Month: February 2015

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News The Fly-By

Leadership Memphis Acquires Volunteer Mid-South

More than 316,000 Memphians volunteered throughout the community in 2013, according to the Corporation for National and Community Service. And now, following a merger, the leading local organization in connecting volunteers with nonprofits is hoping to bolster those numbers by making volunteerism even easier.

Leadership Memphis announced earlier this month that it acquired Volunteer Mid-South, an organization that has connected people to volunteer opportunities over the past 40 years.

The acquisition has provided the nonprofit with a new name: Volunteer Memphis. And a facelift is soon to follow.

Leadership Memphis CEO David Williams said the acquisition would bring forth an expansion of Volunteer Mid-South’s Corporate Volunteer Council (CVC), a group of business and corporate representatives who promote community volunteerism. The new venture will also provide specialized training for volunteer management and connect people, via the internet, to volunteer opportunities best suitable for their interests.

“I think the impact [of acquiring Volunteer Mid-South is] going to be profound in terms of advocacy and awareness for volunteers,” Williams said. “We hope to create an easier way for people to connect and engage with their community through volunteerism, but also through volunteer leadership. Ask any nonprofit that relies on volunteers to help fulfill its mission, and they would be able to say how much those volunteers mean to them and the difference that they make in the community.”

Leadership Memphis is presently meeting with stakeholders, CVC members, and nonprofits to establish stronger methods to increase recruitment of organizations that rely heavily on volunteers for sustainability.

Leadership Memphis plans to assign a full-time director to Volunteer Memphis by March. Additional staff will be provided sometime thereafter.

By acquiring Volunteer Mid-South, Leadership Memphis has now become the local affiliate for Points of Light. The international volunteer movement serves as a hub to connect people globally to opportunities offered by nonprofits within their communities. Former U.S. President George H. W. Bush established Points of Light in 1990.

At the Mid-South Food Bank, volunteers help stock shelves in the organization’s Agency Mart, fill backpacks with meals for children, prepare and serve meals in the Kids Café, and assist with administrative duties.

Last year alone, around 11,000 people contributed approximately 40,000 hours of services to the Food Bank.

“Our volunteers are vital to what we do,” said Paula Rushing, manager of volunteer services at the Food Bank. “We have a very limited staff. We could not do this work without our volunteers.”

The Food Bank provides those impacted by food insecurity with nourishing meals, education, and advocacy. Each week, a reported 21,000 people rely on the nonprofit.

Like the Food Bank, the Humane Society of Memphis & Shelby County receives assistance from volunteers. Locals help with building maintenance, walking dogs, cat socialization, administrative work, and arranging and orchestrating fund-raising events.

“We really couldn’t do everything without the help of our volunteers,” said Linda Larrabee, volunteer manager at the Humane Society. “We probably have 250 volunteers at any given time. We run strictly on donations from the community. We’re limited in our staff. They help us get our animals adopted, keep our building cleaned, and provide foster homes to animals. They really are invaluable to us.”

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News The Fly-By

Memphis United Wants Better Board to Police the Police

CREDIT: Saniphoto | Dreamstime.com

The Civilian Law Enforcement Review Board (CLERB), the independent board that investigates complaints about police officers, was reinstated last June after years of being inactive. But an audit of the board by the Memphis United Coalition found that the board hasn’t reviewed a single case since then.

Part of the reason for the inactivity of the board is its lack of power, according to CLERB Chairman Rev. Ralph White. Now Memphis United has drawn up a list of demands for how CLERB should be operated and what sort of power it should have.

The group addressed those demands in the public comment period of last week’s Memphis City Council meeting, and they plan to work with council members soon to draft a full ordinance increasing CLERB’s power.

“An audit revealed several systemic flaws that limited the ability of the board to function efficiently,” said Paul Garner of Memphis United. “That includes CLERB not having the power to subpoena records or the power to require cooperation of witnesses from the Memphis Police Department.”

Saniphoto | Dreamstime.com

When a civilian has a complaint about excessive use of force by a police officer, illegal search, police harassment, poor customer service by police, property damage by police, or police following incorrect procedures, they’re supposed to first file a complaint with the Memphis Police Department’s (MPD) Internal Affairs Bureau (IAB). If they’re unhappy with the bureau’s findings, they can then appeal their complaint to CLERB.

Memphis United is suggesting that the Memphis City Council give CLERB subpoena power to gain access to police witnesses and documents, the ability to make policy recommendations to the MPD, the ability to investigate complaints concurrently with the IAB, and enough funding to conduct independent investigations into complaints of police misconduct.

“We had a private investigator at one time, and they cut that from the budget,” said White, who served on the last incarnation of the board as well.

CLERB was established in 1994 after 68-year-old Jesse Bogand was shot by police in Orange Mound. At the time, the board was intended to investigate, hear cases, and recommend action on findings of police misconduct. But since police officers were not required to cooperate and because the board didn’t have the power to subpoena documents, CLERB lacked teeth.

The board was eventually dismantled, but it was reinstated in 2014 after a few volunteers at the Manna House, a gathering place for the city’s homeless, attempted to appeal a complaint to CLERB, only to find the board had been inactive for years. The Memphis City Council voted to appoint new members to the board in June 2014, and they also voted to allow Memphis United to host public forums to gain input on how to improve the board.

White said the new board hasn’t heard cases yet because they simply don’t have much power. They’re hoping the council adopts the suggestions of Memphis United.

“We want to make sure we put some of those suggestions in place before we start hearing cases,” White said. “Right now, we simply don’t have enough power on the board to get police officers to come to hearings. We do need a bit more power and authority.”

White said, although the board wants more power, they also want the MPD to know that they’re not in place to oppose the lawful work of the department.

“We want to make sure they understand that we’re not working against them,” White said. “We just want to make sure we have a functional police department that is working for the betterment of the people.”

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News The Fly-By

Wind Energy Coming to West Tennessee

CREDIT: Clean Line Energy

Wind energy may soon be blowing into West Tennessee thanks to a massive wind farm project based out of Oklahoma. The project, however, is still working its way through the approval process.

The Tennessee portion of the larger Plains and Eastern Clean Line wind energy project is located north of Millington, just inside the Shelby County limits. The project will span more than 700 miles to include Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Tennessee, aiming to deliver 3,500 megawatts of wind energy to more than a million households.

The project, spearheaded by Clean Line Energy, is currently undergoing a federal environmental impact statement review by the U.S. Department of Energy. A public meeting was held earlier this month to gather comments, but the public has until March 19th to provide comments at www.plainsandeasterneis.com.

The environmental impact statement identifies the proposed route for the transmission line. Since the route will cut through individual property owners’ land, Clean Line Energy is seeking comment on the route. In most areas, the final easement of the transmission line will be between 150 to 200 feet wide.

Clean Line Energy

This map shows how wind energy from Oklahoma will be distributed to homes in Arkansas, Tennessee, and beyond.

Because of the right-of-way needs for the project, the Plains and Eastern Clean Line has stirred up some opposition from landowners, especially in Arkansas. But Max Schilstone, the director of business development for Clean Line Energy Partners, touted wind energy’s affordable cost and eco-friendliness.

“The actual cost of generating wind energy has dropped dramatically,” Schilstone said. “As utilities such as [the Tennessee Valley Authority] look to broaden their assets and are seeking other ways they can provide affordable energy to their customers, they look at all resources. Wind energy is one of those components that has now become very affordable and one that has garnered a lot of attention. It’s clean [and] it doesn’t have emissions.”

Scott Banbury, the conservation programs coordinator for the Sierra Club’s Tennessee chapter, said the 4,000 megawatts of power that is proposed to be generated by the wind energy project could be the answer the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is looking for as the authority updates its Integrated Resource Plan, which addresses energy needs over the next 10 to 15 years. The TVA provides the power that MLGW sells to Memphis residents. The wind energy will be going through the TVA grid and can be sold by the TVA.

“We believe [the TVA’s] plan needs to be met by renewable energy sources,” Banbury said. “The Sierra Club is encouraging [TVA] to make commitments to buy that power, rather than wheeling it through to other utilities.”

“The reason Western Tennessee was chosen is because TVA has one of their largest connection points that can accommodate the size of the project we’re developing,” Schilstone said. “The project is a large infrastructure opportunity, even though it is a small footprint of a right-of-way.”

The project will also offer hundreds of jobs to Memphis-area residents, according to Schilstone.

“One of the big aspects of the project is to ensure we drive as much job opportunity to the local community as much as we can,” he said.

If everything goes according to plan, construction to build the wind structures can begin as early as 2016. Delivery of wind power could begin by 2018.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Maps To The Stars

Among a certain kind of cinephile, director David Cronenberg is a legend. He cut his teeth in the grindhouse 1970s, creating a string of low-budget horror films that revolved around truly disturbing themes: the melding of flesh and machine; the medical terror of your body betraying you; and the existential horror of being a ghost driving a skeleton covered in meat. Classic-era Cronenberg began with 1979’s The Brood, a psychedelic horror show in which children turn murderously against each other and their parents. The 1980s for Cronenberg were particularly fruitful, with the head-exploding telepath horror Scanners; the sick TV parody Videodrome; the Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone; and the definitive example of the body horror genre, his 1986 remake of The Fly. In the 1990s, he made a movie out of the unfilmable William S. Burroughs drug memoir Naked Lunch and the similarly challenging J. G. Ballard adaptation Crash. In the 21st century, he has collaborated with Viggo Mortensen for crime thrillers A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. And now, at age 71, he has turned his dark lens toward Hollywood with Maps to the Stars.

Maps to the Stars

The film begins with Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a mousy, slightly gothy, young woman arriving in Hollywood, as many young women do, on a bus. The first person she meets is Jerome (Robert Pattinson), a limo driver who takes her to a vacant lot in the Hollywood Hills where she says the home of child star Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird) burned down.

Agatha gives off some pretty creepy stalker vibes — especially when she claims to be internet friends with Carrie Fisher — but the real creepshow starts when we meet Benjie, an entitled Hollywood brat, who is contemptuously meeting with a dying young fan. Benjie’s last film Bad Babysitter, he tells her, made $780 million worldwide, and his mother Christina (Olivia Williams), is negotiating his part in the sequel.

Meanwhile, Benjie’s dad, Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), a celebrity masseuse/therapist/guru, is treating Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), a wildly insecure actress who believes the only way to save her career is to get a part in a remake of a movie that her abusive late mother starred in. It turns out that Agatha did, in fact, know Carrie Fisher, and when Havana runs into the actress (who plays herself) outside a swanky shop on Rodeo Drive, Agatha gets a job as Havana’s personal assistant.

Everyone in Maps to the Stars has a secret or two. In the case of the Weiss family, they have several, each more bizarre and shocking than the next. Agatha, a paranoid schizophrenic who carries visible scars on her face and arms from a fire she may have set when she was a kid, is the most sympathetic character in the film. Wasikowska plays her with mix of trembling vulnerability and wonder. Everyone else is a complete, self-absorbed creep. As you might expect from someone who just won the Oscar for Best Actress, Moore is the best of the bunch, nailing scenes where she shows barely disguised glee when a horrible accident befalls a professional rival. Cusack is also well-cast as the charlatan Dr. Phil figure.

The problem with Maps to the Stars is not in its stars, but in its script. Penned by screenwriter and novelist Bruce Wagner, it’s morbid and muddled. As with all Cronenberg movies, there are striking moments, but taken as a whole, Maps to the Stars seems to have lost its way.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Spring Training

It’s still a little less than two months — April 17th, to be exact — before candidates for city offices can even pull a qualifying petition from the Election Commission. And it’s nearly five months after that until the November 3rd election itself — seven month total.

For emphasis, let’s put that last figure in Arabic numerals: 7 months before Memphis voters can finish signaling their intentions on city offices — encompassing the lengthy span from now, when major league baseball teams are beginning spring training, to a date when the World Series is likely to still be happening.

And yet the roster is rapidly filling up for the most important race on this year’s election calendar — that for Memphis mayor. With the formal announcement of candidacy on Monday of this week by Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams, the number of well-known names still expected to be on the mayoral ballot has shrunk to two — City Councilman Harold Collins, who appointed an exploratory committee last fall and former Memphis School Board member and New Olivet Baptist church pastor Kenneth Whalum Jr.

[IMAGE-1]Whalum is forthright about his own plans, which to a great extent are based on an understanding with Williams, whose views on city matters overlap with his own. It boils down to this: “If Mike follows through and picks up a petition when the time comes and files, I won’t run,” says Whalum. “If he doesn’t, it’s 100-percent certain that I will.”

Already declared, besides Williams, are incumbent Mayor A C Wharton, City Councilman Jim Strickland, former County Commission Chairman James Harvey, current commission Chairman Justin Ford, and former University of Memphis basketball player Detric Golden.

And, while Ford, who has commission business to attend to, has not yet finished stockpiling his artillery, and Harvey has not yet begun to fight, the others are already doing battle. Strickland is speaking lots and firing away at Wharton on an almost daily basis via Facebook and Twitter; Williams and his supporters are active on the same social media; and the mayor is playing his bully pulpit for all it’s worth, materializing in numerous speech appearances and press conference formats that allow him to do double duty as city official and candidate for reelection.

And Golden, who has yet to demonstrate what his political base is, is turning up at public events, including those held by other candidates, and for well over a year has been conspicuous by driving around town in a car that is tricked-out with signs advertising his candidacy.

The mayoral-campaign activity so far is a form of spring training, and, like its baseball equivalent, it is a way of working the kinks out, finding a groove, and getting the jump on the competition. For that reason, Collins and Whalum won’t be able to procrastinate much longer on revealing their own intentions, and an announcement from one or both of them may well beat this issue to the printer.

There’s another reason why time is of the essence: money, which is a finite resource, especially here in hard-pressed Memphis, and won’t stretch far enough to cover every candidate’s needs. In a certain sense, it’s a matter of first come, first served, and the most accomplished self-servers so far are Wharton and Strickland. Both of them have been at it for a while — with receipts through January 15th showing a campaign balance for Wharton of $201,088 and for Strickland of $181,595.

The others have some catching up to do.

• As one of the first commenters to the Flyer‘s online coverage of the event said, “A very sad day, indeed, for the Shelby County Democratic Party in more ways than one.”

The event in question was the forced resignation on Saturday of Shelby County Democratic Party Chairman Bryan Carson, well-liked in his own right and the son of the widely admired Gale Jones Carson, a former local party chair herself and the longtime secretary of the state Democratic Party.

In a nutshell, the younger Carson had, on the fateful Saturday, faced a no-holds-barred interrogation into his oversight of party finances by the party’s executive committee — 76 strong, at peak, with roughly 50 on hand for the occasion, which was closed to the press and public. Saturday’s meeting followed two prior closed-door meetings with Carson last week by the party’s smaller 11-member steering committee, the second of which had resulted in a unanimous vote of “no confidence.”

All three meetings had been called out of a sense of crisis that developed from Carson’s repeated failure either to address party members’ concerns about the state of party finances or to deal satisfactorily with ominous promptings for an accounting from the Tennessee Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance. The bureau had already levied three $500 fines on the local party for late or incomplete submissions of financial disclosure statements and threatened another of $10,000, along with a showdown meeting in Nashville in March.

There were two immediate issues: The first was a disclosure statement that had been overdue since October 28th. Carson would hurriedly prepare one and submit it, such as it was, to the bureau on Wednesday, February 18th, the same day as his second meeting with the party steering committee and their vote of no confidence.

The other issue was even more troubling. It concerned an ad hoc audit, prepared at the request of the steering committee by Diane Cambron, wife of David Cambron, the local party’s first vice chair, and Dick Klenz, longtime president of the Germantown Democratic Club — both with unimpeachable reputations for fair-mindedness.

The audit showed that, since last September, Carson had made 63 withdrawals from the party’s bank account, in an amount totaling $8,437.89, and could produce no receipts for what he contended had been cash payments on behalf of the party. Even allowing for figures submitted in what Carson called a “self audit” (again, unaccompanied by receipts and made difficult to trace by virtue of the chairman’s having arbitrarily switched the party banking account), there seemed to be an amount of $6,091.16, which the Cambron-Klenz audit referred to as “unsubstantiated.”

Carson maintained in all three meetings with party committees that he had done nothing wrong and that the apparent discrepancies were the result of an overload of activity during the 2014 campaign year, coupled with the fact that he had been compelled, he said, to try to function as his own party treasurer.

That last was another fact that confounded committee members, who had thought that party member Jonathan Lewis was functioning as party treasurer. It turned out during the week’s discussions that Lewis had shied away from the service and had not registered with the state after being given a glimpse by Carson into the actual state of party finances.

In any case, the predominant mood of the party executive committee on Saturday was to reject Carson’s explanations, as well as his expressed wish to maintain at least a titular hold on the office of chairman (while handing over actual control to first Vice Chair David Cambron) through the party’s scheduled March caucus-convention rounds that are scheduled to produce a new executive committee and chairman on March 28th.

Vice Chair Cambron has been named acting chair, and he announced that one of his first acts would be to open a new party banking account this week, so as to provide a revised and reliable financing accounting from the ground up.

Beyond that, there has been no word from anyone speaking for the party to take further action or pursue legal remedies and no apparent appetite for doing so.

Various online commenters on the matter have made a point of noting that the Rutherford County Sheriff’s Office has issued a warrant of “theft over $500” against Axl David, former treasurer of the Young Republicans in that Middle Tennessee county, for what Sheriff Robert Arnold called “several discrepancies in the management of Club funds.” But no one has demonstrated any analogy between that situation and the one in Shelby County.

Bryan Carson, meanwhile, apparently still intends to seek the open District 7 City Council seat in this year’s city election. In January, he finished one vote behind Berlin Boyd in a council vote to name an interim District 7 councilman to succeed Lee Harris, who had resigned to assume his new duties as a state Senator.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Copenhagen closes at Theatre Memphis; U of M reimagines Macbeth

Once upon a time I described Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen as a “bad play.” Having gone back for a second serving, I’m comfortable standing by that initial pronouncement, with one allowance. When you submit to the script’s unreality and meet Frayn’s difficult material on its own terms, this “bad play” can make for a fine night at the theater. Thankfully, Theatre Memphis’ straightforward take on the atomic ghost story doesn’t force ideas as big as all of space into a vessel as unworthy as parlor drama.

And maybe it’s a “bad play” because, relatively speaking, it’s not really a play at all. There’s no conventional protagonist here, and the conflict changes with every pass at an uncertain story with no beginning, middle, or end.

Copenhagen is set in no actual place at no particular time. The characters — physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr and Bohr’s wife Margrethe — admit to being dead, though it’s probably more correct to describe them as being “un-alive.” The author’s aim here is to project the simulated image of three historical figures across time and space to catalog possible outcomes of a 1941 meeting at the onset of a global nuclear arms race. At times, it resembles a WWII-era thriller, but Copenhagen is a genuinely experimental, steadfastly inconclusive, and demanding theatrical exercise.

Theatre Memphis’ revival — like good scientific process — requires some patience. It rewards that patience with smart performances by Jason Spitzer, Gregory Alexander, and Mary Buchignani. Director Stephen Huff’s clear, unfussy take on complicated material reflects the spirit of Bohr, the pioneering physicist who expressed complex ideas using practical examples and plain language. To that end, this Copenhagen is still probably more literal than it might be. The staging never takes full, fantastic advantage of the show’s determined anti-realism. But when the actors cook, it’s the atomic bomb.

Scenic and lighting designer Daniel Kopera has imagined a space that expresses space — and time. Three unremarkable black chairs sit in a pitch-black environment. Formulas and wave signs are scribbled in white (painted) chalk on the floor. The next dimension is made apparent when similar formulas are projected across actors inhabiting the void — actors who live, love, and hate on each other a little, in the imaginary skeleton of a rotting universe. An uncomfortable time was had by all.

That’s a good thing, if you ask me.

Few local productions of Macbeth have really wrestled with the play’s supernatural side or attempted to empower the show’s unapologetically demonic side with all the tropes of modern horror.

Although there’s probably a nobler intention underpinning the University of Memphis’ current production of Shakespeare’s Scottish slasher play, it is most successful in its ability to evoke the viral paranoia and apocalyptic tone of ghastly contemporary cinema. It does so using dense recorded soundscapes and group performance pieces with sexual and sadistic overtones.

There are no witches here, only a malevolent group force with many body parts, speaking with many voices and various intentions, none of them pure. This force physically injects evil into Macbeth and swarms all around his hellspawn wife like devil-gnats.

Mixing post-industrial scenic design with blossoms, boughs, and costume profiles plucked from feudal Japan, director Jung Han Kim has built a sensual feast that’s exhilarating but inconsistent. Presentational acting styles may leave some audience members longing for more coherent storytelling and emotional content.

The one real problem I have with Kim’s Macbeth — which really is quite an achievement overall — is that it ends with a whimper rather than a bang. So much sound and fury has been built into the show’s quietest moments that it has nowhere to go. The last battles, for all their choreography, are pastoral compared to the sleepwalking scene. And Macbeth’s head on the pike is accidentally comical.

I get the sense from past work that Kim — a director to watch — isn’t especially interested in traditional linear narrative. I also get the sense that this Macbeth might have been more fully realized without all those words getting in the way.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Condomonium at Playhouse on the Square

When artists Erin King and Mary Allison Cates got their box of 400 condoms from Choices to use in designing a dress for Condomonium, they envisioned peacock feathers.

And so for three weeks, they set about flattening, spray-painting, hand-glittering, and bejeweling the prophylactics to create hundreds of “feathers” for an evening gown to be modeled at the third annual Condomonium event on Saturday at Playhouse on the Square. Theirs is one of 16 gowns and dresses created with condoms by local designers for the event.

The third annual Condomonium

The event is a fund-raiser for Choices Memphis Center for Reproductive Health, and proceeds will support the center’s reproductive health education program and patient assistance fund.

At the event, models display the condom dresses. Attendees are given five wrapped condoms when they arrive, and each condom counts as one vote. Each model has a bucket, and the attendees place condoms in the buckets for their favorite dresses.

Besides the main event fashion show, there will also be a burlesque show and a flashdance to Salt-N-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex.” Artists will be selling condom jewelry and accessories — earrings, bracelets, bowties. And there’s a “naughty bits bake sale” (think vagina cupcakes and boobie truffles).

“In Shelby County, the rates for STIs [sexually transmitted infections] and teen pregnancy are both very high. Condom use is one of the most-effective, most well-researched, and proven ways to address that,”
said Katy McLeod Leopard, director of community partnerships for Choices. “Not only is this a fund-raiser for Choices, it’s also a great way to get people touching condoms and laughing at them. We want to normalize condoms and condom use.”

Categories
Film/TV TV Features

Better Call Saul

You don’t need to know much about Breaking Bad to enjoy Better Call Saul, AMC’s new spinoff series.

I know this because I like what I’ve seen of Better Call Saul even though I’ve never seen a full episode of Breaking Bad. (Oops.) Aside from a handful of random scenes and some unavoidable background knowledge about the Walter White story, I don’t know what I’m supposed to know. But I also don’t know what to expect, and that’s a refreshing way to approach a budding pop culture phenomenon. But perhaps my ignorance is strength. I can experience Better Call Saul without hunting for Easter eggs or suffering from those involuntary “the book was better”-type comparisons.

Bob Odenkirk stars in Better Call Saul

Three episodes in, Better Call Saul resembles Breaking Bad in that it’s a crisply plotted, unexpectedly humorous and potentially grim story about a man who’s lost at sea and sailing into darkness, because it’s either that or abandon ship. This time, though, shady lawyer Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) is on deck. But he’s been both literally and figuratively pushed around by so many people so far that it’s more accurate to say he’s lashed to the mast instead of at the helm. Jimmy, of course, later becomes the ambulance-chasing attorney Saul Goodman that gives the show its title; its central mystery is when and how that rebirth occurs.

Some clues have already emerged. Each episode has opened with a significant time shift, but the first one — a black-and-white flash-forward to a time and a place where an older, balder, mustachioed McGill silently works the dough at a suburban mall Cinnabon — is the most beautiful, most suggestive and most troubling so far. How’d he end up there?

The same question lingers after the third episode’s opening flashback, a prison visit between Jimmy (now an orange-jumpsuited inmate) and his older brother Chuck (Michael McKean), a powerful attorney who we recognize from the show’s present day as a housebound paranoiac who’s taken to wearing a “space blanket” and keeping his perishable food in an icebox.

Those two scenes effectively set the borders of Better Call Saul‘s universe, but I wouldn’t be surprised if additional temporal hijinks were in store. The spaces Saul tends to find himself in are either so large (the New Mexico desert; Chuck’s darkened mansion; several anonymous roadside pay phones) that he threatens to dissolve into the air like a bad odor, or so small (the courthouse men’s room; his office in the back of a Vietnamese salon; his own car) that he rubs up against unsavory characters who reek of bad intentions and pure craziness.

The best scenes in Better Call Saul let Jimmy gab his way out of a jam, and it’s a joy to watch the scowling, whiny-voiced Odenkirk use his hands and his comb-over to animate his tall tales. It’s like he’s trying to conjure a plasma ball with every new speculation. Jimmy’s great at making strange connections that allow him to leap from one dangerous perch to the next: he’s loquacious and folksy enough to lecture a pair of skater hustlers about his old days as “Slippin’ Jimmy” the Chicago scam artist, but he’s compassionate enough to try and do the right thing whenever he can, even if that means using a “sex robot” voice on the phone. The whole doing-good-in-a-messed-up-world mantle fits him more comfortably than his oversized suits, but his actions — and that Cinnabon future awaiting him — beg the biggest question of all: How long can such compromised morality last?

Whatever happens, I hope it doesn’t involve another machine gun popping out of the trunk of a car.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

A Look at Lentils

CREDIT: Mk74 | Dreamstime.com

Lentils are a humble ingredient that appear in many earthy foods. Not the fancy dishes that tap dance around the table, but simple, nourishing foods like Indian dal or hippy mush — the kind of food that feeds villages. It turns out that lentils come from a plant that has a similarly beneficial impact on the land where it grows and on the communities that cultivate it.

During the height of the 1980s farm crisis, four Montana farmers joined forces in a hunt for alternatives to the commodity agriculture system that was destroying their land and communities. The soil was losing its fertility, thanks to the predominant industrial agriculture practices in the region. Droughts were becoming more frequent, which exacerbated the soil’s issues. Farmers were going broke, crushed between rising prices for inputs and lower prices at market.

The four friends were determined to farm their way out of this mess and began by exploring various crops that would add fertility to the soil. One, a lentil named Indianhead, was bred as a cover crop, intended to be plowed into the soil to add nitrogen. But when plants make nitrogen, reasoned David Oien, one of the four founders of the Lentil Underground movement, what they’re really making is nitrogen-rich protein.

“Indianheads were cheap,” Liz Carlisle writes in Lentil Underground, a book about Oien and his movement. “They were great for his soil. And since they were bred to make nitrogen, they were 24 percent protein. Why not add them to the cattle ration? Or for that matter, why not try some himself?”

The Indianheads were delicious, and Oien began eating copious amounts, though it was a while before he admitted to his neighbors that he was eating his soil-building crop.

Oien and his friends, founded a company, Timeless, to market what they grew. The name came from a meeting that went way into the night, and nobody knew what time it was.

Twenty-five years in, the Lentil Underground includes a widening base of organic farmers that grow for Timeless, including old hippies, young environmentalists, gun-loving rednecks, conservative Christians, Libertarians, the state’s organic certification inspector, and Montana’s Democratic Senator Jon Tester. The personalities and “against all odds” tension of the book makes for a fun read that’s as much about ecology and economics as it is lentil farming.

In addition to being an agricultural and social movement, the Lentil Underground is also a political movement. While working for Montana lentil farmer and Senator Tester, Carlisle first learned of the Lentil Underground. Members of the Lentil Underground weren’t shy about calling their senator with ideas, especially since their senator is a lentil grower.

Thanks in part to their efforts, the recent Farm Bill contains a pilot program called the Pulse School Pilot provision — Pulse being the plant family of which lentils are members. The Pulse School Pilot provision funds the purchase of $10 million in lentils and other pulse legumes.

Lentils are such a nutritional powerhouse that USDA classifies them as both a plant and a protein. And those high-protein Indianheads? They are still being grown, marketed as Black Beluga Lentils, and are popular with high-end chefs. Many other varieties of lentils, in a rainbow of colors, also bear the Timeless label, as does the Black Kabuli Chickpea, which functions ecologically like a lentil (and makes a striking hummus, Carlisle says).

These legumes are grown in rotation with grain and oilseed crops and sometimes a pasture phase. The oilseed phase could be flax or sunflower or safflower. The grain phase could be one of several heritage grains like Farro or Purple Prairie Barley, marketed by Timeless. Other heritage grains, like Kamut and Spelt, are bought by the friendly competition, Montana Flour and Grains.

Legumes are able to build their legendary proteins and thus supply the plant with in-house fertilizer, thanks to a symbiotic relationship between the plant’s roots and a type of soil bacteria. This trans-species cooperative effort that goes down below the lentil plants is a metaphor for the entire Lentil Underground movement. And the more I learn about it, the more I feel the urge to eat some lentils.

There are no recipes in the book, alas, but the companion book is in the works: Pulse of the Earth, by Claudia Krevat.

Carlisle explained her default Ethiopian-style lentil recipe to me. It’s a recipe that she never tires of. I’ve cooked it twice, and I’m hooked.

It uses red lentils and Ethiopian berbere spice mix, and results in a dish called messer wot, aka spicy lentils.

Ingredients

I cup red or yellow lentils

1 medium or larger onion, minced

2 cloves fresh garlic

1 tablespoon garlic powder

2 tablespoons berbere mix

¼ cup olive oil

salt

A key step to this recipe, Carlisle said, is to “…let the onions, water, and berbere enjoy each other’s company for a few minutes.”

Add a minced onion to a pan with enough water to cover it. Add your choice of spice. While Carlisle usually uses berbere, sometimes she uses Indian dal spices, sometimes curry powder, sometimes plain cumin.

Simmer the onion, spice, and water for 30 minutes.

Then add olive oil, garlic, and salt. After another 5 minutes, add lentils, and more water or stock as the lentils start to swell.

I was surprised that she added the lentils dry, without soaking or cooking them first.

Most red and yellow lentils are decorticated, she explained, which means the outer skin has been removed. The Timeless Petite Crimsons that she uses cook in 5-10 minutes.

Keep adding water or stock as the lentils swell, and cook until they are done to your desired tenderness.

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Emily Ballew Neff Named Executive Director of the Brooks Museum of Art

With unanimous consent by the board of trustees, Emily Ballew Neff, President of the Association of Art Museum Curators, has been hired to replace Cameron Kitchin as Executive Director of the Brooks Museum of Art.

Kitchen resigned in 2014 to become Executive Director for The Cincinnati Art Museum.

Dr. Neff, who took her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, most recently served as the Director and Chief Curator of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma. She was the first Curator of American Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, where she grew the museum’s collection, and built a reputation for organizing major American art exhibitions. 

Neff joins the Brooks in April, as the museum prepares to celebrate its hundredth anniversary.