Author: Ben Popper

Financial Straits

Post author By Ben Popper
Post date February 3, 2006

In December, executives at Memphis City Schools thought they were close to hiring a new chief financial officer. They were in talks with Henry Marini, a former executive at Bausch & Lomb and the Rochester City Schools in New York state. But negotiations soon broke down because MCS could not meet Marini’s asking price.

“Even after the first page of his proposed contract, I was behind the eight ball,” says Michael Goar, MCS’ chief of operations.

Memphis has not had a permanent finance director since Roland McElrath, the associate superintendent of business operations hired in 2000, quit in 2003. Goar had hoped to announce the district’s new CFO before the Christmas break. At the end of December, however, Marini decided to take a position as a consultant with the Kansas City School System in Missouri.

The incident raises questions about MCS’ ability to compete in the academic job market.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, Memphis is the 21st largest school district in the country. The city school system has an annual operating budget of $785 million, with more than three quarters going to salaries and benefits. Yet in the search for top executives, especially at the position of chief financial officer, MCS is struggling to contend. “I believe that we are underpaying our key positions,” says Goar. “We need to make some sort of adjustment.”

Both Rochester and Kansas city school districts, for example, are significantly smaller than Memphis in terms of size and budget. Yet both were willing to pay Marini more money than he was offered in Memphis. Rochester, which has an operating budget roughly two-thirds that of MCS, paid CFO Marini $161,000 annually, plus a car allowance; MCS offered $153,000.

Kansas City Schools, which has an annual budget of around $275 million, hired Marini as a financial consultant for $6,500 a week and is expected to retain him through their transition to a new superintendent in the summer. If Marini works for six months at KCS, he will make more money than he would at MCS in a year.

Goar asserts that there are a number of pressures facing MCS that make it difficult to stay competitive in terms of salary. For the last two years, MCS has run deficits of $30 million and $32 million. “It is very difficult to address compensation while you are in the middle of dealing with a deficit,” says Goar.

Much of the deficit is, in fact, tied to the size of the MCS workforce. The school system is the largest employer in the city. Expenditures related to salary can be troublesome. “We have four brand-new unions, and these will drive salaries up,” says Goar, “as well as increases in the cost of health insurance, pay, and retirement benefits.”

Yet the troubles facing MCS are exactly what a CFO would deal with. When Marini went to Rochester, the school system was facing a nearly $30 million deficit; he balanced the budget and helped organize the system’s finances.

“The role of the CFO is a lot different today in an urban school than it was even two or three years ago,” says Marini. “There are increased health-care costs and a continuing growth in unions. You need a CFO who is skilled in negotiation, someone with business skills, in addition to [civic] skills.”

In fact, Goar says that one reason Marini was an attractive candidate was his experience in both the private and public sectors.

According to Margaret Coleman, the former MCS CFO who left for Atlanta in 2000, the longer Memphis goes without a permanent CFO, the harder it will be to get a new one. “Memphis hasn’t had a CFO in a while,” she says. “That means there is a high degree of risk. Most CFOs want to be paid for that risk.”

Goar insists that MCS has a capable interim staff and that no one would be a panacea for MCS’ budget woes. Still, he admits that the district may have to reconsider the importance and relative expense of the CFO position.

“We’re in the process of evaluating strategies for compensation and preparing to present that to the superintendent and the board,” he says. “At this point, we lack a coherent model or strategy for compensation. In the past, no one really paid that much attention to compensation. They just went with the flow.”

Perhaps MCS will heed David Smith, school board president at Kansas City, who, praising the hiring of Marini, said: “I didn’t want to be penny-wise and pound-foolish.”

News The Fly-By

Back to the Future

Post author By Ben Popper
Post date February 3, 2006

In the world of thrift, there are the casual devotees, and then there are the self-described junkers: collectors like Kristen Rutschman and Dale McNeil.

Rutschman and McNeil are co-owners of Light Years Vintage, a store on South Cooper near Nelson that opened last November. Both Memphis natives have experience in vintage clothing and, perhaps more importantly, the courage to go beyond the call of duty.

“We go everywhere: podunk towns, rag houses where you can buy by the pound,” says McNeil. “And then there was that one time in Los Angeles.”

The couple, following an Internet lead, found themselves at a suburban home.

“As soon as you stepped inside, the smell hit you, like something here is really wrong,” says Rutschman. The homeowner had vintage clothes in her house, but she also had several hundred snakes.

The duo has dealt in vintage clothes for over six years after a trip to Japan (where a pair of vintage Levis can sell for $600) inspired them to try Internet sales. “We started out buying for clients overseas,” says McNeil.

The couple considered opening a store in Los Angeles but found the market saturated and the real estate pricey. “Memphis, by comparison, didn’t really have anything that was selling to the youth market,” says McNeil. After the Cotton Exchange, a vintage store in Cooper-Young, closed last year, the couple felt there was a vintage void in Memphis.

The two acknowledge that there is some competition, but they are not worried. “We’re trying to do something that is very different from the aesthetic of a store like Flashback, which has an older, very definite period feel,” says Rutschman.

The store gives the couple a home base, but they still act as buyers for independent clients.

“There are certain items we have that wouldn’t sell in Memphis. This isn’t the kind of town where you can sell a T-shirt for $400,” says Rutschman. However, they encourage customers to make requests because of their experience in acquiring specialty vintage items.

Light Years features a wide selection of clothes and accessories, but specializes in vintage rock T-shirts. “The stuff that designers like Marc Jacobs and Chloe are selling is basically borrowed from exactly the kind of stuff we have, except we charge one-tenth the price of designer clothes,” says McNeil. “Plus, if our stuff has lasted 30 years, you know the quality has to be pretty good.”

Film Features Film/TV

Double Fault

Post author By Ben Popper
Post date February 3, 2006

Woody Allen has always struggled with a desire to write high drama. I say struggled because as an artist he is inarguably more successful, not to mention universally recognized, as a comedian. His own life has taken its tragic turns, and Allen has been successful with dramatic films such as Crimes & Misdemeanors, a work that bears no little resemblance to his newest, Match Point. In the former film, however, Allen was present as the comic relief, while in his new work the tone hews closer to Crime & Punishment. The strain of a full-on tragedy results in a film that is ambitious and enjoyable, if ultimately flawed.

The protagonist of Match Point is Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), a former tennis pro who has come to London to try and make his way. He takes a job as a tennis instructor and, between backhands, befriends one of his pupils, a wealthy society lad named Tom Hewett (Matthew Goode). Chris is soon introduced to the whole Hewett clan, begins dating Tom’s sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer), and seems to be on his way to ingratiating himself into the good life. The catch: Tom’s bombshell fiancée, a struggling American actress named Nola played by successful American actress Scarlett Johansson.

I have to stop here and say a word about the acting in this film. I don’t know if Allen was trying out some kind of self-reflexive gag here, casting Johansson as a sexy American who can’t act to save her life, but despite my best efforts to focus on her attributes, her performance is downright miserable. Rhys-Meyers is not much better, while all the Brits and supporting characters do an outstanding job. (Note to Allen: Please, please get a better casting director!)

Nola and Tom break up, Chris and Chloe get married, and then, in a spot of bad luck, Chris and Nola meet again, rekindling his irrepressible lust for her. The film is best here, playing back and forth across the affair and marriage, intertwining British society humor with the domestic sphere that Allen has always captured so well.

The problem is that Allen goes too far. If he wants to write a tragedy without paying lip service to his comic past, fine with me. Here, though, that desire overrides Allen’s attention as a director. Chris is supposed to be a charming character, but Allen only shows him as a moody schemer. Many of the conversations between Chris and Nola sound less like dialogue than recitations of character motivations, the sort of from-the-heart claptrap that Allen should never let himself write.

Despite its flaws, I did enjoy Match Point. The tension builds palpably until you find yourself squirming for a way out. The film ends with a bit of finesse, and Allen’s philosophical musing on the role that luck plays in life doesn’t feel heavy-handed. With a better cast and sprinkle of levity, this could have been a brillant film. As it stands, I would say Allen has hit this one just out of bounds.

Match Point

Now playing

News The Fly-By

MCS’ Money Man

Post author By Ben Popper
Post date January 27, 2006

Martavius Jones, the newest commissioner on the Memphis City Schools board, doesn’t have children of his own. Not yet, anyway.

But he does have strong beliefs about the importance of family in a child’s education.

“I think the biggest challenge facing the board is trying to increase parental involvement,” he says. “I think you will see, whenever you have higher levels of parental involvement, you have higher levels of student achievement.”

Jones was educated in the Bluff City. He went to a number of different public schools, sometimes in his own neighborhood, sometimes not. His opinion of busing is like the man himself — sensible.

“I knew I had to go to school,” he says, “that happened to be on the other side of town, and that the only way to get there was the yellow bus that came in the morning.”

After graduating from Central High School, Jones went to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he studied finance. “I look at my college experience as being everything, inside and outside the university. What was great about Howard was that D.C. was the political capital of the world.”

Although he enjoyed living in that political hotbed, Jones insists that he is no politician:

“As far as my saying, well, okay, what office am I going to seek next, that hasn’t crossed my mind. I would much rather Martavius Jones be known as a successful businessman, a financial adviser, and someone who has served on a number of boards.”

Jones also sits on the alcohol commission, so he is used to the rigors of parliamentary procedure. Until Michael Hooks resigned last fall, Jones says he had no aspirations to be a member of the school board although he regularly attended school board meetings “to see how things work in the community.” But Jones lives in Hooks’ district and belongs to the political organization New Path, which encouraged him to run.

After college, Jones worked for Aetna Health Plans, then later for the brokerage firm AG Edwards and the bank now known as AmSouth. In 2001, he left AmSouth to become an independent financial consultant.

Jones believes his finance and insurance experience will make him a valuable asset to the school board.

“We’ve had parents, ministers, and lawyers, but I’m not sure we’ve ever had a black businessman on the school board before,” says Jones. “I just want to make sure that when I have kids, they get as good an education in Memphis as I did.”

We Recommend We Recommend

Nature’s Song

Post author By Ben Popper
Post date January 27, 2006

When Huun-Huur-Tu appear at the Buckman Performing and Fine Arts Center this week, there will be four men on stage. Despite that fact, there will be between eight and 10 voices singing at once.

Huun-Huur-Tu are practitioners of throat singing, a vocalization that allows a single performer to produce multiple, distinct notes simultaneously. Throat singing — a constant low pitch with a series of articulated harmonics above it — sounds like a difficult skill, but as Huun-Huur-Tu founding member Sayan Bapa explains, it is a part of everyday life for the native Tuvan: “When you are a nomad, you hear your father and your grandfather sing like this, so you do it too.”

The nomadic lifestyle of Tuvan sheep and reindeer herders influenced both the sonic and representational qualities of throat singing. Traditionally, the Tuvan singer performed alone, each soloist specializing in a particular style of throat singing. “It was something you would do to keep yourself company when working or riding a horse,” says Bapa. In addition, the Tuvans’ surroundings dictated the sound.

Ted Levin, an American who explored the Soviet Autonomous Republic of Tuva located north of Mongolia and made the first modern field recordings of throat singing, explains it this way: “By imitating the sounds of nature, the human music-makers seek to link themselves to the beings and forces that concern them.”

The throat singing of the Tuvans is thus a kind of onomatopoeia. The warbling of birds, rushing of winds, and grumbling of animals are all transformed and transfigured as song. According to Levin, the Tuvans not only imitate nature, they also use the songs as a form of oral topography, a way to pass on information to people governed by large-scale movement and perilous geography.

The group playing at the Buckman is unique in that it performs as a quartet. It was formed in 1992 by Kaigal-ool Khovalyg, Alexander Bapa, his brother Sayan Bapa, and Albert Kuvezin. Since then Kuvezin and Alexander Bapa have left the group and have been replaced by Anatoli Kuular and Alexei Saryglar, respectively. The group joined forces as a means of concentrating on the presentation of traditional songs from their homeland. Originally, they were dubbed Kungurtuk but have since changed their name to Huun-Huur-Tu, which in English translates to the enigmatic phenomenon “sun propeller.”

The idea of a “sun propeller” is helpful in understanding the depth of the Tuvan connection to nature. It describes a particular moment, when the sky is clear enough and the sun, either ascending or dropping away for the evening, is briefly perched on the horizon. The rays of the sun divide and fan out like the blades of a propeller.

Since their arrival in America in the early 1990s, Huun-Huur-Tu has attracted a legion of fans and collaborated with many notable musicians, including Frank Zappa, Ry Cooder, and the Kronos Quartet.

Tickets to the group’s Sunday-night performance in Memphis sold out quickly, so a Monday-night performance was added. “The tickets are going like crazy,” says Cindi Younker of the Buckman. “We’ve just had an incredible response to this group.”

In addition to the concerts, Huun-Huur-Tu will visit Rhodes College on Monday afternoon to give a demonstration and lead a master class. Donna Kwan is a professor of ethnomusicology at Rhodes where she teaches a course titled “Global Pop: Asia and Beyond.” “I’m a big fan of Huun-Huur-Tu,” Kwan says. “They are not only amazing singers, they also have an incredible connection to nature.”

Memphians who want to learn how difficult it is to sing more than one note at a time can go to Rhodes’ McCoy Theater Monday, January 30th, at 4 p.m. There will be a 45-minute demonstration by Huun-Huur-Tu, followed by a 45-minute master class, both of which are free and open to the public.

Huun-Huur-Tu

7 p.m. Sunday-Monday, January 29th-30th

Buckman Performing and Fine Arts Center

$18-$20

News The Fly-By

Just the Facts?

Post author By Ben Popper
Post date January 13, 2006

If you have lived in Memphis for a long time, you probably know a thing or two about the city. Yet even a Bluff City buff can only know so much. A city like Memphis is full of details, and it’s changing every day.

So what if everyone in Memphis could add their opinion to the definition of the city, changing information and updating data in real time? That is the idea behind Wikipedia, the popular Internet encyclopedia where anyone can add or edit an entry.

Founded in 2001 by entrepreneur Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia has grown into the largest English language encyclopedia in existence, with over 900,000 articles. It is the second most popular reference Web site behind Yahoo.

The encyclopedia has a long and fairly comprehensive article on Memphis, covering the textbook categories of history, economy, geography, and government. But where Wikipedia excels over a traditional encyclopedia is in cataloging recent events. For instance, Wikipedia notes the Cooper-Young district “is increasingly considered one of the more artistic and hip areas of the city and evidence of successful urban renewal in Memphis’ core.”

Wikipedia also knows that Orange Mound was one of the first African-American neighborhoods built by African Americans and that “Tyler Glover, who operates Tyler’s Place restaurant … has been dubbed the ‘Mayor of Orange Mound.'”

Wikipedia has certain advantages over a traditional encyclopedia. Its article on the Tennessee Waltz contains a timeline of events, the fallout, and links to all the major players. A single click will give users information on John Ford Sr.’s personal and political history.

The site also includes nontraditional information. On the Memphis rap group Three 6 Mafia, Wikipedia offers a complete biography, discography, and the sage advice that former member Gangsta Blac should not be confused with Crunchy Black, who is still in the group.

There is a danger and an allure to Wikipedia. On the one hand, there is the promise of an egalitarian system of collecting, correcting, and sharing information. On the flip side are the possibilities of misinformation and slander, such as the Wikipedia biography of retired Tennessee media mogul John Seigenthaler Sr.

The entry, posted for several months last year, suggested that Seigenthaler played a role in the John F. Kennedy assassination. Seigenthaler countered with a November 30th USA Today story about the “Internet character assassination.”

Kat Walsh, a spokeswoman for Wikipedia and an avid contributor, says Wikipedia decided to focus on the accuracy of its content following the Seigenthaler incident. “We already have a strong base of articles, so accuracy will now become our major focus.”

Film Features Film/TV

Mountain Men

Post author By Ben Popper
Post date January 13, 2006

Perhaps what is most striking about Brokeback Mountain, a film whose content certainly preceded it (yes, right, they’re queer!) and whose title seems to cry out for facile punning (I recommend Bareback Mounting), is how little it resembles a “gay cowboy movie.” Directed with a stoic tenderness by Ang Lee and adapted from a short story by Annie Proulx, this is the aching story of a love that cannot be fully consummated. Brokeback Mountain doesn’t marginalize the sexuality of its primary characters, but the film does look beyond it to the human depths and repercussions of a youthful passion that lasted a lifetime.

The film opens on Ennis Del Mar (magnificently sullen Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (the respectable but less captivating Jake Gyllenhaal), two young cowpokes looking for work. The pair is hired to guard a herd of sheep on Brokeback Mountain and their journey out to the grazing lands allows for Lee’s evocation of that classic western sequence: the cattle drive. Lee’s combination of panoramic and detailed shooting gives a sense of both the isolation and the intimacy the two men are going to experience. Ang Lee’s treatment of the countryside is thrilling. As he did in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Lee parlays the natural setting into a powerful metaphor for the love between his main characters.

I don’t want to suggest that this movie is drawing heavily on the established mythos of the Western genre but rather draw attention to the wonderful realism with which it paints the life of the Wyoming roughneck. Ennis and Jack are not swaggering archetypes but hardscrabble youths living paycheck to paycheck. Their friendship is slow-growing and truthful, their budding attraction not initially expressed.

As Ennis and Jack become closer, they start sleeping in the same space instead of splitting their duties between watching the sheep and the campsite. Soon the moment arrives: the sex. I almost don’t want to go into it, because I’m afraid the anticipation of it can overshadow enjoyment of the film. What is most striking about it is the almost accidental tone and the sudden ferocity while they struggle for dominance.

The two men form a deep bond during their stint on Brokeback but end up parting on ragged terms. When it becomes clear the next year that the situation will not repeat itself, they both try their hand at playing it straight. But Brokeback, the almost Edenic site of the two men’s first commingling, acts as a tether, calling the two back as they try and increasingly fail to maintain both their secret love and their safe roles as hetero husbands and fathers.

One of the fantastic things about Brokeback Mountain is that it makes room for the women who enter the lives of both men. Ennis marries Alma (Michelle Williams), has two daughters, and continues work as a ranch hand. Jack marries Laureen (Anne Hathaway), the daughter of a rich farm equipment salesman, and they have a son. For a while at least, the two men appear to have settled with their past. They find some small joys in marriage and fatherhood. One of my favorite scenes is of Ennis, who has taken his family to a 4th of July picnic, protecting them from a pair of bikers who are behaving lewdly. Lee shows Ennis, determined and masculine to the extreme, silhouetted against bursting fireworks and acting for all the world like an American hero, while his impenetrable scowl hides his buried desires.

The two men eventually reunite and begin a long-distance relationship as old fishing buddies. The relationship is their secret joy, but it increasingly becomes a burden as well. The two are torn by allegiances to their families, by a growing economic divide, and by struggles over the marginalized nature of their relationship. Jack wants to run off together but Ennis is unwilling to, and his fears about the repercussions are captured in a flashback to his youth. When Ennis was young, his father took him to see the corpse of a murdered man, who had lived on a ranch with another man as his partner. Ennis wonders aloud if his father was showing him a warning or an example of his own handiwork, a chilling juxtaposition of a father’s hidden life.

There is time in this film for many twists and turns. We struggle along with the two men, feeling the weight of their love and the painful impossibility of it growing clearer with age. The film is a triumph because it creates characters of humanity and anguish, in a setup that could easily become a target for homophobic ridicule. Jack and Ennis are a brave challenge to the stereotyped image of homosexuals in mainstream films, their relations to their families and to each other truthful and beautifully captured.

Special Sections

Back to Basics

Post author By Ben Popper
Post date January 6, 2006

School-learning is fine. But if I had been a Boy Scout, I would have had the chance to acquire all those wonderful merit badges, each one representing some sturdy all-American skill that I know I’m going to need someday.

Luckily, Memphis provides many opportunities to get educated in a variety of activities that would make any self-respecting Boy or Girl Scout proud. From camping to rock climbing and ceramics to wilderness first aid, organizations around Memphis can help broaden your horizons, although you’ll have to provide your own badges.

At Outdoors, Inc. on North Germantown Parkway, Thursday-evening classes on the rock-climbing wall provide a chance for students and employees to exercise and unwind. “This is more of a workout than I get doing anything else,” says Brian O’Connor, a first-time student from Cordova. “I like it because it is just as much exercise as lifting weights, but it is also a real mental challenge figuring out how to get up the wall.”

The class covers everything from climbing to knot-tying. The teacher, Josh Cook, is a 10-year veteran of climbing who can’t keep a smile off his face when he discusses the sport.

The 20-foot wall has dozens of different routes marked out with colored tape, ranging from beginner to advanced. “Even on this little wall you probably have a couple months worth of routes,” says Cook. Once you’ve taken a class, you can pay $5 anytime to come in and use the wall. Cook says he hopes to start leading climbing expeditions with his students.

Memphians looking for something a little less strenuous can check out the early-morning class at Clayworks. “I’ve had a lot of these students for three years,” says Patricia Schwarz, the owner and instructor at Clayworks. Schwarz has taught pottery classes both privately through the studio and through the University of Memphis Continuing Education program before it was cut.

Barbara Potter is a longtime student and a marketing advisor at FedEx. “It’s just such a nice mix of relaxation, creativity, and camaraderie,” says Potter. Students chat and laugh as they work clay on spinning wheels. “I have a lot of students from the corporate world and the health-care industry, from high-stress jobs,” says Schwarz. “This is where you come to get away from the real world.”

While you’re relaxing, you are also learning to make something beautiful. Schwarz says throwing pottery is a definite skill, one that can take a long time to master. Still, with practice she believes anyone can learn. And even if you don’t, it can still be fun. “Some days the clay decides what I’m making,” Potter says.

If you crave the great outdoors, you might consider taking a backpacking or car-camping class taught by the Chickasaw Sierra Club. Not only do they arrange for hikes, but according to Judith Hamilton, the club’s outings chair, they have a lot they can teach you. “We tell all the attendees of our classes to bring the one thing they can’t camp without. You get everything from a sleeping bag to a bottle of wine.”

The backpacking and car-camping classes are both geared to give urban explorers some solid advice on how to prepare for their trips. “We tell people what to bring and, just as importantly, what not to bring,” says Hamilton. Experienced backpackers and campers from the Sierra Club teach the classes and give advice on everything from what type of pack to wear to how best to equip your car for a family outing while also stressing the importance of respecting the environment.

SOLO is an organization dedicated to wilderness medicine, outdoor leadership, and rescue. They teach a two-day course on how to deal with a variety of injuries in isolated conditions — everything from treating cuts and burns to splinting broken bones and even what to do if someone’s struck by lightning.

So even if you’ve never done more than buy a box of Girl Scout cookies, you still have a chance to learn and play in the great outdoors. With all these great classes it won’t be long before you’re qualified to lead some scouts of your own.

Rock Climbing at Outdoors, Inc. — 755-2271

Pottery at Clayworks — 722-2164

Backpacking and Car Camping with the Sierra Club — 324-7757

Wilderness First Aid — 615-943-6877

ben@memphisflyer.com