahari says.

And that’s exactly what he’s done. Most of Mirghahari’s hookah customers appear to be in their 20s and 30s. Since opening the hookah lounge, Mirghahari says business is up 10 to 15 percent.

The Caspian draws a slightly older crowd than the young faces we see at the University Lounge. The latter’s location near the University of Memphis attracts mostly college students, but owner Allen Rasoul says sometimes professors and grad students stop in.

Downtown’s Sidi Bou Café, which opened last month, serves light lunch fare, so it’s popular among business people by day and hip, young downtowners by night. Unlike the Caspian and the University Lounge, which allow hookah smoking from open to close, Sidi Bou doesn’t bring out the hookahs before 5 p.m.

Sidi Bou offers a handful of traditionally flavored tobaccos — like strawberry, apple, and melon — and one non-flavored version. The lounge also specializes in gourmet coffee drinks.

The Caspian boasts 15 tobacco flavors, and Mirghahari likes to mix things up a bit by substituting juices for water in the hookah’s base. One popular combination is Orange-Orange — orange tobacco and fresh orange juice.

Hungry smokers can take advantage of an array of Persian dishes at the Caspian, and food can be washed down with cocktails from the full-service bar.

At the University Lounge, patrons can choose from 34 flavored tobaccos and 10 nicotine-free herbal blends. Flavors range from the traditional apple and vanilla to the more eccentric snickerdoodle and margarita.

“We even have nicotine filters for people who don’t want to actually inhale the nicotine,” Rasoul says. The University Lounge does not serve alcohol, but they do serve coffees, teas, smoothies, and desserts.

“The main reason we chose not to sell alcohol is because it makes for a loud, rowdy atmosphere,” Rasoul says. “If someone wants alcohol, there are plenty of options down the street.”

Fortunately for local hookah lounges, the new statewide smoking ban, which takes effect this week, exempts establishments that only allow customers 21 and up. With a few modifications to their age restrictions, local lounges should not be affected. Perhaps they’ll even serve as an oasis for smokers wishing to get their fix without being forced into the cold.

“It’s getting harder and harder for smokers to go anywhere to smoke these days,” says Rasoul. “The hookah bar offers a social forum for people to get together and smoke in a relaxed atmosphere.”

Caspian Restaurant, 715 W. Brookhaven Cir. (767-3134)

Sidi Bou Cafe, 111 N. Main (522-0035)

University Lounge, 663 S. Highland (405-3011)

Categories
Cover Feature News

The Man Behind the Moustache

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

“There are some things I don’t apologize for,” he says during a somewhat tense interview at his campaign headquarters on Union Avenue in Midtown. The generally soft-spoken mayoral candidate and former MLGW president is furious with the Flyer‘s John Branston for a recent column that correctly stated that Morris’ Overton Park home never lost power during Hurricane Elvis. The reason his neighborhood didn’t lose power, Morris says, is that it is served by underground cables, which helped minimize power outages.

“Nobody knows what my family went through,” Morris says, smoldering at the implication that he got special service. “A huge tree came crashing through my daughter’s roof, and, but for the grace of God, she’d be dead.”

Contradicting his critics, Morris says his leadership in response to Hurricane Elvis is the crowning achievement of his time as president of MLGW, and he supports his claim with data relevant to the size of the disaster and the speed of the recovery. “We were able to get full reimbursement from FEMA,” Morris says.

For a candidate whose measured speech and low blood pressure are considered a political liability, Morris’ temper flare-up is perhaps more assuring than alarming. He’s got some fire in the belly after all. He isn’t afraid of his critics. In fact, he has long, painstakingly detailed answers for all of them. Here are a few:

Memphis Flyer: How will you manage Memphis’ money? You were a driving force behind MLGW’s failed $30 million telecom venture, Memphis Networx. Even in a good market environment, that kind of business requires the frequent investment of millions of dollars to create revenue streams paying tens of thousands monthly. Have you learned anything from the disaster?

Herman Morris: On further review and reflection, I probably got too ambitious in terms of making Memphis Networx a public/private endeavor. If we hadn’t had the private investors with issues of “don’t release our proprietary information,” the media might have been less aggressive. That’s the kind of thing that really makes the media’s hair stand on end. Handled differently, it could have been built out faster, and it could have become profitable sooner, and we wouldn’t have gotten stuck with the terrible deal we were stuck with.

So you still think Networx was a good idea?

It’s not that the idea doesn’t work. It just didn’t work here.

There was a great deal of controversy over the generous benefit packages enjoyed by top executives at MLGW during your tenure. Again, you’ve never apologized. How will this sit with voters who are angry with the current mayor’s reputation for cronyism and patronage?

[Former MLGW president] Joseph Lee is being investigated. I’m not being investigated. When I left MLGW, it was one of the best utility companies in the nation. Now it’s one of the worst. Look, I try lawsuits. You put expert witnesses on the stand to explain some difficult math problem. Well, some juries’ will understand every nuance of the complex mathematical equation, some juries’ eyes will glaze over. At the end of the day it will come down to “I trust this man or I don’t.”

You’ve campaigned on a platform to reduce crime, reverse urban sprawl, and bring in jobs. Where do we get all the money and the skilled labor?

We’ve got to be smart about that. I’m an assembler of good ideas. I just visited with a company in Binghamton that does precision machine work for surgical devices, and another company that does similar skilled machine parts for NASCAR. These companies take people and send them to school to develop the level of skill required to do these things. I asked these people what it would be worth if employees came in with a competency level that would cut that learning curve in half … if I could get these folks together with folks the academic arena. We did that at [MLGW] with the first two years of the utility’s apprentice program. Now you can go to Shelby State and get a two-year degree as an apprenticed lineman.

Where does the money come from?

Fort Wayne, Indiana, deployed a total-quality-management tool called Six Sigma. They deployed this private-sector tool in their government in order to take something that usually takes 10 steps and cut it down to two. And they have enjoyed tremendous savings as a result. We have to be creative in applying private-sector approaches to a public arena. That’s not always as easy in government as it is in private business because the bureaucrats are all in place. It’s like storming the ramparts with rocks being thrown down on you.