Month: August 2009

Categories
Music Music Features

For the Benefit of Mr. Dickinson

Last week, Memphis-based and world-renowned producer/musical
raconteur Jim Dickinson sat at his keyboard and plunked out the notes
of Furry Lewis’ “Kassie Jones.” It was a heroic moment, considering the
rocky road Dickinson has traveled the past few months.

“In May, Dad had stents put in his heart, and he felt really good,”
recounts Dickinson’s son Luther, a well-known musician in his own
right. “Then he suffered from gastrointestinal bleeding, went back to
the hospital, and had a massive heart attack. He got better and came
home to recuperate before going in for bypass surgery. His heart
stopped, but they brought him back. It’s been a slow but steady
recovery since then.”

Friends and family, including Dickinson’s wife, Mary Lindsay, and
his younger son, Cody, are encouraged by the 68-year-old musician’s
determination to play music so soon afterward.

“At one point, he had a Sharpie in his hand and he was holding a
notepad, composing, which was just the sweetest thing. His memory and
personality are all completely there, and he’s getting his creative
process together, you know?” Luther says.

Even so, it will be a long while before Dickinson has the strength
to reenter the recording studio and command the control board, as he
has for artists such as the Replacements, Pete “Sonic Boom” Kember,
Toots Hibbert, John Hiatt, and Mudhoney — which is why his
friends hastened to stage a benefit concert, which is slated for the
Peabody Skyway Saturday, August 8th.

Hiatt will headline the sold-out event, along with Dickinson’s sons’
band, the North Mississippi Allstars, his longtime bandmate Sid
Selvidge, and Big Star drummer Jody Stephens. Also appearing are Jimmy
Davis, Shannon McNally, Amy LaVere, Jimbo Mathus, the
Yallabushwhackers, and Sons of Mudboy — all musicians who have
benefited from an association with Dickinson.

“It’s going to be a great night of music, but that’s almost beside
the point,” says event organizer David Less, who heads Memphis
International Records, the label behind Dickinson’s past three solo
albums, including Dinosaurs Run in Circles, which was released
in May.

“Memphis music would not sound the same without Jim in the world,”
Less says. “The people he has mentored and influenced on the local
scene have made a difference across musical genres, and the entire
community owes a debt to him.”

Despite the fact that a benefit was held in Oxford, Mississippi,
last weekend and another event is on the books for San Francisco later
this year, hundreds of supporters have already stepped up, donating
time and money to the cause.

Although he’s unable to attend, Elvis Costello purchased a table for
Saturday’s concert, to be auctioned later this week. The Peabody hotel
offered space, and the staffs at Ardent Records and at Beale Street
Caravan are handling ticket sales and donations. Less credits industry
insiders Bob Merlis and Bill Bentley for petitioning major labels and
recording artists — ranging from Aretha Franklin and Arlo Guthrie
to Ry Cooder and the Rolling Stones — to relinquish recording
rights for a limited-edition CD of songs Dickinson either produced or
played on, which will be distributed at the event.

“Jim’s got Medicare, so fortunately, we’re not needing to raise a
half-million dollars. He hasn’t worked since May, so we just want to
make sure he doesn’t go broke. People shouldn’t go bankrupt if they get
sick,” Less says.

With a forced layoff of two months, Dickinson can use the help.

Luther says, “Everyone is so financially fragile right now, but
being my parents’ ages and not having a stable future is really scary.
I think retirement is a mirage.”

Throughout the whole process, Dickinson has reminded his sons to
“take care of your mom and play your gigs.”

Both Luther and Cody have taken the advice to heart, substituting
for their father at what was supposed to be his May 31st CD-release
party at Huey’s and forging ahead with their respective groups, which
include the Black Crowes and Hill Country Revue.

“Music is what’s always held our family together,” Luther says.
“This [experience] is just one of those things that has made me
reevaluate what I want to do with my band. It’s proved to me how
important music is in making the world go around and how important it
is to the strength and continuation of my family.

“Waking up every morning is a blessing, and lifting your arm and
feeding yourself is a blessing,” Luther says, reiterating the words of
his late friend and frequent music collaborator, bluesman Otha
Turner.

“I pray that Dad is through the worst of it. Once he gets his
strength back, you’d better watch out.”

Categories
Music Music Features

10-Year Itch

CREDIT: Shannon Bangham Dixon

After a decade-long break from recording, Memphis’ eclectic popsters
Kitchens & Bathrooms are about to release Eternal In
Between, a polished, 12-song collection showcasing the group’s
ability to fuse Memphis soul, classic rock, and steel-laden country
into thoughtful power-pop with beautiful melodies, complex storylines,
and irresistibly warm guitar sounds.

Kitchens and Bathrooms didn’t break up in 1999. After drummer
Wally Peterson moved to North Carolina to be closer to his
family, the popular band, which was as comfortable playing punk clubs
like the Antenna and Barristers as it was playing Neil’s or the Hard
Rock Cafe on Beale Street, simply stopped gigging and went into a state
of suspended animation. The old friends from Rhodes College were
growing up and plunging headlong into careers that had nothing to do
with playing music in bars.

“Life intervened,” says Clay Combs, the band’s bass player
and principal songwriter. “We were a little tired of it all too. We’re
all married. There are kids. And the shorter answer is that there was
also a lot of laziness involved. We liked getting together on Thursday
nights and rocking, but we also just liked hanging out.”

Other distractions had nothing to do with laziness. Combs works as
an independent IT consultant, drummer Steve Willett is the
business manager of an IT company, and guitarist Chris Wood is
on the faculty at the UT College of Pharmacy.

Even when they aren’t recording or gigging regularly, Kitchens &
Bathrooms is a busy band. But business and pleasure do blend
occasionally, and Combs, who works on the back end of Archer
Records‘ website, struck a deal with his client to become one of
the first artists to record in Archer’s newly renovated Midtown studio
in April of last year.

“We don’t believe you have to do a lot of stuff to get a really good
sound,” Wood says of his band’s no-nonsense approach to recording. “We
think if you play real instruments through real tube amps, you’re
always going to get a great sound.”

That’s the philosophy the band took into Archer.

After the basic tracks were finished, including a pair of
outstanding guest spots by Al Gamble on keyboards and John
Whittemore on baritone and pedal-steel guitars, the band took
advantage of a family connection to indulge in a little rock-star
fantasy. They hopped on a plane and spent three days working on
overdubs at Fantasy Studio in Berkeley.

“My uncle Jeffrey Wood runs that studio,” Wood says. “We’d always
wanted to do this, and finally we did.”

Willett recalls with horror a moment when the head of a maraca he
was shaking came flying off and headed toward the control-room window
in a studio that has recorded Lenny Bruce, Santana, and Dave Brubeck.
Fortunately, no damage was done.

“You’ve got to understand, Steve was singing backing vocal tracks
into a $25,000 Neumann microphone from the 1950s that Ella Fitzgerald
and David Bowie had sung into,” Combs says. “They had Booker T.’s B3
organ in the next room. They wheeled in a piano for us to use … it
was Bill Evans’ piano. We were like kids in a candy store.”

“But I didn’t want to touch anything,” Willett interjects.

Combs and Woods, on the other hand, wanted to touch everything and
took advantage of the studio’s vast supply of old Taylor and Gibson
guitars to lay down acoustic tracks for Eternal In Between.

“I feel like we’re doing the same kind of stuff we were doing when
we were 20,” Combs says of the songwriting on Eternal In
Between, a narrative tale of difficult relationships, depression,
despair, and redemption.

Combs likes to be challenged. “Quirky songs are easy,” he says. “But
if I want to write a great song about a relationship between friends,
or lovers, the bar for excellence is set so high.”

Categories
Book Features Books

Dear Losers

Take it from Pete Tarslaw: “Book reviewers are the most despicable,
loathsome order of swine that ever rooted about the earth. They are
sniveling, revolting creatures who feed their own appetites for bile by
gnawing apart other people’s work. They are human garbage.”

And if there’s one thing Pete Tarslaw knows, it’s garbage. He writes
it to earn barely a living at EssayAides, a business outside Boston
that ghostwrites college-application essays for students who are either
too dumb to write the essays themselves or too foreign-born to
understand basic English.

Pete Tarslaw’s also a loser of the overeducated variety: He’s smarmy
as hell, a real know-it-all. He drinks too much, broadcasts his
opinions on every subject in the book (including the subject of book
reviewers), plus he’s a failure in the romance department. But he gets
fired from EssayAides. And he learns that his successful ex-girlfriend
is getting married.

Time, then, for Tarslaw to get down to business, show that
ex-girlfriend, at her wedding reception, what real success looks like.
His goal: to get famous. And he does get famous by deliberately writing
a piece of garbage with bestseller written all over it. He calls it
The Tornado Ashes Club, and that’s the setup in Steve Hely’s
satire on the publishing industry called How I Became a Famous
Novelist (Black Cat).

Hely is a Harvard grad who went on to write for David Letterman and
the TV show American Dad, which makes him no slouch in the
smarmy department. These days, he’s a writer for 30 Rock. But do
you want yet another comic novel on the unfunny trials and tribulations
of successful slackerdom? How I Became a Famous Novelist will
have you feeding on your own appetite for bile.

For more on the subject of loserdom: Take it from a 25-year-old
musician. When make-or-break Sub Pop writes, you rejoice. As in:

“Dear Losers: This letter concerns your crummy demo tape. While it
leaves much to be desired, miraculously it isn’t as ear-piercingly
horrible as the other thousand we received that day. One song in
particular, ‘Black Smoke, No Pope,’ does not completely suck. Though we
can’t — for legal reasons — encourage you to continue
making music, this letter is intended to come infinitely close to that
point. Sincerely, Sub Pop Records.”

Bingo. Climactic scene and reason enough in It Feels So Good When
I Stop (Riverhead Books) for that 25-year-old musician to turn his
life around.

This is musician Joe Pernice’s debut novel, and it’s about, no
surprise, a slacker, but it’ll be news to readers to read that note
from Sub Pop five pages from finishing the book. Why? Because readers
will scarcely realize that the recipient of that note is a frustrated
musician.

What we do know is that the protagonist in It Feels So Good When
I Stop is hanging out during the off-season on Cape Cod, he’s been
roundly rejected by his girlfriend in Brooklyn, and he’s learning some
lessons in adulthood from the nephew he babysits. He’s learning more
lessons courtesy of an older woman with a dead child haunting her past.
This guy, true to form, also drinks a lot, and, true to form, his
personal hygiene leaves more than a lot to be desired.

What’s a musician with the talent of Joe Pernice doing writing about
such a predictable lowlife? And what’s a lyricist with the intelligence
of Joe Pernice doing writing dialogue that is just this side of
universally potty-mouthed?

I don’t know. But it’s making the idea of even opening Benjamin
Anastas’ 1998 novel, described by its paperback publisher, Dial Press,
as “corrosively funny,” about the last thing this piece of human
garbage wants to dig into. The book’s called An Underachiever’s
Diary.

Categories
Art Art Feature

Here Here

Rehema Barber’s Director’s Choice exhibition at Power House,
“Everywhere, Nowhere, Somewhere,” packs multiple existential,
emotional, and visceral punches. Five talented local artists and six
nationally noted painters, sculptors, and videographers explore our
increasingly complex world and the often overwhelming sensory stimuli
flowing through its cell phones, cables, and cyberspace 24/7.

The words “Real Niggas Don’t Die” are hand-stenciled across the face
of RNDD: Tupac, Charles Huntley Nelson’s large acrylic painting
of the car in which Tupac Shakur was killed. Mounted nearby are
Polaroid images of tourists posing in front of the painting. The hollow
braggadocio of Nelson’s graffiti and the photo-ops of Tupac’s fans
suggest we are more titillated than moved by the death of this
multitalented rapper, actor, and philanthropist.

Red vinyl ribbons flow out of Joel Parsons’ 3-foot mound of latex,
acrylic, oranges, and incense work titled A Secret I Wouldn’t Know
How To Tell. In the exhibition’s most evocative site-specific
touch, the tattered ribbons cross the floor and trail into one of Power
House’s singed, crumbling furnaces.

The rich textures and colors of Keith Anderson’s burned-and-broken
phonograph record As Africa Turns remind us that nature’s decay
can be beautiful. Anderson’s unorthodox and formally satisfying
sculpture is also richly metaphoric. As Africa Turns (as the
world turns, as the music industry turns) evokes royalties that have
been lost, African-American recording artists who have been burned, and
lives that have been broken by the world of entertainment.

Keith Anderson

Jack Dingo Ryan explores what happens when we stop listening to
ourselves and each other. At first glance, Ryan’s delicately fluted,
ivory-white polyurethane ears (hundreds of them) seem out of sync with
the work’s title, Blood and Guts Forever. By adding two
noticeably turned-off light switches to the piece, Ryan’s installation
becomes, in part, an unsettlingly original metaphor for what happens
when we stop communicating, stop valuing creative output, and, instead,
measure success with military power, including the time-honored
tradition of tallying battle kills with piles of severed ears.

The show’s allusions to Greek gods and biblical figures remind us
that the desire to make our mark and find our place in the world is an
ancient one. In Mary and Jonathan Postal’s montage of antique photos,
Vulcan Forging Wings, an African-American blacksmith forges
metal in his workshop next to images of a precariously tilted tenement
and a large bin of tires, worn-out and discarded like the blacksmith’s
ancestors who worked the plantations, chain gangs, and backbreaking
jobs of industry. 

broken As AfricaTurns

The image of an African American just coming into his own as a
skilled artisan poignantly parallels Vulcan’s refusal to return to
Olympus to serve the gods, choosing instead to remain in the underworld
forging works of great beauty. Pigmented beeswax heightens the
intensity of the narrative. Sweat on the blacksmith’s nearly naked body
glistens. The red that oozes into the bottom of one of the iridescently
white wings looks as fresh as blood just spilled, somewhere in the
world, in the ongoing struggle for freedom.

The videos in the show provide important insights for understanding
and surviving our multicultural world. Tall, lean Massai warriors
dancing and models slinking along a catwalk in Brendan Fernandes’
digital video Aya Mama demonstrate humankind’s desire — in
every country and culture — to adorn itself, to strut its
stuff.

The two teenagers in Kambui Olujimi’s video Night Flight
create a room (or rooftop) of their own by rendezvousing in the middle
of the night on top of a Brooklyn apartment. They make their own music
and create their own dance steps as one of the teens, ebony body
swaying with boom box in hand, moves in tandem with
his fair-skinned roller-skating partner.

Dwayne Butcher’s digital video Partagas both lampoons and
pays homage to his redneck heritage. Instead of a hot tub, Butcher
mellows out in a makeshift pool in the back of his pickup drinking Dos
Equis and smoking fine cigars.

At one point in the video, Butcher places his feet flat on the bed
of his red truck, hoists his body, and pours golden liquid from two
cans of beer across his torso to the slow measured sounds of classical
music.

With his signature mix of stand-up comedy, confessional poetry, and
absurdist theater, Butcher describes his worldview in his artist’s
statement for the show:

“I think I will be okay as long as I can keep making digital videos
with the personality of a redneck hillbilly drinking beer naked in the
back of a truck.”

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Ham & Cheese

CREDIT: justin fox burks

Holiday Deli & Ham Co. began in a stack of papers.

It was the early ’90s when Don “Papa” Jordan, who owned a local
Wendy’s franchise, approached his son Trey about getting into business
together. Dad was thinking another franchise, but Trey, who was selling
real estate at the time, wanted to do something completely new.

So, they turned to the stack of papers — magazine articles,
newspaper clippings, and the like — that the elder Jordan had
collected over the years. Trey Jordan estimates the pile was two-feet
high, and with a bit of digging, the pair discovered that not only did
Honeybaked Ham do brisk business in the region, it had no
competition.

The pair toured franchises and mom-and-pops and decided they could
do it.

The first Holiday Ham opened in 1993, and now there are has six
stores in the Memphis area and in Knoxville.

Trey Jordan says the aim in competing with HoneyBaked was
product-based only in part. “The secret sauce for us, so to speak, was
customer service, above and beyond. We were okay with selling less
product as long as we treated people well,” he says.

“Mom said make everyday a holiday,” Jordan explains of the business’
name and philosophy. “She would use any excuse to have an event —
you brought home an ‘A’ in school, came home from college — and
she’d go overboard.”

These family get-togethers were often picnics that included chicken
and potato salads and, what’s become one of Holiday Ham’s signature
items, pimento cheese.

Eighty-thousand pounds of “Papa’s Famous Pimento Cheese” were sold
last year, and in Knoxville, Holiday Ham has another moniker: Pimento’s
Café & Market.

You can get pimento cheese on a sandwich or by the pound, and
Holiday Ham recently added pimento cheese grits to its breakfast
menu.

The recipe for the pimento cheese is top-secret, of course, and the
Jordans have learned there’s no point in messing with it. That’s to
say, the blue-cheese-and-carrot version was a flop.

The blue-cheese pimento salad was an example of the Jordans actively
tweaking their business model. A year ago, they added a breakfast menu.
“None of us believed in breakfast,” Jordan says. “There was a real
push-back.” He estimates that breakfast now constitutes about 10
percent of the business.

As for the ham, which is from a smokehouse in Ohio, Jordan says its
sales make up about 20 percent of business. “Our ham is awesome,” he
says.

One of Holiday’s newest offerings is the “pack-your-own” cooler,
which serves two to four or four to six. The to-go coolers include a
choice of salads (chicken, pimento), half a loaf of bread, a side of
fresh fruit, and cookies.

In the fall, the company will introduce pasta salads and recently
held “preview tastings” for new shrimp and chicken salads. (Customers
volunteer for the “previews” through the company’s website.)

Holiday Ham has roughly 180 employees, who are pushed with contests
offering prizes such as tickets to Six Flags. When one East Memphis
store wasn’t having much success with its curb-side service (you call
in an order; they deliver it to your car in specially marked parking
spaces), the Union Avenue store manager made it her goal to make the
service work in Midtown. She met the goal.

“We all pull together,” Jordan says. “We’re still just a mom-and-pop
operation.”

Jordan points out the black-and-white pictures on the walls. There’s
one of his daughters, another featuring his college roommate who’s an
anchor on ESPN. There’s one, of course, taken during one of those
family picnics that inspired the business.

“We call ourselves a non-alcoholic Cheers — everybody
knows your name,” Jordan says, explaining why Holiday Ham has so far
resisted franchising. “We’re scared we’ll lose that culture.”

Ultimately, Jordan says, the goal is to spread the Holiday Ham brand
across the state. “We want to become a household name in
Tennessee.”

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Show & Tell

Gina and Pat Neely entertained fans at the Southern Food & Wine Festival.

Food Network celebrity Alton Brown lost 45 pounds this
summer. How did he do it? He ate sardines. Seriously. He ate sardines
every day, along with anchovies and pickled herring.

“I went from 213 pounds to a size 32 waist in five months,” said
Brown, the star power behind the Food Network’s Good Eats. “And
I did it by replacing the red meat in my diet with little fish.”

Brown was the headliner Saturday afternoon at the first annual
Southern Food & Wine Festival in Nashville, where almost
1,000 revved-up fans attended his cooking demo at the Gaylord Opryland
Hotel. With quirky antics (he snapped off the head of a trout in close
range of the video camera) and a bit of science, Brown pushed the
sustainability and health benefits of a food many of us find, well, a
little disgusting. He also cooked, demonstrating how to filet, smoke,
and pickle rainbow trout, a fish he brines first in a quart of water
mixed with one-half cup of salt.

“Brine chicken or any kind of fish for three to five hours,” Brown
said. “It gives the fish a firmer texture.”

Although I can’t remember why brining works (something to do with
salt water changing the molecular structure of the meat), Brown
convinced me to give it a try, along with escabèche, a Spanish
dish he prepared of seared trout marinated in onions, spices, and white
wine.

In addition to cooking, Brown tossed out practical advice: There’s
no need to marinate meat for more than 20 or 25 minutes; store fragile
food in the bottom of the fridge where it’s coldest; and eat
farm-raised tilapia from America (not Asia) because tilapia are
vegetarians.

Later in the evening, Memphis’ own Pat and Gina Neely
delivered their soulful mix of advice on barbecue and relationships to
a smaller but equally enthused crowd.

“Thanks for bringing sexy back to the kitchen,” one fan yelled from
the audience. “I’m wearing my pink shirt for you, Gina,” offered up
another. “It says, ‘Oink if you love pig.'”

The Neelys, who parlayed Neely’s Bar-B-Que restaurants into the
cooking show Down Home With the Neelys, demonstrated how to make
pork ribs, slaw, barbecue spaghetti, and Lynchburg Lemonade, a Jack
Daniel’s cocktail made with Limonata and maraschino cherries. They were
fun and funny, teasing one another like this:

Pat: “Always rub your meat low and slow.” (He was applying dry rub
to a slab of ribs, but he really did say that.)

Gina: “Yeah, baby! Go high and fast and you’re spending the night on
the couch.”

For more of the Neelys, watch the premiere of their hour-long
profile on the Food Network’s Chefography series. The special,
scheduled for August 15th, at 7 p.m., was filmed in Memphis earlier
this year.

In between cooking demonstrations, I sampled my way around the
festival’s exhibit hall, looking for products sold locally. My favorite
find was Mama Turney’s Homemade Pies. Made near downtown
Nashville, the bakery churns out 240 nine-inch pies every 55
minutes.

“That’s a lot of pies,” agreed Michael Turney, the company’s
president. “But they still taste like you pulled them out of your own
oven.”

Based on family recipes and sold locally at Kroger and Piggly
Wiggly, the pies come in chocolate, chess, pecan, and lemon chess, a
flavorful and creamy variety added this year to the lineup.

For more expo products and recipes from Brown and the Neelys, see
the Flyer‘s Hungry Memphis blog.

Maybe you missed this news: Trader Joe’s, the gourmet and
whole-foods grocery from Southern California, has opened a store in
Nashville. It’s the only Trader Joe’s in Tennessee.

Located in a former Wild Oats store near Vanderbilt University, the
place was bustling Sunday at mid-day, and here’s why: Trader Joe’s
sells a remarkable assortment of fresh, frozen, and packaged foods at
affordable prices, thanks to aggressive private labeling.

Impulse buying? You bet. I spent $100 in 20 minutes, tossing these
favorites in my cart: pomegranate juice, wasabi mayonnaise,
cocoa-covered almonds, organic oatmeal, almond biscotti, shea-butter
soap, and a can of sardines. (I know. I’m a pushover.) Next time, I’ll
take a cooler.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Food, Link

Julie & Julia is absolute dynamite. “Based on two true
stories,” as it declares in the beginning, Julie & Julia
follows the food travails of novice cook Julie Powell and Julia Child
before she was a world-famous chef.

It’s 1949, and Child (Meryl Streep) arrives in Paris with her
diplomat husband, Paul (Stanley Tucci). Child is bored and doesn’t want
to waste her time in the City of Light like the other diplomats’ wives,
so she seeks out a hobby. She loves to eat and immerses herself in
French cuisine. Two observations change her life: French people eat
French food every day, and there’s no French cookbook written in
English. So she enrolls in the cooking school Le Cordon Bleu and takes
to it like a duck to butter.

It’s 2002, and Powell (Amy Adams) has just moved to Queens with her
editor husband, Eric (Chris Messina). Powell feels inferior to her
same-age friends who are successful businesswomen and high-powered
professionals. She’s a low-level bureaucrat in the post-9/11 NYC
rebuilding effort, and she’s staring at 30 with no real accomplishments
under her belt.

But she loves to write, and she has a desire to learn to cook well.
With the advent of blogs, she has a vehicle for her creativity. Her
idea: to cook the 524 recipes from Child’s Mastering the Art of
French Cooking in 365 days and to blog about it. After all, Eric
tells her, “Julia Child wasn’t always Julia Child.” So Powell launches
the “Julie/Julia Project” on a Salon.com blog, and it takes off like a
well-turned foodie phrase loosed in the hipsterverse.

Streep is dominant as Child. I’ll admit a bias she has to overcome:
I generally think the actress is overrated, with a few, recent-er
exceptions (Adaptation, Doubt). But in Julie &
Julia, she transcends, taking a well-known personality and walking
the performance between familiarity and caricature. Streep’s Child is
physically big and broad and magnanimous — gracefully ungainly.
It’s great physical acting. She nails the voice and mannerisms, too,
and adds a comic flourish that helps define the movie as a comedy
rather than a stuffy biopic.

Adams, too, is swell. She sports a circa-2002 bob haircut and has
kind of a Julie Hagerty thing going on that gives her an infectious
spirit. But Adams also taps into the forlorn underpinnings behind
Powell’s project, and she sells the joy cooking brings her (along with
the attendant relationship indigestion).

For it all, writer/director Nora Ephron may be the strong link in
Julie & Julia. Ephron wrote for Streep way back when with
the drama Silkwood and the autobiographical Heartburn
(with Streep as the Ephron stand-in), but she’s known best for the
rom-com titans Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail.
Her touch in Julie & Julia is golden. With a tight grip on
the historical minutiae of both storylines in addition to the enormous
entertainment value at work, Ephron adds an earthy heft to the picture
that lands it between a typically breezy chic flick and a stuffy
biopic. It’s the best movie of the year so far, and I’ve seen The
Hurt Locker.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Summertime (Blues)

(500) Days of Summer quickly separates potential fans from
potential skeptics. If you chuckle at the disclaimer/”dedication” that
precedes the film, chances are that any complaints about its numerous
structural failings will sound crotchety, picky, fussy, elitist,
curmudgeonly, and unfair. If, on the other hand, you don’t find
the humor in the discordant, ugly note struck by the film’s opening
remarks, then perhaps you might want to understand why this resolutely
anticomic antiromance is so unsatisfying.

The film throws together two cute zombies and tries to explain why
their relationship fizzled. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a decent actor not
known for his light touch, plays Tom, a greeting-card writer who’s
suddenly smitten with co-worker Summer, played by the lithe, large-
(and blank-)eyed Zooey Deschanel. The film’s narrator insists early on
that the film is not a love story but more of an inquest concerning a
dead relationship that scrambles and reassembles the days of Tom and
Summer’s courtship in its search for a cause of death.

What’s so frustrating about (500) Days of Summer is the way
its unconventional asides, voiceovers, and footnotes distract from the
fairly original story about a sensitive guy who refuses to take an
honest, forthright weirdo at her word. For example, the mysterious
narrator steps in on several occasions to provide background
information and trite, quasi-literary psychological analysis of Tom’s
and Summer’s feelings, but it’s unclear whether this voice belongs to
an older and wiser version of Tom, an obliging script doctor, or a
magical indie-film warlock sent to sprinkle the film with quirkiness
and pixie dust.

That may be a small point, but the other nonrealistic flourishes are
equally arbitrary and perplexing. The postcoital dance production seems
less and less likely the more you think about it; it’s unclear why a
guy with an undying love for Joy Division and the Smiths would burst
into an impromptu musical number set to Hall and Oates’ “You Make My
Dreams” — better known as bumper music for dozens of terrible
romantic-comedy trailers. One of the defining aspects of Tom’s
character, after all, is his obsession with Britpop. Why would he find
inspiration in an overused piece of early-’80s schlock he’d probably
hate? And Tom’s art-film daydream, which relies on embarrassing
clichés like mimes and chess-playing deities, mostly shows that
he’s never seen a movie from another country.

The failure of these nonsensical fantasy sequences is clearest in
the film’s chief contrivance. The jumbled chronology and juxtapositions
of, say, Day 303 and Day 27 yield few surprises and feel pretty
amateurish, especially for moviegoers who can remember the unexpectedly
poignant and funny pleasures of 2003’s rom-com Möbius strip
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In contrast, the funniest
things in (500) Days of Summer are probably the costumes, which
suggest that aspiring young professionals should always dress like
second-graders on picture day.

The film finally drowns in waves of cleverness, and any potential
insights about the solipsism and neediness of a certain kind of
indie-rock boy are worn away by the never-ending tide of cutesy-poo
gimmickry.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Screen King

You may have heard it’s Elvis Week. As titanic as the King was when
it came to music, he seeped into the public consciousness almost as
much with his film career, appearing in 31 movies in 13 years.

Elvis is returning to Memphis silver screens with a series of films
shown across town this week. First up is the Orpheum’s presentation of
Blue Hawaii on Sunday, August 9th, at 6 p.m. Girls and surf
merge in the 50th-state paradise, and the film features Angela Lansbury
and Joan Blackman. Tickets are $6 for adults and $5 for kids 12 and
under.

On Tuesday, August 11th, there is a whole slate of Elvis on film
under one roof. Elvis Film Fest 6 takes over Malco’s Studio on the
Square beginning at 10 a.m. (and again at 4:10 p.m.) with a screening
of Jailhouse Rock — which has the single-best scene in the
King’s career, with the magnificently choreographed prison dance.

Bikers and carnies converge in Roustabout, showing at 10:15
a.m. and 2 p.m. At noon and 3 p.m., catch Fun in Acapulco, which
pairs Elvis with Ursula Andress down Mexico way. Finally, King
Creole — a cautionary tale about juvenile delinquency and
night-club shenanigans co-starring Walter Matthau — screens at
12:30 p.m. Tickets are $5 per show, and proceeds benefit the Elvis
Presley Charitable Foundation.

Lastly, how about some nonfiction here? The film festival On
Location: Memphis presents the premiere of At the Gates: Elvis
Presley Blvd. — about the King’s effect on those around him
and the millions of fans who flock to Memphis each year — on
Wednesday, August 12th, at 5 p.m. Tickets are $35. The doc is showing
at Playhouse on the Square, which used to be the Memphian, a movie
theater Elvis rented from time to time to watch films privately. After
the screening, a discussion with Larry Geller, the filmmakers, and
special guests is scheduled.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: Konstantin Sutyagin | Dreamstime.com

In the name of all that’s holy, will some elected

official entrusted with the public’s safety — man or
woman,Republican or Democrat, local, state, or federal — please find
the conscience or the ‘nads to stand up to the telecom industry and propose legislation
banning cell-phone use while driving? Is this a
difficult call to make? Nothing is more enraging than to be held up
in traffic by some grinning, oblivious, self-absorbed fool, yammering
into a cell phone with one hand on the wheel and the other up to an
ear, while angered drivers maneuver to pass on the left and right.
Don’t they still teach driver’s ed in school? And if so, whatever
happened to “both hands on the wheel”? At the risk of sounding
curmudgeonly, I believe that cell-phone use is a prime contributor to
the breakdown of civility in society, but using the dastardly devices
while driving a car is simply stupid, and deadly.

Now we discover that, according to The New York Times, the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration withheld hundreds of
pages of research confirming the deadly results of cell-phone use in
cars “because of concerns about angering Congress.” The research, begun
in 2003, estimated that cell-phone use by drivers caused 240,000
accidents and nearly 1,000 fatalities in the previous year, and we
would never have heard about it had not the Center for Auto Safety
petitioned for the findings under the Freedom of Information Act.
Clarence Ditlow, the center’s director, said, “We’re looking at a
problem that could be as bad as drunk driving, and the government has
covered it up.” Why am I not surprised that the Bush-era Transportation
Department, under Secretary Norman Mineta, decided to quash the report
as “inconclusive”? The Bush team caved in to every other corporate
interest with political donations in hand, why not the cell-phone
industry too? Ditlow added, “No public health and safety agency should
allow its research to be suppressed for political reasons.” Can I get a
witness?

There are currently 14 states that ban texting while driving (which
is like outlawing mixing cocktails behind the wheel) but only six that
forbid yakking on the phone. The movement to ban texting grew after the
April 29, 2009, incident involving a bus driver in San Antonio who was
captured on film while he texted his way directly into the rear of
several vehicles stopped at a red light. Tennessee has a texting ban,
but although we have crash statistics, there is currently no effort to
ban hand-held devices while driving. There is some irony in the fact
that, as a nation, we mourn the brave soldiers, now over 5,000 in
number, who have sacrificed their lives in the Iraq and Afghanistan
wars over the past eight years, yet we barely swallow hard over the
nearly 40,000 traffic fatalities on our nation’s roads annually. A
University of Utah study comparing 40 volunteer drivers of a “virtual
car” discovered that drunk drivers did better than cell-phone users and
that chatting on the cell was the equivalent of registering a .08 on
the breathalyzer.

I understand that there now exists a “culture of the cell phone”
that will be difficult to alter. I carry a cell phone, but I don’t
answer it if I’m driving, and if I need to make a call, I pull in
somewhere and stop. It’s not that I’m not smart enough to multi-task,
it’s that I realize that driving today’s roads requires complete
attention, if only to protect yourself from some Suburban Assault
Vehicle drifting into your lane because the driver is on the phone.
Unless you’re a doctor or a fireman, there is no phone message so
urgent that it can’t wait a few minutes to be answered safely.

In Europe, cell-phone use is already banned while driving, so why
does it always take this country so long to enact the obvious? Oh, I
forgot, we disdain European culture. The Old Country takes the matter
so seriously that there is a kit for sale that includes a paint-ball
gun for drivers to mark the cars of violators when the police aren’t
around. Of course, anyone shooting another car with a paint-ball gun
around here would have their heads blown off with a real gun. The
effete Europeans don’t allow guns in cars either, but at least in this
country, we’re able to report a real shooting by using the cell phone
that’s already in our hands.