Month: September 2010

Categories
Cover Feature News

A New Beginning

CREDIT: Larry Kuzniewski

First the bad news: The upcoming football season is likely to be a long one for the University of Memphis. The good folks at Rivals.com rank all 120 teams in college football’s FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision). And the local Tigers come in at 110, ahead of such world-beaters as New Mexico (112), Buffalo (115), and a pair of Conference USA rivals (UAB at 114 and Tulane at 118). Even if these prognosticators are off by 50 percent — and it happens — the Tigers would be barely on the cusp of bowl participation. And even if fans welcome new coach Larry Porter with open arms, they’ll likely need a healthy dose of patience.

Now, as we’ve learned from every recession-damaged business over the last two years, with crisis comes opportunity. Particularly with a new sheriff in town — one who has tasted the champagne of a national championship as an assistant at LSU — the U of M program can use the start of a new decade as the launch point for a new era in the football program. Porter seems to have a sense of the challenge he faces. “A lot goes into building a program,” Porter says. “Talent is certainly one of those elements, but there’s also attitude and discipline. We have to enhance, strengthen, and grow.”

As long as we’re starting an era, why not make it the greatest Memphis fans have ever seen? Here are six ways this can be accomplished.

1) Seal the deal with a BCS conference … and soon.

R.C. Johnson is the man who fired Larry Finch and hired John Calipari. The University of Memphis athletic director has proved to be a fund-raiser extraordinaire, with the U of M’s Ambassador Club (donors of at least $500,000) now numbering more than 40. He has overseen dramatic improvements in facilities for baseball, softball, and yes, football (a new 13,000-square-foot weight room is scheduled to open this winter). But it has become clear that a large part of the longtime athletic director’s legacy will be determined by whether or not the University of Memphis is a member of a Bowl Championship Series conference before he steps down.

Ask Tiger boosters about their wish list for improvements to the football program and, to a person, the first response is “BCS league.” College football has taken on the landscape of professional baseball, with the “big leagues” (Pac-10, Big Ten, SEC, ACC, Big 12, Big East) and the “minor leagues” (every other conference, starting with Conference USA, a league formed with basketball in mind, before the likes of Louisville and Cincinnati scrammed for the brighter lights of a BCS conference). The dance for new BCS members has already begun, with the Pac-10 now home to 12 teams and the Big 12 down to 10.

When the nationwide game of musical chairs finally ends, the distinction between haves and have-nots in college football will only be more pronounced. (Just wait until the mighty SEC finally hooks new members, and consider the impact SEC expansion would have on a Memphis program stuck in C-USA.) BCS members will enjoy revenue streams from television contracts and bowl appearances that dwarf those of programs not invited to the party.

Say this for Johnson: He knows the importance of the Tiger football program for BCS consideration. At a luncheon in June, Johnson told boosters and media the cold, hard truth: “I’ll tell you how we get into a BCS conference. First and foremost is academics. We’ve come so far; we don’t have to hide anything academically. Then there’s football. The BCS is about football. I don’t care if we have 19 NCAA [basketball] championships, they want to know how we’ll do in football. The third point is image and reputation. Number of TV sets, facilities, location. And how involved is the community?”

Knowing the importance of getting into a BCS conference and actually getting it done are two different things, but it’s the first domino that has to fall for the U of M to get to the next level of college sports.

2) Downsize the Liberty Bowl (or build a new — and smaller — stadium).

It was a standard editorial cartoonist’s image during the George W. Bush presidency: our 43rd president tackling the news of the day, wearing a cowboy hat about five sizes too large. Well, consider Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium the Tiger football program’s 60,000-seat cowboy hat.

Over the last decade, the Tigers have played 63 games at the Liberty Bowl. Only 15 of those contests drew as many as 40,000 fans, and only one of them (a 2000 game against Tennessee) was a sellout. Ten of the 15 quasi-packed games were played during the four years All-America tailback DeAngelo Williams was breaking every rushing record in the U of M book (2002-05).

It’s hard to sell a football program that plays in front of empty seats. The nadir of Tommy West’s nine-year run as head coach came late last October, when the Tigers hosted East Carolina for a Tuesday-night nationally televised game. Fewer than 10,000 fans showed up for the game, which forced the ESPN cameras to spend over three hours locked onto the field (or sideline), essentially censoring the local disinterest for its audience of viewers.

Empty seats — even “only” 10,000 or 20,000 — discourage fans who do show up. They discourage boosters, players, and coaches. And worst of all, empty seats discourage recruits. An 18-year-old football player who has grown accustomed to stardom in high school yearns for two things as he considers scholarship offers: winning and adoration. The former can hardly be guaranteed, but the latter must be a given for a program to land the kind of talent that makes a long-term difference.

“Ideally,” says Johnson, “I’d like to see a 45,000- to 50,000-seat stadium that’s as customer-friendly as humanly possible. Jerry Jones built his stadium in Dallas, and I heard him say his first priority was his fan base.” Johnson feels that adding chairbacks throughout the Liberty Bowl would reduce capacity but increase the comfort for every fan.

There are Tiger supporters — the most vocal being local banker Harold Byrd — who insist an on-campus stadium will transform the Tiger football program into one of relevance for the slice of Memphis community it represents foremost. Byrd and his backers may be right, or the location may be less critical than the facility itself. (FedExForum has drawn plenty of basketball fans every winter despite being miles from campus.) It’s undeniable, though, that a smaller stadium would provide Tiger football an atmosphere at once more intimate and more charged.

Short-term, the U of M should consider what MLS does for soccer teams that play in NFL stadiums: Cover the nose-bleed seats. Drape a massive tarp over the seats that don’t stand a chance of being sold. (Sell the space to sponsors.) Anything to eliminate the sense that Tiger football games are played in front of equal parts human beings and concrete.

(A note on the obvious: The annual Southern Heritage Classic and AutoZone Liberty Bowl can each fill a 60,000-seat stadium. It’s time for the Memphis program to divorce itself from these interests. Whatever long-term decision is made for the Tiger football program, it doesn’t necessarily have to benefit the SHC or ALB. “We’ve never tried to ramrod [a renovation] through,” says Johnson. “I’d never do that.”)

3) Stop playing SEC teams.

The smartest kid on the playground is the one who gets punched by the bully — once. He learns how and where to play without getting his nose bloodied.

Since 1990, Memphis has played 46 games against foes from the hallowed Southeastern Conference. And the Tigers have won 10 of these games. The U of M is 6-24 against Ole Miss and Mississippi State — not exactly perennial powers in the nation’s strongest football league — over the last two decades. Since 1997, Memphis is a turn-your-head-away 2-22 against the SEC.

This isn’t doing the home team any good. Sure, the Liberty Bowl might have a rare sellout, but at what price to the football program? Anyone sitting in the Liberty Bowl on November 9, 1996, will take memories of the upset over Tennessee to their grave. But the win has only made narrow losses since — one point in ’99, two points in 2000, four points in ’04 — that much harder to swallow. And the shellackings — 34 points in ’06, 28 points in ’09 — feel like a rude return to normalcy.

Johnson insists the home-and-home series with the regional big boys are worth retaining. “I think the gap is closing,” he says. “With [the reduction to] 85 scholarships, with our facilities and coaches, I think we have a chance to get the players to compete at that level. From a financial standpoint, it’s an incredible windfall.”

Just like empty seats in a stadium, losses to SEC “rivals” only steer top recruits toward the SEC. Why make the decision so easy? Replace the annual SEC tilt with a team from the ACC, Big 12, or (dare I suggest) the Big East. And the further away the school happens to be, the better, as regional recruits are less likely to cross one team off their list of possibilities. If I’m R.C. Johnson, I’m on the phone with Baylor, Iowa State, Rutgers, or Syracuse.

4) Celebrate history . . . at least the good parts.

If you’re a season-ticket holder, you can probably name the four Memphis football players who have had their jerseys retired. But if you can’t, you could stare at the Liberty Bowl all season and not find out. (We’ll post the answers next week at MemphisFlyer.com.) Why retire the jersey of a past great and not display his name and number? Smacks of that tree falling in the woods with no one around to hear it. One of these honorees — Isaac Bruce, newly retired from the NFL — is likely on his way to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

The Tigers have fielded three undefeated teams over the program’s near-100-year history. They’ve played in seven bowl games and won four. But no paint brush has been lifted, no flag raised to honor the squads that have come to stand out in Memphis football history.

But this may change soon. “We have a committee of associate athletic directors,” says Johnson, “and we’re working on the overall athletic department’s retired-number plan. We need to upgrade it, we need to improve it, and we need to get it up to speed.”

History matters in sports, especially college football. One has to wonder if there would be the money passed around the BCS conferences from television and advertisers were it not for the gray images of Notre Dame’s Four Horsemen, Army’s Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside, or LSU’s Billy Cannon returning that punt to beat Ole Miss and win the Heisman Trophy. The game’s past greats — and great moments — are the fuel of tailgating conversation and the motivation for boosters opening their wallets.

Simply put, the University of Memphis must show more pride in its football heroes — however few they are — and be public about it.

5) Build a diner — a really big one — near the stadium.

I recently made my first trip to The Varsity in Atlanta, across an interstate from the Georgia Tech campus. For lunch on Saturday afternoon, a mass of humanity was lined up at a dozen registers along a counter 30 yards wide. And this was merely the overflow from the parking lot, where drive-in customers awaited delivery of their favorite grease-dripping delights. Packed to a fire code’s limits in early July, you can imagine what this place looks and feels like on a fall Saturday when the Ramblin’ Wreck is in town. The chili-cheese dogs are decent, and a “Frozen Orange” will make you reconsider the milkshake. But The Varsity thrives as much for what it is as for what it serves.

In Knoxville, you have Gus’s Good Times Deli. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, Zingerman’s Deli is on the itinerary for Wolverine fans. Here in Memphis? Near the Liberty Bowl? There’s a sandwich shop squeezed next to a convenience store across East Parkway from the Fair Grounds. And you won’t see any Tiger memorabilia there.

The closest thing to a gotta-be-there dining/drinking establishment for Tiger game day is any number of bars along the Highland Strip. But no single place stands out. I asked some of the most passionate members of the Highland Hundred booster club and did not hear the name of a place where Tiger football was part of the air you breathe on fall Saturdays.

At first blush, Tiger Lane appears to be a huge atmospheric improvement for fans arriving at the Liberty Bowl. You can picture Tiger alumni — including some former players — strolling along the greenway, talking up the program, comparing gameday attire, and exchanging memorabilia, all 586 tailgating spots filled several hours before kickoff. (Each spot includes a 10-foot-square patch of grass and electrical connections.)

Surely, there must also be room in the ongoing fairgrounds renewal for a Varsity-style diner that can attract some of these partying football fans as kickoff nears. And wouldn’t a “Frozen Blue” taste sweet?

6) Find an offensive “genius.”

Success in college football requires financial support, but it doesn’t have to be the kind of figures that would make Warren Buffett blush. In 2009, Ohio State spent $32 million on its football program and finished ranked 5th in the country. The Buckeyes were ranked just behind Boise State — a non-BCS school — that spent $5.2 million on its program. As for the U of M, Johnson says $9.2 million went into the football program last year. And he points out that the figure doesn’t include maintenance fees for the city-owned Liberty Bowl, a large chunk of the football budget for many schools. (For some perspective, the U of M spent $6.1 million on the men’s basketball program.)

For programs outside the Buckeye tax bracket, it’s important that points are scored in bunches. Sure, fans can rally around DE-fense, but touchdowns sell tickets. (Tackle for show, score for dough?) It’s unlikely the U of M will ever be able to recruit the quantity of top-tier recruits that, when molded into a unit, can bludgeon an opponent with sheer size and athleticism. But the right kind of offensive brain — one who insists on creativity and originality in both formations and execution — can maximize even a thin roster and find points where a more standard scheme might not.

Considering the clouds he left under at Colorado, Gary Barnett is hardly the standard for a football program aiming to capture the attention of a BCS conference. But his achievement at Northwestern is worth remembering for any program griping about a “lack of resources” when it comes to building a winner. Coaching what amounts to an Ivy League team in the Big Ten, Barnett won a conference title, reached the Rose Bowl, and went 19-5 over two years (1995-96), before the program fell back to earth. The country’s finest quarterbacks and tailbacks weren’t suddenly flocking to Evanston, Illinois. No, Barnett and his staff ignored history and schemed their way into the nation’s Top 20. (Another program to consider: TCU. As recently as 2004, the Horned Frogs were members of C-USA. Now in the Mountain West, TCU opens this season ranked 5th in the country.)

In 2009, the Tigers were held under 20 points in seven of their 12 games. And that was with the top two receivers in the program’s history — Duke Calhoun and Carlos Singleton — chasing down passes. You have to go back to the 2000 season to find a Memphis team that scored so few points so often. And yes, that was the final season Rip Scherer ran things. Funny how scoring keeps a coach employed.

Here’s hoping Larry Porter is, if not a genius, at least a game-changer. He has every incentive to make an imprint on the Memphis program, as there will be no second head-coaching job unless he shows at least moderate success at his first.

“You have to cater to your talent,” Porter says. “For a long time, this has been a spread offense. But based on what we have, there are things we can do and things we can’t. We have to be efficient, with no self-inflicted wounds. We want to be the toughest team on the field. We want to win with fundamentals, win with the running game and defending the running game.”

Porter offers a provocative view when it comes to the most important position on the field, perspective that may hint at the new coach’s standard for playing time. “The guy who wins the quarterback job,” he explains, “is going to be our best decision-maker. There are certain characteristics and intangibles you can see [away from the field] that distinguish leadership.” (Sophomore Cannon Smith was named the starter Monday.)

Two days before the start of his first training camp as a head coach, I asked Porter about the feedback — the requests — he’s heard from Tiger fans over the course of his first eight months on the job. His answer was succinct, and it summarizes the culture of college football, at Memphis and everywhere: “They want a winning product.”

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: More on That Mosque Controversy

In this space last week, I wrote about the controversy regarding the proposed mosque near ground zero. As one might expect, the column drew lots of comments on the Flyer‘s website. One of our regulars claimed that President Obama admitted to being Muslim and attached a link to a George Stephanopoulos interview (in which it was clear, the president did not claim to be Muslim). In later comments, links were posted to articles in right-wing media — Reverend Moon’s Washington Times, for example — that decried the fact that the U.S. is spending taxpayer dollars to “build” mosques around the world.

I suspected there was more to the story, so I did some research and learned that there is a State Department program that spends our tax dollars on foreign mosques (among many other kinds of structures in other countries). Here is a summation from the conservative website, Dailycaller.com:

Nicole Thompson, a State Department spokeswoman, told The Daily Caller that the U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation is a type of diplomatic effort and outreach … It is helping to preserve our cultural heritage. It is not just to preserve religious structures,” Thompson said. “It is not to preserve a religion. It is to help us as global inhabitants preserve cultures.”

In a document provided to Indiana Republican senator Richard G. Lugar, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the State Department explained that the practice of funding such projects became acceptable in 2003, when the Justice Department declared that the U.S. Constitution’s Establishment Clause did not preclude federal funds from going to preserve religious structures if they had cultural importance.

One can argue that this is an unwise use of our tax dollars, and, frankly, I tend to agree. But the bottom line is that the Cultural Preservation program was created by the Bush administration, vetted by a Republican Congress, and approved by John Ashcroft’s Justice Department.

Of course, now that the Democrats are in power, this has become yet another false cause celebre for right-wing media to use to paint Obama as a terrorist sympathizer.

Getting to the bottom of these issues takes time and a little research, which is what conservative mouth-pieces (and website commenters) hope we won’t bother to do. And sadly, for a large number of those who are predisposed to buy into this right-wing malarkey, they are correct.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Music Music Features

Of Texas and Tennessee

In the fall of 2008, more than a year after a sophomore disc that ended up being the decade’s finest country album and exactly a year before a third album that cemented her as a career artist, Miranda Lambert graced the cover of Garden & Gun magazine. An eastern answer to The Oxford American — only both more high-toned and less academic — Garden & Gun takes as its subtitle subject “The Soul of the New South,” and Lambert was the chosen cover girl for its “Best of the New South” issue.

Not all readers were impressed. The next issue featured a letter complaining that the magazine had lowered itself by putting “a blonde bimbo in a short skirt” on the cover. “She is no Loretta Lynn,” the writer concluded in a huff, citing the magazine’s purist-baiting cover text, which needlessly proclaimed Lambert “The Next Loretta Lynn.”

Lambert isn’t that — and neither is anyone else — simply because the world that produced Lynn and other country titans of her generation has changed too much. But Lambert is one of the most compelling and curious figures pop music has produced over the past decade.

A pin-up-worthy blonde from tiny Lindale, Texas, Lambert got her big break as the third-place finisher on the short-lived Nashville Star, a third-rate knock-off of American Idol. And yet, from those showbiz origins arose mainstream country’s truest artist.

After three albums in five years, Lambert finds herself occupying the lonely place within the country cosmos that the pre-cataclysm Dixie Chicks once enjoyed, straddling the alt/mainstream divide. Lambert is in heavy rotation on CMT and performs at all the big industry events, but despite pairing up with fellow neo-trad Blake Shelton on- and off-stage, she doesn’t quite seem part of the club.

Lambert’s been halfway embraced by the country establishment, and she’s halfway embraced them back. Her brand of country frequently strays into rock sans the usual air quotes, and though she writes or co-writes most of the songs across her three albums, when she goes looking for outside material, it’s much more likely to be from indie/alt artists such as John Prine, Gillian Welch, Fred Eaglesmith, and Patty Griffin than from any Music Row pro. In her Garden & Gun interview, she pays lip service to mainstream country, but she cites the Texas singer-songwriter tradition as her primary source of inspiration.

Lambert’s 2005 debut, Kerosene, was keyed to its title track, a blazing break-up song disguised as class-rage anthem that rather cheekily borrowed from Steve Earle’s “I Feel Alright” (all the way down to the “Ha!” vocal interjection in the same spot). But Kerosene obscured a raft of sharp, personal songs from a young performer with one foot in her hometown and another on the road out.

The follow-up, 2007’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, was a sneaky formal triumph, its spitfire early singles playing up the rough-and-tumble good-girl-gone-bad imagery Gretchen Wilson had taken to the bank. But what distinguished Lambert’s outlaw bid was a depth that pushed beyond Wilson’s fetching cartoon.

Across all three albums, Lambert’s written enough heartfelt songs about an affair with a married man and other sticky romantic travails that it’s hard to believe she’s just playing with a trope. And Crazy Ex-Girlfriend blooms on the backstretch with less showy songs (“Guilty in Here,” “More Like Her,” the latter as complicated a break-up ballad as you’ll ever hear) that are piercingly ambivalent about the emotional risks of walking on the wild side.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was hard to follow up, but Lambert nailed it with last year’s Revolution, and the journey from rollicking girlishness to outlaw-country breakthrough to Revolution‘s expansive self-assuredness feels perfect. The album is Lambert’s longest — 15 songs in over 50 minutes — and perhaps her most relaxed.

Most impressive is that the album’s ambition isn’t built on bloated or grandiose individual songs. The longest track (lead single “Dead Flowers”) is four minutes even, and many of the best songs clock in at under three minutes, with Lambert hitting her target and moving on: the clever, sexy metaphor of “Me & Your Cigarettes,” which finds a novel use in familiar imagery (“Gives you something you can do with your hands/Makes you look cool and feel like a man”); the Christian-on-her-own-terms “Heart Like Mine,” which opens with a confessional — “I ain’t the kind you take home to Mama/I ain’t the kind to wear no ring/Somehow I always get stronger when I’m on my second drink” — before citing a father’s tears over a new tattoo visible on the album cover and declaring that she and Jesus would make good drinking buddies; the ramblin’ woman daydream “Airstream Song,” which nods to Kerosene in its conflicting attraction to both home and road.

The Texas-bred songwriter has taken over the half-in/half-out approach to mainstream country that Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett inhabited 20 years ago. The difference is that the very thing that makes her more commercially viable (she’s a pretty, young, blond woman) also makes it harder for their (stuffy white dude) fans — not to mention Garden & Gun letter writers — to take her seriously.

Miranda Lambert, with the Randy Rogers Band Snowden Grove Amphitheatre Thursday, September 2nd 8 p.m.; $39/$49

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Standoffs!

As a challenge to the results of the countywide election of August 5th continues (see below), controversy is building over an election yet to come — the consolidation referendum on the November 2nd ballot.

Two meetings were held on the subject Monday night. First was a late afternoon meeting at Riverdale Elementary School sponsored by a newly formed anti-consolidation group called Save Shelby Now. Among the attendees were several prominent local officials opposed to the consolidation movement — among them Germantown mayor Sharon Goldsworthy, Shelby County commissioner-elect Chris Thomas, and county school board president David Pickler.

A would-be attendee was former Collierville mayor Linda Kerley, who came to the meeting, as she put it, in her role as a member of the Metro Charter Commission, which prepared the ballot referendum. “As I do at church, I sat on the last row,” Kerley said. “I was not there as a proponent but to answer questions about the charter if there were any.”

But the opportunity never came. Jon Crisp, chairman of Save Shelby Now, informed Kerley that the meeting was just for opponents and asked her to leave. Kerley protested that the meeting was being held in a public building and involved public officials and therefore might be in conflict with the state Sunshine Law.

Pickler, who had assisted the group in locating its event at Riverdale, said he concurred with Kerley that she had a right to attend, but after a heated discussion arose about taking the meeting outside, Kerley finally left voluntarily.

She would later sit in the audience at a second meeting — this one a forum on consolidation sponsored by Leadership Germantown. Goldsworthy would be at that one, too, as one of two panelists opposing the referendum — the other being activist Tom Guleff. Panelists making the case for consolidation were Memphis city councilman Jim Strickland and former councilman Jack Sammons, on behalf of the Rebuild Government organization.

The discussion, held before an audience that was overwhelmingly disposed against consolidation, ranged across the breadth and width of the proposed charter, but question cards solicited from attendees showed that one subject above all is still a major preoccupation with charter opponents — the issue of school consolidation.

Though the charter expressly prohibits a merger between the Memphis and Shelby County school systems, there is still concern over the possibility. One of the audience cards put it this way: “If the charter can be changed by amendment with 2/3 vote and Memphis-dominated representatives have the votes to do so, doesn’t this make the school consolidation a future possibility?”

Beyond the question of whether a public referendum on any such change might be called for, Strickland contended that consolidation of school systems was something that only the two school boards could achieve by mutual agreement. The only other means by which school consolidation could be achieved was through one of the boards surrendering its charter, he said.

Murmurs from the audience indicated that many of its members weren’t convinced, and their concern seemed to grow when panelists were asked about another issue — that of school funding, which is not spoken to in the proposed charter.

Goldsworthy filled the breach with her assertion that it would therefore be the sole responsibility of the entity referred to in the charter as the “General Services District” (the entirety of what is now Shelby County), with the “Urban Services District” (Memphis as currently incorporated) off the hook.

“Single-source funding,” a much-talked-about subject, would be accomplished by default, Goldsworthy said. Pickler, an attendee at the forum, said there was “no doubt” on the subject — citing an opinion he said he had received from then Shelby County attorney Brian Kuhn late last year. Pickler said Kuhn’s opinion had cited a previous one to that effect by state attorney general Robert Cooper.

• The losing slate of countywide Democrat candidates in the August 5th general election still hasn’t thrown in the towel. All the candidates save for outgoing interim mayor Joe Ford are now parties to an amended lawsuit in Chancery Court seeking to overturn the election results as “incurably uncertain.”

A hearing on an Election Commission motion for summary dismissal of the suit will be held on September 17th.

Meanwhile, swearing-in ceremonies for the winners certified by the commission were scheduled to take place on Wednesday, the statutory date for the beginning of new county terms, in the Cannon Center.

Contention between the litigants and representatives of the Election Commission goes on amid an atmosphere of mounting distrust. The litigants, represented by outgoing county trustee Regina Morrison Newman, herself one of the candidates involved in the suit, maintain they are being stonewalled in their continuing request for access to ballot records.

An indication of the gap now separating the two sides is a claim made in a recent post by one of the litigants’ outside consultants, Bev Harris of Seattle, Washington. Writing on her advocacy organization’s website, blackboxvoting.org, Harris seems to have settled on District Attorney General Bill Gibbons as one of the villains of the piece.

As Harris tells it: “There is a county district attorney that needs closer scrutiny from the world at large. His name is William Gibbons. Quite a puller of strings in the Memphis power structure. Ruthless. Everyone I talk to behind the scenes is scared of retribution from Gibbons. As I understand it, the intimidation factor, announcing the arrest of a couple people for voting twice four years ago, plastering the media with this just days before the election, came from Gibbons’ office.

“Then, as you see, the expresspollbooks (e-pollbooks) were coded to wrongfully reject thousands of voters who were told ‘you have already voted.’ This, in combination with the media push touting arrests for voting twice, created voter intimidation. The records needed to identify which voters and how many were disenfranchised were stonewalled, altered, redacted, refused, etc.”

Ironically, Gibbons himself was one of the voters identified incorrectly on August 5th as having already voted because of the incorrect early-voting data — from the May 5th primary election season, says the Election Commission — fed into the electronic poll book (EPB) for election day.

Gibbons would go on, like apparently thousands of other voters, to fill out a “fail-safe” affidavit, after which he was allowed to vote on one of the county’s Diebold voting machines.

Apropos Harris’ charges, Gibbons released a statement which said in part: “When the Election Commission refers a matter to us regarding possible voter fraud, if, upon review, we feel there is a possibility of any criminal conduct, we refer it to the TBI for investigation. After we receive the results of the TBI’s investigation, we decide whether there is sufficient proof to move forward with prosecution. Sometimes we move forward, and sometimes we do not, depending upon whether we feel we have sufficient proof.

“No one should feel intimidated by prosecutions for voter fraud, unless, of course, that person either has or is contemplating engaging in such conduct.”

• Ironically, given the prominence in the local annals of controversy of duplicate voting issues, one of Memphis’ native sons, former congressman Harold Ford Jr., was up until this week a registered voter in both Tennessee and New York, where Ford now resides.

After the situation was brought to the attention of state attorney general Tre Hargett, Ford will likely be purged from the ranks of Tennessee voters, or so Blake Fontenay, a spokesperson for Hargett, has indicated.

The status of Harold Ford Sr., also a former Memphis congressman, now living in Florida, is apparently different. Ford Sr. has not sought to vote in Florida; therefore, his Tennessee registration is still good.

• Democratic gubernatorial nominee Mike McWherter, already basking in the aura of two prominent Democrats — current governor Phil Bredesen, who has endorsed him, and father Ned McWherter, who served as governor from 1987 to 1995 — will get another boost on September 9th, when former President Bill Clinton will come to Nashville on his behalf.

• The Hall of Mayors at City Hall has been the occasion for many a standing-room-only occasion, and last week’s celebration of the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women suffrage, was one such.

The event — moderated by Adrienne Pakis-Gillon and co-sponsored by a consortium of women’s organizations and Memphis mayor A C Wharton — drew a who’s who of local luminaries and officials. One of the highlights came when women in local public office were formally recognized. Standing side by side, they formed a line that stretched from one side of the largish room to the other.

Shelby County commissioner Mike Carpenter was presented the first annual Harry Burn Award, named for the young Tennesseean who cast the deciding vote for the 19th Amendment in the Tennessee legislature in 1920, thereby completing the process of ratification.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

It’s been more than 20 years since I visited Israel as part of a statewide delegation led by then-Senator Al Gore Jr. It was a multi-religious group, which was great for me as a product of a Jewish home and a Catholic education. I saw the tourist sights, but I was inclined to break away from the group, particularly at night, and stroll the streets in order to get a personal feel for the place. Chance encounters, in combination with walking in ancient footprints, soon had me believing that I was a part of some larger scheme. An old rabbi physically stopped me in the street and pulled me into his classroom for a lecture on goodness, and when he had finished, he invited me to join his communal group and promised to find me a wife.

My last night in Jerusalem, I hailed a cab driven by a young Palestinian, who offered to be my guide. When I told him I was leaving for New York the next day, he proudly displayed a business card from his brother’s sandwich shop inside a Manhattan office building. He had me memorize the address, since it was his only card. I glanced at it and told him I’d look up his sibling if I was in the neighborhood, then forgot about it. The next day, after an endless flight and morning hotel check-in, I was feeling jet-lagged and walked through a side door into the afternoon sun. Directly in front of me, not 30 feet away, was the office building whose address I had seen on the cabbie’s card. I crossed the street, entered the building, and walked up to the lunchroom counter where a gentleman identified himself as the owner. I told him, “I was with your brother in Jerusalem yesterday. He sends his love and wants you to call him.” Lunch was on the house. The proprietor told me that he had married a Jewish girl in Israel and they had come to the U.S. to escape the hostility of their respective families and communities. We agreed that the intolerance between the peoples of the Holy Land was regrettable and when I left him and again walked into the sun, I looked up and said (and I paraphrase myself), “Lord, you’re messing with me.”

Most of the Lord’s messengers have beatific news to deliver, but if I was only supposed to convey a shout-out between brothers, that was cool. Afterward, I walked around for several months searching for signs and wonders, believing the Lord was personally leading me by the hand, until reality returned and I discovered that I had neither been called nor chosen but had an ailment common to unseasoned tourists known as “Jerusalem Fever.” It’s the inclination for first-time visitors to the Holy Land to believe they are personally interwoven with the ongoing religious narrative and are receiving instructions directly from the Deity. Some believe they have been called to play great roles in the events of mankind.

Such a pilgrim is Glenn Beck, who claimed his “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington, D.C., landed on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech because of “divine providence” and only “wrote out a few bullet points so as not to interfere in case the Spirit wanted to talk.” He professed an “American miracle” was going to occur and attendees would be present “at the awakening.”

Beck’s not that difficult to analyze. A self-confessed “hard-drinking, hard-living ignoramus” gets sober, reads some books, and begins to see patterns. By espousing his conspiratorial views, he is first promoted from talk radio to back-bencher on the Headline News Channel, then on to the big leagues, where he becomes the most controversial “entertainer” on Fox News — no easy feat. Soon his every utterance is dissected by other teleditorialists and his ratings and self-importance grow until he perceives himself as the leader of an earth-changing, transcendent movement. His grandiose scheme drew a quarter million people to the National Mall, but Beck’s gathering was more of a religious revival than a societal shift, and if he was trying to channel Martin Luther King, he came off sounding more like Elmer Gantry.

At his “Million White Man March,” Glenn spoke of returning to God, supporting the military, and the importance of family. Who could argue with that? The firebrand Beck was entirely inoffensive, unless you object to receiving religious instruction from a shill for Rupert Murdoch. The big crowd seemed pleased, but I thought it was like going to a Kiss concert and having the band come out in street clothes playing acoustic guitars.

Unquestionably, Beck possesses accumulated knowledge, but he consistently misinterprets it and ends up connecting the wrong dots. He praises the “chosen people” but rails against “social justice,” which is the cornerstone of the faith. He speaks of “restoring honor,” yet refers to the president as “a person with a deep-seated hatred for white people,” and “a racist.” Personally, I thought the nation’s honor was restored the moment George W. Bush left the White House, and although a short film was shown to commemorate King’s historic 1963 march, there were more blacks on stage as speakers and singers than in the audience.

Beck’s restraint was the result of his promise to keep the event non-political, but the location, the date, and the name, “Restoring Honor to America,” by implication, made it so. To his credit, Beck waited until three hours into the pageant before succumbing to his patented sobbing. He even read the Gettysburg Address. Mostly, he did no harm, which I suppose is a good thing until his next outrageous on-air outburst. But, his stature has been diminished. Beck demonstrated that he’s not a transformational figure and he certainly is no Martin Luther King. Forty-seven years ago, King had a dream; Glenn Beck merely has a delusion.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Coming of Age

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain — All, all the stretch of these great green states —

And make America again!

— “Let America Be America Again,”

Langston Hughes

Superior Donuts is a cautiously optimistic play about growing up and starting over and the nearly invisible line that separates the American Dream from the American nightmare. The action takes place inside a 60-year-old family-run coffee shop in Uptown Chicago, but the characters’ lives are shaped more profoundly by various foreign wars than they are by each other. They are also motivated by the considerable battle that always seems to be happening just off stage. Critics have almost universally described Terry Letts’ dark comedy as a nutrition-free confection, compared to the playwright’s breakthrough hit August: Osage County. But Donuts, a brutal, Langston Hughes-inspired analogue of Plato’s cave myth, won’t let itself be written off so easily.

Superior Donuts takes place in an American petri dish populated by Old World serfs who, as Hughes wrote, left “dark Ireland’s shore,” “Poland’s plain,” “England’s grassy lea,” and “Black Africa’s strand” to build a “homeland of the free.” But not free refills. Starbucks has just opened across the dangerous street, bringing with it the promise of a civilized future and the demise of Superior Donuts. The Russians have quite literally invaded, only they’ve done it by way of legal immigration.

In Circuit Playhouse’s production, Jonathan Underwood brings his own natural charisma to the role of Franco, a gifted African-American writer and terrible gambler who takes a job at Superior Donuts hoping to pay off his debt to the mob. He’s the character Hughes describes in his poem “Let America Be America Again” as a “Young man, full of strength and hope/Tangled in that ancient endless chain/Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!/Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!” Franco finds a friend in the coffee shop’s owner, Arthur Przybyszewski, a tattered first-generation Polish-American barely hanging on to his parents’ donut legacy. Veteran performer James Dale Green turns in his best performance in years as Przybyszewski, a laconic, joint-smoking introvert who evaded the draft during Vietnam and seems infinitely more preoccupied by America’s military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan than he is with the turf wars going on in his own backyard.

The Chicago of Superior Donuts is a paranoid place where the cops mean well but can’t seem to do much, where it’s hard to tell the honest businessmen from hardcore thugs and even harder to distinguish between hospitality and payola.

Chris Hart isn’t a particularly large actor, but he’s an imposing, chaotic presence as Max, a Russian-American shopkeeper who wants to acquire the Superior Donuts property and open a store selling plasma screen TVs and Ukrainian porn. His dialogue may be a hilarious tangle of mixed malapropisms, but Max, an admittedly greedy, delusional, and dangerous man, knows what he wants, and his meaning is always completely clear. He helps himself when he helps Przybyszewski take on an ulcer-ridden Irish gangster (Michael Mullins) who, quite literally, lacks the stomach to do his own dirty work.

Letts has described Superior Donuts as a love letter to Chicago. That may seem odd considering the play’s nearly apocalyptic tone. But the Uptown streets so vividly described in this harsh, funny, and ultimately humane play aren’t some gang-infested killing ground. They are the literal manifestation of the boiling pot where America is constantly dying and being reborn.

Superior Donuts is a meandering affair, but director Pamela Poletti has kept things on track even when the script threatens to spiral out of control. This is a show that should be gobbled up as a tasty appetizer to August: Osage County, which opens at Playhouse on the Square in March.

Through September 19th

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

“Senior B Safe”

CREDIT: http://seniorbsafe.org/

In January, Crimestoppers initiated a new program based on telephone calls to enable individuals to anonymously report criminal activity and situations which are threatening or frightening.

This program, called “Senior B Safe,” is not designed as an alternative to 911. If someone is in danger, and they need a police response immediately, 911 is the appropriate number to call.

Senior B Safe is, instead, a method to address activity that has happened in the past or is ongoing, when residents are afraid to call police. The reality is that this fear is very real in many cases, particularly in the African-American community.

I am often asked when speaking about this, why would anyone be afraid to call the police? There are several valid reasons: 1) fear of retaliation by the criminals, if a police car is seen at one’s house; 2) a feeling that nothing will result from a call for help because it never has before; 3) pride coupled with confusion or uncertainty; and 4) the fact that many individuals in the African-American community are themselves afraid of the police because of negative encounters in the past and a feeling, consequently, that the whole system can’t be trusted.

Senior B Safe can be reached by making a simple telephone call — anonymously or not — and relaying information on the situation which is then passed on to an appropriate bureau in the Memphis Police Department or, in some cases, to Code Enforcement.

At no time is the identity of the caller revealed to anyone. Through a cooperative effort with the Crisis Hot Line, the system can be accessed on a 24-hour basis by calling CRISIS-7 (274-7477) and asking for Senior B Safe. Contact in that case is live and immediate. The system also can be reached by leaving a recorded voicemail at another number: 528-0699.

Either line can be accessed by complainants themselves or by other parties who wish to help, such as family members, pastors, or friends.

As with Crimestoppers, there is no caller ID on these lines, but if callers choose not to leave personal contact information, they must leave enough detailed information so that authorities can act.

We see this program as a means to help a vulnerable segment of our community and to involve citizens in the solution of the crime problems that beset us on a daily basis.

Without citizen involvement and participation, no amount of money, police officers, guns, cars, radios, etc., will ever fully address criminal activity. Failure to report such activity enables the thugs and gangs to operate with impunity, whether this is an intended result or not.

If everyone in this community told us everything they know and was a part of correcting the wrongs that exist, the results for our city would far outshine the best PR effort that anyone could devise.

The same principle applies if everyone over the age of 65 would tell us everything they know about suspicious or threatening activity. Who is more aware of what is going on than an elderly or retired person who is watching and noting everything?

For this to happen, we must overcome feelings of suspicion and distrust in the black community that exist due to a history of both real and perceived disparity in the application and impact of the criminal justice system. We must clearly exhibit by word and deed that we are just as interested in addressing the problems of black victims of crime as we are in arresting black criminals.

To many in our community, these two aims would seem to be mutually inclusive. However, someone who has had a negative encounter with the system as a victim, witness, or bystander, or who feels they have been harassed by individuals in authority or has heard from someone who has, can certainly tell you otherwise.

It is our hope that by helping people to report criminal activity anonymously, they will see and believe that the “system” is their system and will become part of a movement to eliminate crime and to get rid of the criminals who make life difficult for all of us.

E. Winslow “Buddy” Chapman, a former Memphis police director, is executive director of Crimestoppers of Memphis and Shelby County.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

All You Can Eat

Ella Kizzie gives new meaning to the term “fast food” — the chef’s fare is so good, you’ll want to fast for a day before you imbibe so you won’t get full too quickly. Kizzie’s hot-water cornbread, greens, lemon-baked chicken, mac-and-cheese, coleslaw, and, especially, peach cobbler are good enough to all-you-can eat.

This weekend, Kizzie’s food art will be at the fore at the venue where she’s made her name: the Center for Southern Folklore’s Memphis Music & Heritage Festival. Kizzie will be demonstrating her method of making her (delicious) hot-water cornbread on Saturday at 6 p.m. and her (seriously, shank-a-neighbor-worthy) peach cobbler on Sunday at 7 p.m.

“Ella taught us how to cook,” says Judy Peiser, executive director of the Center for Southern Folklore, who has known Kizzie for more than two decades. Kizzie, who grew up in Hughes, Arkansas, will be telling stories about her childhood and a life spent cooking, during her festival demonstrations. “You can tell she came from a creative family because she can take nothing and make it something,” Peiser says.

At the festival, attendees can have it all: Kizzie’s dishes will be served buffet-style at Miss Ella’s Café. But why stop there? That’s just one part of a literal feast at the festival. Demonstrations will cover how to make Chinese fried rice, French press and iced coffee, hanger steak, brown butter peaches, sushi rolls, guacamole and tortillas, fried pies, Choctaw fry bread, Mu Shu chicken, Hmong delicacies, Challah bread, Swahili chai and Mahamri, and working with pecan oil. Leslie Berkelhammer will make piecrusts while singing The Star-Spangled Banner.

You know, your typical flabbergastingly great Southern food experience that can be had every year at the Memphis Music & Heritage Festival.

Memphis Music & Heritage Festival (Main Street from Peabody Place to Gayoso). Saturday, September 4th, and Sunday, September 5th, 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Free.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Cops & Robbers

On Sunday at the Delta Fair & Musical Festival, there will be a performance by the ReEntry Band, a group made up of inmates from the Shelby County Penal Farm, and that will be followed by a performance by The Peacemakers, a group made up of Memphis Police Department officers.

“It shows the axis of reality,” says Andrew Taber, the former director of Corrections. “It’s a cops and robbers concert.”

The ReEntry Band was started about a year ago as a pilot project. Taber points out that the maximum stay at the Penal Farm is six years. “All of the inmates are coming back to the community,” he says. The ReEntry Band was designed to help along the rehabilitation process as well as send the audience a message about making good decisions and that everybody deserves a second chance.

Taber laughs remembering the initial auditions for the ReEntry Band, describing it as American Idol-esque. But the group started out strong with founding member Eric Gales, the celebrated blues guitarist. Other notable members have included blues artist Willie Covington and Koopsta, a onetime member of Three 6 Mafia.

The 11 members perform everything from Al Green to ZZ Top, and they appear frequently at civic events. Taber says the reaction to the group has been good, what he calls “pleasantly surprised.” One of the group’s most memorable performances was its debut at last year’s Delta Fair when they followed the emo-ish rock group Boys Like Girls. Says Taber of the pairing, “It was a real dichotomy there.”

ReEntry performs on the main stage Sunday, September 5th, at 5 p.m. The Peacemakers perform at 7 p.m. Tickets to the Delta Fair are $9 for adults and $5 for children 5 to 12. For more information on the Delta Fair and a full schedule, go to deltafest.c

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Vegging Out

Even in pork-happy Memphis there are a host of vegetarian options. More and more we are seeing seemingly unvegetarian restaurants focus on this type of cuisine. What these chefs are plating up is exciting, enticing, and incredibly delicious even for an omnivore such as myself.

“I haven’t had meat in 18 years, and I do not miss it at all.” says Rebecca Severs of Bari Ristorante. Her husband and the chef at Bari, Jason, worked at a now-defunct vegetarian restaurant in Knoxville called Tjaarda’s.

In April, Bari hosted its first-ever vegetarian wine dinner. Most Memphis diners, when they think of Bari, think of outstanding fish and great quality charcuterie but not necessarily veggie food. “Most of the wine dinners we do are based on the wines, and Jason will create a menu for them,” Severs says. “We were shocked at the outcome of the vegetarian dinner and will definitely do more of them. It was great having so many vegetarians present who hadn’t been to Bari before.”

When pairing wine with vegetarian food, all bets are off. There are no limits or constraints, which to some degree can be even more confusing. “I would consider all of the ingredients in the dish first — their flavors and texture — and go from there,” Severs says. “A great thing about Italian wine is that it is so food-friendly.”

Spot-on pairings of that evening included chilled pea soup with basil crema and Parmigiano-Reggiano biscotti served with Bisci Verdicchio and roasted potato gnocchi with wilted spinach, cremini mushrooms, caramelized onion, and shaved piave vecchio fi anno served with Tenuta Sant Antonio Scaia Rosso.

Events such as this dinner are helping to change the landscape of food and wine and the way people think about eating in Memphis. Granted, most of the people who attended the Bari dinner were vegetarian. However, the fact that some omnivores were there is a testament to the quality they were expecting as well as their desire to experience something uniquely delicious. Each wine was expertly paired and, of course, Italian. What I appreciated the most, aside from the food, were the wine choices. Not a Cabernet or Chardonnay in sight.

Recently, a local underground restaurant/supper club, eaTABLE (full disclosure: I’m a member), held their third dinner. People getting together for dinner is not news. However, eaTABLE is unique in that the cuisine is predominantly local and always vegetarian. Each guest chef chooses the theme, creates the menu, and cooks the meal with help from a couple “sous chefs.” The courses are paired with a different wine or liqueur that is specifically chosen to match with the dish. Just two memorable dishes: The “oysters” Rockefeller with local shiitakes, Pernod, spinach, garlic, and Parmigiano was paired with Hugues Beaulieu Picpoul de Pinet, and the Saffron Arancini (risotto fritters) with roasted red pepper coulis was paired with Domaine Houchart Rosé.

Each dinner has brought together a wide array of people and personalities. Teachers, chefs, lawyers, artists, writers, vegetarians, pescatarians, and omnivores all gathered together for some locally focused, well-prepared, outstanding vegetarian food. One of the special things about this group is that its members give over control and are completely open to whatever the chef has in store for them. Not one person has given the impression that it’s in any way a drastic leap of faith. There is a trust there that each and every morsel will be delicious. And it always is.

Recommended Wines

Domaine la Berthete “Sensation” Rosé 2009, Cotes du Rhone, France $12.99

Domaine Houchart Rosé 2009, Cotes de Provence, France $14.99

Bisci Verdicchio 2008, Marche, Italy $16.99

Cooper Mountain Tocai Friulano 2009, Willamette Valley, Oregon $15.99

Tenuta sant’Antonio Scaia Rosso 2009, Veneto, Italy $12.99

Novy Family Cellars Four Mile Creek Red 2008, California $11.99