Month: July 2010

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News The Fly-By

On Deck

Bridge isn’t just a card game for little old ladies. For thousands of members of the American Contract Bridge League, it’s a serious pastime, and now the league is prepared to dispel the old-lady stereotype for good.

The league is putting the finishing touches on a new contract bridge museum filled with artifacts, trophies, and a detailed, interactive history of the card game. The museum, which is expected to open to the public in September, is part of the national league’s new offices in Horn Lake, Mississippi.

“Everyone may associate bridge with little old ladies. But we have over 160,000 members in North America, and tournament bridge is really dominated by men,” said museum curator Tracey Yarbro. “We’ve also done a lot of marketing toward people 18 and under, and we have a junior program for people ages 19 to 26.”

Yarbro, who grew up traveling the country with her bridge-playing family, was hired to archive the league’s artifacts. The league then decided to create an interactive museum when the national headquarters relocated from Democrat Road in Memphis to Horn Lake earlier this year.

“In our old building, we had all these artifacts piling up. We thought in our new building that we could show off some of this stuff,” Yarbro said.

Visitors to the bridge museum are greeted with a 10-minute video on the history of the game, followed by a display of portraits and photos of the game’s early promoters. A life-sized clay figure of Charles Goren (aka Mr. Bridge), the world-champion player credited with bringing the game to popularity in the 1940s, sits at a card table behind a glass case.

“Bridge was something that everyone did in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. You were kind of an outcast if you didn’t play,” Yarbro said.

Gleaming silver trophies from American Contract Bridge League tournaments dating back to 1938 sit behind a glass case, serving as the museum’s focal point. But perhaps the most eye-catching display features a large collection of antique trump indicators, which were used in a game that preceded bridge: whist. These whimsical porcelain or wooden figurines feature a moving part, like a witch’s broom or a dancer’s leg, indicating which suit — hearts, diamonds, spades, or clubs — was the trump suit.

Scott Blake, director of Victorian Village Development Corporation, designed the museum. Blake didn’t play bridge before this project, but Yarbro said he taught himself the game while planning the museum’s design.

“Everyone that I’ve worked with on this project is a non-bridge player, and it seems to be very educational for people who haven’t played,” Yarbro said. “The museum doesn’t teach you how to play bridge. It tells you about this game that has been a big part of a lot of people’s lives. We’re trying to give it a more human aspect.”

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall

Dadgum Varmints

They may seem cute and cuddly, but don’t be fooled: Many of our small woodland creatures are rabid, human-hating monsters waiting for an opportunity to take over. A raccoon — described by the AP as “acrobatic and mean spirited” — was recently blamed for scaling a 30-foot fence and causing a massive power outage that left 8,000 MLGW customers in the dark. But do you know who isn’t being blamed for this incident? The terrorist squirrels that trained him.

WREGEE

Hats off to WREG for figuring this whole Internet thing out. The folks at Channel 3 understand better than anyone that news content may be important, but what people really want are pictures of girls with guns and babies with beer.

Pop Culture

From Commercial Appeal editor Chris Peck’s column, “The Evolution of Southern Men”: “In the South, people talk about their daddies. Who your daddy is makes a difference. What your daddy told you about life sticks with you. Father’s Day gives us a chance to consider what it means to be a good daddy. A good daddy in the South. A good Memphis daddy. Unfortunately, many Americans have some stereotype in mind when thinking about Southern, or Memphis, daddies.”

Some condescending Yankee editors also have a stereotype in mind when thinking about their readers.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Gang Signs

Eighteen-year-old Adrian Cobb had plans to attend Tennessee State University on a scholarship this fall. But the athletic Booker T. Washington grad was in the wrong place at the wrong time when a gang-related shooting broke out at Club 296, a nondescript recording studio on Monroe Avenue, killing her at the scene.

Twenty-two-year-old Rodricuas Tucker and 16-year-old Kordarius Childs were arrested for the shooting, which began after a fight inside the club escalated. Police believe Cobb wasn’t the intended target, and their investigation revealed that a new gang called Grind Hard may have been responsible for the violence.

Jimmy Chambers, a gang expert and criminal investigator with the District Attorney’s Office, said the shooting was the first he’d heard of the gang. He believes the Grind Hard gang to be an offshoot of the larger Bloods gang.

“These spinoff gangs break away to start their own little thing,” Chambers said. “Somebody gets the brilliant idea that they can make their own money and don’t have to be under a larger gang’s rules. They can make up their own rules.”

Chambers said the office has very little information on the Grind Hards. The group’s MySpace page features photos of young male (and some female) African-American teens sporting shiny “grills” and airbrushed T-shirts that read “Grind Hard Squad.”

Spinoffs like the Grind Hards tend to be small, with an average of 20 to 50 members, according to Chambers. Most are made up of school-age kids and tend to be more reckless since they’re often trying to prove themselves.

“When I get word that there’s a new gang, I’ve got to hit the streets. You can’t just go on the computer and find out about them,” Chambers said. “I’m in the streets and the schools all the time.”

Chambers learns information about gangs, such as signs and secret codes, from notes confiscated from students at school. He said students as young as kindergartners join gangs.

“Most of the leaders of these gangs are special-ed kids. You can’t tell by looking at them, but you know by going to the classes,” Chambers said. “The crazy part is those kids have honor-roll kids following them.”

There are over 10,000 gang members in Memphis, Chambers said. But he doesn’t know how many gangs Memphis has since spinoff gangs form and fall apart often.

“The gang problem fluctuates,” Chambers said. “It all depends on what we do about it. If law enforcement tries to lay the smack down on them, they’ll lay down. But if we slack off, they’ll raise their heads again.”

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Politics Politics Feature

Getting in Gear

Maybe the certifiably underdog congressional campaign of former Mayor Willie Herenton is getting off the ground too late and maybe not. But Herenton does at last seem to be campaigning for real.

With less than six weeks to go before all the votes are counted in his Democratic primary contest with incumbent 9th District congressman Steve Cohen, Herenton addressed attendees at Saturday’s annual picnic of his major political ally, Shelby County commissioner and former Teamster leader Sidney Chism.

Herenton even seemed to be undertaking ancillary political acts of a pragmatic sort. He sought out Republican sheriff’s candidate Bill Oldham on the grounds of the Horn Lake Road venue, and, in the presence of the media, made a point of praising Oldham, the current chief deputy in the Sheriff’s Department and someone who had served for the better part of 1999 as interim police director while he was mayor.

The former mayor extolled Oldham’s integrity, ability, and dedication, and, while stating for the record that he would not be getting involved in the sheriff’s race, wished the former director well.

Lest this be seen only as a casual act of ordinary graciousness, it needs to be remembered that Oldham’s opponent on August 5th is Randy Wade, a former deputy whose most recent employment was as Cohen’s district director and who is basically running in tandem with Cohen.

Earlier this past week, in a League of Women Voters debate with Oldham at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, Wade had made several charges — including one that Oldham had once abused a city credit card — that had the effect of impugning his opponent’s record. (At the debate and later, Oldham vehemently denied any impropriety, saying that he had followed protocol in transporting himself and his family to a professional conference and immediately reimbursing the city.)

• Interim Shelby County mayor Joe Ford, as previously reported, is either even-Steven with mayoral foe Mark Luttrell (Yacoubian poll) or trailing the Republican (John Bakke, Ethridge & Associates poll). He is, in any case, busily building bridges to the Democratic hotbed of Midtown.

“I’m going to be working hard on my base,” Ford confided privately as last week got under way. Then, he went on to prove the point by picnicking with members of the Sierra Club and turning up as a guest at the Tennessee Equality Project’s ice cream social, thereby cementing ties with two of the Democratic Party’s core constituencies.

Though Ford continues to make appearances at suburban events (some observers credit the interim mayor, a declared foe of city/county consolidation, with having a “white strategy”), he is aware of the possibility that he could lose some Democratic voters — particularly upscale ones — to the studiously middle-of-the-road Luttrell. Hence his redoubled effort in Democratic strongholds, one which some observers see as paying off in a race that is now regarded as too close to call.

• His slogan (well, one of them, anyhow) is “Vote Greg, not Marsha, Marsha, Marsha,” and he insists that he’s got a chance to be elected on the basis of what he sees as “an anti-incumbent fever,” along with what he hopes is revulsion in the 7th Congressional District against the positions of the well-entrenched incumbent, Marsha Blackburn.

That’s Greg Rabidoux, a professor of politics and law at Clarksville’s Austin Peay University and the latest Democrat to hazard the forbidding task of challenging U.S. Representative Blackburn.

Rabidoux basically spent the weekend in Shelby County, making the rounds of actual and potential supporters and turning up on Saturday at the Chism picnic.

Speaking to a group of hard-core Democrats on Friday night at the Germantown home of Adrienne Pakis-Gillon, Rabidoux tried to inspire his listeners with examples ranging from Barack Obama (“He started with just a small core of believers”) to last week’s marathon, record-setting Wimbledon match that took parts of three days to complete (“There’s a first time for everything”).

Allegiance to special interests and indifference to Social Security, Medicare, and other staples of contemporary American life are some of the derelictions Rabidoux charges his Republican opponent with.

However long on enthusiasm, Rabidoux is admittedly short on resources, making it prohibitive just now to get mass-media circulation for a crisply edited video spot linking Blackburn to alleged Big Oil sponsors that’s playing right now on the Internet.

But, like underdog challengers before him, Rabidoux is making virtue of necessity. Not for him the “thousand-dollar-a-plate fund-raisers or the $2,500 ‘spa day’ at a fancy Washington hotel” that he attributes to Blackburn, an assistant GOP whip in the House of Representatives and a fixture on the TV-talk circuit.

“She’s more celebrity than public servant,” argues Rabidoux, the author of a highly readable and comprehensive study, published just last year, entitled Hollywood Politicos, Then and Now.

“There’s a disconnect there that they feel now more than ever before,” Rabidoux says regarding the constituents of the sprawling 15-county 7th Congressional District, which stretches, literally, from the suburbs of Memphis to those of Nashville.

Whether that’s wishful thinking or not remains to be seen.

• One of Rabidoux’s core supporters, Dave Cambron of Germantown, the co-chair (with Gale Jones Carson) of the current effort on behalf of the countywide Democratic ticket for the August 5th general election, made an appeal last week for the party’s gubernatorial candidate, Mike McWherter of Jackson.

Speaking to a meeting of the Germantown Democratic Club, Cambron advised his listeners to disregard the Republican gubernatorial candidates — chiefly Knoxville mayor Bill Haslam and Chattanooga congressman Zach Wamp, though Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey of Blountville is also an occasional visitor — who have been spending more and more time in Shelby County.

“They keep saying what they’ll do for Memphis, but after the election they won’t. So vote for McWherter,” was Cambron’s message to his fellow partisans.

The problem is that many of those same partisans are getting antsy about the fact that McWherter’s presence in Shelby County has been a rare thing. The Germantown Democratic Club itself was slated to be the venue of a McWherter appearance a month ago but his appearance was canceled. Even Cambron concedes privately a sense of urgency about the Jackson businessman’s lack of presence on the ground here.

McWherter’s curious reticence has attracted the notice of observers ranging from WREG-TV reporter Mike Matthews, who has authored several eyebrow-raising tweets on the subject to blogger Steve Ross, who commented on the subject last week in the “Speaking to Power” blog, well-read among local Democrats.

To be sure, McWherter appeared at the local Democrats’ Kennedy Day Dinner in May, and he toured the grounds of the barbecue festival the same month. But these were essentially cameo appearances.

• It was a modest ceremony but a star-studded one. A largish crowd of attendees across the span of the lives of Bill and Jimmie Farris showed up Monday afternoon for the dedication of a Farris Room in the campus administrative building of Southwest Tennessee Community College.

The building itself already bears the name of the Farris Building in honor of Bill Farris, the late philanthropist, patriarch, and ultimate mover and shaker who dominated local politics for at least two generations and had enormous influence on state and national government and politics, as well. What the Farris Room does is house some of the extensive memorabilia that attached to the lives of Farris and his immediate and extended family, who still make a difference in what goes on.

That Southwest exists today as a thriving multi-campus entity is largely the work of Bill Farris, who did so much to endow it and to unite the former institutions of Shelby State Community College and State Technical Institute so as to create it.

Bill — and Jimmie Farris, a community activist and political power in her own right — will be remembered for many things, most of them on evidence in the artifacts of the Farris Room, but the institution itself is an enormous part of their legacy.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Bicameral Government?

By now, there’s an unofficial consensus on last week’s meeting of the Metro Charter Commission with officials and legislators from the city and county, along with members of the general public. Conventional wisdom holds that the meeting in the FedEx Technology Center at the University of Memphis was a failure.

That judgment is based on the fact that members of both blocs — city and county — found fault with this or that aspect of the prospectus laid out by Charter Commission chair Julie Ellis. (And never mind that the complainers, for the most part, had brought their complaints with them, ready-made.)

Conventional wisdom further holds that the current attempt at consolidation, like the several which preceded in decades past, is a non-starter — certainly in the outlying county and very likely within the Memphis city limits as well.

And there is a growing consciousness that the August deadline for a finished charter proposal, followed by two up-or-down votes in November — one in the city, one in the county — will be upon us much too quickly for any missionary work, no matter how inspired, to succeed with the electorate. (And let’s face it, most of the exhortatory agit-prop and dutiful lobbying by consolidation support groups has been well short of inspired.)

Now for the good news. The very fact of the meeting — with core groups representing both city and county confronting each other in organized dialogue — was something of an accomplishment. It looked, sounded, and felt perfectly natural. So the thought came to us: What if such joint meetings of the City Council and County Commission occurred once a month and in the same venue? Joint sessions, as it were — empowered not just to exchange viewpoints and check signals but to generate common resolutions of intent?

For all the talk of “functional consolidation” of various governmental components — the fallback position of consolidation proponents and opponents as well — no one seems to have considered the application of such a principle to the two basic governing bodies themselves: the Memphis City Council and the Shelby County Board of Commissioners.

We’ve been there and done that, and, even if the two bodies seemed to agree on little more than the fact of their general disagreements, that’s a starting point. And the fact is that in recent years council and commission members, in small groups and large, have met to consider a variety of issues.

Were we to pursue regularly scheduled joint sessions, the habit of colloquy might grow into something else — if not a concord on consolidation, then maybe the habit of functioning like a de facto bicameral legislature.

Though it may have frustrated some and disappointed others, the back-and-forth of the council and commission on the matter of Bass Pro and the Pyramid undoubtedly sharpened the terms of the eventual deal and improved the prospects for something actually coming to pass in that iconic but unused facility.

Regular bicameral meetings: It’s worth considering, regardless of what happens in August and November.

Categories
Music Music Features

River City Tanlines at the Hi-Tone Cafe

It’s local power trio night at the Hi-Tone on Friday. Rootsy youngsters the Dirty Streets specialize in a classic-rock facsimile that draws on such ’60s and ’70s blues-rock stars as Led Zeppelin, Cream, and Humble Pie. The band lives up to its name with their grimy, swaggering attack, but they could still learn a thing or two from the band with whom they’ll be sharing the stage: the River City Tanlines, where Alicja Trout (also Mouserocket) lets her inner guitar hero out with ample help from arguably the city’s best rock rhythm section, Terrence Bishop and John Bonds. The Dirty Streets and the River City Tanlines play the Hi-Tone Café Friday, July 2nd. Showtime is 10 p.m. Admission is $6.

— Chris Herrington

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Oh, Mother

Writer-director Rodrigo Garcia’s Mother and Child is a decent film that doesn’t quite live up to its compelling mix of cast and subject matter. Much like, apparently, his previous features Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her and Nine Lives (which I haven’t seen), Mother and Child is a multi-threaded narrative about a sprawling group of women, in this case linking female characters from the cradle to the grave via a series of pregnancies and adoptions.

There are three women at the core of the story: Tightly wound and sharp-tongued physical therapist Karen (Annette Bening), who gave up a baby for adoption at age 14 and, 37 years later, still lives unhappily at home with her ailing mother, still obsessing over the daughter she never knew; icy attorney Elizabeth (Naomi Watts), who broke free of her adoptive parents at 17, choosing a new name and moving on without any emotional attachments; and high-strung bakery owner Lucy (Kerry Washington), who is unable to conceive and is, along with her more reluctant husband, pursuing adoption.

Some connections snap into place quickly — you can pretty much tell from the synopsis that Elizabeth is the child Karen gave up. Others don’t emerge until near the end. Garcia keeps Lucy’s storyline on a separate track — connected, on the surface, only by using the same Catholic adoption service that Karen once used — until very late, and the plot contortions used to weave her into the arc lack a satisfying snap. It feels more like a cheat.

But even if the plot of Mother and Child sometimes feels calculated in a manner similar to other recent narratives such as Crash or Babel (the latter’s Alejandro González Iñárritu is an executive producer here), the difference is that the characters always feel real. Credit this, in large part, to a fine trio of underused actresses. Washington probably hasn’t had a role this substantial and real since debuting in Jim McKay’s too-little-seen 2000 indie Our Song. Watts, since breaking out in Mulholland Dr., might be the most consistently interesting actress in movies. But the standout here is Bening, who plays a woman slowly and fitfully overcoming a lifetime of resentment, working through early hints of caricature to an affecting transformation.

Garcia embeds good performances in the spaces surrounding these women as well. Jimmy Smits and Samuel L. Jackson are interesting in understated roles, but fitting such a women-oriented film, the best supporting turns come from Shareeka Epps (the high school student in Half Nelson) as an expectant young mother and S. Epatha Merkerson, who schools daughter Lucy in the film’s strongest individual scene.

Mother and Child works well in individual moments, performances, and narrative strands, but it doesn’t add up to the big statement the film’s high-concept title promises. Taken together, it feels a little too much like a constricted, soft-edged soap opera. And its approach to big issues — what constitutes a family, biological versus adoptive parentage — never gets past the banal, especially considering the film’s deliberate avoidance of the possibility of abortion as part of this equation.

Mother and Child

Opening Friday, July 2nd

Ridgeway Four

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Growing Up Is Hard To Do

Grown Ups, which fleeced audiences of $41 million at the box office last weekend, tries very hard to efface all of the mysterious, humorous, and cosmically strange moments that mark one’s passage into adult life. The film, co-written by Adam Sandler and directed by his pal Dennis Dugan, also avoids any uncomfortable or truthful insights about adult financial success/failure, marriage, parenthood, and aging. Because it succeeds at its mission most of the time, it is often awe-inspiringly terrible.

The film aspires to be a harmless, halfway decent comic meander among friends, sort of a Caddyshack for haggard parents. Sandler and his fellow Saturday Night Live buddies Chris Rock, Rob Schneider, and David Spade (with Kevin James as Ghost of Farleys Past) play former junior high basketball team members who reunite at their coach’s funeral 30 years later and decide to keep the good times rolling by renting out a lake cabin for a week. These man-boys pass the time by ribbing each other about their pasts, their presents, and their looks until the end of their stay, which is marked by an inevitable (but decently truthful) hoops rematch.

Here and there are glimmers of recognizable humanity, such as an uncomfortable macho showdown at a water park and a late-night refrigerator raid where James and Sandler swig water from gallon jugs and bask in the renewed sexual appetites of their spouses. Far from great, these scenes show that it’s nearly impossible to make a totally worthless film, especially one filled with so many performers who have done riskier, more heartfelt work.

The chummy, self-congratulatory Elks Lodge tone of the male actors’ wisecracks creates a suffocating, solipsistic atmosphere that only the most arrested adolescents or disgruntled parents can breathe. Grown Ups is a proudly stupid film, and if you don’t want to see a sloppy, farty PG-13 Comedy Central roast sponsored by a fried-chicken franchise, then tough titty. That goes double for the ladies, BTW: The boys’ wives (Maria Bello, Salma Hayek, and Maya Rudolph) are pitiable caricatures at best and shrieking, castrating harpies at worst. It is no surprise that all the comics here — especially James, whose geniality and physical grace are only used to shoulder his usual dancing-bear fattie antics — guffaw at their canned ball-busting and intone “Good one” to each other so often that they feel like shills at an SNL taping.

The parade of mean-spirited and unfunny insults leaves you wondering why these men stayed friends in the first place. However, Sandler and Dugan’s straight-faced answer is sort of surprising. Toward the end of the film, Schneider’s wife, an ancient hippie played by Joyce Van Patten, begins her wise-old-owl speech by asserting that “with love comes hostility.” Interesting idea, no? But the rest of the speech (and the remainder of the film) weakly argues that love and hostility are not just inseparable but essential to any functioning relationship. Now maybe that’s a bunch of veteran male comedians’ form of the truth; it would be alarming if it were anyone else’s.

Grown Ups

Now playing

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Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters to the Editor

Oil and Meat

I wonder how many of the dedicated volunteers who were helping save pelicans from the deadly Gulf oil have other birds for dinner or at a local fast-food outlet.

They are not alone. Most people are appalled by the devastation of animal life by the Gulf oil spill yet subsidize the systematic killing of other animals for their dinner table. They know that meat and dairy harm the environment and their family’s health but compartmentalize this knowledge when shopping for food.

And it goes beyond dietary flaws. We tolerate the killing of innocent people when our government and media label them terrorists. We ignore the suffering and starvation of a billion people, except when our government and media tell us to care because an earthquake or tsunami has struck.

Our society would benefit greatly from more original thinkers, and our personal diet is a great place to start.

Morris Furman

Memphis

Bellevue Baptist and Gays

In regards to the Bellevue Baptist Church banning a lesbian softball coach: Being raised Baptist and now openly gay, I had conflicting feelings about the situation. My first thought was that Jana Jacobson had to know Bellevue’s position on homosexuals. I certainly wouldn’t have expected to (or wanted to) play ball for them. Baptists have always been very open about the way they feel about gays, and they are entitled to their opinion.

However, Christians, although well-meaning, are not always on the right side. You don’t have to go too far back in our country’s history to find many so-called Christians hiding under white sheets, persecuting African Americans, or burning perceived witches at the stake.

The struggle for civil rights didn’t happen because people accepted things the way they were. Civil rights happened because a few brave Americans had the strength to stand up and push the envelope in battles large and small, whether it was giving up your life for what you believe in like Martin Luther King or refusing to give up your seat on a bus like Rosa Parks. These folks were heroes, even though society didn’t always see them as such. Even today, there are still some churches where an African American wouldn’t receive the warmest welcome.

In our struggle for equal rights for gays, we need these same kind of heroes. Jana Jacobson, although maybe unwittingly, is a hero. If not yours, she is certainly mine.

Trent Gatewood

Memphis

The Fairness Doctrine

As Independence Day approaches, the political season is heating up. Each side is locked and loaded with focus-grouped talking points and divisive issues designed to stir passions. One topic that ignites both sides, the Fairness Doctrine, is beginning to crackle across media outlets. The doctrine, an FCC rule, requires companies who rent public airwaves to present both sides of controversial issues.

The concept is similar to an idea James Madison proposed in 1828: “Could it be so arranged that every newspaper, when printed on one side, should be handed over to the press of an adversary, to be printed on the other, thus presenting to every reader both sides of every question, truth would always have a fair chance.”

These days, even with the diversity of radio, print, TV, mass e-mails, and blogs, a person might not hear competing points of view. Some find themselves locked in ideological bubbles. And it appears the companies who control the media wish to keep it that way. However, practices that are good for popularity-driven markets are not always good for the health of our republic. America’s democracy is not ratings-based but structured to give unpopular voices an opportunity to be heard.

Maybe it is time We the People declared independence from the media monopolies that want to control the messages we hear. Maybe it is time we restructured the lease agreements attached to our public airwaves. Maybe it is time we took Madison’s advice and gave truth a chance.

Brandon Chase Goldsmith

Memphis

Stupid People?

Have you noticed that there are a lot of stupid people in office? Have you noticed that there are a lot of really stupid people running for office? The Democrats are not immune, but mostly the really stupid people are Republicans. Does that mean that there are a lot of stupid people voting for stupid people?

We’ve got to isolate and destroy the stupidity gene, if we want to save this country.

Dagmar Bergan

Helena, Arkansas