Month: June 2008

Categories
News The Fly-By

Mr. Heidingsfield Goes to Washington

For the past eight years, Mike Heidingsfield has specialized in crime statistics and research as director of the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission. But statistics isn’t exactly his forte.

“I had to change graduate schools twice to find some place I could pass,” says Heidingsfield, whose jovial-sounding voice is no match for his imposing stature. “I could not get through graduate statistics and research. I ended up at Texas Christian University and got a master’s degree in liberal arts.”

Fortunately, Heidingsfield’s academic troubles didn’t have much impact on his later success. Now the law enforcement and military veteran is headed to Washington, D.C., to serve as assistant sergeant-at-arms for the U.S. Senate.

“The biggest mission of the sergeant-at-arms is protection of the senators at their offices and the protection of the legislative process. That will be my responsibility,” Heidingsfield says.

Heidingsfield, 57, was selected for the post by the current sergeant-at-arms, Terry Gainer, whom he served alongside on a congressional commission to observe Iraq’s security forces last summer.

Before moving to Memphis, Heidingsfield served as police chief in Scottsdale, Arizona, located near Phoenix. He held that position for eight years.

“In high school, I decided I wanted to go into law enforcement, but we had a war going on,” Heidingsfield says. “My draft lottery number was 95, so I thought there was some potential that I’d go to Vietnam or Southeast Asia.”

Instead, Heidingsfield and a friend decided to enlist in hopes of getting a better assignment. During Vietnam, he was stationed in a B-52 bomber unit in Guam. After the war, Heidingsfield moved to Texas to attend graduate school and began working for the Dallas/Fort Worth police department. He served as an officer there for 15 years, eventually moving up the ranks to deputy chief.

Throughout those years, Heidingsfield, now a grandfather of six, also led a parallel military career with the Air Force Reserves. As part of that assignment, he was called to the Pentagon after it was attacked on 9/11.

Heidingsfield will start his new job July 15th.

“I’ve always wanted to work in Washington and be a fed, but you have to pick and choose the right opportunity,” he says. “I think this is it, and you never know what other opportunities that might yield with a change in administration.”

Categories
Hot Properties Real Estate

The Grand Tour

Even though America fought a revolution to be rid of foreign rule, this country has always had a love affair with all things European. In the 19th century, the wealthy went on the “Grand Tour” and often came back to build European-influenced houses. The Arts and Crafts movement that began in England in the 1860s was a big hit here, too, eventually encompassing a variety of styles, including revivals of English Tudor and Cotswold cottage originals.

World War I was, in many ways, the poor man’s version of the Grand Tour. Our boys’ exposure to European domestic architecture undoubtedly helped maintain the popularity of Eurostyle houses — no longer just grand country houses, but bungalows and cottages for common folk like you and me.

This house in Washington Heights, built in 1925, is a spacious duplex finished with wide moldings, fancy plasterwork, and two original boilers, allowing each unit — one up, one down — its own thermostat.

There are several original duplexes from this period on this block, and they were all designed to look like grand single-family houses and still do.

The front door to the upstairs unit is featured prominently to the left, under a gable roof with a parapet end wall. The ground-floor entry is tucked away on what looks like a side porch. The floor plans are practically identical, except the upper unit has an enclosed sunroom with two walls of casement windows and a terra-cotta floor above the ground floor’s open front porch.

The ground floor has just had both baths updated and a sparkling new kitchen installed. Upstairs had the same updates a few years earlier, along with recessed lights to accentuate art, a room full of bookshelves, and a wall of new closets in the master suite. There are also two central air-conditioning systems.

The living rooms are spacious, centered on fireplaces, and have triple diamond-paned windows looking out to the street. Walls and ceilings are rusticated with hand-troweled stucco accented by a subtle paint finish. A large cased opening connects living and dining areas.

Behind the dining room is a surprisingly big kitchen. All the cabinets have roll-out shelves. Appliances are new, and generous storage areas conceal pantry and laundry. Additional floor space here works either as a breakfast area, seating nook, or both, elevating these kitchens to “keeping room” status.

There are three bedrooms and two baths down the opposide side of each unit, with minor variations. Downstairs, the rear two bedrooms enjoy their original connecting door, allowing the middle bedroom to serve as a sitting room for the master or a nursery.

Upstairs, the front bedroom has two walls of bookcases, making it a possible library, but it still has a full bed wall, if only for a sleeper sofa. The master bedroom has its connection to the middle bedroom covered by a wall of closets that would make a shopaholic drool.

Most unexpectedly, there is a full deck on top of the two-car garage, with one half open and the other half roofed and screened. It’s got to be one of the best treehouses for dining in all of Midtown.

If the value of the euro has you thinking twice about a trip abroad, it might be wise to plan your Grand Tour of things romantically European right here in Washington Heights.

2225/2229 Jefferson Avenue

Approximately 4,120 square feet (total of both units)

Each unit: 3 bedrooms, 2 baths $455,000

FSBO: Nancy Willis, 483-4200

Categories
Art Art Feature

Young at Art

Photographer Ian Lemmonds’ curating skills are as visionary and playful as his signature artwork in which white ponies vanish into sunlight and minuscule humans stand in awe of luminous goldfish. Lemmonds has put together “The Girls Club,” an L Ross Gallery exhibition that uses the international signage for women’s restrooms as its logo. This is just the right touch of whimsy and insight to describe five young women, who, like Virginia Woolf, have created private spaces in which to generate art straight from the gut.

Our Tiny Graces by Emily Walls consists of an 18-by-20 hand-knit afghan, two oversized chairs built by the artist, and an invitation to climb on and under the installation. The work takes us back to the moment we pulled a blanket off our beds, draped it over chairs much taller than ourselves, and crawled into a private space to enjoy our first work of art.

A young man lies on a pale-blue slab in Pixy Liao’s untitled C-print. A shaft of light hovering above his body creates pitch-black shadows and powerful metaphors regarding life’s brevity and the hope for transcendence. The man is lying on an air-hockey table, and that long glint of light comes from a fluorescent bulb. Perhaps he’s been injured in a poolroom brawl. Perhaps he’s sleeping in a fraternity game room after too much study or too much beer. Whatever the particulars, Liao’s perceptually challenging, richly symbolic work reminds us of life’s pathos, its pleasure, and its pain.

In Women on Washington, Niki Johnson delicately and accurately sketches the portraits of the American presidents’ wives on small pieces of vellum. Each sketch is placed on top of George Washington’s face on the one-dollar bill. The bills (all 39 of them) are relief-mounted on the wall in the shape of a pyramid. Here are just a few of the questions this beautifully executed, conceptually complex artwork asks: On what foundation do we build our homes, ourselves, our country? With greenbacks? With the ideals of early statesmen (and stateswomen)? With trickle-down economics? With the labor of women who often earn substantially less than men?

Other notable works in the show include Gate 3, a breakthrough painting in which Lauren Hamlett reaches a subtle, original level of abstraction, and Rebeka Laurenzi’s soft, porous, surprisingly beautiful sculpture made out of thousands of strips of corrugated paper.

The Stale Calm of Utopia by Marcus Kenney at David Lusk

L Ross Gallery, through June 30th

Four young artists in David Lusk’s current show, “Crowded,” have also mounted original, thought-provoking work.

From a distance, Mike Force’s work is striking and lyrical. Up close, his paintings tell a dark story. The American flag has become limp noodles that swarm like snakes through many of his works. Impastos of burgundy are human hearts that roast on open spits and spew noxious fumes from truncated arteries like factory smoke stacks. This artist’s tattered flags and hearts serve as graphic reminders for ways overzealous patriotism and unchecked corporate interest can bend and bloody democratic ideals and compassion beyond recognition.

An untitled C-print by Pixy Liao on view at L Ross Gallery.

Pale-blue rectangles that narrow at the top of Shawn Mathews’ tall, slick painting Therapy bring to mind high-rise apartments, multiple arteries of freeways, and shipping lanes. Beneath thick layers of resin, Mathews’ scumbled brown background conjures up faces and monuments carved into now crumbling stone. Modernity, backdropped by a palimpsest of ancient forms, suggests no matter how high or technologically advanced we build our structures and infrastructures, they too shall crumble.

In some of the most interesting syntheses of art and space we’ve seen this year, Cordy Ryman screws, stacks, and Velcros enameled slats of wood into the corners of David Lusk Gallery to create floor-to-ceiling installations.

Marcus Kenney explores the American psyche with collages of memorabilia, brand-name labels, vintage wallpaper, and children’s book illustrations that often resemble the Dick/Jane/Sally characters from mid-century elementary school primers. Weaned on the prosperity of the ’50s and the psychedelia of the ’60s, Kenney’s cutouts float over devastated landscapes, taunt physically disabled youngsters, and smoke cigarettes — unaware of the harm they cause — still plump, still beautiful, still 7 years old.

At David Lusk Gallery, through June 28th

Memphis painter Meikle Gardner moved to Manhattan two years ago. This month, he fills his “New York/New Work” exhibition at Perry Nicole with 30 saturate, sensual, and original works of art. Gone are the slathered-on heads and complex gridwork. Gardner’s gestures have become a satisfying blend of calligraphy, geometry, and fertility icon. Spermatozoan shapes spread out into luminous color fields in Morphogenesis. Languid brushstrokes weave in and out of blue-black folds softly lit with silver-white wisps of paint in Ancient Fold. A silver-blue background overlaid with opalescent green sinew in Prattle-Head is punctuated with yellow and topped off with blue calligraphy outlined in red. This tremendously complex, crisp, never overworked painting reads like synapses of a supercharged mind in a supercharged city where possibility is endless.

At Perry Nicole Fine Art, through June 30th

Categories
Music Music Features

Criminal Intent

Straight out the streets of Memphis, Tennessee, the robbery capital of the U.S.,” Three 6 Mafia proclaim at the outset of their new album, Last 2 Walk, and not because they’re about to say anything insightful or interesting about this predicament. They just want to exploit the problem of Memphis crime to give the reckless sensationalism they sell an undercurrent of authenticity — all the better to serve the (real and would-be) gangstas, thrill-seeking cultural tourists, and genuflecting hipsters who make up much of their fan base.

This calculation is the central reality that governs the most polished album the rapper/producer duo Juicy J and DJ Paul have ever made, a long-delayed follow-up to 2005’s pre-Oscar Most Known Unknown that, surprisingly, doesn’t spend all that much time referencing a celebrityhood that’s exploded since their last album: Oscar night, short-lived MTV series (Adventures in Hollyhood), cameos on TV series such as Entourage and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

Of course, a hip-hop album about the contours of violent crime in Memphis would be worth making. It’s a big topic. Sadly, Last 2 Walk coincides with a lengthy Atlantic Monthly article about rising murder rates in small cities, using Memphis as a case study. The Wire, the HBO series about drug crime in Baltimore, is probably the decade’s signature work of American culture, regardless of medium, and hip-hop has certainly proven capable of revealing this world with similar detail, craft, and insight (and even more immediacy), as the best work of Notorious B.I.G. and Ghostface Killah illustrates. Three 6 Mafia cohort Frayser Boy has had useful things to say about life on Memphis’ mean streets.

But while grounding their music in the city’s crime epidemic, Three 6 Mafia don’t actually put much thought into the topic, particularly what it might be like to be the victim of the criminality they glorify. Such empathy is beyond them. Instead, despite such crime-oriented songs as “Trap Boom,” “Get Ya Rob,” and “Click Bang,” this stuff is just atmosphere on Last 2 Walk, an album far more interested in menacing braggadocio, illicit substances, and usable women.

Last 2 Walk is saddled with a few of the overly repetitive, chanted choruses that have long been the group’s worst purely musical tendency: “Don’t play with me boy/Play with your Playstation,” “Click, bang, bang/Click, bang, bang/To your mother[bleepin’] brain, ho,” and “I said I love having sex but I’d rather get some head.” (That last one the chorus of the album’s first single!) But, overall, it’s Three 6 Mafia’s least sluggish, least hectoring, best rapped album yet, the last largely due to enhanced guest stars, such as the late Pimp C, whose smooth, gravelly flow enters “I Got” like a rhyme beacon, and Georgia rapper UNK, whose animated drawl enlivens the otherwise dreary “I’d Rather.”

Juicy J and DJ Paul

Whatever moral or philosophical differences one might have, there’s no denying that Three 6 Mafia’s improvement as music makers has at least partially driven their ascent. The epic, aurally eloquent “Stay Fly,” from Most Known Unknown, is a stone-classic hip-hop single. There’s nothing of that caliber on Last 2 Walk, but high-level R&B collaborators (a first) make this the group’s toniest album by far. The best bets for hits here are the testimonials “Hood Star” and “That’s Right,” which feature sharp sung hooks from Lyfe Jennings and Akon, respectively. “That’s Right,” in particular, rumbles every bit like the “street anthem” they proclaim it to be.

But, honestly, I care too much about hip-hop and Memphis to find much pleasure in this growing musicality. “You know the worst thing about selling dope? Eighty percent of black people are in jail because of drugs, domestic violence, and murder. You should think about that,” Juicy J proclaims at the end of “Trap Boom.” It’s a moment so self-serving that it almost stops the album in its tracks. After all, why should the listener think about it if the artists themselves aren’t willing to?

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Unleash the Kraken

From the beginning of recorded history, seafaring cultures have been terrified of strange, gigantic creatures that live in the deep. Ancient Greek mariners feared Scylla, a vicious, six-headed sea snake that could send an entire fleet of soldiers to their watery graves. For similar reasons, the Vikings avoided the World Serpent, an invulnerable water dragon that guarded the farthest extremes of Midgard. In North America during the late Cretaceous period, Dolichorhynchops, a toothy, 10-foot-long meat eater, swam the shallow oceans that once covered the Great Plains. The difference between these beasties, of course, is that Dolichorhynchops — or Dolly, as the creature is affectionately known to paleontologists — was real. She’s also the star of National Geographic’s Sea Monsters, an epic animated adventure story about life in earth’s prehistoric oceans. It opens Saturday, June 28th, on the Pink Palace’s IMAX screen.

With its 3-D animation, Sea Monsters lets audiences get up close and personal with giant squids, huge flightless seabirds with teeth, and bigger flying reptiles with bigger, freakier teeth. And, of course, there’s Tylosaurus, a massive aquatic predator with dagger-like choppers designed for piercing, slashing, sawing, tearing, and consuming whatever unfortunate creatures cross its path.

If you miss Sea Monsters this weekend, don’t worry. These terrors from the ancient deep will be around to scare and mystify audiences through March 2009.

“Sea Monsters: A Prehistoric adventure” at the Pink Palace’s Imax Theater. Admission is $8 for adults, $7.25 for seniors, and $6.25 for children under 12. For information regarding show times, call 763-IMAX.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall

Welfare Buildings

Ninth District congressional hopeful Nikki Tinker wants Memphians to know that she’s a new kind of politician who will not tolerate the government-assisted advancement of inanimate objects.

“Politicians promise a lot of things that they tend to forget once they are elected,” she wrote in a recent press release outlining what appears to be her firm position against the education and betterment of architecture. “I will be here, with you, working to make our community better. It’s not about renaming buildings, and teaching them to help themselves.”

Truer incoherent words were never spoken.

Totally PG

This headline from the My Eyewitness News’ website sounds like a biological impossibility: “Memphis Man Charged in Shooting of Pregnant Woman and Man.”

Familiar Fonts

If it’s true what they say about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, the good folks at Memphis’ Daily News must really love the Memphis Flyer. Last week the Daily News launched The Memphis News, a free tabloid-style weekly paper featuring a mix of news, reviews, and commentary. But it wasn’t the newspaper’s cost or its content that caught the Pesky Fly’s compound eye. It was the cover logo that’s nearly identical to the original Flyer logo, which was retired in the 1990s.

For the record — and as a service to our friends at the Daily/Memphis News — the Flyer’s original logo was graphically strong but so chunky and such a pain in the butt to design around that certain staff members started calling it “the hemorrhoid.”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Bob Corker and the McCain Effect:

“It’s not an urban myth. It’s just a fact.” That’s how Bob Corker describes the volcanic temper of U.S. Senate colleague John McCain — a fact of life that Corker says he had to deal with “very early on” in his own Senate career. So far Tennessee’s junior senator has held on to his own mild-mannered ways, but an appearance in Memphis this week revealed some other traits and beliefs Corker has come to share with the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

See Jackson Baker’s take here.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters to the Editor

John Ford Did Good Things

After reading John Branston’s usually excellent column (City Beat, June 5th issue) and various articles written recently by Jackson Baker about former state senator John Ford, I’m wondering if his laudable record of legislative achievements has somehow been forgotten.

As the executive in charge of government relations for my former employer (at the time, one of the largest manufacturing companies in the Mid-South) and a volunteer chairman of the governent affairs committee for the largest pro-business advocacy and lobbying organization in Tennessee, I had fairly frequent dealings with Senator Ford. I found him to be an extraordinarily capable legislative leader, who acted honorably and capably on behalf of Memphis and its citizens. He was unfailingly a man of his word and delivered key votes and leadership on a great many issues that benefited our city and state.

It was no accident that he earned the friendship and respect of a great many business executives over the years. Ford’s reputation and the results he delivered made him the legitimate “go-to guy” when a knowledgeable voice in state government was essential. It is a shame that Ford’s great work on behalf of the people seems to have been largely forgotten now that he has been convicted in a corruption case that I still find hard to believe he was truly guilty of commiting.

Lewis Nolan

Memphis

It’s Not the War, Stupid

Cheri DelBrocco’s latest liberal diatribe, “It Was the War, Stupid” (Viewpoint, June 12th issue), recycles all the usual tripe pushed by those who can’t see that the war in Iraq has begun to reconfigure the Mideast in a positive manner. It’s true, President Bush did not take the “easy way.” He had the vision to see that Saddam Hussein’s presence in the region and his continued provocative acts and his development of weapons (yes) of mass destruction would destabilize the region for decades to come. He made a difficult and controversial decision, but history will prove he was right.

The “surge” is finally bearing fruit, and Iraq is beginning to stabilize. It was the war, Cheri, and it wasn’t “stupid.” It was the right thing to do.

Mac Fitzgerald

Nashville

All the News

I recently canceled my subscription to The Commercial Appeal. A woman called to ask why, and I said it was because the CA had laid off 55 more people (“Bad News,” the Fly-by, June 5th issue) and was transferring jobs to India. I said that was un-American.

A week later, a man phoned and asked what he could do to get me to renew my subscription. I explained again why I had canceled. He said: “You’ll be happy to know I am not in India. I’m calling from New Jersey.”

Ray Berthiaume

Memphis

Rachel Hurley’s suggestion to change the format of WUMR 91.7 (“Bright Ideas,” June 12th issue) would be a disservice to local jazz fans and effectively eliminate the representation of a major music genre on Memphis radio. U 92 is the only radio station in the Mid-South with a jazz format and therefore fills a unique niche. It is almost entirely staffed by University of Memphis students and dedicated community volunteers. Many of these on-air personalities have hosted their programs for many years and have amassed a loyal fan base.

Another issue is the idea that the station should have an “eclectic” format. Turn your radio dial slightly to the left, and you will find a radio station that is doing just that. WEVL 89.9, also with a volunteer format, does an excellent job promoting musical genres not ordinarily heard on commercial radio. I’m not sure what genres Hurley is referring to, but I can tell you that WEVL is very thorough in informing listeners about what is out there on the Memphis music scene.

Two “eclectic” radio stations sitting nearly side by side on the radio dial would ultimately result in the demise of one of them and fragment the audience. I doubt that this would do anything to improve the Memphis music scene.

Laurie Snyder

Memphis

The Flyer long has been a bastion of resistance to those who degrade the English language, which made the sub-headline on Bianca Phillips’ Fly-by column in the June 19th issue (“Local crime experts argue the data is skewed”) doubly disconcerting.

“Data” is the plural of “datum.” Proper usage thus demands a plural verb — “are” not “is.”

E.W. “Bill” Brody

Germantown

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Path of Khan

Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol is a summer movie made from anti-matter. Not only does this Genghis Khan biopic avoid showing too many of the lavishly gory historical battles that typify movies like 300, it approaches its legendary subject from an unglamorous, dutiful angle. Rather than focusing on the 13th-century ruler’s reign over the largest contiguous empire in world history, Bodrov’s film charts the long, hard road that brought Khan to the head of the Mongol hordes in the late 1100s. It’s not your average ancient-times bloodletting party, but it earns respect on its own severe terms.

The film’s strangeness and dislocation begins with the fact that no one in the film actually says the words “Genghis Khan.” The presence of Khan, the fearsome and revered warrior, leader, and statesman (and ancestor to about 16 million males currently walking the Earth) is only implied in the film’s final shots. Instead, the film recounts the life of Khan’s “alter ego” Temudgin, the resilient wandering son of a former Khan who was poisoned at a watering hole. As played by Odynam Odsuren (as an 8-year old) and Tadanobu Asano (as an adult), Temudgin’s life is nasty and brutish but far from short; his growth is measured by the size of the cangues that continually ensnare him. What keeps Temudgin moving stubbornly forward is his desire to reunite with his wife Börte (Khulan Chuluun, in a fine debut) and wipe out those who have wronged him.

The fade-outs that punctuate key moments in Temudgin’s life story reflect its status as cultural myth. It’s never explained how Temudgin survives a plunge into an icy lake, the arrow that pierces his chest, or the multiple run-ins with his enemies. He’s treated like both a savior and a necessary force of order, especially when he intones, “Mongols need laws. I will make them obey, even if I have to kill half of them.”

That proclamation is no laughing matter. Only Sun Hong-lei, who plays Temudgin’s adoptive half-brother and eventual nemesis Jamukha, is allowed to smile at it. Jamukha doesn’t possess Temudgin’s focus or drive, so he bends his neck and back, growls like a dog who’s taken Tuvan throat-singing lessons, and watches as his half-brother’s historical moment arrives. Jemukha seems to know that he will be a footnote in history at best, so he takes a rueful joy in his rival’s stamina and cunning.

Mongol‘s vast, harsh landscapes threaten to overshadow the human drama. Through the depiction of coniferous forests and rolling, snow-covered fields, cinematographers Sergei Trofimov and Rogier Stoffers reveal some of the stark, parched beauty of the Mongolian countryside. However, no amount of natural light or magic-hour footage ever softens these unforgiving landscapes. The environmental conditions are inherently alienating; the isolation of each village and each family is so total that Temudgin’s proposal to unite these nomadic tribes feels like the wildest fantasy.

And fantasy is what everyone’s seeking these days, isn’t it? If the main objective of summer moviegoing is to provide escapism, then Mongol is some kind of success; it’s like a medieval version of There Will Be Blood without all the self-justifying cant. How about that?

Mongol

Opening Friday, June 27th

Ridgeway Four

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Gorgeous George

There are very few comedians who can really tickle my funny bone, and, sadly, more and more of them are dying. I always had an affinity for the “borscht belt” comedians. Maybe that’s because I had the glorious chance in my youth to spend time at places like the Concord and Grossinger’s in upstate New York.

Few people remember anymore how many of the comedic greats got their start in the Catskills. Woody Allen, Milton Berle, Lenny Bruce, Jerry Lewis, Don Rickles, Rodney Dangerfield, Henny Youngman, Buddy Hackett, Shelley Berman, and Jonathan Winters (the list goes on and on) all got going in what was affectionately called the “Jewish Alps.”

Forgive me a moment of ethnic hubris, but to this day, many of the most talented comics of our time come from that same cultural heritage: Adam Sandler, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, Al Franken, and Lewis Black, to name just a few.

But to my affinity for comedians who are “members of the Tribe,” I have made exceptions — most notably for Robin Williams, Richard Pryor, and yes, George Carlin, who, sadly, left us for good this week.

I had the great good fortune to see Carlin perform a few years ago in Tunica. The guy was absolutely amazing, regaling the audience with nearly two hours of seemingly extemporaneous shtick (how do those guys remember all that?) and showcasing his irreverence and lack of respect for any and every one of society’s most revered principles and institutions.

There was no such thing as a sacred cow to Carlin, and the proof of that was that God and religion were two of his favorite targets. To him, God was the “invisible man in the sky,” which may have been why Carlin professed to worship the sun (because, he said, he could actually see it) and to pray to Joe Pesci (because, he said, Pesci looked like a guy who could get things done).

He famously abridged the Ten Commandments into two (“Thou shalt always be honest and faithful to the provider of thy nookie” and “Thou shalt try real hard not to kill anyone, unless, of course, they pray to a different invisible man from the one you pray to”) and added a third commandment of his own: “Thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself.”

Carlin’s disdain for government and politicians was famous. He boasted that he had never voted, so that no one could blame him for whatever the elected ones would inevitably foist upon the American public. He preached the evils of corporate control and derided the environmental movement. (If the earth, he said, had endured millions of years of floods, ice, and plague, it could survive a few million plastic bags and soft drink cans.)

He was a great believer (as am I) in the Menckenian principle that “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public,” even though his own popularity would seem to belie that principle.

Carlin was, above all, a wordsmith, possessor of a talent I admire almost as much as I do that of somebody who can tie a knot in a cherry stem with their tongue. His riff on the idea of “stuff” is priceless. He was able at once to ridicule our obsession with conspicuous consumption and to demonstrate, quite seriously, that our society has become one in which we are what we own.

Of course, Carlin’s ultimate act of simultaneous tribute to — and deconstruction of — the English language came in the form of his famous “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” riff, which resulted in a U.S. Supreme Court case upholding the government’s right to control profanity on the public airwaves and which he developed into a free-standing monologue.

He took on a variety of personae in his early career, when he frequently appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show (not coincidentally, also the showcase for many borscht belt comics) and lampooned some of his favorite characters, including “Al Sleet,” the “hippy dippy weatherman,” a dope-smoking, addle-brained takeoff on all weathermen, whose most famous prognostication was: “The forecast for tonight is darkness, followed by increasing light towards morning” — perhaps the last time any weatherman, real or fictional, got it right.

Sadly, the world will become a little darker without George Carlin, who got it right, too, to shed his light on it.

Marty Aussenberg, who writes the “Gadfly” column for memphisflyer.com, is a Memphis attorney.