Month: July 2008

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters to the Editor

Mess Transit?

I’m so happy that you wrote about MATA (“MATA’s Moment of Truth,” June 26th issue). I pass double-length buses, one after the other, with fewer than 15 folks riding, even at so-called peak times. Where are the single-length buses? Where are the even smaller ones that serve specific areas? What’s the gasoline tab for each of these “accordian-pleated” buses that move around only one-fourth full?

Let’s get as practical at the city level as we are beginning to be in private life. We need to stop whining and begin to act like responsible citizens.

Jeanne Crawford

Memphis

I sell real estate in Memphis, and I focus on the downtown market. Almost everyone, without exception, who lives downtown would love to ride the trolley — to work, to go out to eat, to go see friends — but it is impossible because they have no schedule!

MATA claims that a trolley comes by every 10 minutes. They don’t! I cannot tell you how many times I have waited for a trolley for 30 minutes or longer and finally just given up. Or worse, waited for one for 30 minutes only to have it whiz past me without stopping. Or when one finally does come, it has five other trolleys riding its bumper.

Each stop should have a schedule displayed that would say, for instance, the trolley stops here at 7:30, 7:45, 8 and then actually have it do that. We have spent countless dollars revitalizing downtown — millions on the trolleys alone — only to have the trolleys be completely useless because somebody hasn’t got enough common sense to put them on a dependable schedule. I have had clients buy condos and houses on the trolley line so they could ride it to the Medical Center for work, only to find out that it is a total impossibility. All it is now is an amusement ride for extremely patient tourists.

Karen Soro

Memphis

An Urban Market

In regard to your “Bright Ideas” article (June 12th issue), the best idea came from editor Bruce VanWyngarden: Memphis needs a true and permanent urban market.

Many U.S. and international cities are identified with their great urban markets: Seattle, San Francisco, Paris, New Orleans, Baltimore. They’re a destination for tourists and a routine stop for city residents. They support local goods and small businesses and raise tax revenue. They create opportunities for people to interact in a culturally diverse setting.

The Fairgrounds is the ideal location for a permanent Memphis urban market. (The downtown Farmers Market is a wonderful thing, but its limited hours and location make it difficult for the majority of Memphians to patronize it on a regular basis.) Thousands of people drive by the Fairgrounds every day to and from work. The University of Memphis, UT, Christian Brothers, and many other institutions as well as a large residential community provide a huge customer base within a small radius. Envision a stop on the way to work for coffee and pastry, on the way home for fresh-made pasta or bread. Imagine a weekend shopping trip with out-of-town friends.

There’s a great PBS film called To Market To Market To Buy a Fat Pig, which celebrates and applauds the culture of the urban market. Our city leaders need to watch it.

Candace Jeffries

Memphis

New Data

E.W. Brody’s grammatical criticism of a recent Flyer headline (Letters, June 26th issue) would be perfectly valid if the Flyer were published in Latin. But as an English word, “data” is obviously and widely used as a collective noun, and the subject-verb agreement of the recent headline is sound. We English speakers have a long history of borrowing words from Latin (and other languages), retaining their basic meaning, discarding their morphology in favor of our own, and ignoring their gender. I often hear versions of Brody’s argument for applying Latin grammar to modern English but never for words like “table” and “cent.”

Fly on the Wall pokes fun at the local media’s abuse of our mother tongue, and I suspect this is the basis for Brody’s implication of hypocrisy. However, the Pesky Fly is typically tuning in to humorous and ironic misusage or malconstruction, not nit-picking the debatable topics of spelling or grammar. I like to think the Fly believes in clarity of thought and word above all else, and that the endless supply of CA quotes are datums that help prove his point.

Richard Trenthem

Memphis

Categories
News The Fly-By

Skate Life

CREDIT: IJANSEMPOI | dreamstime.com

After 23 years, two knee surgeries, and a dislocated elbow, Mike Lasiter still skateboards.

“It’s just like anything you love — you’re going to find a way to keep doing it,” he says. “Especially with Campbell Clinic to keep you going.”

Lasiter, operations manager for Mid-South Homebuyers, is part of a group that, led by Californian Aaron Shafer, has been advocating the creation of a city skate park for more than a year.

A production/process development scientist at St. Jude, Shafer moved to Memphis two years ago.

“I expected to see three or four skate parks peppered throughout the city because that was my reality,” Shafer says. “In the Bay Area [of San Francisco], you’ve got 20 parks to choose from. In roughly the same size area, Shelby County has one.”

That realization left him shocked and bummed about his new home.

“It was already a big sacrifice coming here,” he says. “I can give up surfing and the ocean, but not being able to skate was too much.”

He decided to start a movement; he launched a website in September 2006 and met with representatives of the city’s park services division two months later.

“They were pretty amenable to the idea. I presented myself as a working professional coming in from the outside, saying these are the sorts of amenities available in other parts of the United States,” Shafer says.

Parks services director Cindy Buchanan says the city became interested in building a skate park more than five years ago. In its earlier incarnation, the park was to be located at the Mid-South Fairgrounds, but for whatever reason, it never came to fruition.

Now skateboarders are getting another chance. When the City Council approved its 2009 budget last month, it included $440,000 to build an 8,000- to 10,000-square-foot skate park.

Buchanan says the park is still in the concept phase — the city needs time to explore all the legal and liability issues related to it.

“This is the first one,” Buchanan says. “We’re probably going to take a lot of time to make sure we do everything right.”

In April, the city hosted a well-attended rally at the Fairgrounds to determine how much interest a skate park would generate. Buchanan was surprised by how young some of the skaters were — no older than toddlers, really — and participants ranged from those young children to middle-aged adults.

“It verified that people weren’t just saying, oh, yeah, we’d love to have one. I was pleased to see how many people came to show solidarity,” she says. “This skate park is another amenity that we can provide for the citizens. … We want to get something out there so skateboarders won’t get in trouble doing the recreational activity they love.”

Though a location has not yet been determined, Shafer’s preference is inside Overton Park. In a survey of local skateboarders and alternadads (and moms), Overton Park also was the favorite. Other suggestions included Audubon Park and Tobey Park near the Fairgrounds.

An 8,000-square-foot park will be able to accommodate about 20 to 40 skaters safely. “Otherwise,” Shafer says, “it will be pandemonium.”

He estimates that Memphis has roughly 2,000 skaters who skate every day, mostly on the street and on homemade ramps.

In addition to the city park, Shafer is working with the Hyde Foundation and the Riverfront Development Corporation to develop another skate park — a larger, regional one — on Mud Island.

“I think it’s more than a skate park. I think it’s about amenities available to young families,” Shafer says.

In the meantime, Shafer has built a half-pipe in the backyard of his Midtown home.

“It’s a place where you can forget about your daily concerns and burn off a lot of stress,” Shafer says. “It’s a meditative sport, because you’re so focused on what you’re doing.”

And, as Lasiter says, people will find a way to do what they love, no matter what.

“Kids need a place to go,” Lasiter says. “Otherwise, they’re going to be terrorizing commercial property. [A skate park] is to everybody’s benefit.”

Categories
News The Fly-By

In the Dog House

CREDIT: by Bianca Phillips

Almost all the dogs held at Fayette County Animal Rescue’s five-acre facility in Rossville have touching stories. Tiffany, a sweet-natured black pit bull, was shot in the hip. Another pit bull named Derrin is missing all the hair on his back after his former owner poured acid on him.

Tiffany, Derrin, and about 40 other dogs live comfortably at Fayette County Animal Rescue, the area’s only nonprofit no-kill shelter. But if a handful of the facility’s neighbors have it their way, the dogs will soon have to go.

In late May, the Fayette County Board of Zoning Appeals ruled that the animal rescue operation was operating in violation of residential zoning codes and had until September to shut down or find a new home. The decision came after neighbors complained about barking dogs.

Fayette County Animal Rescue director Gina Thweatt plans to appeal the board’s decision at a Fayette County Commission meeting next month.

Though the shelter has been operating in the same location for 10 years, neighbors didn’t start complaining about the noise until last fall.

“We’re not against animal rescue, but we can’t stand the constant barking,” says Marsha Baker, whose home is located a few acres away from the property. “There’s a proper place for everything, and we just don’t want this in our neighborhood.”

Thweatt says the dogs, who are housed in outdoor kennels, only bark at feeding times or when a stranger is on the property. When this reporter visited, several dogs barked for a minute or so but stopped shortly thereafter.

“We’ve started making some changes to help with the noise. We’ve put bark collars on the dogs, and we planted some shrubbery [in front of cages] to act as a buffer,” Thweatt says. “We changed our employees’ schedules to make sure no one was feeding really early in the morning.”

The group has served as the county’s main rescue operation, but due to the zoning board’s decision, it has stopped taking in new animals. All dogs are now being placed in Fayette County’s official animal shelter, which can only house 10 canines at a time.

“I know that our animal control officers have called Fayette County Animal Rescue numerous times to aid in taking in abused animals,” says Jim Gallagher, the only person on the four-member zoning board to vote in favor of the shelter. “They recently aided animal control officers in a puppy-mill situation, and they had room for 26 [cocker spaniels] that were seized.”

Fayette County Animal Rescue is holding adoption events in Memphis nearly every weekend to make the move easier if the Fayette County Commission doesn’t overturn the zoning board’s decision. The next adoption event is scheduled for Petsmart near Wolfchase Galleria on Saturday, July 5th.

Categories
Opinion

The Man Who Didn’t Say No

What if Rickey Peete had said “hell no” to Joe Cooper’s bribe back in 2006?

I think the former city councilman — who did not say no and is serving four years in prison — had a rare opportunity to drastically change the course of his own life and even the course of Memphis history with an existential choice at that fateful meeting.

I thought of Peete last week while I was interviewing his former Beale Street associates Onzie Horne and John Elkington for this week’s cover story. Both of them have known Peete since his first bribery conviction nearly 20 years ago and his political comeback and reelection to the council.

Horne replaced Peete as head of the Beale Street Merchants Association, which represents the businesses that employ some 700 people on Beale Street.

“The whole episode involving Rickey was emotional for them,” Horne said. “You can see the hurt in them still today. Because they trusted him and were so disappointed and were genuinely hurt for Rickey and his family. Only now are they completing the healing. I think that’s why they went so long before getting a new director.”

Elkington is head of Performa Entertainment Real Estate, the company that manages and leases the district, where Peete regularly ate lunch at the King’s Palace Café with bigshots such as Jerry West and Michael Heisley, owner of the Grizzlies.

“He could bring people together and make things work out,” Elkington said. “For all the negative things people say about him, he had the ability to form coalitions and make people work together. He had a way of working with merchants to get them to not go to the lowest denominator and instead believe that a rising tide lifts all boats. It was such a shock to everyone down there. I mean no one had a clue what Rickey was doing.”

I heard similar generous comments after Peete resigned from the City Council from former colleague Tom Marshall and from Jeff Sanford, executive director of the Center City Commission, where Peete was chairman of the board. Some of this was political courtesy and refusal to kick a man when he was down. When a council member gets himself or herself appointed to several powerful boards it can be a danger signal. And rubbing elbows with the rich and powerful can stoke greed and envy.

But Rickey Peete, with his 100-watt smile and hearty handshake and his courtesy and attentiveness in council meetings, was one likable politician. Like a lot of other people, I wanted to believe he was a reformed rogue.

So what if he had said no to Good Old Joe? I think he would have been a hero. I know he would have stayed out of prison. He would have derailed undercover federal investigations of political corruption in Memphis, possibly for years. And he might even have achieved his dream of becoming mayor of Memphis.

Consider this fictional reconstruction of the scene that didn’t go down in Peete’s office in the fall of 2006.

“So how about it, Rickey, three large to support my man’s billboard deal?”

“Hell no, Joe, you’re offering me a bribe. Been there and done that. Prison sucks. It wouldn’t surprise me if you’re wired up right now and working with the FBI. I hope you are because I’m going to the federal building right after I kick you out of this office, and then I’m going to tell the United States attorney, the FBI, and the media what a scumbag you are. I’ll be the one playing tapes. Rickey Peete is not for sale.” (big smile)

It’s not like this never happens. Famous Mississippi trial lawyer Richard “Dickie” Scruggs is going to prison for five years because Circuit Court judge Henry Lackey refused to take a $50,000 bribe and instead reported it (three days later) to federal prosecutors, who wired his office and set up a sting. A year ago, Scruggs was the toast of Oxford and one of the richest men in Mississippi. In a few months, he’ll be a prisoner.

With his theatrical flair and political ambition, Peete could have played Cooper and the FBI like a fiddle. Imagine the headlines: “Peete Busts Feds in Foiled Sting; ‘Furious’ at Being Targeted.” So why didn’t he? I suspect because the FBI, Cooper, and Peete himself knew damn well he would take the money because he had taken it before, probably more than we know.

Ethics rules, corruption laws, and prosecutions are fine, but our political culture ultimately comes down to individual decisions about right and wrong. It’s their choice, and ours.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

The Illusionist

Mayor Willie Herenton‘s “press briefing” with the assembled local media last Thursday can fairly be called a bull session — in more senses of the term than one.

Though the news media themselves were among the targets of Herenton’s “J’accuse” — along with federal law enforcement and the local business establishment — media members who sat in the Hall of Mayors for upwards of an hour with the mayor would acknowledge among themselves later on that they never had a better time.

For all his impassioned accusations of a serious conspiracy to bring him down, Herenton was in high good humor — a case in point being his implied threat, at the very end of his discourse, to run again. “I was thinking of retiring, but I must be doing something right,” he jested, enjoying the tease as much as the reporters themselves did.

And there’s the simple fact that Herenton makes for good copy. Nobody does it better — whether it’s alleging a sexual blackmail plot against himself (election season 2007) or declaring himself a major prophet ordained for special vengeance missions by the Lord (January 1, 2004, and various points thereafter) or warring against his City Council (for much of his fourth term) and the city school board (at various points from the second through fifth terms) or challenging a City Council member to “step outside” a conference room (Brent Taylor in 2004) and a former heavyweight champion to step inside a boxing ring (Joe Frazier in 2006) or dancing a lively two-step in church that would be memorialized on YouTube or …

But there’s no getting through such a list. And these, after all, are just some of the latter-day highlights from a public career that goes back for a turbulent half-century, through extended tenures as mayor, as school superintendent, as teaching cadre and principal, and as a youthful Golden Gloves champion who still boasts, “Once I got my growth, I never got beat.”

For better or for worse, Willie Herenton has become a figure of the first rank in Memphis political history. Arguably even the preeminent figure, outshining his historic foils in the Ford family, together or singly, and rivaling even the great Ed “Boss” Crump.

The mayor is now engaged in his most audacious effort ever — to revise history both backward and forward. At his Thursday media event, he made the extraordinary claim that he had never resigned — despite the incontrovertible and highly public evidence of his mid-March letter formally notifying CAO Keith McGee of his intent to resign as of July 31st.

Herenton maintained on Thursday that his statement had been qualified by “conditions” having to do with his opportunity to direct the affairs of Memphis City Schools, though no such conditions nor any reference to MCS are contained within his letter. The fact is, for a vital day or two, Herenton’s interest in the vacant school superintendency had been a matter for speculation only, along with other hypothetical reasons for his departure.

Ultimately, the mayor made it clear that — the school board willing — he did indeed want to crown his career of public service by a triumphant return to MCS. His lobbying of board members and of local CEOs (whom he prevailed to endorse his candidacy for school superintendent) was an open and obvious affair. The problem was that, with the singular exception of maverick member Kenneth Whalum Jr., the board wasn’t willing. Miami educator Kriner Cash, ungraciously dismissed by Herenton as a “third-rater,” was hired instead.

The result? Herenton began to insist, as he did again on Thursday, that he had never even sought the school job!

His primary task on Thursday, however, was more pointed. Charging that the recent federal prosecutions of his former protégé Joseph Lee and others were but political assaults on blacks in general and himself in particular, Herenton was clearly organizing his base in advance of a rumored future indictment relating to city contracts awarded to mayoral associates.

In essence, the mayor was daring the feds, who have just lost two public-corruption cases in a row, to proceed in the face of a daunting political scenario he has now prepared in advance. Having altered the past, Herenton has now gone to work on the future — revising the circumstances of reality in two directions at once.

The ancient Greeks had a word for that: hubris. You can look it up. In the lexicon of history, it keeps close company with that well-known biblical warning about the pride that goeth before a fall.

Categories
Special Sections

Beale Street Tonight

CREDIT: Stephen Strathdee | dreamstime.com

The 4th of July is not only a celebration of freedom. For Memphians, it means hot weather, big beers, and a huge fireworks show. The celebration takes place on the river at Tom Lee Park from 3 to 11 p.m. There will be a “kid zone” with activities for tykes and beer and bands for grown-ups. Local groups the Nina Makris Band, C-Note, Tom, Dick, & Harry, The Soul Shockers, and Ten Years will perform. Admission is free, and the fireworks will begin around 9:30 p.m. Afterward, take a walk down historic Beale Street and party like it’s 2008!

Categories
Book Features Books

The Big Easy?

When Julia Reed met the man of her dreams and, at the age of 42, finally got married, she realized it was time to move on — and out: out of a former slave quarters off Bourbon Street in New Orleans. The apartment sat secluded behind a Creole cottage, and it was your classic French Quarter setup: charming and crumbling.

Reed — a native of Greenville, Mississippi; a senior writer at Vogue; a contributing editor at Newsweek; and a food writer for The New York Times — loves to entertain, but her oven was the size of a tin can. Her dishwasher wasn’t hooked up to a water line. And her microwave … well, she didn’t have a microwave. There wasn’t enough counter space. But there was no end to the noise.

Located between the two biggest gay bars in New Orleans, nights inside Reed’s place were spent thumping to the disco beat; mornings to the sound of a tone-deaf nun singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” at the nearby Cathedral School. Add to this the “triage unit” Reed’s landlord had hired to make repairs. If it wasn’t bricklayers at the crack of dawn, it was roofers who’d leave in the afternoon without tarping over the holes they’d made. Given a rain storm, Reed’s rugs would get soaked and her books water damaged. For further damage, factor in the wildlife below and above ground: subterranean termites and flying Formosan termites.

Time, then, for Reed and her husband John to search the Garden District for a house, which they finally found: a Greek Revival at the corner of First and Chestnut — another New Orleans classic but one in need of mega repairs. And time, according to Reed’s The House on First Street (Ecco/HarperCollins), for the real troubles to begin.

Start with Eddie, the couple’s contractor, and his team of immigrant workmen. You want a room torn to bits? No problem. You want a room painted once and right, outdoor paving laid according to plan, or a roof that doesn’t (repeatedly) leak? Eddie is not your man, but he was Reed’s. She threatened, repeatedly, to kill him.

And then there was Antoine, a handyman with a heart — when he wasn’t in jail. The charges: public drunkenness or possession of crack. (Reed bailed him out, repeatedly.)

And then there was the day, 10 months into the renovation of the house and four weeks after the couple finally moved in, when a hurricane hit, then the levees broke. It was 2004.

Reed and her husband, a lawyer, were the lucky ones, and she knows it. The couple fled for a time to her parents’ house in Greenville, and they returned to New Orleans days after Katrina to find their house in one piece. But major areas of the city … You know the story. The House on First Street is subtitled My New Orleans Story, but it’s the city’s story too in the aftermath of Katrina, with Reed filing early, onsite reports for Newsweek; Reed traveling with and delivering food to National Guard units; and Reed tracking the whereabouts and safety of those who’d served not only in her kitchen but as her friends. And then there are the chefs of the city, who got their restaurants running in the face of terrible conditions.

New Orleans’ road to recovery continues to this day. But the road to The House on First Street was a hard one too, because in the epilogue, we read of Reed’s no end of rotten luck. Roughly a year ago, her book was ready for the publisher. But a burglar got his hands on some things: the author’s TVs, some jewelry — and her computer. She’d backed up exactly one chapter of her book.

Renovation of a house. Recovery of a whole city. It’s all in how you look at it, but try rewriting a book from scratch. Reed did. She had to. And it’s hard to imagine the lost version being funnier, more exasperating, and more affecting. For fans of Reed’s previous book, the best-selling Queen of the Turtle Derby, I don’t have to tell you.

Julia Reed will be signing The House on First Street at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on Wednesday, July 9th, at 6 p.m. She’ll also be at Square Books in Oxford the next day at 5 p.m. But before Reed’s booksignings in Memphis and Oxford, the Flyer had a chance to talk to her by phone from New York City, where she was scheduled for a booksigning. It was the third stop on a national tour. But the interview ran into a problem: the whereabouts of Julia Reed. Twenty minutes after the scheduled time for our talk, the publicist was saying that Reed was trying to call, but there was no word from Reed. Then there was, with an apology for not calling on time and a kindly request. I’ll leave it to Reed to describe:

Julia Reed: This is the wayward Julia. I’m so sorry for not calling you on time. My phone died. I was on the street in New York. I’ve literally had to duck inside a friend’s apartment to make this call.

The Flyer: Thanks, and that’s nice of you to do.

Oh no, it’s not nice.

Why not?

Because today has been crazy. I’m going to ask if you could postpone this interview until tomorrow.

Fine. I can get back to cleaning my apartment.

I know the feeling. I was cleaning the pile on my desk last week, and I found unopened invitations to last year’s Christmas parties. My office is a very scary place. Tomorrow then …

[Tomorrow]

It’s the wayward Julia again … finally. You must have a really clean apartment by now.

I do. And today’s better for you than yesterday?

I’m fine. My book party last night, which was supposed to last from 6 to 8, ended up lasting till midnight. But here I am. Slightly worse in voice but not by much. I’d better start behaving. If I act like this for every signing on this tour, I’ll be dead.

The House on First Street is about a home renovation, and it’s about your adopted hometown, New Orleans, during the worst natural disaster this country has seen. But it’s also a homecoming of sorts for you, back to Greenville, Mississippi, where you grew up.

I left Greenville when I was 16 to go to boarding school, and I pretty much never came back. I worked in Washington, moved to New York. I was 44 when Katrina hit, so, at 44, when you move back in with your parents … well, that’s something you don’t count on happening.

But it was sort of nice. When I left home, the last place I wanted to be was where my parents were. So, after an interlude of 30 years, you appreciate it a lot more. It was a silver lining.

There was lots of talk after Katrina about who should have been FEMA director. Almost anyone but the one we had. My father … He would have made a better director. He was great. He immediately got wireless Internet for my husband and me, new phones.

While your mother was peeling tomatoes to feed the hundreds of those in Greenville who fled New Orleans.

Well, that was just obsessive, crazy. God forbid we have another hurricane. But if you are a refugee, a good place to go is Greenville, Mississippi.

What’s this about having to rewrite The House on First Street?

The book was due on a Monday. On the preceding Thursday, nobody was in the house for about one hour. A man broke in through a kitchen window, stole two or three TVs, all my jewelry — and my computer.

When my husband John got home and called to say the house had been broken into, it was like … the TVs are gone. That was really no big deal. The jewelry, which I had a huge freakout about later … At the time, I could deal with it. But when he literally could not get out the last line of what he was trying to tell me, I was convinced he was going to tell me my dog Henry was dead.

Julia Reed

“No,” he said. “The burglar kenneled him up!”

Henry’s so friendly my neighbor calls him the burglar’s assistant. He probably licked the guy’s face when he came in the window.

So, it was the computer that John was trying to tell me about. After the initial, complete, and total shock (and my not-lovely reaction, let me just say) … The best place for something like this to happen is New Orleans.

Why is that?

When they heard about the burglary, all my writer friends were like, “Oh Jesus, I would jump in the river if that happened to me, kill myself.” Whatever. In New Orleans, things are so bad that if you’re not dead or you didn’t lose your family or your house to Katrina, nothing really bad has happened to you. It’s a good place to keep your perspective.

So, I thought, Okay, I’ll just rewrite the book. I did say last night at the signing that I’d be happy to do something just once. My husband and I renovated a house, and then we sort of re-renovated it. I wrote a book, and it got stolen, so I rewrote it.

I thought you were going to tell me that the computer was recovered, and your book was too.

Hell no! Are you kidding me? The New Orleans police department?

They got fingerprints. They got the guy’s footprint. And I was like, this is great! But one police guy said, “Lady, this ain’t CSI.”

New Orleans didn’t even have a crime lab at the time. It took another year for me to rewrite the book.

Does the rewrite differ from the first version?

Who knows? You’re not the first person to ask me that, and I should have a better answer, but I don’t.

I don’t think it’s much different. Basically, it’s your life you’re writing about, and if you’re not somebody like James Frey, the story remains the same.

When your troubles began with the house and then Katrina hit, did you know at that point that you had a book?

I thought: renovating a house. It’s so not interesting. It’s everybody’s story. I had a renovation like everybody in the world has a renovation, which is a bad renovation. It’s not worth writing about — unless you have a hurricane or you live in Provence. My friend the artist Bill Dunlap — a hilarious guy, he’s from Mississippi — he described my book as “A Year in Provence meets The Poseidon Adventure.”

But a week before the storm, I was with my agent, talking about peddling a book idea: maybe my growing up in the Mississippi Delta, which used to be a much richer, more thriving place. We had an economy back then. Greenville was a great port city. We had a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper. Home of so many writers.

Then the storm hit, and I thought, Why am I writing about my former home when my current home is suddenly a lot more interesting? So I wrote about it immediately for Newsweek and for Vogue.

I knew that Doug Brinkley had gotten his contract for The Great Deluge. And there were other strictly storm books. So many books. My publisher wanted a book about New Orleans that would have staying power. I don’t know if I’ve done that. It is very much a description of a place before, during, and after. In a way, I’m hoping it stands up as a love letter.

And it is that — a testament to the people of New Orleans.

I’m a lot more optimistic about the future of the town now than I was before the storm. There were things like the school system, for example, that you could not have fixed without it literally being blown away. That’s a continuing story.

A lot of people saw the horror show the week after Katrina, and for them that was the end of the story. The city was under water. FEMA failed. Blah blah blah. What I still get a lot is: “How could New Orleans have reelected that mayor?” It’s a good question. We have a buffoonish mayor who’s an idiot.

But I didn’t want the book to be political. The thing about New Orleans is: We made our own problems. Folks — the so-called social elite or economic elite — had opted out of any civic involvement. They were going to spend their life savings on their daughter having a successful Mardi Gras debut. That sort of thing.

That is a recipe for disaster, and we got a disaster. We dodged the hurricane, but after the levees failed, what was writ large was what a cesspool the city had been before the storm.

Now everyone with a remote backbone and brain realizes you get the government you deserve. And now you’ve got a level of volunteerism and civic responsibility that never existed before. You’ve got garden-club ladies lobbying the legislature when the government fails us, whereas before it would have been an eyeroll and “Oh, that’s just Louisiana and that’s our governor.”

The feds are doing us a huge favor too by arresting every single corrupt politician we’ve got left. You’ve read about the money in Bill Jefferson’s freezer. Jefferson’s whole family is now under indictment!

Sounds like Memphis.

Memphis has a lot in common with New Orleans.

You know the city well?

When I was a kid we went to Memphis to buy clothes or eat at Justine’s. You know, we’d just get in the car and drive. We’d stay at the Peabody. I’ve stayed at the Peabody more than any hotel in the country.

When I was growing up, Memphis and New Orleans were our twin cities.

Not Nashville, even though you had grandparents who lived there and you visited often. You write in The House on First Street that you even considered moving to Nashville, but you prefer a city with some grit.

Yes. You know that book by Peter Taylor, A Summons to Memphis, where he compares Nashville as a city of churches to Memphis as a city of barrooms. It’s the barrooms that “get” me.

It was the musicians and restaurant owners and chefs who got New Orleans somewhat back on its feet when the city was practically a ghost town.

The work those restaurant people did can’t be overestimated. The fact that where people used to eat … that those places were back a month after the storm. It was a reassurance.

New Orleans is a neighborhood town — neighborhoods that bump up against one another. A place like the Upperline restaurant: For those in New Orleans who live in that neighborhood, it’s their joint.

I think I gained 100 pounds going to all the restaurant reopenings. It was my civic duty.

Where does the rebuilding of New Orleans stand today?

At one point, there was lots of talk: Will New Orleans be rebuilt to look like Disneyland? First of all, it hasn’t been rebuilt! We don’t have to worry about it looking like Disneyland. You can’t pave over a culture.

Speaking of coming back, where’s your handyman, Antoine?

After I spent about a billion dollars on Antoine, he’s sadly back in jail, where I think, this time, I just might leave him.

And Eddie, your contractor?

I’m still having to correct mistakes he made. Eddie’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Don’t tell me he’s still doing work for you.

No! The other day, I looked at my office window, and it was cracked. I thought, How did that happen? We’d had a mildly windy day, and all of a sudden I had this huge crack in my office window. It was a window Eddie had forgotten to glaze. So it had been rattling around. A thousand dollars later, I replaced the damn window. Other little stuff you can’t even imagine. It was a major day when we actually got grass in our yard. But the house is pretty much done.

Why didn’t you, at some point, just say to hell with it?

Aside from the daily throwing-up-my-hands, what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-me, why-am-I-here, you think of the alternatives. We have a chance now to restore the best things about New Orleans. The choices are rich.

And you have yet another book. It’s due out soon.

It’s called … what? Ham Biscuits, Hostess Gowns, and it’s a collection of my food columns for The New York Times. But because The House on First Street was delayed for a year because of the rewrite, the new book bumps up against it. It’s an embarrassment of riches.

It is. Thank you, Julia Reed.

Thank you. I’m sorry to have driven you crazy.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Sweet Lady

CREDIT: Christopher Parks

Got a serious sweet tooth? Sharon’s Artisan Chocolates and Cheesecakes in Lexington, Tennessee, offers a variety of decadent desserts and other tasty treats that makes that two-hour trek seem awfully tempting, gas prices be damned. Thankfully, Memphians don’t have to make that chocoholic commute to get their hands — and mouths — on them.

Each Wednesday, Sharon’s owner Sharon Fajans loads her van with coolers of delightfully rich chocolate truffles and creamy sweet cheesecakes and baskets of freshly baked breads and drives them to the farmers market at the Memphis Botanic Garden. Fajans’ top sellers include truffles in a variety of flavors, such as dark and milk chocolate, caramel, chocolate raspberry, mocha latte, and espresso. The truffles are beyond creamy, and the taste lingers a few sweet moments after the last bite.

Fajans also sells cheesecakes in classic, key lime, and chocolate. The key lime is exceptional: a tangy fresh melt-in-your-mouth twist on the classic New York-style variety.

She recently introduced her artisan breads, including rustic Italian, semolina, and focaccia. The baked breads come out of the oven at noon on Wednesdays before she heads to Memphis.

“I have an in-house kitchen in my shop. I do it mostly by myself and all by hand,” Fajans says.

“I perfected the recipes over time through trial and error. My classic cheesecake recipe came from my husband’s side of the family, but I’ve also come up with a 60 percent chocolate cheesecake and the key lime cheesecake for summer. They are all very creamy and light,” Fajans says.

Fajans’ retail shop opened last November in Lexington. Customers can purchase fresh goodies in the store, but a large portion of her business consists of special orders.

“I work with a wedding planner in Lexington and make chocolates for weddings and special occasions, and I do truffles for party favors and gifts,” Fajans says.

Besides the aforementioned delectables, Fajans also makes biscottis, eclairs, dark-chocolate blueberry-walnut bark, apricot-almond bark, strawberry shortcake, and tiramisu, all from scratch. Fajans offers seasonal truffle flavors as well, such as pumpkin, eggnog, and peppermint during the winter holiday season. Simply put, she can whip up just about any treat imaginable.

Fajans has worked as a sous chef at an Italian restaurant in New York and also ran a chocolate shop in Arkansas, but she has been cooking since her youth.

“My mom was a baker, so I’ve been around it my whole life,” Fajans says. “It’s my passion. I love what I do. And I love chocolate, too,” she says.

She will continue to offer her goods at the Farmers Market at the Garden on Wednesdays and hopes to rotate between the downtown and Agricenter farmers markets on Saturdays.

To place an order or to find out more about Sharon’s Artisan Chocolates and Cheesecakes, visit her stand at the Memphis Botanic Garden’s farmers market between 2 and 5 p.m. on Wednesdays or call her shop at 731-968-0400.

Sharon’s Artisan Chocolates and Cheesecakes, 60 Natchez Trace Drive South, Lexington

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Summer School

CREDIT: by Justin Fox Burks

Is there any better season than summer to learn new cooking skills, when both produce and free time are more plentiful?

The folks at the Memphis Botanic Garden certainly agree, which is why a cooking series called “Taste of the Garden” offers affordable Saturday-morning classes on summertime foods.

“The classes are casual and family-friendly, using recipes that are simple and easy to prepare,” says Jana Gilbertson, director of marketing and public relations for the Botanic Garden.

Summer squash is the theme for the next class on July 12th, followed by grains on August 16th, and fall squash on September 13th.

“That’s a lot of squash,” admits Gilbertson, laughing, “but we tie our class themes into foods that are readily available at our weekly farmers market on Wednesdays.”

Local chefs conduct the classes, offering demonstrations, tastings, and recipes. Gardening experts can participate, as well. “If we have a nice example in our garden of the food we are highlighting, we might walk out and take a look or discuss how to grow it,” Gilbertson says.

Class size is limited, so participants should register in advance. Classes cost $4 for members of the Botanic Garden and $6 for nonmembers.

“Taste of the Garden,” Memphis Botanic Garden (636-4128)

Seasonal produce also is influencing Mantia’s restaurant and market in East Memphis, where “The Sicilian Table,” “Summertime Salads,” and “An Antipasto Party” are three of six upcoming classes scheduled for summer.

“I think produce from the farmers markets will be even more popular this summer since the great tomato scare,” says store owner Alyce Mantia. “At least we know where local tomatoes have come from.”

One of Mantia’s classes, called “Too Many Tomatoes,” will teach new uses for summer’s most prolific food, and another class, called “Where’s the Beef?,” will offer unusual burger recipes using seafood, lamb, and turkey.

All classes are a “make-and-taste” demonstration format, meet at 6 p.m. on weekdays, cost $35 per person, and require advance registration. Go to mantias.com for class dates, which were not available at press time.

Mantia’s, 4856 Poplar (762-8560)

Here’s more good news for summertime leisure: Continuing education at the University of Memphis is back with cooking and tasting classes offered in three-hour evening sessions.

Course selections are an eclectic mix for cooks who aren’t serious foodies, explains Vicki Murrell, director of professional and continuing education. “We’re not interested in fancy cooking,” Murrell says. “We want classes that teach basic skills, like how to chop up food without leaving a fingertip in the sauce.”

Upcoming classes include “Dinner in the Pantry,” taught by Melissa Petersen on July 21st, and “Great Brews,” a two-session tasting conducted by Steve Barzizza on July 15th and 17th. Each class costs $59.

Later in the month on July 29th, Phyllis Cline will conduct a class called “Desperation Dinners,” offering shortcuts and organizational advice for preparing 30-minute meals.

“I start with all the ingredients on the counter and don’t do any chopping or preparation in advance,” says Cline, the owner of Forty Carrots in East Memphis. “I want people to really see how to make a quick and delicious meal.”

Cline also will provide plenty of advice on topics such as how to freeze food efficiently. “It doesn’t do any good to get home and have a three-pound lump of frozen hamburger,” she says. “Instead, make an extra meat loaf, slice it up, and freeze it in individual servings.”

If summer offerings don’t work, fall classes on vegetarian cooking, stretching food dollars, and healthy eating will begin soon after Labor Day. A complete listing will be published in continuing-education catalogs, available in mid-August at libraries, local bookstores, and online (http://umce.memphis.edu).

Professional and Continuing Education, University of Memphis (682-6000)

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Wanted: Dead, Not Alive

It’s always a little agonizing wondering what the worst movie of the year is going to be, but here we are at the halfway point, and the title of the year’s worst has already been claimed: Wanted, the new action-movie comic-book adaptation starring James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, and Morgan Freeman.

Let’s be clear up front: Wanted has a few great action sequences and intermittent visual panache. It’s based on one of the better comic miniseries of the last five years. The film’s ambitious, but it plays out as a negative. It doesn’t walk the tightrope between too much and not enough — it hangs itself with it. Wanted is truly terrible.

Wesley Gibson (McAvoy) is a white-collar loser, an accountant stuck in a cubicle-correct world with no desire to move beyond it. Gibson’s regularly subjected to a bullying boss, and his girlfriend is cheating on him with his best friend. Hell, even his dad left him when he was only 7 days old. As Wesley says in narration, “I’m the most insignificant asshole of the 21st century.”

That’s until Gibson is rescued from a gunman’s bullets by Fox (Jolie) and is informed that his dad was one of the greatest killers of all time — a member of a secret group of assassins called the Fraternity — and that Wesley has inherited all of his pop’s genetic badassness and million-dollar fortune.

Faster than you can say “montage,” the pathetic weakling becomes a force to be reckoned with, and he’s inducted into the Fraternity. He’s charged with assassinating select people, all determined by a loom, which spits out a hit list based on a complex code built into the threads. The code of the Fraternity: Kill one person and maybe save a thousand. They’re the warriors of fate, the weavers of doom. Oh, yes.

Wanted piggybacks on Fight Club, Office Space, The Matrix, Terminator 2, comic-book origin stories, and fantasy coming-of-age formulas. The movie is so preposterous, it even draws into question the worth of its source material. I almost don’t like fiction anymore after watching Wanted.

The film is directed by Timur Bekmambetov, who also made the visually exciting but dramatically discombobulated Night Watch (and its sequel, Day Watch). Bekmambetov is talented but shows no restraint. Wanted is shot and edited like an epileptic seizure. There are a number of gee-whiz moments — usually spooling in slo-mo — but it’s hard to appreciate them amidst all the chaos. Bekmambetov makes 100-image-a-second movies in a 24-frame-a-second medium. It’s too much.

The comic book that Wanted is based on is light years away from the film in terms of plot, back story, and theme. In the book, Wesley becomes an actual villain — a murderer and a rapist who, in the infamous last few pages (Spoiler Alert!), tells the fanboy reader just what’s going on in the world while everybody’s spending their time consuming pop culture.

Sure, no studio is dropping tens of millions of dollars to make that movie. But, in trying to make the characters fundamentally good guys, the filmmakers have made the whole enterprise morally repugnant. The comic was mean; the movie is mean-spirited. There’s no subversion or satire, just good ole American violent consumerism. Built, as it is, on the absurd loom-and-weavers premise (an addition just for the movie —  thanks, screenwriters!), Wanted is a great cinematic abortion. It’s not as steep a drop-off from source material to film as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but that’s the ass it’s sniffing.

Wanted

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