Month: June 2012

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Love Is Dumb

Dustin Holden is an out-of-the-closet “gleek.”

That was the first word he used to describe himself in a telephone interview. For those not hip to the lingo, gleek is a proudly self-deprecating  word used to identify hardcore fans of Glee, Fox TV’s popular show about teen identity and the age-old conflict pitting jocks and cheerleaders against theater goobs and glee-club geeks. The production numbers, often pop-music/musical-theater mashups, are epic, and Holden says they are the inspiration for his recent work as director for Out Tonight, the Emerald Theatre Company’s annual cabaret.

Having performed in the ETC cabaret for a number of years, Holden first took on the job of directing the show last season. His aim was to make the evening’s performance more like a unified concert and less like a talent show, where everyone took a bow at the end of their performance but nobody actually received a prize. The theme for his first ETC revue was Glee, naturally, and this year he hopes to at least reference his favorite show by naming the cabaret after Paul McCartney’s soft-focus Wings hit “Silly Love Songs,” which was prominently featured in episode 34 of the show.

As one might expect of a program dedicated to all things romantic and ridiculous, full-throated voice will be given to “Love Shack” by the B-52s and to Meatloaf’s “I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That).”

“Savannah Bearden is performing Bjork’s “It’s Oh So Quiet,” Holden says, dishing on the actress’ aversion to singing on stage. “Savannah doesn’t really do musicals. I don’t think she likes them very much.

“We’re working with that,” he says, hinting at a running gag.

“Out Tonight” at TheatreWorks, June 8th-17th. $15. for Reservations, call 272-0909.

Categories
Music Music Features

Drive

When Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings tour, they don’t travel by tour bus or plane. Instead, they go by Cadillac. It’s a mode of transportation that has a long history in country music. “Many before us have realized that this is the best way to roll down the road,” Welch says. “It’s a tried-and-true thing. Hank Williams, Bill Monroe, the Band, Flatt and Scruggs — everybody used to drive a Cadillac.”

More than its illustrious history, however, a car is much more efficient for a duo who play acoustic instruments almost exclusively. It’s greener than a tour bus. “Plus, Dave’s allergic to diesel, so there’s that,” Welch says. Perhaps even more importantly, Cadillacs are comfortable and quiet. “They save your ears,” she explains. “The amount we drive, you have to have a quiet car or you get to the gig and your ears are all road rumbled.”

Welch and Rawlings started touring by Caddy a few years ago, often taking circuitous routes between shows, the better to see even more of the country. The duo prefer back roads through small towns over big interstates through bigger cities, which often puts them in close proximity to the primary subject of their austere country songs: America past and present.

“That’s really how we wrote this new record,” Welch says of the fourth album with her name on the spine, The Harrow and the Harvest. (Welch and Rawlings write and perform together, but typically only one of them gets artist credit.) “We crisscrossed the country I think eight times.”

What they saw was a lot of unhappy people struggling to get by in the current economic crisis. “I’m here to tell you that I’ve seen tens of thousands of miles of this country, and it was really something to behold,” Welch says. “I saw stuff that I’ve only seen in WPA photographs. People were having a rough time. I’m glad I saw it, though. I’m glad I was in touch with it. Dave put it beautifully — he said he felt a sort of gathering weight.”

The country’s bleak mood inspired the austere acoustic sound of The Harrow and the Harvest, which is her first album in nearly a decade. But it also inspired the songs’ subject matter: hard-luck tales of regular Americans at loose ends, forced into dire circumstances such as drug addiction, prostitution, or simple, abject hopelessness.

Welch and Rawlings are not singles artists; in fact, Welch explains they sent Harrow out to radio stations with no highlighted tracks and different stations chose different songs. But one song has stood out to them, the bluntly titled “Hard Times.” Illustrated by Rawlings’ spidery guitar licks and Welch’s grave vocals, it’s a typical Welch/Rawlings composition in that it’s written in character — specifically that of an old farmer working the ground with his beloved mule. “Hard Times” has become a fan favorite off The Harrow and the Harvest, perhaps thanks to its determined chorus: “Hard times ain’t gonna rule my mind.”

“By coincidence or whatever,” Welch says, “it really resonated with what a lot of people were going through economically, so I’m happy to say that those sorts of accidents happen. And they’re probably not accidents at all.”

Touring by car may have put Welch in touch with America in the 21st century, but her and Rawlings’ music is still rooted in the sepia-tone tinge of Depression-era folk music. Especially after the full-band, electric sound of 2003’s Soul Journey, the stark, stripped-down acoustic sound of The Harrow and the Harvest evokes Appalachian folk and Dust Bowl desperation without making the parallels between the Great Recession and the Great Depression too obvious. It’s timely but not necessarily political, topical but without the hokey self-seriousness of OWS folkies like Tom Morello and Bruce Springsteen.

“Every song Dave and I write has to have something in it that we think could make it somebody’s favorite song,” Welch says. “If it’s going to be depressing, make it so depressing that if a person loves depressing songs, it’s their favorite song. If it’s going to be silly, make it so silly that if a person really likes light, wry, witty songs, it’s their favorite song.”

The Harrow and the Harvest has many more depressing songs than silly songs, which is not to say that the album is a complete downer. Welch’s narrators are never truly hopeless, if for no other reason than she imbues them with great wit and wily grit — the necessary tools not only to tell their own stories but to survive in a country that has always been hard.

For Welch, though, traveling by car has not only given new resonance to her old subjects but has given her a new way to document the times she lives in with all their complexity intact. She sees the goodness as well as the heaviness: “If you’re feeling depressed or things are getting out of control, you can get in your car and drive around and see how much goodness is still out there. It’s not all messed up. People sometimes just bury their heads in the daily news and lose hope. To those people I would say, take a trip. Go see for yourself. Decide for yourself how it’s going.”

An Evening with Gillian Welch

Germantown Performing Arts Centre

Tuesday, June 12th

8 p.m.; $32.50

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Local Record Reviews

Local country/punk/speed-metal rockers Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre have long treaded the thin line between parody/homage and originality in the band’s relatively short but prolific career, which has yielded four full-length studio albums, as well as a slew of smaller releases. But despite a somewhat contentious relationship with certain sects of the local music scene, the band has built a solid fanbase on the strength of nearly constant touring and the relentless effort of founder/frontman Joey “Joecephus” Killingsworth.

On Arockalypse Now, the band succeeds the most when it sticks to fast and furious punk rock, as on the fierce early-album tracks “Getaway,” “LoveSong 666,” and “Tomorrow.” But as the record unfolds, it reveals a group with a scattered identity — between all the frequent musical detours into reggae, outlaw country, grunge, and power ballad territory, I’m just not sure what to think. One thing I know for sure is that I’ll never smoke enough weed to get through “Dope Smokin’ Song” without wondering if legalization is really such a good idea after all. — J.D. Reager

Grade: C

Memphis is a city short on indie rock groups like the Family Ghost. Whereas many new underground bands in town tend to hone in on a ragged blues and/or garage-rock influences, the Family Ghost has established itself as, arguably and if nothing else, the most fiercely unclassifiable post-punk band in Memphis.

And, without a doubt, there are moments when the Family Ghost absolutely kill on Artifact 2012: The disco-punk “Like Clockwork” is a clear highlight, as is the psychedelic spoken-word offering “Fall Behind.” But then there are times when the band makes you wait for it a bit too long. I’m sorry, but in my book, 04:45 into a song is too late to start singing — as is the case with the EP’s unfortunately dull opener, “Intro/A Series of False Starts.” — JDR

Grade: B-

Originally released in 2001 on the Oxford-based independent Stump Grinder Records, Big Legal Mess (a subsidiary of the powerhouse Oxford semi-major label Fat Possum) re-issued this debut album from Conway, Arkansas, singer-songwriter Jim Mize earlier this year. And thank God for it, because — with all due respect to more polished bands of the genre like Wilco and the Old 97s — this collection of songs holds up over a decade later as not only Mize’s best work but one of the finer alt-country/Americana albums in recent memory.

Upon listening, the first thing that stands out about No Tell Motel is Mize’s gravelly, Springsteenish voice, which always seems to be straining to hit the next note (in the best possible way). One almost gets the feeling of being yelled at first, because Mize really pushes himself vocally even when the tempo slows down. But after a while the roughness of his delivery becomes a comfort, and it reveals the passion and emotion with which the record was written. The backing musicians on No Tell Motel, which includes Blue Mountain members Cary Hudson and Laurie Stirratt as well as R.L. Burnside guitarist Kenny Brown, are just as on point and elevate the album even further.

Highlights include the opening track, “Emily Smiles,” which has a pop hook powerful enough to stand up to Mize’s growl, the organ-based ballad “Let’s Go Running,” and the honky-tonk rocker “Mary Kenworth,” but those are just the tip of the iceberg. No Tell Motel is worth spending some time with, if you haven’t already. — JDR

Grade: A

Categories
Music Music Features

Bob Frank at Otherlands Coffee Bar and The Hi-Tone Cafe

A product of the Memphis coffeehouse scene of the ’60s that also helped mold such local music fixtures as Jim Dickinson and Sid Selvidge, Bob Frank made his debut with an eponymous 1972 collection for venerable folk/roots label Vanguard. But when the album didn’t take off the way he or the label had hoped, Frank abandoned the music business for Oakland, California, where he went to work for the city (on irrigation systems) and started a family. Frank stopped recording music for nearly 30 years. He still wrote songs and sometimes played them around his Bay Area home, at open mic nights or union rallies. But he’d set aside any notion of a professional music career. And then something unexpected happened: That one missed opportunity from 1972 sprouted a minor Internet-era cult. Bob Frank became a collector’s item of sorts, fetching as much as $100 in online auctions, and far-flung Frank fans began finding each other and, soon, searching for Frank himself.

Inspired to hit the recording studio again, Frank called upon his old friend Dickinson, who had recorded a Frank song (“Wild Bill Jones”) on his own obscure 1972 debut, Dixie Fried. The result was Keep On Burning in 2002, the first Bob Frank album since 1972. It was followed by a few other self-released collections and then an unlikely spurt of higher-profile activity: a second label-released solo album, Red Neck, Blue Collar, for the Memphis International label, and a pair of collaborations with younger, California-based Memphis ex-pat John Murry, most prominently the well-regarded murder-ballad collection World Without End.

Still California-based, Bob Frank returns to his old hometown this week for a series of shows: Frank will play at Otherlands Coffee Bar on Saturday, June 9th, at 10 p.m. And he will play two early sets at the Hi-Tone Café on Sunday, June 10th, starting at 4 p.m. and running until 7 p.m.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Tainted Love

Long before the groundbreaking R&B musical Dreamgirls took its bows on the Great White Way, there was an actual band called the Dreams. It’s such a great name, how could there not have been? Chances are you’ve never heard their music, though. Not unless you’re a record collector from Philadelphia or perhaps an audiophile with a thing for obscure harmony groups from the early days of rock-and-roll. The Dreams’ records are never played on golden oldies radio or reissued by K-tel.

In 1954, the same year Elvis recorded “That’s All Right” for Sun, the real Dreams — who, apart from tight harmonies, were nothing like the Dreams of Dreamgirls — signed with Savoy Records, a pioneering New Jersey label that specialized in black gospel, jazz, and R&B. Shortly after, they visited New York, where they met the celebrated Charlie Mingus and recorded some of the dreamiest sounds to emerge from the musically rich city that spawned Dick Clark’s American Bandstand.

I mention all of this as prelude to my review of Dreamgirls at the Hattiloo Theatre, because it’s impossible to listen to these great lost singles and believe that there has ever been anything remotely fair about the recording industry. Rave reviews never translated into a position on the national charts, and so the magnificent original Dreams faded after their last recording session in 1955.

Dreamgirls, by way of contrast, is an incredible success story loosely modeled after the biography of Motown hitmakers Diana Ross and the Supremes. But the story is no less typical than the one I just told. Success for this version of the Dreams only comes as the direct result of a massive betrayal and only with the help of bribes paid to radio execs and disc jockeys. And while the reconfigured Dreams rise to the top of the pops, Effie, the group’s original lead singer (heavy of both voice and body), and Jimmy Early, an R&B pioneer who helped the girls get their start in the business, tumble off the charts and into the dustbin of history. It’s bedrock American myth, powerfully told.

Henry Krieger and Tom Eyen’s musical is heavy with drama, although dialogue-driven scenes are few and far between. It unfolds like a dream (for lack of a better description), moving with minimal choreography from New York’s Apollo Theater to Las Vegas and beyond with the speed of thought and almost nothing in the way of a set change. In director Dennis Whitehead’s solid, simple, and occasionally spectacular staging, the transitions are helped along with the aid of nice but unnecessary photo projections. As with the Greeks and Shakespeare, everything you need to know is built into the story.

Few moments in the theater are as powerful as the one where Effie (subtly played and perfectly sung by Nia Glenn Lopez) turns on her duplicitous manager and lover, Curtis (a smooth, calculating Marcus Anthony), and launches into the paint-peeling and heart-shredding song, “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.”

Of course, Effie does go and is replaced as both the Dreams’ lead singer and Curtis’ lover by the leaner and more telegenic Deena (an effective Noelia Warnett-Jones), who sings with a lighter, more crossover-friendly voice that doesn’t readily reflect its black gospel roots. And once the change is made, the hits don’t stop.

Even for a musical with minimal technical requirements, the Hattiloo production is especially lean. The competent two-piece band barely hints at what the sound could be, and the cast is a mixed bag of acting talent. But, for all of its ragged edges, there’s something special about this spunky, no-nonsense take on some familiar material.

The Hattiloo is a place where the action often spills off the tiny stage and into the audience. In this case, it doesn’t spill so much as it explodes. Choreographer Emma Crystal puts so many dancers onstage it doesn’t seem like there’s room to move, but they do move and it’s electric.

By the time Mario Williams bounced from the stage into the aisle for the show-stopping “Jimmy Got Soul,” the entire audience had surrendered to the irresistible groove and become his full-voiced backup singers.

This history of popular music is a sleazy affair. The fact that it’s so unfair and fraught with double dealing is part of what makes collecting records — and the stories that go along with them — so much fun. Dreamgirls isn’t just about the Supremes. It’s a fantastic amalgamation of all of those stories, from the most inspirational to the most depressing. And even when it’s stripped down to the bare bones, it’s just about as good as musical theater gets.

Through June 17th

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Grills! Grills! Grills!

CREDIT: Joe Boone

Please stop talking about your obnoxiously trendy barbecue grill. How many parties must you ruin prattling endlessly about cooking steaks at the surface temperature of the sun on a thousand-dollar grill?

A) Nobody cares.

B) We are here to help.

This is Memphis. We were famous for smoking and grilling way before you bought that thing and set upon your campaign of party-conversation destruction. Get a grill that you can be proud of, something everyone will want to hear about because it’s like Memphis: funky and fascinating.

The source of this tirade is an old legend: a Sasquatch-like myth of a grill that is periodically seen around eastern Arkansas. Some say it washed out of the river — part river buoy, part kid-drawn military ordnance. They say it was cut up in a farm shop and set onto wheels. It became the grill/smoker of legend before it wandered west into the Delta never to be seen again.

This mythic river-buoy grill will set your mind free from the limitations of propane tanks, stainless steel, payment plans, and all of the other things that can make your barbecue taste like Nashville sounds: all wrong.

The first thing you should do is look into the grills sold at Kingsbury Career Technology Center on North Graham. James Everett has taught metal shop at Kingsbury for 15 years. He has two classes of 18 kids every day.

“We’ll make them for anyone who would like them,” Everett says. “We use the funds for materials and going to field trips and welding competitions.

“I’ll have about five kids on a grill, depending on the size. We sell between five and eight per semester through word of mouth from students’ parents and teachers.

“This one we also made,” Everett says with a spark of pride. “The plumbers were taking two sinks out of that bathroom and they gave me these.”

Then it dawns on me what I’m looking at: two school-size stainless-steel sinks (each a bulbous half-circle) stacked and hinged along the flat (wall) side and set on a stand with wheels. The grill has a striking symmetry and clean, utilitarian lines. You could see it being Steve Jobs’ grill.

“They are stainless steel and hold the heat for a long time. We use it all the time on campus,” Everett says.

“A lot of the kids leave here and go to Tennessee Tech for higher education and some of them just get jobs,” Everett says before pausing to sort of heckle the premise of this article: “But I don’t know that any of them go on to work making grills.”

For information on Kingsbury grills, call 416-6000.

One exception to this no-jobs-in-grills travesty can be found at DJ’s Welding. If you have not seen the sign where Tillman dead-ends into Summer, you are a defective Memphian. DJ’s Welding brims with custom-made grills and the enthusiasm of owner Dwayne Johnson. They also sell tamales.

“I’m from this neighborhood,” DJ says. He hopes to buy the corner building soon and to give something back to the kids he sees every day.

He is a second-generation metal worker and went to Tennessee Tech.

“My uncle Ezell Matthews was an artist. He worked at Pickle Ornamental Iron.”

Johnson’s enthusiasm for his work and his neighborhood runs over as we look at photos of a grill that he set into the body of a race car for a Memphis in May contestant. He points to a recent hire from Tennessee Tech.

“I’m focused on this neighborhood; on how to build it up and make it better. It’s my way of giving back. So students will have something else to do and somewhere to go.”

DJ’s grills start at $60 for a personal size and run up to the 55-gallon model at $99.99. They also do custom work.

“Whatever you can come up with,” Johnson says.

DJ’s Welding, 2992 Summer (314-6029)

This leaves option three. You must be this cool to ride: Make your own grill.

Drumco, an “Earth minded company” on Tulane Road, will sell you a locally reconditioned barrel for under $25 and a brand-spanking new food-grade model for under $70.

Southern Steel Supply on North Dunlap has just about every part you would need. You can get a plasma cutter and welding kit at Northern Tool on Summer.

Soon, you will be the proud owner of a locally sourced artifact of your new, improved, hog-smoking, life-winning self. Of course, that means taking it out for a strut with some wheels and a trailer hitch. Go to www.tn.gov and search for “homemade trailer.” Our state government is all over this idea and has posted the requirements to hook up what you got and keep it off the impound lot.

Drumco, 3299 Tulane (396-6484)

Then there is the Olympiad of custom grillery. And where in the world might that take place? The National Ornamental Metal Museum. The museum’s bi-annual Art Cooker event is where the masters of the art meet to show cookers/works of art and then hold a barbecue. Last year’s Art Cooker show included the infamous We’re Having a Tea Parody, J. Taylor Wallace’s cooker shaped like an enormous Sarah Palin head. This and other designs boggle the mind and seal in the juices.

Noah Kirby, who teaches sculpture at Washington University in St. Louis, participated in the second Art Cooker and thinks custom cookers are an extension of the cooking and of the culture of food.

“This takes the grill away from pure function,” Kirby says. “It makes a totem of it: a sacred site, a communal site. It’s something interesting to stand around. Even if it’s just sitting in the yard, it’s a memory of that gathering.”

Kirby smoked a turkey in a cannon and shot it out “like a pop gun” onto a platter at the second Art Cooker contest.

The next Art Cooker is set for May 2013.

Just roll that store-bought grill to the street and be done with it. Welcome to Memphis.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Questions!

There are many nerd clans and subclans out there, and in the last decade a number of them have gotten assimilated into mainstream pop culture: Lord of the Rings nerds, comic book nerds, Star Trek nerds, gamer nerds, anime nerds, zombiecore nerds … all it took was some box office or ratings gelt. Now, the nerds run Hollywood, and new and rehashed nerd franchises are launched and await only opening-weekend returns to determine how presentable their fan bases are for polite dinner conversation.

I am Greg of the Alien nerds, devotees of the Ridley Scott 1979 sci-fi horror film and its sequels, spin-offs, and collateral multimedia incarnations. As a little kid, I owned the original Alien board game. As a too-old kid, I collected the Aliens card game. I once made a list of my favorite movies. Alien landed at #26, and Aliens was my second-favorite of all time (still is).

Scott returns to the world of my seminal nerd flame with his new film, Prometheus. Advertised and promoted as a prequel to some degree to Alien, Prometheus takes place in 2093, 29 years before the events of Alien. Archaeologists Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green) have discovered a series of cave paintings and art artifacts from a wide range of civilizations and historical eras that share one message: a star map of a system too distant for ancient humans to know about. Is it an invitation from an alien race?

Funded by elderly billionaire Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), an expedition is sent to the star system in question to accept the summons. Among those adventur ing with Shaw and Holloway are team leader Vickers (Charlize Theron), spaceship captain Janek (Idris Elba), and synthetic human David (Michael Fassbender).

Part of what makes the horror notion of Alien so lasting is that it connects with so many phobias: fear of the dark, the other, death, rape, spiders and snakes, suffocation, being buried alive, technology, pregnancy, blood, disease, sleep — something for everybody.

Prometheus taps into one fear to date not mined in the series: existential dread. What happens after we die? Is there an afterlife? Where did we come from? Were we intelligently created and, if so, by whom and why?

The film does an absorbing job of asking these eternal questions and couching them in a familiar (to Alien nerds) context. Where humans came from may be answered by the “Space Jockey” subplot in Alien and the attendant questions his existence raised.

Prometheus was co-written by Damon Lindelof, deity of the Lost nerds, fans of the mega-hit TV show known for asking intriguing questions during its six-season run. Lindelof is an expert fictional-question asker; few are better. But he and Lost are notorious as well for the unsatisfying (to many) and incomplete answers it finally got around to providing.

Prometheus is adept at asking questions. But whether it’s a success or not can’t be gauged until we know the answers, and those won’t come until a sequel: not Alien, but Prometheus 2. Prometheus is like Lost, seasons 1-3: It’s a hell of an enjoyable ride, but, ultimately, it doesn’t matter how thoughtful or clever the question. If the revelations are withheld, one is left with longing and fearful hope that the question-asker knows the answer. That’s to be expected with existential questions, but what about those more decidedly terrestrial?

I can’t answer how satisfying Prometheus will be for non-Alien nerds. The filmmakers drop clues for the nerds that all may not be what it seems. Non-nerds won’t notice and may enjoy it better for their ignorance. It’s a different movie depending upon your nerdom. Who is this movie for?

Note: This is part one of a Prometheus review. The spoiler-laden and speculative part two, for those who have seen the film and are familiar with the franchise, is posted here.

Prometheus

Opens Friday, June 8th

Multiple locations

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Lovely virgins and killer-queens.

Norman Mailer opened his 1959 book Advertisements for Myself with “A Note to the Reader” that mentioned the pleasures of liking an artist at his worst. Keep this idea in mind when watching Snow White and the Huntsman, another version of the German fairy tale that offers — in between some splashy battles, borderline-campy nonsense, and fairy-tale head-scratchers — multiple opportunities for two underrated actresses to strut their stuff.

Snow White and the Huntsman is best described as a double chase narrative masquerading as a fairy tale. During the first two-thirds of the film, everyone’s trying to catch the escaped Snow White (Kristen Stewart), whose purity and goodness pose a significant threat to the wicked queen Ravenna (Charlize Theron). But in the last third, the tables are turned as Snow White leads her army on a charge against the wicked queen’s castle. The barely-there subtleties of this story are easily ignored, as are all the boys, from the huntsman to the wicked brother to the CGI-enhanced strike force. However, the female leads are captivating from the start: Director Rupert Sanders gives Theron and Stewart mysterious, dramatically lit entrances worthy of their status in the film as allegorical figures.

Say this about Theron: She has no fear. Whether she’s in a near-great movie like Young Adult or something like Snow White, her commitment is always impressive. At times, her wailing overacting feels like a Nicolas Cage impression. Yet in two key scenes — one early and late — her teary-eyed conviction cross-pollinates with her essential cruelty, and something approaching pathos takes root. Plus, Theron proves that you should accept no substitutes when you want a desperate villainess to crawl along a stone floor as her part-crow body slowly reconstructs itself.

As Snow White, Stewart begins the film as mute and frail and ends it as a determined warrior-queen. Like Theron, Stewart doesn’t let the overall silliness deter her. She’s particularly talented at conveying moments of intense emotional arousal: When she swoons for a guy, takes an ill-advised bite from an apple, or declares war, she seems to grow in stature like some raven-haired she-hulk. Neither Stewart nor Theron needed to try very hard in this film. But because they are such craftsmen, they both discover emotional depths in their one-note characters that give their final showdown unexpected seriousness and punch.

The production design is awfully good, too. The Dark Forest is a lysergic nightmare where branches become snakes and everything else is dead, and the Land of the Fairies is a pastoral vision. In fairy land, every animal lives in harmony with every other, mushrooms and butterflies cloud the land and air, and a sacred deer rules them all. Any summer blockbuster that thrives on such throwaway lyricism is certainly worth a look.

Snow White and the Huntsman

Now playing

Multiple locations

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: Lisa Jack

Ordinarily, the school-days hi-jinks of candidates for the highest office are irrelevant, unless you’re George W. Bush and you’ve gone AWOL from your National Guard unit for over a year. But a couple of stories surfaced last month, each about the two presidential contenders’ youthful student “pranks,” which may help shed light on the candidates’ character.

The first investigative piece was about Barack Obama’s liberal use of herbaceous materials as a student at Occidental College; the second concerned Mitt Romney’s assault on a long-haired classmate when he was a senior at an elite prep school in Bloomfield, Michigan. According to witnesses, young Mitt was incensed at the appearance of an eccentric young man who had the gall to grow his hair long. Romney led a group of students through a dormitory until they found the offending party, tackled him, and pinned him to the ground, while Mitt hacked away at his hair with a scissors. The rueful participants claimed it was something they could “never forget,” except for the Barber of Bloomfield who said, “I don’t recall the incident myself, but I’ve seen the reports and I’m not going to argue with that.” Unfortunately, the victim of the attack, John Lauber, who died in 2004, was unavailable for comment.

The revelations about Obama’s school years come from David Maraniss’ new book, Barack Obama: The Story. College classmates claim that young Barack was a copious user of the “sticky-green” and invented novel ways in which to smoke it, including “chooming a doobie.” I had never heard that expression, but for the uninitiated, I would assume it’s synonymous with “burning a fatty” or the “smoking of a marijuana cigarette.” “Barry” was also known to invent some smoking trends. One was called “T.A.,” short for “total absorption.” Another was called “roof hits,” where a bunch of guys smoked pot in a car with all the windows sealed, until they tilted their heads back and inhaled the remaining smoke from the cloud in the ceiling above. Obama also had a tendency to leap forward in a pot circle shouting, “Intercepted,” and take a hit out of turn, but one schoolmate said, “No one seemed to mind.”

I appreciate an imaginative leader who takes the initiative.

The stories about Mitt Romney’s prep school days at the Cranbrook School, first reported in The Washington Post, are far more troubling. Mitt is my age, so when I say that I know guys like Romney, I mean I know guys exactly like Romney. When long hair first came to Knoxville, there was an unexpected reaction from the locals. Rather than correctly assume that these were the same students as before who had just grown their hair out over summer vacation, some of the citizenry reacted as if they were under alien attack. There were accounts of roving Melungeons harassing the hippies, always in groups, including reports of malicious hair-cuttings similar to the Romney incident. Ultimately, there were areas of town that long-hairs learned to avoid. 

Among the students who accompanied Romney on his hair-cutting foray, one recently recounted the events for the record and said, “When you see somebody who is simply different taken down that way and is terrified and you see that look in their eye, you never forget it.” Although Romney claims to have forgotten it, the remorseful rabble with him that night remembered returning to their rooms shouting in triumph. A witness referred to it as “assault and battery.”

Confronting the accusations on Fox News, Romney explained, “As to pranks that were played back then, I don’t remember them all, but again, high school days, I did stupid things. … And if anyone was hurt by that or offended, obviously I would apologize for that.” Later, he expounded that some of his pranks “might have gone too far.” I did stupid things in high school too, but that never included leading an assault on a hapless, helpless victim of nonconformity. I just did things like grow my hair long. Obama has publicly taken responsibility for his cocaine and pot use as a young man. Romney can’t seem to remember anything.

Romney became an honor student at Brigham Young University, where everyone looked like him: finely coiffed, well-groomed, and white. No one to bully in Provo. In fact, the university had an honor code that included: no bad language, alcohol, tobacco, tea, or coffee and to “observe dress and grooming standards, and live a chaste and virtuous life.” The Mormon college also encouraged “undergraduate marriages,” so Mitt married young.

Nothing wrong with any of that, but here I had always thought that college was for raising hell and indulging in the pursuit of happiness, along with all those books and such. I believe that my college experience is more typical than Mitt Romney’s. So is Barack Obama’s, whose indulgences did potential harm only to himself and no one else. While Obama was doing “roof hits,” Romney was doing post-mortem Mormon baptisms in Salt Lake City.

Remember back when George Bush was running against Al Gore in 2000 and a lot of people decided to vote for Bush because “he was the kind of guy that you could sit down and have a beer with”? Well, Bush didn’t drink beer, and neither does Mitt Romney. But if presidential preferences are determined by such inane attributes, I’d rather choom a doobie with Barack than be part of a hair-hacking posse led by the pampered and privileged son of a governor.

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R.C. Johnson Leaves the Building

Retiring Memphis Athletic Director R.C. Johnson talks with Frank Murtaugh about the ups and downs of his career in this week’s Flyer cover story.