Month: March 2008

The Sons of Tom T.

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date March 13, 2008

In 2004, Drive-By Trucker Patterson Hood released a solo album, Killers and Stars, that included a cover of the Tom T. Hall song “Pay No Attention to Alice,” a matter-of-fact depiction of a drunk seen through the eyes of her husband.

At that point, the Drive-By Truckers had long been one of my favorite contemporary bands and Hall’s near-perfect 1988 compilation The Essential Tom T. Hall: The Story Songs had long been one of my favorite records. And yet I never made the connection between the band — small-town Alabama post-punk rockers with a literary aptitude matched by very few guitar-wielding wordsmiths of their generation — and the man — small-town Kentucky post-Depression baby with a catalog of folk-meets-country songs matched only by the likes of Bob Dylan, Merle Haggard, and Johnny Cash — until Hood made it for me.

Lynyrd Skynyrd and, to a lesser extent, Bruce Springsteen are often cited as key influences on the Drive-By Truckers, but more than their multi-guitar classic-rock sound, the Truckers are defined by the songwriting of comrades-for-life Hood and Mike Cooley. But young fans looking for perspective on Hood’s and Cooley’s deft, detailed working-class short stories are advised to hunt down Hall’s Story Songs rather than Skynyrd’s Street Survivors or Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town (though the latter pair are also highly relevant).

On the band’s new Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, a 19-song, 75-minute opus that once would have been called a double album, Hall is name-checked on a Truckers record for the first time, this time by Cooley. In the midst of spinning a cryptic tale of good times gone bad on “3 Dimes Down,” Cooley muses: “If the part about being who he was didn’t help Tom get loose/What’s a guy without a ‘T.’ going to get?/Totally screwed.” This seems to be a reference to Hall’s “A Week in a Country Jail,” in which the narrator is picked up for speeding and describes his failure to communicate effectively with the local sheriff with typical understatement: “That part about me being who I was did not impress him.”

If anything, Cooley has long seemed even more the Hall acolyte than Hood, his own best songs often fitting the format: rich narratives told through the voice of (untrustworthy) protagonists who often aren’t the songwriter, the details unfurling with minimal outside commentary. Cooley’s “Guitar Man Upstairs” (told from the perspective of the aging downstairs neighbor who’s fed up with all the noise) is in the finest Hall tradition, rivaled by Hood’s early “Margo & Harold,” an uncomfortable portrait of a couple of aging swingers. On Brighter Than Creation’s Dark, Cooley’s sometimes misunderstood character sketch “Bob” is the most Hall-like creation.

The small, descriptive moments that Hall’s songs privilege are often more triumphant than the big moments the Truckers also court. This is a band that made an entire album (2001’s excellent Southern Rock Opera) about the demise of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the lingering ghost of regional icons such as George Wallace. And yet the band’s definitive regional portrait was 2003’s Decoration Day, an album that established its unimpeachable Southern bona fides when Hood opened a song in pitch-perfect vernacular with: “Something ’bout that wrinkle in your forehead tells me there’s a fit ’bout to get thrown.”

If Cooley is even more the Hall heir than Hood, it’s fitting that the first Drive-By Trucker record to out this influence is also perhaps the first one where Cooley seems more prominent than his generally more prolific partner.

One apparent function of the band’s Hall-style level-headed storytelling is a streak of sardonic anti-romanticism that separates them from much of the Americana/alt-country/classic-rock world. You can hear this throughout Cooley’s “Self Destructive Zones,” which, aside from Hood’s heartbreaking opener “Two Daughters and a Beautiful Wife,” is the most fully realized song on Brighter Than Creation’s Dark.

The song’s a first-hand death-of-hair-metal remembrance in which Cooley gently dismisses the genre’s own mythos with “It’s easier to let it all die a fairy tale than admit that something bigger’s passing through” and then caps it off with the priceless imagery of “the pawn shops … packed like a backstage party, hanging full of pointy, ugly, cheap guitars.”

The man who once subversively attached a cribbed Eagles riff to the immortal line “Rock-and-roll means well but it can’t help telling young boys lies” on Decoration Day‘s “Marry Me” similarly kills his idols at the end of “3 Dimes Down” by invoking Bob Seger’s line “Come back, baby, rock-and-roll never forgets” to cap off a night he’d like to.

Book Features Books

Get Lit.

Post author By Leonard Gill
Post date March 13, 2008

The Bellwether Prize for Fiction goes every two years to an unpublished manuscript that promotes, in literary form, social justice and change, and the prize in 2006 went to author Hillary Jordan for her debut novel, Mudbound (Algonquin). The prize may have surprised the author; it won’t surprise readers.

When the setting in Mudbound isn’t Memphis, it’s the Mississippi Delta. The year is 1946. And a lynching may or may not be in the works once Ronsel Jackson returns home from army service in Europe. When it’s later discovered that Jackson has fathered a child by a woman in Germany, a lynching is in the works. But it’s only one of the troubles that besets “Mudbound.” That’s the name given to the ramshackle farmhouse bought by businessman turned farmer Henry McAllan. It’s home to Henry and his patient wife Laura (the Memphis woman McAllan rescued from spinsterhood), plus their two daughters, and it sits on land worked by a black sharecropping family: Ronsel’s parents Hap and Florence and their young children. It’s home too, for a few months, to Henry’s alcoholic brother Jamie, another veteran of the war. And it’s lorded over by Pap, Henry’s and Jamie’s father, a hateful old coot.

Torrential rains and a threatened cotton crop. A strained marriage and fulfillment in adultery. Miscegenation and the Klan. One World War and, back home, a world of racial unrest: Mudbound‘s got its share, maybe too much its share, of problems in need of solutions. No arguing, though, with Hillary Jordan’s skillful blending of voices. And no denying that readers in search of straightforward storytelling will be hooked.

Hillary Jordan will sign copies of Mudbound at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on Thursday, March 13th, at 6 p.m.

The Legend of Quito Road, Memphian Dwight Fryer‘s debut novel, took readers from the town of Lucy in north Shelby County to Memphis (and back) in the Jim Crow South of the early 20th century. In that book, it was Raymond “Son” Erby who learned the family trade (whiskey making), but it was Gillam Hale, Son’s grandfather, who passed on the recipe — a recipe for survival. And now Gillam Hale is back in a prequel to The Legend of Quito Road, in the pages of Fryer’s new novel, The Knees of Gullah Island (Sepia/Kimani Press). He’s also back where he started: along the Eastern seaboard — with a story that begins in Maryland and moves down to Virginia. But it’s Charleston where he finds his first wife and his first family of children. It’s also where he finds a city still steeped in West African slave culture.

Fryer, a marketing manager at FedEx, is back too in a series of upcoming booksignings at area stores. Look for him on Tuesday, March 18th, at Davis-Kidd Booksellers. The time is 6 p.m.

On newstands this month: the spring 2008 issue of The Pinch, the literary journal produced by the creative writing department at the University of Memphis. Known for its nationally drawn nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and visual art, in this issue of The Pinch you’ll find an interview with writer (and onetime Memphian) Mark Doty and contributions from this year’s River City Writing Award winners Mary Ziegler and Len Krisak, plus the work of two Memphians: photographer Adam Remsen and poet Lynn Conlee. Gary Golightly, assistant professor of graphic design at the U of M, has produced his fifth in an ongoing series of eye-catching covers. Be on hand to celebrate The Pinch at L Ross Gallery (5040 Sanderlin) on Friday, March 14th, from 6 to 8 p.m.

For more literary doings, courtesy of the University of Memphis writing department: Welcome the next in the River City Writers Series of visiting authors, Floyd Skloot. He’ll be doing a reading at the Jay Etkin Gallery (409 S. Main) on Monday, March 17th, at 7 p.m. (reception at 6 p.m.), and he’ll be the subject of an interview in the U of M’s Patterson Hall on Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. Both events are free and open to the public, and by attending, you’ll not only be supporting the local literary scene, you’ll be doing a daughter proud. Skloot, in addition to being a novelist, poet, memoirist, essayist, and book reviewer, is the father of writer Rebecca Skloot, instructor in creative nonfiction at the U of M and coordinator of the River City Writers Series.

Food & Wine Food & Drink

The Whole Truth

Post author By Bianca Phillips
Post date March 13, 2008

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Now that Austin-based Whole Foods Market has successfully merged with Wild Oats Markets, rumors abound about the fate of the city’s only Wild Oats location in East Memphis.

Just ask a shopper or even a Wild Oats employee. Each one will likely have a different story: The current store will close and move to a location farther east; Whole Foods will open an additional store in Midtown; the Wild Oats store is becoming a Whole Foods; Whole Foods is eliminating Wild Oats brand generics; nothing will change.

It seems no one really knows what is happening to the city’s only health-food grocery store.

Last February, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey announced his company would buy out Wild Oats Markets, Inc. for $565 million, but the U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued to block the deal, claiming the merger would hurt competition in the natural and organic foods market. A federal appeals court later denied the commission’s request, and Whole Foods acquired 110 Wild Oats stores nationwide.

One rather conspicuous change at the Memphis store: The signature giant fruits that once adorned the roof of the building are gone.

The large yellow letters spelling Wild Oats, however, remain in place over the store’s entrance, and that’s not going to change — at least for now, according to Whole Foods spokesperson Darrah Horgan.

“We’re not changing the name at this point. There’s so much more to focus on right now. I don’t think the name is a priority,” says Horgan, from her office in Atlanta.

Horgan also confirms that the store would not be closing but rather redesigned to include more Whole Foods amenities, such as expanded prepared-food options and a more diverse range of produce.

The current salad bar will be replaced and have more options, and a hot food bar also will be added. Whole Foods’ hot food bars typically contain a variety of freshly prepared meats and/or tofu stir-fries and pasta dishes.

In addition, a pizza bar will be constructed, complete with a wood-fired oven. And the store will add a gourmet coffee bar serving lattes, mochas, and the like. Currently, Wild Oats has a modest self-serve coffee station.

“There’s not going to be much change in the square footage of the store, but there will be some major construction within the store,” Horgan says. “When you talk about putting in a wood-fired oven, some physical construction will have to happen.”

With more dining options, Wild Oats also will expand its café seating. Right now, only a few tables line the store’s front, where diners can view the action in the check-out lanes. Horgan is unsure whether those tables will remain or if a new café will be constructed in another area of the store.

“They will be doing away with the community room space [near the back of the store]. But they’ll be adding a conference room, so there’s no reason to think that area couldn’t be used for public meeting space,” Horgan says.

Local chefs and food organizations often host free cooking classes in the current community room, and Horgan says the store may offer a mobile cooking station so groups can continue to host demonstrations.

The produce section already has undergone a facelift, with shelves and bins rearranged to make more space. Horgan says the store will begin carrying a wider variety of produce. Whole Foods stores typically offer exotics such as lychee nuts, cherimoya, and baby pineapples.

“Overall, customers will see a more open store with more selection and a nicer environment,” Horgan says.

Before the merger, both stores shared similar philosophies. Each sold products with no hydrogenated oils, no artificial colors or sweeteners, and no preservatives. As a result, Horgan says the merger shouldn’t affect many brand-name products, as both stores typically carried the same brands.

But customers will see many Wild Oats brand products replaced with the Whole Foods brand, 365 Organics.

“We plan to keep a mix of Wild Oats and Whole Foods brands, but where there’s overlap, we’ll probably do away with the Wild Oats brands,” Horgan says. “With a lot of our private label brands, you really can’t beat the price. Being competitive in pricing is very important to us.”

So what about those rumors of a new Whole Foods store opening elsewhere in the city? In the past month, shoppers have been asked to give their home phone numbers when checking out, leading some to believe Whole Foods is collecting information on where another store is most needed.

“We do ask customers their phone numbers once a year at several stores. It’s a spot survey to see, geographically, where people are coming from,” Horgan explains. “But I’ve heard no news about a new store opening in Memphis.”

Wild Oats, 5022 Poplar (685-2293)

Film Features Film/TV

Big Dumb Fun

Post author By Greg Akers
Post date March 13, 2008

If you subscribe to the auteur theory of filmmaking, you’re going to have to carve out a little room for Roland Emmerich, too. The German director mostly makes movies about how things end (The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day, the upcoming 2012) or begin (The Patriot).

With 10,000 B.C., he works in both bookends: The plot involves the prehistoric human transition from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural one. Woolly mammoths are dying out, and a tribe’s survival is threatened. As one character helpfully defines the moment, “It’s the beginning of the end.”

Emmerich made the irresistible 1994 archaeological sci-fi pic Stargate and the execrable re-tooled Godzilla in ’98. The two balance the scales, but the rest of his work has left me doubtful but willing to give him another chance. 10,000 B.C. doesn’t tip the balance one way or the other.

10,000 B.C. is not a movie that lends itself to scrutiny. If you look close, you’ll find racist overtones and blanket stupidity. At the beginning of the movie, we’re told that swarthy tribal members will be saved by a young girl with blue eyes. Danger! As the film progresses, we encounter a bunch of Africans who stand to be freed by the leadership of, basically, a white guy. Also, in plot, dialogue, and characterization, this is not a smart film, reaching its nadir when the hero finds a saber-toothed tiger to be a wary ally rather than a predatory man killer.

And yet — those are the most important words in this review — despite everything, 10,000 B.C. is also a big ole slop-bucket of dumb fun.

At one point, the movie shows woolly mammoths helping build pyramids in Egypt. There are enough wrong things in that sentence to explode a history department grad assistant’s brain, but why worry? Anachronistic spectacle has a place in this world too.

Steven Strait stars as D’Leh, a young hunter of the mountainous Yagahl tribe. His peers pick on D’Leh because his father, who left the tribe years before, is thought a coward. The tribe’s spiritual leader prophesies the end of the mammoths, and a young girl will lead the group to a new way of life.

D’Leh and the other young hunters have a chance to prove themselves during a mammoth hunt. The one who kills the bull of the herd will claim the Great White Spear of the North (or something like that) to become the leader of the tribe. The chosen one will also get the blue-eyed girl, Evolet (Camilla Belle), as a bride.

D’Leh brings down a mastodon single-handedly. The next morning, a horde of Conan the Barbarian extras swoop in on horseback and take Evolet and the Yagahl men as slaves. With the aid of tribal leader TicTic (Cliff Curtis) and a few others, D’Leh goes on a rescue mission, which will take him hundreds of miles from home. Along the way, they encounter other groups of people and ways of life that are foreign to them. D’Leh also finds out that he’s destined to do something suitably important.

The film’s title is Christian-relevant, and there are all kinds of Old Testament plot points, including a slave who leads a people out of Egypt. When one character is sacrificially killed, his dead body lies, arms outstretched, across a wood beam.

The action set pieces are thrilling but not inspired. However, one sequence, featuring “terror birds,” is particularly effective, as are scenes with the “Egyptian ruler/deity.”

The film does manage to raise the hackles of intellectual interest as it shows prehistoric man encountering unfamiliar technologies. It’s curious to see how important advances, such as horseback riding or agriculture, give one group a significant advantage over another.

But, when the film has a character inventing celestial navigation, the whole endeavor just seems so silly. On the other hand, that a man would travel 1,000 miles over mountain and through desert and jungle for Camilla Belle is completely plausible.

10,000 B.C.

Now playing

Multiple locations

Film Features Film/TV

Seuss classic survives and thrives on screen.

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date March 13, 2008

Horton Hears a Who!, an animated adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ 1954 picture-book classic, has one of the more captivating openings in recent memory: A gumball drops from a tree, rolls across the ground, and lands in a patch of dandelions, sending white tufts skyward. The images fill the screen, and at first, the rolling gumball evokes Raiders of the Lost Ark. Happily, the reference — perhaps unintentional — is fleeting. The imagery is about nothing more than itself, and even before its function in the film’s plot is clear, it’s liable to engage pipsqueak viewers who see the wonder in gumballs and dandelions daily and provoke nostalgic recognition in parents who remember such mundane items as talismans of childhood outdoor play.

From that point on, Horton Hears a Who! enters a fantasy world, but it mostly matches the opening scene’s sense of engagement. For those who don’t remember the book on which the film is based or haven’t read it recently to their own children, the film concerns Horton, a gentle elephant living in the jungle of Nool, whose giant ears one day hear a tiny cry emanating from a speck of dust floating by. Horton captures this speck on a flower and becomes convinced there are microscopic creatures living there, in peril, and must be protected. Other creatures in the jungle scoff at this assertion, but Horton is steadfast in sticking to his mission and his mantra: that “people are people, no matter what size.”

It turns out Horton is right. The speck of dust houses the tiny, fantastical city of Whoville and its happy, unsuspecting citizens, the Whos.

In marshalling this familiar material to the screen, the makers of Horton Hears a Who! have crafted a superlative kids’ movie, one that happily eschews the self-conscious cleverness and pandering pop-culture references that mar popular kids’ movies of the Shrek variety. Instead, this film deeply respects its source material and the connection it has to generations of children.

The elastic, colorful computer-generated animation is rooted in the look of the original text, and the film gets a surprisingly, pleasingly reserved lead performance from Jim Carrey as the voice of Horton. The story from the picture book is expanded smartly, giving Horton a more direct relationship with the mayor of Whoville, which juxtaposes their respective difficulties in persuading their world about the existence of the other.

One word of minor warning: There are a few perilous moments that may be mildly troubling to sensitive younger children.

Horton Hears a Who!

Opening Friday, March 14th

Multiple locations

Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Post author By Joe Conason
Post date March 13, 2008

Whatever their true private beliefs, presidential candidates in America are constantly required to provide proofs of faith, often through their connections with various religious figures. Benedictions from the pulpit bestow an aura of righteousness — except, of course, when the pastor or minister is a disreputable kook whose endorsement should be an embarrassment.

In recent weeks, both Barack Obama and John McCain have suffered exactly this kind of indignity, under very different circumstances. And their contrasting responses revealed not only aspects of their own characters but also the enduring prejudices of the national media covering this year’s campaign.

For an African-American politician seeking to attract voters of all ethnicities and persuasions, there could hardly be a less desirable supporter than Louis Farrakhan, the aging leader of the Nation of Islam. As the media never tire of reminding us, Farrakhan is a habitual bigot whose utterances have repeatedly denigrated Jews, Catholics, Caucasians, and homosexuals, among others, seeking to inflame his followers against these supposed enemies.

He detects conspiracies of “international bankers,” whose machinations he blames for all the world’s troubles dating back to World War II. He looks forward to a time when the Holy Land will be “cleansed by blood,” as he exclaimed in a sermon not so long ago. He warns that the evil ones ruling the planet will someday be destroyed for their sins, while those who obey his admonishments (and tithe to his organization) will be saved.

Well aware of Farrakhan’s record, since both of them reside in Chicago, Obama forthrightly rejected the support of the unsavory minister. Unfortunately, his own Christian pastor, Jeremiah Wright, has chosen to associate himself with the Nation of Islam, which may well create problems for Obama — but at least he has clearly separated himself from the poisonous Farrakhan philosophy.

By contrast, McCain went out of his way last week to accept the endorsement of a Christian pastor with a deeply disturbing record of bigotry and extremism. That would be John Hagee, a Texas televangelist whose career is chronicled in God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, a new book by investigative reporter Sarah Posner. As Posner reveals, Hagee is the kind of evangelical minister who has anticipated the end of the world for decades now, even as he promises untold riches to those who tithe to his ministry. He is an ardent warmonger who, like Farrakhan, seems to imagine a Middle East cleansed by blood — except that in his fantasies, the Christians will be saved while everyone else burns. (The saved won’t include members of the Catholic Church, however, an institution he despises and denounces as venomously as Farrakhan does.)

But the perspectives of these two self-proclaimed men of God resemble each other even more closely in certain ways. Hagee, too, promotes hatred of homosexuals and demands that women submit to men. And he also imagines a conspiracy by international bankers, the Bavarian Illuminati, the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, and other shadowy groups to deliver America into the hands of Satan. All that verbiage is merely code for traditional anti-Semitism, as Hagee surely knows, because, like Farrakhan, he blames the Jewish people for their own persecution, including the Holocaust, as he explained a few years ago in his book entitled Jerusalem Countdown.

Yet, for reasons that seem more related to race than reason, the assorted inanities of Hagee are acceptable while those of Farrakhan are not, at least in the higher circles of the Republican Party and the national media. No matter how many times Obama rejects the Nation of Islam leader, a television anchor or debate moderator will demand that he do so again, if only to mention their names in the same breath.

Meanwhile, McCain escapes the hard questions that should be asked about his embrace of Hagee, whose ugly words and mad prophecies ought to repel him. Eight years ago, the San Antonio minister was among the political preachers, including Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell, who denounced McCain and proclaimed George W. Bush to be the Lord’s chosen candidate.

Back then, the Arizona Republican proved his maverick courage when he rebuked them all as “agents of intolerance.” He has sought to court their favor ever since — and it is sad to see him genuflect now to the same kind of demagogue he once mocked.

Joe Conason writes for The New York Observer.

Politics Politics Feature

When Kooks Endorse: McCain and Obama and Their Controversial Supporters

Post author By John Branston
Post date March 13, 2008

Whatever their true private beliefs, presidential candidates in America are constantly required to provide proofs of faith, often through their connections with various religious figures.

Benedictions from the pulpit bestow an aura of righteousness — except, of course, when the pastor or minister is a disreputable kook whose endorsement should be an embarrassment.

In recent weeks, both Barack Obama and John McCain have suffered exactly this kind of indignity, under very different circumstances.

Read the rest of Joe Conason’s Rant.

Music Music Features

Chris Herrington’s SXSW Diary: Day One

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date March 13, 2008

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Wednesday

Due to various complications getting out of Memphis, Flyer photographer Justin Burks and I were pretty late rolling into Austin Wednesday night for the annual South By Southwest Music Festival. By the time we got checked in to our hotel, registered and credentialed for the festival, and found sustenance in the form of enchiladas and guacamole, it was almost midnight.

There are more Memphis-connected acts playing this year’s festival — perhaps the country’s largest annual music-industry showcase of (mostly) emerging artists — than ever before. But the only Memphis act on the slate for Wednesday night was hip-hop-/rock-/soul-hybrid faves Free Sol, whose 9 p.m. showcase was going to be a longshot even if we’d gotten an earlier start out of town.

Wading into the fray at close to midnight, we missed a chance to see Kimya Dawson, the singer-songwriter who’s become a very unlikely star via her appearance on the Juno soundtrack, because she played an hour earlier than her scheduled set time. Finally, we settled on getting into the large indoor/outdoor club Emo’s to see Ohio blues-rock duo The Black Keys.

On the way to Emo’s, we spotted Memphis-based Folk Alliance director (and one of the SXSW founders) Louis Jay Meyers crossing the street. Once inside the club, the warm-up music piping through the PA was Memphian Jay Reatard’s recent album Blood Visions, a sign that Reatard could end up being the most visible and buzzed-about Memphis artist at the festival this year.

The Black Keys, who once did an entire album covering songs by the late north Mississippi bluesman Junior Kimbrough, were good — strong, confident, their guitarist justifiably in love with the sound he was getting out of his instrument. But they’re sort of like the White Stripes without songs or a singer (or as cute a drummer), and I became bored and a little claustrophobic.

Going back outside for air, I wandered down Red River Road and into one of the happy accidents that makes SXSW worthwhile. With six or so bands playing official showcases each night at 80 or so participating venues (not to mention an unfathomable number of unofficial events going on around the clock), the sheer crush of music in Austin each year is overwhelming, so you never know what you might see.

Walking down Red River, I heard a familiar sound — no, noise — blaring from the open door of a club, Spiro’s. It was a cover of “Funhouse” by proto-punk band the Stooges, a record I adore. I went in to check it out and what I saw was a stage crammed with college-aged derelicts who looked very much like the Manson Family — out of control facial hair, tribal face paint, and acid-casualty expressions. There was a four- (or five?) piece horn section bashing into each other like a mosh pit while they played and a lewd lead singer prowling around exhorting the whole band.

It looked ridiculous, but it sounded just like the apocalyptic jazz-punk meltdown Iggy Pop and his band put on vinyl in 1970. In this case, that wasn’t lack of imagination. It was a heroic feat. The band was Dark Meat, from Athens, Georgia. Goes to show you never can tell.

Making my way back up Red River, I met up with my cohorts at Emo’s, where they had congregated after the night-ending showcases they’d attended. Walking into the bar, the lights were up, there was a middling crowd milling about, and there was a lone young woman standing on the slightly elevated stage warbling an amateurish but likeable version of the Guns ‘N Roses classic “Sweet Child O Mine” into the microphone, accompanied by piped-in music.

A post-showcase round of karaoke? No — the headliner! It was The Blow, an electronic duo (though the singer’s better half didn’t appear to be around) from Portland that a Memphian recently returned from the Pacific Northwest tells me is quite popular throughout the region. Proof that, in indie rock, there’s a thin line between a put-on and a sensation.

SXSW action goes full-throttle starting today, with Amy LaVere, MGMT, and the aforementioned Jay Reatard among the Memphis-connected artists with official showcases scheduled. Check back tomorrow for a full report on some of the local and nonlocal happenings down here in Austin.

— Chris Herrington

Theater Theater Feature

Civil War Ghosts: Bad Acting Wrecks a Philosophical Spook Story.

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date March 13, 2008

In 2006, Playwrights Forum scored an Ostrander Award for best original script with Pound, Sean O’Leary’s sparklingly complex play about Ezra Pound, the fascist American poet and spiritual father of modernist verse.

The shoestring production was a thrilling example of everything that’s good and right with this small but tenacious theater group dedicated to staging new works by emerging writers. So it makes perfect sense that the Forum would produce Beneath Shelton Laurel, another intriguing play by O’Leary, a clever writer who tends to construct his fictional encounters as extensions of historical record. It makes no sense at all, however, that this emotionally charged examination of events related to an actual Civil War-era massacre of civilians by Confederate troops, hasn’t been given the workout it deserves.

Beneath Shelton Laurel tells the story of two Confederate officers with blood on their hands who are forced to confront, quite literally, the ghosts of their past. The play is an all-too-relevant essay on the human animal’s ability to rationalize even the most horrible deeds in order to avoid guilt and responsibility.

As the aging officers, notable actors Marler Stone and Jim Spratley both struggle to remember their lines and stammer through what little they easily recall. And that’s too bad, because these wrecked parts seem to have come custom-made for these generally capable performers. Tripp Hurst fares much better as the angry ghost of Old Jim Shelton. Randi Sluder’s full and furious portrayal of Patsy Shelton, Jim’s formidable widow is, by turns, heartbreaking and heroic.

American history enthusiasts may still enjoy Beneath Shelton Laurel in spite of its flaws. It’s a resonant, Greek Tragedy-inspired meditation on the legacy of war and mankind’s darker angels.

Beneath Shelton Laurel is at TheatreWorks through March 16. 725-2040.