| Submitted by: Evelyn C. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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Also, if the South won the Civil War, either the subtitle is giving away the outcome of the book, or the book is misnamed.)
We took the driving tour of the battlefield. It was well-marked and took about two hours. There are other areas of interest if you want to walk to them, but in this heat that seemed inadvisable.
At noon we left and drove as far as Bolivar, where we ate lunch at El Ranchito. We then drove the rest of the way to Memphis (http://www.hermitage.com/nashville.html, http://memphisguide.com/Sightsee.html). On the way we passed a historical marker for the site where Buford Pusser was 'killed in a car accident' (as the marker said, though Unauthorized America indicates he was ambushed and killed deliberately). A little further on we passed an ostrich, three camels, and two zebras. This is very different from what one sees from the interstate. (Earlier I had seen a sign for 'Panther Road Rhea Farm.' I had thought at the time that was a reference to Rhea County; now I'm not so sure.)
In addition to exotic fauna, we also saw exotic flora. Kudzu was gradually taking over, covering not just signs and utility pole supports, but whole sections of forest. It looks like some alien life form out of a science fiction novel.
All this points out the difference between traveling on interstates and traveling on 'back roads.' Given that the speed limit on these 'back roads' is 65 miles per hour, and slowdowns for towns don't happen very often, the time differential isn't as much as you might think. But there is more interesting 'stuff' on the back roads-strange animals and plants, quirky historical markers (though Tennessee seems to put up a historical marker at the drop of a hat), and so on. On the other hand, since most of the long-distance traffic is on the interstates, almost all the motels and eateries have moved there as well. In some ways, your best bet is where an interstate crosses whatever road you're taking.
We got to Memphis about 4 PM and checked into a Super 8. After dropping our luggage off and freshening up, we drove into Memphis and parked near one end of Beale Street to take the Beale Street Walking Tour as described on the Web (http://memphisguide.com/Beale/Beale.html). Beale Street was 'the Birthplace of the Blues,' and while I'm not a big blues fan, it is an interesting street historically.
We started with the Orpheum Theater, now used both for movies and for live theater. The nine-foot statue of Elvis Presley at the corner of Beale on South Main had been under renovation, but is now back. We passed the Blues City Cafe (one of the settings in the movie The Firm), B. B. King's Club, the Band Box, and Memphis Music Records and Tapes (the original home of the world famous A. Schwab's Dry Goods). We went into the Police Museum at the Police Station at 159 Beale. This is both an active police station and a twenty-four-hour museum. This was a bit of a mistake, since we got out at 5 PM, which was just when A. Schwab's Dry Goods Store closed. We should have done them in reverse order. (We did get back to Schwab's Wednesday, so I will talk about it there.)
After this we passed King's Palace Cafe, and dropped into Strange Cargo briefly (nothing really interesting). Then came Rum Boogie Cafe, and Silky O'Sullivan's Patio (the 'Pride of Beale Street' is now nothing but its facade). After Handy Park (named for W. C. Handy, of course) was the future home of a Hard Rock Cafe, Beale Street Barbecue and Piano Bar, and Joyce Cobb's Club. Then came Pee Wee's Saloon, where the Blues were born when W. C. Handy is said to have written 'Mister Crump Blues' (later called Memphis Blues) here at Pee Wee's Bar on the cigar counter. There were even more sites listed but we ended about here, partly because of the heat, and partly because the rest of the sites often had no structure left standing.
It was still fairly early (6 PM), but there was nothing specific we had to do, so we drove past the Pyramid, a large, 321-foot high pyramid that is a sports arena and concert stadium and has a statue of Ramesses II in front. Then we saw the outside of the Danny Thomas ALSAC Pavilion at St. Jude's Children's Hospital. This pavilion is shaped like the Dome of the Rock, supposedly to honor Danny Thomas's Middle Eastern heritage, but a bit strange for a Catholic hospital, and not in Lebanon anyway. We also drove past the Lorraine Motel (now the National Civil Rights Museum, which we will be visiting tomorrow) and the rooming house from which James Earl Ray shot the Reverend Martin Luther King.
And finally we drove past Graceland (http://www.elvis-presley.com). We did not go in or take any of the tours, but even the outside is worth seeing. All along the stone wall, people have written messages, until the whole wall is covered. The old ones fade with time and the new ones overlay them. They have even provided a pull-over lane where you can pull off the road, stop, and leave your message. I wonder if there is someplace you can fax messages to and someone will write them for you. (This is a reference to a service whereby you can fax a prayer and someone will put it into the Western Wall for you.) We missed the anniversary of Elvis's death by two days, and probably just as well.
Dinner was at a small place called Ruby's Family Restaurant near the motel. The buffalo wings were pretty good, spicy without having sauce dripping off them. They did, however, take a long time.
After dinner, I managed to work out the intricacies of dialing in to the computer at work (not helped by incorrect instructions on the phone as to how to make a direct-dial call) and checked my email, sent a status message to folks, etc. I was pleased to see that they repaired the broken mailing list for the MT VOID, as we want that to go out automatically every Friday. And I did get a response as to when and where the pre-Hugo reception was. I couldn't manage to connect to my off-site mail; Microsoft Internet Explorer gave me some sort of general exception fault. I'll have to see if that's intermittent or happens all the time. Mark also checked his mail. Tomorrow I'll try to check my voice mail.
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We woke up early, but didn't leave until 8:30 AM, because nothing opened until 9 AM. Our first stop was the Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology (http://www.memphis.edu/egypt/main.html) at the University of Memphis. We managed to find the street it was on (Norriswood) but had to ask directions, since the building is actually on a dogleg extension of the street.
Memphis has a fascination with things from its namesake. There's the Pyramid, of course, with a statue of Ramesses II in front. and there's also the Institute of Egyptian Art & Archaeology. It wants to be a major player, I suspect, and the opening was attended by Mrs. Anwar Sadat, but the collection is rather small. Still, it was well displayed and explained.
There was also some modern art in the same museum (if indeed it is a museum-I'm not sure the term is correct here). There was what appears to be obligatory in Memphis: Elvis art. This included a three-dimensional 'piece' on the 'Food of Kings' which contained 'Blue Suede Sauce,' 'Heartburn Hotel Beans,' and 'Hunka Hunka Burnin' Tongue Hot Sauce.'
There was also an exhibit of folk art by Joe Light with strange religious messages ('Punishment is evil, but it's justifiable if it's necessary.').
This took only about an hour, and then we drove up Poplar Avenue to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (http://memphisguide.com/Brooks.html). Poplar Avenue is apparently one of the main shopping/eating streets (in the mall sense), and a considerable improvement over Elvis Presley Boulevard/Bellevue Boulevard, which we drove down yesterday. That was full of pawn shops (I have never seen so many pawn shops as in Memphis), and the gas station we stopped at had the cashier behind what I assume was bullet-proof glass. Not exactly reassuring-I guess I expected the neighborhood of Graceland to be a little better.
Anyway, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (which I guess I could call just the Brooks Museum of Art, though no one seems to) has a fairly small collection as art museums go. They seem to be trying to 'hit the high points,' so they have a Picasso pitcher, a Rodin, a Winslow Homer, two Pisarros, a Renoir, a Georgia O'Keeffe, and a Thomas Hart Benton ('The Engineer's Dream'). It is undoubtedly foolish to rate a museum by a scorecard of what artists it has, but one can't help but feel that's what drives many of the acquisitions museums make. And given that they need public support, it probably makes sense to be able to tell their donors which great artists they have works of. Of these 'masterworks' the only one that impressed me was the Benton, but maybe that's just because I like his style.
They also had a section 'In Touch with Art,' with touchable sculpture for the visually impaired (or anyone else, actually).
Another section had art from Africa, Oceania, pre-Columbian America, and the Middle East. I'm not sure what general name one would give to these. 'Primitive art' is probably no longer politically correct, but 'ethnic art' or 'folk art' could be applied to art produced today. In any case, I thought that the Oceanic art looked a lot like African art, but it also had totem poles like Pacific Northwest art. The museum had some quite impressive African pieces, though an 'ancestor figure' described as 'wood and shells' clearly also had a monkey skull as part of it.
There was a short film on Walter Anderson, an American artist who was first exhibited by the museum. He was born in 1903 in New Orleans, and though he attended prestigious art schools, he was more influenced by the Gothic cathedrals and cave paintings in Europe than by the art museums. He worked for a while for the family business, Shearwater Pottery in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, but after suffering a breakdown in 1937 became reclusive and worked entirely on his art until his death in 1965. His use of 'pattern, repetition and the abstract design of the visual world closed the gulf between realism and abstraction.'
Various musings: In the painting 'Enthroned Madonna and Child with Two Virgin Martyrs,' if this is post-martyrdom of St. Catherine and St. Christina, how come Jesus is still a baby?
British portraiture has little to recommend it.
Some of my favorite pieces are by 'unknowns': George Luks' 'The Fortune Teller,' Carl Gutherz's 'Portrait of Susan B. Anthony,' and Burton Callicott's 'The Gleaners.'
Downstairs, they had the (apparently obligatory) Elvis display. This was 'Elvis Presley: The Beginning of a Legend,' early publicity photographs of Elvis by William Speer.
We ate lunch at Saigon, a Vietnamese noodle place (shades of all our noodle lunches in Japan!).
After lunch we drove back downtown to the National Civil Rights Museum (http://www.mecca.org/~crights/ncrm.html) ($6 less a $1 AAA discount). I know there is some dispute going on over this museum involving the question of who should be running it, but I can't provide more details offhand.
This museum is in the Lorraine Motel, where the Reverend Martin Luther King was shot on April 4, 1968. And where were you when you heard? (I was at a freshman orientation at the University of Massachusetts, and learned about it the next morning when I saw all the posters up about it.)
The museum is almost entirely text, photographs, and quotations. There are a few three-dimensional recreations (such as of a lunch counter), a few audio and videotapes, and some artifacts (a Klan robe, old white/colored signs), but on the whole it is very wordy. This is okay, although after a while one wishes for something besides just reading. |
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