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Month: August 2009
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Food on Film
For some reason I always watch “food” movies when I am hungry enough to eat my empty cardboard popcorn container.
In those types of appetite-whetting movies, sometimes the food will become another character and steal the scenes with bright colors and beautiful textures.
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Sports From Afar
A sailing champion, a diving champion, a lollapalooza of an article on skate parks, the bike capital of America, and a roots tour of college football stadiums. Or how I spent my summer vacation.
In Memphis magazine’s current City Guide, I told readers that I wanted to see how much they really knew about the history of the city they call home. Most people can recite one or two basic facts about Elvis, or Sun Studio, or Piggly Wiggly, or the many accomplishments of the Lauderdales. But I tossed more than 30 questions your way, about considerably more esoteric subjects, though I made it clear that if you had been reading the magazine’s “Ask Vance” column, you should already know the answers.
Finished the quiz? Then put your pencils down and compare your results with the answers below. There’s no prize for winning. Just the immense pride you should feel if you did well.
THE ANSWERS:
1. For years and years, what well-known Memphian kept telling listeners, “Keep dialing and smiling. Bye-bye now”?
c. J.C. Levy, owner of the Dial and Smile telephone joke line (above, recording a baby elephant, probably as part of one of his telephone gags).
2. In 1952, a massive blaze at the Quaker Oats plant in North Memphis consumed thousands of:
d. Corncobs. That’s right, corncobs.
3. In the 1950s, a Memphian opened a business on Lamar with the curious slogan, “Where You Won’t Get Bit.” This was, of course:
b. Bittman’s Appliances, owned by Herbert Bittman.
4. Who were “The Original Memphis Five”?
a. A jazz quintet formed in New Orleans in the early 1900s.
5. What stands on the former site of the Grand Opera House, which burned in 1899?
c. The Orpheum Theatre.
The mayoral succession to Willie Herenton, the dominant figure in Memphis city politics for the better part of two decades, is now beginning to resemble the situation in Yugoslavia in the early ‘90s after the death of that country’s long-time dictator, Marshal Tito.
Not only did rivals of every sort begin staking their claims to power, but the country itself broke up into fragments — Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, etc., etc., and the process is continuing even today. Nobody expects that kind of Balkanization to occur in Memphis. The city is the city and will remain so.
But the power struggle is something else. For years, ever since it became obvious that Herenton wanted to take leave of the mayor’s office before his term expired, Shelby County Mayor A C Wharton has been reckoned the odds-on favorite to succeed him. Even now, the major challenge to that assumption has come from Wharton’s own expression of concern about the size of the prospective October 27th special election field two weeks ago.
Wharton worried out loud that a plethora of niche candidates could create a “fluke” situation with an unexpected victor. And a day after he had formally left office, leaving city council chairman Myron Lowery in charge as “mayor pro tem,” Herenton, too, advanced the notion that the special election would be a “crapshoot,” one which “anybody can win.”
The “anybody” in question at the time was a relatively smallish field consisting of Wharton, Lowery, former city council member Carol Chumney, lawyer and Herenton intimate Charles Carpenter, WWE wrestler/commentator Jerry Lawler, maverick school board member the Rev. Kenneth Whalum Jr., and businessman/Shelby County Commissioner James Harvey. Lawyer Jim Strickland, who had been considered a strong contender, had decided against running after commissioning and digesting a poll.
Lowery, whose early wish to have an orderly transition and head up an activist interim government had been quashed by Herenton, was reeling anew this week after his post-swearing-in effort to fire city attorney Elbert Jefferson had angered fellow council members and been blocked, at least temporarily, by a judicial injunction.
Coincidentally or not, that imbroglio coincided with a second wave of mayoral candidates — including, it would seem, city court clerk Thomas Long, city council member Wanda Halbert, and former city council member Edmund Ford Sr. Nor, with ample time left before the September 17th filing date for candidacies, is there reason to believe that the parade of new hopefuls is over.
Clearly, there is a power vacuum in Memphis at the moment, and the fact that nature abhors a vacuum is a bona fide physical law, one that applies to politics as well. The present confusion in the city’s political ranks is a case in point.
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The Story That Keeps on Killing
Frank Murtaugh talks professional athletes, guns, and violence at From My Seat.
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The Story That Keeps on Killing
Three major Southern cities. Three acts of gun violence. Three victims: all African-American men under the age of 40. Reviewed as statistics, they hardly cause one to pause in skimming a paper or web site for news. Perhaps a shake of the head, pursed lips, and a thought bubble: “Not again.”
Only when the names of the victims are read do they capture attention. On July 4th in Nashville, former Tennessee Titans quarterback Steve McNair was shot and killed as he slept by a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair. On July 20th in Memphis, former Tiger and Grizzly basketball star Antonio Burks was shot during a backyard robbery of a dice game. Burks is recovering, but remains hospitalized. Then, on July 25th in Atlanta, former welterweight boxing champ Vernon Forrest was shot and killed near a gas station after a robbery attempt gone awry. (Forrest actually chased his assailant and fired the first shot before being slain from behind.) Forrest’s 11-year-old godson witnessed his murder.
With the wounds of these stories still fresh — literally in Burks’ case, metaphorically with the others — the sports world seems to have turned to the ongoing saga of Michael Vick as its “crime and punishment” story of the day. Conditionally reinstated to play in the NFL by commissioner Roger Goodell, Vick is aiming to return to the playing field after serving two years in prison for running a dog-fighting ring from his Virginia home. The story is going to stir intense debate between hard-line animal-rights advocates who feel barbarism like Vick displayed doesn’t fade (not even with a spell behind bars) and those who feel the quarterback has paid his penalty, served his time, and should receive that most American of gifts: a second chance.
I happen to fall on the side of second chances. And I hope Vick takes the field sometime this fall, and finds a way to use the spotlight of an NFL star to help shine a light on the rights and wrongs of animal care across the country. Who better to focus attention on the myriad abuses of dogs and other four-legged friends of ours than a man who has been in the middle of a bloody ring, as it were, and now sees forgiveness as his own salvation?
But however the Vick story turns out, it’s borderline trite if you consider the violence costing the lives of other members of his professional sports fraternity, not to mention the countless human beings who indeed earn merely a shake of the head when their names appear in the obituaries. If only last month’s events were unusual. If only we could fall on the old crutch, “Bad things happen in threes.” But last November, New York Giants star Plaxico Burress shot himself in the leg with a gun he was carrying illegally. Precisely the day before, Washington Redskin star Sean Taylor died from a gunshot wound after a break-in of his Miami home. On New Year’s Day, 2007, Denver Bronco Darrent Williams was shot and killed in a drive-by shooting. A review becomes sadly and tragically tiresome.
The mere suggestion of new restrictions on gun possession — like this column — will mobilize members and advocates of the National Rifle Association. And the vitriolic feedback is further proof that the message is either not clear enough, or not getting through. Members of the NRA — those well-versed in how to use a firearm, how to care for a firearm, and how to secure a firearm — are precisely the kind of people who should be carrying guns. My guess is the three people who fired the shots that hit McNair, Burks, and Forrest are not members of the NRA. And that screams for more attention, not just from the government, but from the NRA itself, whose interests are (presumably) in the safe possession and use of guns.
The Michael Vick story is compelling, but it will come and go. How long before we read of the next professional athlete on the wrong end of a gun? And when will we do something more than merely shake our heads?
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Billy Lee Riley, RIP
Guitars at half mast, please. Billy Lee Riley, the Sun Studio rockabilly artist who recorded atomic age classics such as “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll” and “Red Hot” is dead. Chris Davis pays tribute.
This morning, Food News writer Pam Denney and I made one last round through the vendors’ section of the Southern Food & Wine Festival.
This is the owner of Mama Turney’s Homemade Pies. The pies — pecan, chess, lemon chess, and chocolate chess — are amazing. He told us they’re available in Memphis at Kroger’s.
While we were talking, a man and his family approached the booth. There was some back-and-forth involving the man, a pie, and a stick (to keep his family away from the pie).
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Billy Lee Riley, RIP
Guitars at half mast, please. Billy Lee Riley, the Sun Studio rockabilly artist who recorded atomic age classics such as “Flying Saucers Rock and Roll” and “Red Hot” is dead. It was recently reported that Riley, who had been in poor health since taking a bad fall in 2005, was suffering from the final stages of terminal cancer.
On August 30th, there will be a memorial show in Newport, Arkansas, featuring Sonny Burgess and the Pacers, WS Holland and his band, Travis Wammack, Carl Mann, Smoochy Smith, Ace Cannon and his band, Jr. Rogers, Warren Crow, J.M. VanEaton, Dale Hawkins, C.W. Gattin, and the Blues Brothers Band.
We’ll have more to say about this influential and under-sung Memphis artist, in the meantime here’s a clip from a live performance in 2003.