Virginia McLean of Friends of Our Riverfront and June West of Memphis Heritage are both forces to be reckoned with.
So who are they? John Branston has the details in City Beat.
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Month: January 2010
Categories
Honky Tonkin’
The bad news first: Crazy Heart, a new film about a washed-up country-music star trying to deal with age, alcoholism, abandoned children, a career in decline — and new hope provided by the love of a younger woman — suffers in comparison to two films it bears much resemblance to: Tender Mercies and The Wrestler.
Tender Mercies, Robert Duvall’s 1983 Academy Award-winning film, was effective as a prayer for comfort on behalf of its fictional celebrity protagonist. And The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke’s 2009 Academy Award-nominated movie, was effective as an implication of the audience in the crimes committed against its famous lead character.
But Crazy Heart just is — an inert vehicle too undersized for its larger-than-life lead.
Which gets us to the good news: As Crazy Heart‘s Bad Blake, Jeff Bridges is fantastic. (He’s already won the Golden Globe and SAG awards and looks like a lock for the Best Actor Oscar.) Always a reliable presence on-screen, here the actor is in complete command of his role, filling Blake out with little physical asides such as whistles, snaps, gestures, tics — collateral acting that infuses the character with life. Perhaps more impressive, Bridges doesn’t get the benefit of an audience’s institutional memory of the actor to inform the performance, as Rourke did in The Wrestler.
Crazy Heart is the feature debut of Scott Cooper, who adapts from Thomas Cobb’s same-name novel. The film is shot through with observations on lifestyle details: unbuckled jeans and a jug of urine after a long road trip; motel-room blinds drawn to keep out the harsh light of day; a pile of mail back home.
T-Bone Burnett and the late Stephen Bruton provide original music for the film, including the Bad Blake songs “The Weary Kind,” “I Don’t Know,” and “Hold On You.”
“The Weary Kind” won the Golden Globe for Best Original Song. “Hold On You” sounds a lot like the intro song to the TV show Firefly.
Bridges performs each of these tunes and acquits himself fine as a singer. Though a mild bit of suspended disbelief is required to imagine him as a star vocalist, he’s got the performance charisma and fictional songwriting chops to back up the illusion.
Blake seems to be a country star in the Outlaw subgenre — Hank Jr. immediately came to mind, though I’m no musicologist and have no doubt missed out on some subtleties and culture references. (That said, you don’t need to be a country fan to extract nutrients from the film.)
Bridges has chemistry to pass out to his co-stars — in relationships romantic, antagonistic, or platonic, the rising tide of his performance lifts all boats. Blake is interviewed by and forms an attachment with Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a single mother who impresses him with her knowledge of Lefty Frizzell. One person he doesn’t want to be asked about is Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell), a former back-up musician who has hit the big time performing songs Blake wrote. Back home in Houston, Blake leans on his pal Wayne (Tender Mercies‘ Duvall).
Blake is 57 years old, four times divorced, chain-smokes, drinks too much whiskey, suffers from hemorrhoids, and drives a worn-down ’78 Silverado. “I used to be somebody but now am somebody else,” he sings. Sounds like a country song.
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Full Throttle
From Elizabeth Alley’s saturate, crisp-edged depictions of the 1950s in Perry Nicole’s 10th Anniversary Exhibition to Mary Stubbs’ black-and-white infrared photography at the Buckman to Daisy Craddock’s brooding Southern landscapes at David Lusk, Memphis galleries are bringing in the new year with shows that run the gamut of sensibility and style.
Rod Moorhead, one of Perry Nicole’s newest artists, counterpoints Elizabeth Alley’s paintings of starched white blouses and Danish modern divans with Furies #6, a pit-fired clay sculpture of a young woman who appears to take shape or to decompose in front of our eyes. Pieces of cloth (or perhaps Eden’s proverbial serpents) wrap around the loins and barely pubescent breasts of a creature who looks like a hybrid of a fallen angel and teenage Eve. We can see the sculptor’s thumbprints in the figure’s ruffled, sooty brown wings and the armless, half-formed body that still looks malleable. The half-closed eyes and relaxed mouth (in limbo? a little dazed?) complete Moorhead’s haunting evocation of what it feels like to be human, to be able to glimpse the divine while still trapped in a mortal coil.
Perry Nicole’s anniversary exhibition also provides viewers with an opportunity to see, side by side, works by a wide range of accomplished landscape artists, including Martha Kelly’s signature vision of summer, Top of the Island, in which a canopy of trees casts cool, dark shadows across a grassy field that looks lime-green in full sunlight.
Instead of the expressive female forms for which she is best known, Mary Reed contributes textured, sinuous landscapes to the show. In Boundaries, for example, the bare branches of a misshapen tree reach out toward a winding river and layers of handmade paper, fabric, and paint suggest the heft and roughhewn surface of large boulders as well as the rise and fall of waters rushing toward us.
Arline Jernigan fearlessly works and reworks the surface of her mixed-media, nearly monochromatic painting Flight. We soar through overcast skies past crumbling limestone rock faces, where plant life just begins to take hold in the crevices, where ideas just begin to take shape on an almost blank tabula rasa that is one of the subtlest and most assured works in the show.
Through February 26th
TU, a touring company noted for its inventive syntheses of dance forms (including ballet, contemporary, and African), performs Friday, January 29th, at the Buckman Performing & Fine Arts Center. TU’s choreography has been described as “beautiful, intelligent and singularly wrought.” The same can be said of the watercolors, ceramics, and black-and-white photography mounted just outside the Buckman auditorium in the Levy Gallery’s January exhibition, “Seen, Shaped, Considered: Works Inspired by the Natural World.”
In one of the most mature works of her career, Mary Stubbs — a photographer noted for images of crosses and church steeples — evokes transcendence with infrared light and a trinity of trees. The trees at bottom left and bottom right of Beyond the Moment are barren. Across the top of the work, branches of a third tree are covered with buds backdropped by luminous jet contrails and a preternaturally dark sky.
Anne Froning Wike creates a sense of wonder with ceramics. A prime example is Lotus Gazing Bowl — Amethyst, a clay vessel shaped out of ever-widening circles of translucent mauve petals flecked with dark green. At the center of this inventive, exquisitely beautiful mandala is a tiny pale-pink rose.
Clouds roll across the top edge of Tom Pellet’s satisfyingly complex, delicately observed watercolor All That Glitters. Near the bottom, a geometric abstraction of greens and corals repeats the colors in the leaves and petals of a large camellia that fills the rest of the work.
Through February 12th
Massive oaks, magnolias, and crepe myrtles weighed down with dusty mauve blossoms nearly fill the canvases in “Points South,” Daisy Craddock’s show at David Lusk. There are no breezes, no rippled waters, no rustling of olive-green foliage in Craddock’s oil-on-linen Magnolia, Midday. Instead, the placid gray surface of a lake reflects an overcast sky. In hands less skilled than Craddock’s, colors muted and images blurred by thick atmosphere could feel suffocating.
For viewers who both rue and revere the Deep South’s all-encompassing humidity (including Craddock, who grew up in Memphis in the ’50s when open porches and ceiling fans were the norm, not central air-conditioning), Craddock’s honest and elegiac paintings register as brooding rather than oppressive, contemplative instead of languishing.
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Goal-Oriented
Marcus Santi
Elite and ordinary
Take a good look at the above picture of Marcus Santi leaping over a hurdle. Now face the facts: You are not going to look like this.
Fitness programs and apparatus are often promoted by incredibly fit men and women with the implied or spoken message that you will look like them if you follow their simple routines.
The problem is that their routines are not simple. Exercise routines take hours of disciplined practice every week and must be combined with rigorous dieting and God-given good health.
Santi, 38, a personal trainer in Memphis, is an elite runner, lifelong athlete, and all-around jock. In his promotional video, he is running up a sand dune, hopping up on a dresser, doing squats on one leg, and sprinting in a harness. He works out six to eight hours a week, plus the time he spends training others.
“The key as you get older is time management and energy issues,” he said. “What I do is try to kill as many birds as I can with one stone by combining lifting with aerobic benefits and flexibility. My heart rate is constantly up, and I am always moving.”
Santi started running track when he was 5, starting taking tennis lessons at the Racquet Club when he was 11, played competitive soccer, and ran the 400-meter hurdles at the University of Memphis. Now 6′-1″ and 170 pounds, he has never been out of shape.
He takes one or two days a week off — “rest is part of the program” — but never Sunday. No matter what he did Saturday night, he goes to the track and meets his buddies Sunday afternoon to do interval training. You can see the results.
— John Branston
Justin Fox Burks
Fitness and coping with grief
There are harder things than losing weight. Moving on after the death of a family member is one of them. For Justin Fox Burks, a fitness quest was part of coming to grips with his grief over the death of his mother.
Burks, a local photographer whose pictures often appear in this newspaper, is just short of six feet tall, weighs 195 pounds, and competes in triathlons. Two years ago, he weighed 265 pounds despite being a vegetarian and leading a reasonably active lifestyle.
“I was riding my bike and doing the things I thought I should be doing but not with the frequency I should have been doing them,” said Burks, 34 years old. “I was eating all the right things but with lots of cheese on them and with too much bread.”
Combining running short distances with walking, he worked up to a one-mile run, then a 5K race on the Fourth of July, which took him 35 minutes. In October, his mother was killed in a car accident. Justin and other family members dedicated themselves to raising money in her name for the St. Jude Half Marathon.
“Running became for me a great release to keep me busy and direct my energies,” he said. “I definitely became more focused.”
With his weight down to 220 pounds, he set his sights on finishing a triathlon and the Chicago Marathon in 2009, both of which he completed. With more training, he changed his diet. He made a $200 weight-loss bet with his brother and their father, which he lost. But he dropped his weight to 195 pounds by going vegan, eliminating beer and alcohol, and watching his sugar intake. He now has modified his diet to “vegan until 6 p.m.”
“I eat fresh fruit and vegetables but no dairy until 6, then I will have a pizza or enchiladas after 6, so I never feel deprived.”
— John Branston
Fighting the “Freshman 15”
Adventure, innovation, and a regular sleep schedule
College is about intake. You soak up information and skills like an intellectual sponge. And more often than not, you soak up more food and alcohol. The days when your mother force-fed you balanced meals and your high school gym teacher made you run laps seem far away. Before long, your pants are starting to strain at the hips. And really, can you afford new pants?
The best way to stay fit, for me, turned out to be through activities. Many of my friends like biking, so group trips to the park or the river became a regular activity. I spent money on concerts or movie tickets instead of snacks for my room. Cafeteria innovation became a competition: A spinach-mushroom quesadilla uses four different stations, while a grilled chicken salad uses only two. And as simple as it seems, creating a regular work and sleep schedule was the most effective way to get (most of) my assignments done well and on time, while keeping my energy up and my snacking down.
The other strategy that’s gotten me through four years of college is cutting myself a break. If I’ve been in the library for four hours reading Nietzsche’s attack on philology, I find a friend, bike to the park, and talk about it. When my mother sends me a huge care package full of junk food and baked goods, I share it, but I save some for myself. When I’ve had a hard week, I make mimosas with friends, and the next day — broke again — we’re back to drinking water. (It’s free.) The point, really, is to stay active, avoid monotony, and not think about it so much. If the “freshman five” creeps up, you’ll be able to deal with it before it becomes 15.
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Let’s Eat Out
Call it a new spin on a much-loved meal, or simply say: Spindini Sunday brunch. Either way, it’s delicious Italian comfort food from Chef Joe Cartwright.
The popular dinner-only restaurant on South Main Street started brunch last Sunday to accommodate its downtown neighbors, said Kevin Darker, operations manager. “We are surrounded by lots of new condos, and people are looking for a neighborhood restaurant where they can relax and have brunch,” he said.
Served from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m., the mix-and-match menu sounds delicious. A $6 cold buffet includes pastries, fresh fruit, bruschetta, and breakfast pizza. A hot buffet, also $6, offers potato and lobster hash, roasted garlic egg strata, creamy polenta with smoked mozzarella, and rigatoni with sausage and vodka sauce.
Entrées on the à la carte menu are $20, and that includes both hot and cold buffets. Among the seven entrées are Italian eggs Benedict and a frittata made with sausage, bacon, tomatoes, and mozzarella.
“We also have champagne and Bloody Mary specials, because this is downtown,” Darker said, “and everyone likes their drinks.”
If you can’t make Sunday bunch, consider stopping by Spindini on Monday evenings when all pizzas and bottles of wine under $75 are half-price. The restaurant opens at 5 p.m.
Spindini, 382 S. Main,
spindinimemphis.com (578-2767)
Here’s a good reason to get downtown a little early: Market Café on Madison has started serving breakfast, offering frittatas, burritos, and fried-egg-and-bacon breakfast burgers.
“We also have quiche: a Southern-style quiche with ground beef, bacon, and sausage and a whole-grain quiche with veggies only,” said Teresa Johns, the café’s new chef.
Along with quiche, the café is serving oatmeal, grits, biscuits, bacon, sausage, scrambled eggs, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and build-your-own omelets. Beignets are served for breakfast and lunch, along with apple strudel, six-berry cobbler, chocolate crumble, and cheesecake.
“I love to bake, but I love to cook too,” said Johns, who was the pastry chef at Blues City Pastry on South Main until it closed last year. “I’m fusing my French culinary training with Las Vegas international cuisine. It’s going to be fun.”
Johns’ culinary accomplishments are impressive. She apprenticed under Thomas Keller at the French Laundry in Napa Valley, served as a chef de cuisine at Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill, and worked as the executive pastry chef for Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas.
At Market Café, her creative flavor combinations kick up a straightforward lunch menu: The pecan tarragon chicken salad is mixed with apples and herb aïoli ($7); the pan-roasted salmon sandwich is served with cilantro slaw and house vinaigrette ($8.50); and the sexy Mexi burger is topped with jalapenos, avocado sauce, sour cream, pico de gallo, lettuce, and onions ($8).
Owner Ed Bell is enthusiastic about Johns reinventing his kitchen. “She brings a wealth of knowledge, experience, and charm to our restaurant,” he said.
Market Café is open Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. It is closed on weekends.
Market Café, 149 Madison,
memphismarketcafe.com (577-0086)
The display of $5 Bears’ Lair stacked near the checkout of Liquor & Wine Depot in East Memphis caught the attention of everyone in line, including me. “What’s it taste like?” I asked owner Greg Cross.
“It’s good,” Cross answered. “It’s our version of Two Buck Chuck.”
Two Buck Chuck is the Charles Shaw label of wines sold exclusively by Trader Joe’s grocery stores for $2 a bottle. The California wine is made from excess grapes, so the taste can differ from one batch to the next.
“I’ve heard people buy a bottle, open it in the car and taste it, and if they like it, come back in and buy a case,” the woman behind me said.
Available in Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, Bears’ Lair was released this month in Memphis by the same company that distributes Two Buck Chuck. The grapes are grown in California’s Lodi district. “That’s a really high-end area,” Cross said. “We’re already seeing re-buys.”
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Unnecessary Angels
Ever wonder why so many movies these days begin with the end of the world? I’m not asking this because I’m spooked about the end of time or worried about our national psyche, although disturbing phenomena like peak oil, world financial meltdowns, and the New Orleans Saints’ first Super Bowl appearance might be early signs of the apocalypse. I’m more interested in what stylistic or thematic traits recent doomsday pictures such as The Road, The Book of Eli, and 2012 have in common.
But, after seeing those films, it’s become clear that style and theme aren’t very important. Indeed, the recent over-reliance on Armageddon as a dramatic trope is mostly used to justify pseudo-spirituality, poorly choreographed action mayhem, and ultra-simple, barely human characterizations.
Consider Legion, which stars Dogville‘s Paul Bettany as the renegade angel Michael, who has abandoned heaven and landed on earth to fight on the side of humanity against God’s army, which has been sent to destroy mankind because He is, as the opening (and closing) voiceover points out, “Tired of all the bullshit.”
Once he shears off his wings, Michael raids an Asian weapons cache in Los Angeles, loads up on guns and ammo, commandeers a squad car, and races out to a remote roadside diner where the future of the human race is being unwittingly and carelessly carried by Charlie, a surly, pregnant waitress (Adrianne Palicki, as luminous as a blue-collar Eva Mendes).
At first, this ridiculous premise — part Terminator, part Left Behind: The Movie — shows some promise. The image of a trenchcoated Michael with two duffel bags full of ordnance is both a big walking cartoon metaphor for the “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” strain of Christianity and a nice contrast to the brief, flickering image of Clarence the angel from It’s a Wonderful Life that’s glimpsed on the diner’s TV.
The first pestilence sent by the Almighty arrives in the form of an 80-year-old woman with a walker — and an incredibly foul mouth. And both crusty diner owner Dennis Quaid and gun-totin’ family man Tyrese Gibson get to spout plot summaries and angry commands such as, “Let me see them teeth!”
By concentrating on the angels’ siege on the diner, its staff, and its stray customers, the film establishes an almost classical unity of time and place quickly and effectively. This might have been cool if all the characters, when they aren’t cowering in panic or shooting angel-possessed regular folks, didn’t speak to each other in mawkish, hackneyed sermons about big moments in their lives. The Last Judgment is no place for idle chitchat, people!
The film’s silly sledgehammer gore is compounded by its addiction to grating background music and ear-splitting noise that leaves little room for quiet moments of intimacy and shakes your head like a concussive blast from the trumpet of the angel Gabriel, who’s played here as a PED-powered sadist. But most disturbing of all is the possibility of a sequel. What kind of God would allow such a thing?
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Stepping Up
“Who’s with me?”
Liz DiMaggio, director of Memphis Raqs Bellydance, posted the question on her Facebook page. She wanted to revive “Dance from the Heart” to raise money for Haiti. The response was immediate: Members from the Pyramid Dance Company, Desert Rose Dance Company, and Dance with Jasmine all wanted to participate. Others who signed up include hoop performers Nadia Sophia and Ann Humphreys, Company d, Red Hot Lindy Hop, Fred Astaire Dance Studio, and the Children’s Ballet Troupe.
The first “Dance from the Heart” was organized by a Memphis Raqs member after the 2004 tsunami. She posted about the event on a belly-dancing forum, and the idea was picked up by other troupes around the country, ultimately raising $12,000 nationwide. The event was held again after Hurricane Katrina.
DiMaggio says that “Dance from the Heart” adds a personal element to donating that texting lacks. “Dancing expresses so much emotion,” she says. “[The audience] will get that feeling. It helps us remember that we’re all in this together.”
The evening will include Haitian-inspired numbers, and between dance numbers, someone will read about the history and culture of Haiti. Toward the end of the program, a presentation will be given about the earthquake devastation. But DiMaggio promises “Dance from the Heart” will go out on a high note. “There is hope,” she says. “People will rebuild.”
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The Rant
Okay, I haven’t seen her yet and I haven’t had the
nerve to find out when she appears on Fox News, and I know I keep
saying I’m not going to write about her any more, but I don’t know how much longer I can go without seeing Sarah Palin and Bill O’Reilly chatting on national television. It’s just too good to be true.
I can’t even fathom what this will do in terms of butchering the English language, but it ought to be mind-boggling. Has anyone out there had a chance to take any of this in and if so, will you please e-mail the Flyer and have someone from the staff forward it to me? I could just look for her, but I’m afraid my morbid curiosity will keep me so glued to the show that I may never recover.
I did read something about one of the recent shows that was such a teaser that I feel my time to watch is nearing. It was a transcript of a conversation Palin and O’Reilly had about their vacation likes and dislikes. If the conversation was anything akin to the transcript, I’m afraid I’m going to have to learn how to TiVo. Apparently, Palin only feels comfortable vacationing in the middle of nowhere, and O’Reilly’s main complaint is that no hotel will take his reservation because everyone hates him. This transcends justice. Can you imagine what restaurant workers might do to their food in the kitchen before serving these people? I shudder to think.
But no more about Palin.
I also saw an interesting interview recently with an “investigative reporter” for thedailybeast.com, a website I have never seen. The reporter’s name is Gerald Posner, and watching the interview was both difficult and riveting. I don’t know much about the guy, but it seems his mission in life is to track down “sources” who can provide him with details about Tiger Woods’ relationship with his wife, their marriage, what transpired between them when the news broke about Woods’ affairs, etc. As I watched Posner answering the questions about his “reporting,” I felt sorry for him at first, thinking, wow, what a dismal, sad, and moronic way to make a living. But then it became pretty clear that he actually likes doing this and is indeed proud of doing everything but getting on his hands and knees and digging through their garbage to find out the seediest details about what two adults (well, more than two, I guess!) do in their private lives. Even though my day job at a nonprofit is never going to make me rich, I feel so lucky to have it and to not have to resort to dissecting the private lives of “celebrities.”
That whole “journalistic” world is like a cult of vultures, and I don’t think those who participate in it are even aware of it. Every time I see one of the young “experts” from People magazine or TMZ or any of the other garbage “news” sources pontificating about the trials and tribulations of this star or that one, it becomes obvious that they really think they are making a contribution of some kind to society.
It points to my long-held theory that free speech isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There should be limits. It should be illegal for anyone to keep reporting on Tiger Woods’ personal life. And Pat Robertson should not be able to make remarks about the children of Haiti deserving to die because of some imagined pact the Haitians made with Satan 100 years ago. He should not have the right to inflict that kind of stupidity on people. Or — hmmm — maybe he should. Maybe if he says things that are that stupid, no one will ever listen to him again and he will go away — like a disease that’s finally been treated. Same with O’Reilly and Palin. Maybe they can all go on vacation together and get lost.
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Pig Out
Can’t believe you ate the whole thing? Believe it. For the upcoming Swine & Wine Dinner at Andrew Michael Italian Kitchen, you’ll be going whole hog — from nose to tail. (And, yes, that does include pig brains.)
“We’re trying to take the fear out of it,” explains Michael Hudman, who owns the East Memphis restaurant with Andrew Ticer.
When Hudman and Ticer were studying cooking in Italy, they were treated to a pig harvest dinner by their host family. Amazed at how the entire pig was used in the meal, they vowed to recreate the experience when they opened their own restaurant. And so they did. Last year’s dinner was such a hit that they’re expanding this year’s to two nights, Wednesday, February 3rd, and Thursday, February 4th.
The dinner will include eight courses using Newman Farm products. There will be a prosciutto plate with pig’s head cooked sous vide, plus head cheese roasted in garlic and deep-fried. Pig ears will serve as garnishes. A take on the BLT will feature jowls that have been cured for seven days accompanied by a stew that incorporates the entire pig. (“It’s one big pig in one little bowl,” Hudman says.) The offal — liver, kidney, heart — will be served with pasta and caramelized tomato. The fish course is shrimp wrapped in lardo. Skewers (rosemary, perhaps) will deliver the fried brain, and the pork belly comes via a clever reinterpretation of bacon and eggs in ravioli filled with egg yolk and pork belly. “To bring it home,” Hudman says, they’re serving Southern-style barbecue ribs.
And then there’s dessert (yep, there’s no escaping it): roasted apple donuts served with caramel made with pig’s fat and a ham-hock panna cotta, using Benton Farm bacon and ham, with fig marmalade.
The dinner, Hudman says, has sparked a tremendous amount of creativity in his kitchen: “We’re all goofy about pig.”
“I want to personally thank the many across our state and country who urged me to run for governor. There will be another race and time to ask for your support.”
Those were the words of Harold Ford Jr. bowing out of the race for Tennessee governor just 10 months ago — nearly two years after he now claims he moved to New York to live with his new wife.
Yes, despite holding a Tennessee drivers license and being on the voter rolls in Shelby County until two weeks ago, Harold is a New Yorker now and boasts an issues portfolio entirely consistent with the progressive electorate of that state.
Of course — as countless pundits, prognosticators, and politicos have noted — his portfolio didn’t always look so cosmopolitan. In fact, when his interest in the New York Senate seat first became public, I immediately thought Ford, while a lifelong Democrat, might have to think about eschewing the closed primary and make an independent run for the seat. After all, a dramatic switch from good ole boy Tennessee Southern Democrat to New York liberal in three short years just wasn’t plausible.
But Ford is far more brazen than anyone imagined. Junior has not merely adapted to New York; he has done a clear, abrupt, and unabashed about-face. He has turned his back on just about everything he stood for in 2006, when he ran for Senate against Bob Corker.
Amazingly, he’s not even asking New Yorkers to accept and understand a dramatic transformation storyline. Instead, he’s denying any significant alteration of his politics. Ford asserts that he has not suddenly become pro-gun-control, gay-friendly, pro-choice, and pro-immigrant. He maintains that he always has been. Ford and his new New York spokesman bristle at the insinuation that Ford’s record is not completely consistent with his new progressive electorate.
Ford is by no means the first politician to try and sneak one by the voters, but he may very well be the first to attempt a transformation of this magnitude in the age of YouTube. There aren’t just dry records of his anti-gay-marriage votes in the Congressional Record and bland newspaper accounts of his right-wing 2006 campaign in Lexis/Nexis — there’s video. A lot of it.
On gay marriage, one of the few areas Ford concedes even the slightest evolution, his conversion story is that despite being against “gay marriage” (rhetorically speaking), he has supported civil unions from the moment he entered Congress in 1997. When asked for evidence of this assertion, spokesman Davidson Goldin said it was “undisputed.”
Asked again for evidence the media could use to confirm the claim, Goldin provided none. No vote in the Congress. No clips from old news reports.
I covered Junior’s campaign for U.S. Senate against Bob Corker. In 2006, Ford wanted desperately to leave voters with the impression he abhorred gay marriage and thought it offensive to his faith. He wanted voters to believe that his few votes to restrict abortion amounted to a pro-life record. He wanted voters to believe he had no intention of making any moves against the NRA on firearms legislation. And, more than anything, he tried to get to the political right of his opponent with a fierce advocacy of clamping down on “illegals.”
We like to believe — underneath all the strategy, posturing, and maneuvering — politics really is about something. It may look dirty, but we want to believe everyone has some sort of policy goal, some set of core beliefs for which they fight. But for more politicians than not, politics isn’t about anything but politics. Public service is not a calling, and there is no moral center; it’s just a job. It’s what they do. And Ford is pretty damn good at what he does.
In 2006, Ford lost in a Republican state where his race and family name were a severe handicap. He convinced more than a few Reagan Democrats — and probably a few Reagan Republicans — that he, a Memphis Ford, was on their side.
He didn’t do it because he believed any of what he was saying. That much is clear now. And he didn’t do it for the greater purpose of serving progressive ideals. He did it to win a race. He needed poor and middle-class redneck whites to vote for him, so he donned a camouflage hat and stood in front of a Confederate flag. In New York, he needs to rally the black vote, hold onto Wall Street, and mollify white progressives. And one way or another he’ll do that, too.
Ford’s nihilistic attitude toward politics may be an extreme example of the typical officeholder, but he is not unique. Ford just happens to gamble bigger and play the game at a higher level than most.
(A.C. Kleinheider is blogger/aggregator for the Nashville Post and the City Paper up thataway, where this essay first appeared.)