Month: March 2017

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Midtown Opera Festival at Playhouse on the Square

Opera Memphis’ General Director Ned Canty compares Later the Same Evening to the collage-like film Love Actually. “It’s like snapshots,” he says. John Musto’s intimate operatic work is more specifically inspired by the shadowy urban landscapes of American painter Edward Hopper. It asks what brought the characters inhabiting Hopper’s nocturnal world to the places where the painter froze them in oil and time. And what happened immediately after?

Later the Same Evening is one of three contemporary operas by living composers being presented at the fifth annual Midtown Opera Festival. The 10-day event also showcases performances of Jake Heggie’s epistolary family saga Three Decembers, and Peter Hilliard and Matthew Boresi’s Blue Viola tells the story of a priceless antique instrument that winds up in the hands of a junk dealer when it’s left on the street. A fantastic journey follows.

Bring on the Midtown Opera Festival!

“I think Three Decembers is a masterpiece, and I’m especially drawn to it,” Canty says. “It aligns with a lot of the things I care about — the most basic notions of what it means to be in a family and what it means to be human.”

Season five crescendos with a production of Arnold Scheonberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, with projections by Memphis photographer Joey Miller.

Canty says he’s especially looking forward to a new event called the “Operathon” — back-to-back performances of this year’s featured operas followed by workshop performances of German opera with a new libretto. He’s also excited about a libretto reading for Opera Memphis’ latest co-commission, The Rising and the Falling. With a quilted narrative by Jerre Dye, this first opera commissioned by the U.S. Army tells the story of wounded veterans coming home.

The Midtown Opera Festival was created to produce great, intimate, and mostly modern and contemporary opera. It’s also a perfect tasting opportunity for the opera curious.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Up in Smoke

Despite heady optimism early in the current session of the General Assembly, proponents of significant reform legislation regarding marijuana were well advised not to hold their breath.

Bills regarding the possible legalization of medical marijuana have been bottled up for now; the major one was pulled last week by its sponsor, East Tennessee Republican state Representative Jeremy Faison, who realized that, while prospects for House passage were fair, his bill was sure to be killed in the state Senate’s Judiciary Committee, chaired by Germantown Republican Senator Brian Kelsey, an arch-foe of marijuana reform.

[content-1]

To keep alive the long-range prospects for medical marijuana, Faison prevailed upon the speakers of the two legislative chambers and Governor Bill Haslam to consent to the creation of a task force on the subject. Faison and other backers of legalized medical marijuana are hoping that the task force, which will meet over the summer, will help create support for legislation in the 2017-18 session.

Circumstances are murkier on another marijuana-related matter. The state Senate this week put its imprimatur on a House bill restricting the rights of local governments to pass ordinances that would reduce the penalties for possession of a half-ounce or less of marijuana. The city councils of Nashville and Memphis had passed ordinances allowing law enforcement officers the discretion to write tickets calling for modest fines as an alternative to imposing existing misdemeanor penalties involving jail time. When state Attorney General Herbert Slatery offered a non-binding opinion in November that state law prohibited such local deviation, Mayor Jim Strickland put a hold on the Memphis ordinance, but Nashville metro government continued to allow the issuance of citations to offenders.

In House debate last week on the bill brought by Republican House member William Lamberth (R-Cottontown) to prohibit local marijuana-possession variations, Democratic state Representative Mike Stewart of Nashville moved to seek a waiver for Nashville, attesting that the citation alternative had proved “very popular” in his city and that there had been no problems in implementing what citizens of all stripes regarded as a “great step forward.” The courts, whose decisions would be final, should be allowed to rule on the matter, he said.

That brought some harrumphing from Lamberth, who invoked the principle that “everyone should be treated the same” under law and chastised his colleague for suggesting that police officers should be allowed “to discriminate on the basis of their whim.” Further, said Lamberth, the issue at root was “not one of constitutionality but of morals.” Stewart’s motion for a Nashville exemption was tabled as the Lamberth bill went on to easy approval, 65 to 28. It was basically a party-line vote, though a sprinkling of Republicans, including Faison and House Speaker Beth Harwell (a Nashvillian), voted no.

The issue returned in the Senate on Monday, when Lamberth’s bill, co-sponsored by GOP Senator Jack Johnson of Franklin, came up for a Senate vote. Democrats Lee Harris and Sara Kyle of Memphis objected, as did Senator Jeff Yarbro, a Nashville Democrat.

Harris pointed out that allowing local leeway on possession of small amounts of marijuana was one means of addressing woeful inequities of incarceration policy, while Yarbro called the roll on case after case in which local municipalities across the state were allowed to prescribe a variety of penalties that varied from those prescribed by state law. Why, he asked, “single out one particular area of criminal code for this [uniform] treatment?”

“My perspective is this,” added Kyle, “Local government means local control,” with an obligation to bring “government as close as we can to the citizens.” All of this rhetoric was to no avail. The Lamberth/Johnson measure passed on a strict party-line basis, 26-5.

Two more bills, one legalizing medical marijuana and another decriminalizing possession of an ounce for recreational purposes, both sponsored by Nashville state Representative Sherry Jones, a Democrat, were in the House Criminal Justice subcommittee this week. Prospects for passage were not great.

UPDATE: Rep. Jones postponed action on her medical marijuana bill for a week and pulled her decriminalization measure off the calendar.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Tennessee Legislature Trumps Cities’ Laws, Again

As has been amply demonstrated in the Tennessee General Assembly, Memphis is often on the short end of the stick when it comes to legislative actions. One recent case in point, covered in “Politics” this week (p. 8), was the action of both state Senate and state House in rejecting the city’s right to prescribe alternative penalties for the possession of modest amounts of marijuana for recreational use.

In this case, Memphis was not alone in getting the back of the hand from the legislature. The city councils of Nashville and Memphis had passed ordinances allowing their local law-enforcement arms to exercise discretion by way of citing first-time offenders with tickets and modest fines as an alternative to misdemeanor arrests carrying punishments of up to a year in jail.

To some extent, the legislative rebukes reflected a party-line reaction by the Republican super-majority that controls both chambers of the General Assembly. In a sense, both Memphis and Nashville are isolated Democratic enclaves, blue islands in a red sea.

To some extent also, both cities share a cultural matrix toward which the rest of the state is unsympathetic. That fact loomed large a few years ago when the legislature struck down a Nashville ordinance prohibiting hiring and contracting discrimination by local government on the basis of sexual orientation. The legislature’s action nipped in the bud similar action then pending in the Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission.

In this instance, too, the guiding principle stated by proponents of the restrictive legislation was that state law overrides local law, and that general claim has been stoutly defended by former Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey, among others, against charges of being inconsistent with a parallel insistence on states’ rights in national affairs. The retort by Ramsey and by current spokespersons for the Assembly’s GOP super-majority is that cities and counties within state lines and the federal union itself were brought into being originally by the states. Hence, the doctrine of state government über alles, which is the governing doctrine of the General Assembly at present.

An even more flagrant example of the principle looms in pending legislative action — sponsored, ironically, by a Shelby Countian, state Senator Brian Kelsey — that would impose the constitutionally dubious expedient of taxpayer-funded private-school vouchers on Shelby County alone. The bill, styled as a “pilot program,” is further limited so that its potential financial drain would apply only to existing funding for Shelby County Schools.

Kelsey’s bill advanced through a House education committee last week, despite drawing protests and nay votes from local House members from both parties.

In the long run, such imposition of state authority on matters of clearly local provenance deserve full testing by the courts. In the short run, they merit the stoutest resistance possible.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Still Fighting Forrest

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

The attorney for the Memphis City Council said that the city will continue to push for the relocation of the remains and statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest from the Health Sciences Park in the Medical District.

Attorney Allan Wade said that the Tennessee Historical Commission failed to properly adopt the criteria of the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act of 2013, which was used to deny the city’s application for a waiver that would allow for the relocation of the statue and remains of the Confederate general, slave trader, and Ku Klux Klan founding member.

“The commission’s denial of the city’s petition was invalidated due to the failure of the commission to adopt the criteria used to deny the petition in accordance with the Tennessee Administrative Procedure Act,” Wade said.

The commission must now start from scratch and properly adopt criteria, Wade said, which could take until June. Meanwhile, city officials have filed a petition that identifies the grounds for voiding the commission’s decision to deny Memphis’ waiver application.

Justin Fox Burks

The Nathan Bedford Forrest statue in the Medical District

Commission chairman Reavis Mitchell said in a meeting last year that the city’s application for the statue’s removal was submitted on March 7, 2016, five days before Gov. Bill Haslam signed into law the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act of 2016. Therefore, he said, the application fell under the 2013 version of the law.

Also, Mitchell said that the commission adopted the updated waiver criteria. The city’s petition to the commission states otherwise.

The controversy over renaming and relocating Confederate-themed parks in Memphis began in 2013, when city council passed a resolution to rename three city parks before the Tennessee state legislature could pass measures to prevent such efforts.

Public pressure to remove Confederate symbols on public grounds began to swell across the Southeast states after the racially motivated killings of nine black parishioners in a Charleston church in 2015.

That pressure hasn’t waned completely. The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently gave the city of New Orleans the go-ahead to remove statues of Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. The same court is also expected to eventually issue an opinion on the Confederate battle flag portion of the Mississippi state flag.

Forrest and his wife, Mary, were originally buried in Elmwood Cemetery alongside Forrest’s biological brothers and fellow officers in their family plot. That plot is still partially vacated to this day should the remains be relocated back to their original burial site.

Though the Forrests’ wishes were, according to his will, to be laid to rest in Elmwood, two civic groups in Memphis advocated for a reinterment of he and his wife to the newly established Forrest Park in 1905.

Charles McKinney, associate professor of history at Rhodes College, said that historical documentation points to the multiple intentions behind the statue’s erection, the least of which not being a pointed reminder to the growing black middle class, now two or three generations removed from slavery.

“Forrest’s relocation to the center of town was an explicit reassertion of white supremacy,” McKinney said. “It was an act that put a growing black community on notice that both its presence and progress would be greatly contested.”

Categories
News The Fly-By

Raiford, Pence, and Power

Weirich reprimanded

Shelby County District Attorney General Amy Weirich accepted a private reprimand for her conduct in the murder trial of Noura Jackson and did not face a Supreme Court hearing panel.

A court board recommended discipline for Weirich in 2016 for an outburst during her closing arguments in the trial and for failing to hand over a witness statement to Jackson’s attorneys.

The reprimand “admits an attorney error has occurred but … it does not unnecessarily stigmatize a lawyer from whom the public needs no protection,” Weirich said.

Zoo threatens Greensward deal

The Memphis Zoo threatened to pull out of the deal to rework its parking lot (and end Greensward parking) last week because zoo officials said the Overton Park Conservancy (OPC) could not pay its share.

OPC officials said they did not have reserves to cover their half of the project — estimated to cost $3 million — and that getting the funds would be a challenge. However, they said last week they’d raise the funds.

The two groups are expected to work out details of the plan before the council’s next meeting on Tuesday, April 11th.

Wharton joins “Hall of Mayors”

A portrait of former Mayor A C Wharton was unveiled at Memphis City Hall, joining the 62 mayoral portraits in the Hall of Mayors. City officials, judges, past mayors, and more joined Wharton and his family to mark the event.

New retail aimed for Union

Loeb Properties will raze an old Valvoline shop on Union and build a “modern” shopping center to cost about $1.1 million. Demolition will begin on the project April 1st, the company said, and the new space will be completed this fall.

Raiford passes

Robert Raiford, the colorful downtown icon/disco owner, passed away.

“People don’t realize I don’t play music like a DJ; I play music from the heart,” Raiford said in a Memphis magazine story last year. “I can watch you — you don’t even have to dance all night long, but I know good and well you’re having a good time. I watch your feet, watch your mood, read your body language, and I can tell. I’m doing something for you — I’m not just doing something for the dance floor.”

Politicians argue wind energy

Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander and Shelby County Commissioner Terry Roland publicly argued two sides of a proposed project that would bring wind energy here from Oklahoma and Texas.

Clean Line Energy Partners want to build a $2 billion wind-energy network, called the Plains and Eastern Clean Line, that would connect the plains and Memphis via 720 miles of overhead electrical lines.

Alexander urged Tennessee Valley Authority board members against buying power for the project, saying it would raise energy rates.

Roland said Alexander’s information was “outdated and misleading” and that it would be a boon for Shelby County. The project would help “our country realize President [Donald] Trump’s vision for more infrastructure here,” Roland said.

“Senator Alexander obviously didn’t take note of what happened in November,” Roland said. “The American people voted for public-private partnerships, new infrastructure, job creation, and economic opportunity.”

Pence cancels

Vice President Mike Pence cancelled his trip to Memphis last week.

Pence was scheduled to attend the NCAA South Regional games at the FedExForum but cancelled as lawmakers prepped a vote on a bill that would have repealed and replaced the Affordable Care Act. Cancelled, too, was a protest aimed at Pence.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

“Memphis Cares: A Benefit Concert for the Victims of the Bowling Green Massacre” at Loflin Yard

You remember where you were on the day of the Bowling Green Massacre.

Ah, well, Kellyanne Conway does. The couch-sitting media punching bag for President Donald Trump fretted about the massacre to TMZ, Cosmo, and MSNBC.

Trouble was, though, there was no massacre. But that doesn’t mean we can’t still remember.

“Never forget what never happened” is the motto of “Memphis Cares: A Benefit Concert for the Victims of the Bowling Green Massacre.” The fake benefit show is a blend of comedy and music, but it’s all political theater (and a real-life fundraiser for the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center).

Memphis Cares

Organizer Chris Davis, a Flyer writer, musician, and raconteur, said the idea for such a show was a joke. But he posted that joke on social media, and the idea got real, really fast. Less than a month later a troupe of actors, clowns, and musicians are readying for what will be a one-of-a-kind show.

It’ll begin with some loose, open-mic-style performances and launch into a 30-minute faux telethon for Massacre victims. Easy-D’s Low-Life Leakers will then play new songs about the Bowling Green Massacre and covers bent into protest songs (like Big Star’s “Don’t Lie to Me”). Davis calls it an “all-star band of local musicians” including LD Beghtol of the Magnetic Fields, J.D. Reager, Davis, and more. (But watch out for many special performances.)

“This seemed like an opportunity for people … who are angry, frustrated, feel lied to, and have been out there in the trenches, to blow off some steam,” Davis says. “And who doesn’t want a little more peace and justice these days?”

Categories
Cover Feature News

Sun Records

Imagine what the world would look like today if Sam Phillips had never started a recording business out of 706 Union. The blues would still have been a fascinating Southern musical style, but would Howlin’ Wolf have ever come to the attention of Leonard Chess’ record label? Would B. B. King have ever moved beyond his career as a radio DJ? Rock-and-roll, or something like it, might have evolved anyway, even if Ike Turner hadn’t been able to take advantage of the Memphis Recording Service’s dirt-cheap rates to bring the Delta Cats in to record his song “Rocket 88” in the spring of 1951. But Elvis Presley would have never had the opportunity to record “My Happiness” for his mom and might have died a truck driver.

Deprived of its biggest star — indeed, the biggest star the world had ever seen — would rock-and-roll have spread, or would it become nothing more than a regional novelty? Without Sam Phillips or Elvis, the Beatles would have been a skiffle band, if they’d ever bothered to pick up guitars at all. Without Sam Phillips, you wouldn’t know who Johnny Cash was, and country music would lack its greatest poet and its social conscience. Without Sam Phillips, Memphis would be an insignificant backwater, not the origin point for America’s greatest cultural export.

Films and television shows have told the story of the birth of the music before. Elvis himself starred in Jailhouse Rock, which, on some level, was a version of his own origin story. In 1979, Halloween director John Carpenter cast Kurt Russell in a made-for-TV biopic called simply Elvis. Jerry Lee Lewis got the biopic treatment in 1989, when Dennis Quaid memorably played the Killer in Great Balls of Fire!. In 2005, Walk the Line dramatized Johnny Cash and June Carter’s epic love story with Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon. But while there have been nonfiction books and documentaries recounting Sam Phillips’ story — most notably Morgan Neville’s Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll, based on Peter Guralnick’s book of the same name — Phillips has only played a supporting role onscreen.

CMT

In 2015, Leslie Greif got a call from cable network CMT. Fresh off the success of Nashville, the network was looking for another original TV property to develop. “I had just seen [Broadway musical] Million Dollar Quartet, and it just flashed in my head, wouldn’t it be great to tell the story of the birth of rock-and-roll? It all came out of Memphis. That’s what got me going.”

Greif is a veteran TV producer who developed shows such as Walker, Texas Ranger and the Emmy-winning 2012 miniseries Hatfields & McCoys. Greif says his father was friends with songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who penned early rock-and-roll hits such as “Hound Dog,” “Kansas City,” and “Jailhouse Rock,” and he was a huge fan of the music. “I grew up surrounded by it as a little kid, and I loved it,” he says.

Greif optioned Million Dollar Quartet and started working on the project while he was in production on another show, Texas Rising, which was helmed by director Roland Joffé. “He talked about it quite a lot,” says Joffé. “I loved the area he was looking at — that wonderful time in the 1950s when all of this musical movement, which really gave birth to pop music, and therefore much of modern music as we know it, was actually happening. It was a fascinating time, and it raised really interesting issues about art and music in general.”

On the West Coast, writer and producer Gil Grant needed a change after six seasons’ work on NCIS: Los Angeles. “If I was going to do another show about PTSD, I was going to get PTSD!” he says. “I was looking for something a little more interesting.”

He interviewed with Greif’s ThinkFactory Media. “This was originally designed to be a four-part miniseries. Once they decided there was so much rich material here, let’s open it up and spread it out and see if we can do a series, they realized they needed a show runner who had done it before. Their experience was in miniseries and reality. So, I got the gig. I had done a musical before. Early in my career, I created a show called Hull High. It was a high school musical directed by Kenny Ortega, who went on to do High School Musical. We were only about 20 years ahead of our time. This really was up my alley.”

Drake Milligan (left) and Chad Michael Murray

Meanwhile in Memphis . . .

Around the same time, Memphis Film and Television commissioner Linn Sitler got a call from a producer inquiring about Tennessee’s state film incentive program. The call came at a particularly opportune time. Sitler, with the help of State Senator Mark Norris, state film commissioner Bob Raines, and the county and city offices, had managed to gather state support for new production. There were two candidates: the crime show Quarry and a 20th Century Fox adaptation of Peter Guralnick’s Elvis biography Last Train to Memphis. “Quarry had been gung ho to base here, even though we could not match Louisiana’s incentives. What had happened was that, 20th Century Fox went away — they shelved that project, at least temporarily — and Quarry decided to shoot almost everything in Louisiana. Here we had whined and moaned and bullied, and gotten almost $4 million, and all of our projects had gone away! So when the call came in, I could say, ‘Oh, we happen to have over $4 million for qualified projects!'”

Hollywood accounting is notoriously opaque, and the nuts and bolts of film incentives are even more confusing. But the bottom line is that state film incentives can make or break a production. “It makes all the difference, because if you go to one state, you can buy a Buick for $25,000. If you go to another state, you can get the same Buick for $18,000,” says Sitler.

Greif and Joffé really wanted to base the production in the city where the history had happened. “If it wasn’t for the tremendous help from all of your people in the state of Tennessee and the city of Memphis, Linn Sitler and Senator Norris and Bob Raines. … These people assembled all of the proper entities. The Chamber of Commerce chipped in; the tourism bureau chipped in. They made it possible. And we had great guys like Jack Soden from the Elvis Presley estate. They all supported this project, and once they did that, they opened up the world of the local Memphis community. Everyone in Memphis, the Peabody Hotel, the Gibson Guitar factory, Humes High — every entity was like, what can we do to be helpful? All that spirit, combined with a little good luck, made it so we were able to bring this project to Memphis.”

Chad Michael Murray

Searching for Sam

For months, the production searched for its Sam Phillips before calling on actor Chad Michael Murray, who had worked with Greif and Joffé on Texas Rising. “I just kind of starting looking into Sam’s life, and I fell in love with the guy,” says Murray. “I thought he was insane in the most beautiful way. He was so ahead of his time! … I call him the Wizard of Oz. He was the man behind the curtain pulling the strings for these gigantic legends and icons.”

Murray’s research for the role included spending time in the Bluff City. “One person would tell you one version of the Sam Phillips story, another person would tell you another version of it. I just kind of took pieces from what people told me in Memphis, and everything that I studied and read. … Sam was a charming, sophisticated, complicated motor. He was just go, go, go, go, go. When I sat down with Roland, we really wanted to make sure these things came through in the work. That passion, that drive, that charm, and charisma.”

Grant says getting the character of Sam Phillips right was crucial, particularly the love triangle between Sam, his wife, Becky, played by Jennifer Holland, and his assistant at Sun, Marion Keisker, played by Margaret Anne Florence. “Sam was a very complicated individual. He was a very flawed individual — his family will talk about that — but he was a brilliant individual. On the one hand, here was this guy who, musically, he would get whatever he could get out of you to make you better than you are. And yet at the same time, he’s fooling around on his wife with Marion. I think he had a great deal of guilt over it, but it certainly didn’t stop him. And it doesn’t end there. Yet he stayed married to Becky his entire life. It’s a tough role. You have what could be a very unsympathetic character, but Chad is naturally very charming, kind of like Sam was, and he played into that. I think you can see the conflict on his face. He loved Becky, but he loved Marion in a different way. And you also see the raw passion when he sees a musician that sparks him. Chad really prepared for the role. He took it to heart.”

Margaret Anne Florence

Marion

Florence’s mother was born in Memphis in 1948. “My grandfather actually owned a couple of restaurants: The Riviera Grill and a place called The Old Master Says,” says the actress, now based in New York City. She says her familiarity with the city’s culture and music helped get her the part but that she was not familiar with Marion Keisker, the woman who was the first person to record Elvis. “Unfortunately, the women are not well documented in this time period. It’s been the blessing and the curse of the role. It’s nice that I don’t have that same pressure of being somebody like Elvis or Johnny Cash, that people are so familiar with and have an idea of how they should be played,” she says.

Keisker, who died in 1989, was a graduate of Southwestern in Memphis (now Rhodes College) and had a radio career of her own before joining Sam at Sun. “I don’t think she took a lot of flack from anybody,” says Florence. “That’s been an awesome part of the character to play. Luckily, the writers built that in to what we’re doing. I think it’s really important that you see her standing up for herself all the time, in any situation, whether it’s with Sam or with other producers who come into the studio. … That’s something the director really stressed, just to keep her as intelligent and on top of things and respectable — a woman that people could admire, even though she was maybe not doing the right thing, having this affair with Sam.”

Romantic tension between Sam, Becky, and Marion is crucial to Sun Records‘ drama, but the facts of the affair are unclear. “Some people believe it happened, some people say it didn’t,” says Murray.

“We’ve always been very, very clear that we’re not a documentary,” says Grant. “We’re doing a show that’s inspired by true events. We try to be respectful of the characters we’re portraying. We try to get the big moments right. But within that, we’re a dramatic piece of fiction.”

But there’s no doubt that the spark between Murray and Florence gives Sun Records life. “Chemistry is a very strange thing,” says Joffé. “It’s not something you can talk about. You’ve got to find a way to get those actors to sort of engage with each other. You can do that by telling them slightly different things that they want to get out of the scene, so they’re discovering what the scene is about as they go. A lot of the chemistry is discovery. When the actors are starting a scene, they don’t know where it’s going to end up. I think that keeps it very alive and helps the birth of chemistry. It also helps if the actors both have a sense of humor, because a lot of chemistry is in humor. In those little looks they exchange. They have lovely chemistry, those two.”

Drake Milligan

Elvis

Drake Milligan’s first screen role was playing Elvis Presley in the 2014 short film, Nobody. “The producers saw the short, and they brought me out to the calls in Memphis,” says the Fort Worth, Texas, native.

Playing one of the most famous people who ever lived is a heavy burden for a novice actor. “My goal is to portray him as humanly as possible, and to get the feel of what it must have been like to be Elvis, coming from Tupelo and not having a lot of money,” he says. “Then all the sudden, fame hits, and it’s a roller coaster ride. He went from government housing and Memphis public high school to being the biggest star in the world in a matter of a year and a half.”

“He did brilliantly,” says Joffé. “Drake is a natural. I loved working with him, because it was almost like doing a documentary. He has a natural charm and a natural Elvis shyness in him that I really like. That’s a side of Elvis that people don’t remember, the fact that the young Elvis was very shy. A lot of things he did afterwards was his way of dealing with his shyness. A lot of the pain of Elvis’ life, and there was quite a lot of it, had to do with that fact that in some ways, he was a home body, and in other ways he was an icon and a wild man.”

Milligan, Joe Chrest, and Billy Gardell

Memphis Makes It

According to documents provided by the film commission, the total expenditure in Shelby County exceeded $6 million. Sun Records shot in Memphis for 70 days in 2016. “That was longer than most films I have catered,” says Erik Proveaux, owner of Fuel, the restaurant, food truck, and catering firm that provided food for the mammoth production. “That’s a huge deal for the economy. Each of those days is like a big production. It’s like doing a wedding every day for 70 days. It paid for a new truck for me and allowed me to move ahead on other aspects of my business.”

It was the biggest production Memphis had seen in a decade, and that had a big impact on local crew members who had been struggling. “Some crew people, I know of one for sure, had not had health insurance,” says Sitler. “Even though this guy was not a union member, he still had to receive union benefits. He was able to have surgery he had put off because of Sun Records.”

Joffé, who has had a long career in film and TV and has shot all over the world, says his experiences in Memphis were unforgettable. “The show hinges on Memphis’ heritage in many ways, and I think Memphis should be very proud of it. The history of Memphis is the history of your parents and grandparents and their parents. That’s really important, when people live in a city that has a sense of past lives lived. Those lives affect the city. … I felt when I was there that this is a city that’s getting itself together, a city that’s re-finding its voice and its confidence. It has a lot to offer. I really enjoyed being there.”

Grant says the city’s stock of varied architecture, much of which is still standing from the 1950s and ’60s, made it easy for the production to get the necessary vintage look. But he could tell the future was bearing down. “I feel like Memphis is ready to pop. Downtown Memphis is ready to become one of the great small cities in the United States,” he says.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

After TrumpCare’s Fall

Now that the thrown-together Frankenstein’s monster that was TrumpCare has failed in Congress, the time may be ripe for common sense reforms which can save the essential elements of Obamacare. People who care about a humane system of universal coverage should be very clear about what needs to stay and what needs to be added.  

Keep What’s Good: We should acknowledge that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has done far more good than harm. It’s enabled over 20 million people to get access to health care, cutting our uninsured rate in half from 20 percent to 10 percent. Insurance companies can no longer deny people coverage for preexisting conditions, kick people off for getting sick, or deny essential benefits like cancer screenings, birth control, or mental health services. Young people can stay on their parents’ policies until they’re 26.  People no longer have to go bankrupt because of an unexpected health crisis or avoid preventive care because of cost, thus making themselves sicker.

Steve Mulroy

The ACA cost about one-third less than expected and decreased the budget in the process, far from the “disaster” claimed by Donald Trump and Paul Ryan.Contrary to Trump and Ryan, the ACA is not in a “death spiral.”  Enrollment last year in the ACA “health-care exchange” insurance markets was brisk and is expected to continue. True, it is possible that Republican officials can cause a death spiral if they continue to sabotage the ACA. GOP governors and HHS Secretary Tom Price can place regulatory chokeholds on the dreaded Obamacare.

Real Problems: The ACA does have problems. We’ve seen health premiums rise the last few years. True, they’re lower than they would have been without Obamacare (given the out-of-control, pre-ACA inflation rate), and the ACA subsidies have absorbed most of those extra costs for most people, but it would be troubling if this trend continues.

Worse, insurance companies have pulled out of the ACA health-care exchanges, such that in about one-third of U.S. counties, there is only one provider available, depriving consumers of choice and all of us the competition needed to keep health costs low.

The solution to both problems is to get more people, even healthy people, into the system. This lowers the per-person cost for everyone and incentivizes insurers to participate, increasing choice and competition.  

Real Solutions: We should thus “fix it, not nix it.” Here are some possibilities:

Single-Payer: We should be pushing hard for a “Medicare for all” plan.  Medicare has the lowest administrative overhead (only 2 percent) of any player in the system, including the supposedly efficient corporations, because it doesn’t have to advertise, market, or attract overpaid executives. This system could replace the ACA as we know it and solve in one fell swoop the problems of universal coverage, rising costs, and choice. Almost as good is Hillary Clinton’s proposal to expand Medicaid and reduce eligibility for Medicare (to, say, 50).

Public Option: If that’s not feasible, we can reintroduce the “public option,” which lobbyists took out of the original ACA bill.  Especially in counties with only one provider on its exchange, the government could offer competition with a public-run insurance plan — like Medicare. 

Miscellaneous Tweaks: We should insist on a grab bag of adjustments which would bring in customers, reduce costs, and provide long term stability.

Carrots & Sticks: Everyone’s supposed to buy health insurance or pay a penalty if they don’t. The penalty’s small enough that young, healthy people would rather pay it than sign up for insurance. This needs to change. To that “stick” we can add the “carrot” of increased subsidies to get people to buy into the system.

Bargain Down Drug Prices: Thanks to a Bush-era sellout to Big Pharma, the federal government is currently barred from negotiating to reduce prescription drug prices. This should change, too.

Extend the “Risk Corridors”: The parties ought to be able to agree to extend the so-called “risk corridors.” Under the “corridors,” insurers pitch into a pool, which compensates insurers who lose money on the exchanges. These “pools” are due to expire. Yes, it’s a bailout of big corporations, but it’s one way — politically, the easiest way—to keep the health exchanges functioning. 

For more information (on both sides), check out this Friday’s all-day symposium on the Future of the ACA, held at the University of Memphis Law School.

Former County Commissioner Steve Mulroy, the Associate Dean at the University of Memphis Law School, prepared these points for a Federalist Society symposium on health care this week.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Now open: Cafe 7/24 and Chef Tam’s Underground Cafe

Charisse Gooden works in the health insurance industry. Her sister, Shan, is a teacher. Her father, Charles, is a retired firefighter. Now, they’re all restaurateurs.

The three of them plus Charisse’s brother, Charles, decided to open a restaurant after the matriarch, Charisse’s mother Rosalind Martin, passed away in early 2015.

“The inheritance was taxed so heavily, my sister said we need to do something,” Charisse says.

Her sister also noticed the old Prohibition Lounge space at 94 S. Front was up for lease and urged Charisse to go look at it.

A meeting with Prince Mongo and his bare feet and the Zambodia Ambassador’s rapport with the Chief (Charisse’s dad’s nickname), and they were signing a lease.

The family debuted the restaurant, named Cafe 7/24 in honor of Martin’s birthday, in December of last year with its grand chandeliers, its New Orleans-style balcony, and its old-world exposed brick and ironwork and the kind of fanfare it, and Martin, deserve.

Charisse Gooden and family debuted Cafe 7/24 in the old Prohibition Lounge space.

“We had a pop-up shop downstairs and a DJ,” Charisse says. “It was packed out. It was beautiful to see so many people come out and support us.”

They built the menu around the Chief’s experience cooking in the station house.

“Dad has always been a griller,” Charisse says. “He would grill stuff for people for the holidays and call it Chief Gooden’s Smokin ‘Cue.”

They added his knock-out catfish, burgers, fried chicken, a sampler platter, and Charisse’s creation, Loaded BBQ Fries — crinkle fries topped with chopped pork, the Chief’s barbecue sauce, cheese sauce, and a dusting of dry rub ($9).

They offer a menu of signature drinks and a special for Grizzlies games, the GrindTime Grub, served from 6 p.m. to close during Grizzlies home games which includes their special Delta burger, fries, and a domestic bottled beer for $10.

Charisse looks forward to hosting poetry slams in the downstairs area, which is also available for rent, as well as trivia nights and karaoke.

Most of all, she’s glad she’s found a way for the whole family to honor the woman a whole community looked up to.

“My mom was a principal for Memphis City Schools for 30 years,” Charisse says. “When she was in Frayser, which was run by gangs, she turned it around in one year. She was a boss.”

Cafe 7/24, 94 S. Front, 590-3360, cafe724.com. Open Monday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.

It’s all about family for Tamra Eddy, too.

She had been looking to branch out and open her own restaurant, putting feelers out with family and friends, and someone suggested she take a look at the old Imagine vegan restaurant space on Young.

She did, and decided against it, but one more trip to the house-turned-restaurant space and a car-sitting session, and something sort of miraculous happened.

“I looked up, and at the cross street I saw my father’s name,” Eddy, known as Chef Tam, says.

Chef Tam’s Underground Cafe sits at the corner of Young and Bruce, at 2299 Young, and has hit the ground running.

“We opened a day and a half before Memphis Black Restaurant Week, and we took on that beast,” Eddy says. “We had cars parked all the way back down the street and 30 or 40 people standing waiting on a table.”

They were waiting to get their hands, and mouths, on Deep Fried Ribs ($15), the Donut Burger (yes, that’s a burger on a glazed donut, $10), and her signature Deep Fried Muddy Balls, macaroni and cheese with crawfish, crab, and shrimp, deep fried for $8.

Or her butter rum cake that’s “ridiculous” and her honey butter yeast rolls that “everybody goes crazy for.”

Eddy has taken the spot and made it her own, repainting the walls, redoing the electricity, and recently updating the patio, and she’s looking forward to offering curbside service as well as delivery, by the end of April for the former and the end of the summer for the latter.

Her favorite feature is the community table in the front room, which is covered and sealed with her grandmother’s handwritten recipes.

“I had that built with the thought that nobody sits and talks to each other any more,” Eddy says. “It has happened that people ended up sharing food, and they didn’t even know each other.”

She learned from the best. Her grandmother was a baker, her grandfather a barbecue pit master, and her father a chef with his own restaurant.

“My slogan is Legacy Is Intentional,” she says. “If we can just bring everybody together, we have the opportunity to change the world.”

Chef Tam’s Underground Cafe, 2299 Young, 207-6182, cheftam.com. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Trumpscare

CREDIT: Americanspirit | Dreamstime.com

Now that the farce called Trumpcare has imploded into finger pointing and recriminations, you can bet the insurance companies, aided by the GOP congress, will do everything in their power to assure the final destruction of Obamacare. Since the health-care industry is in turmoil, may I ask a basic question? What in God’s name is the insurance business doing in the heart of health care in the first place? Why should anyone profit from the misery of others?

I roughly understand the basics of life insurance. People come together as a group and pay continual premiums into a general account. Miss a payment, and they keep your money. Just ask me. Everybody’s premiums are invested, making the insurance companies grandly prosperous, so they can afford to pay death benefits to the beneficiaries of the dearly departed who had the courtesy to die within the allotted time frame. In other words, you’re making a bet on when you’ll buy the farm. The insurers even have mortality tables that provide odds on your death, sort of like a human expiration date. Should you win your bet, your family gets paid, only you’re dead. If you live past the 20 or 30 years usually proscribed in an insurance contract, you lose and get squat. And they keep your money — all of it.

[content-1]

The whole thing is purposely vague so that you need to hire an agent, or one will surely find you. The same principles apply to other insurance instruments, like car, home, travel, or personal accident. The difference is that not everyone will be involved in a car wreck, or have their travelers’ checks stolen, or their house burn down, but sooner or later, everybody is going to get sick. 

The purpose of Obamacare was to spread the risks of health-care costs among a large group of people in order to pay the extortion rates of the medical and pharmaceutical industries. For instance, a bottle of Excedrin at Walgreen’s costs six dollars, but in the hospital, it’s six bucks a tablet. It’s all a scam assembled by the institutions that stand to reap the profits from the treatment of the sick and elderly. That’s why Obama asked for the mandate, so that younger people who tend to be healthier join the pool of the insured. Just as everyone is required to buy auto insurance, even if you never use it, everyone’s purchase of health insurance would pay the costs of colossal, backbreaking hospital bills and prescription medications.

The plan faltered because young people weren’t interested in another monthly note, and the bill had Barack Obama’s name on it. Still, 20 million people were able to take advantage of the Affordable Care Act, even if many didn’t know it was Obamacare by another name. The mistake was allowing the insurance companies to remain in place to continue fleecing the populace, but that would require a public option, and you know how those free marketeers love their capitalism. It’s well known that the United States is the only country in the civilized world that doesn’t offer health care to its citizens as a right and not a privilege. A study by the Commonwealth Fund of the health-care systems in 11 developed countries found America dead last, despite our health care being the world’s most expensive.

[content-2]

By contrast, just across the river from Detroit is the nation of Canada — less than half a mile away, but light years away in the care of its citizens. Health care in Canada works like Medicare for everyone, advocated by Bernie Sanders during his presidential campaign. All medical expenses are free except dental and prescription drugs. The government keeps drugs cheap by negotiating with the pharmaceutical companies on a federal level. Bringing that model to this country would bring peace of mind to patients, free doctors from endless paperwork, and since the profit motive would be removed, there would be no need for fraud or superfluous hospital tests to run up Medicare bills that benefit someone’s bottom line. Of course, that would require that hospitals be funded by the public as part of the national budget. Now that the Jolly Orange Giant has turned his back on the health-care issue, he has focused his gaze on tax cuts for the wealthy. So there will be no universal health care during Trump’s tenure — however long that may be.

The reactionary Republicans voted to repeal Obamacare more than 60 times. They had seven years to come up with a replacement, and they couldn’t do it. Speaker Paul Ryan’s hastily constructed American Health Care Act couldn’t pass muster with the GOP Freedom Caucus, the group formerly known as the Tea Party. Although health-insurance lobbyists helped shape the bill that slashed funding for Medicaid so the poor would suffer first, it still wasn’t cruel enough for the hard-right zealots. Last-minute revisions intended to throw raw meat to the jackals included turning the funding of Medicare over to the states, giving “health-care tax credits” to the elderly, the immediate repeal of Obama’s taxes on the rich, and the instituting of a test for all “able-bodied adults” to pass a work requirement before being enrolled in Medicaid.

Americanspirit | Dreamstime.com

Donald Trump

Herr Trump blamed the Democrats for not voting to destroy President Obama’s signature achievement. Trumpcare went up in flames because of the activism of millions of people who opposed it and transformed town hall meetings into episodes of The Oprah Winfrey Show. As it turns out, the public seems to like their Obamacare, which was formulated by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s and enacted into law by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. The Affordable Care Act remains the law of the land and a bruising defeat for the “Art of the Spiel.” Donald Trump rose to prominence by appearing in a reality TV show called The Apprentice. He should return to a career in reality television, only this time, Trump could be the host of The Biggest Loser.
Randy Haspel writes the “Recycled Hippies” blog, where a version of this column first appeared.