Tag: YouTube

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Film Features Film/TV

From Netflix to Criterion: All You Need to Know About What’s Streaming

Those of us who are not doctors, nurses, or EMTs or others on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19 are faced with some time on our hands. The only silver lining to the situation is that our new reality of soft quarantine comes just as streaming video services are proliferating. There are many choices, but which ones are right for you? Here’s a rundown on the major streaming services and a recommendation of something good to watch on each channel.

Stevie Wonder plays “Superstition” on Sesame Street.

YouTube

The granddaddy of them all. There was crude streaming video on the web before 2005, but YouTube was the first company to perfect the technology and capture the popular imagination. More than 500 hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Cost: Free with ads. YouTube Premium costs $11.99/month for ad-free viewing and the YouTube Music app.

What to Watch: The variety of content available on YouTube is unfathomable. Basically, if you can film it, it’s on there somewhere. If I have to recommend one video out of the billions available, it’s a 6:47 clip of Stevie Wonder playing “Superstition” on Sesame Street. In 1973, a 22-year-old Wonder took time to drop in on the PBS kids’ show. He and his band of road-hard Motown gunslingers delivered one of the most intense live music performances ever captured on film to an audience of slack-jawed kids. It’s possibly the most life-affirming thing on the internet.

From Netflix to Criterion: All You Need to Know About What’s Streaming

Dolemite Is My Name

Netflix

When the DVD-by-mail service started pivoting to streaming video in 2012, it set the template for the revolution that followed. Once, Netflix had almost everything, but recently they have concentrated on spending billions creating original programming that ranges from the excellent, like Roma, to the not-so excellent.

Cost: Prices range from $8.99/month for SD video on one screen, to $15.99/month, which gets you 4K video on up to four screens simultaneously.

What to Watch: Memphian Craig Brewer’s 2019 film Dolemite Is My Name is the perfect example of what Netflix is doing right. Eddie Murphy stars as Rudy Ray Moore, the chitlin’ circuit comedian who reinvented himself as the kung-fu kicking, super pimp Dolemite and became an independent film legend. From the screenplay by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski to Wesley Snipes as a drunken director, everyone is at the top of their game.

Future Man

Hulu

Founded as a joint venture by a mixture of old-guard media businesses and dot coms to compete with Netflix, Hulu is now controlled by Disney, thanks to their 2019 purchase of Fox. It features a mix of movies and shows that don’t quite fit under the family-friendly Disney banner. The streamer’s secret weapon is Hulu with Live TV.

Cost: $5.99/month for shows with commercials, $11.99 for no commercials; Hulu with Live TV, $54.99/month.

What to Watch: Hulu doesn’t make as many originals as Netflix, but they knocked it out of the park with Future Man. Josh Futturman (Josh Hutcherson) is a nerd who works as a janitor at a biotech company by day and spends his nights mastering a video game called Biotic Wars. A pair of time travelers appear and tell him his video game skills reveal him as the chosen one who will save humanity from a coming catastrophe. The third and final season of Future Man premieres April 3rd.

Logan Lucky


Amazon Prime Video

You may already subscribe to Amazon Prime Video. The streaming service is an add-on to Amazon Prime membership and features the largest selection of legacy content on the web, plus films and shows produced by Amazon Studios.

Cost: Included with the $99/year Amazon Prime membership.

What to Watch: You can always find something in Amazon’s huge selection, but if you missed Steven Soderbergh’s redneck heist comedy Logan Lucky when it premiered in 2017, now’s the perfect time to catch up. Channing Tatum and Adam Driver star as the Logan brothers, who plot to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Inside Out

Disney+

The newcomer to the streaming wars is also the elephant in the room. Disney flexes its economic hegemony by undercutting the other streaming services in cost while delivering the most popular films of the last decade. Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars flicks are all here, along with the enormous Disney vault dating back to 1940. So if you want to watch The Avengers, you gotta pay the mouse.

Cost: $6.99/month or $69.99/year.

What to Watch: These are difficult times to be a kid, and no film has a better grasp of children’s psychology than Pixar’s Inside Out. Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) is an 11-year-old Minnesotan whose parents’ move to San Francisco doesn’t quite go as planned.

Cleo from 5 to 7

The Criterion Channel

Since 1984, The Criterion Collection has been keeping classics, art films, and the best of experimental video in circulation through the finest home video releases in the industry. They pioneered both commentary tracks and letterboxing, which allows films to be shown in their original widescreen aspect ratio. Their streaming service features a rotating selection of Criterion films, with the best curated recommendations around. You’ll find everything from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent epic The Passion of Joan of Arc to Ray Harryhausen’s seminal special effects extravaganza Jason and the Argonauts.

Cost: $99.99/year or $10.99/month.

What to Watch: One of the legendary directors whose body of work makes the Criterion Channel worth it is Agnès Varda. In the Godmother of French New Wave’s 1962 film, Cleo from 5 to 7, Corinne Marchand stars as a singer whose glamorous life in swinging Paris is interrupted by an ominous visit to the doctor. As she waits the fateful two hours to get the results of a cancer test, she reflects on her existence and the perils of being a woman in a man’s world.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Future-Everything Hosts YouTube “QuaranStream”

Future-Everything, a Memphis-based “for artist, by artist” multimedia label and lifestyle brand that collaborates with more than 50 EDM artists and multi-instrumentalists from around the world, debuted its first live “QuaranStream” episode on YouTube last Wednesday.

The episode was hosted by Future-Everything co-founder Micah McGee, otherwise known by his DJ name Strooly, previewing the label’s unreleased material, like the upcoming Night Park EP that drops April 3rd, masters from the forthcoming HeartWerk EP, and unheard demos from collaborators Qemist and DJ DanceAlone.

“It was so awesome to get to preview out all this unreleased music we have coming out in the next few months,” says McGee. “There’s no other way we could feel comfortable doing that.”

Micah “Strooly” McGee

Future-Everything has experimented with streaming live content in the past, McGee having produced a live podcast series in the infancy stages of the label’s founding in 2014. Due to technical difficulties, however, the label steered its focus toward live events. But with the recent changes in events surrounding the global pandemic, Future-Everything was encouraged to revisit the idea of live streams.

“I think considering how quickly I pieced the setup together, it went great,” says McGee. “It was the first one I’ve done like that, so there were some great learnings to come from it.”

McGee hopes that through the live streams, his collaborators can continue to make a living while aiding growth in the musical community.

“If there’s anything that we can do to help keep our artists connected, and maybe even help supplement some income through these efforts in the near future, then we are going to do everything we can in the meantime to help get us closer to that,” he says.

To stay updated on Future-Everything’s QuaranStreams, follow Future-Everything (username ftrvrythng) on social media.

Categories
News The Fly-By

MEMernet: Virtual Dad

A round-up of Memphis on the World Wide Web.

Virtual Dad

Will Loden wants to be your dad.

If you never learned how to wash a car, throw a football, open a jar, or take a nap, Loden’s character “Virtual Dad” is ready to step in.

About a year ago, Virtual Dad debuted with a how-to YouTube video, “How To Take Out the Trash.”

“This is a full trash can,” Virtual Dad says, motioning to a mound topped with milk jugs and beer bottles. “You’ll notice it’s full ’cause there’s stuff over’n the top of it.”

Dad uses classic-dad nicknames, like hoss, rascal, and kiddo, but he’s not the most responsible, saying once, “I didn’t know I had you this weekend.”

Dad’s instructions are correct, but comedy is the real lesson on display. Directions about washing a car from the top down, for example, lead to a hilariously unexpected diatribe about Reaganomics. Classic dad move.

Production value on the series is high, and Loden doesn’t do it alone. Virtual Dad was created by Loden, Derek Beck, and Jono Foley. Music is by Trevor Smith, and graphics are by Corey Ellis.

Find Virtual Dad on Facebook (@virtualdad) and on YouTube at Virtual Dad.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Ten Years Of YouTube

Most nights I like to drift off to sleep with Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K). Watching bad movies along with Joel and the bots takes me back to the 1990s, when MST3K was a late-night comedy staple. For most of the 21st century, it was abandoned by both Comedy Central, a network it helped legitimize, and the SyFy Channel, the network whose cluelessness ultimately allowed it to wither. Getting DVD rights to so many movies was an impossible task, so unless you were one of the hardcore fans who traded VHS tapes by mail, it was pretty much impossible to see old episodes. But tonight, I can watch Tom Servo heckle Manos: Hands of Fate, Gorgo, Fugitive Alien II, or any of MST3K‘s 197 titles on YouTube.

It was 10 years ago this month that Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim registered youtube.com. At the risk of sounding old, it’s difficult to remember what the web — and the world — was like back then. Bandwidth was at a premium, so that meant downloading a video could take quite awhile. A funny kid video passed around via email could, and frequently did, bring an entire company’s IT infrastructure crashing down.

There was such an assortment of different video codecs floating around that you might not even be able to play the video it had taken all night to download. The bigger media companies were experimenting with something like streaming video, but it was usually buggy as a dumpster. Remember RealPlayer? I wish I didn’t.

The first video uploaded to YouTube was of one of its founders, Karim, at the zoo. Its title was “Me at the zoo,” and it set the tone for the site’s early content. YouTube was originally marketed as “Flickr for videos,” after the popular photo sharing site that doubled as one of the web’s first social media experiments. For that was YouTube’s biggest innovation: It allowed videos made by a normal person to be seen by anyone, anywhere.

For the first century of its existence, film and video production had been highly technical pursuits that required lots of training and infrastructure. Theatrical distribution and broadcast to a mass audience was the realm of only a select few. But digital video technology, which first started to trickle down to the hobbyists in the mid-’90s, changed that. If you had asked me as a filmmaker in 2005 if I wanted to shoot an actual film on film, I would say, “No, for the same reason I don’t want to paint a fresco.” But back in 2005, we were still dependent on the old film-era distribution infrastructure. Now, anyone with a smartphone can make a video and have it seen by the world in a matter of minutes.

YouTube sensation Psy

The social change YouTube’s democratizing of video distribution has wrought was unfathomable in 2005. As the saying goes, the generational dividing line is now whether you have spent more time listening to U2 or watching YouTube. Entirely novel genres have sprung up. Not even the most drug-addled science fiction writers predicted that famous cats would be making their owners millions of dollars, or that the most popular song of the century would be from a Korean pop singer named Psy who got famous by doing a horsey dance with obscure celebrities few outside Seoul could name.

And then there’s the baffling phenomenon of the unboxing video. There are thousands of videos whose content consists solely of a pair of hands opening the box of a new toy or a “surprise egg,” and they all have more views than anything you’ve ever uploaded.

Which brings us back to MST3K. The fan club that traded VHS tapes back in the ’90s also happened to populate some of the earliest internet message boards. When YouTube started, they were among the first to digitize their aging VHS tapes and upload them to share. This caused all sorts of copyright issues and for a while led to YouTube limiting uploads to less than 10 minutes.

But these days, most of the old videos stay up, preceded by a commercial whose proceeds usually go back to the rightsholders instead of the uploader. Shout! Factory has started an official YouTube channel populated by HD transfers of the shows, but I’ll probably keep watching the old ones in all their grainy glory. They remind me of the bad old days, when video sharing meant you had to, as the MST3K closing credits extolled, “keep circulating those tapes.”

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Ready for Generation Z?

While there is some disagreement on the time period, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce defines Generation Z as those born after 2000. In four years, the first batch of these Y2K babies will be early-onset adults, members of the freshman collegiate class of 2018, voters, and, in some cases, job-seekers. They are us the day after tomorrow.

So who are they? What are the influences that have shaped their worldviews and personal perceptions?

GenZ-ers’ lives began with the “hanging chad” and the contested 2000 election, in which a month-long political battle over who would be the 43rd president was decided by a controversial Supreme Court ruling in George W. Bush’s favor. Their innocence was lost by their first birthday, as the United States and the world were rocked by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. With the invasion of Afghanistan and the toppling of Iraq, Generation Z has known nothing but terror and a war on terror.

Z-ers have also witnessed the violence of nature. An outbreak of the respiratory disease SARS decimated hundreds in Asia and started to spread across the globe. A mega-tsunami killed hundreds of thousands living near the Indian Ocean. A Japanese tsunami destroyed a nuclear power plant and radiated the Pacific Ocean. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated New Orleans and many cities along the Gulf Coast. Heck, even Pluto lost its status as a planet.

As Generation Z was entering second grade, the “Great Recession” shook the foundation of the global economy, weakening fiscal systems and wrecking individual savings. As a result, many Z-ers experienced poverty or watched friends and family members struggle financially.

Gen. Z witnessed history as the first African-American president won the 2008 election. The brief Democratic super-majority in the Congress and Senate fought the recession with a stimulus package and passed the Affordable Care Act — thereby igniting a fury of political partisanship which gave birth to the Tea Party.

Generation Z’s middle-school years saw the congressional repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the military, as well as the Supreme Court ruling against the Defense of Marriage Act, which opened the door to same-sex marriages in many states. The tweet became mightier than the sword, as an “Arab Spring” of revolts and civil wars spread across the Middle East. Osama bin Laden was killed by American Special Forces.

Our hearts were broken by mass shootings in Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown, Connecticut. The Boston Marathon was bombed, and the country stood strong with the Red Sox Nation as they won the 2013 World Series.

Gen. Z’s first wave are now freshmen in high school, living with constant, swirling political vitriol. President Obama’s second term has been plagued by Republican investigations into the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, the alleged targeting of conservatives by the IRS, and the revelation that the NSA was mass-collecting American’s cell phone records. Unbridled political partisanship and uncompromising ideologies are the governmental models they are witnessing.

These natives of a digitalized world have primarily experienced these dramatic events through some form of technology. An analog existence seems like the dark ages. The concept of collecting music or movies in physical form seems medieval to them. The majority of Gen. Z-ers have never invited someone over to see their record, tape, or CD collections. Their lives have been immersed in social media.

Generation Z’s use of the open-source reference site Wikipedia, founded in 2001, contributed to the death of the printed version of the 244-year-old Encyclopedia Britannica. That same year, Steve Jobs handed the CD a death sentence with Apple’s personalized digital music player, the iPod. Professional and social networking started to bloom in 2003, with MySpace and LinkedIn. Facebook and the picture-sharing network Flickr entered the scene in 2004.

In 2005, YouTube began providing videos that could be instantly shared. In 2006, the first 140-character communications were transmitted on Twitter. The 2007 2G iPhone transformed the mobile phone market and was followed by the iPad tablet in 2010. Generation Z has not known a world without the internet. Their globalized networks, virtually unlimited connectivity, and ability to multi-task between devices, gives GenZ-ers a skill set unlike any generation before them.

Generation Z-ers follow us, but they will ultimately be leading us. In four short years, these digital natives will be invading our offices, ballot boxes, and universities. Are we ready for Generation Z? We’d better be — and for whatever letter of the alphabet or mutation in Outlook — comes next.

(Brandon Goldsmith, a frequent Flyer contributor, is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Memphis. This piece is adapted from a portion of his dissertaton)

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Conversion

In January 1989, Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape won the Audience Award for best feature at the Sundance Film Festival, kicking off the modern Indie film movement.

To audiences, “Indie” usually means quirky, low-budget, character-driven fare that is more like the auteurist films of the 1970s than contemporary Hollywood’s designed-by-committee product. But “Indie” originally referred to films financed outside the major studios by outfits like New Line Cinema, which produced Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) and the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984). By 1990, The Coen Brothers had crossed over into the mainstream with Miller’s Crossing, a film that brought together the meticulous plotting, brainy dialog, and stunning visual compositions that would garner them acclaim for the next 25 years.

As the 1990s dawned, a whole crop of directors stood up with a mission to make good movies on their own terms — and that meant raising money by any means necessary. Robert Rodriguez financed his $7,000 debut feature El Mariachi by selling his body for medical testing. It went on to win the 1993 Audience Award at Sundance, and his book Rebel Without A Crew inspired a generation of filmmakers.

Richard Linklater’s 1991 Slacker threw out the screenwriting rulebook that had dominated American film since George Lucas name-checked Joseph Campbell, focusing instead on dozens of strange characters floating around Austin. The structure has echoed through Indie film ever since, not only in Linklater’s Dazed And Confused (1993) but also the “hyperlink” movies of the early 2000s such as Soderbergh’s Traffic and even more conventionally scripted films such as Kevin Smith’s 1994 debut, Clerks.

Quentin Tarantino is arguably the most influential director of the last 25 years. His breakthrough hit, 1994’s Pulp Fiction, was the first film completely financed by producer Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax. But even then, the definitions of what was an “Indie” movie were fluid, as the formerly independent Miramax had become a subsidiary of Disney.

Indie fervor was spreading as local film scenes sprang up around the country. In Memphis, Mike McCarthy’s pioneering run of drive-in exploitation-inspired weirdness started in 1994 with Damselvis, Daughter of Helvis, followed the next year by the semi-autobiographical Teenage Tupelo. With 1997’s The Sore Losers, McCarthy integrated Memphis’ burgeoning underground music scene with his even-more-underground film aesthetic.

In 1995, the European Dogme 95 Collective, led by Lars von Trier, issued its “Vows of Chastity” and defined a new naturalist cinema: no props, no post-production sound, and no lighting. Scripts were minimal, demanding improvisation by the actors. Dogme #1 was Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1998.

Meanwhile, in America, weirdness was reaching its peak with Soderbergh’s surrealist romp Schizopolis. Today, the film enjoys a cult audience, but in 1997, it almost ended Soderbergh’s career and led to a turning point in Indie film. The same year, Tarantino directed Jackie Brown and then withdrew from filmmaking for six years. Soderbergh’s next feature veered away from experiment: 1998’s Out Of Sight was, like Jackie Brown, a tightly plotted adaptation of an Elmore Leonard crime novel. Before Tarantino returned to the director’s chair, Soderbergh would hit with Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich and make George Clooney and Brad Pitt the biggest stars in the world with a very un-Indie remake of the Rat Pack vehicle Ocean’s 11.

Technology rescued Indie film. In the late ’90s, personal computers were on their way to being ubiquitous, and digital video cameras had improved in picture quality as they simplified operation. The 1999 experimental horror The Blair Witch Project, directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, showed what was possible with digital, simultaneously inventing the found footage genre and becoming the most profitable Indie movie in history, grossing $248 million worldwide on a shooting budget of $25,000.

The festival circuit continued to grow. The Indie Memphis Film Festival was founded in 1998, showcasing works such as the gonzo comedies of Memphis cable access TV legend John Pickle. In 2000, it found its biggest hit: Craig Brewer’s The Poor & Hungry, a gritty, digital story of the Memphis streets, won awards both here and at the Hollywood Film Festival.

In 2005, Memphis directors dominated the Sundance Film Festival, with Ira Sach’s impressionistic character piece Forty Shades Of Blue winning the Grand Jury Prize, and Brewer’s Hustle & Flow winning the Audience Award, which would ultimately lead to the unforgettable spectacle of Three Six Mafia beating out Dolly Parton for the Best Original Song Oscar.

Brewer rode the crest of a digital wave that breathed new life into Indie film. In Memphis, Morgan Jon Fox and Brandon Hutchinson co-founded the MeDiA Co-Op, gathering dozens of actors and would-be filmmakers together under the newly democratized Indie film banner. Originally a devotee of Dogme 95, Fox quickly grew beyond its limitations, and by the time of 2008’s OMG/HaHaHa, his stories of down-and-out kids in Memphis owed more to Italian neorealism like Rome, Open City than to von Trier.

Elsewhere, the digital revolution was producing American auteurs like Andrew Bujalski, whose 2002 Funny Ha Ha would be retroactively dubbed the first “mumblecore” movie. The awkward label was coined to describe the wave of realist, DIY digital films such as Joe Swanberg’s Kissing on the Mouth that hit SXSW in 2005. Memphis MeDiA Co-Op alum Kentucker Audley produced three features, beginning with 2007’s mumblecore Team Picture.

Not everyone was on board the digital train. Two of the best Indie films of the 21st century were shot on film: Shane Carruth’s $7,000 Sundance winner Primer (2004) and Rian Johnson’s high school noir Brick (2005). But as digital video evolved into HD, Indie films shot on actual film have become increasingly rare.

DVDs — the way most Indies made money — started to give way to digital distribution via the Internet. Web series, such as Memphis indie collective Corduroy Wednesday’s sci fi comedy The Conversion, began to spring up on YouTube.

With actress and director Greta Gerwig’s star-making turn in 2013’s Francis Ha, it seemed that the only aspect of the American DIY movement that would survive the transition from mumblecore to mainstream was a naturalistic acting style. Founding father Soderbergh announced his retirement in 2013 with a blistering condemnation of the Hollywood machine. Lena Dunham’s 2010 festival hit Tiny Furniture caught the eye of producer Judd Apatow, and the pair hatched HBO’s Girls, which wears its indie roots on its sleeve and has become a national phenomenon.

The Indie spirit is alive and well, even if it may bypass theaters in the future.

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News

Hannah Montana’s Memphis Concert: The Bootleg Video

Thanks to the wonders of YouTube.com, you now can see and hear the world’s most important artist, Hannah Montana, performing a song during her recent Memphis concert at FedExForum. You know, the one you couldn’t get tickets for.

After forcing ourselves to watch this, we don’t want to say the young lady is, uh, overrated, but does the name “Tiffany” ring a bell?

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Et YouTube, Brute?

CREDIT: WMC-TV

One of the most discussed developments of the current campaign for the open U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee has been last Friday’s encounter between Democrat Harold Ford Jr. and Republican Bob Corker on the parking lot of Wilson Air Services at the Memphis airport.

Video from the affair has gone around the world, literally — not just via network and cable newscasts but, notably, through the medium of cyperspace. The original footage of the event derived mainly from two sources — WMC-TV and WREG-TV, Memphis’ NBC and CBS affiliates, respectively. But various combinations and recombinations — short, long, and edited for effect — have made the rounds of many Web sites proper, most of the political blogs, and assorted e-mail networks. YouTube.com has virtually teemed with different takes.

The bottom line: Anybody whose curiosity had been whetted by news of the event has been able to find several different versions of it. And many, many have. CNN’s version of it was the single most-watched video on that cable network last Saturday.

Well, what did it show exactly? Opinions differ, largely according to the politics of the beholder, but another, equally interesting question is: What was the origin of the event?

It was not a random circumstance or a happenstance encounter: Be assured of that. Word had got out to most of the local news media well in advance that Ford or some surrogate would be on hand when Corker arrived at Wilson Air Services at 11 a.m. on Friday to announce proposals in the area of ethics. It was no secret, either, that these “proposals” coincided with various campaign charges unleashed by candidate Corker against candidate Ford and the candidate’s father, former congressman, now lobbyist, Harold Ford Sr.

Putting it plainly, media representatives who showed up at Wilson Air on Friday morning had every reason to suspect some act of one-upmanship by Ford or somebody representing his campaign. Just what that might be was the only mystery.

After filibustering with the press pack long enough to give his rival time to show up, Ford bounded over to Corker after he had exited his vehicle and voiced a greeting. The actual conversation, posturing and cross-talk condensed, came down to this:

Ford: It’s good to see you. I’d love to debate you on this Iraq thing and the fact that so many Republican senators now are coming around on the partition plan. In Memphis here you said I might be playing God with it, but now it looks like John Warner and even Kay Bailey Hutchinson, she, uh….

Corker: Uh huh. I came to talk about ethics, and I have a press conference, and I think it’s a true sign of desperation that you would pull your bus up while I’m having a press conference.

Ford: No sir, I can never find you when I’m in the state.

Corker: I was in Jackson last night, and I saw your …

Ford: Well, tell me, what do you think about this Iraq thing. I know you’re here to talk about my family. I thought you made a promise right after …

Corker: No, no, no. I’m here to talk about you, and this race, and you and I, and I’m going to do that right now. As a matter of fact, this is my press conference. Not yours. Okay?

And that was it. Corker went into a terminal to do his planned availability, and Ford chatted with the press a few minutes more.

Who won? At the scene, Ford clearly dominated proceedings with his quips, thrusts, and mugging as much as by his statements. It was his surprise attack, and he had the initiative. On TV, however, Corker’s resolute and terse termination of the encounter was the sort of image that may grow larger in the collective memory of the event. He had, besides, protocol on his side, and an air of maturity more in keeping with the public notion of what a senator is.

Indeed, Corker’s campaign team promptly dubbed the affair the “Memphis Meltdown” and claimed victory in as many press releases as they could repackage and turn out in the next 36 hours. That part of the blogosphere sympathetic with Corker (which these days includes several yellow-dog Democrats disgusted with what they see as Ford’s creeping conservatism) concurred, as did a good many bona fide neutrals.

Only … back to that question of what Ford had in mind. Clearly, if Corker had gotten flustered or defensive, Ford stood to reap huge dividends. Didn’t happen. Hence, the Corker camp’s euphoria at what campaign manager Tom Ingram called “a defining moment.”

But wait: Here’s a minority opinion, from one Richard Banks, a former editor of Memphis magazine, now a toiler on behalf of Southern Living in Birmingham:

“I don’t have any inside scoop on Ford’s intentions, but the video was ready-made for the Web. Now that more voters have broadband at home and at work, it’s easier for these videos to spread virally. Ford shows attitude and bravado in the video, which is ironic, considering now that public opinion has turned against the war, that the ‘tude is used to push an agenda that [Ford] has not been supportive of until now. My guess is that bravado appeals to the younger voters — the very audience this video was designed to reach.”

Hmmmm. Maybe. And as good a place as any to make the point that Junior’s base constituency is as much young white professionals as it is urban blacks. Arguably, more so. But for the apparent consensus that Corker kicked butt, Ford had an answer. Did he! On Sunday morning, news got around that Newsweek magazine had him on its cover, illustrating the title “Not Your Daddy’s Democrats.” The blurb continued, “Hungry to take back Congress, moderates like Harold Ford Jr. have the GOP running scared. Would a Democratic majority go wild or govern from the middle?”

As reassuring — even exalting — as that cover and the fulsome story within were to Ford and his partisans, it was a fresh acid bath on the already scalded psyche of liberal Democrats, whose attitude toward Ford has been, at best, on-again, off-again — the “on” phase tenuously linked to the knowledge that his victory in Tennessee could be the one that returns the Senate to Democratic control.

The polls? For now they are still going back and forth. It seems likely that this weekend’s climactic third debate between Ford and Corker in Nashville will go far toward settling things on November 7th.

Meanwhile, Representative Ford, who had maintained a cautious and ostensibly neutral distance from his brother Jake Ford‘s independent congressional race against Democratic nominee Steve Cohen and Republican Mark White, seemed to cross a line with unexpectedly strong criticism of Cohen.

It began when state senator Cohen, on a fund-raising trip to Nashville, checked in with members of the Legislative Plaza press corps and delivered himself of some typically outspoken observations about what he — honestly or conveniently or both — saw as the drag on Ford’s senatorial campaign. Cohen saw Representative Ford’s “tremendous attributes” being overshadowed by the candidacy of brother Jake as well as by a speech given by Harold Ford Sr. in which the former congressman not only conflated a Harold Jr. rally with support for second son Jake but attacked Cohen in language that disturbed many who heard or read about it with its religious overtones.

“We’re from a Christian city here,” Ford Sr. had said at one point. “[Jake] doesn’t believe in legalizing marijuana. This man that’s running against Jake wants some sex shops running in downtown Memphis on a Sunday! That’s our religious holiday.”

After remarking on Representative Ford’s “tremendous attributes,” Cohen told his audience of Nashville media, “For him to come this far and to have the effort to overreach, I guess, and to have his younger brother run in the 9th District, I think has hurt his campaign.”

Further, in a reference to Ford Sr.’s out-of-town residences: “The Ford machine used to have a lot of foot soldiers. … The top brass has moved away from the foot soldiers. It’s hard to be in touch with your foot soldiers when you’re on Fisher Island [Miami] or in the Hamptons.”

That prompted a press release in Representative Ford’s name, which said in part: “Now, it appears that state senator Steve Cohen and Mayor Bob Corker are singing from the same Ford family attack hymnal. I know that Bob Corker is attacking my family because he has come up short on ideas and answers in this campaign. I didn’t know that … Cohen was suffering from the same problem.”

The congressman’s statement also accused Cohen of support for gay marriage, amnesty for illegal immigrants, legalization of marijuana, and “a cut-and-run strategy in Iraq.”

For the record, Cohen has denied favoring gay marriage, opposing only what he calls “constitutional tampering” on top of existing statutes outlawing it. He also introduced a bill last year to legalize the use of marijuana for strictly medical purposes.

“I really think that if Harold Ford Jr. had run with me on a ticket, it would have been a ‘dream team,'” Cohen mused last week in Nashville.

So much for that dream. The reality was that, with the advent of early voting last Wednesday, Ford Sr. had personally taken charge of a Get-Out-the-Vote drive on behalf of both of his candidate sons, routing voters to polling sites via a fleet of buses and other vehicles.

Republican White, the third candidate in the congressional race, has meanwhile kept active, conceding nothing and maintaining dreams of his own for a significant share of the vote in the inner city.

Indeed, “Realizing the Dream,” the title of a panel on overcoming poverty that White was scheduled to appear on this week at Olivet Fellowship Baptist Church (along with Martin Luther King III), could serve as the GOP candidate’s campaign slogan as well. White recently cited a poll (from the Silver Star News, a newspaper with an African-American reader base) showing him with a potential 19 percent share of the black vote.

Though White has addressed economic issues (and went so far as to chide President Bush for not touring the inner city with him on the president’s recent fund-raising appearance here for Corker), his basic appeal both to his would-be black constituency and his predominantly white Republican base has been along social and moral lines.

In a recent fund-raising letter, White attacked “leftist” Cohen along the same lines as had Representative Ford, accusing the state senator of having promoted gay marriage and being responsible for a “bill to legalize drugs in Tennessee,” among other things. The letter took opponent Jake Ford to task as well, citing the latter’s GED degree, “no known background of any kind,” and alleged need for “on the job training” if elected.

The equal-opportunity bashing reflects White’s need — acknowledged in Republican circles — for Cohen and Ford to break even while White holds the line against attrition of the GOP vote and gains at least a modicum of the church-based black vote.

See also Viewpoint,“Color and Politics,” .