One of the buzziest new bands of 2012, the Alabama Shakes finally make their Memphis debut this weekend. I got to see the band live this spring at Austin’s South by Southwest Music Festival, about a month ahead of the release of their debut album, Boys & Girls. The band’s concept — a contemporary, low-key, garage-rock take on Aretha Franklin at Muscle Shoals — is surefire and one that immensely likable lead singer Brittany Howard embodies. A young African-American woman with a big voice and a bigger smile, the glasses-wearing Howard gives off the onstage vibe of an Everygirl morphing into a star. Her voice, while nowhere close to prime Aretha, of course, has more growl to it, more blues and rock elements that might make Etta James and Janis Joplin truer antecedents. But her band is not Chicago or San Francisco. It’s full-on white-boy soul and swamp rock descended straight from the Muscle Shoals, Alabama, tradition. And the band’s rootsy sound and matter-of-fact interracial dynamic evokes Southern antecedents from Muscle Shoals and Stax to the North Mississippi Allstars. Howard owns it, and her band also looks and feels the part, especially the wiry, diffident guitarist Heath Fogg and chubby, easygoing bassist Zac Cockrell. The Alabama Shakes play the New Daisy Theatre on Friday, September 28th, with Fly Golden Eagle. Doors open at 7 p.m. Tickets are $25.
Month: September 2012
Since 1980, roughly, the beginning of the cable television (now internet and cable television) era, the American presidential contest has become a lot like The Bachelor — reality television writ large. The most likable guy wins. The stiff always loses.
Ronald Reagan was the prototype, an aw-shucks, “common sense” guy who played his greatest acting role as president. He was a natural on camera, a good speaker with a great speech writer, Peggy Noonan. His 1980 opponent, Jimmy Carter, crippled by gas shortages and the Iran hostage crisis, came off as weak sauce — no fun.
In 1984, Democrat Walter Mondale took on Reagan. He was handicapped by being a boring stiff and by having the name “Walter.” The affable Reagan ate his lunch.
In 1988, the first President Bush had the good fortune to get Michael Dukakis as his opponent. Dukakis had the triple whammy of being from Massachusetts, being short, and having advisers who thought it would be a great idea to have their candidate drive a tank, which resulted in one of the most hilarious visual gaffes ever. Compared to dorky Dukakis, the patrician Bush came off as Larry the Cable Guy.
But then, in 1992, along came Bubba — Bill Clinton — the über good ol’ boy. Given the combination of Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy and the senior Bush’s aristocratic air, Clinton was a shoo-in. In 1996, the GOP threw Bob Dole at Clinton, who swatted him like a gnat — a stiff gnat.
In 2000, the Democrats nominated Al Gore, a wonky stiff who talked about “lock boxes.” Up against the latest folksy model from the GOP — George W. Bush — Gore managed to win the popular vote but failed to convince the Supreme Court, which decided he was a stiff.
The Democrats doubled down in 2004, nominating the awkwardest guy they could find: John “Munster” Kerry. He talked like a stiff. He went duck hunting and looked like a stiff. He went windsurfing and looked even stiffer. Bush, despite war, scandal, incoherency, and incompetency, won a second term.
Then, in 2008, came Mr. Smooth, aka President Obama, an orator who could hang with Clinton and Reagan. He was young, likable, had a cute family. He played basketball. Opponent John McCain never knew what hit him.
Now, the Republicans have nominated Mitt Romney, a man so uncomfortable in his own skin, he makes John Kerry look hip. The most recent polling suggests he is in trouble. I say, forget the polling. Just figure out who the stiff is. I think I know.
Bruce VanWyngarden
Categories
Fly on the Wall
Crack Up
Who doesn’t think that a drive down Summer is incomplete without some random quotation marks and double entendre? Universal Glass has a brand-new paint job and now more than ever they want to see your “crack.”
We’re pretty sure they mean broken windows.
Listed
Memphis doesn’t get much respect in the magazine world. We’re always making some sensational worst cities list, and by all accounts, we’re among the fattest, laziest, most depressed and crime-addled cities in the world. On the bright side, we’re also very sober and a great place to retire or visit a cool film festival! Now, apparently, and due to completely random criteria, Travel & Leisure magazine has dubbed Memphis the ninth dirtiest, loudest, and rudest city in America. T&L generously notes that Memphis has improved its standing thanks to its 52-Clean litterbug hotline, but “Offenders get only a scolding letter in the mail — perhaps proof of the locals’ easygoing nature.” Voters also put Memphis in the top 10 for its “purposely sloppy barbecue and unrestrained music scene.” Littering we get. But are there really places where restrained music and neat barbecue are considered a good thing?
Neverending Elvis
When The Wall Street Journal called pop singer Emin Araz oglu Agalarov “the Michael Bublé of Russia,” the international recording artist said he’d rather be known as “the Elvis Presley of Azerbaijan.” And who wouldn’t?
Categories
Payback
Standing in the drizzling rain in the parking lot of Lee Kan’s Asian Grill, Mauricio Alfaro’s composure and polite smile belie the months he has spent fighting for wages he earned but was never paid. Backed by organizers from the Workers Interfaith Network (WIN), Alfaro has come to protest the $8,226 he claims was withheld from him during his 10-month stint as a dishwasher and fry cook for the Collierville restaurant.
Twenty feet away, owner Lee Kan emerges from her car. As she approaches Alfaro, who is wearing a homemade garbage-bag poncho that reads, “Lee Kan’s owes me wages,” the otherwise pleasant chatter between protesters falls away.
“I can’t believe you’d do that to me,” she says to Alfaro. “I was so nice to you. I paid you on time and everything.”
Alfaro is silent. Behind him, WIN organizers flank him on all sides wearing their own garbage-bag ponchos that read, “Thou shalt not steal.” Kan holds out her cell phone to Alfredo Peña, WIN organizer, and asks him to speak to her lawyer.
Ten minutes later, and still in the parking lot, Lee Kan’s attorney and Peña, whom Alfaro has given permission to speak on his behalf, come to an agreement. Lee Kan’s Asian Grill will pay $5,000 of the $8,226 Alfaro seeks, $2,500 immediately and the rest in installments.
“Usually, if we get to a protest, they’ll pay up,” says WIN organizer Kyle Kordsmeier. “Every time but once we’ve come to an agreement.”
Wage War
How common cases like Alfaro’s are in Shelby County is difficult to determine. Over the last four years, WIN, a workers rights organization, has helped workers like Alfaro recover a total of $280,000 in unpaid wages, but Kordsmeier admits this is only the tip of the iceberg.
“We get 400 calls a year from people with cases,” he says. “And we don’t even get in all the cases we could.”
In 2010, WIN helped Jorge Panuco win a case against local Mexican restaurant El PatrÓn. After working for two years for “chips and tips” — food from the restaurant and tips, but not the waiter’s standard minimum wage of $2.13 an hour — Panuco took El PatrÓn to court and won the right to double his unpaid wages, a total of $32,000. (Because El PatrÓn already owed the government in back taxes, Panuco is still waiting for his money.)
That same year, Texas de Brazil settled a national case, agreeing to pay $177,502 worth of back wages and overtime pay, including $14,574 to 42 employees at its location in downtown Memphis.
Accurate statistics on wage theft can be hard to come by, primarily because wage theft victims are almost always low-paid workers, many afraid of reporting wage theft at the risk of losing their jobs.
“Wage theft is so underground in general that nailing it down with decent statistics is a bit of a bear,” says David Ciscel, University of Memphis professor emeritus of economics. “But I think it’s happening a lot.”
“I think it’s frighteningly common,” says Bryce Ashby, an attorney at Donati Law Firm, who works closely with WIN on arguing wage theft cases. “It’s one of those things that people don’t realize just how common it is.”
Wage theft is perhaps most common among Latino workers, where language barriers and the fear of documentation questions make them even less likely to report instances of wage theft.
“There are all sorts of gimmicks that have been used in the Memphis economy, but of course they’re used most consistently, in my experience, against Latinos,” Ciscel says. “Latinos have the most difficult time complaining. If you’re white or black, you can start by going to your minister and then go to Mayor Wharton’s office, and if you really understand, you’ll go to the wage-and-hour people, although they’re hard to get hold of. But if you’re undocumented or if your documentation is not altogether good, then you’re hesitant, so it’s easier to steal from you.”
Ashby agrees, adding that it isn’t always the non-Latino population taking advantage of Latino workers.
“The Mexican restaurant industry right now is a good example,” Ashby says. “A lot of them are typically owned by new immigrants or second-generation immigrants. From what I’ve seen, the vast majority of those aren’t paying their workers properly, aren’t paying their workers overtime. We have cases right now against the Happy Mexican restaurants and another one that we’re looking at against a couple others.”
Making a case against employers who commit wage theft can be especially difficult when workers won’t come forward to report the crime or corroborate their co-workers’ claims.
“The majority of wage theft cases we see are when workers are terminated or when conditions become unbearable,” Ashby says. “They start thinking, You know what? I’ve had it. I’ve been getting cheated long enough. I want the time that I should have gotten.”
Carlos Limon was in this position last April, when he filed his case against Casa Mexicana with WIN. After a year working as a waiter and suspecting he was being cheated out of his wages, Limon starting keeping track of his hours and talking to co-workers about the possibility of wage theft at the restaurant. He believes the management caught on to his suspicions and fired him, after which he wasted no time contacting WIN about a multitude of minimum wage and overtime violations he says were common practice at the restaurant.
“Every two weeks when we got our checks, we would have to pay in cash the same amount of the check,” Limon says. “It was just one of the rules for us to pick up the check.”
If this seems nonsensical — paying the amount of the check to receive the check itself — Kordsmeier reiterates that this is actually one of the ways businesses hide wage theft. Wait staff and bartenders collect tips from patrons as usual but are denied the additional $2.13 an hour they are entitled to because the employer keeps that amount by forcing workers to pay for their checks.
A hidden camera caught a similar kickback scam at a Cincinnati animal hospital in 2010. The video shows workers paying their employer cash to cover the overtime payments in their checks.
“Basically, Carlos was just getting paid in tips and not even that federal minimum of $2.13 an hour,” Kordsmeier says. “It looked good on paper for the restaurant.”
Limon also claims to have worked more than 60 hours a week and never received overtime pay. (Any hours worked beyond 40 hours a week are supposed to be compensated time and a half.) WIN is currently seeking legal help as all other avenues of negotiation have been exhausted.
“Their lawyer requested a time sheet, so we sent them some and got another letter back stating that Carlos was lying, that he couldn’t have possibly worked all the hours at Casa Mexicana he said he did because no one works in the restaurant from 2 to 5 p.m.,” Kordsmeier says. “I went down to the restaurant the other day at 4 p.m. and made a video of people eating and waiters working. I asked the guy at the front, ‘Are you open here?’ He said, ‘Yeah, we’re open.'”
In total, Limon is seeking $13,000 in back pay and overtime from his former employer. When asked if this type of wage theft happened to anyone else at the restaurant, Limon says it happened to everyone.
“But a lot of other people may or may not have papers and say, ‘This is the only job I can get, and if I lose this job, I won’t have a job,'” Limon says. “They’re scared.”
Legal Action
Through mediation, direct action, and connecting workers with attorneys, WIN has helped victims of wage theft in Shelby County find recourse for stolen wages.
Now, WIN is looking for a large-scale, more efficient way to fight wage theft in Shelby County: an ordinance.
If passed, a wage theft ordinance would allow workers who believe they have been victims of wage theft to file an official complaint with the county. Employers would then have the chance to negotiate with aggrieved workers, a phase known as conciliation. If neither side can agree, the case goes before a hearing examiner who would determine whether or not the worker had been a victim of wage theft. If the employer is found to be at fault, he or she would be forced to pay treble damages — triple the amount of wages originally owed. If not, the case would be dismissed.
“The focus, I think, is on that first level of mediation, where we can try to work this out,” says the ordinance’s sponsor, Shelby County commissioner Steve Mulroy. “Only if the employer is being stubborn will we then move on to getting away from the carrot and getting into the stick, and the stick is treble damages.”
While Shelby County does have a system in place to take on wage theft claims, according to Peña, the Department of Labor office doesn’t have the resources or staff to handle the magnitude of wage theft claims in the county. That’s because Tennessee, without its own minimum-wage law, defers to the federal minimum-wage law and relies on federal investigators to take on minimum-wage and overtime violations in Shelby County. There are only two Department of Labor investigators for all of West Tennessee. According to Pena, neither is bilingual.
“It’s often the case that [investigators from the federal Department of Labor] are going to use their scarce resources to go after big violations or systemic pattern and practice violations,” Mulroy says. “And in individual cases, where the amounts are not headline catching, there may not be time for that. But those amounts, nonetheless, are still huge in the eyes of the individual minimum-wage workers who are counting on that money to get by.”
And, as Mulroy points out, local government might be better suited to taking on these small-claims cases.
“It’s entirely appropriate for this to be a matter of local legislation,” he says. “The problems with wage theft may vary from locality to locality, and this is the type of small-claims dispute that has traditionally been resolved through county adjudicatory processes. So it’s appropriate for this to be handled at the local level, and necessary, since the state’s not really doing anything about it.”
The Shelby County wage theft ordinance would be one of many passed nationally in recent years, including ordinances in San Francisco, Seattle, and Miami-Dade County. In fact, the Shelby County wage ordinance is modeled heavily on the one Miami-Dade County passed in 2010, which has so far resulted in the restitution of $1,248,331 to wage theft victims.
According to Jeanette Smith, director of South Florida Interfaith Worker Justice, one of the biggest successes of the ordinance is the swiftness with which cases can be resolved.
“A prompt call from the county can be a little intimidating, and if you owe the money, you tend to take care of it pretty quickly. That quick phone call can resolve a lot,” Smith says. “Any county that’s going to do this has to be sure they handle the cases quickly. Otherwise, if it gets backlogged too far, they go to make calls and people’s phone numbers have changed, people may have moved.”
That swiftness may have helped Zorina Bowen, who lost $1,493 in wages after working only a month at the now-closed Safari World Tapas Bar on South Main. Her employer and friend, Faatimah Muhammad, promised Bowen and others that they would receive full compensation for their work, but when Bowen received only partial payment in cash, she started asking questions. She was promptly let go.
“We were working 12- and 13-hour days,” Bowen says. “I wasn’t the only one; I was just the only one who spoke out about it.”
By the time Bowen went to WIN and began trying to get in touch with Muhammad, she was impossible to find.
“We tried to file with General Sessions Court to try to serve her, and she’s been unable to be served by the processor,” Kordsmeier says. “Then the restaurant closed. She was essentially a ghost.”
Bowen has not been able to locate Muhammad and has yet to recover her lost wages.
A Wage Theft Economy
When it comes up before the county commission in the fall, the ordinance could be the first official legislation addressing wage theft in Shelby County. But despite a demonstrated need and evidence of the Miami-Dade ordinance’s positive returns, Mulroy is still anticipating resistance to the ordinance.
“There’s going to be resistance to anything that would require more resources in county government,” he says. “I don’t think this will be that expensive to administer, but any amount over zero will trigger a certain amount of reflexive opposition.”
Mulroy hopes that by highlighting the impact wage theft has on the local economy, beyond the immediate victims of the crime, citizens and commissioners will appreciate the need for the ordinance.
“The businesses that cheat have a competitive advantage over their competitors that don’t cheat,” he says. “This will actually protect the good employers who do what they’re supposed to do for their employees. It’ll also mean that since these are people who tend to spend more of their income, there will be more money put right back into our economy at a time when we need that kind of stimulus.”
Ciscel agrees.
“Of course, it cheats people out of income they should have and consequently reduces the amount they spend in grocery stores and, since most of these would be low-wage workers, the amount they spend in small restaurants and fast-food joints,” Ciscel says. “But in addition to the economic impact, what wage theft does is send the message to small businesses in general that in order to compete they have to engage in labor practices that are less than honorable. If one person is not paying overtime or is cheating his workers out of hours, it causes others to be at a competitive disadvantage. That’s a big social impact.”
Categories
Born Free
The academic world has failed to answer many important questions about the life and work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like, if this celebrity philosopher, whose social contract outlined the republican fundamentals of legitimate political order, was really such a big damn deal, then why didn’t Monty Python even mention him in “The Philosophers Song”? Descartes is there alongside Kant, Hume, and Wittgenstein. And it’s not like Rousseau isn’t a funny-sounding name. Nor is it hard to rhyme. But when it came to ol’ J.J.’s stout drinking habits, the Pythons, it seems, had nothing to say.
Once again, this vastly fascinating topic is being completely ignored by a distinguished panel of experts who are coming to Memphis to participate in “Rousseau at 300,” a free symposium and celebration of the philosopher’s tricentennial at Rhodes College, September 27th-28th.
Instead of pursuing a Pythonic model by focusing on things like stability and liquor consumption, visiting professors from Boston College, St. Michael’s College, and UC-Davis will deliver lectures on relatively unimportant things like the pursuit of happiness, the origins of evil, childhood development, and the politics of standing apart from the crowd. ”Rousseau at 300″ at Rhodes College, Thursday-Friday, September 27th-28th. This “Communities in Conversation” event is free, but attendees are requested to register online with Rhodes College at the following online address: alumni.rhodes.edu/rousseau.
Categories
Film Spotlight
Tennessee Queer
The third comedic feature from writer/producer Mark Jones, Tennessee Queer stars Christian Walker as Jason Potts, a gay man who left his small Tennessee hometown for New York but is lured back for what he thinks is an intervention for his alcoholic brother. Instead, Jason finds his supportive family angling for a full-time return, insisting that the town has become more gay-friendly.
Tennessee Queer sketches a legacy of small-town homophobia with a tidy opening sequence that reveals a “smear the queer” wall in the locker room of the high school football team, where the humiliation of suspected gay students — including Jason — has been noted for decades.
Back home, Jason seeks to disprove his family’s claims by petitioning to hold a gay pride parade down the town’s Main Street and is shocked to find his petition approved by the positive vote of conservative council member DeWayne Cotton (Billie Worley), who has his eye on a mayoral race and may have ulterior motives.
Jones collaborates again here with cinematographer/editor Ryan Parker — whose technical hand is as sure as ever — and a talented crew that includes assistant directors Sarah Fleming and Morgan Jon Fox, both significant figures on the local film scene.
Tennessee Queer screens at the Paradiso theater on Tuesday, October 2nd, with showings at 6:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. Tickets are $10 and are available via brownpapertickets.com.
Categories
The Rant
With zero precincts reporting, we can now accurately predict that the next president of the United States will be Barack Obama. Now that Mitt Romney is un beignet français, or French toast, as we call it in the lower 47 percent, his bilingual supporters might say his pâté de foie gras is cooked.
I mean, who’s left that he hasn’t insulted except the Obama haters? And there aren’t enough of those to elect him president. Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot the “principled conservatives” and the anti-tax zealots who are prepared to vote for the architect of the despised Obamacare and his running-mate, the champion of small government who co-sponsored an anti-abortion bill with Missouri senatorial candidate Todd Akin, who introduced the term “legitimate rape” to the nation. The slapstick campaign of Romney and Ryan is like watching the Watergate hearings. Every day there’s a new revelation that is damaging to Republicans nationwide. By choosing these two escapees from Ringling Bros. as their candidates, the GOP didn’t just shoot themselves in the foot, they blew their brains out. It was bad enough that Lord Mitt was surreptitiously taped saying out loud to his wealthy donors what everyone thought he believed anyway, but there’s a sweet irony that he was done in by a bartender in league with James Earl Carter IV. The tape made great reality television and opened the eyes of working people everywhere, as well as the elderly, members of the armed services, and the poor.
Romney violated the unspoken alliance between the privileged and the peasants, the filthy rich and the unwashed rubes, the pampered and the propagandized. Not even that 24-hour Mitt Romney infomercial called Fox News could save this sinking ship from Titanic disaster — that is, everywhere except the South. In our blue corner of this red-state wasteland, Romney can still depend on the votes of the resentful Caucasoids, regardless of their economic status. The deceitful have succeeded in fooling the delusional, who will vote against their own well-being before voting for a Marxist, Kenyan Muslim with a secret agenda to turn the U.S. into a European-style socialist state where everyone gives according to their ability and receives according to their need.
As Mitt Romney said to his donors in Boca Raton, imagine the chutzpah of the rabble demanding everything from health care to food to shelter. Next, they’ll be insisting on clean water from the tap when bottled water is sold in every 7-Eleven. The wealthy have convinced the middle class — or what’s left of it — that Obama wants to take money from hard-working taxpayers and give it to Romney’s gangs of loafers and moochers. A lot of people receive government benefits — Social Security and Medicare recipients, those with disabilities, the working poor, and those in poverty who receive some sort of welfare benefit.
This is where the real class warfare begins — wealthy Republicans ginning up resentment against the most vulnerable among us by portraying them as lazy, black, able-bodied schemers who live lives of leisure by gaming the system. They’ve been doing it since Ronald Reagan’s “Welfare Queen,” and the myth of the “Welfare Cadillac” still lingers on. Seniors and soldiers have earned their retirement benefits, and if you’ve ever known anyone on welfare, then you know that it’s a wretched existence. Although there will always be someone looking for an illegal advantage, it’s a lie to claim there is rampant abuse of the system, just as it’s a lie to divide the nation between “makers and takers,” as Ryan has done. His adopted Ayn Rand philosophy may make rich people feel special, but it’s no way to govern. It does fit perfectly, however, with the notion that half the populace are mendicants, undeserving of compassion from their government.
I was introduced to Ayn Rand during a vulnerable period in my life by a conservative intellectual who used to work for segregationist Georgia governor Lester Maddox. He was the accountant for a music producer I was working with while living in a makeshift, hippie-band commune south of Nashville. He gave me a copy of Atlas Shrugged to read while the band guys were constantly borrowing my car. The idea that the “makers” could just take their ball and go home, leaving the “takers” to fend for themselves, was an appealing idea when I was 21 and chafing at the communal experience. But I outgrew it when I realized the world is not so simple and we humans are interdependent in every way. Ryan has never outgrown his Ayn Rand obsession and sticks by the old slogan that everyone should “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.”
Unfortunately, after the Bush recession, there are scores of people without any boots, but in Ryan’s world, “a strong back is a terrible thing to waste.” Thus, the easily disprovable canard that Obama has removed the Clinton era “welfare to work” requirement that is repeated ad nauseum by the GOP. The irate Tea Party knuckleheads believe that entitlements are socialism rather than part of the social contract, but even Ayn Rand ended up claiming her Medicare and Social Security benefits when she got old and sick.
In 1988, the Democrats nominated another governor from Massachusetts who had difficulty with the personality he projected: Michael Dukakis. He lost in a landslide. So it will be for Romney, and richly deserved. For four years, we have witnessed the Republican Party refuse to lift a finger to help the president, unless it’s the middle finger. In colonial days, the GOP’s obstruction might well be regarded as treason and its perpetrators pilloried. Now, according to conservative former Congressman Joe Scarborough, the Republicans have become “the party of stupid.” It would seem that if an eager student has to take the SAT test to get into college, an aspiring politician should have to pass a civics exam. This is the point where everything falls apart for them. The Senate Republicans’ rejection of the Veterans Jobs Act is only the latest example of a party so desperate to make this president look bad that they would refuse to care for the volunteer soldiers who fight our wars.
This will be a washout election where the voters rectify the terrible mistake of 2010 and oust the Tea Party extremists. Then we’ll salt the earth from whence they came so that we’ll see them no more. When the election is over, Romney can return to doing what he does best — making money off the misery of others and firing people who provide him services. Au revoir, Mitt.
Randy Haspel writes the Born-Again Hippies blog, where a version of this column first appeared.
Categories
Rolling and Getting Crunk
In 2002, while working as a caterer in Starkville, Mississippi, Marisa Baggett was caught off guard when one of her clients requested sushi.
“I had no clue what sushi was,” she says. “I wound up checking out a bunch of books from the library. It seemed so fascinating, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind.”
Her love affair with the Japanese culinary art blossomed from there. Soon she was working at Tsunami, then Dō, then teaching private in-home sushi classes. After an intensive three-month sushi program in Los Angeles, Baggett began her website, marisabaggett.com, to share her passion and expertise with the Mid-South. Not long after, she was approached by Tuttle Publishing to write her own sushi cookbook.
Sushi Secrets: Easy Recipes for the Home Cook will be available in October at Burke’s Book Store, the Booksellers at Laurelwood, Barnes & Noble in Collierville, and on Amazon. Readers, particularly beginners, will benefit from the introduction to sushi, including basic techniques and ingredients, as well as the stand-alone recipes. (Each page includes step-by-step instructions on how that type of roll is made.)
The book is divided into chapters dedicated to a different method of making sushi, including methods behind the classic inside-out roll, futomaki roll, nigiri, and sushi in a bowl.
“Basically, sushi in a bowl is rice in a bowl with different toppings,” Baggett says. “There are traditional methods of mixing things in with the rice, methods for decorating the toppings on top of the rice, things that go on top of the rice and then get torched.”
Baggett also covers how to substitute for ingredients you might not be able to find and how to purchase fish and shellfish, a talent she picked up in the landlocked Mississippi college town where she discovered the art.
“I use a very realistic method, especially in areas where you can’t really go to a seafood market and see the whole fish,” she says. “So all of my tips are specific for fish that has already been cut. That’s realistically what people are going to be buying.”
You can see Baggett in action, making sushi and signing books, at the Bookstock event at the main library on October 6th or at her first official booksigning at Burke’s Book Store on November 1st. She’ll also be hosting a kosher sushi event on November 29th at Temple Israel. Sushi Secrets is available for $18.95.
It’s hard to imagine Southern food without meat and dairy. No bacon, no cheese, no barbecue pork …
But that’s exactly what you’ll get in Cookin’ Crunk: Eatin’ Vegan in the Dirty South, the first cookbook from the Flyer‘s very own Bianca Phillips.
A reporter by day and vegan blogger by night, Phillips has 18 years of vegetarian living and eight years of veganism backing her up. She started her blog, Vegan Crunk, in 2007, and began working on recipes for her cookbook that same year.
“I started developing recipes so that I’d have something to post [on the blog] every day,” Phillips says. “After a while I had a stack of recipes and I was like, ‘You know what? I should write a cookbook.’ I didn’t have any kind of theme. I just had some recipes.”
Quickly, Phillips recognized a dearth of Southern vegan cookbooks. She culled her stack of recipes for Southern dishes, and then focused her efforts on veganizing some of her favorite Southern meals.
“Country-fried tempeh steak with soy milk gravy,” Phillips says. “That’s my favorite.”
In Cookin’ Crunk, you’ll also find twists on Southern classics like mac and cheese, tofu chicken biscuits, tofu deviled eggs, and hoecakes.
As for desserts, Phillips says the bulk of her recipe tweaking and testing went into the cakes and baked goods.
“You can come up with savory recipes easily because cooking is an art,” Phillips says. “But baking is a science, and everything has to be in the right proportions or it turns out crazy.”
Cookin’ Crunk is available on Amazon for $19.95, or you can pick up a copy at one of Phillips’ many booksigning events. She’ll be at Imagine Vegan Café with her book and some samples on September 29th from 3 to 6 p.m.; at the Booksellers at Laurelwood on October 2nd for a booksigning and samples at the Bistro; at Whole Foods on October 12th at 3:30 p.m. with more samples; and at the Easy Way on Cooper for a cooking demonstration on October 13th at 10:30 a.m.
Cookin’ Crunk; vegancrunk.blogspot.com, phillipsbianca@gmail.com
Killer Joe is the second collaboration between Oklahoma playwright Tracy Letts and veteran director William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection), following the 2006 horror sleeper Bug.
Somewhat less contained than that hotel-room-bound film and far more lurid, this Texas-set neo-noir concerns a trashy makeshift family — working-class dolt Thomas Haden Church, conniving girlfriend Gina Gershon, drug-dealer-in-trouble son Emile Hirsch, and baby sis Juno Temple — whose collective greed and desperation results in a scheme to kill Church’s ex-wife and Hirsch and Temple’s mother in order to collect the insurance money. To pull this off, they hire Killer Joe (Matthew McConaughey), a black-clad policeman who moonlights as a killer-for-hire.
Killer Joe seems devised, in large part, to turn McConaughey’s title character — a suffer-no-fools psychopath whose usual “code” is set aside when he takes an unhealthy interest in Temple’s ostensible family innocent, whom he keeps as collateral in lieu of advance payment for the job — into an iconic villain, on the order of Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth (Blue Velvet) or some of the frightening figures played by Robert Mitchum (in Cape Fear and The Night of the Hunter, particularly). McConaughey — increasingly an on-screen presence who’s difficult to harness, for good or ill — is up to the challenge. He’s the most compelling aspect of a nasty little film that, despite being pretty well-plotted, ultimately lacks much value beyond the prurient.
Perhaps surprisingly, Killer Joe‘s misanthropic, mischievous shocks are more reminiscent of horror filmmaker Rob Zombie’s early work (particularly The Devil’s Rejects) than any noir antecedents. And the film’s final, now infamous conflagration — the scene that earns the NC17 rating that the filmmakers apparently sought to get rather than avoid — is unpleasant but darkly funny as the solution to a self-imposed problem: How do you construct what is essentially a hardcore pornographic scene without technically crossing that threshold?
Killer Joe
Opening Friday, September 28th
Studio on the Square
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Time and Time Again
About midway through the new time-travel thriller Looper, the hitman Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) first speaks to a 30-year-older version of himself, credited as “Old Joe” (Bruce Willis). And as the two versions of the same man sit together and try to make sense of what’s happening, Old Joe speaks for us all: “I don’t want to talk about time-travel shit. If we get started talking about that, we’re going to be here all day, doing diagrams with straws.”
This little meta moment is indicative of a film that gets the time-travel theme just right: playing the story just below the surface, deep enough to heighten the viewer’s perceptions and get his or her mind working, but not so deep that the entire scenario wobbles, as these kinds of films inevitably do under close inspection.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that Looper, the third film from writer/director Rian Johnson (Brick, The Brothers Bloom), is the best movie of the year so far. But it’s probably the most perfect movie of the year — the one that most fully accomplishes what it’s trying to do. There are no reservations here. No wrong turns or underperforming scenes. Looper hooks you in from its opening images and holds you through the last of its 118 minutes.
Gordon-Levitt, whose face has been altered by make-up to more closely resemble Willis, is a “looper” — an underworld assassin in the year 2044. In the film’s present, time travel has not been invented yet. But it’s coming soon, and a criminal syndicate in the post-time-travel future has sent an associate, Abe (Jeff Daniels), on a one-way ticket back to 2044 to run an assassin program. In this future, tracking devices have made it difficult to dispose of bodies, so when criminals need to get rid of someone, they kidnap and then transport their targets back in time, where they’re immediately shot by the loopers. The “loop is closed,” eventually, when the loopers are made to kill their future selves, a job for which they are handsomely rewarded and retired, freed to live out their remaining days until that future killing is repeated.
Joe — young Joe, that is — is willing to close his loop, but Old Joe has a different plan in mind, which puts the two iterations into a conflict that quickly expands to include other elements of the future world, which somehow involve Emily Blunt as a gun-toting single mom at a Kansas farmhouse. (How she introduces herself: “I have shot and buried three vagrants this week.”)
I won’t reveal any more of the story, because much of the pleasure in Looper is in experiencing how these plot mechanics play out without pulling the film too deeply into the morass of time-travel paradox.
I do wonder how well Looper will play on repeated viewings, once its secrets have been revealed. But I suspect it will hold up well. The film’s conception of America, circa 2044, is provocative without being too fussy or calling too much attention to itself. Loopers are paid in silver and gold — which arrives strapped to their targets and which they trade in for Chinese currency. Recreational drugs are administered via eye-droppers. The gap between rich and poor has grown, with the former armed, the latter legion, and law enforcement nowhere to be seen.
There’s a crucial middle passage of alternate futures — in which Gordon-Levitt morphs into Willis — that’s stylish and affecting and takes some teasing over but which locks into place. Richard and Linda Thompson’s gorgeous, yearning folk-rock anthem “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight” — which would be 70 years old by 2044 — is deployed in the best and most surprising use of pop music in any recent movie I can remember.
These are marks of a movie that completely nails its high-concept premise but isn’t satisfied with just that. Probably the best time you can have at the movies right now.
Looper
Opening Friday, September 28th
Multiple locations