Month: September 2008

GonerFest: Take 5

Post author By Andrew Earles
Post date September 25, 2008

Garage rock, power pop, punk rock, and a few other visceral permutations of rock ruled the game at last year’s GonerFest, a now semi-legendary rock festival curated by local record store and label Goner. This year, the evolving festival — which begins with, of all things, a Ping-Pong tournament Wednesday, September 24th, before the musical assault launches the next day — expands beyond its garage/punk base, roping in a diverse landscape of independent rock bands over four days and nights at five locations.

GonerFest stalwart King Louie One Man Band kicks things off with a 5 p.m. performance Thursday at the Goner Records store in Cooper-Young, which also will be hosting a photo exhibit by the San Francisco-based Geoff Ellis, the man behind Sad Kids, the wonderful photography zine that focused its last issue on GonerFest 4.

“I wasn’t getting the attention I wanted through gallery openings, and doing a zine in 2008 actually puts me in a unique area,” says Ellis, a onetime Memphian who recently shot the cover for comedian Brett Wienbach’s next album. “People pay attention to it, because the web is saturated with photography blogs.”

Thursday night’s set at the Hi-Tone Café starts with San Francisco’s Sic Alps, one of the more talked-about bands of the festival. Sic Alps’ sound is informed by the lo-fi indie rock of the ’90s, along with the primal stomp of early garage-rock bands such as the Troggs or Pretty Things, unifying these influences via an inspired melodic sense and with the guts to blanket choice moments in layers of noise.

The more-pop-than-garage Crusaders of Love will represent France on their first U.S. visit. A totally different but no less interesting mindset will follow when Dan Melchior takes the stage. Melchior, a Brit who has been based in New York and, more recently, North Carolina, has appeared on more than 30 releases during the past 11 years, collaborating with Billy Childish and Holly Golightly, recording solo, or fronting Dan Melchior’s Broke Revue. The latter released three great, full-length albums from 1999 to 2002 on the labels Sympathy for the Record Industry and In the Red.

Continuing Thursday night’s overload of goodness and hailing from the same San Francisco scene that spawned Sic Alps, Oh Sees are the current brainchild of John Dwyer, veteran of, in his estimate, “20 to 30 bands and creative monikers.” The long list includes the sadly defunct Coachwhips (which also featured Sic Alps’ Matt Hartman), a stripped-down garage-rock band that recalled the glory days of John Spencer’s legendary Pussy Galore. Before that, Dwyer led the unclassifiable Pink and Brown. “After being in so many bands over the years, Oh Sees are seven or eight of my creative outlets crashing into one band, so to speak,” Dwyer says.

Among the lineup at this year’s Gonerfest: Vivian Girls

For those who are not too hungover or still asleep or both, the first of the official GonerFest satellite shows will take place Friday afternoon in the backyard of Light Years Vintage at 885 S. Cooper. The Touch-Me-Nots, a Bay Area couple who play country-tinged pop, will kick things off around 2 p.m. More pop will come by way of Indiana’s Eric & the Happy Thoughts before the set concludes with the promising punk-rock assault of locals Dead Trends.

Friday night’s show at the Hi-Tone commences with Jeff Evans & His Southern Aces, a new project that the Goner site refers to as “Evans backed by a new crop of Alabama studs.” Should be interesting.

Evidenced by the strength and increasing popularity of their eponymous debut on In the Red, Cheap Time have made serious strides since longtime Goner regular Jeffrey Novak (late of his one-man band the Rat Traps) formed the band in 2006. The cover design of Cheap Time’s album screams “power-pop throwback,” but the sounds within benefit from a revamped lineup and an appreciation of early-’70s glam.

“The Ooga Boogas were my favorite act of last year, and that was only their first performance in the States,” says Goner co-owner Zac Ives. “I’m really looking forward to seeing how they are a year later, after releasing an album.”

The place that the Ooga Boogas are coming back from, to be precise, is Australia, where they are sort of a sister band to soon-to-be-omnipresent (just wait) Eddie Current Suppression Ring, the most recent addition to the Goner Records stable (with the release of this month’s Primary Colours full-length).

Among the lineup at this year’s Gonerfest: Oh Sees

The “B” side of the Vivian Girls‘ seven-inch debut (“I Believe in Nothing”/”Damaged”) is one of my most frequently played pieces of new music in 2008. The band’s full-length debut will be released in a matter of days on In the Red. The album and the band are tough to pin down sonically — perhaps a low-budget My Bloody Valentine with gorgeous vocals, big hooks, and everything pushed through the speakers with drumming that evokes the Velvet Underground’s Mo Tucker.

They have two out of three predictions correct when it comes to GonerFest 5: “My vision of coming to Memphis is buying records at Goner, eating a lot of pizza, and partying a lot. People have warned us that there will be a lot of partying,” bassist Kickball Katy says.

Clocking in dangerously close to when some revelers will be rising after a round of early-morning after-parties, double-stage Murphy’s lineup for Saturday afternoon is alone worth the price of a three-day golden pass.

Blasting off at 1 p.m. with Chicago’s AV Murder, the lineup also includes the spazzy, fidelity-challenged pop of Eat Skull. Featuring former members of the Hospitals, Eat Skull are active participants in the rebirth of the Siltbreeze label, once a ’90s safe house for noisy, no-fidelity bands droning and screeching from the margins of underground rock (Dead C, Bardo Pond, Strapping Fieldhands).

To music fans who consider Arcade Fire or the Decemberists challenging fare, the Columbus, Ohio, trio known as Psychedelic Horseshit may sound like exactly that.

Among the lineup at this year’s Gonerfest: Intelligence

But ears trained in the above-mentioned noise-pop movements will hear mind-blowing hooks and inspired lyrics underneath the prickly blanket of noise and loose rhythm. They are highly recommended.

No strangers to a local stage, house party, or in-store performance, The Barbaras return to this year’s GonerFest with a Goner-released single (“Summertime Road”) under their belts and a Jay Reatard-produced full-length debut on In the Red scheduled for the near future. They command a whimsical pop sensibility somewhere between skiffle, the Beach Boys, and the forgotten glam of Roy Wood’s Wizzard.

“We’ve issued a challenge to certain audience members, and that challenge is to surprise us with something while we’re playing, just so long as it doesn’t interrupt the music,” says band member Bennett Foster. “If no one ends up doing a good prank or stunt, we have something that we’re going to unleash. Well, we’ll probably unleash it regardless.”

There’s no need to panic if attendance swiftly rises during the fourth hour. It just means that Jay Reatard and his band (Stephen Pope and Billy Hayes of the Barbaras) are about to take one of the stages. Moments later, Sector Zero will take an opposite stage. A vehicle for Goner co-owners Ives and Eric “Oblivian” Friedl, the band also includes Reatard on drums.

Also working to make this a very special afternoon are local hardcore hopefuls No Comply, The Oscars, with their first show in who knows how long, Alabama’s Wizzard Sleeve, Earthmen & Strangers, and Turpentine Brothers.

By this point, after processing the band schedule already covered, some readers probably are feeling phantom hangovers or hallucinating that their ears are ringing. Toughen up. It’s time for Saturday night back at the Hi-Tone.

Charging out of the gate will be Pierced Arrows, or Fred and Toody Cole of Dead Moon reborn with a different drummer. Lifers? The word doesn’t even begin to explain this couple. From his brushes with garage and bubblegum stardom in the ’60s (with the Weeds and the Lollipop Shoppe) on through countless bands until settling on the incredibly consistent Dead Moon in the mid-’80s, the Coles always have possessed more energy and passion than the vast majority of bands in their early 20s and will continue to do so two or three decades from now.

Regardless of this year’s impressive variety, there is no band playing GonerFest 5 that sounds quite like Intelligence. The baby of Lars Finberg, this Seattle band was long affiliated with A Frames due to Finberg’s membership in both. The (now-defunct) A Frames’ sound was an industrial post-punk wasteland with very rough edges, but Intelligence is less apocalyptic and more open to pop.

“When I saw this year’s GonerFest lineup, I thought, wow, it’d be great to play one of these things. [It includes] so many of my favorite bands right now,” Finberg says. “And then we were actually asked to play. I was really excited.”

The proverbial 25th hour of GonerFest 5 will be colored with the punk-rock slap of Static Static (John Henry, formerly of Detonations) and the decidedly different Box Elders, an up-and-coming Ohio trio. “Box Elders will be a dark horse coming out of nowhere this year and blowing people’s minds,” Ives says.

Tags Goner Records, Gonerfest, Music

News The Fly-By

A Dumpster-Free Downtown?

Post author By Bianca Phillips
Post date September 25, 2008

Even though the downtown Walgreens keeps its dumpsters locked, vagrants have mastered the art of popping the locks on the plastic lids.

“Every day, we have homeless people rummaging through our dumpsters. They get trash all over the place, and then our employees have to clean it up,” said Walgreens manager Sheila Scott.

Scott attended a meeting at the Center City Commission last week in which city public-works officials discussed an upcoming pilot program to rid downtown alleys of dumpsters.

The 30-day project will require business owners who keep dumpsters in the alleys to instead place trash in plastic bags held inside the business. City sanitation workers will make three to four stops at each business per day. The pilot program will affect businesses in the area bordered by Riverside Drive, Second Street, Court Avenue, and Monroe Avenue.

“One of our main problems downtown is dumpster divers. The vagrants and homeless pry lids open and scatter debris in the alleyways,” said public-works director Dwan Gilliom. “Also, many homeless people do their ‘business’ in and around dumpsters since they can’t use the bathrooms inside establishments. If you pass that walking through an alley on your way to lunch, you don’t even want to eat lunch.”

The pilot program, scheduled to start by the end of October, is modeled after a dumpster-free program in Seattle. Businesses in several historic districts there dispose of trash, recyclables, and compost in color-coded bags, which are picked up several times a day by Cleanscapes, a privately owned waste collection company.

“Our program is totally voluntary,” said Signe Gilson, waste diversion manager for Seattle’s Cleanscapes. “People have to call in and ask for service. But once people look into alleys free of dumpsters, it’s a no-brainer. Alleys with dumpsters look disgusting and smell horrible.”

The Memphis program will be managed by the city’s sanitation service. Gilliom said the pilot project will not require business owners to separate trash into color-coded bags, but if the pilot goes well, the city would extend the program to all of downtown and require separation of trash and recyclables.

The public-works division also will draft a new ordinance requiring the removal of most of the dumpsters in downtown streets and alleys if the pilot is successful.

Business owners who currently store dumpsters on private property, as well as some apartment buildings and hotels, will not be affected.

Gilliom estimates the new program will require an additional 11 city sanitation employees, but since business owners would be asked to pay for the color-coded bags, he said the program will pay for itself.

Opinion Viewpoint

Intoxicating the Voter

Post author By Parker Dixon
Post date September 25, 2008

Politics and beer. Beer and politics. The message is in the beverage. In fact, a major brewery has been a primary sponsor of the presidential debates for the last four presidential elections. Thus, if you watch the debates conducted by the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), it should come as no surprise that the debates share some of the characteristics of the sponsor’s advertisements.

No one ever consumes a beer in a beer commercial. Presumably, there are good intentions behind this rule. The most important being the avoidance of the perception that beer companies actually support drinking. It would be quite a PR hit if they appeared to be supporting abuse of a product that can cause negative effects such as alcoholism, DUI, liver disease, and death. The preferred message is that beautiful women and muscle-bound men are attracted to people who purchase beer.

The CPD, like its beer-hawking sponsor, has an interest in hiding the negative sides of its product from consumers. The CPD sells candidates and, to a lesser extent, their ideas to the American voting public. The founders, co-chairmen, and board of the CPD are Republicans and Democrats, so naturally they exclude third parties and limit probing questions and extended discussion on any issue. It would be a travesty for Republicans and Democrats to give anything other than prefabricated talking points. What if some brazen third-party candidate tried to debate them without the assistance of a teleprompter? How could they sustain such a monumental PR hit?

Fortunately for the Republicans and Democrats, they won’t have to face such horrific circumstances. Their organization sets the rules for inclusion in the debates, making it all but impossible for third-party candidates to qualify. They also negotiate a contract, which dictates who will be asking the questions and what type of questions can be asked. The contract sets out ground rules for the candidates, such as forbidding the candidates from asking one another questions. All this is done in the interest of “educating the voting public” and “narrowing the issues” — presumably to fit in more beer commercials.

If this sounds undemocratic, others share that sentiment. The League of Women Voters, host of the presidential debates prior to 1987, withdrew its sponsorship from the debates “because the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter. It has become clear to us that the candidates’ organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity, and answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.”

After the league withdrew, the Democrats and Republicans simply created their own debate organization, the CPD, disguising it as a nonprofit and “nonpartisan.”

The warnings of the League of Women Voters are proving particularly prophetic in this presidential election. The U.S. is stuck in a multi-trillion-dollar quagmire in Iraq. The civil rights of Americans are eroding. Wall Street is collapsing, and health care is failing. Yet the Democrat and Republican solutions to these problems are virtually indistinguishable. There are rumors of alternatives floating around, but these are almost exclusively limited to the Internet. Ralph Nader and Bob Barr meet all but one of the criteria for inclusion in the debates and have views substantially different from the major-party candidates, but they are excluded.

It is obvious that the Democrats and Republicans are mutually responsible for the problems facing the U.S. today. What other parties have controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency for over 100 years?

Despite this, the American voters continue to buy into the tired rhetoric created by Republicans and Democrats and perpetuated by the national media that accuses third parties of being “spoilers.” It is as if the American public is voting under the influence — but of what? Perhaps the suds-soaked message of the CPD debates.

For those who believe in the concept of an informed, participatory democracy, the message is clear: “Crack open a cold beverage. It’s going to be a long night.”

Parker Dixon, a recent graduate of Mississippi College School of Law, helped arrange independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader’s recent visit to Memphis.

Film Features Film/TV

High Water All Around

Post author By Chris Herrington
Post date September 25, 2008

After hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, filmmakers Tia Lessin and Carl Deal headed south. Shooting at a FEMA assistance center in Alexandria, Louisiana, a couple hundred miles north of New Orleans, they met Scott and Kimberly Roberts, a couple of penniless refugees from the dirt-poor Ninth Ward, who had survived the storm — barely — at their home and then worked their way up to Alexandria.

Like everyone left in New Orleans during the storm, Scott and Kim had an amazing story to tell. But, more than most, they — especially Kim — had a means and drive to do so, and, in Trouble the Water, Lessin and Deal help them out while mostly staying out of the way.

An aspiring rapper (under the moniker Black Kold Madina), the 24-year-old Kim also owned a camcorder, which she used to document the coming of the storm, its full assault, and immediate aftermath. Fifteen minutes of Kim’s home-movie footage is interspersed throughout Trouble the Water, most of it in the film’s gripping first half. The second half is almost equally driven by Kim’s other mode of expression: fierce rap songs that speak of her experience before, during, and after the storm with candor and defiance.

Trouble the Water doesn’t surpass Spike Lee’s epic and mournful When the Levees Broke as the definitive documentary portrait of this national catastrophe, but it’s an intimate companion piece — somehow both more plainspoken and more poetic.

Lessin and Deal deploy damning media footage of New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and President George Bush early on but don’t overdue it: Political anger instead bubbles up from situations largely viewed from ground level.

The foreboding found in early scenes from Kim’s camcorder footage is a real version of the creeping dread that fictional films like Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project tried so hard to duplicate. Kim scans her kitchen, noting the bag of charcoal and meat packed down with ice — “stuff to get us through the hurricane. Everybody’s scared. Even my dogs are scared.”

Later, focusing her lens on neighbors loading up a car to evacuate, Kim’s voice, behind the camera, says, “That’s okay. I’d be gone too if I had wheels.” (This is juxtaposed with a Nagin press conference about the evacuation order. Asked how many people will be left, he responds, “I have no idea. We’re hoping everyone will leave.” No public transportation was arranged.)

Kim captures the anticipation — and lack thereof — in the neighborhood: guys outside the corner store joking that the police aren’t around (“they’re worried about the hurricane”); a man passed out on his stoop whom Kim wakes up.

Looking through her camera lens from her Ninth Ward porch as the rain starts to fall and trees start to sway, Kim delivers a monologue: “They put it on the news that we should get out. You got those people that just couldn’t leave. Like me. Not because we ain’t want to, but because we couldn’t afford the luxury. I tried to get a rental. … But I believe Jesus the Lord will send me through this one. Whenever the Lord allow it, I’ll be able to tell the story. August 28, 2005 … It’s me reporting live, Kold Madina.”

When we see Kim’s footage again, the levees have given way. Opening her screen door, she sees a car almost entirely submerged in the street. A stray voice speaks for everyone: “Damn, you see how high this shit is?” From there it gets surreal: a standing stop sign submerged in water; a neighbor floating by on a punching bag, another in a washtub.

The film retraces the couple’s escape (via a john boat that happened to float by) and subsequent journey out of New Orleans with Lessin and Deal: turned away from a military base; sleeping in an empty school; somehow (the film is vague on this point) getting hold of a truck to haul 30 people out of the city.

The first half of film — geared around Kim’s own footage — is a riveting first-person disaster movie, one that underscores the resilience of Kim and her Ninth Ward neighbors. (One of my favorite moments is Kim sitting down with a FEMA worker in Alexandria. “Do you always have TV cameras following you?” he asks nervously. “Yeah, usually,” she says, shrugging.)

Kim and Scott’s odyssey eventually ends up in Memphis (“Go up there and start my music career. Find me a church where I can worship”), where Kim has a cousin who’s watched the TV coverage of the disaster in horror. Tearful, the cousin says she won’t let her son join the military now. “You’re not going to go fight for a country that doesn’t care about you,” she says.

Unable to find work in Memphis, the couple returns to New Orleans but not, apparently, to their old lives. For Scott, life before Katrina isn’t much to be nostalgic about. In Memphis, he talks about not being able to find good work and dealing drugs to get by. “I hated my life down there, you know,” he says. “I really did. It was horrible.”

A year and a half later, Scott has found work in construction, and Kim is recording her music. They’re doing better, but the city is struggling, as a silent driving tour of lingering Ninth Ward devastation attests.

This endless tracking shot of flattened, bombed-out, debris-strewn landscape in the middle of an American city brings back to mind something one of Scott and Kim’s neighbors had said to a crew of Louisiana National Guardsmen earlier in the film: “We thank y’all for being in the city of New Orleans, and we pray y’all don’t have to go back to Iraq. It’s not our war. This is our war right here.”

Trouble the Water

Opening Friday, September 26th

Ridgeway Four

Politics Politics Feature

Stormy Weather

Post author By Jackson Baker
Post date September 25, 2008

CREDIT: by Jackson Baker

Though circumstances — including what appeared to be a slowly dawning second take on the part of various pundits and politicians — could change, the prognosis remained favorable for something like the massive federal bailout of Wall Street proposed late last week by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke.

An early backer of the plan was 9th District representative Steve Cohen. Forecasting “a massive change in the way government and the free market have interacted,” Cohen told reporters late Friday that Congress was prepared to work past its planned adjournment this week to “come up with a package that will rescue the economy.” The Memphis congressman expressed confidence in Secretary Paulson, “who at the present moment is the president.” (Doubts about Paulson’s lack of accountability under his plan already had begun to surface but have since accelerated and intensified.)

Discussing the current economic crisis at an impromptu press conference at his Midtown home, Cohen recounted for reporters “the most sobering conference call I’ve ever been in” — one that he and other members of the congressional Democratic caucus had earlier Friday with Paulson and Bernanke.

As other governmental figures had done, Cohen described the situation as “the worst crisis since the Great Depression.”

“Everybody’s pension, everybody’s job is at stake,” Cohen said. “Homes, mortgages, businesses, everything.” Cohen said the current congressional session might be extended through “the end of October,” right up to the eve of the presidential election, in order to work out all the ramifications.

In the Paulson-Bernanke scenario, Congress would in the short run assume a “massive” amount of debt (estimates ranging from $700 billion to $1 trillion) — much of it stemming from the subprime mortgage catastrophe that resulted in the collapse and near-collapse of several venerable Wall Street investment firms. In the long run, there must be serious reforms, “a change in the way the American people see their government,” Cohen said. “Our whole idea of the free market is history.”

Attributing the current crisis to “greed in the private sector and disregard in the public sector,” Cohen called for a return to the principle of regulation that had been forsaken by the current administration. Among a variety of other changes he suggested might be coming were curbs on “short selling” in the stock market, better capitalization, and an end to “the disgustingly high amounts of money” in golden parachutes that corporation executives have been given “for failing.”

Asked if he thought the crisis would have consequences in the current election environment, he assailed Republican presidential candidate John McCain for a “total disinclination” to deal with the economy and said, “I don’t see how it can fail to benefit the Democratic Party.” But he envisioned that the two parties would work together on an overall solution.

• For someone who has been a longtime national figure, Ralph Nader has an unassuming manner, but at this stage of his life he may, in the mode of onetime perennial presidential candidate Harold Stassen, also have a tendency to overstate his role in the scheme of things.

Both tendencies were on exhibit Friday, as Nader, assisted by one traveling aide and one local helper, came to Memphis for an appearance on behalf of his latest presidential candidacy. Speaking from a portable podium set up in front of City Hall (he had been denied access to the Hall of Mayors inside), Nader began modestly enough, introducing himself to a small battery of reporters as “an independent candidate for the presidency of the United States” and, taking note of a slowly gathering storm, asking politely, “Is that noise bothering y’all?”

Soon enough, the combination of thunder and heavy rain jeopardized the outdoor portion of the press conference. A game Nader, who already had discussed the current Wall Street crisis, “the worst meltdown since 1929,” as a scourging of taxpayers and giveaway to “crooks” and condemned the “pervasive” corporate influence within the two major parties, tried for a while to work the miscreant weather into his second major theme: Memphis’ location on the New Madrid Fault.

“Apropos this thunder, Memphis is in extreme peril of a disastrous earthquake. It’s not a matter of if, it’s only a matter of when,” Nader said, not very reassuringly. And that inevitable cataclysm would not only destroy Memphis but severely damage St. Louis. Worse: “This area has a major natural-gas trunk line going all the way to New England. The resulting fire would be like nothing any other city, including Chicago, has ever seen.”

Nader had gotten into his third point, relating to the Tennessee Valley Authority and purportedly untoward contracts TVA had with Bechtel and other corporations, when he yielded to the pleadings of his aide and finally surrendered to the raging elements, which, in every sense of the term, had begun to drown him out.

“Let’s go inside,” the aide insisted. Nader sprouted a grin: “Why? Do you suppose there’s a storm coming?” And, as he bundled up his papers and hurried inside City Hall, he turned to a reporter and observed, “This is almost like a Shakespearean play.”

Lear, thought the reporter, following the 74-year-old Nader inside.

When the press conference resumed, in a forward corner of City Hall just inside the doors, Nader continued listing planks in his platform: solar energy, wind power, a “massive technology efficiency program for automobiles” (shades of Unsafe at Any Speed, the 1966 philippic which made the young Nader’s name), a tax policy aimed at Wall Street excesses, addictive industries, corporate crime, gambling, and pollution — “all things we’d like to diminish” and not at workers’ wages.

Nader noted that he and vice-presidential running mate Matt Gonzalez of San Francisco are on the November ballots of 45 states, a fact which made them technically able to win the presidency in the Electoral College. He cited polls showing the ticket running at “5, 6, 7 percent” in various states and at 8 percent in New Mexico.

That should have qualified him for inclusion in the forthcoming series of presidential debates, he argued, and he held out hope that New York mayor Michael Bloomberg might have enough clout to arrange his inclusion in at least one of them. “He can pull it off,” Nader said.

The candidate was at pains to point out that, at a time when Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain were deadlocked in Florida, a sampling of voters that included Nader cost McCain votes but not Obama. This was clearly an effort to dissociate himself from culpability in the election of George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000.

“All he [Gore] had to do was win his home state of Tennessee, and he’d be president,” Nader pointed out. And, no matter how many votes he himself had won in Florida that might have gone to Gore, the fact was that the Republicans, aided by “the five politicians on the Supreme Court,” had “stolen” Florida and thereby the election for Bush.

In any case, Nader’s own conscience was clear. And, for all his hopefulness and determination and commitment to the serious reforms that he began advocating long ago in his muckraking days, the basic modesty of his demeanor suggested that he realized what everybody else has in 2008: He is unlikely to pose that kind of threat or have that kind of influence this time around.

Still, he was Ralph Nader, and as the reporters left, he stayed behind for a while inside City Hall, maybe to indulge the one or two bystanders and well-wishers who recognized him and wanted some time, or maybe just waiting for the weather to change.

• Just as a spate of rumors had it last week, David Kernell, the 20-year-old son of Memphis state representative Mike Kernell, a longtime Democratic legislator, is apparently the subject of a federal investigation into the widely publicized hacking of an e-mail account belonging to Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

After what seemed to be early confirmation to The Tennessean of Nashville that his son, a student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, was indeed being looked at by the feds, Kernell became more close-mouthed about the affair, confining subsequent statements to expressions of paternal concern and denials of his own foreknowledge of any hacking efforts by the younger Kernell. Mike Kernell’s legislative colleagues, Democrat and Republican, rallied around the Memphis legislator and confirmed that he was unlikely to have been involved.

The younger Kernell was seemingly still on the spot, though, as details emerged both the method and the motive of his effort smacked less of the sinister than of the prankish.

Whoever hacked into Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account apparently did so by trial-and-error use of common facts known about the Alaska governor to retrieve and then change her password, meanwhile accessing the contents of her e-mails. When several of these were posted on the Wikileaks.org site, however, they turned out to be unrevealing, consisting mainly of routine personal and political chattiness, though some of the e-mails may have involved official business.

Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters to the Editor

Post author By Flyer Readers
Post date September 25, 2008

Bass Pro and the Pyramid

From the perspective of my 25 years of work in the Memphis tourism industry, I’m particularly sensitive to Memphis’ image. This letter is motivated by an impending disaster to the city’s image.

By chance, I happened to see renderings of the exterior alterations proposed by Bass Pro to transform the Pyramid into a retail store/Grand Lodge. I could not believe my eyes that such a grotesque plan was, I presume, seen and approved by both the City Council and the County Commission at the August 25th presentation for the project.

The Pyramid is the city’s major physical icon, so it is inexplicable to me that the Bass Pro renderings have not been made public, especially since, by virtue of their presentation at the aforesaid meeting, the report and renderings are now public record.

Attached is a subject rendering. Note the dormer windows and the rustic lodge attached to the shiny Pyramid and the American flag at its apex.

Bass Pro’s intent, I understand, is to blend the appearance of the Grand Lodge and the Pyramid into an overall rustic look. Hopefully, that look will not include camouflage paint!

Don Hassell

Memphis

McCain and Banking

Those who question the sincerity of McCain’s enthusiasm for regulating the banking industry (which would have prevented this week’s $1.5 trillion freefall) have good reason to do so.

Here’s a quote from McCain’s article, “Better Health Care at Lower Cost for Every American,” in the September/October issue of Contingencies, the magazine of the American Academy of Actuaries: “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”

So McCain, who now poses as the scourge of Wall Street, was praising financial deregulation, like, 10 seconds ago — and promising that if we marketize health care, it will perform as well as the financial industry!

Please note that the cost of cleaning up the current catastrophe of financiers run amok will require $7,500 from every man, woman, and child in America.

Jerry Chen

Memphis

Science and Politics

This is in response to a letter from Chris Stahl (September18th issue):

Science is the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of natural phenomena, according to The American Heritage Dictionary. A lot of people may think that “science” is just about stem-cell research, evolution, the Big Bang, and eroding family values through the denunciation of religion. But it’s more than that.

The scientific method is humankind’s best approach to problem-solving. We should think of the results of scientific problem-solving this way: “If a human being made it, it was due to the application of scientific principles.” Think of all the items you use and interact with throughout your day. All “that” is due to scientific thinking and problem solving.

One may pray for more light, but I’ll flip the switch and thank the electrician.

I agree with Stahl that we need a debate between the candidates to determine who will problem-solve most effectively to get us out of the messes we are in.

Michael Rohr

Somerville

Best of Memphis Special Sections

Best of Food & Drink

Post author By Flyer Staff
Post date September 25, 2008

CREDIT: Alex Harrison

Memphians are becoming more discerning diners. How do we know? In the past decade or so, as the number of ethnic-cuisine categories has grown, the number of readers who write in “gross” or “don’t eat that” has shrunk.

One other aspect of the voting worth mentioning: “Best Barbecue” received the most votes of any category on this year’s ballot. Priorities (and wet naps), right?

Best Chef

READERS’ CHOICE

John Bragg, Circa

Jose Gutierrez, Encore

Erling Jensen, Erling Jensen,
the Restaurant

It’s true: Good things do come in threes. This trio of popular restaurateurs — two downtown and one in East Memphis — divvied up the ballots for “Best Chef,” with no one winning a clear majority. Which, when you think about it, means three times as much prize-winning food for Memphis diners.

Best Burger

BOM 1. Huey’s

2. Earnestine & Hazel’s

3. Big Foot Lodge

Hey, guess what? Huey’s won “Best Burger.” Again. The late Thomas Boggs’ culinary and civic legacy exemplifies the very Best of Memphis and always will.

Best Breakfast

by Justin Fox Burks

Owen Brennan’s Restaurant, 1st place: Best Sunday Brunch

1. Brother Juniper’s

2. Blue Plate Café

3. Cracker Barrel

Brother Juniper’s isn’t a big place. It’s tucked away near the Highland Strip, where no chain restaurant could survive. And it’s not easy to get a table on weekend mornings. That’s because Brother Juniper’s offers delicious homemade breads, breakfasts your mother never had the nerve to make, and a unique yet familiar charm.

Best Romantic
Restaurant

1. Paulette’s

2. The Melting Pot

3. Le Chardonnay Wine Bar & Bistro

Feel like makin’ whoopee? Well, don’t try it at Paulette’s. The other diners will get upset. But as a romantic prelude to makin’ whoopee? Flyer readers say you can’t go wrong at the little white restaurant on Madison. And don’t forget dessert.

Best Sunday Brunch

Alex Harrison

Flyer readers say Hueys is the best place to go for lunch. And who can blame them? Seven locations scattered all over the metro area offer great burgers, fries, chicken fingers, salads, po boys, and more. And most important, you can still shoot toothpicks at the ceiling tiles. Just remember to act innocent if one of yours falls into somebodys food at the next table.

1. Owen Brennan’s Restaurant

2. Boscos Squared

3. Peabody Skyway

Owen Brennan’s Sunday brunch offers six serving stations — one each for salad, seafood, bread, prepared entrées, cooked-to-order entrées, and dessert. Most brunch customers don’t eat again until Tuesday.

Best Wine List

1. Le Chardonnay Wine Bar & Bistro

2. Texas de Brazil

3. Ronnie Grisanti & Sons

Le Chardonnay crossed Madison Avenue this year, taking up larger quarters in the former Square Foods building. But they kept the great wine list and added a big fireplace. Don’t worry. It’s still dark as heck, perfect for a quiet rendezvous.

Best Steak

by Justin Fox Burks

Gus’s Fried Chicken, 1st Place: Best Fried Chicken

1. Folk’s Folly Prime Steak House

2. Ruth’s Chris Steak House

3. The Butcher Shop

Flyer readers are nothing if not loyal, and Folk’s Folly not winning “Best Steak” would be rare to medium-rare. It doesn’t take a medium to predict another meal well done by this East Memphis institution.

Best Barbecue

1. Central BBQ

2. Corky’s

3. Germantown Commissary — tie — The Bar-B-Q Shop

Central BBQ has elbowed its way into the upper tier of Memphis barbecue joints. And that’s fast company, indeed.

Best Ribs

1. Charles Vergos’ Rendezvous

2. Corky’s

3. Central BBQ

Rendezvous takes the top prize for ribs again. After 60 years of luring diners down the best-smelling alley in the world to savor the ultimate Memphis dining experience, what else would you expect?

Best Hot Wings

1. Buffalo Wild Wings

2. D’Bo’s Buffalo Wings-N-Things

3. Central BBQ

Buffaloes are to wings what Chicken of the Sea is to tuna. Or something. We know buffaloes don’t have wings, but Buffalo Wild Wings does, and they’re really good.

Best Fried Chicken

by Justin Fox Burks

Brother Juniper’s, 1st place: Best Breakfast

BOM 1. Gus’s Fried Chicken

2. Popeye’s Chicken & Biscuits

3. KFC

Smoky, crispy, explode-in-your-mouth fried chicken is the trademark of this Memphis-area restaurant. Well, that, and red-check tablecloths, cold iced tea, friendly help, and big lunch crowds.

Best Cajun/Creole

1. Bayou Bar & Grill

2. Owen Brennan’s Restaurant

3. Pearl’s Oyster House

Bayou Bar & Grill may have moved to a new location on Madison Avenue, but this popular Midtown eatery and watering hole hasn’t budged from its number-one position in the mouths and minds of Flyer readers. You can still waste a beautiful day on the patio sipping beer (or café au lait) while nibbling at a perfect po’ boy sandwich or scarfing down a bowl of alligator chili. Just don’t forget the beignets.

Best Mediterranean

1. Yia Yia’s

2. Casablanca

3. Bari

At first glance, one might wonder why Memphians picked Yia Yia’s as their favorite Mediterranean restaurant. The menu boasts dishes like Idaho rainbow trout and fresh Atlantic salmon, which are, by definition, not Mediterranean. But despite some American main courses, Yia Yia’s menu is inspired by the cuisines of Italy, Spain, Greece, and France. It’s a place where you can have perfect gnocchi with your Cobb salad or nosh on duck confit with polenta while waiting for your flank steak.

Best Dessert

1. Paulette’s

2. Beauty Shop

3. Big Foot Lodge

The crème brûlée is fine, the Bavarian apple strudel is special, and the hot-chocolate crepe is wicked. But the K-Pie (aka Kahlúa-Mocha Parfait Pie), a gigantic wedge of coffee ice cream in a coconut-pecan crust topped with fresh whipped cream and Kahlúa, is a rite of passage. by Justin Fox Burks

Fino’s from the Hill, 1st place: Best Deli

Best Italian

1. Ronnie Grisanti & Sons

2. Pete and Sam’s Restaurant

3. Bari

What’s so great about Ronnie Grisanti & Sons? Imagine a grilled Bartlett pear drizzled with balsamic vinaigrette and topped with toasted walnuts and Gorgonzola cheese. Follow that salad with a potato-crusted salmon in cipollini-onion butter. Wash it all down with an Italian red as dark and chewy as licorice raisins. That’s what’s special.

Best Mexican

1. El Porton Mexican Restaurant

2. Taqueria La Guadalupana

3. Molly Gonzales’ La Casita

Mexican Restaurant

El Porton is like the Mexican Huey’s. It’s fast, affordable, and consistently delicious — and with enough locations to ensure that no matter where you are, there’s always a margarita close by.

Best Chinese

1. P.F. Chang’s China Bistro

2. Wang’s Mandarin House

3. A-Tan

Monolithic horse sculptures, expertly mixed martinis, and Chengdu spiced lamb tossed with cumin and mint. What else do you want?

Best Thai

by Justin Fox Burks

Folk’s Folly, 1st place: Best Steak

1. Bhan Thai

2. Bangkok Alley

3. Sawaddii

Bhan Thai is coziness personified. The curries are exquisite, and the Singha is always ice-cold. Bhan Thai is veggie-friendly too.

Best Vietnamese

1. Pho Saigon

2. Saigon Le

3. Pho Hoa Binh

The spring rolls are nine-months pregnant with basil-wrapped shrimp. The flavorful noodle soups are as delicious as they are enormous. Pho Saigon is a no-frills operation with a vast, reasonably priced menu. The emphasis here is entirely on the food.

Best Japanese/Sushi

1. Sekisui

2. Bluefin

3. Sekisui Pacific Rim

Whimsy, flavor, and lots of locations make Sekisui Memphis’ favorite sushi bar. The eel-stuffed, mango-topped Pikachu roll is appropriately cute — and it kicks tail.

Best Indian

1. India Palace

2. Golden India

3. Bombay House

Two words: gulab jamun. After gorging on a lunch buffet of tandoori chicken, lamb korma, and a half-dozen samosas, there is always room for gulab jamun, those juicy syrup-soaked balls.

Best Home Cooking/Soul Food

1. The Cupboard

2. Soul Fish

3. Blue Plate Café

The fried green tomatoes and the divine cheese- and cracker-crumb-laden eggplant casserole at the Cupboard are truly good for your soul.

Best Vegetarian

1. Wild Oats Market

2. Jasmine

3. The Cupboard

Is it really fair to let Wild Oats, soon to be finally renamed Whole Foods, compete in this category? It’s the definitive whole-foods megastore for Memphis, and everywhere else, for that matter.

Best Tapas

BOM 1. Dish

2. Mollie Fontaine Lounge

3. The Brushmark

Sometimes it’s better to graze than to eat a huge meal. At Dish, the tapas menu features all sorts of yumminess, such as a Japanese pickle assortment with seasonal cheeses, wild mushrooms and goat-cheese wontons, and broiled scallops over edamame hummus.

Best Seafood

1. Tsunami

2. Bonefish Grill

3. Blue Fish Restaurant and Oyster Bar

With a menu featuring delightful dishes such as seared sea scallops with grilled pineapple salsa and cornmeal-crusted halibut with gazpacho vinaigrette, Tsunami once again placed first for “Best Seafood.” It looks like Flyer readers love sake-steamed mussels in Thai red-curry sauce, crispy calamari with chipotle aïoli, and … uh, we’ll be back … it’s time to eat.

Best Pizza

BOM 1. Memphis Pizza Café

2. Garibaldi’s Pizza

3. Coletta’s

Once again, readers say the best place for a mouthwatering slice is Memphis Pizza Café. Offering more than your typical slice of pepperoni with cheese, it’s the place to go for an out-of-the-ordinary and out-of-this-world pizza pie.

Best Deli

by Justin Fox Burks

Bhan Thai, 1st place: Best Thai

1. Fino’s from the Hill

2. Bogie’s Delicatessen

3. Young Avenue Deli

In a repeat win, the deli to take the cake in ’08 is Fino’s. Offering soups, cannoli, and tasty vegetarian and meaty subs in the heart of Midtown, there’s something delicious for everyone.

Best Bargain Dining

READERS’ CHOICE

Big Foot Lodge

Huey’s

Kwik Check

Pho Hoa Binh

Taco Bell

Everyone enjoys great meals on the cheap — especially when gas and groceries have reached their highest prices in years. Though voting was too close to call on this one, apparently Flyer readers like huge burgers and bar food, quick deli sandwiches, thrifty Vietnamese meals, and 79-cent tacos.

Best Service

1. Chick-Fil-A

2. Texas de Brazil

3. Houston’s Restaurant

Maybe it’s because they have Sundays off. But there’s always a smiling face behind the register at Chick-Fil-A when you want one of those tasty chicken sandwiches. And their drive-thru is pretty fast and efficient too.

Best Waiter/
Waitress

READERS’ CHOICE

Michele Fields, Calhoun’s Sports Bar

Jeffrey Frisby, Restaurant Iris

Tyler Lloyd, Mollie Fontaine Lounge

Chris Owens, Café Society

Everyone appreciates great service. Though voting in this category was too close to call, these people obviously do a great job serving up tasty food and drinks to their customers.

Best Kid-Friendly
Restaurant

1. Chuck E. Cheese

2. Chick-Fil-A

3. Huey’s

Think about it: Kids love Chuck E. Cheese. Whether they are afraid of the giant man-mouse or not, kids run wild playing games like Whac-a-Mole and Skee-Ball, and they love to bury themselves in the big ball pit after eating pizza.

Best Late-Night
Dining

READERS’ CHOICE

Alex’s

Earnestine & Hazel’s

CK’s Coffee Shop

Huey’s

Krystal

It looks like Flyer readers are satisfying late-night munchies with burgers, bar food, and breakfast. Whether it is fresh, hot, small, and square or covered with caramelized onions, burgers can generally kick a late-night craving. And who doesn’t love waffles, bacon, and eggs after a few too many beers or a long night of studying?

Best Place for
People-Watching

1. Flying Saucer

2. Beale Street

3. Young Avenue Deli — tie — The Peabody

Maybe it’s the hot girls in plaid skirts or the huge selection of beer. Or maybe it’s the prime location in Peabody Place one block over from Beale, where a constant stream of tourists wanders to and fro. Whatever the case, the Flying Saucer downtown is the best place to sit back and people-watch.

Best Patio

1. Celtic Crossing

2. Boscos Squared

3. Café Ole

Located in the heart of Cooper-Young, Celtic Crossing’s patio always has been a popular outdoor spot. With a newly revamped enclosed patio, the comfort level for dining and drinking was taken up a few notches, and Memphis likes the change.

Best Place That
Delivers

1. Young Avenue Deli

2. Garibaldi’s Pizza

3. Camy’s

Some days you don’t want to leave your couch. When hunger strikes, Memphians love a tasty “Sam I Am,” a hot roast-beef sandwich, or a California pita delivered right to their door. Oh, and don’t forget a side of Young Avenue Deli’s famous fries. It’s quick and easy, and there aren’t any pots and pans to wash.

Best Bakery

1. La Baguette

2. Atlanta Bread Company

3. Fresh Market — tie — Brother Juniper’s

Take a handful of local food lovers, add a dash of entrepreneurship, et voila! C’est magnifique! C’est délicieux! C’est La Baguette. High school French aside, readers love the traditional French pastries, breads, and croissants available near the main library on Poplar. After 25 years of bringing Continental confections to Memphis, La Baguette is still a favorite.

Best Local
Coffeehouse

1. High Point Coffee

2. Otherlands

3. Java Cabana

The aptly named High Point Coffee gives Flyer readers a nice alternative to that big, corporate coffee shop which shall remain nameless. With a wide selection of coffees, teas, and eats, High Point also has the environment of a warm, neighborhood coffee shop. Local art, Wi-Fi, and comfy chairs add to the ambience.

Best Restaurant

READERS’ CHOICE

Circa

Erling Jensen, the Restaurant

Majestic Grille

McEwen’s on Monroe

Tsunami

From the regional fusion food at McEwen’s and the Majestic to the Continental flair of Erling Jensen and Circa to the fantastic seafood at Tsunami, our readers like to keep their options — and mouths — open.

Best New
Restaurant

1. Restaurant Iris

2. Café Eclectic

3. Elfo’s — tie — Muddy’s Bake Shop

With a chef who hails from southern Louisiana, the authentic Creole cuisine at Restaurant Iris makes our readers’ mouths water. It could be chef Kelly English’s experience at the Culinary Institute of America and cooking in Spain and France. It could be the design of the restaurant by Memphis native Jackie Glisson, winner of HGTV’s Designers’ Challenge. Or maybe it’s that the restaurant serves the tastiest “knuckle sandwich” you’ll ever eat.

Best of Nightlife

Best of Arts & Entertainment

Best of Media

Best of Goods & Services

& The Rest

Staff Picks

Tags Bardog Tavern, Bari Ristorante Enoteca, Beauty Shop, Bosco's, Boscos Squared, Bryant's Breakfast, Buffalo Wild Wings, Celtic Crossing, Earnestine & Hazel's, Flying Saucer Draught Emporium, Happy Mexican, Young Avenue Deli

Best of Memphis Special Sections

Best of Memphis 2008 Intro

Post author By Flyer Staff
Post date September 25, 2008

CREDIT: Alex Harrison

Readers came out in record numbers this year to vote in the Flyer‘s Best of Memphis Readers’ Poll, and if there’s something to be discerned from this year’s results, it’s that Memphians are fed up with Mayor Willie Herenton’s antics and that they love fried chicken. It was the mayor in a rout to win “Best Failure,” and Gus’s, the winner of the “Best Fried Chicken” category, received the most votes out of all the winners. Rounding out the top-five vote getters: 2) Memphis Pizza Café (“Best Pizza”); 3) Flying Saucer (“Best Beer Selection”); 4) The Orpheum (“Best Live Theater”); and 5) Huey’s (“Best Burger”).

Best of the Best of Memphis winners — designated by “BOM” — are those places and people who dominated their categories, receiving three times as many votes as the second-place winners. Readers’ Choice means the vote was too close to call.

As always, the Flyer thanks our readers for participating and our advertisers for their support.

The Best of Memphis issue was written by Alicia Buxton, Mary Cashiola, Shara Clark, Chris Davis, Pamela Denney, Susan Ellis, Michael Finger, Leonard Gill, Chris Herrington, Bianca Phillips, and Bruce VanWyngarden and designed by Carrie Beasley.

Best of Food & Drink

Best of Nightlife

Best of Arts & Entertainment

Best of Media

Best of Goods & Services

& The Rest

Staff Picks

Best of Memphis Special Sections

Staff Picks

Post author By Flyer Staff
Post date September 25, 2008

CREDIT: Alex Harrison

Best Crab Leg Feast: I love crab legs. There’s something slightly barbaric about cracking open the spiky shells and really working for slivers of that delightfully juicy meat. I’ve found that a short drive to the Hollywood Casino in Tunica on a Friday evening can really satisfy my crab-leg craving. They offer an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet, which includes my personal favorite, king crab legs. At under $20 per person, you can’t beat it. Get ’em while they’re hot, think about bringing a bib, and maybe sit by an empty table, so you’ll have somewhere to put all the cleaned-out shells. — Shara Clark

Best Rehab Job: The Levitt Shell at Overton Park. Saved from oblivion by local activists and the Los Angeles-based Levitt Foundation, this WPA-era jewel looks mighty nice after a $1.3 million renovation. With its old wooden benches jettisoned for a lake of gleaming grass, the rechristened Levitt Shell probably won’t be dependent on the name recognition of its bookings to attract a crowd. Like AutoZone Park, the venue itself will be the draw. Early returns have seen a diverse, friendly cross-section of Memphians coming together to enjoy fresh air, live music, and civic fellowship. — Chris Herrington

Best Legit Way To Drink in Public: Combine artwork with great hangouts, wine and beer street vendors, and a designated driver (the trolley), and “ding, ding, ding” goes the bell at the South Main Trolley Art Tour held the last Friday of every month. It’s a place to run into friends, particularly since you can grab a bite at the Cheesecake Corner. But the best part may be admiring artwork in a slightly tipsy state, which allows you to make comments you would never make otherwise, like, “What? I can make that!” — Alicia Buxton

Best Yard Art: The giant concrete Buddha in the front yard of the house at South Mendenhall and Dargen. The family who lives there is actually Buddhist, and the statue is a serious religious shrine, but the bright spotlights that keep the figure illuminated really make it something special. — Michael Finger

Best Yard Art #2: The bomb planted in the front yard of 1082 Colonial. Actually, it’s an old river bouy, erected by the home’s owner, who was a self-described “river rat.” But since it was placed in the ground upside down, with the fins showing, it certainly has an ominous look to it. It’s a wonder the family gets any mail delivered there. — MF

Alex Harrison

Best Homegrown Theater: Voices of the South is a multitalented collective that’s as comfortable adapting classics of Southern literature as they are developing original theatrical experiments. Steve Swift’s larger-than-life creation Sister Myotis has deservingly attracted a cult following and VOTS’ annual Children’s Festival has become a springtime tradition at Rhodes College. — Chris Davis

Best Tease: We’ve never seen such joy, such jubilation, such sheer emotion, as when Mayor Willie Herenton announced he was going to retire. It was like the Rapture or the Tigers making it to the Final Four.

Phone lines were jammed. People were getting out of their cars and thanking their higher power. Former council members Brent Taylor and Carol Chumney both did cartwheels.

by Michael Finger

Best Yard Art

And what happened? Herenton didn’t resign, he’s still mayor, and that is that. — Mary Cashiola

Best Tease, Honorable Mention: March Madness became March sadness as the Tigers were defeated in the national championships against the Kansas Jayhawks.

And yeah, we’re proud of them for making it to the Final Four. But we were so close — so close! — to the national championship and then it slipped away. — MC

Best Place To Feel Like a Turn-of-the-Century Socialite: With its ornate crown molding, raised damask wallpaper, and antique furnishings, it’s hard not to imagine yourself a part of the 19th-century bourgeoisie at Mollie Fontaine Lounge in Victorian Village. But you can leave the hoop skirts and calling cards at home. Instead, bring plenty of friends and raise a toast to the ghost of Mollie Fontaine, the wealthy daughter of the cotton businessman Noland Fontaine. — Bianca Phillips

Best Website: If you’re like me, you have a couple dozen bookmarked websites on your browser. Mine are mostly politics, music, news, journalism, travel, and a few aggregator sites. I “check my traps” daily, sometimes more often. But there are also times when I’m tired of the usual fare, when I crave something fresh and stimulating. That’s when I click on the little icon on my browser that says “Stumble.” And away I go, exploring new and amazing worlds.

Stumbleupon.com aggregates millions of other people’s favorite sites — and believe me, it’s a big, wide, weird Internet out there. You can download the Stumbleupon software onto your browser in seconds, then you simply choose a few favorite categories (mine include humor, art, travel, and photography, to name a few), and click away. Each new website will be in one of your categories but extremely unlikely to be familiar. I’ve been amazed at things I’ve discovered and learned. It’s an instant cure for Internet boredom.

— Bruce VanWyngarden

Best Obscure Local Band: This award lovingly goes to a local avant-garde group, A Funeral Walkaway Parade. The group’s self-produced album, Colours and Of Tones, came out under the radar earlier this year. These six musicians are doing something completely different — something you surely won’t hear on any mainstream radio station and something meant for open, indiscriminate ears. It’s a near impossibility to pin down exactly what style their music is. In trying, I might say classical/experimental/modern folk. But what they really create is a feeling through sound. With ambient electronics and guitar effects, piano, organ, Autoharp, Theremin, percussion, and emotive, almost vulnerable vocals, their music tends to be transcendental. During a live AFWP performance, I’ve been known to hold back tears. There’s an alluring intensity at their shows. If you haven’t heard them yet, you’re in luck: They’ve got two shows this week: Saturday, September 27th, at South Park Bar on Highland, and Monday, September 29th, at Murphy’s. — SC

Best Company Mascot: The giant mouse atop Atomic Pest Control on Elvis Presley Boulevard. He’s been nibbling on that cheese since 1978, and we still think he’s pretty cool. — MF

Best-Kept Grocery Store Secret: Yes, you can keep your Schnucks, your Krogers, your Piggly Wigglys.

We love us some Superlo. What do we like in particular? The prices are right; the workers are Supernice (hi, Nancy!). — MC

by Michael Finger

Best Yard Art #2

Best Buffet: You may not win big at the casino, but you won’t leave hungry, thanks to the new Paula Deen Buffet in Tunica. Boasting six stations of deep-fried and slow-simmered goodness, the newest addition to Harrah’s Casino offers some of the Queen of Southern Cooking’s most cherished recipes. Don’t miss the famous smoky collard greens, the fried hoe cakes, or Uncle Bubba’s char-grilled oysters. — BP

Best Overlooked Natural Gem: Shelby Forest offers a quick getaway from our omnipresent flat Delta terrain and harried urban lifestyle. Twenty miles of hiking trails line steep river bluffs, swampy bottomlands, and Mississippi River banks. There is great fishing and boating at Piersol and Poplar Tree lakes. (You can rent a boat at Poplar Tree; Piersol is BYOBoat.) A disc golf course offers another diversion. The park even has a beach (unofficial) you can walk to, if the river is low. But all this and the more than 40 cabins and dozens of campgrounds in the woods don’t overpower the natural feel of this huge 13,000-acre forest. It’s a true escape, less than a half-hour away. — BV

Best Food Porn: Does anybody else blush when the hyper-flirty Pat and Gina Neely make vaguely suggestive comments on their Food Network show, Down Home With the Neelys? All that stuffing and dry rubbing! — CD

Best Regional Sickness: College football fandom — a chronic condition in which grown men obsess and agonize over the extracurricular activities of college students (and “students”) to whom they aren’t related. — CH

Best Buffet

Best Local Music Breakout: Jay Reatard. The onetime enfant terrible of local rock is having the best year ever, signing a deal with indie-rock heavyweight Matador Records, polishing his growing reputation on the road, and releasing a series of sharp, anticipation-building singles for the label. The former punk provocateur continues to evolve into a versatile, melodic, but forever agitated music maker. His Singles 06-07 collection, released earlier this year as a farewell to his former label, In the Red, doesn’t just chart the progress: It might be the best collection of made-in-Memphis music released this year. — CH

Best Enduring Myth: That the big stone in the park across from the downtown MATA station was a slave trading block. Nothing supports this claim, and in fact, old newspaper articles from the 1920s specifically say the giant chunk of granite was brought to what was then called Colonial Park by a group called the Colonial Dames of America. They mounted a nice shield-shaped plaque on it — since stolen — to mark the site where (they thought) Hernando de Soto may have first seen the Mississippi River. That claim, it turns out, is just as bogus as the one about the stone being an auction block. — MF

Best Fast Fingers: First of all, get your mind out of the gutter. Second of all, speaking of produce, have you ever seen the checkers at Easy Way blanch as they ring up assorted fruits and vegetables?

They know the difference between an English cucumber and a zucchini (you might be surprised). They never seem to have to look up a code. And they type those codes into their cash registers faster than a secretarial pool on speed. — MC

Best Place To Get Pets Spayed or Neutered: Two dogs can produce 12,288 puppies in five years, and two cats can make 11,801 kittens in the same amount of time, which is all the more reason to follow Bob Barker’s advice to spay and neuter your pets. You can’t even use the financial excuse anymore. The Animal Protection Association only charges $25 to $35 to spay or neuter a cat and $45 to $65 for a dog. That’s far cheaper than what most vets charge. You can also throw in a rabies or distemper shot for $5. — BP

Best Thing About the Energy Crunch: It makes the downtown trolley look at least a little less anti-visionary. — CD

Best Block: If you stroll unawares onto Carr Avenue in Midtown, between Diana and Cooper, you may find yourself thinking you’ve entered another dimension — or at least another city. The houses on this shady and intimate block are almost all small shotgun-type domiciles, painted in fanciful colors, with odd and delightful additions poking up from behind or on the side. Porches are filled with flowers and ferns. Odd sculptures adorn some of the tiny front “lawns.” The block is a testament to the creative and wonderful things that can be done in small spaces. — BV

Best New Name: Ovinton J’Anthony “O.J.” Mayo. The Grizzlies’ much-heralded rookie — nationally known since junior high — rivals Anfernee “Penny” Hardaway and Stromile Swift for most memorably monikered Memphis baller. The Grizzlies just hope he plays more like the former and can pair with emerging star Rudy Gay to give the franchise some much needed, um, juice. — CH

Best Thing About Flying into Memphis: The smell of barbecue that hits you as soon as you step off the plane. — CD

Best Local Radio Lunatic: Mike Fleming. The 600-AM afternoon host’s jabbering and provincial invective about the candidacy of “Barry Hussein Obama” would be excellent unintentional comedy if only Fleming’s small-minded belligerence didn’t attract so many fellow travelers. — CH

Biggest Outrage of the Year: That members of Topeka’s Westboro Baptist Church would have the gall to drive to Memphis to picket Isaac Hayes’ funeral because they thought his songs were somehow anti-Christian and — oh, it’s too stupid to get into here. The ceremony, held at Hope Presbyterian Church, had already attracted far too much controversy because of the singer/songwriter’s ties with Scientology. Hayes was a pillar in our community and an inspiration to thousands of kids here. He deserved to be treated with far more respect than that. — MF

Best Thing To Do with that Overstuffed Chair You Bought at the Platinum Plus Auction: Burn it! Burn it now! Quick, before the long gestation period is over and it gives birth to half-human/half-chair monsters bent on global insemination. Or domination. — CD

Best Art Show To Anticipate: Look, despite what you may think, there’s not much money in publishing. Prestige, yes. Wine, wanton women, yes. Money, no.

Which is one reason why we like David Lusk Gallery’s annual Price Is Right show, where all the art is priced under $1,000.

And who doesn’t want to get the work of a young up-and-comer at a steal? — MC

Best Local Music Breakout

Best Free Music Festival: You can see Jason D. Williams, Bobby Rush, Joyce Cobb, and the Klezmer All Stars all for no money down? At the Center for Southern Folklore’s annual Heritage Festival, yes you can. — CD by Changzhi Yu

Best Free Music Festival, Pictured: Joyce Cobb

Best Place To Find Exotic Produce: Looking to try the infamously stinky durian fruit? What about cactus? Or daikon? The massive Winchester Farmers Market (which isn’t actually a farmers market at all) on Winchester Avenue has the largest selection of exotic fruits and veggies in town. The store, which caters to the city’s Hispanic and Asian populations, also carries a large variety of ethnic specialty foods, such as Pocky Biscuit Sticks, pure Mexican cane sugar, and sweet red-bean sticky buns. — BP

Best Bubble Tea: Whoever decided to toss cute little tapioca pearls into a cup of flavored, sweetened tea was a genius. There’s just something magical about sucking that chewy “bubble” up an extra-thick straw. At Chang’s in Cordova, diners can ask for tapioca pearls in fruit smoothie teas or classic milkshakes, such as the popular almond milk tea or raspberry chai. For something totally different, try the green-bean tea or mix-and-match with coconut and taro root teas. — BP

Best Plan for the Pyramid: Develop it as the Boondoggle Hall of Fame. — CD

Best of Food & Drink

Best of Nightlife

Best of Arts & Entertainment

Best of Media

Best of Goods & Services

& The Rest