Though a legislative race or two taking place in Shelby County could have important consequences on the balance of power in Nashville, two contests happening just on the fringes of the county are drawing most attention statewide. Those are: the race for state House District 81, which pits House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh of Covington, a […]
Posted inNews, News Feature
The Sham of Political Polling
Anybody who believes national political polls are giving you facts is a gullible fool. Any editors of newspapers or television news shows who use poll results as a story are beyond gullible. On behalf of the public they profess to serve, they are salesmen of falsehoods. This is because these political polls are done by […]
Posted inNews, News Feature
The Sham of Political Polling
Anybody who believes national political polls are giving you facts is a gullible fool. Any editors of newspapers or television news shows who use poll results as a story are beyond gullible. On behalf of the public they profess to serve, they are salesmen of falsehoods. This is because these political polls are done by […]
Posted inOpinion
Pride and Prejudice
Around this time last year, more than 300 people gathered at the Overton Park Shell to watch local musicians perform, attend workshops, and purchase crafts and other goodies. Many dined on the usual festival food — corn dogs and funnel cakes — and some used the opportunity to meet new people. To casual observers, it […]
Posted inOpinion
The Cost of Care
During last week’s City Council meeting, the city’s human resources director, Dr. Lorene Essex, updated the council on the health-care committee’s plan to change the city’s health benefits vendor from CIGNA to United Healthcare. CIGNA has provided services to about 6,000 city employees for the past three years. In a report last month conducted by […]
Posted inFilm Features, Film/TV
Addictive
Jim Jarmusch onetime darling of American ?indie? cinema with Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, and the Memphis-filmed Mystery Train has seen his commercial prospects dim considerably in the decade or so since the film scene he helped spur has blurred into a subset of Hollywood business-as-usual. Unlike his generational compatriots Spike Lee, Richard Linklater, […]
Posted inMusic, Record Reviews
Short Cuts :: Record Reviews
A landmark indie label looks back. Old Enough To Know Better: 15 Years of Merge Records Various Artists (Merge Records) This three-disc sampler from Chapel Hill’s Merge Records amounts to an audio biography of what we call “indie rock.” Merge was founded by Laura Balance and Mac McCaughan as an outlet for their band Superchunk […]
Posted inOpinion
Taken to Heart
In the documentary Chernobyl Heart, pediatric heart surgeon Dr. William Novick of Memphis cries after a successful surgery. The scene takes place in a dimly lit stairwell, so his tears are not visible to the camera. Nonetheless, his emotions are there, upfront and center. Novick is the lead surgeon for the International Children’s Heart Foundation […]
Posted inFood & Wine, Food & Drink
The joy of eating
Gina Mallet was in the middle of eating a restaurant’s veal chop when she realized she was bored not only with the chop but with food in general — bored with food overpraised by critics, bored with food trying too hard to make a “splash,” bored with food that was “imaginative,” and bored with food […]
Posted inFilm Features, Film/TV
Culture Clash
It would be difficult to find a drearier way to spend two-and-a-quarter hours than with Vanity Fair the Reese Witherspoon vehicle that is generating Oscar buzz for the actress whose trademark contribution to her films is zest and spunk. Vanity Fair, a bloated but hollow, gaudy antique of a movie based on the 1848 classic […]
Posted inFood & Wine, Food & Drink
How Sweet It Is
In his offbeat classic Jitterbug Perfume, author Tom Robbins heaps lavish praise upon the beet. It is, he says, “the most intense of vegetables deadly serious the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized.” The novel goes on to […]
Posted inMusic, Record Reviews
Short Cuts :: Record Reviews
Uh Huh Her PJ Harvey (Island) On Uh Huh Her, PJ Harvey’s righteous, angel-of-death passion and anger are imprisoned within familiar lyrical tropes and familiar, simple arrangements, which make her latest release as weak and timorous as her previous masterpiece (and greatest album), 2000’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, was strong and […]