Randy Haspel tells some tales about the legendary Sputnik Monroe, and says we ought to name a day in his honor.
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Month: March 2011
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Tokyo Grill
Picked up lunch from the recently opened Tokyo Grill. Hannah Sayle will have all the details in the next week’s Food News column, so I’ll only be sharing my favorite dish from the meal, the fried tofu appetizer ($3.75).
For a fried dish, this appetizer has a surprisingly delicate touch. It’s lightly battered in tempura and the tofu is absolutely creamy. Wonderful.
Coals-to-Newcastle Dept.: A new federal suit has been filed relative to the ongoing school merger controversy, and this one — aimed primarily at the current Shelby County Schools board and the General Assembly’s recently passed Norris-Todd bill — seeks to declare Memphis City Schools officially null and void and to facilitate the makeover of the SCS board as the governing agency for public schools throughout Memphis and Shelby County.
Styled a “complaint for declaratory judgment and permanent injunctive relief,” the suit, filed Thursday morning, could well end up being absorbed within the case now being adjudged by U.S. District Judge Samuel Hardy Mays, who is due to issue a ruling Monday on whether the Shelby County Commission should be enjoined from proceeding with its plan to appoint 25 members of an interim all-county school board.
The existing federal lawsuit was filed by Shelby County Schools, which was joined in the action by the state Department of Education.
Plaintiffs in the new suit, represented by Allan Wade (who doubles as the City Council’s attorney in merger-related cases) are four Shelby County residents: Eddie Jones, Kathryn Leopard, Jason Pearson, and Regina Guy. As the suit notes, all but Leopard are African Americans. Jones, Leopard, and Pearson reside within the Memphis city limits; Guy lives in outer Shelby County.
Essentially, the suit maintains that MCS, as a special school district chartered in 1869, conclusively ceased to be, under terms of a 1961 Private Act, when the Memphis City Council voted to terminate it. The suit further disputes the former legality of MCS as a special school district on grounds that it did not possess taxing authority and maintains that any doubt as to its defunct status was resolved by the Council’s action on February 10 in formally dissolving it.
The suit alleges that the same facts make illegitimate the Norris-Todd bill of this year, which provides for the continuation of the temporary existence of MCS until 2012; the suit further alleges that state law makes the SCS board the proper governing authority for all public schools in Shelby County but that the board, unless reconstituted to reflect proportional representation for all citizens of Shelby County, including Memphis, is in violation of the Constutition’s “one person/one vote” provisions.
Efforts by the currently constituted SCS boad and its sympathizers In the legislature to maintain the existence of two side-by-side school boards and/or to allow the subsequent creation of new special school districts in Shelby county are attributed to “motives wholly unrelated to the best interests of the public school children of the City of Memphis, but rather…purposefully intended to maintain the current racial balance of the two (2) school systems.”
Formally, the Shelby County Commission is designated as a co-defendant (along with county mayor Mark Luttrell), but the suit essentially seeks a judicial mandate for the county commission to continue with actions it has already initiated under its proposed 25-district formula — in the language of the suit: “to adopt a plan establishing districts from which members the Board of Education of the Shelby County Schools can be elected that guarantees to all qualified voters of Shelby County one-man one vote guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.”
- JB
- Justin Ford doing his morning shape-up
Talk about following family tradition: Justin Ford, the first-term Shelby County commissioner and member of the well-known political clan, not only is involved in the family funeral-home business (and considering opening up his own independent establishment), he’s thinking of making a political race that would have him treading in the footsteps of other Fords.
That race? One for Congress, he confided while doing a daily morning workout Thursday on an elliptical cross trainer at ATC Fitness in Lakeland. Against Steve Cohen, a fellow Democrat and the incumbent congressman in the 9th District? “Against whoever,” Ford shrugged. (Inasmuch as he holds the Position 3, District 3 commission seat, which is well within the confines of the 9th Congressional District, both the question and the answer were more rhetorical than not.)
If the 25-year-old commissioner — elected last year to succeed his father, Joe Ford, who had gone on to serve as interim county mayor — really does end up making the congressional race, he will become the fourth member of the extended Ford family to compete against Cohen for the seat. Cousin Harold Ford Jr. won the Democratic primary against Cohen in 1996, and cousin Jake Ford, running as an independent, lost to Cohen, the Democratic nominee, in 2006. Also running in what had been a crowded Democratic primary that year was Justin Ford’s brother, Joe Ford Jr.
Last year, running for a third term against former Mayor Willie Herenton, which he won easily, Cohen had the public support of former congressman Harold Ford Sr., the family patriarch, and the implied support of Harold Ford Jr.
If Justin Ford intends to become a congressman, he would be of age to do so as early as next year, but just barely. The Constitution requires that members of the U.S. House of Representatives be 26 years old.
The congressional balloon is not the only one being floated by Commissioner Ford. He acknowledges that he’s thought of challenging current Shelby County Democratic Chair Van Turner for the chairmanship of the local party, but he owns up to being unsure if he has the votes in hand or if that’s where his fancy really lies.
Ford’s experience so far on the commission seems to have whetted his appetite for taking public stands on hot-button issues, and he isn’t averse to crossing over to vote, as his father did, with the commission’s Republicans on issues that break along party lines. Ford’s answer to that one is simple: “There are a lot of Democrats, regular voters, who’ve sided with the Republicans recently.” He goes on to suggest that several public issues need to be re-evaluated in light of that fact.
So far Commissioner Ford has more or less let his votes speak for him, keeping to a tradition of relative modesty that once characterized legislative first-termers and eschewing the kind of definitive speeches that characterize his more established colleagues (and several fellow newcomers on the commission, for that matter).
That reticence may change, however, as he finds his profile shaping up in the public mind. “The media ought to pay more attention to someone as young as I am doing what I’m doing,” he says, indicating that he intends to offer more precise definitions of exactly what that is, or will be, in the very near future.
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Keeping Contraband Out of Jail
Officials at the Shelby County Jail fight a daily war against contraband. Louis Goggans has the story.
More than 800 Memphis Light, Gas, & Water (MLGW) customers in five zip codes will get a little schooling on water usage on Friday, April 1st. Beginning at 8:30 a.m., representatives from the utility company will begin visiting homes of people who demonstrated overly-high water consumption in the month of March.
(Disclaimer: There are no actual police involved in this effort. These are just friendly visits by MLGW field reps. “Water Police” certainly grabbed your attention though, right?)
The customers in zip codes 38104, 38108, 38106, 38111, and 38114 showed an average of 39 CCF of water usage during March. The average usage for most MLGW customers is 10 CCF, which is still higher than the national average. MLGW representatives will consult customers with the highest water usage on what factors may be contributing to their use.
For comparison, 39 CCF is the equivalent of drinking 234,000 16-ounce water bottles or flushing a 15-year-old toilet 7,293 times during the month. Part of the problem for the zip codes in question may be attributed to plumbing fixture leaks, fixtures that pre-date the 1990 low-flow toilet, facet, and shower regulations, or heavy laundry or showering habits.
Field service representatives will be wearing a uniform and badge. They’ll also be going door-to-door on April 21st.
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Grizzlies Beat Warriors, 110-91
The Memphis Grizzlies continued their drive for the playoffs with a comeback win over Golden State Wednesday night. Chris Herrington has the story.
We’re all for economic outreach on behalf of Memphis and Shelby County and generally approve the thinking behind the newly formed Economic Development and Growth Engine (EDGE) umbrella, devised jointly by city and county administrations. Our metropolitan area is in a state best described by Arnold Schwarzenegger, back when he was a bodybuilder and daily flogging his muscles to get them up to a competitive level. “They had to grow just in order to survive,” said the then Mr. Olympia and now former California governor.
Well, that pretty much says it about our city and county — both of which are now concerned about population loss, income stagnation, and the other ills of a stagnant economy. We, too, have to grow in order to survive. So the cooperation between Memphis mayor A C Wharton and Shelby County mayor Mark Luttrell in forming EDGE has been the single most impressive and far-reaching manifestation of inter-governmental cooperation in these parts, as well as of the much-touted idea of “functional consolidation.”
But local advocates for EDGE, including the two mayors, have made a huge point of keeping their cards close to the vest on the score of public awareness. That means keeping elected members of the City Council or County Commission (“politicians,” if you’re making the case against them) out of direct policy-making or supervisory roles on the EDGE board, and it means keeping certain key aspects of negotiations with target industries away from the media. To be sure, most details of a recruitment package ultimately become known both to the members of the two local legislatures as well as to the media, but on an ex post facto basis, after the deals have been cut.
A case in point was the landing of the Electrolux plant for Memphis — or, technically, the lifting of one from Quebec, where the loss of some 1,200 jobs has been lamented simultaneous with the gaining of those jobs on this end. To land this bonanza, the city and county agreed to put up roughly $20 million each, and the state almost $100 million in start-up incentives. The company itself would supply another $40 to $50 million.
A necessary investment by government? Very likely. But little to no information was publicly disseminated in advance as the deal was being hatched. Maybe the hush-hush negotiations were necessary, as well — though a few members of the County Commission raised eyebrows.
Now we are told, via press release from the Memphis Chamber of Commerce, that an all-star cast of local luminaries involved in the nitty-gritty of industrial recruitment would be in New York this week to discuss the Memphis area’s “plan and strategies” for marketing itself. With whom? Such august national publications as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, Newsweek, FastCompany, and Business Facilities, we are told.
All well and good, we say. We just wonder why the local media, which has been kept at a polite arm’s length from such advance planning, has not also been given a chance to see said plans and strategies.
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Thrift Store Comedians
After selling out one of the two larger rooms at Studio on the Square last year, the traveling Found Footage Festival is returning to town this week at a new venue: Young Avenue Deli.
The Found Footage Festival is the brainchild of Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett, two childhood friends, now in their mid-thirties, who were raised on VHS and have done for garage-sale and thrift-store video refuse what cult TV series Mystery Science Theater once did for drive-in era “B” movies: Mine it for unintentional comedy and communal, smart-ass good fun.
For half a decade, Prueher and Pickett — comedy professionals who have worked for outlets such as The Onion and The Late Show With David Letterman — have been compiling obscure footage found on used videotapes and DVDs into quick-moving film programs that they take around the country, using two rules: In this Internet era, they only use material found on a physical format (no YouTube) and the comedic effect they’re pursuing must be accidental.
In past years, this material has taken the form of regional television commercials, exercise videos, training and instructional videos, short-lived Saturday morning cartoons, and — a recurring category — “celebrity bullshit.”
Prueher and Pickett return to Memphis as part of a 75-city tour spanning the U.S., Canada, and — later this summer and for the first time — the United Kingdom.
“It keeps getting bigger,” Prueher says from New Orleans, one of the cities he and Pickett are visiting for the first time on this tour. “Last year, we did 60 stops. It’s always fun when we do a city for the first time.”
Prueher and Pickett have developed a self-renewing process, hunting for videos at each tour stop and then taking a break between tours to mine their new acquisitions for material for the next program. And new cities equal fertile ground for tape hunting.
Last year, the duo had some extra time on their first Memphis stop and spent most of it at the AmVets Thrift Center on Elvis Presley Boulevard.
“We stopped in there and spent most of the day,” Prueher says. “They had an incredible number of tapes. We had to take two boxes full of stuff home. And we’re featuring a lot of it.”
Much of the duo’s Memphis material has been compiled in a “VHS slide show segment,” a bit Prueher and Pickett have done on past programs in which the packaging of their finds is highlighted rather than the content of the tapes. ”Sometimes the video itself doesn’t live up to the cover,” Prueher says. “But we found a lot of tapes [in Memphis] where people were recording stuff and labeling the tapes. And there are some hilarious misspellings and some interesting pensmanship. Memphis is well-represented. I think we still have some stuff [from Memphis last year] that we haven’t even watched yet.”
In addition to the Memphis-located material, this year’s program — roughly 90 minutes — draws from some 70 to 80 videos.
“There are 12 different self-hypnosis videos — how to be better at making love, how to quit smoking, how to hypnotize yourself into being a better bowler,” Prueher says. “This was a trend in the ’80s that we didn’t know existed.”
There’s also an instructional video Prueher found in Atlantic City about how to be a ventriloquist and a bizarre video called “Rent-a-Friend.”
“We were starting to feel like we were seeing a lot of the same videos,” Prueher says. “But then on the Chicago stop we found this tape that was still shrinkwrapped. When we put it in it was this guy on screen — “Sam” — offering to be your friend and trying to have a conversation with you. He asks you questions and pauses for you to answer. It starts off serious, but he begins to run out of things to talk about and starts opening up with things he probably shouldn’t be talking about. And you start to watch him unravel.”
This was apparently part of an — aborted? — series, with other installments like “Rent-a-Grandma” advertised on the back.
“Just when you think there’s nothing new, you find something to reinvigorate yourself,” Prueher says with a laugh.
In the recurring celebrity video section of this year’s program, Prueher’s favorite is “Linda Blair’s How to Get Revenge,” in which The Exorcist actress — at this point an adult — offers some titular tips.
“You hear the title and you think they’re trying to be cute,” Prueher says, “but the stuff she suggests is too real and often illegal. Slashing tires. Putting a water hose in someone’s home mail slot.”
In addition to the Found Footage program, Prueher and Pickett are traveling with an opening act this year: a 25th anniversary screening of the cult-classic short-form documentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot, which surveys the crowd before a 1986 Judas Priest concert.
“It’s an amazing time capsule. It has the same aesthetic and comes from the same pre-Internet trading tradition that we were a part of,” Prueher says. “I remember getting a sixth-generation version in the ’90s. We became friends with the two guys who shot it way back when, and they let us use the original tape, so we’re showing it on a pristine transfer.”
As for the new venue this year, it’s mostly a product of timing. Last year, Prueher and Pickett hit Memphis for a Wednesday night screening. This year, they’ll be here on Saturday, which was a tougher night to secure at Studio on the Square. The change sent them to screening sponsor Indie Memphis for a new venue.
“We remembered the screenings we used to do at the Powerhouse and how fun they were,” says Indie Memphis director Erik Jambor. “Young Avenue Deli seemed like a perfect fit for this. It’s as much a live comedy show as a film screening.”
Prueher says that most of the duo’s screenings take place in traditional movie theaters, but about a third of their events have taken place in rock clubs or other non-traditional film venues.
“Obviously at rock clubs they serve alcohol,” Prueher says. “People tend to like to drink at the show, and who can blame them?”
I loved the old Perry Mason reruns in which that peerless lawyer would get the alleged wrongdoer to admit to a crime in open court. But, of course, those of us who live in the real world understand that people do not always abide by the rules of honesty and full disclosure, even when caught in the act.
Several questions have been raised regarding the intentions of Steve Cooper for Stella Marris, his now dormant “restaurant” located in Cordova just off Germantown Parkway on Fisher Steel Road. Is he telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth? I’ll let the facts speak for themselves.
Cooper, a known proprietor of what lay-folks call strip joints, has done very well for himself in the adult-entertainment industry. It could even be argued, despite what you may think of him personally or of his tactics, that he has been successful at building businesses.
Several years ago, Cooper purchased the property on Fisher Steel, just across from First Tennessee Fields, a nationally renowned Little League baseball park. He claimed he had no plans to open another strip joint. Instead, Cooper said he was interested in using his wealth of business knowledge on behalf of the riskiest business model in the nation. He claimed he wanted to open a restaurant.
Notwithstanding Cooper’s business savvy, he seemed ill-prepared and uncommitted to any sound business philosophy, changing the name and type of restaurant several times before he opened. At first, he said he intended to open an Italian restaurant called “La Italiano.” Next, it was to be a seafood restaurant called the “Ocean Club.” Then Cooper finally settled on “Stella Marris,” a high-end steak and seafood restaurant.
Here was an experienced businessman deciding to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in a restaurant, similar to what one would find in Las Vegas, in an industrial section of Cordova, with no clear plan of success.
It would seem Cooper’s past business success did not translate well into the restaurant business, because he closed after only a few months to “remodel.” Perhaps the fact that the “restaurant” does not have windows was the problem, or the fact that the building was built with dance stages typically not found in upper-end restaurants. Or it may have been the fact that there were so many private rooms in the building.
Did Cooper change any of these flaws during his remodeling? No, instead, he increased the size of the parking and filed for what is called a “compensated dance permit.”
Now, a compensated dance permit, if granted by the Memphis City Council, would enable all of the following:
Beer and liquor could be sold; women could be paid to dance in the club; they could take tips from customers; they could take customers to back rooms (of which the Germantown Parkway facility, as mentioned, has several) for private dancing; they would not be allowed to be totally nude — the relevant code specifies only that the dancers must cover up “the breast below the top of areola or any portion of the pubic hair, anus, cleft of the buttocks, vulva, or genitals.” They could not engage in prostitution, nor “touch, caress, or fondle the breasts, buttocks, anus, or genitals of any other person,” but they would be allowed to dance in front of and next to customers.
Should the dancers violate the “no touching” rule or expose more skin than the law permits — say, in one of those many back rooms — they could incur fines ranging from $50 on a first offense to as much as $1,500 for multiple offenses. Experience has taught us that operators of sexually oriented businesses are typically willing to accept the risk of such fines — mere slaps on the wrist — given the income generated by performers, coupled with the volume of alcohol sales.
We need to reconcile our adult-entertainment laws with our regulations regarding obtaining a compensated dance permit. That means, at a minimum, increasing the financial penalties and suspending beer sales on first offense.
Perhaps all Cooper wants to do, as he claims, is to open a fun club with live bands and lively dancers — something like, say, Coyote Ugly on Beale Street, which stays well within the bounds of legal propriety.
In that case, he should have little problem in joining with us to insist that the loopholes alluded to above be eliminated.
Brian Stephens is a founding member of the Cordova Leadership Council.