Month: March 2008

Microphone Fiend

Post author By Andrew Earles
Post date March 6, 2008

Back in the spring of 1981, Henry Lawrence Garfield was an impulsive, unhappy 20-year-old managing a Häagen-Dazs in Arlington, Virginia. Hardcore punk was ascendant, and, as singer for the marginal S.O.A. (the initials stood for “State of Alert”), Garfield was a cog in the local D.C./Arlington scene. So was his good buddy, Ian MacKaye, who fronted the far more visible Minor Threat.

Garfield’s favorite band was Black Flag, the Southern California institution headed by enigmatic guitarist Greg Ginn, who also had founded SST Records. Like Minor Threat, Black Flag defined early hardcore. Unlike Minor Threat, Black Flag had been around since 1977 (when they were called Panic) and was looking for its fourth singer by 1981. The band’s most recent singer, the charismatic Dez Cadena, had switched to rhythm guitar, a fortuitous move that would make Black Flag a sonic monster. Garfield, who had previously corresponded with the band, jumped the ice-cream ship, went to New York during the band’s East Coast tour, and ended up as a Black Flag roadie and vocal apprentice under Cadena. Legend has it that Garfield, who had rechristened himself “Henry Rollins,” was so nervous when offered the job that it took an encouraging word from MacKaye to seal the deal.

To say that Black Flag’s first full-length album, 1981’s Damaged, benefited from the new five-piece lineup is a gross understatement. Not only is the album the key touchstone of the hardcore genre, it’s arguably one of the greatest rock albums of all time — a point of departure that made the first-wave punk rock of the Clash, the Ramones, or the Sex Pistols sound like Dan Fogelberg by comparison. Rollins stayed with Black Flag until the band’s demise in 1986.

Rollins had been giving spoken-word performances and self-publishing his writings since 1983, but it was the decade following Black Flag’s break-up that Rollins’ career exploited a wider range of formats. Whether fronting the Rollins Band, releasing and touring behind spoken-word albums, or writing books, Rollins took no vacation days.

“I started splitting my time between my band and talking shows. I got extremely active, doing 150-plus shows a year when the band would go off the road to spend time with their warm-blooded friends,” Rollins explained in a recent phone interview in advance of his spoken-word performance this week at Beale Street’s New Daisy Theatre.

The Rollins Band enjoyed a period of success during the early-’90s alternative-rock boom. They appeared at the first Lollapalooza festival in ’91 and at Woodstock ’94 and charted with two albums (1992’s The End of Silence and 1994’s Weight). Rollins’ best-known book, Get in the Van, an engrossing and exhaustive account of his days in Black Flag, also was released in 1994. In terms of historical and anecdotal value, it stands as a fantastic piece of music-related nonfiction.

In the latter half of the ’90s, Rollins found extra exposure hosting shows for MTV, VH-1, and Comedy Central and making big-screen appearances in The Chase, Heat, and Lost Highway. The Rollins Band disbanded and reformed a couple of times during this decade, with one particularly notable release being 2003’s Rise Above: 24 Black Flag Songs To Benefit the West Memphis Three.

Spoken-word and television work have dominated Rollins’ time in the past few years as he developed a relationship with the Independent Film Channel. He hosted Henry’s Film Corner before settling into The Henry Rollins Show, a half-hour talk show that features a musical guest and one extended interview with a celebrity of Rollins’ liking (William Shatner, Ben Stiller, Bill Maher, etc). This year, the show will give way to IFC filming and airing several spoken-word performances around the globe. These are long-form specials based on the success of 2006’s Henry Rollins: Uncut from NYC and last year’s Henry Rollins: Uncut from Israel.

“I just came back from South Africa doing the first of several live and uncut shows we’re doing this year. The one from Israel went so well last year that they asked for more of those,” Rollins said.

Rollins also has done a handful of U.S.O. tours in the past five years, adopting a pro-troop/anti-war stance.

“U.S.O. tours are great. The war I don’t like. I don’t think anyone does. But the troops I like very much,” Rollins said. “It’s a chance to make them laugh, show them that they have support back in America. A lot of them have questions; they just want to hear about what’s going on. It’s a distraction that’s quite welcome over there. They see the same thing every day, then I pop up on the base. That’s why I’ve done U.S.O. whenever possible since they contacted me about five years ago.”

So, what can audiences expect when Rollins takes the stage at the New Daisy?

“There’s no theme,” Rollins said. “I’ll be talking about the traveling I’ve been doing — South Africa, Pakistan, Syria, and Iran. All these trips were very informative. It’s going to be a lot of stories from the road.”

Music Music Features

SXSW Preview

Post author By Flyer Staff
Post date March 6, 2008

Memphis musicians have been a growing presence at Austin’s annual South by Southwest Music Festival, but the Memphis presence at SXSW will be bigger than ever this month. In addition to the annual showcase from local label Goner Records as well as one-off showcases from Memphis acts such as punk-rock breakout star Jay Reatard and hip-hop acts Free Sol, Lord T & Eloise, and Tunnel Clones, this year’s festival will feature the biggest showcase of Memphis acts yet in the form of Six Degrees of Memphis, an all-day, all-night sampling of Memphis bands organized largely by local writer/blogger/Internet DJ Rachel Hurley and musician Jeff Schmidtke (guitarist for The Third Man).

This Six Degrees of Memphis showcase, which will present six bands at an unofficial day party Friday, March 14th, at Opal Divine’s Free House and six more (headlined by The North Mississippi Allstars, The Bo-Keys, and Amy LaVere) at an official SXSW showcase that night at the same venue, was born out of an unofficial day party Hurley organized at the event last year, itself an outgrowth of her 10 Degrees of Memphis show on the Internet radio station Breakthruradio.com.

Seeking to expand that event, Hurley, Schmidtke, and others decided to collaborate with as many local labels as possible and submit an official showcase application to the festival.

“We picked six different artists from six different labels and contacted Austin and said, okay, this is what we’re trying to do,” Schmidtke says. “When they heard that [the] North Mississippi [Allstars were] committed and the Bo-Keys and Amy LaVere [were in as well], they were all for it.” Snowglobe, The Tennessee Boltsmokers, and Schmidtke’s band the Third Man will round out the official showcase.

Schmidtke says it wasn’t at all difficult to get the hard-touring Allstars on board.

“I was very taken aback by how willing and enthusiastic they were to participate in this,” Schmidtke says of the band. “They got it very quickly what we were trying to do and were very excited to be a part of it and represent Memphis in Austin.”

Local fans can get a sneak preview of some of the Memphis acts representing the city in Austin as well as help out with some of the costs at a benefit show this weekend at downtown’s new Ground Zero Blues Club (located on the ground floor of the Westin Hotel across from FedExForum).

The showcase-style concert will feature six of the artists scheduled to make the trek to Austin: the Bo-Keys, the Tennessee Boltsmokers, the Third Man, Snowglobe’s Brad Postlethwaite, Jump Back Jake, and Two Way Radio. Doors open at Ground Zero at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 8th. Showtime is 9 p.m. The $15 cover includes an open bar.

— Chris Herrington

“Sometimes, if a house is on fire, in order to save somebody, you’ve got to shake them and shout, ‘THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE!'” says Ayele Akibulam of the rap duo Brotha’s Keepa. And that’s exactly what he and his partner Jmalo Torriel do on their latest CD, The Re-Education of the Negro, a collection of overtly political tracks referencing everything from the Jenna 6 and the disintegration of urban families to war profiteering by government-connected megacorporations.

“We like to put a little medicine in our applesauce,” says Torriel, who insists that music can bring about positive change in the world.

For seven years, Brotha’s Keepa has been matching torrents of words to grassroots action by feeding the homeless, raising awareness about what they call the “prison-industrial complex,” and organizing cultural programs for young people.

Originally inspired not only by contemporary hip-hop but also by the jarring, incendiary verse of civil-rights-era proto-rappers the Last Poets, Brotha’s Keepa doesn’t simply aim to describe the less savory aspects of the contemporary African-American experience. The group tries to inspire and to motivate their listeners into action.

“It’s always about bringing a message to the people,” says Torriel, who hopes music will inspire his detractors to research his words and try to prove them wrong.

“For me, a lot about the new CD was inspired by being a father,” Akibulam says. “So many problems in our community today are the result of fathers not being fathers. Our young men are being locked up at an astonishing rate, and the murder rate keeps going up. I strongly believe that this is related to a lack of fathers in the home, to men who’ve forgotten what it means to be men.”

The CD-release show for Re-Education of the Negro takes place Saturday, March 8th, in the theater at Southwest Tennessee Community College. Showtime is 8 p.m. The $15 admission charge includes a copy of the CD. Proceeds from the event will help fund the various projects undertaken by Brotha’s Keepa. — Chris Davis

Book Features Books

Acting Out

Post author By Leonard Gill
Post date March 6, 2008

John Rechy was 12 years old, in 1945, when for the first and only time he laid eyes on Marisa Guzman, though he already knew of her. She was the infamous “kept woman” of one of the richest, most powerful politicos in Mexico, and her father in El Paso despised her for it — despised her for bringing such shame on the family; despised her because she was not ashamed.

But there she was on the day of Rechy’s sister’s wedding: a woman sitting alone on a threadbare couch in an empty room, elegantly dressed and inhaling on a cigarette. Rechy was transfixed by her beauty, her poise, her “sublime” aloofness, and her challenge to the conservative attitudes of Mexican-American culture.

Rechy knew that culture, because he was born into it. He was Juan Rechy, son of a pious Mexican mother, who took pride in what she called her “pure” Spanish blood, and a violent father of Scottish descent, who went from successful orchestra conductor in Mexico to occasional musical tutor after he moved the family to Texas, where they barely made ends meet — a fact Juan Rechy hid from the outside, Anglo world.

This much we know from the opening chapters of About My Life and the Kept Woman (Grove Press), Rechy’s new memoir.

This much we learn later — and it isn’t the fictionalized account in the novel that made Rechy famous in 1963 (City of Night) or the nonfictional account that made Rechy a notorious literary figure in 1977 (The Sexual Outlaw):

He was a fair-skinned child who was able to “pass” for Anglo, but, like Marisa Guzman, he was aloof — a “ghost boy,” in the words of a neighborhood boy. He was bright too and fond of literature and writing, which brought him to the attention of a high school English teacher. One afternoon, she invited Rechy to her apartment; the same afternoon, she seduced him into losing his virginity. Then she threw him out, and Rechy soon threw himself into college studies. Then he met the demands of army life, but he wasn’t shipped to fight in Korea. He was assigned in Germany, and on leave in Paris he discovered one night where the easy money was: hustling.

Rechy moved to New York — a guy who played it straight but earned his way cruising Times Square. He moved to Los Angeles — a guy who played it straight but earned his way cruising Pershing Square. In San Francisco, he got a taste of S&M. And in New Orleans, he had his fill of sex, drag queens, and drugs. But he lived to write about it in a piece that Rechy titled “Mardi Gras,” and he mailed it to Evergreen Review. That “letter,” expanded to book form, became City of Night, and it threw him into the company of Christopher Isherwood and Allen Ginsberg. But Rechy’s hustling days weren’t over.

He headed for the “field of sexual anarchy” known in Los Angeles as Griffith Park, where he recalls 27 (yes, 27) sexual encounters in a single day and where, one day, he and another man were arrested. The charge: “oral copulation,” a felony. The judge’s verdict: guilty as charged. The sentence: probation and a fine, not the usual jail time, because, in the words of Rechy’s lawyer outside the courtroom, “of who you are.”

Free to go, Rechy went back to work, but it wasn’t at his typewriter. It was inside Griffith Park, and for the first time, Rechy writes, he wasn’t there for the pay. He was there because of who he was: an object of desire acting, unashamed, on his own desire.

This, finally, put him in the same company as Marisa Guzman, and Rechy doubles back, during scenes of crisis, to that sight of her throughout this memoir. He’d already been in the company of Isabel Franklin, an object of his fascination in high school — the “American” high school in El Paso where the lighter your skin color, the better for you. Isabel had spied on Guzman too that wedding day. She was, in fact, Guzman’s niece; her real name, Rechy learns, was Alicia Gonzales; and she went on to further falsify her background and marry a prominent San Francisco newspaper columnist. She’d lied her way into that marriage, and it failed. Rechy had lied his way through an underworld, and he survived. But as he writes in About My Life and the Kept Woman, he “escaped the final dangers of that world only through the accident of talent.” The man’s lucky to be alive.

Food & Wine Food & Drink

Just Right

Post author By Michael Hughes
Post date March 6, 2008

Not many wines are named after children’s nursery rhymes. In fact, I can think of only one: the Napa Valley winery 4 Bears.

“4 Bears Winery received its name after my daughter interrupted a tasting session with questions about what I was doing,” explains owner Sean Minor. “After a brief explanation of the tasting procedure, she equated the process of finding a wine that was ‘just right’ with her favorite bedtime story.”

While the Goldilocks story has three bears, Minor and his wife have four — including that inquisitive daughter and three sons. Family is an integral part of the business. His children’s initials adorn the label of each bottle, for example, and Minor bases many of his professional decisions from a personal point of view.

“We purchase grapes from a mix of small family growers and larger producers,” says Minor, “but I tend to gravitate toward smaller growers — with them it’s all about family. They are making choices that will ensure that vineyard is healthy enough to pass down to their children and grandchildren. These growers are also more apt to be practicing sustainable farming.”

Minor first began working in the wine industry 20 years ago after receiving a degree in finance. His interest sparked, he returned to school for a degree in enology and went on to work at several wineries, including King Estate in Oregon and Renwood in California.

4 Bears started out as a quest for quality wines at more affordable prices. “My wife and I would drink wine every day, but it began to get awfully expensive. We would find ourselves drinking these $30 to $40 wines. One day I said that I really felt I could produce wines of that same quality for half the price. My wife basically told me to put my money where my mouth was.”

While the Goldilocks story has three bears, wine maker Sean Minor and his wife have four.

4 Bears is able to offer their wines at affordable prices due to savings on brick-and-mortar costs. Minor produces his wines at a co-op facility that houses 10 other wineries. Everyone shares equipment, certain staff, and warehouse space. His startup capital went into sourcing the best-quality grapes he could find instead of building his own winery.

“We wanted to focus on Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and Sauvignon Blanc, because those grapes are the most familiar to the consumer. When I was at King Estate, we had to focus not only on producing good wine but education as well,” he says.

“The market wasn’t comfortable with — much less understood — Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir from Oregon. Likewise, at Renwood, at the time, the consumer wasn’t as familiar with Amador County as a wine-growing region. With 4 Bears, we knew we wouldn’t be equipped to educate the market on a fringe region or grape varietal. I knew that I wanted to produce wines from well-known varietals that best express the nature of well-known appellations.”

Too many wine labels have come out focused solely on price and ignoring what is inside the bottle. This is a folly that Minor is wary of. “Yes, the wines are price-driven, but at any price you have to give people value for their money,” he says. “These wines are focused on the consumer for enjoyment and to be approachable.”

Recommended Wines

4 Bears Cabernet Sauvignon 2005, Napa Valley, $15.99

4 Bears Chardonnay 2005, Central Coast, $12.99

4 Bears Sauvignon Blanc 2005, Dry Creek Valley,

$12.99

Food & Wine Food & Drink

Talking Shop

Post author By Simone Wilson
Post date March 6, 2008

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

For many of us, a trip to one of the international markets in Memphis is almost like visiting a foreign country — the food labels are written in a different language, there’s an array of produce we have never seen, and foreign smells and languages whir in the air. The newly opened Sara Supermercado on Park near Getwell is no exception in many ways, and yet it’s different. With all the things hanging from the ceiling at Sara — Superman piñatas in the main grocery section, for example — it feels a little like you’ve stepped into a rather unusual birthday party.

Sara is owned and operated by Nathan Hammab, who moved to Memphis from Chicago three years ago and quit the beauty-supply business in order to open the market. The business consists of two stores. One is the small market carrying mostly Hispanic foods; the other is a butcher shop (pictured below) with a counter that stretches the length of the shop.

In the butcher shop, strips of cured beef for making jerky hang to dry above the counter. On display in the glass cases are marinated pork, beef, and chicken, skewered chicken, pork chops, several yards of sausages, and fresh seafood, among many, many other meats.

Price and item descriptions are mostly in Spanish, displayed on bright orange tags strung from wall to wall. The butcher speaks very little English, but Hammab will help out if pointing to the desired item and hand signs don’t get you anywhere.

Store hours are Monday through Saturday 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Sunday.

Sara Supermercado, 3984 Park (562-5100)

The Peabody hotel, which recently received the Mobil four-star award, will partner with Jack Daniel’s for a Southern Dinner and Whiskey Tasting on Thursday, March 27th, at 6 p.m. The dinner is part of the 75th anniversary of the Peabody ducks, a tradition that started after a little too much whiskey.

Lynne Tolley, one of the distillery’s seven master tasters and owner of Miss Mary Bobo’s Boarding House Restaurant in Lynchburg will lead the whiskey tasting of Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 Black Label, Gentleman Jack Rare Tennessee Whiskey, and Jack Daniel’s Single Barrel at Capriccio Grill. The tasting will be followed by a four-course dinner featuring recipes adapted from Tolley’s Cooking with Jack. On the menu: Tennessee-smoked trout spread; spinach and beet salad with bacon dressing; cornbread and muffin cup ham biscuits; glazed salmon; beef brisket; and bread pudding for dessert.

Cost for the dinner is $85 per person plus tax and gratuity. Reservations can be made by calling Capriccio Grill at 529-4183.

Capriccio Grill, The Peabody, 149 Union (529-4000)

On Saturday, March 29th, Memphis in May is holding a barbecue-judging seminar on the judging process and the rules of the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest.

Participants will learn about the official meat categories, the scoring process, and blind, on-site, and final judging, and, of course, sample barbecue during the simulated judging exercises. Attending the seminar, however, isn’t sufficient to becoming a certified judge. That badge is obtained after judging an official meat category at two Memphis In May-style barbecue contests as well as completing other requirements.

Cost for the seminar is $60 per person, and the registration deadline is March 21st. The event is being held from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Grand Ballroom of the Holiday Inn Select at 160 Union. For more info, e-mail cscott@memphisinmay.org or visit memphisinmay.org.

In addition to its free cooking demonstrations on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, Williams-Sonoma now offers one-hour technique classes on Sundays at 11 a.m.

The series will cover soufflés (March 9th), Easter eggs (March 16th), balsamic vinegar (March 30th), knife skills (April 6th), pasta from scratch (April 20th), breakfast for Mom (May 4th), and grilling 101 (May 18th).

Classes are free of charge, but registration is required.

Williams-Sonoma, 7615 West Farmington (737-9990)

Film Features Film/TV

Starting All Over Again

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date March 6, 2008

A full 40 years after changing modern horror movies with his landmark Night of the Living Dead, George Romero has gone back to the beginning with his fifth installment, Diary of the Dead.

Night of the Living Dead was followed by Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), and Land of the Dead (2005), each volume pushing the apocalyptic story of cannibalistic zombies that Romero began in the Pennsylvania hills and forwarded into grander, more paranoiac areas.

Diary of the Dead, by contrast, is a restart. It’s another origin story and one that returns to the zombie ground zero of the Pittsburgh outskirts. The film opens, after an introductory bit of found news-camera footage of an initial zombie sighting, with a University of Pittsburgh student film crew deep in the woods making a mummy movie called The Death of Death. When the dead really do come back, this student fiction morphs into an on-the-fly documentary, and the conceit of Diary of the Dead is that we’re watching this documentary.

Shown entirely through the subjective lens of this student film crew (Romero again uses a crew of unknown actors), Diary of the Dead is an oh-so-modern update of the DIY spirit of Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead. But the other horror classic it evokes isn’t from the Romero canon: A decade after The Blair Witch Project tapped into the homemade horror aesthetic of Night of the Living Dead, Romero finally reciprocates.

Of course, The Blair Witch Project made a strategy of resisting visceral content. Zombie movies are, in part, about gore and coming up with new ways to off the walking dead. Diary of the Dead is no different from Romero’s other zombie classics in this regard.

Romero’s real interest here isn’t in the bloody particulars of man-on-zombie warfare but on the paradoxically active passivity of an intensely mediated age. In this vein, Romero not only presents Diary of the Dead through the lens of a film crew that chooses to wield its cameras rather than drop them when the boogeyman emerges, but engages in a full range of modern communication modes. The radio and TV reports through which earlier Romero protagonists got info on the zombie plague are here supplemented by websites, cell phones, text messages, viral videos, home movies, camera phones, surveillance footage, etc.

But, as astutely as Romero deploys all this new technology, he doesn’t celebrate it. Diary of the Dead wonders what happens when the juice is lost — when you run out of gas or battery power or electricity — before concluding, ruefully, that “It’s all just noise.” Even more than that, Diary of the Dead wonders whether more and more strains of media increase a need to see, show, and comment along with a reluctance to act. This idea is as close as the film comes to commenting on recent disasters from Katrina to Iraq, but here the critique (“Are we even worth saving?” one character wonders toward the end) is about more than how easily mankind slips into violence and mayhem. Rather, it’s Romero’s most self-reflexive film ever. With abundant riffs on camera-as-gun metaphors (“keep shooting,” “this thing is too easy to use”), Diary of the Dead might be the most unsparing cinematic connection of voyeurism to violence since the 1960 classic Peeping Tom.

Diary of the Dead

Opening Friday, March 7th

Studio on the Square and Malco Cordova

Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Post author By Joe Conason
Post date March 6, 2008

Irritated Democrats — and everyone else who feels that we have heard more than enough from Ralph Nader —cannot help wondering why he would be running for president yet again, at the risk of becoming a permanent national joke. Is he stroking his own ego, as some critics complain? Is he motivated by principle to offer voters a different choice, as he will insist? Both those explanations may still be plausible, although between 2000 and 2004 his support fell from 3 percent to 0.3 percent, which is not exactly an ego boost or an endorsement of third-party politics.

But the evidence suggests another possible motive for Nader to run this year — namely, that he hopes to help his longtime ally John McCain, to whom he owes at least one big favor. Nader is already focusing his fire on the Democrats, with his website featuring dozens of press releases attacking Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, while none voice the slightest criticism of McCain.

Nader’s proclivity to boost Republicans and blast Democrats has been a matter of historical record ever since the Florida debacle eight years ago, when his 97,000 votes probably deprived Al Gore of victory in that crucial state. Although the consumer advocate and his supporters continue to deny any such culpability, Republicans clearly feel that his presence on the ballot works to their advantage. As Mike Huckabee noted on hearing of Nader’s impending announcement last week, a Nader candidacy tends to siphon votes away from the Democratic presidential nominee. “So naturally,” said Huckabee bluntly, “Republicans would welcome his entry into the race.”

Actually, Republicans have learned to do more than merely “welcome” Nader. Four years ago, Republican officials and activists in certain swing states helped gather signatures to gain ballot access for Nader, while several major Republican donors sent generous checks to his campaign. And no Republican spoke out more forthrightly on his behalf than McCain, who in 2004 urged the authorities in Florida to put Nader on the ballot there despite his failure to qualify — and who sent his own lawyer down to the Sunshine State to fight for Nader in court.

McCain launched that intervention from his perch as chairman of the Reform Institute, a Washington think-tank funded by corporate soft money and liberal foundations and staffed by McCain staffers and partisans. On the surface, at least, the Arizona senator was pursuing a principled defense of open ballot access. He sent Trevor Potter, a prominent attorney and former Federal Election Commission member who has long represented him, to assist the Nader forces in Tallahassee. It was an inspiring story of shared democratic values that crossed the ideological spectrum.

But as The New York Times reported in September 2004, there was a political back story behind McCain’s assistance to Nader. According to the Times, “Mr. Potter said that the Nader campaign first sought Mr. McCain’s backing in the case last week and that subsequently the Bush campaign also asked him to get involved.” (Candidate Nader and his running mate, Peter Camejo, issued a statement thanking McCain and the Reform Institute that is, for some reason, no longer available on the Nader campaign website.)

That tantalizing sequence of events suggests McCain’s motive in backing Nader may well have been partisan as well as principled, since the “maverick” senator had only weeks earlier sworn his fealty to George W. Bush on the dais at the Republican National Convention. Certainly the Bush campaign would have felt reassured knowing that Nader would be on the ballot again in Florida, like a lucky rabbit’s foot.

The Naderite connections with McCain go back many years, to the era when the Arizona senator displayed real maverick tendencies in jousting with corporate interests in the tobacco, telecommunications, and automobile lobbies, as well as his strong support for campaign finance reform. Nostalgia for the old McCain may explain why Joan Claybrook, who directs the Nader-founded Public Citizen organization, stepped forward to defend him against the Times exposé of his relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman. Meanwhile, Claybrook, Nader, and other reformers have said little or nothing about McCain’s gaming of the public campaign finance system while voicing sharp criticism of Obama for waffling recently on his commitment to accept public financing.

Nader may occasionally tweak McCain over the war in Iraq or the Canadian health-care system, but they both know that that won’t matter. Watch while Nader blisters Obama or Clinton and McCain smiles. Wait to see whether McCain tries to insist that Nader, whose support is minuscule and shrinking, deserves to appear on the debate dais with him and the Democrat. Look for Republicans to prop up Nader with ballot signatures and campaign cash. And remember that this time Nader’s candidacy, having descended from tragedy to farce, may simply be an inside joke.

Joe Conason is a columnist for The New York Observer and Salon.

News

The Lessons of Lester Street

Post author By John Branston
Post date March 6, 2008

In a city where murder occurs at the rate of about one every other day, the murders of six people, including two children, in a house at 722 Lester set a new standard for brutality.

Memphis police on Tuesday asked the news media and the community for help in solving one of the worst mass murders in Memphis history.

“There are people out there who have the information that we don’t have,” said Lieutenant Joe Scott.

Read the rest of John Branston’s City Beat column.

News

Design Firms Unveil Shelby Farms Plans

Post author By Bianca Phillips
Post date March 6, 2008

Three finalists in the Shelby Farms Park design competition revealed plans for the 4,500 acre park at a press conference at the Central Library Thursday morning.

Plans from all three firms — Tom Leader Studio, Hargreaves Associates, and Field Operations — were inspired by trends in “green” environmentally-friendly design. Each puts some focus on restoring waterways and encouraging on-site organic food production.

Tom Leader Studio is proposing a solar farm that would utilize sun energy to run all Shelby Farms’ facilities. Their plan would also restore natural streams and divert their flow into the Wolf River. That water would be used to irrigate organic food crops and native grasses used in the creation of biofuels. Under the Leader plan, public art would be installed by artists-in-residence who would live onsite for six months. The plan also calls for a new amphitheater with studio space for musicians and an on-site restaurant specializing in healthy food.

Hargreaves Associates plans to turn Shelby Farms Park into Shelby Lakes Park by creating new streams using water from the Wolf River. The end result would consist of 10 miles of waterways that could be used for canoeing, kayaking, and other recreational activities. The plan would also create a new sports center with fields for outdoor sports, such as track and football, and space for indoor sports.

The Field Operations plan includes a 100-acre orchard for apples, peaches, figs, and cherries to be sold at the on-site farmers’ market. An Art Mound would be developed on the west end of the park for public art installations, and the plan includes a Shelby Farms Charter School. Patriot Lake would be expanded, and goats, llamas, and additional bison would be added to the existing range area.

The plans are on display the Central Library and Cossitt Library. Plans will be available for viewing at the Shelby Farms Visitors Center beginning March 17. Later today, they can be viewed on the Shelby Farms Park website. The public is being asked to comment on their favorite aspects of each plan in an online questionnaire. A final design firm will be chosen in April.

— Bianca Phillips