Month: September 2010

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Fincher Didn’t Know Memphis was in 8th District, Herron Tells Crowd

CREDIT: JB

Herron (center) surrounded by Raleigh-Frayser natives (l to r) Matt Kuhn, Dennis Dugan, Karl Schledwitz, and Bill Haltom

  • JB
  • Herron (center) surrounded by Raleigh-Frayser natives (l to r) Matt Kuhn, Dennis Dugan, Karl Schledwitz, and Bill Haltom

While being feted by longtime Memphis friends Bill and Claudia Haltom on his birthday at the Haltom’s Hein Park home Thursday night, 8th District congressional candidate Roy Herron couldn’t resist telling the crowd of well-wishers on hand about a gaffe made earlier Thursday by Democrat Herron’s Republican opponent, Stephen Fincher, a stay-away from Memphis for most of the campaign year.

Gathering four friends from the Raleigh-Frayser area around him to undescore his point, Herron, a state senator from Dresden, said, “My opponent was in my home county, Weakley County, the first time they let him out from under the wraps, the first time he’s been interviewed by a reporter from Memphis or Jackson or an AP reporter this whole month.” He then warmed to his punch line. “He managed to convey that he did not know that any of the city of Memphis was in the 8th Congressional District. You cannot make this stuff up.”

The birthday celebrants laughed appreciatively. “What else doesn’t he know?” a female voice was heard to say.

Herron went on: “I’ve known about Frayser for 50 years now. My wife grew up in Memphis. If you look at the 8th District race and want to make one clear distinction, there’s one candidate that knows that Memphis is in the 8th District, and one that doesn’t, and I’m the one that does. “He then nodded toward wife Nancy, standing nearby. “And there’s no candidate in any race that’s more indebted to Memphis. I married the best, the kindest, the sweetest in the whole world that came from Memphis. “

He finished up by saying, “I’ll be honored to represent the city of Memphis, and if you give me the opportunity, ladies and gentleman, I’ll work from Can to Can’t to represent you and the rest of the people from this congressional district.”

The Fincher remarks referred to by Herron occurred during an interview with Commercial Appeal reporter Richard Locker after Fincher had addressed students at the University of Tennessee at Martin.

Locker asked Fincher what he might do for Memphis and Shelby County if elected, and the Republican candidate, a farmer/gospel singer from Frog Jump in Crockett County, responded, “I’m in Memphis a lot and see lots of folks. They’re close to us and part of the district…. The city of Memphis is not in. But we’re going to work for the state and country to do what we can. Memphis is a key part of the 8th District. I mean it’s close to us.”

When Locker asked Fincher for clarification on whether he thought parts of Memphis lay within the 8th District, Fincher responded that the district lines extended into Shelby County. “Just into the county part. I don’t think we have the city part. I don’t think the city of Memphis.”

At that point, according to Locker’s article about the incident in the CA, Fincher aide Paul Ciaramitaro prodded his boss, reminding him that Frayser, a part of Memphis, lay within the 8th District. Fincher then corrected himself, saying, “Frayser is. Ok, yes.”

Neither he nor Ciaramitaro would go on to mention the fact, nor was it remarked on in the article, but Raleigh, which adjoins Frayser, also lies within the 8th District.

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leo kottke

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Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Ryko Releases Bill Hicks Anthology

hicks.jpg

Bill Hicks
The Essential Collection
(Ryko)

This month, Ryko rolled out a long awaited four-disc (2 CDs, 2 DVDs) retrospective on the now legendary late comedian, Bill Hicks. Since his untimely death in 1994, Hicks’ status has slowly but steadily risen to the level of a cult icon, thanks in part to the success of “alternative” comedians such as David Cross, Patton Oswalt, and even Russell Brand, all of whom Hicks is often credited as being an artistic influence on and forerunner to.

Whether that’s true or not, Hicks was definitely a dynamic, unconventional, but still polished (you’d never see Hicks carry notes onstage) performer. And his material still feels fresh and relevant, whether he’s talking politics (Reagan, Bush, the first Iraq war) or pop culture (art vs. commerce, reality TV, manufactured pop stars).

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News

The Confederacy: Let It Go, Already.

Chris Herrington says enough is enough when it comes to “celebrating” the Confederacy, in this week’s Rant.

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News

CUSA PIcks: Week Five

Prognosticator Frank Murtaugh attempts to enhance his gaudy picking record with predictions about this week’s CUSA games.

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Sports Tiger Blue

C-USA picks: Week 5

LAST WEEK: 9-0
SEASON: 34-6

SATURDAY

C-USA_logo.JPG

MEMPHIS over Tulsa
Texas-El Paso over NEW MEXICO
Southern Methodist over RICE
NORTH CAROLINA over East Carolina
SOUTHERN MISS over Marshall
RUTGERS over Tulane

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gang that couldn’t shoot

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Film Features Film/TV

Facebook, Official

The Social Network has been a minor running joke ever since the project was announced more than a year ago. A movie about Facebook? With Justin Timberlake? Ridiculous, right? But anyone rolling their eyes wasn’t reading the fine print: The project, based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, was being directed by David Fincher, who has never made a dismissible film and who was coming to the project on a roll, following his best film — the obsessive procedural Zodiac — with his most celebrated — the multi-Oscar-nominated The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Snickers and doubts aside, The Social Network is based on a terrific story: a revolutionary (for better or worse) idea and billion-dollar business first developed in an undergrad dorm room. An all-American tale of an awkward, striving outsider who rather unhappily gets what he thinks he wants, the film’s antihero protagonist, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Adventureland‘s Jesse Eisenberg in an intense, compelling performance), is presented as something of an Internet-age Gatsby or Kane — but in a Gap hoodie and ever-present “fuck you flip-flops.”

The Social Network is about big topics: power, privilege, technology, communication, generational upheaval (the few over-30s onscreen watch from the sidelines, perplexed), and rapidly shifting social mores. But it tackles all this via an intimate, funny, suspenseful intellectual procedural.

But what really makes any film is not what it’s about but how it’s about it. And, in this case, the telling is even better than the story.

Fincher’s film opens audaciously with a static pre-credit scene that pits Harvard undergrad Mark against his Boston University girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara, who will star in Fincher’s upcoming adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), at a college bar. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s trademark quick, brainy patter is in overdrive, as Mark patronizes his girlfriend (“You don’t have to study. You go to BU.”) until, exasperated, she delivers the coup de grâce: “Listen, you’re going to be a very successful person in computers. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.”

This scene establishes all of Mark’s motivations: romantic resentment, jealousy of his more-privileged WASP classmates, the urge to not only prove his brilliance but rub everyone’s face in it. “The ability to make money doesn’t impress anyone around here,” Mark tells Erica of his Harvard experience. This establishes that his goal isn’t wealth, but it also reveals that it is impressing people.

When Mark retreats to his dorm room for a night of belligerent, drunken programming that becomes the seed of Facebook — hacking into various dorm photo logs to create a sexist hot-or-not program, Facemash — Fincher shifts into the style that will drive the rest of the film. Locking into rhythm with a propulsive score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and rat-a-tat-tat dialogue from Sorkin, Fincher’s quick but assured editing and shifting but natural camera completes a hypnotic union.

As a piece of pure filmmaking, The Social Network is like Fincher’s brilliant Zodiac on speed. It lacks the grandstanding of showier work like Se7en, Fight Club, or Benjamin Button but burrows obsessively into its material, maintaining its grip for a tight two hours. And it’s paced like a pop song.

Structurally, The Social Network tells the Facebook development story in straightforward fashion but encircles this narrative with two later deposition scenes that essentially form the film’s present tense, bopping skillfully among all three narrative tracks. One deposition is part of a lawsuit from Zuckerberg’s onetime friend and business partner, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), who claims to have been wrongfully forced out of the company. The other is from a trio of blue-blood Harvard students who had hired Mark to program their own university-specific dating site (Harvard Connection) and now accuse him of stealing their idea. Along the way, Timberlake shows up as Napster co-founder Sean Parker, a hedonist and gambler who may be the devil on Zuckerberg’s shoulder but also offers some fruitful advice before his ignominious exit.

Ultimately, The Social Network isn’t much more concerned about the outcome of these lawsuits than Zuckerberg seems to be. Like Citizen Kane, it’s more focused on how to explain a man’s (or maybe manchild’s) life — in this case, on the extent of his asshole-ness. And in this we-live-in-public world, appropriately, Rosebud is a constantly refreshing web page and a pending friend request.

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Book Features Books

Winning Ways

It’s been a long time in the making,” Bobby C. Rogers, age 45, says. “Good to finally get the book out. And the call I got from Ed? That was the phone call you want to get.”

” “Ed” is poet Ed Ochester, and he was calling Rogers to say he had good news: Rogers’ manuscript, Paper Anniversary, had been awarded the prestigious Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for 2009 — a prize given annually by the University of Pittsburgh to a first full-length book of poetry, with publication of that winning manuscript by the university’s press.

Which puts us where things stand now: official publication this week of Rogers’ debut collection of 35 poems, most of them set in West Tennessee or Memphis, every one of them signaling a talent in our midst — a talent at home observing (and enlarging upon) the lunchtime scene inside the Barksdale or a Jerry Lee Lewis show inside Bad Bob’s Vapors Club; hearing the nighttime sirens of Memphis and the strain of FedEx engines overhead; or reflecting on the uneven sidewalks of Midtown underfoot and the darkened four-squares lining Carr.

At home too: recalling the natural sights and sounds and the very air associated with small-town West Tennessee or recalling a Christmas day spent, during Rogers’ student days, in Marseilles; another day spent “burning” a house of its exterior paint; the look of snowfall, sunlight, and shadow. And then the following: doubts as to language’s ability to capture the things of this world or to adequately convey the innermost self.

“What we do is collect and assemble, dosed up with caffeine and whatever else/ might nerve us/ to shape the world into something orderly and tellable. It’s all artifice,” Rogers writes in “Anagnorisis.” It all depends on words. (Or when words fail us, silence.) But small comfort there, because, as Rogers observes in “Winter”: “Words go corrupt and settle and/ shift/ from the plumb meanings you once nailed them to.” And so, as the poet wishes they could: if only language could share in the certainties of sound carpentry — the tools of carpentry recurring throughout Paper Anniversary: a surform tool, a chalk line, a whetstone, fluting gouges and mortise chisels, a jack plane. The object, in carpentry as in poetry: craftsmanship and accuracy.

“I’ve always seen the world in terms of words,” Rogers answers to the question of when he began writing. “I grew up in the town of McKenzie in West Tennessee, and I spent a lot of time on front porches, among extended family, listening to stories. That’s how time passed. That’s how time was given meaning.”

But as Rogers puts it in his acknowledgments, it was Marilyn Kallet who’s “to blame for all this.”

It was as an undergraduate at UT-Knoxville that Rogers worked with Kallet, a poet who gave him the freedom to take his work less seriously. And yet, it was Rogers’ time in Knoxville followed by the MFA program at the University of Virginia (learning from Charles Wright and others) that was seriously important — “important,” he says, “to be around serious poets, serious minds thinking about poetry.”

Rogers’ poems have appeared in numerous literary reviews over the past 15 years. He is the recipient of the Greensboro Review Literary Prize in Poetry. He has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. And he today commutes from Memphis to Jackson, Tennessee, to teach at Union University. But he’s not a “poetry scene kind of guy,” he admits, though he makes a point of attending local readings.

After earning his master’s at Virginia, Rogers headed not to New York or Boston, as many of his classmates did, but to Memphis. It’s where he and his wife Rebecca Courtney, an architect, and their children call home. It’s, he says, a good place for him to be.

“I’ve always wanted not to be considered a regionalist, but it seems I am,” Rogers says. “Ed Ochester in his blurb on the back of my book comments on that, tries to defuse the charge, expand my reach. But I’m happy to be one — a regionalist — now that I think about it.”

And now that I have the opportunity, I’d like, in one respect, to prove the poet wrong — wrong that Rogers should write in “In Season” that: “I’m not sure I shape a damn thing, the concussions of the hammer/ more noise/ than ringing.” The poems in Paper Anniversary do indeed “ring” — clear, strong, and true.

Bobby C. Rogers will be signing copies of Paper Anniversary at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 9th. Look for him to be reading from and signing his book at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on October 21st.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Back to School

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Bully stole your sack lunch? No problem. Lunchbox Eats, a school-themed spot with plenty of lessons in good eating, is now open on Fourth just off Linden. This is one school cafeteria worth checking out: If not for its thorough adherence to the theme (the bathroom sink is set in a school desk; the menus are printed on loose-leaf paper), then for its selection of school lunches — way better than your elementary cafeteria fare but still served on a plastic tray.

If you’re thinking cold mystery meat, you’re way off. Try Homeroom Chicken and Grids with fried chicken, cheddar waffles, Muenster cheese, and green tomato relish or the Graduation Burger, made with pepperjack meatloaf, creamy mashed potatoes, tomato gravy, and crispy Tabasco onions. I can personally recommend the 3rd Period Smoking Birds, which puts pulled Cajun turkey, molasses chicken, duck, veggie slaw, and pan liquor between two slices of fresh baked bread. And I’ll admit I have a bit of a schoolgirl crush on the mac and cheese, with its warm spice and perfectly crisp crust.

Kaia Brewer, owner and chef, attended Johnson & Wales before taking a job as the executive chef at the downtown Doubletree. Her lunchbox concept began as a catchy marketing vision. “I always wanted an easy name that people could identify and remember,” Brewer says. “Then the school thing reminds people of growing up. I always felt like if you had a concept like that it would bring them back.”

The concept might bring them in, but the food is what will keep them coming back. Lunchbox Eats is open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., and because of its proximity to FedExForum, Brewer hopes to stay open later on game nights.

Lunchbox Eats, 288 S. Fourth (526-0820)

Last Wednesday, Automatic Slim’s celebrated their new chef, David Schrier, formerly of Currents at River Inn, and their new menu, which takes a farm-table approach to the restaurant.

“We’ve changed the concept,” Schrier says. “We’re highlighting local farms and ranches and stepping away from the Caribbean and Southwest style infusion that [Automatic Slim’s founder] Karen Carrier was so great at. It was just time for a change.”

The new menu is what Schrier calls “globally inspired with a little Memphis Southern flair.” French, Asian, and Italian influences emerge with a local spin, as in the crudo style of raw fish paired with local watermelon. The menu is also geared toward small and shared plates. “We want people to come in and try as many things as they want to,” Schrier says. “You can get three, four, or five things for under $35.”

Entrées range from $15 to $25 and include lemon-oil poached corvina (a firm, mild fish) with spinach, grapefruit-fennel salad and dill hollandaise, and braised pork cheeks with collard greens, smoked onions, mustard potatoes, and bacon jus. Starters, which range from $5 to $7, include house-cured gravlax with salmon roe, fresh dill, and whipped brie; a spinach salad with candied Benton bacon; a pumpkin-truffle risotto; and veal sweetbreads with bleu-cheese flan, pickled carrots, and celery-leaf salad. Sunday brunch includes the delectable crab cakes Benedict. The soup will change daily.

Some familiar names pop up on the vendor list: Donnell Farms beef, Newman Farms pork, Springer Mountain chicken, Whitton Farms produce. As for the wine menu, Schrier says they’re making improvements every day, and the martini list still features 56 varieties.

Automatic Slim’s is open for lunch Monday through Saturday at 11 a.m. The kitchen is open until midnight on weekdays and until 3 a.m. on the weekend, and Sunday brunch begins at 10 a.m.

Automatic Slim’s, 83 S. Second (525-7948)

automaticslimsmemphis.com