Glover for Sayles

The new John Sayles film Honeydripper, a musical drama about a restless bluesman and the roots of rock 'n' roll, won't open in Nashville until Feb. 15. But you can get an advance peek without striking a deal with the devil. The film's co-star Danny Glover will appear 7 p.m. Monday, Feb. 11, at Regal's Green Hills megaplex at a special screening and post-film Q&A presented by the Nashville Film Festival. Tickets are $15 or $12 for festival members; you can get them here.

How to Improve Metro Schools: Part 329

Jeremy Kane, director of LEAD Academy, who is featured in this week's Scene, has drafted a memo outlining a radically different way of approaching education. In it, Kane proposes we undertake a far-out, risky enterprise in which we look at what works at other school districts and see if we could apply any of those lessons here. Sure, that approach may not seem so revolutionary, but in the arena of public education the debate is typically between incrementalism and doing nothing. Kane's memo argues for more meaningful reform designed to foster smaller, more autonomous schools. We're not convinced all of the measures outlined here are feasible, but Kane's proposal is as good a starting point as any for a debate about our district. After the jump, a rough draft of Kane's memo. Though he hasn't finished citing all his sources, we pleaded with him to let us publish it now.

Art of the Insult

Last week, the folks developing Nashville's Museum of African American Music, Art and Culture proposed a partnership between the museum—slated to open in 2011—and Fisk University to showcase the school's coveted Stieglitz Collection. In return, Fisk would get “a steady stream of revenue” to help the school recover from financial purgatory. Seemed like a good enough idea.

But it sure didn't take long for Fisk officials to crap all over the first real attempt to keep the art local. If there was any question about what Fisk thought about the new proposal—or about how the promise of making a quick buck stacks up against the significant cultural value of keeping the collection local and intact—university president Hazel O'Leary has cleared it right up. The Fisk prez called the Nashville museum's proposal “ludicrous” and “insulting.”

Yeah, we get that Fisk is in dire financial straits and a $30 million offer from the Wal-Mart heiress to ship the art to Arkansas is mighty tempting. And, as exhibited during her tenure as energy secretary during the Clinton administration, O'Leary doesn't exactly have the best judgment. But what's with all the sass?

Does Fisk's near-rabid desire to turn art into dollars really merit insulting a group trying to honor the influence of African American culture in Nashville—not to mention, trying to help Fisk? Course, the Nashville museum is still in the formative stages. But last time we checked, the Wal-Mart museum still looked like nothing more than a hole in the ground in Bentonville, Ark.

O'Leary even chided the museum for not having an “expert” on board, apparently a reference to some sort of curator. It's an odd blow, especially coming from the leader of a university that thought it would be a good idea to house an art collection hand-selected by Georgia O'Keeffe in a dank, renovated gymnasium with zero climate control.

Touch of Touch of Evil

Nashville. Music City. A wet kiss on the end of a fist. A filthy town where anything can be bought—for the right price. That includes a pass to the Belcourt's Nashville Film Noir Festival, starting tomorrow night at 7 p.m. and continuing through March 4.

Roll dice, flip a coin, throw a dart at the calendar. You'll be hard pressed to pick a movie in this 18-film series that won't rock your world, especially if you have any affinity whatsoever for crackling dialogue, sharp-brimmed hats, femmes fatales, and character actors whose mugs look like granite chiseled with a jackhammer. For an overview that barely hints at the hardcore jollies on tap, look here.

The opening-night feature is Orson Welles' baroque sleaze masterpiece Touch of Evil, to be introduced by The Rage's Jonathan Malcolm Lampley. Above, you'll find the movie's justly renowned opening, which captures in one unbroken shot the three minutes and change leading up to a deadly car-bombing in a Mexican border town. Much as I miss Henry Mancini's jazzy title music in this reconstructed edit, the layered sound design that defines the town is a marvel. I love the way the car radio fades in and out of the action, building suspense by cueing us in to its proximity. And the shot itself is noir distilled to a bouillon cube—the tilted angles, the looming shadows, the side streets seething with menace.

What are ya waiting for, an invitation? I'll post more on individual films throughout the festival. Check back in and report on what you see. I can't wait to hear what people make of Kiss Me Deadly, Point Blank and The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3.

Red State Fred Portrait Sold!

ACK breaks the news, which will show me to go get another cup of coffee before posting what I know: Drew Johnson and Trent Seibert of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research have purchased for $1,200 the Fred Thompson portrait featured here.

Why We Don't Care About Ron Paul

So some Ron Paul operatives dropped by the Scene the other day to leave some material, which our administrative assistant dutifully passed on to the edit department. But then, they came back—two of them. As Jeff Woods and I were in my office talking about upcoming stories, our colleague Brian appeared in my doorway to say they were waiting to talk with one of us. What ensued went something like this:

Me: (rolling eyes) What do they want?
Brian: I don’t know. To talk to you.
Woods: Tell them I got their shit.
Brian: But they want to see you.
Me: Brian, look, I’ll talk about coverage with pretty much anyone who shows up, but Ron Paul isn’t a Nashville story. Can you get rid of them?
Brian: I can try.
Woods: Hell, I’ll go talk to them.

Woods does and—I can attest because I was getting my mail and overheard it—was uncharacteristically cordial, friendly, attentive. When after a few minutes he said he was busy with some work and needed to get back to it, they ignored his attempt at a gracious exit and continued their strident advocacy. He said, “Thanks for coming by” or some such, but they wouldn’t take the hint. Finally, he asked them if they were "a bunch of Jehovah's Witnesses or something." In the end, he simply had to turn his back as they continued to peddle a libertarian masquerading as a legitimate GOP candidate—someone who has prolifically published all manner of racist, homophobic material (which he now claims no responsibility for).

Here’s the deal. We at the Scene don’t care about Ron Paul. He’s a single-digit wonder who doesn’t care about the environment ("Private property owners have a much better record of taking care of the environment. If you look at the common ownership of the lands in the West, they're much more poorly treated than those that are privately owned. In a free-market system, nobody is permitted to pollute their neighbor's private property— water, air, or land. It is very strict."), has no chance of success and is irrelevant to the Tennessee primary process.

But as much we may loathe what he represents, this isn’t a political consideration. It’s a practical one. You never saw us writing about Dennis Kucinich either. Save your tracts and your time and leave us alone, Paulites.

Playing Abortion Politics

In a fine bit of political theater, Democrats showed up Republicans on the abortion issue this week in the state Senate.

Republicans, denying any political posturing for this year’s elections, are pushing a state constitutional amendment on abortion. They say it’s needed to nullify a Tennessee Supreme Court ruling that they say prohibits “commonsense” restrictions on abortion rights.

But Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday delayed voting on a bill by Democratic Sen. Roy Herron that would require just the kind of precautions Republicans have been saying are reasonable—informed consent and mandated periods of reflection before abortions. The legislation also provides an exception in cases in which an abortion is necessary to protect the health and life of the mother. And Herron produced a state attorney general’s opinion saying his bill is constitutional in spite of that Supreme Court ruling that Republicans hate so much.

"This is a pro-life bill, and any legislator claiming to be pro-life should support it," Herron told the committee, which is controlled 5-4 by Republicans. "There has been a lot of talk in the Senate lately about amending the constitution concerning abortion, but none of that would take effect for at least three years. If our goal is to protect unborn babies, we can pass this bill and begin protecting those babies immediately."

Democrats sent a press release this morning on the meeting in which pro-life Sen. Doug Jackson, a Democrat from Dickson, expresses dismay at opposition to the bill. "I feel sure this is a bill that Tennessee Right to Life can support," he says. "If they want to protect unborn babies, why wouldn't they support it?"

Update: Republicans respond with their own press release. They seem to have dropped their insistence that the issue is about providing "commonsense protections for women," as Sen. Diane Black put it. Suddenly, it's all about letting the people speak.

"Democrats seek to confuse a very simple issue: An activist court overturned laws that protected women and the unborn while SJR 127 seeks to return to the people the vote to address the issue of abortion ," state GOP chair Robin Smith says. "Rather than permitting voters to speak on the issue, Democrats are seeking to put this issue back in the hands of the courts, not at the ballot box."

Harassing the Homeless

Nashville’s homeless community is justifiably outraged by this YouTube video in which some chucklehead cruelly mocks a couple of street people. Charles Strobel, founder of the Room in the Inn shelters, brought the video to the attention of Pith. “The homeless showed it to us and our staff here is upset about it,” Strobel says. “It needs to be exposed because of the bigotry that’s there and the ridicule of people in an unfortunate condition.”

One homeless man, who asks not to be named, tells Pith, “This is exploitation of the downtrodden. I guess you can video anything you want and you can hate anyone you want, but that doesn’t make it right.”

This video surfaces at a time when Nashville is about to crack down on panhandling because beggars are bothering downtown tourists and residents. Isn't that ironic?

Dispatch From Aztlan

I got a love note yesterday from crazy Jim Boyd, or, as we characterized him in our December Boner Awards, "the Paul Revere of Brown Peril." Contained in the box that accompanied his sweet nothings were, as you can see above, some dirt collected from the Arizona-Mexican border and what is probably water laced with toxins.

Read the jump for his entire note, but before that, I share with you the recipe he enclosed with his offering:

1. Mix one part water with three parts dirt.

2. Fling mixture at those braver than yourself.

3. Run and hide so you won't get your pansy ass kicked by your intended target.

UPDATE: Aunt B. gets all philosophical about the picture above.

Sunnyside Up

Gov. Phil Bredesen sounded a few upbeat notes on education in his State of the State speech last night by invoking Education Week’s recent state-by-state report card on public schools:

Believe me, these kinds of grades and rankings should always be taken with a grain of salt, and they don’t always capture what is most important. But I’ll confess to you that it was nice to look it over this year. We’re still in the 40s on school finance, 41st to be exact. But this year for the first time they ranked states on overall scores – the measure that tries to take everything into account—achievement, standards, transitions, teachers, finance—the bottom line. In that ranking, this January, we’re not in the 40s. We’re not in the 30s. We’re not in the 20s even. Tennessee is ranked this year No. 16 in the nation.

In areas we have focused on, we do even better. In the category of “Standards, Assessments and Accountability,” we’re ranked number 10 in the nation. After the actions that our State School Board took last week to further raise standards, I expect this to climb even higher in the years ahead. And my personal favorite ranking: In one of the six categories they look at, “Education Alignment Policies”—this is where pre-K lives—we know we still have lots to do here, but in 2008 our Education Week rank nationally is one.

Readers, I Need Your Input

OK, this is a little embarrassing, but it's the way it is: I missed the deadline to register to vote in the Super Duper Blowout (Now Fred-Free!) Presidential Preference Tuesday. Yep, I moved from Nashville to Brentwood back in August and kept putting off registering in Williamson County until, when I finally got the notion, lo and behold, I missed the deadline by a day. Whoops.

But here's the thing: I'm still registered in at my old address in Davidson County, and I have been told by more than one person that I could just go vote there. Well, I have no doubt that I could just walk into my old precinct and cast a vote, sure, but I have a real personal problem with that because I am no longer a resident of the county and I think—at least technically speaking—I'm not allowed to vote there.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today...or Something Like That

If not for a Xeroxed local zine called The Fireplace Whiskey Journal, fueled by beer, Obie's Pizza and Diet Dr. Pepper in the waning days of Ronald Reagan's second term, I would never have ended up writing for the Scene a year later. I'm just telling you who to blame, that's all.

FWJ editor/founder/publisher/Anglophile Tom Wood recalls the zine's 20th anniversary this week over at NashvillePost.com. And check out the official site.

Can Obama Win Tennessee? Discuss.

So there we were last night at Brandon's bar in the Arcade—a motley collection of journalists and political hangers-on. I was as usual the only one with ovaries, which is neither here nor there. Amid the rise and fall of elbows, between drags on fags and when we weren't busy trading barbed insults of one another, we talked politics. Before I get to the question at hand, a few minutes from the Reject Roundtable:

1) Word is that Gov. Phil Bredesen may be predisposed to sign what may be the backwater bill of the session should it pass the House: the "guns in bars" legislation, as House Speaker Jimmy Naifeh calls it. If he does, maybe it's true after all that he has higher political aspirations.

2) Consensus is that erstwhile presidential candidate Fred Thompson's media operation may have been just as poor and haphazard as Al Gore's was in 2000.

3) Hillary Clinton has Republican coattails, it was decided. Should she get the Democratic nomination, she energizes the fractured GOP—and McCain, or perhaps Stepford candidate Mitt Romney, gets elected.

As for Clinton, will she win the Feb. 5 Tennessee primary? Will Obama? Will John Edwards sneak up the middle? The Reject Roundtable was divided over these questions, and some pointed to Harold Ford Jr.'s Senate loss in Tennessee as evidence that this state wouldn't elect a black man. Here are my thoughts on the matter: Ford Jr.'s problem was his family name, not his race; Hillary Clinton can't win Tennessee, but either Edwards or Obama can; while I could vote for any of the three Democrats or for John McCain, I'm betting that Obama (to whom, in the interest of full disclosure, my husband made a contribution) wins Tennessee; have no clue who will get the GOP nod here.

Discuss.

Don't Give up on Fred Yet

Here's an article touting the possibility that, even though our beloved Fred Thompson has withdrawn from the presidential race, he might still wind up as the GOP nominee. The basic theory is that if the Republican National Convention is deadlocked, delegates will turn to somebody who is so utterly bland and boring that he's inoffensive to just about everyone and therefore totally acceptable as the nominee. And who fits that bill to a tee? Fred Thompson, of course.

"The flip side of his failure to articulate much of a platform is that he hasn't really alienated anybody," says the article's writer, Steven Stark of the Boston Phoenix. Yes, Thompson could become this year's Warren Harding, who emerged as the nominee from the GOP's deadlocked 1920 convention. Now that would be something to make Fredheads proud.

Hanging with AG Cooper

A heads up to Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper: You might want to consider using the rear entrance at work tomorrow.

Protestors are planning an 11:30 a.m. rally outside Cooper’s downtown office in response to his latest appeal in the case of Paul House, who remains on death row despite exonerating DNA evidence and the U.S. Supreme Court’s determination that he’s likely innocent. A story in this week’s Scene delves into the latest development in the capital case and what it could mean for 46-year-old House, who is suffering from advanced multiple sclerosis.

Speakers at tomorrow’s event (sponsored by the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing) will include the inmate’s mother, Joyce House, Rep. Mike Turner, a Democrat from Old Hickory who believes House is innocent, as well as a few local musicians. The group will gather in front of the John Sevier Building at 425 5th Avenue North.

Rob Briley: 'I'm Sorry'

With two Democrats ready to challenge his reelection this year, state Rep. Rob Briley tried to begin his political rehabilitation today, standing before the state House to apologize for his wild drunken escapades, and his colleagues responded with a rousing ovation, hugs and pats on the back.

Here are excerpts from the Nashville Democrat’s remarks to the House:

Scene Story Pirated by Nicaraguan Daily Paper

Last week’s cover story about Megan Volz’s stormy relationship with—and subsequent filing of assault charges against—two Uruguayan illegals has gotten an unauthorized boost in circulation. The Nicaraguan daily El Nuevo Diario reprinted the story without our permission in its entirety…well almost. The editors there removed all references in our story to Eric Volz’s trial being a sham or other facts of the case that point to the young man’s innocence. They also deleted all references to the significant movement to free Eric Volz, including the work of his lawyers and the website his family started. In all, the story the paper "reprinted"—titled "La Otra Volz"—is about half the length of the English version that we first published last week.

The paper also added ominous subheds such as “The Volz’s, from victims to executioners,” and “A bad girl” in between sections of the story.

Finally, they spelled my name P.J. Robia.

Mercedes Alvarado, mother of the young woman that Eric was accused of killing, was shown the bootleg version of the story and is quoted in this article, which attempts to make the case that violence runs in the Volz family. “They apparently come from a violent society and from an unstable family emotionally," Alvarado tells the paper in Spanish. She also says that she was surprised to know that Eric had a sister. "Here always he said that he was an only child," she says.

Keep in mind that this is a woman who claims that Volz offered her $1 million for her silence. He claims that he didn’t, and even if he did, it didn’t work. Alvarado testified at his trial, where he was found guilty and sentenced to 30 years before an appellate court finally released him last month.

Revisiting the Garcia Acolytes

With the quiet, ignoble demise of Pedro Garcia, who came to Nashville brimming with bluster and confidence only to become an object of scorn and ridicule, it's hard to believe a few people really did welcome him as a liberator. One particularly dim-witted (if rather handsome) writer nearly dislocated his shoulder patting the smug schools director on the back in Garcia's early years. After the jump we'll give you some of his less-than-prescient characterizations:

Bredesen's Blemish

Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper takes the brunt of the blame in this week's story about efforts to keep an ailing and likely innocent man on death row, although the governor certainly hasn’t been spared from criticism for refusing to free Paul House.

Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court declared in 2006 that no reasonable juror would convict House given the exculpatory DNA evidence now available, Gov. Phil Bredesen has refused to use his exclusive authority to end the ongoing legal battle and pardon the inmate, who has advanced multiple sclerosis and can no longer walk or feed himself.

Let Fred Aid Begin!

Help Jackie Broyles and Dunlap make sweet lemonade out of the lemon that was Fred Thompson's candidacy. Wouldn't you want to own an original Jackie Broyles?

Meanwhile, forget Jackie's presidential campaign. Let's lobby Dick Wolf to get him Thompson's old gig on Law & Order.

"God Hates Fags" Comes to Nashville

Halloween comes early this year in the form of a super-creepy YouTube clip of Fred Phelps—founder and head crazy man of the website "God Hates Fags"—rambling and mumbling in front of our very own Metro courthouse. Listen as he tells us how “gay” is not actually a word and shares advice on child rearing. Specifically, if you catch your child watching Internet porn, Phelps advises you hit them across the head “…with a hard stick. Give 'em one across they lips until they bleed.”

He also brags that his site, godhatesfags.com has had “over 3 million hits" and gets about 200 emails a day.

The guy holding the camera in this clip is definitely not one of those web visitors. He says that he doesn’t “do the web.... I preach against it. I can’t.”

Dean Believes the Children Are Our Future

Well unfortunately, we promised we'd give you Mayor Karl Dean's reaction to David Fox's proposal. Here it is:

“I share Mr. Fox’s eagerness to see real changes made in our schools and I certainly appreciate his recognizing my commitment to improving our school system. Having entered into a new era of accountability under No Child Left Behind, I recognize the future success of our schools will be reflected by the need for more involvement between local government and the school district.”

In other news, Dean thinks mom bakes the best peach cobbler, kittens are adorable and Fred Thompson was a pretty shitty candidate. Hopefully, in the days ahead the mayor will have something more interesting to say about Fox's very specific and substantial proposal to improve the school system.

Why Fred Lost

Now that Fred Thompson has belatedly ended his presidential campaign, the rationalizations for the failure of his candidacy can begin. It’s likely that many Fredheads will blame the media for relentlessly portraying their hero as a lazy, low-aptitude moron, and that caricature did damage Thompson, who began at or near the top of the GOP field and started falling in popularity almost from the day he declared.

I agree the media overdid it at times in their zeal to make Thompson look dumb. But like many stereotypes, Thompson’s was rooted at least partly in fact. He campaigned lackadaisically and, especially in the beginning, he obviously hadn’t taken the trouble to brush up on the issues. (Notably, he was forced to admit to reporters that he was foggy on the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case.) The fact is that he had to be talked into running, and he was never too keen on the idea.

Be that as it may, the real causes of the campaign’s downfall may have had not so much to do with Thompson’s lack of energy or ambition as with other deficiencies in his candidacy.

Tennessean/USA Today Use Hate Group as a Source

This article about the cost of illegal immigrants to the U.S. Health care system in today’s Tennessean—with a byline by a USA Today reporter—cites statistics by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR.) Last month the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) officially named FAIR a hate group because it accepted a $1.2 million gift from what the SPLC calls an “infamous, racist eugenics foundation.” (Eugenics is the Nazi utilized theory of culling inferior races from the gene pool so that a “pure” race of people can be bred.) This long-form investigative piece by an SPLC reporter also cites bigoted statements by FAIR founder John Tanton against Catholics and his comparison of immigrants to an aggressive bacteria that will one day overwhelm the American Petri dish. The group is also a big advocate of the Aztlan theory.

Despite all of that, FAIR has great influence in the American immigration policy debate. Its members have been called to testify before the U.S. Congress, and according to the SPLC were quoted almost 500 times in mainstream media outlets in 2007. FAIR has also hosted press events—such as this one in Iowa this month (last item)—where conservative talkers like Steve Gill do live broadcasts starring major party candidates and FAIR spokespeople. And of course, Phil Valentine quotes their figures and study results dutifully, and has even written this column for FAIR's website about the impact of illegal immigration on Tennessee.

FAIR and other groups founded by Tanton have been credited with starting a grassroots wildfire that ended up killing last year’s bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform package then making its way through Congress.

It’s a good bet that most of the people who were prompted by FAIR’s media push to call or fax their elected officials and advocate for the FAIR agenda had little knowledge that they were acting on behalf of a man with such dark motives. But shouldn’t the Tennessean—or for that matter USA Today—know better?

Crazy Like a Fox? School Board Member Urges Mayoral Control of Nashville Schools

Nashville School Board member David Fox wants out of a job. At least, that's one upshot of a proposal he made today in a speech before the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce in which the former business journalist asked Gov. Phil Bredesen to allow Mayor Karl Dean to commandeer the city's struggling school system and appoint his own school board.

“I request that as soon as practically and legally possible, Governor Bredesen empower the mayor with authority over MNPS and support legislative efforts to give Nashville's mayor the power to appoint all members of the Metro Nashville Board of Education,” the first-term board member said.

Fox's proposal, though a radical one in Tennessee, reflects a growing trend toward more centrally run school systems. With abysmal graduation rates and dropping test scores, state legislators across the country have authored legislation handing big-city mayors the authority to call the public education shots. The thinking is they couldn't do any worse than the oft-corrupt and incompetent elected boards who've run their schools into the ground. Mayors in Chicago, Cleveland and New York have taken over their local school districts with largely promising results. Closer to home, Memphis mayor Willie Herenton has asked for control of his troubled school district. We'll have some comments from Dean later today. After the jump, Fox's chamber speech: