Month: March 2006

Categories
Music Music Features

Street scenes and buzz bands highlight a first-time festival experience.

The South By Southwest Music Festival is a music fan’s wet dream, but as they say, the best laid plans of mice and music critics. During my two days and three nights in Austin, I saw some anticipated acts flop and some unknown groups make the biggest impact on me of all.

On Wednesday, the opening night of the festival, I caught a capacity crowd for Belle & Sebastian at Stubb’s, a beautiful outdoor shell on the north end of Red River.

On Thursday, I had more time to prep and planned an ambitious evening: Catch Spoon at the Town Lake stage across the river from downtown, bounce over to Beerland for the Goner showcase, then back to Stubb’s for Fiery Furnaces before rushing back down to 6th Street for the band that defines buzz, New York’s Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.

But Spoon was late to come on, and their sound was a bit lost at the large open-air venue of Town Lake. The Fiery Furnaces did a better job filling the air at Stubbs. Lead singer Eleanor Friedberger looked confident and in control of the group, which says something about the progress of this band, famous for the onstage antagonism of its sibling founders.

It was on my way back from Stubbs that I ran into what would stand out as the high point of the trip. Playing to a crowd of nearly 200 people was a New Orleans street band who identified themselves only as The Hot 8. They were in full second-line swing, with a six-piece brass section anchored by bass and snare drummers.

In contrast to some other acts that played on the street outside crowded venues, the Hot 8 were set up on a nondescript corner. Half a dozen cameras were filming the event, and a small circle of fans formed right in front of the band to dance.

The music was so infectious that people were leaving the long line to see Flaming Lips/Clap Your Hands to see what all the fervor was about. By the time I left to get in line, the group had the whole crowd singing along in a Creole patois that only a scant few probably understood.

From there it was back to the original plan. The Flaming Lips were billed at SXSW as a “special guest,” but they packed them in at Eternal. Frontman Wayne Coyne had spent the earlier part of the evening rolling around 6th Street in his human-sized hamster ball and conducting a sing-along.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah finished off the evening at Eternal. This Brooklyn-based quintet made the jump to indie stardom before being signed, capitalizing on Internet buzz to sell records. Their rich, organic sound is a powerful platform for lead singer Alec Ounsworth, who sounds like David Byrne but wastes less time, ripping into the audience and the scene with witty, self-deprecating lyricism.

But as good as Wednesday and Thursday were, my final night at SXSW was a bit of a flop. I made it into one of the hardest tickets in town, a triple bill of Dungen, Elefant, and The Sword. Sadly, Dungen took its sweet Swedish time tuning up, then played a set that sounded half-way to Jamville.

There is a strict rule at SXSW that all clubs close at 2 a.m. So despite the fact that the Sword was only warming up to a salivating crowd, they were only able to play for about 15 minutes before they had to leave. Dungen, whose long delay had wasted the time intended for Sword, was visibly nervous as an angry crowd turned to heckle them before exiting.

So there it is, a whirlwind three days, packed with disappointment, surprise, and satisfaction. Still, exhausting as it was, the SXSW experience is one I am eager to repeat. Maybe my veteran status will help me plan better next time, or maybe I’ll just have to get lucky again.

Categories
Theater Theater Feature

Homer

Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out has been wrongfully pigeonholed as “the gay baseball play.” Although baseball is the central metaphor and the play opens with biracial superstar Darren Lemming’s surprise coming-out speech, Take Me Out is a thorough exploration of the tragic flaws in our national character and an unflinching deconstruction of the melting-pot mythos reminiscent of Arthur Miller at the top of his game. Over the course of the evening we get to see nearly the entire cast naked, physically and emotionally. We are also treated to bigotry in all of its raw glory as a reciprocal, self-sustaining trait hardly exclusive to the John Rockers of the world.

Playhouse heavy-hitter Jonathon Lamer charms and endears as Kippy, the brightest bulb in the major leagues and the audience’s native guide into a team sport where many players don’t even speak the same language. Under the capable direction of Dave Landis, the rest of the cast match Lamer’s high benchmark, with Dennis Whitehead and Mark Mozingo standing out as the conflicted Lemming and Shane Mungitt, a racist redneck with one helluva fastball. In an uncharacteristic portrayal, Mungitt is cast as society’s victim, while Lemming is less than sympathetic throughout.

The play follows the New York Empires through a turbulent season that ends with a World Series championship, but it’s hardly made in the feel-good mold of a Rocky movie. All good feelings are tempered with tragedy and laced with a hard lesson: Those who are born with advantages are seldom grateful, and many who struggle to achieve greatness aren’t necessarily heroes.

To dismiss Take Me Out as “the gay baseball play” is to miss the point entirely. From the opening strains of the Star Spangled Banner to the tenuous hope established in the closing scene, Take Me Out is a warts-and-all portrait of a nation, not its pastime.

At Playhouse on the Square through April 15th

For the camp musical Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens, Circuit Playhouse has been fabulously transformed into a seedy intergalactic cabaret. The bulk of the audience sit at tables rather than in theater seats and sip on intoxicating libations throughout the performance. The libations, no doubt, help.

It’s not that Saucy Jack — a transgendered glam-and-disco-infused murder mystery — isn’t good fun; it is. But it’s too derivative and pays constant homage to much better shows, especially the magnificent Hedwig and the Angry Inch and the granddaddy of horror-tinged camp musicals, The Rocky Horror Show. Saucy Jack‘s narrator, Willy von Whackhoff, is clearly a carbon copy of Rocky Horror‘s criminologist, and he ends the show with a heartfelt request to the audience that functions as a less melodic answer to Rocky Horror‘s famous benediction, “Don’t Dream It, Be It.”

Visiting artist Keith Patrick McCoy makes Saucy Jack into a seething, shirtless cauldron of wicked libidinousness, and Mary Hollis Inboden is an earthy pleasure as the tough-talking smuggler Chesty Prospects. Sean Lyttle exudes clueless charm as the unlikely ingenue Sammy Sacks, and his dippy sweetness is perfectly matched by Michael Crea as Booby Shevalle, a cross-dressed variation on the abused Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors.

The Space Vixens, played by Rachael Saltzman, Megan Bowers, and Megan Keach, are glam angels who wield futuristic hairdryers capable of turning bad guys into smoke. Their theme song, “Glitter Boots Saved My Life,” is easily the show’s high point, and in a musical short on memorable tunes, the reprises make for welcome repetition.

Anyone looking to have an evening of perfectly foolish fun could do much worse than Saucy Jack, which, under the guiding hand of director and camp aficionado Scott Ferguson, is a grin-inducing romp from start to finish. It’s easy to revel in the futuristic visuals, bop along to the disco beat, and after a few drinks, the script only seems mildly dreadful. Be advised.

At Circuit Playhouse through April 2nd

Categories
Art Art Feature

Where It’s At

For the past six years, Cynthia Thompson, the head of Memphis College of Art’s papermaking and book-arts department, has curated highly praised shows for the college dealing with subjects as wide-ranging as violence, faith, and race.

For “Above + Beneath,” her current and last curatorial project (she’s stepping down to concentrate on her own work and that of her students), Thompson brings together her love of words, textures, and eloquent abstraction. In this spare but compelling show, six New York artists explore the parameters of the human body with works that go as far above and as deep into the body as science and imagination can take them.

Lesley Dill, for instance, envisions Emily Dickinson’s rarefied, passionate poetry with Red Thread Fall. Thin filaments of wire at the top of this sculpture twist together to form a line from Dickinson’s poetry. It reads: “TAKE ALL AWAY FROM ME BUT LEAVE ME ECSTASY.” Cascading from these words are thousands of long, delicate threads in shades of gold and orange mixed with red. Dickinson has let down her hair.

Il Lee invites us to experience our bodies, feelings, and thoughts as one luminous whole. In his 46-by-60-inch untitled work on paper, thousands of strokes of a ballpoint pen become an iridescent ocean of purple-black ink. Set against untouched white paper, this piece can be read as the silhouette of a mountain beneath a pale sky. It’s also an abstraction evocative enough to be a Rorschach inkblot and saturate enough to be the sum of a viewer’s ballpoint pen doodles, grocery-store lists, love notes, and diary entries.

In this intensely personal yet monumental work, we see the individual strokes of the artist’s pen at the edges, and we feel the cumulative power within the large shape of thousands of gestures that make up a work of art or a human life.

Sarah Lovitt’s three small, untitled bas-reliefs hint at processes deep inside the human body. Some of the artist’s earlier works explored scars, wounds, tumors. For this show, pustule-like forms work their way almost to the surfaces of smooth, translucent wax molds. Lovitt’s studies of the fragile but resilient body’s ability to release toxins and to heal are simultaneously disturbing and hopeful.

On a lighter note, photographer Gary Schneider “gunked-up” his hands and created what could be a portrait of the artist as playful child with the Midas touch (Genetic Self Portrait: Hands). Heat- and sweat-sensitive film emulsions (photograms) appear gritty and black where Schneider imprinted his hands. In stark contrast, light reflecting off his fingertips resembles whirlpools of gold. Here is the artist (gritty with dirt or grease or photo-emulsions) curious, digging into things, and bringing them into the light. With both hands raised, palms wide open, Schneider appears to exclaim, “Hey, look at this!”

Theresa Chong, an accomplished cellist as well as a nationally noted visual artist, charts the twists and turns of her own creative process. Graphite lines accented with touches of gouache white flow rhythmically, switch back, dead end, and go in unexpected new directions. Up close, Chong’s points of light on dark blue rice paper bring to mind synapses, electrical circuits, and insights forming deep within a psyche (Fred I, CNS, and Light 6 #1). Viewed at a distance, they look like night skies dense with stars.

Paper sculptor Noriko Ambe dissolves boundaries of “above” and “beneath.” She describes the experience of cutting into and layering hundreds of sheets of vellum-like paper as “melting into the natural world.” Viewing Ambe’s work produces a similar effect. The thin, staggered ledges surrounding the open center of Linear Action Cutting Project #7 resemble wide-mouthed chasms cut by water for millions of years. Their translucent, smooth surfaces also suggest shifting sand dunes, deposits of shale in an ancient sea bed, and, like the proverbial onion peel, layers of our own skin and psyche.

Is “melting into the natural world” too esoteric and dramatic a claim? As we are gently and incrementally drawn into an artwork remarkable for its power to evoke myriad visceral responses within its 11-by-14-by-1-inch boundaries, the artist’s descriptions of disappearing into nature begin to make sense.

Categories
News

Back to the Trees

I went back to the redwoods last week. In fact, I went back to the same place I’d been to twice before. Three times I have stood at the base of these trees, walked among them, looked up at them — and even now, I feel like I’ve never seen them, because I’m not sure what it means to see something.

What you hear about the redwoods is true: They are beyond description. The problem is, they’re beyond comprehension in the first place.

It’s like your eyes send this signal to the brain that reads, “Really big tree,” and your brain says, “Yep, got it. Big tree.” But the eyes keep at it, insisting, “No, this is a really big tree,” and to deal with the info, the brain has to dumb it down, shrink it to something manageable: a tree. The problem is, “trees” in our normal brainworld don’t get 20 feet thick, 300 feet high, and 2,000 years old.

It’s like the first time I saw the Grand Canyon; my brain adjusted after a while, and then I saw a sign that said it’s 16 miles across the canyon and that some of the features in it, features that look like they’re right next to each other, are actually five miles apart. Faced with information like that, the brain loses its footing in reality; you realize that everything you were basing your perception on is false and that you actually have no concept of what you’re looking at.

It’s the same when you’re looking at a tree that a whole family can hide behind. Often, you can’t even see the top of the tree. It just sort of disappears up there in a canopy, a canopy that’s so far away that it only resembles limbs and needles in a general sense, like a photo that needs to be zoomed into.

The redwoods are so big they make a sound in my head. Ever hear a huge clap of thunder, with no rumbling afterward? A big BOOM and then you can hear the echo in other places, the sound waves retreating from you. That’s what happens in my head when I see one of the really big redwoods. The sight of it makes such a BOOM that for a few moments, there’s no thought, no feeling, not even perception — just an echoing emptiness, a psychic pause, a stillness. The same thing happened to me when I first walked into St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican. I was consciously aware that I had stopped thinking. BOOM, then stunned silence.

The other aspect of the redwoods is there’s so damn many of them. Miles of them. And once you “adjust” to the ones that are “only” 10 feet thick, you stop gawking at them and lose track of how many you’re seeing. It’s tough to take a picture, because there are so many others in the way.

Besides, how do you take a picture of them? Do you go for the trunk, where you use another tree or a person to show how big it is? Do you go for the looking-up angle, to show how tall they are? Do you go for the looking-through-the-grove angle, to show how many there are? Perhaps the along-the-road shot, preferably with a car for perspective.

Then there’s the light. Most of the time you’re in shadow, and the occasional shaft of light really confuses your camera. That’s why whenever you see a cool picture of redwoods or other big trees, it’s shady or, even better, foggy. And the fog — that’s where you go back to some primordial state.

And yet, as I sit here now, looking at my photos, I am struck all over again. I see a photo and think, Look how big they are! They seem bigger than I remember, but I’m the one who took the picture and logic tells me the camera didn’t capture their real size.

So here’s what I think. First, a human life that doesn’t include time among old-growth redwoods is stunted. Second, one must spend time among the trees to even begin to deal with them. Last time, I spent three days; I camped among the trees, walked among them. This time, I was a bit rushed. I would see a particular angle or play of light, take a picture, move on and then realize I’d just spent more time on the picture than I did simply looking at the tree.

When faced with something of this magnitude, I have to remind myself to sit with it for a minute. Feel it. Be with it, quietly, and soak in the moment.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Expensive Tastes

Caspar MacRae has one of the greatest jobs in the world: brand ambassador for The Macallan, the biggest name in the premium scotch-whiskey market. A former captain of the guard at Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London, he now travels the world, telling people about single-malt whiskey and Macallan. He says he got the job after responding to an ad “which might as well have been the Scottish national lottery. It’s really a dream job for any Scotsman.”

MacRae will be conducting a scotch tasting on Thursday, March 23rd, at the Brooks as part of the museum’s “Art of Good Taste” series. Funds raised through the events go to support education and programming for the museum and its exhibitions.

Macallan created the position of brand ambassador in 2002 to take advantage of growing interest in high-end spirits and to help market their new “Fine and Rare” line.

“We’re keen for people to understand single-malt whiskeys,” MacRae says, “and also for people to be more aware of Macallan. Single-malt whiskey is without a doubt the most diverse distilled spirit, the flavor is all natural, and people are becoming more interested in finding out why the things they drink taste the way they do.”

For starters, MacRae likes to point out, “scotch” just means any whiskey made in Scotland, 95 percent of which is blended — meaning it’s a combination of different single-malt whiskeys. The single malts are harder to make, more time-consuming, and therefore more expensive.

Josh Hammond, owner of Buster’s Liquors and Wines and co-chair of the “Art of Good Taste,” says when it comes to production and marketing, “nobody does it better than Macallan.”

“There is more interest in scotch — maybe because it involves witty Brits,” he says. “The Macallan, in particular, has led the way in the premium category. They are spending a lot of money to teach people about their brand and what makes it so unique. They’re really the upper echelon.”

And what makes Macallan unique? They are among very few distillers who use casks previously used to make sherry, which Hammond says gives their product a sweeter flavor profile. In fact, they contract with specific foresters to get their wood, and MacRae says it takes up to six years to get a barrel ready, because it is first used to make sherry. They also use low-yield Golden Promise barley, which most makers have abandoned for higher-yield grains.

All of this, of course, makes the stuff a little pricey. Macallan’s lowest-priced product, its 12-year-old, retails for about $50. Their high end in retail, the 1952 vintage, goes for about $4,500. Collector bottles of very old vintages run as high as $60,000. The 1952 is part of the “Fine and Rare” line. Each bottle of the line is registered to ensure its lineage. And this year, Macallan is releasing a 50-year-old vintage in a special Lalique crystal bottle. Hammond says he expects Buster’s to receive one of only 100 bottles sent to the U.S. and that it will retail for about $5,000.

Do those numbers make you jump? Enter MacRae.

“Part of my job is to explain why it’s become more expensive,” he says. “Between the barrel and the aging, an 18-year-old whiskey takes 25 years to make, so you have to predict 25 years in advance how much to make. Twenty-five years ago, we were not such a global brand. Now, for every bottle we make of 18-year-old, five or six people want it. There’s a lot of demand.”

At the Brooks event, MacRae’s job will be to entertain the crowd, tell them about Scotland and its whiskey, and pour samples of five single malts which, were you to buy them all in bottles, would set you back about $5,000. The fun starts at 6 p.m. with light food from the Brushmark restaurant.

So, what does Macallan’s brand ambassador carry in his hip flask? “I’m bringing some 1952 to pour in Memphis,” he says. “But in my very well-guarded flask I also have some 1946. It’s definitely one of the perks of the job!”

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

To Market We Go

What does it take to start a farmer’s market in downtown Memphis? A group of neighbors with lots of determination.

“We started with this idea six months ago, and right now we’re in final negotiations with MATA to make Central Station’s Pavilion the home of the Memphis Farmer’s Market,” says Sharon Leicham, vice chair of the Memphis Farmer’s Market (MFM).

The market is scheduled to open on May 13th and will be open every Saturday from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. until October 28th. The MFM is a nonprofit organization with an aim of helping regional farmers promote and sell their products while offering locally grown foods to the Memphis community.

“The local aspect is very important to us,” Leicham says, “and we definitely like to see vendors who offer organic produce.”

Local means products native to the Mid-South. The market will be able to accommodate approximately 40 vendors with room to expand. To uphold its mission, the market will give first priority to local farmers with 100 percent, certified organic produce then local farmers with conventional produce. In addition, vendors who sell homemade craft items, such as soap and jewelry, or homemade foods, such as jams, jellies, honey, baked goods, and freshly roasted coffee, will be offered space so long as the food items have been prepared, stored, and displayed in accordance with Shelby County health department regulations. Vendors can rent a space at the market for $20 per week, $60 per month, or $250 per year.

Community and consumer education is another aspect the market’s organizers want to emphasize. The MFM team plans to use this opportunity to host weekly events that center around good nutrition and healthy food choices.

May 13th kicks off with a National Safe Kids Week event, then it’s a different topic every week until the market closes for the winter. One Saturday in July will be devoted to diabetes awareness and a Saturday in September to cholesterol education. There will also be a pumpkin playground and fall festival in October.

“At some point, we’d like to have a year-round market, and we’d also like to be open more than one day a week,” Leicham says. “But right now, we just want to get started.”

memphisfarmersmarket.org

The space formerly occupied by the Russian restaurant Café Samovar has found a new tenant. Tsunami owner Ben Smith — along with partners Demitri Phillips, sous chef at Tsunami, and Thomas Boggs of Huey’s — is expanding his culinary territory to this downtown location, with a new restaurant to be called Meditrina.

“Thomas has been trying to talk me into opening another restaurant for a while. Demitri had talked to me about doing his own thing. And then this location became available,” Smith explains.

Now it’s down to the nitty-gritty of opening a new restaurant. The menu, which will feature Mediterranean fare, has to be planned, plus the interior has to be remodeled. Smith & Co. don’t want customers feeling like “this is Café Samovar with a different menu,” says Smith. They want the space to be a social gathering spot, where people share food, wine, and stories.

Phillips will be heading the kitchen as executive chef. He’ll be taking Tsunami’s popular small-plates menu a little further but also offering a regular menu.

“We are definitely not claiming authenticity,” Smith says. “We’re just taking influences from the foods of Spain, Greece, Italy, and the like and incorporating those into our menu.”

The restaurant is scheduled to open for lunch only in April. Dinner service will follow a couple weeks later.

Ballet Memphis’ “Connections: Food” will feature a five-course dinner prepared by Memphis chefs Karen Blockman Carrier, Erling Jensen, and Felicia Willett. New choreography by Ballet Memphis dancers will accompany each course. The event, under the direction of Dorothy Gunther Pugh, will take place on March 25th at 7 p.m. at the Bridges Center downtown.

For further info and tickets, call 737-7322, ext. 302. The price is $135 per person, $250 per couple, and $1,000 for a table of eight.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Read All About It

The pursuit of wine education can begin with one simple question: Why do I like this so much?

Like food, there are many facets to wine: tastes, growing regions, types, styles, etc. For many, the process can be overwhelming and intimidating. One approach to learning more about wine — besides tasting, of course — is to read about it. Whether you are a beginner or on your way to being a sommelier, there is a book for you.

One of the best all around books for any wine lover is The New Wine Lover’s Companion by Ron Herbst and Sharon Tyler Herbst (Barron’s Educational Series, 2003). My absolute favorite book, anyone can use it to start learning about wine. It is functional for the novice, and a great book to keep on hand as a reference. Set up in dictionary format from A to Z, it’s hassle-free, conversational, and highly usable.

The New Wine Lover’s Companion includes details on grape varieties, styles, growing regions, and winemaking techniques as well as instructions on how to read a label and how to buy, store, and serve wine. Included are maps and information on glassware, bottle shapes and sizes, temperatures, and more. The book also has phonetic pronunciations and is compact so it can be taken anywhere. It is definitely worth its price of $15.

Another essential introduction to wine is Windows on the World Complete Wine Course: 2006 Edition by Kevin Zraly (Sterling, 2005). The publication provides practical information and explores each wine-growing region in detail. It also covers the basics of fermentation, how to taste wines, and winemaking technology, laws, and practices from every country in the world. Zraly’s approach is easy-going with simple jargon anyone can understand. There are sidebars to help reinforce what you have learned. This book is a fabulous way to start your wine education, and it sells for about $25.

The Oxford Companion to Wine by Jancis Robinson (Oxford University Press, 1999) is for those who already know a little about the topic and for the more advanced person yearning to learn more about the science of wine, the particulars on winemakers’ techniques, and the geographic conditions that influence the flavor profiles of the grapes each area produces. This book is an encyclopedia, and while it’s arranged alphabetically for quick reference, there is nothing else quick about it. It is heavy and thick and not an easy read, but it has all the information you will need to continue your wine education. It sells for $65.

The World Atlas of Wine by Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson (Mitchell Beazley, 2001) is an in-depth look at the world of wine, including the history of wine, winemaking, grape varietals, and how grapes are grown. The book details the geographic conditions, climates, appellations, laws, and production of every wine-growing region in the world and helps the wine lover know exactly how and why wines display certain characteristics. The book is 350 pages long and is designed for someone very serious about learning everything there is to know about wine. It costs $50.

twerne@hotmail.com

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Seventh-Inning Stretch

Lisa Bobal, chairman of the Memphis Film Forum, has no reasons to complain. After raising the entry fee, a tool used as much to weed out less-than-serious entrants as to raise funds, there were more than 400 submissions for the Memphis Film Forum’s seventh annual International Film Festival.

“We used to have to go out searching for new filmmakers, and now we’ve not only gotten more submissions, we’ve also gotten higher-quality films,” Bobal says. “Quite frankly, when we first started, we used to screen films that weren’t as good as some of the ones we’re turning away today.”

Even with 50-plus screenings of features, documentaries, short films, animation, and classics from around the world, the 2006 festival retains a decidedly Southern flavor. Acclaimed music documentarian Robert Mugge opens the festival on Thursday night with a sneak preview of his latest aural history, New Orleans Music in Exile. Amazing Grace, a rockumentary about Jeff Buckley, the angel-voiced indie-pop darling who spent his final days in Memphis, screens Friday. For more hometown flavor, the festival includes several documentaries: Altered by Elvis; Richard Johnston: Hill Country Troubadour, about Beale Street’s diddly bow hero; and an evening of Afro-centric comedies selected by Reel Soul Memphis, which has planned an “unreal neo-soul event” for Saturday’s after-party.

The 24-minute Dammi Il La scores bonus points for being both local and international. The screenplay for this Italian-language short was written by Memphis filmmaker Sarah Ledbetter.

“We are now at a point where we have to think about growing the festival,” Bobal says, recounting the process of sorting through 400 submissions and the disappointment of turning away good films.

“We’ve been talking about hiring a full-time director for about a year now,” she says. “We’re looking at funding streams. But this is going to happen in the next few years, not the next few months.” — Chris Davis

Buckley Doc Remembers the One Who Got Away

Amazing Grace: Jeff Buckley is a documentary-as-love-letter about the talented singer-songwriter who died way too young at age 30 while he was in Memphis recording his fourth album. The film, by Laurie R. Trombley and Nyla Bialek Adams, frequently crosses into the corny as Buckley’s mother, friends, bandmates, and musical peers speak of the dearly missed artist in painfully earnest platitudes. (“He came into this world a very old soul,” says his mother.) The footage of Buckley, in performance and in interviews, also seems to be the very cliché of the romantically doomed artist. And yet there’s no way not to get drawn in by Amazing Grace.

While Buckley achieved only modest commercial success before he died, there was something about his starved look and heartfelt approach to music that stirred emotions. When he died so unexpectedly, there had to be something to fill the void. That something are the more than two dozen tribute songs and covers, at least three books, a modern dance, a classical composition, paintings, and four documentaries, including this one.

The film, which shows Memphis as the sum of squalid shotgun shacks, Beale Street, and the Mississippi River, is nonetheless at its best when depicting this period of Buckley’s life. There was all this excitement around Buckley being in town and then, suddenly, absolute bewilderment. One night in May 1997, he went for a swim in the Wolf River with his boots on. He was missing for six days when his body was spotted near the Beale Street Landing. — Susan Ellis

Coming Home

Memphis writer Sarah Ledbetter heads home with a new movie in tow.

Memphis writer Sarah Ledbetter has spent the past few years abroad studying and making films in France, Italy, and Australia. Her most recent endeavor is the screenplay for Dammi il La (They Give to Me), an Italian-language film about a priest who befriends a tragic young man on a pilgrimage along the Camino di Santiago, as recounted years later to a woman with a few secrets of her own. It’s also a meditation on the subjective and transformative qualities of storytelling.

Dammi il La premiered at the Fargo Film Festival where it won top honors in the short-film category. After leaving Memphis, Dammi il La will screen in Sarasota, and Ledbetter is still waiting to hear from Cannes and the Tribeca Film Festival. She is currently writing her first feature-length film but is ready to get behind the camera instead of just the keyboard. “The next time out, I’d like to direct,” Ledbetter says. “It’s hard for me not to direct.”

Back in town to show off her new work, Ledbetter took time to talk with the Flyer.

Flyer: How does a Memphis writer wind up making a bittersweet Italian-language film?

Ledbetter: I met [the director] Matteo [Servente] at a filmmaking workshop in Paris in the summer of 2002. We worked well together, and when the workshop ended, we decided to stay in Paris and practice [making films] together. We continued film school together in Australia. I wrote the original screenplay in English, and Matteo and I translated it together.

Although the film is set in Italy, the dialogue is reminiscent of Tennessee Williams. How deeply are you influenced by Southern writing traditions?

They say you have to leave home to understand home. I was never more aware of Southern storytelling than when I was writing in Paris. I became interested in what happens to a story when someone is telling it and about the transformative nature of storytelling.

The film leans heavily on implication, and the relationships between the three characters are intentionally vague.

I think this has something to do with the short-film format. It’s kind of like baking. You have to use just enough of the chemical element to make the bread rise because if you use too much it will be bitter. I get tickled by the variety of responses from people who say, “I get it.”

What kind of responses do you get?

Some view Dammi il La as a love story, platonic or not. They see it as the story of a man grieving for a lost love. Others think it’s about the conscience of a priest who fails to be a “guardian angel.” I like that and don’t want to fix these divergences. — Chris Davis

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Ain’t Got No Home

Robert Mugge, the acclaimed music documentarian responsible for films such as Deep Blues, Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, and Hellhounds on My Trail: The Afterlife of Robert Johnson, is visiting his mother at a retirement community in Silver Spring, Maryland, after editing his latest film, New Orleans Music in Exile, a feature-length documentary about the post-Katrina diaspora of Crescent City musicians.

“I’m overworked,” Mugge moans. “I’m completely brain-dead.” Although he was living in Jackson, Mississippi, when hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29th, Mugge’s life was interrupted by the storm. This visit to see his mother is about the closest he’s come to R&R in the past seven months. His job as filmmaker-in-residence for Mississippi Public Television didn’t work out as planned, and Mugge was planning a move to Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, where he’d been tapped by Muscle Shoals producer and former Elvis sideman Norbert Putnam to create the school’s first department of music film production.

“Everything was supposed to be confirmed on September 1st,” Mugge says. “Then Katrina hit and flattened several of the casinos that pump money into the state’s education system.” Under the circumstances, Delta State was reluctant to commit to creating any new positions, and Mugge found himself adrift.

“That’s when I started looking for a silver lining,” Mugge says. “If you can call it that.” He went to Starz Entertainment group, which had funded previous projects, and pitched his plan to make a documentary about how New Orleans musicians were responding to the tragedy in the Gulf. Starz was interested, but Mugge would have to wait for funding.

“I kept pushing the idea of doing the film right away,” he says, “because at the time nobody really knew how long the musicians would be gone. It could have been a week, a month, or a year. I wanted to capture the shock. I wanted to show the desolation.”

Following a two-day shoot at the Voodoo Music Festival in Memphis, the funding came through to shoot in Lafayette, Austin, Houston, and New Orleans. The final film features concert footage and interviews with Dr. John, Irma Thomas, Eddie Bo, Beaten Path, Cyril Neville, the Iguanas, the Rebirth Jazz Band, Jon Cleary, Theresa Anderson, Cowboy Mouth, and others.

“I remember being up in the helicopter,” Mugge says of filming in New Orleans. “I told my cameraman that even though we’re up here with this camera, nobody will ever see what we’re seeing. You have to be able to see the horizon, all the blue [tarp-covered] roofs. And I became aware of all of these bare areas where houses used to be.”

Mugge was with revered junker-style pianist Eddie Bo when he went back into his ruined club for the first time. He was with Irma Thomas when she finally went back into her club. Both artists handled the shock with amazing calm as they pored through the rubble of their ruined lives.

“I’m glad I focused just on music and the musicians,” Mugge says. “But you could have turned the camera in any direction and there would be something worth shooting. You could go up to anybody and they would have a story to tell.”

Mugge also tracked the Iguanas — a roots-rock band that mixes American R&B with various styles of Latin music — to Austin, Texas. The band still seemed shell-shocked as they showed the filmmaker images of wrecked homes and ruined instruments on their computers. Cyril Neville of the Neville Brothers, who was also in Austin, spoke for the African-American community, saying that the 7th, 8th, and 9th wards must be rebuilt and the culture preserved. Certainly they were impoverished areas, but without them there would be no Mardi Gras Indians, and so much of the culture that defines Bourbon Street would just vanish. As Neville says, “That’s the roux in the gumbo.”

“There’s this place where Jan Ramsey [of New Orleans’ Off Beat magazine) points to a telephone pole and starts talking about how it’s a famous telephone pole because everybody used to hang flyers from their clubs on it,” Mugge says, relating one memorable scene from his film. “The flyers could get inches thick before someone took them down. After months of nothing, Jan says that posters are starting to show up again. It’s a wonderful symbol of the nature of this community — like a sprout coming up from dirt. Since it’s impossible to capture the magnitude of the disaster as a filmmaker, you have to look for these small, resonant images that suggest the larger situation.”

Mugge, who likens New Orleans to a dead body immediately after the spirit has departed, is hopeful that the cradle of American music will return to its former glory, but he’s also doubtful.

“I have all the same questions that the artists I’ve interviewed have,” he says.

Foreign Affairs

American distribution of the best international cinema has become increasingly spotty. Sure, the DVD explosion makes these movies more available than ever, but they’re meant to be seen in a theater, not on your television. Which makes the Memphis International Film Festival’s International Masters Series a public service worth looking forward to each year.

This year’s edition covers all the bases, culling celebrated cinema from Europe to Asia, Africa to North America. Here’s a quick guide to the year’s screenings:

Claire Dolan (9:30 p.m. Friday, March 24th): American indie filmmaker Lodge Kerrigan hasn’t been able to break through to any kind of national success despite stellar reviews for all three of his features: Clean, Shaven, a disturbing 1994 film about a schizophrenic; Keane, a 2004 film about a young man who loses his daughter in a bus terminal; and this 1998 feature, where the late Katrin Cartlidge plays a high-priced call girl determined to leave the business and have a baby.

La Promesse (2:30 p.m. Saturday, March 25th): Belgian filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne won the big prize at Cannes last year for their latest film, L’Enfant. But while waiting to see if L’Enfant ever makes it to Memphis, you can see the Dardennes’ breakthrough film, the one that put their neorealist style on the international map. This 1996 film follows the 15-year-old son of a slum landlord, who breaks from his father to help the wife and infant son of a deceased tenant.

Moolaade (4:30 p.m. Saturday, March 25th): This 2004 film from Senegal’s octogenarian filmmaker and novelist Ousmane Sembene is the second film in a planned trilogy about African women, following the more comedic Faat Kiné, which previously screened at MIFF. Moolaade is set in an African village on a day where six adolescent girls are to be circumcised — a brutal and sometimes lethal practice.

Weekend (9:30 p.m. Saturday, March 25th): If you’re any kind of film buff and have never seen Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 farewell to narrative cinema on the big screen, then this is a must-see. Funny, provocative, and frustrating all at once, this apocalyptic flick about society collapsing under its consumerist preoccupations is utterly of its era and yet retains its power. A total classic with the best “car crash” scene in film history.

Quitting (2 p.m. Sunday, March 26th): Chinese director Zhang Yang’s funny, tender 1999 film Shower played Memphis, but we missed out on this 2001 follow-up — until now. The true story of a Chinese movie star (Jia Hongshen) battling drug addiction, with the actor playing himself.

Beau Travail (7:30 p.m. Sunday, March 26th): Dubbed a masterpiece by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum and named the best film of 2000 in a national critic’s poll, this reworking of the Herman Melville novella Billy Budd from French director Claire Denis concerns an ex-Foreign Legion officer who looks back on his life leading troops in Africa. — Chris Herrington

All screenings at Studio on the Square.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Puffin’ Stuff

From The Chattanoogan: State Senator (and US Senate hopeful) Rosalind Kurita has proposed a 71-cent per pack tax on cigarettes in order to deter teenage smoking and raise $100-million for healthcare in Tennessee. It’s a bold plan that would bring the comparatively low price of tobacco products in Tennessee in line with the rest of the country. On the other hand it could lose Kurita the crucial chain-smoker vote.