Bits and pieces

Just as it did last month, Dell laid off employees from its Winston-Salem plant Thursday, but won't tell taxpayers who've invested millions of dollars in the plant how many employees were cut. But finally, officials are starting to press for answers. Plant-manager Mehran Ravanpay has been asked to come before the city council's finance committee next month.

"I think we're going to remind him that we're in a partnership here, with the city and county being part of this, and even though we're well protected from an agreement standpoint, the public has a right to know about what's going on there," Mayor Allen Joines said yesterday.

Mayor Pro Tem Vivian Burke said, "I would think the taxpayers would want to know the accountability of their funds, and how those funds have been used … and if those funds have not been used properly to make sure they're returned." Dell has created local jobs with its computer plant and in related businesses, she said, and it's not alone in its struggles.

Joines got only a vague hint that the latest round of cuts was coming this soon. Sources told the Journal that at least 50 contract workers were laid off. It's unclear whether those cuts were part of an estimated 150 workers who were laid off last month, or were in addition to that cut.

Dell will be required to pay back some of its incentives if it does not create 1,700 jobs by September 2010, and the company will face a reduction in future incentives. But as it stands now, it's uncertain how many employees the plant has. The agreement only requires that it give annual reports on employee figures.

Dell's continued silence is probably required by some corporate policy handed down from its Texas headquarters. The local plant manager may have no choice. But he might want to ring up Mr. Dell and let him know the locals are not happy, that the company's silence is perceived as corporate indifference to the thousands of people whose taxes are underwriting Dell's success.

"Just put in on the table, lay it all out," Burke said. "Be aboveboard."

How hard could that be?

The name game

Dr. John McConnell, the first head of both the hospital and the medical school at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, is serious about gaining his center a bigger national reputation than it has now.

So serious that he says the center may even consider changing its name. "Everything's on the table," he said during a get-acquainted session at the Journal last week.

Shakespeare wrote, "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet ...," but people take the names of their institutions very seriously. Just ask John Mauceri, the chancellor of the UNC School of the Arts, who caused much controversy last year when he successfully pushed for the "University of North Carolina" to be placed at the front of the school's name.

McConnell, like Mauceri, wants his institution to be known to the widest possible audience.

The medical center does a pretty good job of landing articles about its research achievements in the national press and holding its own with big-name hospitals, such as that one down the road in Durham. McConnell, who came here from Texas last year, wants the medical center to do even better.

It's already gone through one name change. Bowman Gray School of Medicine became Wake Forest University School of Medicine in 1997, and the school and Baptist Hospital became Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. That was a big change to get used to. Some old-timers still refer to the med school as "Bowman Gray," as much out of habit as for respect for the late Reynolds Tobacco president whose money helped lure the school here.

McConnell recognizes the need for caution in considering another name change. "I suspect that this will be an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary, step," he said.

That's what we'd call a smooth bedside manner. We'll trust the good doctor not to do anything rash.

Through the lens

With Winston-Salem's RiverRun International Film Festival coming up later this month, it's worth noting that the best films -- and the best reviews of films -- can make us look at the familiar in a whole new way.

That may be the case with Goodbye Solo, directed by Ramin Bahrani, a Winston-Salem filmmaker. Bahrani, well known to many RiverRun fans for his previous work, will this year become the first recipient of the festival's "Emerging Master" award. Goodbye Solo will be shown at the festival.

In the film shot in and around our city, an aging white Southerner wants a Sengalese cab driver to drive him to Blowing Rock. The old man apparently wants to jump off the mountain. In one of several good reviews of Goodbye Solo, A.O. Scott wrote last week in The New York Times that the film coaxes "a rough beauty out of Winston-Salem and its environs, capturing the lonely, slightly menacing feeling of a city at night."

"Rough beauty" sounds about right, but we're not sure about the rest of that. About the only place you might see "slightly menacing" would be the look on the waiter's face if you asked for Down East barbecue and a bottle of Tabasco sauce.

Another New York take

The review of Goodbye Solo wasn't the only exposure Winston-Salem has received in the Big Apple in recent days. David Sedaris, writing in the March 30 New Yorker about his latest book tour, includes a sidesplitting passage about his journey to Costco in Winston-Salem with his brother-in-law, a local resident. Here's the best line:

"As with every big-box store in Winston-Salem, it took fifteen minutes to drive there and another fifteen minutes to cross the parking lot," he writes. "If the building seemed large from the outside, inside it was twice as big, the kind of space that has its own weather."