Tag: Local

Categories
Music Music Features

At the Car Wash

Hip-hop news: Local faves Tunnel Clones have been holed up at DJ Red Eye Jedi‘s Hemphix Audio Labs for months, putting the final touches on World Wide Open, their follow-up to 2005’s Concrete Swamp. But this Friday, April 6th, they’ll be hitting the Hi-Tone Café with Sound Rebel Dem, DJ Leroy, DJ Wrekuh, b-boy Nosey, and a break-dancing crew in tow. “Nosey always has something interesting up his sleeve,” explains Tunnel Clones MC Bosco, who says that World Wide Open is scheduled for a summer release. Doors open at 9 p.m.; the show is 18 and up. For more information, go to www.MySpace.com/TunnelClones.

Memphian J. Simmons, the latest artist to record at Terry “FreakMaster” Turner‘s Sole Studio, will debut his stellar new album, Southern Hospitality, at Pressure World on Saturday, April 7th.

“Music was the only way I could find joy and peace, release tension, and enlighten myself,” explains the 26-year-old rapper, who grew up in foster homes and public housing, relocating from South Memphis to North Memphis to Westwood during his turbulent childhood. “I’m just a roamer. I grew up everywhere,” Simmons says.

“If I don’t write songs,” he adds, “I find myself clogged up with a lot of emotions. I learned how to make music in order to survive — to not get caught up in prison, be dead, or get caught up in other foolishness. With music, I have some control, but I’ve had to ask myself tough questions about what life was really about. I might be 26, but I feel like I’ve been here for a hundred years.”

Simmons formed short-lived alliances with K Roc from Three 6 Mafia and partnered with New Jack Entertainment before hooking up with Turner of “Mac of the Roundtable” and “Gimme What You Got (For a Pork Chop)” fame.

“Before, things just weren’t clicking. I was rapping about stuff that was destructive instead of constructive. When I met up with [Turner], I began writing music that ventured out, songs that people could dance to. He’s a very smart guy, plus he’s got a big heart and the patience of Job.”

The decision to hold his record-release party at a popular Orange Mound car wash was a no-brainer for Simmons. “Pressure World has a lot of history for helping up-and-coming independent artists,” he says. “I remember 8Ball & MJG playing there, all that element. And Big Mike [Rhodes, co-owner of Pressure World] is a real person. He’s very supportive, and he wants me to prosper as an artist, because we have the same message for the city’s youth: Don’t be about so much ignorance.”

Both Simmons and Turner tap the catchy “The Power of Music” as the album’s first single. Hear it live on Saturday night, after a spoken-word set from El Hakim the Poet. Showtime is at 8 p.m. Pressure World is located at 2575 Lamar Avenue. For more information, go to SoleStudio.com.

Powdered wig power: Lord T & Eloise just signed a two-year exclusive booking contract with Jason Pitzer of the Progressive Global Agency, which represents DJ Logic and R.E.M. The ink is hardly dry on the deal, but, says Cameron “Lord T” Mann, “if he puts his money where his mouth is, we’ll be in some interesting new cities this summer.”

Next week, the aristocrunk rappers are headed to Grimey’s Basement in Nashville, where they’ll play a diverse billing with Shake It Like a Caveman and Point Break on Thursday, April 12th. In the meantime, they’re in heavy discussions with Duane Hargrove, general manager of Hot 107.1FM, to see if they can launch a single on the popular urban radio station.

“When we say ‘white-boy rap,’ 90 percent of the population shuts down,” says Mann of the group’s attempts to cross over to an African-American audience. “Duane’s the gatekeeper at Hot 107.1. Everything has to go through him. He doesn’t want to rock the boat, so he called Yo Gotti and said, ‘Tell me what’s the reals on these guys.’ Within a half-hour, I got the call from Gotti, who said, ‘So, you’re talking to Duane.’ Now we’re mixing and mastering a song to test the market.”

Mann is also staying busy as studio manager of Young Avenue Sound: “Free Sol is in pre-production on a project for Justin Timberlake‘s new label,” he reports, “and Nakia Shine and Jack Frost came into the studio for three days, doing something for Universal. The Wailers did guitar and vocal demos with Aston Barrett, the guy who produced and nurtured so much music at Studio One in Jamaica.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Thirty Days Late, Thousands of Dollars Short

Every year around this time, a dreaded white-and-blue envelope arrives in the mail. Some people, scared to view its contents, throw it on a desk or in a drawer unopened, hoping it will disappear. Others, anxious to see the damage, rip it open immediately.

It’s the end-of-winter Memphis Light, Gas and Water bill, the one that reflects all the energy used to heat homes in February, generally the coldest month of the year. Some people hold off on payment, risking cut-off. Others try to work out a payment plan, backing up their debt for months. And a few will try to argue their way out of paying a portion.

But residential customers are not alone. Hundreds of local businesses are in similar positions. Last week, the Flyer requested a list of all commercial MLGW customers that were at least $5,000 behind on their bills and 30 days or more late in making payments.

Topping that list was the Memphis Cook Convention Center, with a total debt of $801,205. When contacted, general manager Pierre Landaiche said the facility made a $288,078 payment last week, bringing the new debt total to $513,127.

“The Cook Convention Center was underfunded by the city and county,” says Landaiche. “Rate increases and additional consumption over the last couple of years were unanticipated, causing a deficit beyond our budget.”

Though he says they’ve been trying to make partial payments, the bill has been backing up since 2005. An average monthly bill for the convention center ranges from $85,000 to $95,000.

Landaiche says money is now being appropriated from the city and county, which jointly fund the facility, to cover the convention center’s obligation to MLGW. Some of the $513,127 is being disputed. Landaiche claims they were billed too much for heating during winter months, when the center was not being used.

At a city council committee meeting Tuesday afternoon, council member Deadrick Brittenum asked the city attorney’s office to look into whether or not the Cook Convention Center should be billed for water usage, since some government buildings get free water. Currently, the center is billed for water.

Landaiche says he hopes to have the entire bill resolved in about two weeks. “Obviously, we want the convention center to be current,” says Glen Thomas, a spokesperson for MLGW. “There are probably additional logistics involved with them as far as cut-off. That would have to be a pretty serious issue. Are they significantly over? Yes. Are we in danger of not getting the money? No. I think the convention center will pay up. We’d just like to see it happen sooner.”

Thomas says the utility’s cut-off policy is the same for both residential and commercial customers. MLGW sends out approximately 5,000 cut-off notices per day. Those are sent three days after the bill’s due date. If some payment isn’t received 21 days later, all service is cut off. The key, says Thomas, is working out a payment plan.

In second place for the highest unpaid bill was the city of Memphis, with $741,036 due to MLGW. But, according to city engineer Wain Gaskin, that number doesn’t reflect an outstanding debt.

“The amount our MLGW bill shows as overdue is actually the amount we’ve saved taxpayers since May 2004,” says Gaskin.

He says the city began replacing red and green incandescent traffic light bulbs in about 760 intersections with more energy-efficient LED bulbs at that time. The change-out was completed about three months ago, but Gaskin says MLGW’s billing system hasn’t caught up with the energy savings from the new bulbs.

“They’ve had difficulty with their automated system because traffic signals don’t have meters,” says Gaskin.

Gaskin says LED bulbs use 15 to 20 percent less energy than the old bulbs. While the city is still billed for the old bulbs, they only pay a portion of that total each month. For example, last month the city was billed $45,000 from MLGW for traffic lights, but Gaskin says they only paid $8,600. The remainder each month backs up in MLGW’s billing system, appearing as unpaid debt.

Thomas says he does not know enough about the city’s account to comment, but Gaskin claims the city and the utility have an agreement on the traffic bulb issue. The city pays MLGW a total of about $28 million a year for all city accounts.

The Memphis Housing Authority (MHA) shows an MLGW debt of $360,773, totaled from multiple accounts. But Yvette Camel-Smith, general counsel deputy executive director for MHA, says most of that debt is being disputed due to what she calls “mislabeling” by the utility. They’ve scheduled a meeting with MLGW to discuss the bills.

According to Camel-Smith, at least four of the five overdue accounts belong to other agencies. One property on Firestone actually belongs to the city’s division of Housing and Community Development, she says. Another two properties with outstanding bills, listed on Exchange and Fairview, were transferred to Uptown Square, but Camel-Smith says MHA is still getting the utility bills.

MHA isn’t the only commercial customer disputing its bill. Shelby County Government is past due with a $5,757 payment to MLGW. County spokesperson Gwendolyn McClain says the county audits its MLGW bills to make sure they agree with the totals, which usually run about $500,000 to $600,000 a month.

Though they paid most of bill, the $5,757 is being disputed. McClain was not sure what that amount was for, but she says it’s not uncommon for the county to find inconsistencies with part of their bill.

Blues City Baseball, the management company for the Memphis Redbirds, is in the red (no pun intended) with their MLGW bill. They’re listed as owing $70,816, but President Dave Chase believes some of that has been paid off since the Flyer requested its list, leaving them about $30,000 in debt.

“Since the bulk of our revenue comes in the summer, we tend to fall behind in the winter,” says Chase. “In-season, the ticket sales drive revenues up, and we get more caught up.”

Chase says the average monthly bill for the Redbirds and AutoZone Park runs about $30,000 a month from April to September during in-season and about $15,000 a month in the off-season.

Memphis Publishing Company, the parent company of The Commercial Appeal, owes $79,763 to MLGW, according to information generated by MLGW last week. Requests to interview someone at the daily newspaper were forwarded to their lawyer, who had not contacted the Flyer by press time.

And another Ford is late on his utility bills. Joe Ford, unsuccessful in a recent run for Congress, owes $8,115 for the utilities used in his campaign office. Other notable customers on MLGW’s overdue list: Church of God in Christ ($7,449), International Paper ($9,524), Muvico Theaters ($18,331), and Target House/ALSAC St. Jude ($19,999).

Thomas says it’s likely many of the hundreds of overdue customers on the list are working off their balances through payment plans. Others may have paid the day after the list was put out.

“We actively try to recover the money. We’ve begun an initiative to clean up some of these accounts very recently,” says Thomas. “There will be phone calls and letters.”

MLGW furnished the Flyer with a list of nearly 300 customers who had an outstanding unpaid balance of more than $5,000. Some of the more notable names and their bills included:

Blues City Baseball: $70,816

Town of Collierville: $75,784.75

Memphis Publishing Company (The Commercial Appeal): $79,763

Waverly Gardens LLC: $88,661.96

Veterans Administration Hospital: $167,011.47

Memphis Dept. of Public Works: $736,849.60

City of Memphis: $741,036.64

Memphis Cook Convention Center: $801,205.04

Categories
Cover Feature News

Power Play

CREDIT: (AP Photo/Wade Payne)

In publicly rejecting MLGW president Joseph Lee’s resignation last Thursday, Mayor Willie Herenton declared, “I will not, cannot in good conscience participate in a media, political witch hunt that is currently operating in the city of Memphis around the leadership of this utility company. Let me also say that I cannot approve any initiative that has the support of The Commercial Appeal, Carol Chumney, and Myron Lowery.”

He referred to the troika as “an array of evil.”

After refusing to accept his resignation, Herenton encouraged Lee to focus on “regular folk” and their mistrust of the utility’s meter-reading and billing.

“This is one disturbing issue, that I have been overwhelmed by criticism and concerns in the community. I’m asking Mr. Lee, help me and the citizens understand the spiraling increase … that leads many to believe that the billings are excessive and arbitrary,” Herenton said.

(AP Photo/Wade Payne)

Herman Morris

Herenton then announced his solution: “Next week, I will be requesting from the Memphis City Council an allocation of funds to provide assistance to needy citizens, many of whom are on fixed incomes. I will be asking the City Council to support my request for $5 million … to assist us in helping us to help the people who need it most.”

Every Thursday, the MLGW board of commissioners meets downtown at the utility company’s headquarters. Before the afternoon session, the floor opens to citizens wishing to address the board. Last week, Georgia King took the floor and asked a key question, not only for the future of MLGW but also for election-year city politics.

“When was the customer ‘VIP list’ started, and by whom?” she asked.

King was referring to the list of high-profile MLGW customers whose utility accounts were under the supervision of MLGW executives. The list, which was apparently generated as the result of an e-mail by then MLGW head Herman Morris, was released to the public by Lee’s attorney Robert Spence just after Lee’s grand-jury appearance last week.

MLGW board chairman Rick Masson assured King that an internal investigation would soon be under way to address the question.

Though Herenton had rejected Lee’s resignation earlier in the meeting, he left the door open to revisit the issue, after first decrying the array of evil, which he perceived as trying to force his hand to remove Lee following the revelation of Lee’s “preferential treatment” of VIP-list member and city councilman Edmund Ford.

(AP Photo/John L. Focht)

Willie Herenton

“I find it unacceptable at this point in time to consider accepting his resignation, when, apparently, the wave of public sentiment and the blitz of bias exerted by The Commercial Appeal and other members of the media, I believe, has had undue influence, perhaps, on many key decision-makers,” Herenton said.

The mayor then acknowledged that City Council chairman Tom Marshall had initiated an independent investigation of MLGW, and he contrasted the two approaches to solving the crisis of public confidence in the utility company — the “media, political witch hunt” of the evil array and the objective investigation.

Marshall told the Flyer that “the mayor indicated that he is deferring until the results of the investigation are complete. Ultimately, he will revisit the issue of the termination of Mr. Lee. If you listen carefully, as I perceive it, the mayor is still open to that possibility, depending on the outcome of this investigation.”

Joseph Lee

The mayor focused on the differences between having an agenda for Lee’s removal and the facts to support such a move. “Hopefully, the investigation will be thorough, unbiased, not tainted by any predispositions or judgments based on a biased media that is really focused on discrediting Joseph Lee and this institution,” Herenton said, adding, “I applaud the councilman [Marshall] for his leadership and hope that the individuals who have accepted that engagement will conduct it with the highest of integrity and professionalism.”

Marshall appointed attorneys Oscar Carr and Saul Belz to lead the investigation. The attorneys were slated to outline the investigation plan at the Tuesday, March 6th, City Council meeting. Marshall says that Belz will present the results of the investigation to the council March 20th.

“Part of my reason in not accepting this resignation is that that investigation has not been complete,” Herenton said. “I have no facts surrounding any recommendations that Mr. Lee should be removed from his position.”

Justin Fox Burks

Carol Chumney

While Herenton exercised his prerogative to reject Lee’s resignation, Marshall says that Lee’s future as MLGW president rests as much with the council as it does the mayor.

“The City Council has authority, as prescribed in the charter, with 11 [out of 13] votes, to remove the president of MLGW without the consent of the mayor. In addition to that, the council also appears to have the authority to remove all of the [MLGW board] commissioners without the authority of the mayor,” Marshall said.

The MLGW “crisis of confidence” issues encompass more than the creation and maintenance of the so-called VIP list. The independent investigation will also address the meter-reading and billing practices of MLGW, which Herenton said give the appearance of “excessive and arbitrary” billing. Herenton has attributed the questionable billing practices to a “a conspiracy to sabotage [Lee] from within.”

Marshall offers a simpler explanation. “I’m having trouble believing [the sabotage allegation]. I don’t think that such sabotage exists,” Marshall said. “There is the potential for incompetent billing practices going on, but not as the result of any kind of direct effort. If there is malfeasance, it’s the result of inability,” added Marshall.

MLGW board member Nick Clark expressed a concern for the utility’s business practices that may not go away with leadership change. “The core problem, in terms of the future of MLGW, is the politicalization of business issues, because that interferes with the operation of a public utility.

“Why does MLGW have a problem with the culture of mistrust with certain members of the City Council?” Clark added.

It hardly needs to be said that that mistrust goes both ways. At this point, neither the public nor anyone else has a clear grasp on just what the problems are at MLGW. Are bills really out of line? Is Lee a capable administrator or just a Herenton crony in over his head? Was Herman Morris’ VIP list anything more than a way to maintain good PR? Were favors granted to others besides Edmund Ford?

With any luck, the coming weeks will bring some answers. Meanwhile, the power struggle continues.

Attorney Saul Belz, who will lead the independent investigation of MLGW, is scheduled to appear before the City Council, in order to provide the council with the scope and timeline of the investigation. Visit www.memphisflyer.com for updates throughout the coming week.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Willie and “the Dozens”

One of the first things a would-be opponent of incumbent Memphis mayor Willie Herenton will discover is that he or she is in for a mauling — figurative or maybe even otherwise. As for the latter, just ask retiring councilman Brent Taylor, who was asked outside by the mayor, or ABC-24’s Cameron Harper, who, while persisting in an interview attempt, was warned to get his hands off … or else.

Most of the abuse, though, is verbal — the kind of extreme stuff you might expect from a proud alpha male and former fighter who happens to be undefeated both in the boxing ring and in the political arena. Mayoral opponent Carol Chumney got a whiff of that last week when, without really having said much about the current MLGW mess and Herenton protégé Joseph Lee, she nevertheless got relegated by Herenton to an “array of evil” — right up there, presumably, with North Korea and Iran.

But the real rough stuff is what Herenton aims at fellow black politicians who, whether declared adversaries or not, get on his wrong side. What the mayor is doing has been known historically in Memphis’ black neighborhoods as “doing the dozens.”

That’s the confrontational practice of trading insults which get rougher and rougher (up to the nuclear threshold of 12, hence the name) until somebody either gives up or one of the contestants is, one way or another, acknowledged the winner, or … things get out of control. Out on the street, people have gotten killed. Dozens and dozens of them.

In a political contest, things are unlikely to get that far. But the mayor, who proudly boasts his rough-and-tumble origins, has demonstrated time and again that he is not loath to administer psychic wounds that, in the macho-conscious African-American community especially, can be crippling.

A case in point was his statement last week in a WDIA radio interview aimed at another rival for the mayoralty, former MLGW head Herman Morris, who announced his candidacy last week. Herenton’s response? “I want the world to know, there’s a man up in here in City Hall. If they’re looking for a boy, they identified one in Herman Morris, but he ain’t going to enter this gate.”

The venue, a historic black radio station, was no accident. Nor was the insult. Herenton has aimed that same barb before — at least twice to real or putative mayoral opponents. Back in early 1999, when it appeared likely that then county commissioner Shep Wilbun would be running for mayor, Herenton entertained this reporter in his penthouse office at City Hall and pointed out a vintage photograph from his first election-night celebration in 1991.

Wilbun, the mayor noted, was in a back row of the jammed entourage on stage, straining to get into the picture. “Look at that boy!” said a literally gleeful Herenton, who went on to declare that Wilbun’s chances of getting into the foreground were no better in 1999 than they had been eight years before.

Another Herenton opponent that year was Joe Ford, then a well-liked city councilman and, as a member of the prominent Ford political clan, regarded as the best bet to upset the mayor in a crowded field. In the very first forum involving the two of them, Herenton waited until Joe Ford seemed hesitant on an answer to someone’s question and then called out to the candidate’s brother, former congressman Harold Ford Sr., in the audience: “Harold, you got to do a better job of getting this boy ready!”

Candidate Ford seemed flustered and never quite recovered his aplomb in that race. Both he and Wilbun went down hard, along with the rest of a generally accomplished field whom the mayor, in his election post-mortem with the Flyer, dismissed as “clowns.”

In no sense, literal or metaphorical, is Herman Morris, a former star athlete and a middle-aged man of ample professional experience, a “boy.” But he and Chumney and John Willingham and whoever else ventures to run against Willie Herenton this year can expect that kind of verbal treatment — and worse.

In his exhibition boxing match last year against a gallant but used-up Joe Frazier, Herenton boxed circles around the onetime world champion, but he made sure to pull every punch. His mayoral opponents this year won’t be so lucky.

Jackson Baker is a Flyer senior editor.A longer version of this essay appears in “Political Beat” at www.memphisflyer.com.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Shocking!

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Although petitions for city office won’t be available at the Election Commission until next month, this year’s Memphis municipal election — or at least the mayoral component of it — is already fully under way.

To judge by the charges and countercharges and the quantity of mud that has so far been slung, this contest promises to be as entertaining and down-and-dirty as any in the past (see also Viewpoint).

And the fact is, for all the complaints levied by abstract theorists at “horse-race” journalism, we are electing people, not position papers, and all of it — the battle of personalities, the spin machines, the fund-raising competition, and certainly the size and effectiveness of the contenders’ cadres — counts toward a bona fide measure of the candidates and what they might do in office.

But in this election year, more than in many previous, issues will play a huge role in voters’ minds and none more so than the issue of Memphis Light, Gas and Water, which — both for those ordinary citizens whose service is constantly under threat and for those privileged ones who (we now know) have been allowed to run up huge bills — has alarm bells ringing throughout the city.

Rarely has the distinction between haves and have-nots been so starkly drawn as by the disclosures of the last few weeks concerning the now infamous “third-party notification” lists kept by current MLGW president, Joseph Lee, a protégé and appointee of incumbent mayor Willie Herenton.

But at least one major opponent of Herenton’s, former MLGW president Herman Morris, is also tainted by the scandal — particularly by a 2002 e-mail, dating from his own tenure as head of the giant city utility, that arguably might have established the precedent.

Morris’ memo, written in response to a customer complaint from then Commercial Appeal editor Angus McEachran, urged staff to “make sure we handle this matter with sensitivity.” Another key point of the e-mail was that MLGW should develop a list of customers “that require my special awareness, attention or staff intervention when they have problems.” He spelled that out to mean a longish list of elected officials (city, county, and state) and news media members.

The memo, conveniently leaked to the media by Herenton allies, was clearly meant to blunt Morris’ almost simultaneous announcement of his candidacy and to share out an albatross that was already a burden on the mayor himself. Meanwhile, candidate Carol Chumney, a frequent critic of Herenton on MLGW’s future and other issues, could enjoy the serendipity of having become chair of the City Council’s MLGW committee as of January 31st.

As such, she is entitled to conduct investigations and to shepherd solutions regarding MLGW and all the controversies attending it, old and new. In her campaign opening last month, she made a point of standing in opposition to the sale of MLGW, something which Herenton proposed a few years back and a project which many of his detractors believe he still holds in reserve.

The new scandal gives Chumney ample opportunity to burnish her reformer credentials (it also presumably gives a boost to the anti-establishment candidate John Willingham), while at the same time it inevitably tarnishes those of Morris.

When he was asked about the memo at his opening announcement last week, Morris floundered for some time, managing in a remarkably unhoned and stammering answer to acknowledge that he had given access to “family and friends” and to influential members of the community at large but not making clear distinctions between such a procedure and the possibility of granting special privileges.

In a curious way, the awkwardness of Morris’ response was exculpatory. It was as if, instead of indulging in some ready-made spin, he was trying to reason it all out as he spoke.

In a brief Flyer interview this week, the newly announced candidate had thought it through more carefully. (See sidebar.)

Special Election(s) Jackson Baker

Chair candidates Bailey (left) and Norman

Report: Yard signs indicate that the two Republican candidates in next Tuesday’s special elections for state Senate District 30 and state House District 92 — Larry Parrish and Richard Morton, respectively — are putting forth an effort, but the two Democratic nominees — state representative Beverly Marrero for the Senate position and G.A. Hardaway for the House seat — are heavily favored.

Two-Man Race for Chair of Shelby Dems? So it would seem, after Saturday’s preliminary caucus, in which a record crowd showed up at Airways Junior High to elect delegates for the party convention on March 31st. Current chairman Matt Kuhn is not seeking reelection, and things are shaping up for a two-man race between lawyer Jay Bailey and minister Keith Norman.

Bailey is supported by David Upton and some, but not all, members of the party’s old Ford faction, as well as by the activist Grant brothers (Greg and Alonzo), Del Gill, and blogger Thaddeus Matthews. Norman has emerged as the candidate of the Sidney Chism faction and is likely also to be supported by Desi Franklin of the MidSouth Democrats in Action reform group. It should be noted that other Democrats — including longtime activist Jody Patterson, who says she will run — may also launch candidacies before March 31st.

For more reports on the mayor’s race and other political news, go to “Political Beat” at www.memphisflyer.com.

A Q&A With Herman Morris

Flyer: Do you think it was strange that the text of your memo about access to certain customers became public just as you got ready to announce for mayor?

Morris: It was a very curious timing. Someone must have scoured the records of the utilities.

What’s the difference between how you handled “special” customers and how Joseph Lee has handled them?

On my watch, if you didn’t pay or didn’t make an arrangement to pay, you got a cut-off notice and services were terminated. It didn’t matter who you were. I wanted elected officials to be able to get through. They, after all, were representatives of a constituency. Big industrial users were a somewhat different case with major issues. But even they, if they got months in arrears, could get cut off.

What about the well-publicized case of former Commercial Appeal editor Angus McEachran? It was in reaction to a query from him, about wildly fluctuating monthly charges, that you wrote the memo that got leaked.

Angus was a tough issue. We ultimately concluded that he paid his bill every month and that our meter malfunctioned. He ended up owing more than he thought he did, so we worked out a payment plan to collect it from him.

The case that’s aroused most attention has been Councilman Edmund Ford’s. Did you have the same problem as Joseph Lee, and did you, too, let him go indefinitely without paying?

I’m not aware of any time that we had anyone go delinquent for the period of time that he did later on, except maybe in cases of bankruptcy, when we couldn’t by law cut them off. My recollection is that Edmund Ford did get cut off, though he would also come in and make payments to avoid cut-offs.

Can you shed any light on your departure from MLGW in 2003?

My departure remains a mystery to me, too. It could have been that I was opposed to the sale of MLGW. It could have been a more open attitude toward providing services to outside communities awaiting annexation. It could have been disagreements about staffing or the way the mayor wanted to handle the “prepaid” issue [an advance purchase of TVA power via preferred brokers designated by the mayor]. I was never given a specific statement or reason.

Another issue that has aroused the public is that of too easy and too lucrative pension arrangements for public employees. Was that an issue with your own golden parachute?

At the time, the parachute didn’t seem very golden. I negotiated fairly in terms of my departure. I wasn’t eligible for a pension, so I had to negotiate. At 52, I wasn’t quite old enough, and I hadn’t been there 15 years. I was just under the limit both ways for a pension. In all honesty, the final settlement probably fell short of being the equivalent of what I would have received through retirement eligibility.

Categories
Opinion

News About This and That

The MLGW story has legs, but the county public school realignment has even longer legs. MLGW is good water-cooler fodder. School zones determine where people live and how the county grows. If I were a decision maker, I’d be picking the brains of two people: Willie Herenton and developer Jackie Welch. Herenton knows this story cold and could predict the ramifications better than anyone because of his experience in the city school system when it still looked a little bit like the county system. Welch made a great living selling new school sites to the county for 20 years. The two men are anything but friends, but they agree on a surprising number of things on this issue, and anyone who ignores or demonizes either of them will get it wrong.

• Regionalism does matter. That’s one of the conclusions that can be drawn in the post-mortem of Marion, Arkansas’ failure to land the new Toyota manufacturing plant. Not only did Mississippi governor Haley Barbour out-hustle the competition, he lined up support for Tupelo from the governor of Alabama. Last time I looked, Alabama also borders Tennessee. The Memphis Regional Chamber of Commerce took a my-governor-right-or-wrong approach, and Marion/Memphis once again came up empty-handed. It’s time for the chamber’s board and local business leaders to do some soul searching.

• Speaking of the chamber of commerce, the front-page news in last weekend’s Nashville Tennessean was the latest news of the weird in the continuing saga of football player Adam “Pacman” Jones of the Tennessee Titans. The front-page story in last weekend’s Commercial Appeal was the latest news of the weird in the continuing saga of Mayor Willie Herenton. In which city would you rather be running the chamber or building a career or a business?

• Everyone’s an editor these days, and the problem of sourcing a story has never been clearer than it is in the MLGW saga. MLGW spokeswoman Gale Jones Carson was Willie Herenton’s spokeswoman until this year. Former MLGW president Herman Morris is running against Herenton for mayor. A story that suggests the Morris years were golden years is most likely pro-Morris spin. A story from Carson must be treated as pro-Herenton spin. Board members were appointed by Herenton but are supposed to show independence and represent citizens. One of them, Nick Clark, wrote an opinion column for The Commercial Appeal Tuesday saying Joe Lee should quit.

• The Morris style is a mystery. He announced his candidacy at The Peabody in front of a mostly geriatric crowd that buffered him from the news media. A picture was worth a thousand words. A couple days later, knowing full well that political storms were brewing in Memphis, he headed for California for an NAACP function. Odd timing.

• The story about the $12.5 million settlement between the Federal Communications Commission and four radio networks (including Clear Channel) representing more than 1,500 stations got buried beneath other news. But opening the airways was a big deal at the National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis in January. In theory, the settlement will mean a greater variety of music and programming. We’ll see.

• There are a couple of pieces of good news for downtown Memphis. First, notice the bulldozers and tree-clearing on Mud Island north of the Interstate 40 bridge. It’s preparation for more houses and apartments on the last large piece of undeveloped property on the island. Second, the University of Memphis law school is proceeding with plans to move to the old Front Street post office and customs house. James Smoot, dean of the law school, said last week the move-in is scheduled for 2009.

• A confusing and little-noticed change in the Memphis City Charter could make it possible for newcomers to run for council and even mayor this year. The original charter says mayoral candidates have to be residents of Memphis for five years. But at this writing, city attorney Sara Hall was researching the question. I’m not the only one confused. When I called the Memphis City Council and Shelby County Election Commission last week, both chief administrators thought that the five-year requirement was still in place. If we’re wrong, watch for a fresh face with big-name support to jump in.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Fanning the Flame

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

In a few days, Brown Burch will be taking a vacation from his 60-hour-a-week sous-chef position at the Inn at Hunt Phelan. During that vacation, he’ll be working 10 to 12 hours a day — unpaid — doing whatever is asked of him, and when his time is up after a couple of weeks, he’ll be sad to go.

Burch, 25, is headed to the acclaimed Chicago restaurant Alinea for a two-week stage — a French term for an internship in the culinary arts. Last year, Ruth Reichl of Gourmet declared Alinea the “Best Restaurant in America” in the magazine’s twice-per-decade list of America’s Top 50 Restaurants.

Working like a dog without pay might seem like a crazy idea, but for the passionate aspiring cook who wants to learn from the best, it’s often the only way.

“In France, we say if you have a flamme secrète — a secret flame, an unyielding passion for something such as cooking and food — you will do whatever it takes to become the best,” says Jose Gutierrez, the owner/chef of Encore, who spent many years as a stagiaire (an intern) in some of the top restaurants in France.

Gutierrez explains that in France, after graduating from cooking school, it could easily take 10 years of stage-ing and apprenticing before a cook moves up to the next rank. “This time is not about making money. It’s about learning your craft and concentrating on your craft and nothing else,” Gutierrez says.

Europe is the ultimate stage destination for many American cooks. Labor laws are such that in many countries, foreigners must forgo pay to work in trendsetting restaurants.

On egullet.com, the Web site of the Society for Culinary Arts and Letters, young cooks from all over the world exchange their stage experience, and most of them agree on one thing: If you think it’s tough in the kitchen you’re working in now, wait until you work in Europe. One stagiaire recalls his first days at Oustau de Baumanière, a Relais & Chateaux hotel/restaurant in Provence, where he spent several days in “ravioli limbo,” making close to 1,000 chicken-, leek-, and truffle-filled ravioli.

“As stagiaire, you’re on the bottom of the food chain,” says Gutierrez. “But you don’t complain. You do what the chef tells you to do, and if he wants you to wash his car during your break, you wash his car during your break.” Gutierrez calls it an investment in your future, a life lesson.

And the young stagiaire who spent days making ravioli? He had never seen that many truffles in his life, and it was an absolute delight to him to have his blistered hands fragrant with their precious aroma. The point is that you can only endure long hours and hard labor if passion is strong, as it is for Burch.

Although Burch has always had an interest in food (at his mother’s house, you can find pictures of him as a 4-year-old slurping oysters in New Orleans) and has been working in restaurants since he was a senior in high school, his determination and love for cooking developed slowly, growing as he’s gotten more experience.

He’s had short stages at Joël and ONE.Midtown Kitchen in Atlanta, Frank Stitt’s restaurant in Birmingham, as well as numerous other well-known restaurants. All he’s done for the past year is work and save money. While his other twentysomething peers party, he cooks. When he’s not cooking, he reads about cooking and food.

It might seem that if you offer your skills for free, it shouldn’t be hard to find a place that will gladly take you in. That’s true, but for young cooks interested in doing a stage at a first-rate restaurant, the competition can be fierce. And once that person has his or her foot in the door, they’ll have to give their everything and set themselves apart to be recognized in the kitchens of lauded places such as Alinea or the French Laundry in Napa Valley, which can choose from the best.

“The task is really how to distinguish yourself from the other 15 stagiaires, so the chef will even pay attention to you,” says Gutierrez. Outperforming everybody else and, according to Gutierrez, stealing the chef’s recipes (to a French chef, a sign of ultimate determination) is a start.

Contrary to European stages, which are at least two months long and provide the young native cooks with food, lodging, and a meager allowance, most restaurants in the United States let culinary apprentices come in and observe for a couple of days and generally don’t provide housing.

As for Burch, he’s ready for blistered hands. He’s saved enough money to work without pay for a while (as long as he can sleep on a friend’s couch), and he’s determined to learn from the best and bring back his knowledge and honed skills to Memphis when the time is right.

Categories
Cover Feature News

The Company

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Craig Brewer so badly wanted Kim Richards to play Christina Ricci’s mother in Black Snake Moan, he had his people search far and wide to find the retired, relatively obscure actress who seemed to have dropped from the face of the earth. He wanted to use Richards for one reason: He’d had a terrible crush on her since 1975, when the child star played the role of Tia, a magical alien in Disney’s sophisticated kid flick Escape to Witch Mountain.

“After shooting, [Kim and I] took a walk, and while we were walking I kind of put my arm around her,” Brewer says playfully. “And I remember wishing I had some way to go back in time and find that chubby kid I used to be and tell him everything that was going to happen to him.”

Success has its privileges, and, thanks to Hustle & Flow, Brewer now has the ability to indulge his inner child a bit as well as the clout to recruit A-list actors such as Ricci and Samuel L. Jackson. But after three feature-length films showcasing the work of Memphis actors, artists, and musicians, there’s still nothing that revs him up like talking about his adopted hometown and the underappreciated talent it attracts.

“Whenever I come home after working on a project, I can’t help feeling this sense of look at what we made together,” he says. “I get completely giddy with this feeling that [Memphis artists] are finally leaking out.”

Though set in rural northern Mississippi, the faces in Black Snake Moan look an awful lot like Midtown. Veteran stage actresses Kim Justis and Jo Lynne Palmer take a pair of delightful turns as an easily shocked waitress and an impeccably coiffed Southern matron. Fifteen-year-old Overton High School student Neimus K. Williams plays the pleasantly surprised victim of Ricci’s amorous advances like an old pro, while Brewer alums John Malloy and T.C. Sharpe say more with a stupefied look than most actors can accomplish with a monologue. John Still, the seedy chop-shop boss from The Poor & Hungry, plays a drunk and disgruntled ex-Marine. Jeff Pope, a horny trick from Hustle & Flow, pops up in Black Snake Moan as a suburban drug dealer, while Claude Phillips, Hustle‘s memorable junkie, makes an equally memorable impression as the owner of a stripped-down Mississippi juke joint.

Set to gritty blues riffs arranged by Memphis musician Scott Bomar and recorded by artists such as Jim, Luther, and Cody Dickinson, Charlie Musselwhite, Roy Brewer, Kenny Brown, Jason Freeman, and Alvin Youngblood Hart, all these contributions make up a part of the bigger picture. Like the stock players assembled by directors such as John Ford and Preston Sturges, Brewer’s local talent brings an abundance of quirkiness, color, and authenticity.

“It reminds me of my ancestors,” Brewer says of his local human resources. “Some of them sold eggs. Some of them got into milking cows. All the way back to the Civil War, they were always looking for something different. I can imagine them saying something like, ‘Well, it looks like ol’ Craig’s on to a new cash crop.’ Conversely, as Brewer takes long walks with his childhood fantasy and imagines Memphis culture as an exportable commodity, his actors refuse to become starstruck.

“I would really just like to be a steadily working character actor,” says musician and occasional stage performer Jeff Pope, whose character supplies the drugs that send Ricci’s already out-of-control character into a three-day blackout. “I remember when Craig invited us all up on stage at Sundance,” he says. “I felt overwhelmed, because I didn’t think I’d really done anything special.”

“I’m going to the Black Snake Moan premiere, and I’m going to wear a pair of zebra-striped shoes when I walk the red carpet,” says Amy LaVere, the throaty singer whose resemblance to rockabilly sex symbol Wanda Jackson landed her a role in the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line. “I’m wearing them in honor of Jim Dickinson’s Zebra Ranch,” she asserts. Like Pope, LaVere has always wanted to act but found music to be a more accessible mode of expression. Even now, recording and touring come first.

“I’m just not in a position to go to L.A. and find an agent,” she says. “I’ve got a new record coming out in May, and I have a responsibility to support that record to help recoup costs. So acting is something I can’t aggressively pursue.”

Still is an actor without an agent who refuses to attend cattle-call auditions. In the early ’90s, the voiceover artist best known for his work with WKNO-TV and radio decided to try his hand at acting and took classes so he wouldn’t sound so much like a radio announcer. Shortly thereafter, he landed a lead role in Brewer’s first completed film, The Poor & Hungry, and went on to play smaller featured roles in Hustle & Flow and Black Snake Moan.

“I just don’t have good audition skills,” Still says. “But Craig thinks I’m a good actor and he’s an actor’s director. He knows how to get the performance he wants from me.”

Freeman doesn’t appear on camera in Black Snake Moan, but his work is crucial to the film’s success. Freeman, a moaning roots musician who got his start busking on Beale before breaking out with his jug-grass ensemble the Bluff City Backsliders, helped to teach Jackson how to play his purple Gibson guitar.

“This isn’t the sort of thing I ever sat down and visualized myself doing,” says Freeman, who fell in love with the blues when an older brother brought home a copy of Muddy Waters’ Hard Again. “But it doesn’t completely surprise me either. I always knew I’d be — well, not famous but involved in interesting and creative things.”

“I’ll never forget when Claude Phillips first auditioned for Hustle,” Brewer says of the renovations contractor turned character actor. “I had somebody else in mind, but this guy really looked like an old sessions player for Stax. I felt his desperation when he was trying to sell this keyboard [for a bag of weed], and that’s when I realized that [the lead character] DJay could be staring straight at his own fate. Even if he had success as a rapper, he could hit the juice or smoke too much weed and end up in the same position. So I cast Claude … and everybody from Chris Rock to Spike Lee has asked me about him.”

“One time when we were shooting, Craig just hollered out, ‘I love seeing Memphis people in my movies!'” Phillips recalls. “And let me tell you, that was a real turn-on.”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Déjà Vu: Conyers in the 9th

Roughly a decade ago, during the first term of then 9th District congressman Harold Ford Jr., the redoubtable African-American congressman from Detroit, John Conyers, came to town and announced to a sizable crowd that young Ford could well be a future president of the United States.

That was very likely the first such pronouncement from a well-known national figure — all the more compelling in that Conyers had a well-defined reputation as a serious legislator dating all the way back to his service on the House Judiciary Committee in 1974. That was the committee that voted articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon and paved the way for that president’s exit from office.

Here it is 33 years later, and, following last year’s Democratic sweep, Conyers is the new chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and, politically, he and Ford have traveled in opposite directions.

When, in late 2002, the ambitious Memphian made an unsuccessful challenge to Nancy Pelosi (now Speaker of the House) for the leadership of House Democrats, Conyers publicly chastised the congressman, who had just voted to give President Bush authorization for military action in Iraq, saying, “I don’t think anybody is going to become the next minority leader of the Democrats that wants to go along with Bush on the war.”

Ford’s continued support for the war may have even been a marginal factor in his narrow loss of a U.S. Senate race last year. The man who succeeded Ford as congressman for the 9th District, Democrat Steve Cohen, made no bones about his opposition to Bush’s war policy during his race last year, and he continues to be vocal in congressional debate on the subject.

Cohen, a longtime Conyers admirer who, post-election, was granted his desire to serve on Judiciary, will bring his committee chairman to town with him for a town meeting on Thursday. The two congressmen will appear together at the National Civil Rights Museum beginning at 6:30 p.m.

Will Conyers complete a cycle of sorts by billing Cohen as a possible future president? Unlikely, but we’ll be there just in case.

Junior on the Move

Democratic Michigan congressman John Conyers

Meanwhile, the man Cohen succeeded in office, the aforesaid Harold Ford Jr., seems to be proceeding full speed ahead. The New York investment firm Merrill Lynch last week announced Ford’s coming aboard as a vice president.

Together with his election last month as head of the right-center Democratic Leadership Council and his appointment as an ad hoc professor at Vanderbilt University, Ford would seem to have a fully fleshed-out profile for whatever political purposes might come, either statewide or national.

During a meeting last week with a group of local political adepts called “The Politicos,” Memphis businessman Karl Schledwitz made a compelling argument that the circumstances would be ripe for Ford to make another bid for the U.S. Senate in 2008 against Republican incumbent Lamar Alexander.

One fact, for better or for worse: After taking the DLC post, Ford has undergone renewed attacks in the progressive blogosphere for his conservative — some say reactionary — positions on both domestic and foreign-policy issues.

Carpenter Under Siege?

There is no question that first-term Shelby County commissioner Mike Carpenter has riled hard-core Republicans with his decision to join with commission Democrats in voting, consistently and decisively, for a second Juvenile Court judge.

Adding insult to injury, as these GOP cadres see it, Carpenter has become increasingly critical of Judge Curtis Person, elected last year after decades as a GOP icon in the state Senate and several years, too, as an administrator in Juvenile Court.

Ironically, Carpenter was heavily backed in his race last year by the Republican establishment. He was then regarded as an acceptable alternative to predecessor John Willingham, a maverick GOP type who often bucked party discipline. Faced with Carpenter’s well-funded challenge, Willingham read the tea leaves and ultimately opted out of his reelection race in favor of a largely symbolic long-odds race for county mayor.

Now it’s Carpenter, a onetime state GOP political director, who’s seen by some as the maverick and a potential thorn in the side of Republican orthodoxy.

And word comes that Probate Court clerk Chris Thomas, among others, is meditating on a challenge to Carpenter three years hence. Thomas, known as a hard-right Republican, is one of several local elected officials who, though ensconced in positions that look to outsiders like safe and satisfying sinecures, are clearly lusting for more active political roles.

That’s especially the case when Republicans like Thomas, having to run countywide, seem to keep pulling rabbits out of hats during their reelection campaigns, thereby defying changing demographics that more and more should favor Democrats.

Sooner or later, at one of these four-year intervals (that’s eight years in the case of judges) the rabbits won’t be there in the right quantity. As it was, several narrowly defeated Democratic candidates mounted credible legal challenges to the outcome of last year’s vote.

A commission race in solidly Republican District 1 is another matter entirely, but it remains to be seen whether Carpenter’s vulnerability is short- or long-term and to what degree it exists at all. (Thomas, for that matter, is not every mainstream Republican’s cup of tea.)

And, weekend before last, at the monthly conservative-oriented Dutch Treat Luncheon, one well-known local Republican passed along speculation that Carpenter’s stance on Juvenile Court reform might be part of a trade-off involving Democratic votes in the future for a controversial proposal to privatize county penal facilities.

The truth content of such a suggestion is less interesting than the fact that it’s implicitly exculpatory of Carpenter in an ideological sense. The fact is, the commission’s Democrats had the votes for a second Juvenile Court judge without him, and, one hears, trade-offs do take place once in a while on the commission and other legislative bodies.

Under the circumstances, there are worse things than having a reputation as a player, whether justified or not — and certainly worse things than being considered independent-minded.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

When Is It a Crime To Lie?

I once had a colleague who thought it was clever and funny to ask people, “Do your parents know you’re gay?”

The point, if you can call it that, was that you couldn’t answer this tricky question without falling for the “joke” and incriminating yourself, ha ha.

This is not a column about gays or jokesters. It is about liars and trick questions and, specifically, about people who are criminally charged with lying. There seems to be a lot of that going around lately. On the national scene, Scooter Libby, the former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, is on trial for lying, among other things, and some famous journalists have taken the stand to refute him. A few years ago, you may remember, Martha Stewart got sent to prison for lying about her stock trades.

On the local scene, former state senator Roscoe Dixon was convicted last year of bribery, but he compounded his problems — and lengthened his sentence by several months — by lying to FBI agents in an 11th-hour interview two weeks before he was indicted. The agents knew he was lying because, unknown to Dixon, they had him on tape. Gotcha.

Memphis police officer Orlando Hebron was indicted last month for lying to FBI agents about a drug deal and theft at a Budget Mini-Storage. The agents had Hebron and an undercover informant on tape. But Hebron didn’t know it. A few days before the trap was about to close, he compounded his problems by lying about something the FBI knew perfectly well was true. So prosecutors tacked on another count of making false statements to U.S. investigators in their indictment. Gotcha.

Former Memphis Board of Education member Michael Hooks Jr. is also charged in a federal indictment with lying. In documents filed this week, attorneys for Hooks and the government argue about whether the lying count in the indictment should be dropped. The offense that Hooks is charged with — participating in a scheme with Tim Willis and Darrell Catron to fraudulently get payments from Shelby County Juvenile Court — happened nearly six years ago. The feds found out about it after Willis and Catron began cooperating with them in 2003. That led to Operation Tennessee Waltz. Of course, Hooks didn’t know they were cooperating until it was too late. Gotcha.

Former U.S. attorney Hickman Ewing Jr., who is now retired, says there’s a lot of law about lying. In a nutshell, courts have decided there is something called an “exculpatory no” that is not perjury. In other words, defendants can assert their innocence in broad terms but they cannot, say, lie to a grand jury about specific events.

From reading the transcript of the tape, it seems like FBI agents were giving Roscoe Dixon a chance to confess. He didn’t take it, he went to trial, and he got convicted. He got hammered by both the jury and the sentencing judge for lying. On the one hand, Dixon was guilty. On the other hand, if you’re a defendant in a criminal case and you’ve pleaded innocent, aren’t you in the in-for-a-penny-in-for-a-pound position? And could the government not indict people in wholesale lots for lying when they have problems with the more serious issue in the underlying criminal offense?

The Michael Hooks Jr. case will be interesting if it goes to trial. He is represented by Glen Reid, a former federal prosecutor in Memphis 30 years ago. In his motion, Reid argues that the alleged Hooks “lie” was immaterial to the underlying offense. According to the indictment, Hooks got an unspecified amount, possibly as little at $1,500, for his participation. It seems his more serious crime was refusing to cooperate with the government, as Willis and Catron did. If the case goes to trial, Reid will be opposed by his former colleague Tim DiScenza, who is 2-0 in Tennessee Waltz trials so far.

And the answer to the question is “no.”

John Branston is a Flyer senior editor.