The help finance her European tour, Amy LaVere has started a Kickstarter.com campaign with a goal of raising $10,000.
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Month: November 2011
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The Longest Occupier
The Occupy Wall Street protest has spread to Nashville and Memphis, among other cities, and shows signs of having staying power and, perhaps, picking up steam. The Memphis protest on the plaza across from City Hall began October 15th, or 17 days ago as I write this.
How long will it last? Who knows? But take note, occupiers and city officials everywhere. The mother of all occupations of public spaces began in Memphis 23 years and 293 days ago, give or take a month or two, at the National Civil Rights Museum at the other end of downtown.
I stopped by the other day to visit with Jacqueline Smith at her solo sidewalk vigil on Mulberry Street. Considering what she has been through, she looked and sounded remarkably like the thin, articulate young woman I interviewed on January 12, 1988, when the Lorraine Motel, where she worked at the time, was shut down. She was evicted, literally kicking and screaming, on March 2, 1988.
Since then, she has been encamped, more or less continuously, on the sidewalk with her blue tarps, desk, posters, worldly possessions, and well-worn books, including Martin Luther King Jr. conspiracy theorist William Pepper’s Orders to Kill. Her occupation is older than the museum itself. After efforts to persuade or force her to leave failed, the city and museum officials reached a live-and-let-live standoff, and Smith became a sort of unauthorized adjunct exhibit, part living history, part protest. In addition to her books, snapshots, and laminated copies of news articles, she has a website, fulfillthedream.net.
I wanted to find out what she thinks about the current occupation movement and what advice, if any, she might have for the protesters about logistics, determination, publicity, or anything else. The day before, I briefly visited the Occupy Memphis site, sprinkled with tents and tarps, and asked a woman how long she planned to stay. “Until things change,” she said. Well, I thought, the weather will change for the worse a lot sooner than the distribution of wealth in the U.S.A., and that will test the resolve of the protesters.
But Jacqueline Smith didn’t want to talk much about that. She is, as political consultants say, relentlessly on message.
“I really haven’t given any thought to what they’re doing,” she said. “I have to stay focused on what the issue is here.”
The neighborhood around the museum has gentrified somewhat, but there are still blighted areas nearby. The museum is in the midst of a campaign to raise $40 million for a major renovation. Last month, Mulberry Street was taken over for the River Arts Fest. There were bands, dancing, and beer vendors, and the stage was sponsored by a casino. Smith was dismayed.
“This is sacred ground and should be respected as such, like Ground Zero,” she said. “There is no room for festivals and alcohol on the property. That is not being done in Washington where you go to pay respects to Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln. Or Graceland. Those places insist upon silence and respect.”
Has she ever thought about packing up and moving on?
“Absolutely not. I feel this is the least I can do because of all that Dr. King did for us.”
What’s it like living alone on the street?
“I won’t make any comments about that. The issue is that there is not affordable housing in this area on Mulberry Street.”
Does she get hassled or urged to move?
“I make no comment on that either. I have no problems with the people working at the museum. I am here because of the system.”
Does she get help with the website?
“I will not make any comment on that. It has been up for years. It is a homemade website.”
And with that I gave her a cup of coffee and some chocolate rolls and said good-bye. A short while later she called me to add a comment on the protesters outside City Hall.
“They are doing what Dr. King was doing back in the Sixties. Their right to protest is guaranteed under the Constitution. As far as their issue, I don’t know, but they have a right to raise their issue, the same as I do and as Dr. King did.”
If I am still around 10 or 23 years from now, I fully expect to see Jacqueline Smith at the corner of Mulberry Street, behind the fire station and across from the National Civil Rights Museum, with her tattered books, blue tarps, winter coat, and her undying resolve.
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Amy LaVere Raising Funds for European Tour
Though her performance in the locally produced film Woman’s Picture will debut this weekend at Indie Memphis, local musician Amy LaVere is preparing to blow town a few days afterward, taking her band on a European tour.
The help finance the tour, LaVere has started a Kickstarter.com campaign with a goal of raising $10,000. LaVere is more than halfway there with four days left on the campaign. There are various extra items – ranging from a download of LaVere’s excellent new album, Stranger Me, to a private concert – accorded based on the level of donation.
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Indie Memphis Competition Features
Chris Herrington previews the competition films at this week’s Indie Memphis Film Fest.
The 14th Indie Memphis Film Festival gets underway tomorrow. We covered a lot of the most high-profile selections in this week’s Flyer cover story, which hit the streets today and will be online tomorrow. As always, there’s far more going on than we have room for in print, so we’re extending our coverage online with several additional preview posts over the next three days, starting with a breakdown of the festival’s competition features (one of which, the locally produced Woman’s Picture, we featured in print).
The competition films aren’t as high-profile as the out-of-competition showcase screenings, but offer the best chance to catch emerging indie filmmakers on the way up. We haven’t had a chance to screen all the competition features yet, but of the ones we have, these stand out:
Bad Fever (Saturday, 5 p.m., Studio on the Square) Hometown favorite Kentucker Audley shows off his acting chops in the second feature film by Dustin Guy Defa. Eddie (Audley) is a socially stunted would-be comedian who jockeys between driving around and tape-recording each terrible joke that comes to mind and actually sharing those jokes with an unforgiving audience at a stand-up comedy club. Irene (Eleonore Hendricks) is a warped vixen who delights in making videos of men humiliating themselves. Thus, a match made in purgatory emerges: a socially clueless loner looking for love and a manipulative sex fiend looking for a victim. The film is exceedingly and intentionally uncomfortable, but achieves a strange harmony in the intersection of these two lives. Audley has mastered his character, with an almost schizophrenic manner of speaking you won’t be able to forget. — Hannah Sayle
The Dish & the Spoon (Thursday, 6:45 p.m., Studio on the Square): This feature, directed and co-written by Allison Bagnel, who co-wrote the Vincent Gallo indie hit Buffalo 66, is something of a showcase for actress Greta Gerwig, who has lately been transitioning from the mumblecore/festival scene into the mainstream. Gerwig is a woman who reacts messily to the discovery of her husband’s infidelity. Gerwig’s character flies off the grid for a while, and picks up an effete stray (Olly Alexander) in a meet-not-so-cute. Most of the film is about the developing friendship between these two lost souls, with echoes of such previous quirky/indie odd-couple pairings as Midnight Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, and Annie Hall. Big-boned, disheveled, but still quite attractive, Gerwig is more charming, flawed-human oddball than Manic Pixie Dream Girl. — Chris Herrington
As the video clip above — from a public-information session on the new state Photo-ID law, held at the Vasco A. Smith County Administration Building on Tuesday night — makes clear, public response has been relatively meager to state government’s current campaign to publicize the ins and outs of the law, which goes into effect on January 1st.
Officials of the Shelby County Electon Commission and the state Department of Safety were on hand for Tuesday night’s session, which also featured a prefabricated video of state Election Coordinator Mark Goins. The video recapped information that Goins had imparted at greater length during two live appearances in Memphis last week concerning the law passed by the 2011 General Assembly and binding on all Tennessee elections as of the New Year.
During his two live appearances here last Wednesday — at the offices of the Commission for the Aging on Poplar and at the Board of Education on Avery — Goins, who stressed that he had no part in making the law, made the point that, in essence, it replaced a requirement that voters show state or federal identification containing a legitimate signature with a requirement for a state or federal ID containing a bona fide photo.
The bill’s Republican sponsors have touted it as a way of guarding against election fraud; the bill’s detractors, including members of the legislature’s Democratic leadership, see it as a means of suppressing voter turnout, especially among college students, whose IDs are not regarded as acceptable, and seniors, whose reduced mobility could make their acquisition of an appropriate Photo-ID difficult.
In Memphis, Goins made an effort to allay concerns about the bill, pointing out that the law permits exemptions — e.g., for absentee voters, for residents of nursing homes or assisted-living centers, for voters with religious objections to being photographed — and that indigent voters and driver’s-license holders over 60 without Photo-IDs could receive “express service” upgrades at driver’s license centers.
(State Safety and Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons recently 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.)
Goins also noted that voters without Photo-IDs could cast provisional ballots on election day that would be counted if they could furnish legitimate Photo-IDs within two days of the election.
At neither of his appearances last week was Goins pressed especially hard by opponents of the Photo-ID measure, but that honeymoon is destined to end, as state Democratic Party chairman Chip Forrester announced on Monday the beginning of a statewide voter-education program on the matter under party auspices.
Among other differences of opinion, Forrester contends that some 675,000 Tennessee voters now find their previously valid credentials to vote under challenge, as against the 126,000 currently invalid driver’s licenses cited by Goins.
- JB
- Goins in Memphis last week
Jim Kyle, the Democrats’ leader in the state Senate and a longtime Shelby County legislator, says he woke up Tuesday morning without any particular thought about running for another office but started getting phone calls urging him to consider a race for District Attorney General next year.
Bingo!
“I hadn’t thought about it at all, but I had to respect the people who were talking to me about it, and I am thinking about it seriously.”
Blogger Steve Steffens (leftwingcracker.blogspot.com) was the first person to float the idea in public, but Steffens said he was responding to some of the same people who had contacted Kyle about the idea. He, like them, thought it made perfect sense.
For one thing, it is the most open of secrets that the now dominant Republicans intend to re-district Kyle out of his Senate seat. And even if he should win in a freshly gerrymandered district and survive, he’d be mired in minority-party status for years to come in Nashville.
Meanwhile, Shelby County, like Davidson County (Nashville), is one of the few areas with enough of a Democratic core for a Democrat to make a serious race for a major position — like, say, District Attorney General.
Amy Weirich, a respected longtime deputy to former D.A.., now state Safety and Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons, and currently the D.A. herself, will be the Republican candidate, and Shelby County Democrats had been casting about for an opponent. Former judicial candidate Glen Wright, they thought, or maybe Carol Chumney, the onetime legislator and City Council member who ran for mayor twice (or actually thrice —two times for city mayor, once for county mayor)….
Neither of those balloons seemed to be flying, however. But Kyle? As Steffens said on his blog, “There are, at this point, only three people in Shelby County who have the name recognition,legal background and ability to raise money to beat Amy Weirich in the District Attorney General’s race. A.C. Wharton is staying Mayor of Memphis, and Steve Cohen is quite happy being our Congressman. That leaves Senator Jim Kyle….”
Just last month Kyle was offering himself as a candidate for the new unified Shelby County School Board. Coordinated Republican opposition on the Shelby County Commission deprived him of that, but the senator had given a clear signal that he might be hankering for new opportunities.
Kyle will mull things over for a while yet. But he’s clearly interested. He has enough fundraising contacts both locally and statewide and enough organizational experience to put together a major effort. And as far as the job itself goes: “You know, the thought struck me: I have personally written a lot of those laws I’d be enforcing!”
Stay tuned. Things could develop quickly here.
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Last Day to Adopt
Thursday will be the last day to adopt an animal from Memphis Animal Services until after their move to a new facility. Bianca Phillips has details on the big “Yappy Hour.“
As the NBA lockout finally consumes the start of the planned regular season and with no clear end in sight, on of the few modes of NBA-related basketball — the charity exhibition game — could be finally coming to Memphis.
There have been a few such games in recent weeks — in Oklahoma City, in Miami — and Rudy Gay announced on his Twitter feed this morning that he’s bringing a game to Memphis on November 8th. The game is expected to be played at the DeSoto Civic Center — with the FedExForum unavailable due to the lockout, it’s probably the only viable option. The charity recipient is still unknown.
Who will play? Gay promised more details later this afternoon, but we can speculate.
Grizzlies players: I would expect to see Grizzlies players make up a large portion of the players involved. I wouldn’t expect Marc Gasol, but pretty much anyone else could be in play. In addition to Gay I would think Tony Allen, Mike Conley, and Zach Randolph would be among the most likely. And draftee Josh Selby, who has been making the summer rounds, would seem to be a good bet.
Stars: Gay played in the Miami game organized by Lebron James and Dwyane Wade, but I wouldn’t assume reciprocity — though it would be nice. More likely is Kevin Durant, a longtime friend of Gay’s who has been looking for any kind of game he can find during the lockout. Another strong possibility might be Chris Paul, another friend of Gay’s who has been active in other exhibitions.
Gay/Memphis connections: Former Grizzlies and Gay friends Kyle Lowry and Hakim Warrick have popped up in recent exhibitions and seem likely participants. And, Marc Gasol aside, the NBA’s best Memphis high-school product, Thaddeus Young, is someone who might pop up.
Again, that’s all just speculation. Hopefully, Gay will drop some more details about the game in the coming hours. We can also hope that there’s an agreement between the player’s union and owners in the next week to end the lockout, but even if that happens before November 8th, it will take longer to draft and ratify a new agreement, so I wouldn’t expect a break in the lockout to squash this game. And, assuming it happens, if nothing else it will be Memphis’ first chance to see Gay in action since his February injury.
Update: The Commercial Appeal is reporting some early player confirmations for the game. In addition to Randolph, Durant, and Lowry, whom I’d mentioned, and O.J. Mayo, the CA says Josh Smith and John Wall are on board.
And Gay has announced on Twitter that game tickets go on sale tomorrow at 10 a.m. on Ticketmaster.com, desotociviccenter.com, or via 1-800-745-3000.