Tag: book

Categories
Book Features Books

Mississippi Hippie

Our nation has a distinct literary tradition, which some dub the American bildungsroman, that delves into the provincial life of a protagonist in his or her youth, then reveals, layer by layer, the stages of learning and mind-opening encounters by which the narrator learns of the wider world, thereby transcending provincialism and achieving a kind of worldly wisdom. And such books, often loosely autobiographical, can, by way of setting the scene for the protagonist’s eventual escape, offer rich and nuanced portraits of the small-town milieu in which they were raised. Writings as disparate as Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory paint indelible portraits of daily existence in small towns.

Now, local author, filmmaker, musician, and photographer Willy Bearden has produced such a work about his hometown of Rolling Fork in his semi-fictionalized memoir, Mississippi Hippie: A Life in 49 Pieces. And, in its segmented, episodic telling, it reads like another great fragmented bildungsroman, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio — but with a laconic Southern drawl.

Like Anderson’s masterpiece, Bearden’s memoir is, as he notes in the first sentence, “a work of literature.” And yet he’s committed to telling the story of his life. “Memory has its own story to tell,” he writes. “But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.” 

Bearden has an artist’s commitment to truth-telling, and, as becomes clear over the course of his youthful epiphanies, that unflinching honesty served him well in his quest for a life of some significance. As the Tennessee Williams quote beginning the book states, “No one is ever free until they tell the truth about themselves and the life into which they’ve been cast.”

For Bearden, that starts with a long, hard look at his father. This being a somewhat conversational read, though, it takes him a while to settle on the opening scene. First, he tells the reader of his curious habit, at the age of 11, of listing everyone he’d known who had died. It marks a vivid through-line to the book itself, written in his 70s, filling that same need. 

Then, skipping ahead in time, Bearden confronts the idea of “woke” culture, a descendant of the “hippie” culture that Bearden threw himself into as a teen in the ’60s. And, as he writes, “I am proud of my hippie roots,” yet the book makes clear that such pride comes after long years of confronting the very un-hippie culture of Rolling Fork. 

The book really gets started when, after such preambles, Bearden unearths a short story he wrote in 1984. His father has been returned to the home where Bearden, then 10, was being raised by his mother. “What until now had been the complacent, resigned look of an alcoholic had turned wild and frantic as if some demon inhabited his skinny 130-pound frame.” As the father is unceremoniously dumped into a bed, the stage is set for Bearden’s early years and the chaotic family life he endured.

But, as reflected upon by the author decades later, it’s a thoughtful portrait of such chaos. That’s true of any of the local characters young Bearden interacts with, as the stories skip back and forth in time, often hinting at Bearden’s development as a thinker and a questioner later in life. For, while he wasn’t a great student and didn’t really learn to read until after he was 10, he was doggedly curious and reflective. The folk songs his brother played him jolted him into imagining other values and life ways, and the growing counterculture of the ’60s only confirmed those humanistic values, even if he met some sketchy characters along the way. That in turn served him well as he ventured out into the world (hitchhiking widely from 1969-1976) and greeted all he met with a mixture of Sherwood Anderson’s keen observational eye and Woody Guthrie’s everyman approachability. 

That hopeful, clear-eyed, and even bawdy approach to the world rings out from every page of this book, and it’s still heard in Bearden’s current work as a historian, filmmaker, and raconteur. Knowing that Bearden became a key player in Memphis’ progressive community helps make sense of what he passed through to get there, from the unsavory drunks to the homespun wisdom of Rolling Fork’s working people. Seeing the poverty and racism of his hometown didn’t give him a permanent scowl. Rather, it only made him more determined to keep searching, just over the flat Delta horizon, for some kind of redemption. 

Burke’s Book Store will host a reading and book signing by Willy Bearden on Thursday, September 5, at 6 p.m.

Categories
Book Features Books

Michael Kiggins’ And the Train Kept Moving

Photo: Courtesy Michael Kiggins

Earlier this month, Michael Kiggins released his debut novel, And the Train Kept Moving (Running Wild Press). Set in Memphis, the book uncovers the story of Bryan Meigs, described as “a gay alcoholic with OCD who struggles with the aftermath of getting date-raped and potentially infected with HIV.” It’s a story about mental illness, addiction, and compulsion, and it’s a story about a doomed quest for revenge. 

A former student of the University of Memphis, Kiggins now lives in Nashville but will return to Memphis for a reading and book signing at Burke’s Book Store this Friday at 5:30 p.m. In anticipation of the event, we spoke with the author about his debut novel and his writing journey. Here’s what he had to say. — Abigail Morici

Memphis Flyer: What drove you to write this book?

Michael Kiggins: It started off almost 20 years ago as part of my MFA thesis, but it was a completely different book. It’s gone through several drafts. The narrator and protagonist of the final published draft was originally a secondary character. Just full disclosure, I have OCD, kind of bad, and I just sort of locked into Bryan as the narrator and his mental illness and how that shapes the way that he looks at the world and reacts to the things that happened to him and the things that he does became the spine of the novel. I kind of wanted to explore [OCD] — sort of like, what if a person dealt with what I have sort of have dealt with and mostly gotten over, but that person didn’t [get over it] and what if they went into a really dark place because of it? And I wanted to study that in a time that advances in HIV treatment were there, had been there for about seven years, but it was nine years before the FDA would approve PrEP and 12 years before marriage equality. So much better times than the early ’80s and early ’90s, But his mental illness and just fixations and obsessions can’t really let him see past his own fears of infection. … 

There have been times in previous versions where [the novel] was third person and I just felt like it wasn’t clicking, that it was too removed. And I think one of the strengths of the narration in this final version is that you are so locked into Bryan’s sort of headspace, and — I don’t know if I succeeded at this — but I wanted readers to sort of feel trapped as he is in his own thoughts.

Why was it important for your character to have OCD?

OCD in popular culture and then media often gets reduced to very simplistic things often about tidiness and anal retentiveness, and I really would like for people to inhabit a character who is constantly on guard, trying to protect himself, not really fully understanding exactly how that is ruining his life. I wanted [readers] to feel the obsessive nature that often just gets reduced to a punchline. Also, by using the first person narrator, I wanted them to sort of sympathize with Bryan, but at the same time, by the end of the novel and over the course of the novel, to really begin questioning their allegiances, and why maybe they originally identified with him. I mean, he does some horrible stuff. The novel opens and we know he’s murdered somebody. To me the novel is a tragedy, but the narrator of this novel believes this is sort of a comedy in the classic sense. He is deluding himself. He thinks he’s claimed a victory, but we can hopefully recognize just the pure tragedy of it. 

Why did you choose to set your novel in Memphis over any other place?

I have been in Nashville since 2002, but I was in Memphis from the fall of 1993 until May 2002. I went to undergrad when it was still Memphis State University at the time. And I worked in the mental health field for a few years.Then I realized I didn’t want to do that with my life. So I Hail-Mary-ed an application for [University of Memphis’] MFA program and got in. I started writing [the story] in Memphis like little scraps of scenes here and there, and I didn’t change it because, I don’t know, I love Memphis to death. To me, Memphis was just such a character in the novel itself. And there’s just something about the city that when I lived there, I knew so many people that had been there forever and would rag on the city but they’d never moved. In certain ways, I wanted Bryan to be sort of emblematic of the kind of person who has stayed in Memphis maybe too long, but doesn’t really know how to move on with his life. 

What made you shift from working in the mental health field to pursuing creative writing?

I wasn’t an English major in undergrad. And in fact, I didn’t have enough English credits from undergrad when I got into the MFA program so I had to take some extra classes, but I wrote my first novel in high school. But when I graduated with my B.S. in psych, I worked in the mental health field, and by the end of that, I was so stressed that I had worn deep gouges into my steering wheel, just from the stress. Eventually, I went to work for Friends for Life, and it was one of the most rewarding and fulfilling jobs in my life. But I lost many clients to HIV. I had recently lost one of my favorite clients, and my partner was like, ‘Michael, do you want to do social work for the rest of your professional career?’ And it was such an obvious question, but I hadn’t really ever considered it. At that point, I had been writing a lot, but before the MFA program, I’d never been in a writing workshop. So that sort of opened my eyes to how much I needed to learn. But the program probably saved my life. If I had stayed in the mental health field without any sort of options, I don’t know who I would be today.

Do you feel that you were able to benefit by having another career before pursuing writing professionally and by working on this book for almost two decades?

I’m so grateful for the time I had to really just put this aside to grow as a person, to reconsider what I was attempting to do, and to maybe shed some of my youthful or late 20s, early 30 pretensions. I’m dealing with a lot of heavy topics, and with the very different book that it was way back then [when I first started], I don’t think I had enough insights to accomplish what I was trying to even then. So, yeah, the many extra years really let me sort of interrogate things on a deeper level and just simply refine my writing at the sentence level. But I’m also very grateful and glad that I’m being published before I’m 50. 

And the Train Kept Moving is available for purchase on Amazon and Burke’s Book Store. An audiobook is in production. 

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Phyllis Dixon’s Intermission

Dixon describes her novel as “Dreamgirls meets Waiting to Exhale.”


To an outsider, banking doesn’t seem like the kind of profession to inspire bursts of creativity, but for Phyllis Dixon, that’s how she found her passion for writing fiction. “In a way, it was kind of similar [to my job],” she says, “because one of the things I did was write exam reports, which is the story of the bank and the story of what was going on. We also wrote synopses of some of the borrowers, so you would have to tell their story, too. So it’s kind of the same thing as far as, you know, analyzing a situation and being able to distill that into a story to let people know what’s going on.”

“I traveled a lot [for my job],” Dixon adds. “And so I spent a lot of time in hotels and airports and things like that. Some of the things that people do to kind of pass the time — some people drink, some people knit, some people fool around. And I just stayed in my room and wrote down stories that were swinging around in my head.”

By 2013, Dixon self-published her first novel, Forty Acres, to be followed in 2016 by her second book, Down Home Blues. When Covid hit, she began her third book: Intermission. 

This most recent novel revolves around four women, who were once part of a 1990s girl group on the brink of stardom before breaking up. At the telling of the story, they reunite for a second shot at success, each of them facing a different crisis in her personal life. What follows, the author explains, is a story of forgiveness and reconciliation — and, as it so happens, a story that occurs mostly in Memphis.  

“The idea came to me many years ago,” Dixon says, “and I just always thought about it, even pushed it to the side and wrote another book before coming back to this idea, and then during the Covid lockdown, I told myself, ‘No distractions, no excuses, no slacking.’ I was just determined. And I said, ‘I’m gonna try and get an agent.’ And I sent out a lot, a lot, a lot of queries. And those stars aligned, and here we are today: I was able to get an agent and a traditional publisher [Kensington Publishing].

“Really,” she continues, “I just want to entertain people. There’s so much going on — so much divisiveness and trauma and tragedy and global warming and all this bad stuff going on. I just want to entertain, tell people a good story, and kind of take their mind off all the bad stuff.”

This Tuesday, Dixon will celebrate the launch of Intermission at Novel with a book-signing and discussion. “I just invite people to come by, and even if they don’t come buy my book — it’ll be available [at the] library — I’d appreciate their support because even with my first two books, Memphis has been very supportive. And I appreciate it.” 

Phyllis R. Dixon: Intermission Book Launch, Novel, Tuesday, July 25, 6 p.m.

Categories
Book Features Books

Jamie Harmon’s “Memphis Quarantine”

Grayson Oberg (Photo: Jamie Harmon)

“The Memphis Quarantine Project started on March 13, 2020,” writes photographer Jamie Harmon in the opening lines of his new book, Memphis Quarantine (Amurica), and noting the date only heightens the new volume’s sense of time travel. By that Friday the 13th, the World Health Organization had declared Covid-19 a pandemic and area schools were transitioning to remote learning or extra time off. With the city’s official lockdown more than a week away, most of us were already radically rethinking our routines — and at that point, many feared contagion from just touching groceries. There was but one suggestion of increased safety: the great outdoors.

And so Harmon hit the streets. “I asked a friend if I could photograph them from outside their home,” he writes. “This led to posting an open invitation on social media and the project quickly grew to over 1,200 dwellings.” Luckily for Memphis and the world, Harmon is a photographer with a keen eye for flashes of character in the moment; his bio says he’s a visual anthropologist, and that’s closer to what he does with a camera. With it, he casts a wide net to capture the culture of Memphis in all its diversity: a multitude of porches, windows, apartments, garages, pets, and various states of parenthood reveal themselves from more or less the same zone — between the inside and the outside.

From only a few yards away or through double-paned glass, the distance is always there, looming in every image. A family crouching on a screened-in porch; young housemates gathered with their instruments just inside the door; a couple represented by two heads framed in separate windows; someone playing a guitar solo in green graduation robes; a porch-sitter obscured by the Memphis Flyer she’s reading, her dog alert. Yet all of them also feature another silent subject: the distance itself.

In each shot, Harmon puts himself into what anthropologists call liminal space, a realm betwixt and between different states of being. The photographer keeps his pandemically correct distance, yet simultaneously peers across it, illuminating those interior safe spaces to which we all retreated. Harmon occasionally keeps his spot flash in the frame, throwing light from just outside the window into the spaces where humans live. These pictures capture both how people defined a safe distance in those dark days, and how they defined the interior space of their bubble.

As Harmon was taking images and posting them on social media, just glimpsing them in a scroll was somehow hopeful, albeit ephemeral. Others first saw these portraits in Memphis magazine, or when exhibited by Crosstown Arts in February. But it takes the more contemplative space of a book in your lap to bring it home: Here was someone seeing all of us, bearing witness, even as we bore witness to the friends and neighbors we saw through Harmon’s work. In pairing strangers with more familiar faces, this book forges an all-embracing, democratic vision of who we were.

Writ large, the expressions lean toward the grim, the anxiety-ridden. They’re not unlike dignified 19th-century portraits where subjects presented themselves before the lens in stillness, with the gravitas of the ages. Yet others defy such seriousness of purpose, determined to keep some fun or beauty to their lives, through funny ears, pets, or mugging for the camera. Or, as with that person wearing a tyrannosaurus rex suit in their living room, through all of the above.

It’s a credit to the inventiveness of both Harmon and his subjects that the book presents hundreds of variations in setting, color, lighting, and mood. Some, like Ben Siler, Andria Brown, or Flyer alum Chris Davis, offer writings from or inspired by the time. But most of these portraits are resolutely anonymous, all of us reduced to that stalwart everyman or everywoman bent on survival. In a nod to the many who agreed to have their portrait published (some didn’t), Harmon lists the 814 folders of images in the order he shot them over two and a half months. They’re not meant to identify the subjects; they’re just another artifact of this anthropologist’s journey, from the outside to the inside in the click of a shutter.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

POLITICS: Looking Back

CREDIT: jb

  • Remembering
    Ernest Withers

    One of the great serendipities I’ve experienced as a
    journalist was the decision by former Memphis Magazine
    editor Tim Sampson back in 1993, on the 25th anniversary of
    the death in Memphis of Dr. Martin Luther King, to use as the centerpiece
    of an anniversary issue an archival piece of mine, along with pictures by the
    great photographer Ernest Withers.

    Uncannily often, Withers’ photographs directly illustrated
    specific scenes of my narrative, which had been written originally on the day
    after the assassination and concerned the events of that traumatic day. It was a
    little like being partnered with Michelangelo, and I was more than grateful.

    The publication of that issue led to an invitation from
    Beale Street impresario John Elkington for Withers and me to collaborate
    on a book having to do with the history of Beale Street, and the two of us
    subsequently spent a good deal of time going through the treasure trove that was
    Withers’ photographic inventory.

    For various reasons, most of them having to do with
    funding, the book as envisioned never came to pass (though years later Elkington
    published a similar volume), but the experience led to an enduring friendship.

    One day, when I was having car trouble, Ernest gave me a
    ride home, from downtown to Parkway Village, the still predominantly white area
    where I was living at the time, just beginning a demographic changeover. At the
    time it appeared as though it might become a success of bi-racial living, and we
    talked for some time about that prospect.

    That very evening, Ernest was a panelist on the old WKNO
    show, Informed Sources, and, instead of focusing on the subject at hand,
    whatever it was, chose to discourse at length on the sociology of Parkway
    Village. Watching at home, I was delighted – though the host and other
    panelists, intent on discussing another subject, one of those pro-forma
    public-affairs things, may not have been.

    They should have been. This was the man, remember, who
    documented the glory and the grief of our city and our land as both passed from
    one age into another, which was required to be its diametrical opposite, no
    less. Ernest saw what was happening in Parkway Village as a possible trope for
    that, and whatever he had to say about it needed to be listened to.

    Sadly, of course, the neighborhood in question was not able
    to maintain the blissfully integrated status that Ernest Withers, an eternally
    hopeful one despite his ever-realistic eye, imagined for it.

    As various eulogists have noted, last week and this,
    Withers not only chronicled the civil rights era but the local African-American
    sportscape and the teeming music scene emanating from, an influenced by black
    Memphians.

    He was also, as we noted editorially last week, a family
    man, and it had to be enormously difficult for him that, in the course of a
    single calendar year while he was in his 70s (he was 85 at the time of his
    death), he buried three of his own children.

    Among my souvenirs is a photograph I arranged to have taken
    of Ernest Withers with my youngest son Justin and my daughter-in-law
    Ellen    , both residents of Atlanta, on an occasion when they were visiting
    Memphis a few years back. Happy as they were with the memento, the younger
    Bakers expressed something of a reservation.

    What they’d really wanted, explained Ellen, a museum
    curator who was even then, in fact, planning for a forthcoming Withers exhibit
    in Atlanta, was a picture of the two of them taken by the master.

    Silly of me not to have realized that. To be in a picture
    by Ernest Withers was to become part of history – a favor he bestowed on legions
    of struggling ordinary folk as well on the high and mighty of our time.

  • Remembering Kenneth Whalum Sr.

    There was a time, before Mayor Willie Herenton became the
    acknowledged alternative within the black community to the Ford family’s
    dominance, that councilman Kenneth Whalum was a recognized third force to reckon
    with.

    jb

    The Rudy Williams Band led Ernest Withers’ funeral procession down Beale on Saturday.

    Rev. Whalum was both the influential pastor of Olivet
    Baptist Church in the sprawling mid-city community of Orange Mound and the
    former personnel director of the U.S. Postal Service, locally. In effect, he had a foot planted
    firmly in each of the two spheres that make up the Memphis political community.

    That fact made him a natural for the city council during
    the period of the late ’80s and early ’90s when the era of white dominance was
    passing and that of African-American control was dawning.

    During the 1991 council election, Whalum, along with Myron
    Lowery, achieved milestones as important in their way as was Herenton’s mayoral
    victory, taking out long-serving at-large white incumbents Oscar Edmunds and
    Andy Alissandratos, respectively.

    Whalum was uniquely able to serve both as a sounding board
    for black aspirations and a bridge between races and factions on the council. He
    was a moderate by nature, though sometimes his preacherly passions got the best
    of him and he sounded otherwise. Something like that happened during a couple of
    incendiary sermons he preached during the interregnum between the pivotal
    mayor’s race of 1991 and Herenton’s taking the oath in January 1992 as Memphis’
    first elected black mayor.

    Word of that got to me, and I was able to acquire a
    recording of one of the incriminating sermons. I had no choice but to report on
    it, and – what to say? – it made a bit of a sensation at the time, no doubt
    limiting Whalum’s immediate political horizons somewhat.

    It certainly limited the contacts I would have, again in
    the short term, with a political figure that I had previously had a good
    confidential relationship with. Whalum’s sense of essential even-handedness
    eventually prevailed, however, and we ultimately got back on an even keel.

    To my mind, in any case, Whalum’s outspokenness never
    obscured his essential fair-mindedness, and his occasional prickliness was more
    than offset by his genuine – and sometimes robust – good humor.

    There are many ways of judging someone’s impact on society,
    and one might certainly be the prominence of one’s offspring. In Rev. Whalum’s
    case they included the highly-regarded jazz saxophonist Kirk Whalum and the
    councilman-minister’s namesake son Kenneth Whalum Jr., a school board member and
    an innovative pastor himself — so innovative in his wide-open 21st-century
    style as to cause a generational schism involving Olivet church members. That
    would result in two distinct churches, one led by the senior Whalum, one by
    Whalum Jr.

    Kenneth Whalum Sr. had been something of a forgotten man in
    local politics since leaving the council at the end of 1995 (he would also run
    losing races for both city and county mayor). But he got his hand back in
    briefly during last year’s 9th District congressional race, making a
    point of endorsing Democratic nominee Steve Cohen, who ultimately prevailed.

    Appropriately, Rep. Cohen took the lead, along with Senator
    Lamar Alexander, on behalf of a congressional resolution re-designating the
    South 3rd Street Post Office in honor of Whalum, closing a cycle of
    sorts and forever attaching the name of Kenneth T. Whalum Sr. to one of the
    city’s landmarks.

  • Political Notes:

    Kenneth Whalum Sr.

    –Congressman Cohen was the target recently of what many local Memphians report on
    as a “push” poll taken by random telephone calls to residents of the 9th
    District. Purportedly the poll contained numerous statements casting Cohen in a
    negative light before asking recipients who they might prefer in a 2008 race
    between him and repeat challenger Nikki Tinker.

    (At least one person called recalled that the name of
    Cohen’s congressional predecessor, Harold Ford Jr., now head of the
    Democratic Leadership Council, figured in a triad of potential candidates being
    asked about.)

    –Early voting is now underway in the four city council
    runoffs that will be determined on November 8th.

    Those involve Stephanie Gatewood vs. Bill
    Morrison     in District 1; Brian Stephens vs. Bill Boyd in
    District 2; Harold Collins vs. Ike Griffith in District 3; and
    Edmund Ford Jr    . and James O. Catchings in District 6.

    • Categories
    Book Features Books

    Punk’d (Memphis-style)

    Among the memorable moments in Memphis punk-rock history, some things you just count on: the New York Dolls playing the Auditorium in ’73, when David Johansen of the Dolls was arrested either for inciting a riot or impersonating a woman (accounts differ); the Sex Pistols at the Talysen Ballroom in ’78 (no incidences, but hey, it was the Sex Pistols); and singer/onstage-defecator GG Allin at the Antenna club in ’91, when Allin was stabbed by a fan.

    Other high points are anybody’s guess, and in The Official Punk Rock Book of Lists (Backbeat Books), it’s Eric Friedl — onetime Oblivian, today a True Son of Thunder, and the man behind Goner Records — doing the guessing.

    In addition to Friedl’s “10 Things That Made Memphis Punk,” count on #11, supplied by Memphian Jim Cole and his fond memory the 1910 Fruitgum Co.’s “Bubblegum Riot” at the Mid-South Coliseum in the late ’60s. At the top of the bill was Tommy James & the Shondells, but it was the Fruitgum Co. that brought the house down and the police out in force when members of the band went running through the aisles, the lead singer took a swing at a security guard, and a dozen cops dragged the group off the stage.

    Which kind of puts Tav Falco’s appearance on Marge Thrasher’s TV talk show (#2 on Friedl’s list) in a kinder light. After Falco and his Panther Burns performed their version of “Train Kept A-Rollin,” Thrasher greeted the group with: “That may be the worst sound I’ve ever heard come out on television.” Falco’s polite reply: “Thank you very much.”

    Categories
    Food & Wine Food & Drink

    Praise the Lard!

    Here’s a fun exercise: When you take your pumpkin or apple pie to a Christmas potluck, tell the folks you made the crust with lard, even if you didn’t.

    What is likely to happen next is a combination of (mainly) horror and disgust, mixed in with some fascination and even a dash of admiration. That’s because there are two universally accepted “truths” about lard: One is that lard is terrible for you, and the other is that it makes really, really flaky pie crusts and biscuits.

    On the second truth, there is essentially no debate — although there is still a strong argument for the taste of butter over lard. The first truth, however, is a bit fuzzier.

    Food writers Matt and Ted Lee, in their 2006 Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook, urge the use of some lard in pies and biscuits, and in a chapter on the subject, they make the basic case. Lard, they say, is nothing more than pure, rendered pig fat: “North America’s primary grease from the time European explorers introduced hogs to this continent until the middle of the 20th century.”

    Since then, however, fear of fat has gone up as studies linked animal fats, cholesterol, and heart disease. As the Lee Brothers put it, “Today, most Americans would rather smoke unfiltered Camels while riding a motorcycle without a helmet than eat [lard].”

    But the Lees point to newer studies which talk more about eating the right fat instead of no fat. On that score, quoting stats from the Department of Agriculture on saturated and unsaturated fat, they argue that “lard is no worse for you than butter, and they’re both a heck of a lot healthier than any of the processed, hydrogenated margarines and spreads.”

    The Lees’ pie crust recipe has four tablespoons of butter and two tablespoons of lard, and it can be said from experience that the result is pretty amazing — as long as you warn your vegetarian or kosher friends ahead of time.

    The thing about lard, though — and the Lees acknowledge this — is that the lard you get in stores is hydrogenated (therefore containing trans fats) and loaded with preservatives which at the least add off-flavors and at the worst have been identified as possible carcinogens.

    That — as well as the decades-long problem with public perception — is probably why, if you call any restaurant or bakery in town, you get responses like, “Lard? Oh Lord, no!” Such was the hurried statement from an employee at the Pie Folks in Olive Branch. Backermann’s Bakery in Whiteville, which sells fried pies to Easy Way, says they use only vegetable shortening in their products.

    Lard isn’t a four-letter word everywhere. Mexican cooks rely on it (and Mexican groceries usually have it), and in some places it’s even celebrated. In Ukraine, there’s a festival in honor of what they call salo. At one of the festivals, patrons ate a giant sandwich made with 80 pounds of lard.

    While not yet spreading lard onto sandwiches, Americans may be coming back around to the stuff. There has been a wave of articles with headlines like, “Nothing beats lard for old-fashioned flavor” (Seattle Times, 2006); “Don’t let lard throw you into a tizzy” (San Francisco Chronicle, 2003); and “Heaven in a pie pan” (The New York Times, 2006). Famous chefs like Rick Bayless use it for baking and frying, the latter because it has a very high smoke point.

    The thrust of these articles and many others is about the same as the Lee Brothers’ argument: Our health problems come more from bad fats and calories than anything lard has to offer; Crisco and other fake products (including commercial lard) are unhealthy; and what you really should try is real, fresh lard.

    Ah, and there’s the greasy rub: Where on earth does one find real, fresh lard? In essence, since we couldn’t find anybody in Memphis who sells it, you have two options: mail-order and make-your-own.

    Several places have online ordering of preservative-free lard: Dietrich’s Meats in Pennsylvania (610-756-6344, dietrichsmeats.com); Fiedler Family Farms in Indiana (812-836-4348, fiedlerfamilyfarms.com); and Linda J. Forristal, who calls herself Mother Linda and occasionally has some lard (momlinda@motherlindas.com).

    There are instructions for various rendering methods all over the Internet, and since this reporter doesn’t own his own home, he has yet to try any of them. They boil down (pun intended) to some form of this: Get some pig fat, melt it, strain it, and cool what’s left, which is lard. In essence, bacon grease is lard as well, but not as recommended for these uses. Ideally, you want leaf lard, which comes from the kidney area; the usual backup (another pun), especially for frying, is fatback.

    With some notice, Schnucks says they can get pork fat for about 99 cents a pound. Or check with the meat vendors at a farmer’s market.

    All accounts agree on one thing, though: Your kitchen will smell like a breakfast diner when all is said and done.

    Local connections, hands-on cooking, old-timey ingredients, taste over convenience, purity over preservatives — we just might be on the verge of a lard revolution!

    Categories
    Book Features Books

    Grievous Angel

    “He was a good Southern boy,” Chris Ethridge said of his onetime bandmate Gram Parsons. “Loved to rock and roll, sad all the time.”

    “With certain people,” Chris Hillman said of his onetime bandmate Gram Parsons, “you figure there is nothing you can do.”

    Ethridge and Hillman were right. Gram Parsons had the wealthy makings of a good Southern boy, and he loved to rock when he wasn’t crooning according to the sounds laid down in Nashville and Bakersfield. At heart, he was a sad guy too, and what could anyone do? Nothing, apparently, but watch as drug usage and drinking landed Parsons — former member of the International Submarine Band, the Byrds, and the Flying Burrito Brothers and later solo artist or in partnership with Emmylou Harris — in an early grave.

    Parsons died in 1973 at 26. But before he could reach that grave, there was one thing ex-con artist Philip Kaufman could do: honor Parsons’ wish to be cremated and scatter his ashes at a site where Parsons, in life, found peace: Joshua Tree, California.

    So, following Parsons’ death, Kaufman and Parsons’ friend Michael Martin stole the coffin containing Parsons’ body in Los Angeles, drove it to Joshua Tree (where Parsons had died of an overdose), poured gasoline on the body, and set fire to it. Then Kaufman and Martin drunkenly hit the road back to L.A. But Parsons’ remains didn’t stay in Joshua Tree for long. Parsons’ stepfather had them flown to New Orleans and buried.

    And yet, today, when it comes to Gram Parsons, things still don’t go right. As David N. Meyer reports in the 500-plus pages of Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music (Villard), the singer-songwriter’s date of birth on his grave is off by two days. But that figures, given the facts of Parsons’ emotionally charged household chronicled in the opening chapters of Meyer’s thoroughly researched and highly readable biography:

    Those facts include (but are hardly limited to) the suicidal gunshot death of Parsons’ biological father, Ingram Cecil “Coon Dog” Connor, when Parsons was 12 years old and the alcoholically fueled death of Parsons’ mother, “Big” Avis, after she entered into a tumultuous marriage to Robert Parsons, himself a towering alcoholic. And what of “Little” Avis, the sister Parsons adored. In 1991, she and her daughter were drowned in a freak boating accident. And what of Polly, Parsons’ daughter? She’s seeing to her father’s musical legacy in the form of tribute albums, which comes as a surprise, since Parsons hardly saw to Polly’s welfare growing up.

    More on his mind was music in all its popular forms, be it rock, country, pop, gospel, folk, R&B, or rockabilly — the more “authentic” and unpolished the better. It was that way when Parsons was a teenager attending prep school in Florida and already playing in bands. And it was that way when Parsons entered Harvard. (“Attended” isn’t the right word; he split after one semester.)

    But if Parsons’ sights were on making music, recording that music was another matter. So too, rehearsing. So too, performing, all of which Meyer covers in often depressing detail. Only his late work with a team of seasoned musicians (including members of Elvis Presley’s Las Vegas band) and his duet work with Emmylou Harris gave Parsons the discipline and professionalism he needed — and then only when he put his mind to it. Parsons’ fabled friendship with Keith Richards, no stranger to excess? As Meyer explains, even the Rolling Stones knew when to get down to business and nail the details.

    “Gram fled those details, refusing to confront them, thus avoiding the rigor of making good work great and great work immortal,” Meyer writes.

    And that’s not all. Meyer condemns the romanticized circumstances behind Parsons’ death and calls the man himself, by turns, “a pathological liar, an unreliable friend, a narcissistic husband and careless father.” Parsons’ sizable talent? “He threw it all away.” In the same breath, though, Meyer will add that Parsons’ “songwriting showcases the bravery with which he described the self he could not bear.”

    That’s beautifully put by David Meyer. And though Gram Parsons didn’t write it, that’s just what you hear from Parsons on a song called “Sleepless Nights.”

    Categories
    Film Features Film/TV

    Failed Fantasy

    I’ve read all seven Harry Potter books. I’ve been up one side of Mount Doom and down the other with Tolkien. I’ve chased (and finally caught) Stephen King’s Dark Tower since prepubescence. And I’m here to tell you that love them all though I do, none of them can hold a candle to Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy.

    Composed of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, Pullman’s books are teenage-appropriate fantasy with an adults-only allegorical kicker. It’s a coming-of-age story about coming-of-age. Wondrous, ambitious, original, black, profound — the series exists, as far as I’m concerned, in a hyperbole-free zone.

    Which does not mean that the new film adaptation of The Golden Compass is anywhere near as good. Directed and adapted by Chris Weitz (About a Boy, Down to Earth), the film is clunky in exposition — a forgivable sin, except it’s all exposition.

    The missteps begin immediately, with a narrated prologue that spills the beans on some primary mysteries that the book withheld to build tension. It’s sickening. Imagine if the opening crawl in Star Wars bluntly stated what the Force was, that it was indisputably real, and that, oh yeah, Darth Vader is Luke’s dad: Obi-Wan would come off like a preening know-it-all, Luke like an imbecile, and Han Solo like a recalcitrant asshole. If The Golden Compass doesn’t guard its secrets jealously, why should anybody else be invested in it?

    Skipping past some of the more frustrating revelations, Pullman’s world opens up: Jordan College, Oxford, England, something like the 1800s. Except there are fundamental differences from our own world: Primarily, each person has an animal-like creature companion, called a daemon, that is much more than just a friend — that is analogous, in a way, to the human soul.

    At Jordan College lives Lyra Belacqua (the very convincing Dakota Blue Richards), the 11-year-old clever, wild child who is the protagonist of the story. The orphan Lyra rules the roost at Jordan, palling around with Gyptian children (an ethnic group similar to the Roma) and getting into trouble with her daemon, Pantalaimon (voiced by Freddie Highmore). She encounters her uncle, Lord Asriel (Daniel Craig), a kind of English Richard Halliburton who has made a scientific discovery about the mysterious particle “Dust” in the Arctic and wants funding from Jordan College for an expedition.

    After Asriel heads north, Lyra meets Mrs. Coulter (the perfectly rotten Nicole Kidman), another dignitary visiting Jordan. Attracted by her ethereal beauty and confidence, Lyra accepts Coulter’s invitation to go home with her to London. Before leaving, the college master gives Lyra an alethiometer to safeguard, a small, extremely rare device that is said to be able to tell the truth, but it doesn’t come with an instruction booklet. (This is the titular golden compass.)

    In London, Lyra learns that Coulter may not be everything she seems, and, soon enough, she escapes to head north on a journey with the Gyptians. Oh, and lurking in the wings is the Magisterium, the ruling authority in this world, who have set themselves in opposition to Lord Asriel, the existence of Dust, the use of the alethiometer, and a laundry list of other things. But Dust, we learn from the prologue, is real. Therefore, the Magisterium, believing otherwise, is set up as the bad guys right away, and not very intelligent ones at that. Does it matter that the Magisterium will turn out to actually be the bad guys much later in the series? Only if you haven’t read the books.

    Dakota Blue Richards in The Golden Compass

    And then there are the witches, and the armored bears, and the prophecy, and … well, I could go on, but it’s just too much information — especially when the film tries to cram it all in about 20 minutes of screen time. The Golden Compass doesn’t take enough time to establish the ground rules for this familiar but fundamentally alien world. It acts as though it needs to do no work to gain the trust of the audience or to establish any credibility, or, for that matter, that there’s any doubt that the audience is going to buy any of this.

    The film has garnered a lot of pre-release bother from some religious groups, who accuse it of having an atheist message. Inevitable questions about whether many of these protesters have even seen the film aside, the argument gains no traction. There’s no doubt that the Magisterium resembles the Catholic Church, just as there’s no doubt that in the books, especially The Amber Spyglass, certain key religious elements come under fire. As a fantasy, it’s the anti-Narnia.

    But Pullman’s books — it remains to be seen how true it is of the films — don’t decry religious experience so much as the organization that traps it. If it’s atheistic, then I hate college football just because I detest the Bowl Championship Series.

    The Golden Compass also struggles almost every minute with editing. This is a three-hour fatty crammed in a two-hour corset. The story is globetrotting in breadth, and there’s a lot of plot to put in play, especially since it’s based on a book that is all set up for the breathtaking last two installments.

    Unfortunately, the big payoff in the book is remaindered by the movie for its presumed sequel. The Golden Compass ends exactly one sequence too soon and loses out on what could have been a saving grace. Herein is yet another basic flaw in the film: trusting that by playing off the audiences’ built-in fantasy-film expectations and desire for a happy ending, it will be enough to lure them back for a sequel. Instead, the movie is all empty calories. If my interest in the series weren’t rooted in the books, there’s no way this film would have me asking for more.

    I can’t stand the idea that films have to be faithful to their source material, and I won’t respect myself in the morning for saying this (but I’ll respect Chris Weitz even less): would that The Golden Compass treated the book it’s based on like it was the gospel truth.

    The Golden Compass

    Opening Friday, December 7th

    Multiple locations

    Categories
    Politics Politics Feature

    Former Governor Dunn Meets His Fans at Bookstar Signing

    CREDIT: jb

    The lines were respectably long and composed for the most part of vintage campaign colleagues, who smiled and reminisced with the author as copies of From a Standing Start, Winfield Dunn’s political memoir, got signed Wednesday night at Bookstar on Poplar by the onetime Memphis dentist and ex-Tennessee governor.

    A typical purchaser was Happy Jones, the well-known Memphis political activist who these days tends to back liberal candidates but back then saw the likeable Dunn, a Republican conservative, as the state’s best hope for reform. She, well, happily stood in line with old friends like retired Cordovans Roy and Sara Jane Greenlee or Dr. Shed Caffey or Harry Wellford, who was Dunn’s campaign manager for the 1970 upset win over Democrat John Jay Hooker.

    When these political comrades-in-arms, most of them fellow toilers in the building of the modern Republican Party in Shelby County, finally reached the table, they got more than a signing. Almost uniformly, they got hugged by the author.

    There were more youthful book-buyers, too – many of them cadres of today’s Republican Party, like Young Republican Drew Daniel or current Shelby County party chairman Bill Giannini or Fayette County state representative Dolores Gresham, who intends to take on longtime Democratic titan John Wilder in a state Senate race next year.

    Gresham might well study From a Standing Start, which details how Dunn came from relative obscurity to out-point better-known Republicans in the ’70 GOP primary for governor, then overcame Nashvillian Hooker to become his party’s first elected governor since Reconstruction.

    Nor is Dunn’s book the usual pro forma memoir. Opening it at random, one might find a passage in which the author, close up with Hooker at an oudoor event that summer of 1970, realizes to his horror that his Democratic opponent is wearing pancake makeup. The discovery fueled his determination in that campaign, Dunn writes.

    But there is an aura of good will in the book, as there was at the Wednesday night signing. When someone mentioned the Hooker reference to Wellford, the former judge nodded and said, “But they’re good friends now,” then smiled and added, “And that’s as it should be.”