Month: January 2009

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

What’s on Tap

CREDIT: by Justin Fox Burks

Drew Barton brewed his first batch of beer when he was a student at the University of Memphis. He was hooked immediately — not on a hobby but on a career.

Last week, he was headed home to Memphis from Ashville, North Carolina, to introduce three new microbrews from the French Broad Brewing Company, where he works as head brewer, producing 1,600 barrels of beer every year.

“I’m going to the Flying Saucer,” he explained from the road. “Our beers have been in eastern Tennessee, and now we are making our way across the state.”

ESB, or “Extra Special Bitter,” was highlighted last Friday for the Saucer’s monthly cask night, a promotion that features the traditional containers that siphon beer with a hand pump.

“Casks are having a resurgence all over the country,” Barton explained. “A cask gives beer a different flavor and a smoother body.”

ESB, a pale ale with dark fruit notes and big hoppy finish, is also available in bottles, along with Barton’s other introductions: Kölsh, a German-style golden ale with lively carbonation, and Alt, a smooth and malty amber ale.

“People think Kölsch is smoother than Alt because it’s lighter in color,” Barton said. “But just the opposite is true.”

The Flying Saucer Draught Emporium,

130 Peabody Place (523-7468)

Here’s an entertainment tip for food, fun, and philanthropy: Buy a ticket to 3 Course Feast, dress up and show up January 25th at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn, make a quick bid at the silent auction, and then head straight for the event’s 21 tasting stations from the city’s most accomplished chefs.

Try appetizers, entrées, and desserts (there are seven choices for each course) or stop by one of five open bars for wine, boutique beers, and pomegranate vodka martinis.

Hosted by Circa’s John Bragg, the fund-raiser is a new spin on the United Cerebral Palsy of the Mid-South’s Great Chefs’ Tasting. “We’ve revamped our organization this year, and we wanted to do something special to bring attention to our new programs,” explained Jordyn Matthews, development associate for events and marketing.

Matthews is most excited about the evening’s center-stage demonstrations, where chefs showcase food preparation and signature dishes. In addition to Bragg, demonstrations are planned by Erling Jensen of Erling Jensen in East Memphis; Kelly English of Restaurant Iris in Midtown; and Patrick Reilly of downtown’s Majestic Grille.

“Demonstrations will last about 30 minutes each and continue throughout the evening,” Matthews said.

Demonstrating chefs will host tasting tables, as well, along with chefs from other locally owned restaurants, including the Beauty Shop, Bluefin, Napa Café, Equestria, Ciao Bella, Café 61, Orleans on Front, Grill 83, Café Toscana, Jarrett’s, Mollie Fontaine Lounge, Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen, Bari, McEwen’s on Monroe, Felicia Suzanne, Dish, and Chez Philippe.

3 Course Feast tickets are $65 per person and available by phone (761-4277) or online at ucpmemphis.org.

Roustica, a family-owned restaurant in Midtown known for its charming ambience and delicious food, closed last weekend, the latest victim of the national economic meltdown.

Despite efforts by supportive staff and loyal customers, the restaurant couldn’t ride out a drop in business that started in October. “We had a good thing going until the economy took a dive,” owner Larry Rains said earlier this week. “Unfortunately, not enough people are spending money on fine dining.”

Roustica, located at the corner of Willett and Overton Park Avenue, opened in September 2007 under the direction of Kevin Rains, who had been chef de cuisine at Equestria for five years. Rains quickly established a reputation for simple but well-prepared food with a menu that changed every few weeks.

Other owners have operated restaurants in the same location since 1991, when Jack and Rena Franklin opened Marena’s. Ten years later, the Franklins sold Marena’s to Chef Mortez Gerani, who now operates Marciano on Brookhaven Circle.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Dying Breed

Walt Kowalski’s wife has just died, his kids don’t like him, and his grandkids are an embarrassment. Moving in next door are a bunch of foreigners. (They’re Hmong, ethnic Asians, but I won’t repeat what he calls them.) What he has left in life is his dog, his front porch, his cold beer, and his 1972 Gran Torino — a car he helped build when he was a Ford autoworker. He’s also got a bloody cough, some demons from the Korean War still sticking to his guts, and a Catholic priest who won’t stop pestering him about going to confession.

This is the setup for Gran Torino, and it looks like it’s as sweet as life is going to get again for Walt (Clint Eastwood, who also directed). When the neighbors get into some trouble from a local Hmong gang, Walt has to step in, initially just to keep the kids off his lawn. He’s a bitter man, furious at how weak and weird the world has become. (Note to Hollywood producers: If you have to make another Hulk movie, cast Eastwood.)

This is Eastwood’s best film since Mystic River. Gran Torino feels like quality minor Eastwood the same way 1993’s A Perfect World did. But both films are sneaky good, and they’re both better than technical-driven prestige pics such as Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima and (far) better than melodramatic claptrap with shades of brilliance such as Million Dollar Baby.

Eastwood has reigned as the most masculine American figure since John Wayne rode off into the sunset in 1979. Especially coming from him, Gran Torino, a film about what it means to be a man, is compelling stuff. The lovely middle of the film settles down into a father-son conversation between Walt and the bashful, emasculated kid next door, Thao (Bee Vang). You see, Walt is Dirty Harry with a heart of gold.

Gran Torino does for racism what the TV show Mad Men does for sexism — almost makes it an art form. Sometimes, you can only guffaw at the outrageousness of it. Walt speaks in an unending stream of racial invective, punctuated only by growls that give the subwoofers some exercise. At least Walt is an equal opportunity offender, laying into his friends just as assiduously. And such is the frequency that, by the end, you can tell when Walt means a word to be rude and when he means the same word to be a term of endearment.

The last act is a little tidy and can’t quite live up to where it began, but the film survives the ordeal. Gran Torino is ultimately a fitting later-life entry in the Eastwood canon, worthy of the myth and even expanding it a little. Eastwood has hinted that it might be his last screen role. If so, it’s note perfect. But personally, I don’t think he’s ready yet for the pasture.

Gran Torino

Opening Friday, January 9th

Multiple locations

Categories
Music Music Features

Our Year in Lists

With the digital revolution and breakdown of major labels leading to more recorded music, not less, the amount of new music released becomes more staggering each year. No one can keep up with it, but we were happy to try. Our critics report on their year of musical discovery:

Chris Herrington:

After extolling the virtues of Jay Reatard and Al Green in our local year-in-review piece a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t want to double-up here. For the record: Reatard would be number eight on the following list, while Green would be among the honorable mentions.

1. Hold On Now, Youngster … — Los Campesinos! (Arts & Crafts): As a sprawling, gender-balanced indie-rock ensemble whose music is not terribly guitar-driven, Wales outfit Los Campesinos! can’t help but resemble genre heavyweights Arcade Fire. But across a two-year body of work that includes two full-length albums and a gaggle of singles and EPs, these underdogs prove to be the smarter, funnier band. On Hold On Now, Youngster …, the first of their two 2008 albums, co-leaders Gareth and Aleksandra trade off verses like conjoined twins completing each other’s thoughts while their bandmates bop around behind them in a tumult of handclaps and vocal interjections, dancing to the breakbeats of broken hearts. This young band obsesses over their messy lives (favorite title: “My Year in Lists”) and is always ready with a sardonic rejoinder (“I cherish with fondness the day before I met you”). But they’re the kind of sarcastic, introspective wallflowers delighted to discover themselves having fun (“You! Me! Dancing!”). The music is springy, chaotic, breathless: It has to be to keep up with their overactive minds and racing hearts.

2. Brighter Than Creation’s Dark — The Drive-By Truckers (New West): Though Brighter Than Creation’s Dark peaks at the very beginning with the saddest, loveliest song Patterson Hood will ever write, it holds its shape for an epic 19 songs and 75 minutes. Hood takes the toll of the Iraq war from two vantage points, ruminates on road life, spits in the wind of recession, and tips his cap to printer-of-legends “the great John Ford.” Musical life-partner Mike Cooley spins one wonderful, low-rent character sketch after another, several of them probably autobiographical, led by a definitive metal-to-grunge saga he’s old enough to have lived and a shaggy confession that outs country storyteller Tom T. Hall as this great band’s biggest influence.

3. Tha Carter III — Lil Wayne (Cash Money/Universal/Motown): Lil Wayne is rap’s Al Green — an idiosyncratic vocal genius who combines cutesy with carnal while deploying a wide range of verbal registers and tics. This commercial tour de force is his best album because it’s the first time he’s reined in his logorrhea and put it at the service of so many conceptually focused songs. And while this 16-song, nearly 80-minute opus drags a little down the stretch — and would have been better as a tidy, 10-song banger climaxing with the Kanye West-produced “Let the Beat Build” — the reason it gets better over time is that Wayne’s dense, voracious, stream-of-consciousness rhymes constantly yield new surprises.

4. The Way I See It — Raphael Saadiq (Columbia): There are suddenly a surfeit of artists tapping into ’60s and ’70s soul sounds, but former Tony Toni Tone singer Raphael Saadiq has been working in the vein for 20 years now: He’s not a tribute artist; he’s a practitioner. And the nonstop groove, compositional detail, and sometimes surprising songwriting (“Keep Marchin'” the campaign theme Curtis Mayfield wasn’t around to write; “Sometimes” a family meditation of Smokey Robinson-level grace) on The Way I See It is the closest he — or anyone else — has been to the muse since his old band’s 1996 swan song, House of Music.

5. Made in Dakar — Orchestra Baobab (Nonesuch): The follow-up to this vintage Sengalese band’s unlikely 2002 comeback triumph Specialist in All Styles, Made in Dakar combines fresh versions of unknown-in-these-parts West African standards with new songs. As always, guitarist Barthélemy Attisso spins indelible melodies and launches entrancing grooves with his vibrant but deliberate style, while sax man Issa Cissoko offers droll, elegant counterpoint. The unavoidable comparison is the Cuban rehab project Buena Vista Social Club, but Orchestra Baobab is better — less folkie, more organic, not as molded by an outside producer. Made in Dakar is great groove music for body and soul.

6. Alphabutt — Kimya Dawson and Friends (K): Juno soundtrack star Kimya Dawson followed up her rather unlikely rise to fame with this silly, scatological concept album about kids and parents. With “friends” of all ages joining in to give the record a rambunctious, campfire spirit, Dawson lets songs about hungry tigers, splashing bears, and potty-training triumphs commingle with songs about pregnancy anxiety, schoolyard lessons on egalitarianism, and the ethics of food availability. This collection of deceptively simple acoustic ditties alternately for, to, and about Dawson’s own kid — and maybe yours too — is her most engaging album yet, though perhaps too sweet, too homely, and too messy for a lot of listeners.

7. Stay Positive — The Hold Steady (Vagrant): This fourth album from America’s most literate bar band opens with something of a master statement: “Constructive Summer,” which spins some Springsteenian imagery off a title almost surely inspired by Hüsker Dü’s “Celebrated Summer” before splitting the difference with a song-ending dedication to the Clash’s Joe Strummer. This fits an album where songwriter supreme Craig Finn literalizes more than ever his band’s mission to unite classic-rock grandeur with the regular-guy modesty and small-scale ethical sense of the hardcore and punk scenes that weaned him.

8. That Lonely Song — Jamey Johnson (Mercury Nashville): This been-to-hell-and-back-again Waylon Jennings fanatic covers his hero twice, references him once, and sings with the same garbled machismo. But Johnson’s damaged tales of hard living, divorce, and recovery are too detailed and lived-in to be merely outlaw cliché. And the best song here (well, aside from an opener that boasts the instant-classic lyric “That Southern Baptist parking lot is where I’d go to smoke my pot”) is a bit of modern Nashville songcraft that might be a Kodak commercial if it weren’t so tough and unsentimental.

9. Feed the Animals — Girl Talk (Illegal Art): By and large this masterful mash-up mix from Pittsburgh DJ Greg Gillis layers rap vocals over pop hits from the ’60s to the present. Though I do wish Gillis’ taste in hip-hop samples more often reached beyond the declamatory and pornographic, he mines his juxtapositions for plentiful comedy. And, musically, it never quits. The prurient party record of the year.

10: Vampire Weekend — Vampire Weekend (XL): From the write-what-you-know department: detailed, insightful, witty, and not at all uncritical evocations of collegiate lust over some the year’s most sprightly guitar pop. I suspect most criticisms of this pale, “privileged” band’s “appropriation” of Afropop forms (primarily a guitar sound, but with plenty of other rhythmic and vocal bits as well) come from people who don’t actually listen to much African music. Given that African guitar is one of mankind’s greatest achievements, this enthusiastic longtime Afropop dabbler only wishes more western guitar bands would follow suit.

Honorable Mentions: Conor Oberst — Conor Oberst (Merge); When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold — Atmosphere (Rhymesayers); Harps and Angels — Randy Newman (Nonesuch); Fearless — Taylor Swift (Big Machine); Primary Colours — Eddy Current Suppression Ring (Goner); Distortion — Magnetic Fields (Nonesuch); Alegranza — El Guincho (XL); Dear Science – TV on the Radio (Interscope); Oracular Spectacular — MGMT (Columbia); Rising Down — The Roots (Def Jam).

Top 10 Singles: “Paper Planes” — M.I.A. (XL); “Time to Pretend” — MGMT (Columbia); “Black President” — Nas (Def Jam); “More Like Her” — Miranda Lambert (Sony BMG/Nashville); “Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It” – Ice Cube (Lench Mob); “In Color” – Jamey Johnson (Mercury Nashville); “Lights Out” — Santogold (Downtown); “Takin’ Off This Pain” — Ashton Shepherd (Mercury Nashville); “Sequestered in Memphis” — The Hold Steady (Vagrant); “A Milli” — Lil Wayne (Cash Money/Universal/Motown).

Stephen Deusner:

1. Brighter Than Creation’s Dark — The Drive-By Truckers (New West); Stay Positive — The Hold Steady (Vagrant): Two of the most reliable rock bands further entrenched themselves in their respective regions, the Truckers telling more Southern stories with such natural verisimilitude that they have the force of literature and the Hold Steady hashing out dime-novel murder mysteries set in Midwestern college towns and set against mash notes to Iggy Pop and the Dillinger 4.

2. With Blasphemy So Heartfelt — Jessica Lea Mayfield (Polymer); Fearless — Taylor Swift (Big Machine): Mayfield worked with Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach to create a dark album about romantic resignation, while Swift worked with high-profile Nashville handlers to show that tween culture could transcend the Jonas Brothers. Laying it all out for the high school set, these two late-teen singer-songwriters reveled in youth while sounding older than their years.

3. Fleet Foxes — Fleet Foxes (Sub Pop); Awake My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp — Various Artists (Awake Productions): The joy of hearing many voices singing together: Their astonishing harmonies elevated Fleet Foxes’ debut above all the My Morning Jacket comparisons and dad-rock accusations, while the soundtrack to Matt Hinton’s shape-note-singing doc made rock stars of small-town congregations.

4. That Lonesome Song — Jamey Johnson (Mercury Nashville); 808s & Heartbreak — Kanye West (Roc-a-Fella): Break-ups fueled these two artists’ similarly themed albums. West’s anger at his cold-hearted ex is offset by his constant self-mutilation via Autotune, while Johnson simply directs his ache inward to create a doom-laden country album that’s as self-assured as it is self-loathing.

5. Hercules & Love Affair — Hercules & Love Affair (Mute); Dear Science — TV on the Radio(Interscope): Two different visions of dance music, one looking backward and the other forward: Herc’s disco portrayal of the dancefloor as perpetual gay safehaven gives the modern beats a mirrorball heart, while TV on the Radio’s examination of race and sexuality lends their rock-oriented rhythms a distinguishing braininess.

Honorable Mentions: Robyn— Robyn (Cherrytree/Interscope); Dig Lazarus Dig!! — Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds (Mute); Carried to Dust — Calexico (Touch & Go); Jeanius — Jean Grae (Blacksmith); Asking for Flowers — Kathleen Edwards (Rounder).

Andrew Earles:

1. Dear Science — TV on the Radio (4AD/Interscope); Smile — Boris (Southern Lord): Every time I see Dear Science topping someone’s year-end list, I’m elated that something this inventive has reached mainstream popularity. But I also wonder if we’ve simply become too lazy to embrace genuinely bold music. Smile adds the important elements of “challenge” and “risk.” It is not safe music, like Dear Science, but it is beautiful music if given the proper chance. Dear Science‘s feat is that it masterfully cherry-picks influences and styles that only deeply imbedded music nerds know about then repackages all of it into music that won’t alarm anyone’s parents. It’s the Wilco/Radiohead trick to an extreme. Part of the reason the Velvet Underground, Black Sabbath, Black Flag, and Sonic Youth were so important is that, in their respective days, anyone over the age of 45 would recoil from and denounce the music. Smile feels like one of those historical checkpoints.

2. Third — Portishead (Mercury/Island): Third is not a comeback because Portishead never made music this arresting; never even came close. This is the stark, moving music that Stereolab would be making today if they hadn’t spread themselves so thin with 400 albums in 15 years.

3. The Ace of Hearts Reissues — Mission of Burma (Matador): To date myself, Rhodes College’s WLYX collapsed into obscurity not long after introducing me to bands like Hüsker Dü and Mission of Burma, and I’ll never forget the pathetic Saturday night alone at home when my lost 15-year-old ears were filled with “Revolver,” a song that has since become the “Mustang Sally” of post-punk. The past 20 years of indie rock, emo, post-hardcore, etc., would be a completely different animal without this band.

4. Meanderthal — Torche (Hydra Head): Aside from a three-month blackout in Cabo, I never thought I’d have anything in common with Sammy Hagar fans, but Meanderthal actually makes me drive recklessly. It’s more a lack of careful attention than exceeding the posted speed limit or rutting people’s yards in a rock-and-roll frenzy, as this is an album that demands full attention while rewarding listeners with what is more or less a simple formula: heavy rock-influenced hardcore and metal driven by golden pop hooks.

5. Nouns — No Age (Sub Pop): No Age’s Nouns is like a Time-Life Music infomercial of forgotten bizarro-pop brilliance from 10 to 15 years ago (Thinking Fellers, Sebadoh, Swirlies, some Guided By Voices). Unlike other bands who turn calculatedly “crappy” production values into an important, deliberate sonic element, No Age writes killer songs.

Honorable Mentions: Pyramids — Pyramids (Hydra Head); Alight of Night — Crystal Stilts (Slumberland); Saint Dymphna
— Gang Gang Dance (Social Registry); The Chemistry of Common Life — Fucked Up (Matador).

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Ron Howard’s dishonest trek through Nixonland.

Like most Oscar bait, Ron Howard’s dull, unctuous Frost/Nixon stinks. The film, about English talk-show host David Frost’s television “trial” of former President Richard Nixon (Frank Langella), inflates and distorts a fishy media nonevent from the 1970s that has been revived and repackaged for your consideration during the final days of George W. Bush’s presidency, which coincide with — surprise, surprise — the opening days of the biggest Academy Awards publicity push.

This skeletal, power-suited duet is really a pseudo-historical freak-show. As Frost, Michael Sheen’s features and coiffure are distorted enough to make him look like a Dr. Seuss sketch of Austin Powers. He’s a total airhead who’s supposed to be no match for old Tricky Dick. But Nixon himself is portrayed as an old softie, a pushover with a basset-hound mug and a proclivity for long-winded homilies. Their on- and off-camera encounters are often less than riveting.

Both the impromptu strategy sessions before and after each interview taping and the breathless cheers and jeers from each camp — Nixon adviser Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon) compares the president’s opening remarks to a boxer’s first punch, while Frost researcher James Reston (Sam Rockwell, doing a passably skittish Tom Cruise impression) croaks that Nixon’s performance during the early interview sessions was “horrifying … and he was so confident” — backfire in their attempts to hype the two men’s big Watergate showdown. Instead, the interviews evoke the tawdry, greasy feel of a fixed prizefight. And according to Elizabeth Drew’s December 14, 2008 article on The Huffington Post, that’s exactly what it was.

Not only was Nixon paid $600,000 for his participation, he received 20 percent of the cut from sales of the interview to television stations. The film is explicit about the price Frost paid for the interview, but the sweet back end of this deal is never mentioned. Without knowing that Nixon had a fiscal stake in the proceedings, the legitimacy and credibility of his remarks are far less questionable than they were. As Drew points out, “the two purported gladiators were in business together, with a mutual interest in making the interviews interesting enough to make a nice profit.” Politics has its theatrical side, but this phony summit remains a historical footnote precisely because both sides were peddling baloney from the start.

Frost/Nixon is specious, dead-end grad-school historical revisionism at best, and it’s about as entertaining as copyediting a master’s thesis. Langella’s laconic, soggy Nixon lags behind the livelier previous incarnations by Anthony Hopkins (Nixon), Philip Baker Hall (Secret Honor), and Dan Hedaya (Dick). Langella isn’t even the best Nixon in the movie; Oliver Platt, who plays Frost researcher Bob Zelnick, briefly imagines the commander in chief as a cross between Ed Sullivan and the jowly Gungan ruler from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

At its climax, the film luxuriates in a money shot of Nixon sulking in plausibly deniable defeat as Reston brays about “the reductive power of the close-up.” That this overused shot is praised for its “reductive” ability rather than its capacity to reveal or instruct is the clearest indication of this movie’s shoddy priorities.

Frost/Nixon

Opening Friday, January 9th

Ridgeway Four

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Did you see him? Dick Cheney on Face the Nation

this past Sunday morning? I was going to just flip the channel as fast

as possible when I saw that he was going to be the featured guest, because in 15 days from

this writing, Ding Dong, the Witch Will be Dead. Well, not dead, but at least no longer the vice president. Of course, he could

be dead by then if he goes hunting again and accidentally shoots himself instead of one of his friends. Or he could just explode. He always looks like he’s on the verge of it anyway. I felt relief in knowing that it might be the last time he would appear on television as the vice president. I thought perhaps he might show some feeling remotely resembling humility — stupid me — so I watched the show. It was like watching a talking rectum. He claimed to have no regrets about his eight years in office as veep and that he would do everything over again the same way. We are talking Abu Ghraib. Yes, he was asked specifically about torture, and he said it was fine and that water boarding, in his opinion, is not torture. It reminded me of a song (to the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon”):

Dick, the magic honky

Lived underground.

He’d surface long enough to authorize torture

And then could not be found.

His wife writes lesbian porno,

He gets paychecks from Halliburton.

The way his hand is up Dubya’s ass,

You’d think that puppet would be hurtin’.

In a few weeks, he’ll be history,

And we’ll no longer see his fits,

Let’s hope he lost the nuclear code pad

So no one gets blown to bits.

But he may be back in the limelight,

If justice should prevail,

And he gets charged with crimes of war

And winds up with a beau in jail.

Or something like that. At least he and his little beady-eyed friend will be gone.

And speaking of the “Barack the Magic Negro” parody, why did the people involved in this have to hail from Memphis? It’s not bad enough that the national media brand them simply as being from “Tennessee,” which begs the question for the rest of the world: “Do we really run around barefoot down here and marry our cousins?” Is it impossible for the universe to give the rest of us from Memphis a freaking break now and then? I don’t know this Paul Shanklin guy who wrote and recorded the funny little ditty, or I may have met him and don’t remember it. But come on, dude: “Negro”? Yeah, I know all about the Los Angeles Times article your song is based on and I get satire and comedy and I don’t take much of anything seriously myself, but really. Was this necessary? Were you just trying to get publicity? If that was the case, why didn’t you show up naked at Cracker Barrel and frighten some people from Bellevue Baptist Church? And your pal Chip Saltsman, also from Memphis, and the guy who sent this out as a “gift” to the GOP cronies he hopes will vote him into the position as leader of the party? How could anyone with a degree from a school as fine as Christian Brothers University end up this way? Couldn’t he have simply sent out bumper stickers that read “White Is Right”? I’m not really incensed by all this, because it is all too typical and nothing much shocks me anymore, especially from people who aspire to be higher-ups in the Grand Old Party — “old” being the key word here. You know, like the aforementioned Dick. Do you remember when he had those foot problems and his big white flabby foot was all over the news? That’s all I can think about when I see him now. It reminds me of that gross Adam Sandler movie commercial in which he sticks his foot in a guy’s face and then smacks him with it. I almost get sick every time I see it, because I think of Cheney’s foot and what it would be like to be touched by it. Talk about torture.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Reader

In the film adaptation of The Reader, Kate Winslet plays Hanna Schmidt, a German woman who has a carnal summer fling with a teenager, Michael (David Kross), only to have the young man discover years later, as a law student, that she’d been an SS guard at Auschwitz.

Schmidt shares a first name (minus an “h”) with German Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt, who famously coined the term “banality of evil” in suggesting that the Holocaust wasn’t executed by fanatics or sociopaths so much as by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their government and thought they were just acting normally.

In The Reader, Winslet’s Hanna becomes something of an embodiment of that concept. Though she takes on something of a paternal role in her affair with the teenager she dubs “Kid,” there’s always a distance to her. Watching from the gallery at Hanna’s war crimes trial a decade later, Michael sees a woman with the emotional intelligence of a child, seeming not to comprehend the severity of her past actions or the charges against her.

The Reader follows the complex relationship between Michael and Hanna at different points between their 1958 fling and a present day (with Ralph Fiennes playing the adult Michael) set in 1995, with the 1966 war crimes trial at the center.

In part a reckoning with post-war German responsibility for the atrocities, The Reader is rather sharp in humanizing Hanna without manipulating the audience into sympathy for her. And Winslet, as is becoming common (see also Revolutionary Road later this month — or don’t), is better than the movie she’s in. Stephen Daldry’s sturdy, unimaginative direction results in a high-toned, respectable, but somehow underachieving film, much like his 2002 Oscar bait The Hours.

Now playing, Ridgeway Four

Categories
Hot Properties Real Estate

The Old City

The Pinch was the earliest settled area in Memphis. The city’s original land office was established there, followed by the first trading store and two locations of Paddy Meager’s Bell Tavern, where travelers could both sup and sleep. The area is adjacent to the old mouth of the Wolf River, which provided a harbor for flatboats and a ferry that crossed the river.

This harbor eventually proved too small for the riverboats, many of which were four or five stories high. The city center migrated south from the Pinch to a broad area where the riverfront could be paved with cobblestones. This remains the downtown we now know, where cotton-classing offices and grand hotels were built near the dockage for the floating palaces.

The Pinch survived as a dry-goods trading center with mill yards and breweries along the lower Wolf. Waves of immigrants washed through the area, most notably an Irish contingent after the potato famine of the late 1840s and early 1850s, and a large Jewish influx, which built a synagogue there. The surviving building stock is predominantly two- or three-story brick buildings, most having a commercial use on the ground floor and the lodgings above.

This building was constructed in 1900 by a Jewish tinsmith. It has been a pool hall, a restaurant, and an early home to a stained-glass studio. Four years ago, the then-uninhabited structure was bought, and a year of reconstruction followed.

The ground floor now houses an art gallery. Salvaged oak floors and one wall of exposed brick accent the 14-foot-tall space. Just behind the gallery is a spacious eat-in kitchen with three walls of pale birch cabinets and cast concrete counters. A new rear addition includes a dining/family room that opens to a brick-walled courtyard, a large workshop, and a two-car garage.

Upstairs has three bedrooms, three baths, and separate guest quarters that could be rented out as an apartment. Two of the bedrooms are suites that offer lots of options. The one on the front has cherry floors, and its diminutive fireplace has a metal mantel, possibly made by the original owner. A similar fireplace is featured in the suite’s bath, and a large skylight crowns the adjoining dressing room.

The second suite has a private balcony that overlooks the courtyard and is built atop the new dining/family room. This position insulates the area from the typical sounds of an urban environment. Along the stair hall between the two suites is a third bedroom, a bath, and a laundry room. The one-bedroom guest apartment is above the garage.

The Pinch has languished while downtown and South Main have experienced a residential renaissance. Saint Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Mud Island, and the Pyramid surround the area and suggest that this now quiet corner of the old city has lots of room for growth. •

356 N. Main

4,500 square feet

3 bedrooms, 3 baths,

plus guest quarters

$695,000

The Garland Co., 527-7779

Agent: Tracie Gaia, 649-6232

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Local Bank Officers Made Millions While Stocks Tumbled

When it comes to compensation for corporate executives, the two phrases we’ve heard for years are “pay for performance” and “align executives’ interests with those of shareholders.” This was supposed to justify their salaries, stock options, and bonuses …

Read the rest of John Branston’s City Beat on compensation for local bank officers.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Believe It Or Not, They’re Already Running for Governor in Tennessee

Frist is out, Gibbons, Wamp, and Haslam are in, and more are raring to enter the 2010 Tennessee gubernatorial race, already getting under way. Jackson Baker tells you who, what, when, where, how, why, and why-the-hell-not in this week’s “Politics.”

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Out of Gas?

The first road trip I remember taking was from Michigan to Florida in a dull blue 1955 Chevrolet with a V-8 engine, one of 1,690,000 sturdy Chevy’s made in that record year for General Motors.

The last Tennessee road trip I made was just before Christmas from Memphis to Chattanooga with my son Jack in his trusty 1998 Chevy Blazer with 198,000 miles on the odometer. Don’t tell me GM makes crappy cars that nobody wants. I bought the car used for $9,000 when Jack was in college at UT-Knoxville, and it has survived six years of fender benders, break-ins, and countless hunting and fishing trips from the Smokies to the Mississippi River bottomlands, usually towing a johnboat.

This trip would push the Blazer near the once mythical 200,000-mile mark. The weather was a Michigan-like 18 degrees, a suitable challenge for the occasion. The sun was shining, and we filled the tank for $20 with cheap gas, the mother’s milk of the SUV.

Jack was going to a wedding before leaving Tennessee for Montana. I was going along for the ride to eyeball the car manufacturing business that migrated to Middle Tennessee, as I did 30 years ago, along with millions of Midwesterners. Car towns like Spring Hill, Chattanooga, Smyrna, and Decherd are to Tennessee in the 21st century what Dearborn, Flint, Pontiac, and River Rouge were in the second half of the 20th century to Michigan.

A week earlier, U.S. senator Bob Corker of Chattanooga emerged as the Republican Party’s point man on the Detroit bailout. He sparred with the United Auto Workers (“We were this close”) and GM CEO Rick Waggoner (“You’re the problem”) in iconic television clips from the congressional hearings. A wealthy developer, Corker worked at Western Auto as a kid, graduated from UT-Knoxville, and was once a card-carrying union member. He owns a 1997 Toyota with 180,000 miles and a vintage Ford pickup truck. I have nothing against Corker or foreign cars. I drive a used Mercedes made in Alabama. But I have a soft spot for the UAW. You’d have to be an idiot or an ingrate not to acknowledge your debt to the UAW if you’re a baby boomer from Michigan.

What was good for General Motors may or may not have been good for America, but it was certainly good for Michigan, no matter where you worked. My friends and I went to state universities for a generously subsidized $480 a year in tuition, easily covered with earnings from factory jobs in the summer, meal jobs during school, and money left over for enough Carling Black Label and Stroh’s to ensure that we would not be invited to join Phi Beta Kappa. I can still remember where I was in 1970 when I heard that Walter Reuther had died in a plane crash. I doubt if one in 10 Americans these days can identify the labor leader who bargained with the Big Three for health and pension obligations in contract talks in 1950 and 1951 when they were on top of the world, setting the stage for the current crisis.

Bob Corker

Detroit was king in the ’50s. My favorite novel about the era is Edsel, by the Detroit writer Loren Estleman. Reuther and Henry Ford II are cast in a fictional reconstruction of the rollout of Ford’s disastrous Edsel, and the narrator is an aging ex-newspaper columnist whose time has passed him by.

The two Detroit newspapers were full of gloomy reports the week of my recent road trip, with several of them targeting Corker for his insistence that the UAW agree to givebacks by a specific time in order to get a bailout. A sampler: “More Are Saying So Long to Michigan”; “Union Members Have Messed Things Up”; “Shame on Sen. Corker”; and “Michigan’s Growth Stagnant While Other Parts of the Country See Robust Growth.”

Corker, formerly the state finance commissioner and the mayor of Chattanooga, told me this week that he feels misportrayed in the national media by Washington Post columnist David Broder and others. “I could not believe he lumped me in with folks who were not trying to make a deal happen,” Corker said. “We wanted to solve the problem in such a manner that the car companies would not have to come back and ask for more money.”

Corker said he was stunned that the UAW did not agree to being competitive with Honda, Toyota, Nissan, and BMW on reduced wages and benefits for active employees. The hangup was the month, day, and year they would go into effect.

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“I went to Washington to try to solve problems,” Corker said, “and I felt like I got within three words of solving this one.”

The growth of Tennessee at Michigan’s expense has been especially robust. The headquarters of Nissan North America is in Smyrna, just south of Nashville. Nissan also has a powertrain assembly plant in Decherd in Middle Tennessee. Volkswagen is building its first U.S. factory in two decades in Chattanooga and expects to turn out 250,000 cars a year in 2012. The granddaddy of them all is GM’s plant in Spring Hill, “the 14th fastest growing city in the United States” according to welcome signs. Adding insult to injury, in Nashville the Tennessee Titans were clinching homefield advantage for the NFL playoffs on this Sunday, while in Detroit the Lions were going 0-15.

Memphis, which was home to a Ford assembly plant until 1959, somehow missed the action. There are a dozen foreign and domestic car factories within 500 miles of Memphis and its 670,000 residents but none within 200 miles, except the future Toyota plant in Tupelo which has been delayed.

Corker said he’s not sure why that is.

“There are some sites in rural West Tennessee trying to get megasite status, and I am committed to working with them,” he said. “We’ve created a niche for ourselves. Companies have seen that they can make money in Tennessee.”

But Middle Tennessee’s party may be toned down for a while. The Spring Hill plant retooled in 2008, aborted the Saturn Vue, and started making a crossover SUV/minivan called the Chevy Traverse instead, just in time for the recession and GM’s imminent bankruptcy. The tours had been canceled and the visitor center was almost empty when we arrived in Spring Hill three days before Christmas. The attendant said the plant was shutting down the next day. The last Traverse would roll off the line just 18 years after the celebrated Saturn debuted.

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In the most optimistic scenario, the plant will reopen in February 2009. In the worst scenario, it will remain closed indefinitely, two decades of prosperity will slowly unwind, and Middle Tennessee will get a taste of what Detroit is going through.

R.I.P., Walter.

Shot 1: Spring Hill

Behind this bucolic white, wooden fence and field sits a General Motors assembly plant, one of the first big Southern victories in the dismantling of Detroit. GM made the announcement in 1985 that it would build the Saturn on a horse farm in Spring Hill, 30 miles south of Nashville. By agreement, the site was dug into the ground behind a berm so that it is nearly invisible from U.S. Highway 31. More than 5,000 people worked at the plant at its peak. The first Saturn rolled off the line in 1990, a model that looks strikingly similar to my daughter’s well-traveled 1995 Saturn. In 2007, the plant stopped making the Saturn Vue, which is now made in Mexico. There is speculation in the Detroit newspapers that GM will soon sell Saturn.

“I think Spring Hill is one of those assets that, even if GM were to go bankrupt, it would survive and thrive,” Corker said.

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Shot 2: Saturn Visitor Center

The visitor center used to be a stable. It displays the very first Saturn manufactured with the joint blessing of the United Auto Workers union and GM management, led at the time by CEO Roger Smith, the subject of filmmaker Michael Moore’s breakthrough movie Roger and Me. Inspirational quotations from Smith are featured on banners hanging from the ceiling. Moore is from Flint, Michigan. Spring Hill is everything Flint is not — a scrubbed, manicured, prosperous place that boomed from 1985 until today. My favorite exhibit in the visitor center is a shopping cart loaded with two bags of groceries and mounted on a motorized track. Push a button and the cart rolls down the track and crashes into a Saturn polymer door panel without leaving a mark.

Shot 3: White Chevy Traverse

This 2009 Chevy Traverse sits outside the visitor center in Spring Hill. It looks sort of lonely, as it should. The last one rolled off the line on December 23, 2008, its life span possibly just one year. Billed as “the crossover where beautiful and useful come together in perfect balance,” it was instead the crossover where overproduction met irrelevance in the perfectly disastrous year of 2008. The list price is $28,000, and it gets 24 miles per gallon on the highway, which GM says is the best in its class. After a brief spike to $4 per gallon, however, the price of gasoline dropped like an axle late last yeat, making fuel economy less urgent. On this day, we filled up for $1.36 a gallon. My son suggested we offer $18,000 to take the Traverse away. I didn’t have the heart.

Shot 4: Decherd water tower

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Like something from The War of the Worlds, this water tower looms over the town of Decherd, home of a Nissan powertrain assembly plant. Decherd is in a beautiful valley about 100 miles southwest of Nashville, between the Jack Daniel’s and George Dickel distilleries. Wages are lower here than they are at the plants in the Midwest, and Decherd looks less prosperous but more authentic than Spring Hill or Smyrna. The little houses are neatly kept but older, and there is a roller-skating rink, drive-in movie theater, locally owned cafes, horse farms, and several impressive-looking fireworks stands not far away. It reminded me, as it probably did Nissan’s site-selection team, of the way small-town America used to look.

Shot 5: Nissan factory in Smyrna

Even Nissan is feeling the pain of the recession. This plant in Smyrna was closed for three days before Christmas. The headquarters of Nissan North America is just outside of Nashville on Interstate 24, halfway to Murfreesboro, and contributes mightily to the Middle Tennessee boom. Residents clogged the interstate for miles on Sunday heading for the Titans-Steelers game. The 1998 Chevrolet Blazer in this picture has nearly 200,000 miles on it and was manufactured in Ohio. If it has a fault, from GM’s perspective at least, it is that it lasted too long, giving its owner little incentive to buy a newer one.

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