Month: October 2011

Categories
News The Fly-By

What They Said

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

About “The Rant” and the Occupy movement:

“The U.S. government wants these protests to grow! Not only that, they want them to spread across the entire country and globe so they can bring in some type of ‘global governance.’ With the entire globe appearing out of control, this would be the perfect opportunity for them to do this with legislation through the United Nations. Watch! One World Order.”

— Lucycocomo

About “Respiratory Disease Outbreak at Memphis Animal Services”:

“My pup that was adopted from MAS in late August 2011 had this and it was easily treated, one inexpensive pill in her food each day for one week. Her cough was deep and the running nose was constant and messy, and she fully recovered without any problems. I am glad she got out of MAS before they over-reacted and destroyed her for a treatable condition.”

— jascochran

About “Good News From FedEx” and a comment from spokesman Jess Bunn about their SmartPost business “growing like a weed”:

“Did I read this right? FedEx’s business is growing weed?”

— TennesseeDrew

About “Fly on the Wall” and the woman who saw a vision of a dove in her homemade jelly:

“Not so much a dove as an Easter Peep.”

— jeff

Comment of the Week:

About “Bike Lanes Touch a Nerve at City Council”:

“You’d think that Janis Fullilove would be all for bike lanes seeing as how she can’t drive a car.”

— Scott Banbury

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on The Wall

N’Secure

If you are in desperate need of fabric to make a pair of pants, you probably want to visit this fabric store during the daytime. Because if you go at night, the mean old sign will laugh at your rooster and make it cry.

Doggy Style

Memphian Kimberly Lawson has been charged with sexually assaulting a German shepherd named Adam. According to a police report, neighbors observed him having sex with the dog at least three times in one hour. Witnesses say Lawson pulled down his pants, got down on his hands and knees in an alluring position, and waited for the dog to mount him. “I told Adam he didn’t do anything wrong,” Adam’s owner Caroline Morris told a WMC news crew. “It was the man who did wrong.”

Verbatim

File this under “F” for “fair weather friends.” Last week, as the weather shifted from warm and sunny to cold and rainy, home viewers watched a live video of Occupy Memphis protester Alexandra Pusateri fretting about a possible encounter between police and a crowd of five protesters. “We don’t even have enough people to do a ‘human mic[rophone],'” she lamented.

Categories
News The Fly-By

House Is Not a Home

With its ceiling illuminated by scattered holes from a 2009 fire, the bedroom on the second floor of 406 Lucy Avenue in South Memphis doesn’t look like it had been home to a queen.

But, indeed, this was where the “Queen of Soul” Aretha Franklin laid her head for her first three years of life.

“This is the room she was born in,” said Herb Jackson, director of development for the R.E.S.P.E.C.T. Foundation, as we enter the charred bedroom.

Franklin’s childhood home is slated to become a museum in her honor, and Jackson’s R.E.S.P.E.C.T. Foundation is behind the project. Jackson said though there’s much work to do, big things are in store for the property.

“I believe it’s a great project, probably one of the biggest things to hit Memphis in a long time,” Jackson said.

While still in the early planning stages, the home’s restoration is the first thing R.E.S.P.E.C.T. plans to address.

“We’re going to restore this to as close to the original state as possible. We don’t want to move it because we’ll lose a lot of it in translation, considering the age and condition of the house. So we’re going to keep it right where it is and build around it,” Jackson said.

The home is currently owned by Memphian Vera Lee House, and she was in the process of fixing the place up to become a tourist attraction before fire struck in 2009. Now, Jackson’s R.E.S.P.E.C.T. Foundation, which is currently fund-raising for the project, is stepping in to help.

Their multi-million dollar plan includes two additional facilities across the street and next door to Franklin’s home, which will house a community center, coffee shop, an exhibit displaying a timeline of Franklin’s life, a gift shop, and the C. L. Franklin Memorial Chapel dedicated to Aretha’s father, a Baptist minister in Memphis before they moved to Detroit. The museum also will offer music and arts education classes for kids.

“You might look at this as an economic revitalization tool for this community, and at some point in time, we plan to expand further down [Lucy]. It’s kind of long-range but definitely doable,” Jackson said.

The neighborhood around Franklin’s childhood home has deteriorated over the years. But Jackson said the museum project has inspired a few residents to fix up their homes.

“We planned this center as a beacon of hope for the community, and they’re definitely enthusiastic about the project,” Jackson said. “We’re getting calls from some of the neighbors, who have already started working on their properties. We’ve done some inspiring and encouraging.”

There’s no projected completion date for the museum, but Jackson said he hopes to have it open by the spring of 2013, around Franklin’s 71st birthday. He said the project has Franklin’s blessing.

“Aretha’s worthy of this honor,” Jackson said. “She’s won 18 Grammys. She was the youngest person to be honored at the Kennedy Center. She’s had 45 Top 40 singles since 1965. We think she’s more than deserving.”

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Memphis and Memphis

CREDIT: Danzinger

With the expected segue between last season’s exhilarating Grizzlies showing and the prospect of more this season having been stalled mercilessly and in danger of being aborted altogether, our city was badly in need of a morale-building entertainment to fill the breach, and Memphis the musical was it.

As our reviewers astutely noted, there was something less than a one-to-one relationship between the plot elements of the musical Memphis and the real history of Memphis music. Indeed, as local audiences watched the narrative of the Broadway show onstage at the Orpheum, as presented by a touring cast, one reaction was fairly common — a sense of “That’s not right. … No, that’s not accurate. … That’s not even close. …Hey, this is pretty good!”

For, as no few philosophers and saints have reminded us, there are facts, and there is the truth. And they are not necessarily the same thing.

Those same audiences, who, on a night-to-night basis, had to include a fairly generous sample of music-savvy Memphians, seemed to have no trouble suspending disbelief despite the numerous inaccuracies. And by inaccuracies, we’re making full allowance for the differences between fact and fiction. Just for starters, though: Country music did not get its due in the roots parade; the disparagement of  local “Christians” as reactionary Gloomy Gus types ignored the gospel antecedents of local forebears, both white and black (though the Rev. Herbert Brewster’s church choir got a significant hat-tip). And, most importantly, the musical’s score, even at its most exhilarating, didn’t begin to resemble the earthy stuff that actually came out of here and rocked the world.

Not in a New York minute and not by a country mile.

But still, you’d have to be a pretty hard customer not to appreciate the intrinsic tribute to the city that the musical represented. And the story line, based loosely on the life and career of Dewey Phillips, as close to being the ur-disc jockey of rhythm and blues and rock-and-roll as anybody else, was compelling. Though significantly different in presumed bio and persona from Phillips, the Huey Calhoun character had the look and feel (if not altogether the sound) of the real deal.

And there were several gratifying reminders to the old guard who actually remember Daddy-O Dewey — among them, Calhoun’s “Hockadoo” echoing Phillips’ “Dee-Gaw”; Calhoun’s madcap spiel for “Dupont Beer” close in spirit to Phillips’ for Falstaff Beer: “Yeassuh, folks, Falstaff Beer! If you cain’t drink it, freeze it and eat it or open up a cotton-picking rib and pour it in!”; and the TV-show sidekick with a ‘gator mask doubling for Phillips’ ape-masked Harry Fritzius.

The truest proof of the communion between the show’s performers and those who saw them here: In several performances, including the final one on Sunday, the audience applauded long and loud when the Calhoun character was told his radio show had hit number one in the ratings!

Memphis is gone now, and those who missed it missed something. But hey, Million Dollar Quartet, the Broadway show recapping the feats of Elvis, Jerry Lee, Johnny, and Carl is right behind it this spring at the selfsame Orpheum.

Dee-Gaw!

Categories
News The Fly-By

Creature Feature

Parties will be packed with Draculas, Wolf Men, and plenty of zombies this Halloween weekend, but a group of University of Memphis students are spending more than one night doing the monster mash.

Since the beginning of the fall semester, nearly 30 students have been taking a closer look at classic monster films in a new U of M course that breaks down scary movies in a theoretical and cultural fashion.

Marina Levina teaches “Monster Films” in the school’s communications department. She began teaching the course at the University of California at Berkeley before introducing it to the U of M this fall.

Levina said she explains how monsters are “representative of societal fears” regarding race, gender, appearance, and sexuality. For example, one film the class will focus on later this semester is King Kong, which Levina said represents societal anxiety over race.

“King Kong gets presented as this dark figure that comes out of the African jungle as it tries to destroy this civilized white society,” Levina said. “It threatens to kill the blond women. The anxiety about the racial other gets presented in the figure of it.”

Other films will address sexist ideals.

“We look at how anxieties about women having too much power in society get presented as these monstrous, female figures,” said Levina, an assistant professor of communications. “For example, David Cronenberg’s movie The Brood presents this woman as a female body that’s potentially dangerous if left on its own.”

The course meets on Mondays, and all types of traditional monsters are up for discussion, including vampires, zombies, werewolves, and aliens. Besides The Brood, the syllabus includes viewings of Freaks,The Thing, Teeth, and Frankenstein.

Although students spend much of their classroom time watching movies, Levina warns that it’s no easy “A.” The class covers psychological and film theory.

Student Devon Haines was misguided by the course title and received a wake-up call on the first day of class.

“She pretty much told us that we’re not going to just be sitting here watching monster movies. We’re going to be analyzing them and looking at them in a completely different light,” Haines said. “At first, I was kind of skeptical because I was thinking, I don’t want another lecture course. I know everything that I need to know about monster movies. It turned out that was not the case.”

Haines said the course has helped him look at horror films in a new light, applying the various theories and aspects he’s learned from class.

“It’s actually really interesting, the way she brought these films in and completely transformed them into not just movies but works of study,” Haines said.

Another student, Carolyn Block, said she’s “one of the biggest wusses you’ll ever meet,” but the class is helping her rid her fear of monster movies.

“I’m looking at the movies from an academic perspective instead of from a personal perspective, and it’s not quite so scary,” Block said. “I can understand why the story is the way that it is and that takes some of the fear away.”

Besides watching films, the students have assigned readings, exams, and a research paper to write about a film of their choice, analyzing scenes using material they learned in class.

“Monster Films” student Graham Winchester said the class puts students on their toes and challenges them in a way they haven’t been challenged before.

“It’s been cool learning that each monster is representative of a different cultural time and space,” Winchester said. “I would tell other students to take the plunge. Take the challenge. Accept the fact that it’s going to be difficult work, but it’s going to be a lot of fun.”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Election-Year Overlap

Believe it or not, the election season of 2012 is already under way, even as the last vestige of the 2011 election cycle, a November 10th runoff between Lee Harris and Kemba Ford for the District 7 seat on the Memphis City Council, has yet to run its course.

The deadline for candidate filing for Shelby County offices is December 8th, not quite a month after the District 7 runoff. County primaries will follow on March 6th (the same day as Tennessee’s presidential primary), and the county general election will be held on August 2nd.

One of the first candidates actively running is Amy Weirich, the longtime assistant district attorney general who became district attorney in her own right when her former boss, longtime district attorney Bill Gibbons, was named state Safety and Homeland Security commissioner earlier this year.

Weirich is running as a Republican, though she’s not exactly avid about the partisan aspects of her race. Her answer to a question about that after she picked up a filing petition at the downtown election commission office on Monday is worth quoting in its entirety:

“Of all of the elected positions in the county, it’s the one that’s the least partisan in terms of what we do and how we function and the way we work. We certainly do not pay attention to Republican Party agendas, Democratic Party agendas, or Tea Party agendas. We do what the people need. We do what the community asks. We are the voice of the community. Our job is to pursue the guilty and protect the innocent. We don’t honestly care what their political affiliation is or what their party affiliation is. But that [partisan elections] is the way it is in Shelby County, and so we’ve got to deal with it.”

That said, why is she running in the Republican primary rather than the Democratic primary?

“Just lifelong. I’ve always been a Republican, and it’s the party I remember. But in terms of doing a job, it really doesn’t have much to do with the functioning of the D.A.’s office.”

So far no opponent has declared against Weirich, but, as Weirich notes: “The filing deadline is December 9th [again, actually December 8th], so who knows what will happen then?”

Many people regard her as almost a prohibitive favorite. Would she agree? “I do. I’ve done a good job since January. I’ve been doing a good job for 20 years in this office, and I think I have what it takes to lead this community to the next level.”

Given the depth of Weirich’s support in Republican ranks, it is unlikely she’ll draw a serious primary opponent (though spoilers are always possible), and the Democrats have not yet fixed on a candidate. Speculation earlier this year focused on former state legislator and city council member Carol Chumney and former judicial candidate Glen Wright.

The term which Weirich and any potential opponent would be seeking is the final two years of the eight-year term to which Gibbons was elected in 2006. The full eight-year term will be up again in 2014.

• Even before the 2012 elections themselves take place in Tennessee, a war has begun over the ground rules for voting — specifically over the law, passed in the 2011 General Assembly, requiring would-be voters to present an officially recognized photo ID at their polling place.

Against a background of charges that the law was passed as part of a Republican-backed national effort to suppress turnout among likely Democratic voters, especially seniors and low-income voters, and of efforts to change the law, a series of informational events has been scheduled in Memphis, including two this week featuring Tennessee election coordinator Mark Goins.

On October 26th, Goins will appear at a joint meeting of the American Association for Retired Persons and the Aging Commission of the Mid-South at noon at 2670 Union Avenue. Later Wednesday, Goins will be on hand at the Board of Education building on Avery Street for an informational session sponsored by the League of Women Voters.

Another meeting, sponsored by the Shelby County Election Commission and featuring Tennessee Safety Driver Services director Michael Hogan, will be held in the Shelby County Commission chambers in the Vasco A. Smith Jr. Administration Building from 6 to 8 p.m. on Tuesday, November 1st.

Meanwhile, Lowe Finney and Mike Turner, the Democratic chairs of the state Senate and state House, respectively, have filed legislation to repeal the photo-ID bill, contending, in Finney’s words, “This new requirement will put hundreds of thousands of Tennesseans in danger of losing their right to vote.”

Objections to the law have focused on the difficulty and expense of acquiring photo IDs, especially for seniors, as well as on the exclusion of college IDs from eligibility.

Last week, state Safety and Homeland Security commissioner Bill Gibbons announced an agreement with 30 county clerks in Tennessee, including Shelby County clerk Wayne Mashburn, to provide free-of-charge upgraded drivers’ licenses with photos to drivers who possess drivers’ licenses without photos.

• A last-ditch effort by veteran Democratic cadre Lexie Carter and Shelby County commissioner James Harvey to rescue Planned Parenthood’s hopes for a share of Title X family-planning action in Shelby County appeared forestalled early this week when Shelby County mayor Mark Luttrell made moves to finalize a Title X contract with Christ Community Health Services.            

On Monday, Luttrell signed a county commission resolution to extend such a contract, carrying with it a $397,000 federal stipend, and indicated he would sign the contract itself in short order.

Last week, after the commission voted 9-4 to approve the contract, Carter, who has held several Democratic Party offices and who co-hosts Eyes on Memphis, a weekly public-affairs program on KWAM, 990 AM, talked Harvey, one of three Democrats to vote for the CCHS contract, into using his position as someone on the prevailing side of that vote to call for a reconsideration at the commission’s next meeting on Monday, October 31st. Parliamentary procedure mandates that only someone who had previously been with the majority on a completed vote can seek such a formal reconsideration.

Four of the commission’s seven Democrats voted against the CCHS contract last Monday, either because they preferred the bid of Planned Parenthood, the traditional local provider of Title X services, on the merits or because they resisted state GOP efforts to disenfranchise Planned Parenthood, or for both reasons.

Three Democrats — Harvey, Steve Mulroy, and Justin Ford — joined the commission’s six Republicans to approve the CCHS contract. Each did so in a context of some ambivalence. Mulroy and Ford had voted the other way in a preliminary vote the previous Wednesday in committee, while Harvey abstained.

Ford has not stated publicly his reasons for changing his vote. Mulroy agonized over the matter and voted for the CCHS contract last week only after obtaining spoken assurances from county CAO Harvey Kennedy that Christ Community Health Services would be held to strict compliance with the terms of the county’s request for proposal on Title X.

Strict compliance, in that context, meant, for example, that CCHS would faithfully provide third-party referrals to patients seeking emergency contraception (e.g., via the “morning after” pill), though the agency would not perform such measures on its own premises. It also meant that CCHS would include abortion in the alternatives it described to patients, though, again, no such procedure would be performed at any of the CCHS centers (seven, including one mobile unit).

Abortion itself is not directly covered by Title X funding, though Planned Parenthood’s historical inclusion of abortion among the services it provides patients at large has been the sticking point for the social conservatives who loom large in the state GOP establishment. Only a technical flaw in a General Assembly measure last spring kept Planned Parenthood from being proscribed from Title X funding altogether.

Subsequently, state GOP officials lobbied hard for county health departments on their own to exclude Planned Parenthood from Title X activities.

Local Planned Parenthood director Barry Chase has indicated his agency may sue for the right to continue as a Title X participant.

• The pace of local school-merger activities continues to pick up. A group of Chattanoogans involved in the mid-’90s Hamilton County school merger related their experiences last week to a joint meeting of the new 23-member interim county school board and the 21-member planning commission required by the Norris-Todd bill.

Meanwhile, the interim school board was scheduled for another meeting this week.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters to The Editor

Steve Jobs in Memphis

I enjoyed John Branston’s story about Steve Jobs’ stay in Memphis (City Beat, October 13th issue). There is a footnote to that story. My friend, David Brookings, got a job from Jobs at that time. Jobs took a private tour of Sun Studio, and David was assigned to be his tour guide. Not long after that tour,  David accepted his employment offer and moved to San Jose. As far as I know, David is still employed at iTunes.

Mike Freeman

Memphis

Steve Jobs in Memphis in secret for a liver transplant was a touching story. Jobs was an amazing man and contributed much to our world. He was born an American and lived the American Dream. His vision and drive enabled him to put together others with the same dream. Apple products have changed the world.

What Jobs failed at was his commitment to his fellow Americans. We bought his world-changing products, but tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs went to China. Of course, in his home country there are those troublesome labor and environmental laws. While in China, child labor, forced overtime, low wages, toxic waste, and the health of employees are overlooked.

Apple isn’t alone. There are many American companies whose idea of success is manufacturing their products in nations that allow them to pollute and pay less than a living wage. Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Vizio, and Motorola, among others, find higher profits are more important than loyalty to their home country.

Jack Bishop

Memphis

A Maximum Wage?

The Supreme Court has given corporations rights that have been historically reserved for people. If we are going to view corporations as people, then corporations should shoulder some of the same responsibilities as people.

To protect shareholder value and to protect employees, Congress should pass legislation that limits the compensation of all corporate officers to no more than the combined salaries of the corporation’s 100 lowest-paid employees. A “one-hundred rule” would also limit executives’ salaries at publicly traded companies to 100 times minimum wage. The minimum wage produces an annual income of approximately $18,000. Executives would therefore have their salaries capped at $1,800,000 per year.

If executives want to increase their pay, they would have to raise the salaries of their base. This salary cap would help shareholder value and help raise many poor working people to middle class.

Only 100 times minimum wage? I can hear the yowls of protest now. My deeply considered response to their complaints is, “Piggy, piggy, piggy.” We should remember that Steve Jobs accepted one dollar a year as a salary at Apple. His wealth was in stock. The one-hundred rule would not inhibit innovation or prevent people of vision and skill from becoming billionaires and will help build a strong middle class.

Bill Stegall

Memphis

“Occupy” Playing Cards

Come on, where are the clever entrepreneurs? Those behind the Occupy Wall Street movement should consider the American occupation of Iraq and the printing of playing cards with the Iraqi bad guys on them. How about 52 cards of Wall Street scammers, merchant bankers, and crooked corporate leaders? If cards are too expensive, a softer, more disposable form of paper with an everyday use could be employed. 

Ted Norman

Memphis

Terry Roland

Yet again, county commissioner Terry Roland, “public servant,” is allowed to make hateful remarks in a public forum with impunity (Politics, October 13th issue). His assertion that “girls in Frayser missed the bus” when it comes to abstinence education was hateful and insulting, especially in the context of the family planning hearing. This is not the first ugly comment from this racist misogynist, and it won’t be the last. We cannot depend on his fellow commissioners to stand up to him, and he is apparently representing his district as it wants him to.

Wake up, Memphis! This man is at best an embarrassment, at worst the epitome of the backward image of the South prevalent in the U.S.

Karen Jo Smiley

Memphis

Categories
Music Music Features

Here, There, Everywhere

Bridge Over Troubled Water” is such a deathless composition that Paul Simon will probably be remembered more for his densely hit-packed half-decade alongside Art Garfunkel in the sainted ’60s than for a solo career about to enter its 40th year. Tellingly, Simon & Garfunkel leads both Simon’s Wikipedia entry and his career overview in The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll.

But a better case for Simon comes from a cherry-picked selection of solo material, at the core of which is a trio of linked testaments, two that bracket his career — the 1972 debut Paul Simon and this year’s subtle, somewhat overlooked So Beautiful or So What — and the blockbuster in the middle, 1986’s Graceland, which will rival “Bridge Over Troubled Water” as Simon’s headliner.

This unintentional trilogy comprises not only the three best albums in a long, rich, somewhat erratic career but also forms something of a conceptual journey — from local to global to eternal.

With the eponymous debut, Simon signaled immediately that his solo career was going to take a different shape than the comparatively stiff, word-first folk of his ’60s work. Garfunkel’s choir-boy purity dispatched, Simon embraces rhythm and movement, with the reggae lilt of the timeless opener “Mother and Child Reunion” matched by the side-two-starting calypso snap of “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard.”

Geographically, Jamaican excursion aside, it’s an East Coast record, with autobiographical New York City as epicenter. Simon names names — including his and his soon-to-be-ex wife’s — dispenses drug advice, bids adieu to an outer borough neighborhood girl (“Rosie, the Queen of Corona”), and suffers Chinatown misadventures. “I got the paranoia blues from knocking around New York City,” he confesses, climaxing his tour of post-hippie city life.

The musical exploration of Paul Simon set the stage for Graceland, which is not about touches and echoes but relatively full immersion.

Folk-rock, by nature, is lyric-focused, but Graceland is music first — literally, in that Simon apparently recorded rhythm tracks before appending lyrics. The album is about Ray Phiri’s guitar, Baghiti Kumalo’s bass, and Isaac Mtshali’s drums before it’s about anything.

Simon’s genteel but buoyant embrace of South African pop  was, much like inheritors Vampire Weekend a couple of decades later, easily mocked or dismissed by people who don’t actually listen to African music. But Graceland served as a crucial gateway drug for many curious listeners — this one included — opening the door for the epochal South African comp The Indestructible Beat of Soweto and then an entire country, then continent. Graceland is also, all by itself, beautiful.

A few mild lyrical acknowledgements aside, the non-musical content here is rarely African. Simon remains himself while letting the musicians he employed and the musical culture he embraced remain relatively whole. Most of Graceland doesn’t draw from South African pop; it essentially is South African pop, albeit a little less guttural, a little less tightly coiled, if possible, maybe even a little prettier.

Graceland‘s global — deceptively, almost uncomfortably “universal” — sweep is part musical, the union of American and African opening up at the end to include sympatico accordion-driven sounds both zydeco (“That Was Your Mother”) and latin (the Los Lobos-driven “All Around the World or The Myth of Fingerprints”), but it’s also conceptual.

The opening “The Boy in the Bubble” is a bundle of globe-trotting, visionary imagery that hasn’t aged much in the quarter-century since its initial release: terrorist attacks, turnaround jump shots, medical advances, “staccato signals of constant information/a loose affiliation of millionaires/and billionaires.” From there, Simon leaps from his Manhattan-Soweto foundation for a pilgrimage to Memphis, a beer-bellied American finding salvation in a Third World marketplace, a baby born in Tucson, a rubber-necking remembrance in Lafayette.

Simon’s So Beautiful or So What is a culmination that absorbs both Paul Simon and Graceland and then pushes forward. The album’s musicality is informed by Graceland and Simon’s subsequent international forays but is shaded rather than immersed, with a postmodern bent that incorporates sampled loops and percussive soundscape-production elements.

Conceptually, it feels personal in the manner of Paul Simon but shot through with reckonings with mortality. Full of more humor and detail than are typical of these kinds of records, Simon looks back with both gratitude (the final-verse message to his departed parents on “Getting Ready for Christmas Day”) and regret (“Rewrite”) and is thankful for a good marriage on a love song (“Dazzling Blue”) that memorializes a summer drive to Long Island.

But the core of a record whose title ends up being a choice presented as a challenge is Simon’s consideration of the eternal. This means speaking in the Lord’s voice, condensing creation into an even tidier package than Terence Malick did in The Tree of Life, and most of all envisioning “The Afterlife” as a form to fill out and a line to wait in before you’re swept away in an “ocean of love” and a fragment of song — maybe “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” maybe “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” — that Simon can’t quite recall.

Paul Simon

Mud Island Amphitheatre

Saturday, October 29th, 8 p.m.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Stars and Bars

CREDIT: Dreamstime

Ever wanted to ask Jerry Lawler to make you a Gin Rickey? Or maybe you’ve been waiting to ask the mayor to make you a Mai Tai at the Mercedes-Benz dealership on Poplar while models walk around in the latest fashions from Laurelwood. It’s go time.

“STRUT! Memphis,” a benefit for the Community Legal Center, is a fashion show with celebrity bartenders such as Lawler, Mayor A C Wharton, newscaster Mearl Purvis, mega-lawyer Leslie Ballin, mega-doctor Susan Murmann, and some dude named VanWyngarden.

There are over 30,000 families in Shelby County whose income is between 125 and 175 percent of the poverty line. That means they can pay their rent, but they struggle beyond that. When they buy a used car, get a divorce, or run into landlord problems, the legal help they need is often out of reach.

Community Legal Center serves this niche by providing pro bono advice to people who do not qualify for Memphis Area Legal Services, which helps those below the poverty line.

“We have too many reports of seniors who have lost their homes or cars to scams. Very often the only thing that can reunite senior citizens with their property is free legal help,” Purvis says. 

In 2009 alone, the CLC fielded more than 5,000 calls, met with 143 clients at bimonthly clinics, and formally represented 400 Memphians with legal problems.

But remember: Not all celebrity bartenders are created equal. Ballin warns, “Attendees should order from the other bartenders. I practice abstinence. Since 2003, I have not woken up with a hangover or pregnant.”

“Strut! Memphis” Fashion Show, Mercedes-Benz of Memphis, 5389 Poplar.

Thursday, October 27th, 6 p.m.

Categories
Blurb Books

Preston Lauterbach: Making the Circuit

the-chitlin-circuit-and-the-road-to-rock-and-roll-preston-lauterbach.jpg

For the past three months, Preston Lauterbach, author of The Chitlin’ Circuit: And the Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll (W.W. Norton), has been making the circuit himself at booksignings, author appearances, and book festivals. He’s traveled to St. Louis, New Orleans, Jackson, Mississippi, and Nashville. Last weekend, he was in Dallas and Austin. This week, though, he’s back in Memphis, which is not only his home base but also the scene of several events designed around his book, beginning with a lecture by Lauterbach at the University of Memphis on Thursday, October 27th (reception at 6 p.m.; lecture at 6:30 p.m.), inside the U of M’s University Center Theater.

On Friday the 28th, Lauterbach will head a panel discussion (featuring blues artist Bobby Rush, music educator Emerson Able, and music promoter Julius Lewis) inside the McCallum Ballroom of the Bryan Campus Life Center at Rhodes College. The discussion begins at 3 p.m., and it’s followed that evening by a concert by Rush (along with the Bo-Keys) at 8 p.m. at the Warehouse (36 East G.E. Patterson).

And on Wednesday, November 2nd, at noon, the Dixon Gallery and Gardens (4339 Park) will host Lauterbach as part of the gallery’s “Munch and Learn” lecture series.

Where does all this activity leave Lauterbach, who’s already at work on a followup to The Chitlin’ Circuit: a history of Memphis’ Beale Street?