Month: September 2013

Categories
Music Music Features

Blonde on Blonde

Like most people who cared about such things back in 1998, I thought Lucinda Williams made a career album with Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, that painstaking document of and testament to Southern identity. Fifteen more years down the road, it’s unclear how conventional wisdom has settled on the matter, but I’ve rethought my position, now prizing even more Williams’ 10-years-earlier eponymous breakthrough, Lucinda Williams. Where Car Wheels now feels like something to admire — scratch that, something to wonder over — Lucinda Williams has coiled its way around my heart.

It’s a less perfect record, and maybe that’s partly why it cuts deeper. Car Wheels may peak at the very beginning, but every song is of a piece. Lucinda Williams is comparatively uneven. Half the songs are brilliant; the rest offer companionable support. The breathless, yearning opener — “I Just Wanted To See You So Bad” — rushes by in 21 lines, nine of them a repetition of the title refrain. “Changed the Locks” is a love-gone-wrong song that builds steadily toward the cosmic, managing to be horrified and comic all at once. “The Night’s Too Long,” a fictional story of a small-town girl moved to the city, and “Crescent City,” an autobiographical sibling song, are sketches so precise you can feel the cool moisture coming off the beer bottles in the bars where one song ends and another begins. And then there are “Passionate Kisses” and “Side of the Road” — twin titans about the imperatives and limits of romantic love that are at once visionary and also grounded in the everyday. Throughout, Williams’ breathy, marble-mouthed, tinglingly evocative vocals — her signature, if anything is — are just a little more naked and open than they’d ever be again.

The simpler secondary songs — the straight country “Price To Pay,” the alt-country Velvet Underground “Like a Rose,” the lonely lament “Am I Too Blue” — give the album some room to breathe, and they grow more lovely all the time. The closing Howlin’ Wolf cover? A turf grab. Not just a declaration of artistic support but one of artistic equality. Williams will commemorate the 25th anniversary of the album by playing it start-to-finish to open her show this week at Minglewood Hall.

Though she’s another blonde, female, indie-but-not-really-alt country/folk singer-songwriter with a colorful (Southern) family background, Elizabeth Cook is not quite an artist of Williams’ magnitude. But at her best she can fool you into thinking she is. “Mama’s Funeral” is an autobiographical family song that matches Williams at her own game. “Heroin Addict Sister” is one no one could quite match. Both of those are from Cook’s most recent and best album, 2010’s Welder. And while Cook’s career album (so far) isn’t as classic as either of Williams’, it’s also less distant in the rearview mirror.

She’s funnier, on record and — oh boy — in person, where she topped headliner Todd Snider at last year’s What the Folk Fest at the Levitt Shell and where she’s got several memorable Late Show with David Letterman interviews waiting on YouTube for your discovery. And that makes her more relatable. Cook is a mortal. She’s one of us.

Sometimes she’s smarter too, in an everyday way — humor and brains tend to go together, after all. In Cook’s musical world, an El Camino isn’t a signifier of retro cool (see Williams’ “Lake Charles”) but a signal that, hey, this dude hitting on you at the bar might be a little creepy. And she doesn’t romanticize her unreliable musician boyfriend as a “Drunken Angel” but instead — on “Rock n Roll Man” — punctures his self-conscious cool.

Cook, who hosts an “outlaw country” show on satellite radio, is a cult artist — self-penned gems like “All the Time” and “Girlfriend Tonight” are ace Nashville readymades even if Nashville doesn’t know it — but one whose cult is growing, as witnessed by her Levitt Shell return this week, this time with a night all to herself.

Lucinda Williams

25th Anniversary Show

Minglewood Hall

Tuesday, September 10th

7 p.m., $30 in advance,

$35 at the door

Elizabeth Cook

The Levitt Shell

Thursday, September 5th

7:30 p.m., free

Categories
Music Music Features

Memphis Rocks (for Love)

After raising more than $120,000 for the Church Health Center over the past six years, the signature Rock for Love series of benefit concerts will add to the tally this weekend with its seventh installment. Since 1987, the Church Health Center has helped provide health care to uninsured working Memphians. Since many who have benefited from the center have been musicians, Rock for Love has emerged as a way for the local community to give back.

It’s also grown into one of the best annual showcases for contemporary Memphis music, this year highlighting 17 local bands and solo acts from a wide range of genres and scenes, who will play across three venues and three days. After tapping into Stax last year for Saturday night headliner Booker T, Rock for Love does so again, in a manner of speaking, with Soulsville “Chief Creative Officer” and Grammy-winning saxophonist Kirk Whalum headlining the free Saturday night show at the Levitt Shell.

In addition to the series of concerts, Rock for Love is conducting an online auction and will be selling a 20-song compilation CD featuring artists from this year’s series and some who have played the event in past years. Among the highlights: The slow-burn anthem “Old Man,” from rising country-rockers Dead Soldiers; the comic “Yardsale Weirdo,” from singer-songwriter Mark Edgar Stuart; the ghostly rockabilly groove of “It’s Only a Lonely Night,” from John Paul Keith; and “Deez,” a rare new track from Memphis indie-rock institution Snowglobe.

A day-by-day snapshot

Thursday, September 5th: An opening “VIP BBQ” at Ardent Studios will feature Latin singer Marcela Pinilla setting the stage for vintage soul band the Bo-Keys, who will be joined by singers John Gary Williams (of the Stax vocal group the Mad Lads) and Percy Wiggins. The event starts at 6 p.m. Tickets are $30 for individuals, $55 for couples, or $500 for a table.

Friday, September 6th: With K97’s Devin Steel keeping the party moving, the lineup at Young Avenue Deli will jump from the vintage roots of the Side Street Steppers (8:30 p.m.) to the Southern-flavored rock of Reemus Bodeemus (9:30 p.m.) to the soul/funk party of Hope Clayburn’s Soul Scrimmage (10:30 p.m.) to genre-flouting trio Kaleidophonix (11:30 p.m.). Admission is $10. Show starts at 8 p.m.

Saturday, September 7th: Three different Rock for Love concert slates provide live music from noon to late night on the concluding day of the festival.

A free day show at the Levitt Shell starts with singer-songwriters Elizabeth Wise (noon) and Chad Nixon (1:15 p.m.) and continues with promising young indie band the Star Killers (2:15 p.m.) and fun-loving Elvis tribute band Big E & the Mississippi Boys (3:15 p.m.).

Free music continues at the Shell that night, with the centerpiece Rock for Love concert. It’s already September, and I still haven’t heard a local album I like as much as Mark Edgar Stuart’s debut, Blues for Lou. Stuart will open the show, alongside frequent collaborator Kait Lawson, at 6 p.m. He’ll be followed by the “future blues” of Beale Street stalwart and The Voice contestant Patrick Dodd (7 p.m.) and then by veteran Memphis rocker John Kilzer (8 p.m.), culminating in Kirk Whalum’s headlining appearance at 9 p.m.

Rock for Love wraps up with an after-party back at Young Avenue Deli, where Devin Steel will again be on the turntables and a terrific three-band bill will feature the Mighty Souls Brass Band at 10 p.m., perhaps the city’s best new band to emerge this year, country-rockers Dead Soldiers at 10:45 p.m., and then roots-pop trio the Memphis Dawls at 11:30 p.m.

Rock for Love 7

Various locations

Thursday, September 5th-Saturday, September 7th

rockforlove.org

Categories
Music Music Features

Steely Dan at Mud Island Amphitheatre

CREDIT: Danny Clinch

After launching their 1972 debut Can’t Buy a Thrill with the beautiful, bitter radio-rock classic “Reeling in the Years,” Steely Dan became AOR staples throughout the decade. Yet musical partners Walter Becker and Donald Fagen never really seemed that fond of rock. Rather, Becker and Fagen assembled their sui generis sound from every element tangential to rock-and-roll — jazz, traditional pop, blues, and R&B. Steely Dan’s songs were tricky, laden with irony and delivered by untrustworthy narrators, qualities hard to hear through a sonic aesthetic that could sound like cocktail hour for upscale fortysomethings. But the very source of Steely Dan’s charm is in the tension, such as it is, between the band’s low-life lyrics and high-toned jazz-rock soundscapes. Those plush, meticulous backing tracks are perhaps best heard as the idealized interior soundtrack of the typical Steely Dan protagonist — invariably a well-educated and well-off white guy of questionable moral character for whom things aren’t quite working out. Fagen has even sort of endorsed this reading by confessing that he and Becker think of their albums as comedy records to some degree. Reuniting more than a decade ago as a touring and occasional recording unit, Steely Dan has aged well. This isn’t surprising: The band’s music has always sounded “old,” so, in a way, Becker and Fagen may just be catching up with their own sound. Steely Dan plays the Mud Island Amphitheatre on Friday, September 6th. Showtime is 8 p.m. — Chris Herrington

Categories
Book Features Books

She Had a Dream

The March on Washington was 50 years ago — August 28, 2013, to be exact. August 22, 2013, to be exact, was the birthday of Anne Whalen Shafer — her 90th.

What do these two dates have in common? One was a national call for racial equality. Redressing racial wrongs was Shafer’s life work, and she was at the right place and time: Memphis in the troubled 1950s, turbulent ’60s, and beyond. She describes those decades of unrest in her self-published memoir, Memphis Instruments of Peace: How Volunteers and Visionaries Challenged Racism, Reactionary Politicians and the Catholic Hierarchy, edited by Sheila Patrick.

That title and subtitle cover a lot of ground: the example set by St. Francis (and his prayer to be made “an instrument” of God’s peace); Shafer’s volunteer efforts to improve postwar race relations in Memphis in the face of opposing city leaders and citizens; and her run-ins with a tradition-bound Catholic clergy that questioned not only Shafer’s outspokenness but the visionary quality of her deeply ingrained — and activist — faith.

Who, briefly, is Anne Whalen Shafer? A pro-labor reformer who has been labeled a liberal, a socialist, and a communist. A champion of women’s rights and onetime president of the local branch of the League of Women Voters. A vigorous supporter of progressive, mid-century figures such as mayoral candidate Edmund Orgill, attorney and civil rights advocate Lucius Burch, and newspaper editor Edward Meeman. A former chairwoman of the Memphis City Beautiful Commission. A key player in the establishment of Martyrs Park and the creation of downtown’s Bluff Walk. And last, not least, a tireless worker for interracial and interfaith understanding. Her core religious beliefs wouldn’t have had it any other way, when many in the local, all-male church hierarchy often wished she’d just go away — their attitude toward Shafer, as she describes it: tolerance spilling over into, at times, outright dismissal.

Is it any wonder, then, that Shafer eventually adopted the faith of her Presbyterian husband, Robert? But it’s no wonder that Shafer took religious belief seriously. Her memoir covers five occasions when, Shafer writes, God intervened directly in her life. Mystical intervention? To the believer, so be it.

“Who am I to speak my mind?” Shafer asks in the closing pages of her memoir. She’d already, in high school, had a priest discount her idea of becoming a nun. (Vocations were reserved at the time for students who were “top of the class.”) One woman had once described her as the “daughter of a labor man, not college material.” And in March 1968, when Shafer, along with several other women, met with Mayor Henry Loeb to ask that he reconsider the plight of the city’s striking sanitation workers, Loeb reacted by treating those women cordially but as troublemakers.

Often disappointed but never undeterred, Anne Whalen Shafer has persevered and can now conclude in Instruments of Peace: “I know what happened, what I saw, and heard. … I tried to do my best.” And indeed, she did. “Good citizenship,” she goes on to write, was her “competency.” And indeed, it was.

This past February saw the publication of Cary Holladay’s very fine Virginia-set, cross-generational, linked short-story collection Horse People.

This month, Holladay is back — and back in Virginia — with The Deer in the Mirror (The Ohio State University Press): nine stories in all (two of them Glimmer Train award winners). And if Anne Whalen Shafer covers decades in her memoir, Holladay bridges centuries — from the early 18th to the present day. It’s an expansive time frame that allows the author, who teaches at the University of Memphis, to display her abiding interest in the natural world and the changes wrought by frontiersmen and farmers, tradesmen and armies.

Central to Holladay’s concerns, though, is the human element at the heart of these stories. Or could the encroachment of big-box stores and mass transit threaten even the ways of the human heart? The answer in the short story “Hitching Post”: no way.

Cary Holladay will be reading from and signing The Deer in the Mirror at Burke’s Book Store on Thursday, September 5th, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Buffalo Pie

“Sometimes it was mild, and sometimes it would be so hot I would go through a stack of napkins just wiping the sweat off my face,” says Amy Stewart-Banbury, reminiscing about the Hi-Tone’s famous hot-wing pizza.

While the live-music venue reopened earlier this summer at a new location, the pizza as of now remains a memory. There is nothing quite the same as the Hi-Tone’s “flaming” hot-wing pizza, but several restaurants have their own variations on the Buffalo chicken pizza.

In June, the Memphis Pizza Café (MPC) created a new Buffalo chicken pizza as the “pizza of the month.” It was so popular they added it to the permanent menu at every location. The pizza has an olive oil base and is topped with mozzarella, cheddar, chicken, Frank’s hot sauce, and ranch dressing.

MPC’s version definitely does not go easy on the Frank’s. The artistic drizzle of ranch dressing may take a bite out of the heat, but the heavy-handedness with the Frank’s definitely hits the spot and satisfies the strongest of Buffalo sauce cravings. The thin, famously crispy MPC crust is the perfect base and makes it (too) easy to polish off a whole pizza without blinking.

Memphis Pizza Café, multiple locations, memphispizzacafe.com

Camy’s also has a Buffalo chicken pizza available for dine-in or delivery. The Buffalo sauce is more sweet than hot, and the standout on this pizza is the red onion scattered in rings across the top. It’s tasty, but for a more “Buffalo” flavor, you can doctor it up with your own hot sauce. This is perfectly acceptable considering someone will bring the pizza to your door from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. (midnight on weekends).

Camy’s, 3 S. Barksdale (725-1667), camys.com

The fanciest Buffalo chicken pizza in town is at High Point Pizza and is aptly called the Buffalo Chicken Supreme. Its base is a regular cheese pizza with red sauce. On top is cubed chicken breast, crumbled Gorgonzola cheese, and several swirls of a housemade Sriracha ranch dressing.

The pizza has a nice heat from the Sriracha, and the red sauce is an added bonus. The Gorgonzola definitely elevates it above an average Buffalo chicken pizza. (High Point Pizza is also doing some fun specials like a greens-and-pork pizza.) Oh, and, Celiacs, rejoice: High Point offers a gluten-free crust as well.

High Point Pizza, 477 A High Point Terrace (452-3339),

facebook.com/HighPointPizza

For those not opposed to hitting the road, Buon Cibo in Hernando has a mighty fine Buffalo chicken pizza they call the Itta Bena. (Maybe B.B. King is a Buffalo chicken fan?) Buon Cibo only serves pizzas in one size — 10 inches — so it’s 100 percent socially acceptable to refuse to share. Buon Cibo’s crust is stellar. It has the perfect chew and fold, much like a perfect New York slice.

The Itta Bena starts with a cheese pizza, like at High Point, and then tops it with cubed chicken that has been tossed in Buffalo sauce and has just the tiniest bits of celery sprinkled across. The menu listing says it also includes blue cheese, but, if this is true, it is incredibly subtle. Regardless, it’s a damn fine pizza.

Buon Cibo, 2631 McIngvale, Hernando, MS (662 469-9481), buonciborestaurant.com

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Not-Bad Lands

I want to like Ain’t Them Bodies Saints a lot more than I do. Arriving at the tail end of summer blockbuster season, David Lowery’s somber, serious new feature contains much that is good. Its look is distinct. Its cast packs plenty of indie-film star power. Its formal strategies and its borrowings from other movies are clever and unusual. In short, it’s a helluva calling card. But Lowery simply isn’t there yet. He might not be great now, but he should be real soon.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints sings the ballad of Ruth (Rooney Mara) and Bob (Casey Affleck), a couple of kids who are on the verge of starting a family when Bob is sent to jail after a bank robbery gone bad. While in prison, Bob vows to reunite with his beloved and live the American dream together. But in his absence, Wheeler (Ben Foster), a lawman shot during the standoff that ended with Bob’s arrest, takes an interest in Ruth’s well-being that appears more than neighborly.

With a couple of notable exceptions, Lowery’s film follows the “lovers on the run” template used by filmmakers like Steven Spielberg (The Sugarland Express) and Terrence Malick (Badlands) early in their careers. Because this template offers simplicity, precision, and flexibility, Lowery has plenty of chances to show off his formal skill. He’s especially good at elliptical editing: the birth and growth of Ruth and Bob’s daughter is shown in three or four cuts that take no more than 30 seconds. The bank robbery isn’t shown at all.

The film’s crepuscular glow is more distinctive still. Whether sunlight, lamplight, or headlight, most of the illumination in any given scene conceals as much as it reveals. This strategy serves to taint the purity of the characters’ intentions; Bob may be a romantic, but he often has to lurk in the shadows like a fugitive. Ruth is frequently shot in profile, her long, black hair concealing her face like a long, black veil.

The dialogue in the film often reaches for a kind of colloquial poetry. Most of the time, though, it works too hard to enlarge the smallness of relationship platitudes. For every scene when Affleck puts over a line like “They don’t know things the way they think they know, ” there are two scenes where he wrestles in his clenched-teeth way with lines from the “I knew yew before yew was even born” school of romantic infatuation.

Unlike Affleck, Ben Foster doesn’t overemphasize the local color of his character. His performance, particularly those scenes that follow his gentle, stumbling, fumbling courtship of Ruth (She: “I’m so goddamned tired.” He: “Then rest.” She: “While you lay with me while I do?”), are the film’s highlights. By emphasizing Wheeler’s sensitivity as a key part of his masculinity, Foster etches one of the year’s most delicate performances.

Imagery, actors, some strangely unstuck-in-time music: everything is there. Lowery’s developing a gentle yet firm voice. But, right now, that voice can make you drowsy.

(Lowery’s last feature, 2009’s St. Nick, screened at Indie Memphis. He was also on the crew of Open Five, a feature from Memphis actor/filmmaker Kentucker Audley, who has a small role in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.)

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints

Opening Friday, September 6th

Malco’s Forest Hill Cinema

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Opening-night highlights of this year’s Outflix Film Festival.

The Outflix International LGBTQ Film Festival celebrates its 16th season with a week-long run at Malco’s Ridgeway Cinema Grill theater beginning on Friday, September 6th, and with an opening night that includes strong documentary and feature titles.

Directed by veteran television producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, Bridegroom (7 p.m.) is a documentary that tells an intensely personal story that illuminates larger issues in gay life. It’s the story of two young men from the Midwest — Shane Bitney Crone and Tom Bridegroom — who find each other and build a life together in Los Angeles before Bridegroom dies in random accident. Told via Crone’s own recollections and those of his family and friends, along with video diary entries from Crone started to document his journey from Montana to California, the story of the two young gay men coming of age in small-town, middle-American environments is sharp, and the story of their budding romance as adults is feature-worthy on its own. When Bridegroom suffers his tragic accident and Crone — who had lived with Bridegroom for six years — is first barred from his hospital room and then from his funeral, the films puts a very personal face on issues of legal protection and marriage equality. Bridegroom was an audience award winner at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Crone will appear at the Memphis screening and conduct a question-and-answer session.

An entertaining high-school comedy in the knowing, satirical vein of Mean Girls or Easy A, G.B.F. (9 p.m.) isn’t quite as sharp as those mainstream antecedents, but it could easily reward audience attention beyond the festival circuit. The film focuses on the plight of two barely closeted teen boys at a moment and in a place where homosexuality is morphing from a subject of scorn to trendy fascination. That’s an improvement, obviously, but the film’s gentle point is that it’s still dehumanizing.

G.B.F. — “gay best friend” — finds ample comedy in this subject. One female student’s attempt to form a gay-straight alliance at the school is stalled by her inability to find a gay student, leading her to grouse, “My future GBF is just dying to come out of the closet and tell me how fierce I am.”

When Tanner (Michael J. Willet) is finally outed, he becomes a status symbol the school’s trio of rival alpha girls compete over and a potential solution to many looming problems — “We’re doing The Wiz and we’re going to need as many minorities as we can get,” one student says, imploring Tanner to try out. He struggles as much to live up to his classmates’ stereotypes (“Thank you. That’s just the kind of bitchy, gay insight I’m looking for!”) as he once did to cloak his sexuality.

The film’s supporting cast is dotted with familiar faces (Natasha Lyonne, Rebecca Gayheart, Harry Potter’s Evanna Lynch), but the casting never feels like a stunt. Particularly good is Megan Mullaly as an understanding-to-a-fault mother who subjects her son to the excruciating bonding of a mother-son Brokeback Mountain movie night.

For more on this year’s Outflix slate, see “Sing All Kinds” at memphisflyer.com/blogs/singallkinds.

Outlfix Film Festival

Ridgeway Cinema Grill

Friday, September 6th – Thursday, September 12th

$10 for individual screenings; $90 for a full festival pass. For more info, see outflixfestival.org.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

CREDIT: Richie Lomba | Dreamstime.com

Many people could learn a lot from the woman who works in the entrance and exit booth at Parking Can Be Fun on Union Avenue next door to the Cotton Exchange Building. I am embarrassed that I don’t know her name, but I see her and hand her cash about once every two weeks when I park there to eat lunch downtown.

Although I’m not a regular, she always remembers me and always has a huge smile and we talk briefly about the weather and tell each other to have a wonderful day. I love going to see her and sometimes park there when it would be more convenient to park elsewhere and she just makes me feel like a million bucks. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be in that little booth all day long but she gets by just fine with her Kindle and her spirit.

Why is it that all people can’t be that nice? I’ve been trying and trying to figure out what makes some people so mean, and for the life of me I can’t come up with a good answer.

How is it that someone could reach a point in his life where he feels it necessary to spray innocent children with nerve gas and kill them, as Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has recently done? What goes through the mind of someone like that? Do you just wake up one day and think, Oh, why not gas some children today?

I know it’s more complicated than that but I really do wonder what could possibly make someone think doing that is okay. These are not rhetorical questions. I genuinely want answers. Same with serial killers, violent gang members, racists, and the three teens in Oklahoma who shot and killed that Australian baseball player not long ago because, as one of them said, they were “bored.” They were “bored” so they decided to commit a murder? My feeble mind simply can’t comprehend that. And when they go to prison and get no kind of rehabilitation because there is none in the American prison system, they will probably become even meaner and kill more people in jail. It makes me wonder what kind of a bizarre experiment Earth is. I’m not a religious person but it does make me wonder if there really is a Satan who invades some people’s psyche.

I think one of the things that is making me wonder about all these unanswerable questions is the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington. I’m thinking about what it must have been like to be captured, separated from family, crammed into a ship with life-threatening conditions, delivered to the United States, stripped naked in front of a crowd of people, and sold to the highest bidder, who had every legal right to kill you if you talked back to him or, God forbid, learned to read. What kind of minds did those slave owners have? What was going through their minds when they were buying people to work and torture? Was it greed? Was it hatred? Was it ignorance? And don’t tell me that’s just the way it was back then and they didn’t know better. I don’t buy that nonsense for a second.

I also find it odd that despite the fact several Republicans were invited to speak in Washington, D.C., during the anniversary ceremony, NONE accepted the invitation. (Despite all of the things he has done with which I disagree, I bet George W. Bush would have been there if not for his recent heart surgery.) Do they hate President Obama so much that not one of them could be there to speak on the anniversary of one of the most important speeches in American history? House majority leader Eric Cantor was invited but declined because he was busy in North Dakota and Ohio looking at energy sites.

How can someone be too busy to speak at a ceremony commemorating King’s “I Have a Dream” speech? You can’t be a little flexible for something like that? You can’t take a break, go make a short speech alongside a sitting American president, two former presidents, and some of the most notable civil rights leaders alive today? And you want to change the Republican Party’s image to get more African American votes? Not such a great strategy to achieve that goal if you ask me. On the flipside of the coin, the organizers of the event didn’t invite Tim Scott — the only African-American serving in the Senate — to participate, which also seems a little strange.

I’ve also been wondering if America will ever have someone like Dr. King again. We still have horrific poverty, which he fought against like a lion. He ultimately died while trying to help Memphis sanitation workers get a decent wage and better working conditions. And now, fast-food restaurant workers who work full-time and still live below the poverty level are striking to get a living wage and the right to unionize, some of them even carrying the famous “I AM A MAN” signs from the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike in 1968.

Will there ever be another person in this country who will be willing to do the kind of work Dr. King did to try to remedy these kinds of situations? Or is that something from a past era that’s just gone. I think Newark mayor and Senate hopeful Cory Booker has it in him and maybe he will be the next equal rights icon. Who knows? All I know is that I am leaving now to go see the woman at Parking Can Be Fun. She is my hero.

Categories
News

The AC is On

John Branston tagged along with Mayor AC Wharton for a day — a very long day — in the life of the Memphis mayor.

Categories
News

Stay Out of Syria

Bruce VanWyngarden says about Syria involvement: We’ve seen this slow dance to Hades before.