Month: September 2010

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Facebook, Official

The Social Network has been a minor running joke ever since the project was announced more than a year ago. A movie about Facebook? With Justin Timberlake? Ridiculous, right? But anyone rolling their eyes wasn’t reading the fine print: The project, based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Accidental Billionaires, was being directed by David Fincher, who has never made a dismissible film and who was coming to the project on a roll, following his best film — the obsessive procedural Zodiac — with his most celebrated — the multi-Oscar-nominated The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Snickers and doubts aside, The Social Network is based on a terrific story: a revolutionary (for better or worse) idea and billion-dollar business first developed in an undergrad dorm room. An all-American tale of an awkward, striving outsider who rather unhappily gets what he thinks he wants, the film’s antihero protagonist, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (Adventureland‘s Jesse Eisenberg in an intense, compelling performance), is presented as something of an Internet-age Gatsby or Kane — but in a Gap hoodie and ever-present “fuck you flip-flops.”

The Social Network is about big topics: power, privilege, technology, communication, generational upheaval (the few over-30s onscreen watch from the sidelines, perplexed), and rapidly shifting social mores. But it tackles all this via an intimate, funny, suspenseful intellectual procedural.

But what really makes any film is not what it’s about but how it’s about it. And, in this case, the telling is even better than the story.

Fincher’s film opens audaciously with a static pre-credit scene that pits Harvard undergrad Mark against his Boston University girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara, who will star in Fincher’s upcoming adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), at a college bar. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s trademark quick, brainy patter is in overdrive, as Mark patronizes his girlfriend (“You don’t have to study. You go to BU.”) until, exasperated, she delivers the coup de grâce: “Listen, you’re going to be a very successful person in computers. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.”

This scene establishes all of Mark’s motivations: romantic resentment, jealousy of his more-privileged WASP classmates, the urge to not only prove his brilliance but rub everyone’s face in it. “The ability to make money doesn’t impress anyone around here,” Mark tells Erica of his Harvard experience. This establishes that his goal isn’t wealth, but it also reveals that it is impressing people.

When Mark retreats to his dorm room for a night of belligerent, drunken programming that becomes the seed of Facebook — hacking into various dorm photo logs to create a sexist hot-or-not program, Facemash — Fincher shifts into the style that will drive the rest of the film. Locking into rhythm with a propulsive score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and rat-a-tat-tat dialogue from Sorkin, Fincher’s quick but assured editing and shifting but natural camera completes a hypnotic union.

As a piece of pure filmmaking, The Social Network is like Fincher’s brilliant Zodiac on speed. It lacks the grandstanding of showier work like Se7en, Fight Club, or Benjamin Button but burrows obsessively into its material, maintaining its grip for a tight two hours. And it’s paced like a pop song.

Structurally, The Social Network tells the Facebook development story in straightforward fashion but encircles this narrative with two later deposition scenes that essentially form the film’s present tense, bopping skillfully among all three narrative tracks. One deposition is part of a lawsuit from Zuckerberg’s onetime friend and business partner, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), who claims to have been wrongfully forced out of the company. The other is from a trio of blue-blood Harvard students who had hired Mark to program their own university-specific dating site (Harvard Connection) and now accuse him of stealing their idea. Along the way, Timberlake shows up as Napster co-founder Sean Parker, a hedonist and gambler who may be the devil on Zuckerberg’s shoulder but also offers some fruitful advice before his ignominious exit.

Ultimately, The Social Network isn’t much more concerned about the outcome of these lawsuits than Zuckerberg seems to be. Like Citizen Kane, it’s more focused on how to explain a man’s (or maybe manchild’s) life — in this case, on the extent of his asshole-ness. And in this we-live-in-public world, appropriately, Rosebud is a constantly refreshing web page and a pending friend request.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Off Target

The 28-acre area known as Washington Bottoms once held the promise of new retail development — with a Midtown Target — but now the long-vacant apartment buildings south of Poplar and east of Cleveland have become the target of a neighborhood group.

Last week, residents who live near the crumbling, abandoned apartments met to form a new neighborhood association aimed at convincing Lehman Brothers Holdings Company, the current property owner, to clean up the area.

“We’re not interested in development at this point,” said neighborhood activist Candice Hawkinson, who lives on nearby Stonewall. “We want the area leveled. People could do a community garden or it could be grassy knoll. I don’t care. I just want the buildings demolished.”

The Evergreen District One Neighborhood Association will soon open to new members who live in the area bordered by Madison Avenue, Watkins Street, Poplar Avenue, and Avalon Street. Though the district falls under the purview of the existing Evergreen Historic District Association, that group isn’t focused on the Washington Bottoms area.

“This district needs activism,” Hawkinson said. “The purpose of forming our own association is because no one else is paying attention to us.”

In 2007, Florida-based WSG Development cleared more than 30 apartment buildings and a few single-family homes in Washington Bottoms to make way for a $180 million multi-use project that would have included retail, residential, and office space. At the time, rumors circulated that a Target store might be built there.

The Memphis City Council approved the development in October 2008, but shortly after, WSG defaulted on its $14 million loan from Lehman Brothers. Also in 2008, Lehman filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The property went on the auction block in April of this year, and Lehman purchased it back.

Shortly after the purchase, Lehman demolished a few homes and installed a chain-link fence around the perimeter of the area, which Hawkinson said is continually breached by vagrants.

In September, there were three arsons in less than two weeks. Hawkinson and her neighbors fear that the arsons could release harmful asbestos into the air. She said there is still asbestos lying on the ground at the site of the last fire.

Neighbors also worry that the vacant properties are host to drug dealing, rodents, and other public health hazards.

“We live here, and we do not understand how a company that has already invested [millions] cannot be bothered to take care of its business,” Hawkinson said. “They are aware of the hazards and dangers the property encompasses. Why did Lehman Brothers buy the property if they’re not willing to take care of it?”

Categories
Book Features Books

Winning Ways

It’s been a long time in the making,” Bobby C. Rogers, age 45, says. “Good to finally get the book out. And the call I got from Ed? That was the phone call you want to get.”

” “Ed” is poet Ed Ochester, and he was calling Rogers to say he had good news: Rogers’ manuscript, Paper Anniversary, had been awarded the prestigious Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for 2009 — a prize given annually by the University of Pittsburgh to a first full-length book of poetry, with publication of that winning manuscript by the university’s press.

Which puts us where things stand now: official publication this week of Rogers’ debut collection of 35 poems, most of them set in West Tennessee or Memphis, every one of them signaling a talent in our midst — a talent at home observing (and enlarging upon) the lunchtime scene inside the Barksdale or a Jerry Lee Lewis show inside Bad Bob’s Vapors Club; hearing the nighttime sirens of Memphis and the strain of FedEx engines overhead; or reflecting on the uneven sidewalks of Midtown underfoot and the darkened four-squares lining Carr.

At home too: recalling the natural sights and sounds and the very air associated with small-town West Tennessee or recalling a Christmas day spent, during Rogers’ student days, in Marseilles; another day spent “burning” a house of its exterior paint; the look of snowfall, sunlight, and shadow. And then the following: doubts as to language’s ability to capture the things of this world or to adequately convey the innermost self.

“What we do is collect and assemble, dosed up with caffeine and whatever else/ might nerve us/ to shape the world into something orderly and tellable. It’s all artifice,” Rogers writes in “Anagnorisis.” It all depends on words. (Or when words fail us, silence.) But small comfort there, because, as Rogers observes in “Winter”: “Words go corrupt and settle and/ shift/ from the plumb meanings you once nailed them to.” And so, as the poet wishes they could: if only language could share in the certainties of sound carpentry — the tools of carpentry recurring throughout Paper Anniversary: a surform tool, a chalk line, a whetstone, fluting gouges and mortise chisels, a jack plane. The object, in carpentry as in poetry: craftsmanship and accuracy.

“I’ve always seen the world in terms of words,” Rogers answers to the question of when he began writing. “I grew up in the town of McKenzie in West Tennessee, and I spent a lot of time on front porches, among extended family, listening to stories. That’s how time passed. That’s how time was given meaning.”

But as Rogers puts it in his acknowledgments, it was Marilyn Kallet who’s “to blame for all this.”

It was as an undergraduate at UT-Knoxville that Rogers worked with Kallet, a poet who gave him the freedom to take his work less seriously. And yet, it was Rogers’ time in Knoxville followed by the MFA program at the University of Virginia (learning from Charles Wright and others) that was seriously important — “important,” he says, “to be around serious poets, serious minds thinking about poetry.”

Rogers’ poems have appeared in numerous literary reviews over the past 15 years. He is the recipient of the Greensboro Review Literary Prize in Poetry. He has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. And he today commutes from Memphis to Jackson, Tennessee, to teach at Union University. But he’s not a “poetry scene kind of guy,” he admits, though he makes a point of attending local readings.

After earning his master’s at Virginia, Rogers headed not to New York or Boston, as many of his classmates did, but to Memphis. It’s where he and his wife Rebecca Courtney, an architect, and their children call home. It’s, he says, a good place for him to be.

“I’ve always wanted not to be considered a regionalist, but it seems I am,” Rogers says. “Ed Ochester in his blurb on the back of my book comments on that, tries to defuse the charge, expand my reach. But I’m happy to be one — a regionalist — now that I think about it.”

And now that I have the opportunity, I’d like, in one respect, to prove the poet wrong — wrong that Rogers should write in “In Season” that: “I’m not sure I shape a damn thing, the concussions of the hammer/ more noise/ than ringing.” The poems in Paper Anniversary do indeed “ring” — clear, strong, and true.

Bobby C. Rogers will be signing copies of Paper Anniversary at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville on October 9th. Look for him to be reading from and signing his book at Davis-Kidd Booksellers in Memphis on October 21st.

Categories
Music Music Features

Arkansas Blues Fest Turns 25.

In our music feature this week, we profile local roots musician Valerie June, who is following up a Memphis show on October 5th with a two-day appearance Thursday and Friday at the Arkansas Blues & Heritage Festival in Helena.

June won’t be the only Memphis performer heading south for the festival, which is celebrating its 25th year by showcasing an amazing selection of blues heavyweights. The festival runs Thursday, October 7th, through Saturday, October 9th, at the Cherry Street Pavilion on the banks of the Mississippi in historic downtown Helena-West Helena.

Long a free festival, the Arkansas Blues & Heritage Festival is now a ticketed event, with a $25 admission supplying entrance to all three days. This year’s lineup looks well worth the price.

Thursday night, the festival is headlined by B.B. King, with an undercard that includes Tupelo songwriter Paul Thorn and Memphis mainstays the Reba Russell Band.

On Friday, the festival expands from one stage to three, with bravura dual headliners: New Orleans R&B institution Dr. John and chitlin-circuit king Bobby Rush. Artists preceding Dr. John on the Sonny Boy Williamson Main Stage include barrelhouse piano queen Marcia Ball and blues guitar legend Hubert Sumlin. The Memphis connection includes June on the Emerging Artist Stage and Greenville, Mississippi’s Eden Brent, a pianist/vocalist whose terrific new album, Ain’t Got No Troubles, was released by Memphis label Yellow Dog Records.

On Saturday, the main stage welcomes a back-to-back pairing of Memphis native and harmonica master Charlie Musselwhite, whose new album, The Well, is his first collection of entirely self-penned songs, and the versatile Taj Mahal. Other likely Saturday standouts include piano legend Pinetop Perkins with guitar ace Bob Margolin. Memphis representatives include Beale Street vets Preston Shannon and Don McMinn.

See bluesandheritagefest.com for more information.

Ruckus Return

Back in 2003, bandleader Eldorado Del Rey authored one of the more unexpected passages in recent Memphis music. The frontman for a loose, energetic garage punk-blues band, the Porch Ghouls (which also featured ex-Grifters guitarist Scott Taylor), Del Rey met Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry during the Memphis musician’s day job as a Sun Studio tour guide. Intrigued, Perry listened to the Porch Ghouls demo, became smitten, and signed the band to his then-new Roman Records label. Soon, the Ghouls’ debut, Bluff City Ruckus, was getting major-label distribution, and the band was opening for Aerosmith and KISS on tour.

It was too much too soon: The record didn’t take, and the band didn’t last. But Del Rey regrouped to form a new band, El Dorado & the Ruckus, which released two albums, 2005’s Planet of the Vampires II and 2006’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. By 2007, Del Rey had drifted back to his native Florida.

But Del Rey couldn’t stay away. Since returning to Memphis — and Sun — Del Rey has re-formed the Ruckus, which now includes Matt Ross-Spang and Jason Freeman on guitar and Daniel Farris on drums. Del Rey is simultaneously releasing two new albums, The Hidden Fortress and Duck, You Sucker!, the former recorded before his exit from Memphis, the latter since his return, both at Sun. Both albums also feature a film theme of sorts.

The Hidden Fortress is named after the Akira Kurosawa film that helped inspire Star Wars. The opening song, “Yojimbo” (fun chorus: “Yojimbo! Yojimbo! Yo!”), is also named for a Kurosawa film and features the electronic sounds (in this case, an agreeable blend of hip-hop and Atari 2600) that Del Rey dabbled in immediately after the Porch Ghouls. The more recent Duck, You Sucker! is a westerns-themed album named after a Sergio Leone spaghetti western (better known by the alternate title, A Fistful of Dollars). The album is somewhat of a return to the more rootsy, guitar-driven sound of the Porch Ghouls.

El Dorado & the Ruckus will celebrate the release of both albums at the Hi-Tone Café Friday, October 1st, with opening bands the Dirty Streets and the Gunslingers. Showtime is 10 p.m. Admission is $5.

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Being Nosy

There is Mo’s nose — that nose belongs to Mo, the dog hero of the “Mo Smells” children’s book series by Memphis-born author Margaret Hyde and illustrator Amanda Giacomini. But also active in this series is your nose.

Using the “Press-2-Smell” feature, which produces air puffs of scent, readers smell what Mo smells. In the first book, Mo Smells Red, that meant roses and strawberries. In the eco-friendly adventure Mo Smells Green, it was limes and mint. In the latest book, Mo Smells Christmas, there are gingerbread houses, pine trees, and chocolate Santas to take in.

And there’s now another way to get interactive: the Mo’s Nose app. The app, which can be downloaded for free at iTunes, helps pet lovers find pet-friendly hotels and events, dog parks, and shelters. There’s also “Mo’s Deals” for discounts at pet retailers as well as color-oriented games for the kids. Another feature of the app is “Augmented Reality,” which animates Mo on the user’s phone and changes with location.

Mo’s real-life counterpart and inspiration for the series is Giacomini’s dog, which she found living on the streets of Oakland, California. A portion of the proceeds from book sales goes to Friends of Mo charities dedicated to improving the lives of animals.

“Mo Smells Christmas” booksigning by Margaret Hyde, Davis-Kidd Booksellers, Tuesday, October 5th, 4 p.m.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Write Right

Sometimes the best lesson is the one that sneaks up on you.

Through its “disguised literacy” program, Write Memphis mentors meet each week with a group of middle school girls from the Beltline neighborhood to talk and write about their daily lives. At the same time they’re dealing with illiteracy, group leaders hope to combat the problems associated with low self-esteem, such as drug use and teen pregnancy.

“For the most part, we get together and do writing exercises,” says Emma Connolly, who started Write Memphis after moving here from Jackson, Mississippi, where she led a similar writing group for women in a transitional shelter.

For Connolly, the real reward is giving young women a chance to express themselves: “Their feelings and emotions get put on the page. They become real for them,” she says.

The group promotes a non-hierarchical approach, where all members share stories and learn from each other. Mentors include former teachers, college students, retired professionals, and church volunteers.

“These are girls who may not have a terrific role model at home,” Connolly says. “We want to show them that people from humble backgrounds can do anything.”

Recently, the group added a new element. Adopting the curriculum of the True Body Project, a program that started in Cincinnati, Write Memphis will incorporate physical activities such as yoga, Pilates, and dance.

“We’ll intersperse those movements with writing about the process, how it feels to move with free abandon,” Connolly says. “My hope is that these girls will learn to respect, love, and understand their bodies.”

Write Memphis is also looking to expand: In October, they’ll start working with girls in the after-school program at Emmanuel Episcopal Center. While participation in the Beltline writing group has fluctuated, Connolly is looking forward to having more consistent attendance at Emmanuel. Residents of Frayser, Whitehaven, and Orange Mound have also expressed interest in starting writing groups.

“The girls we’ve worked with are still moving forward. They’re staying in school. They’re looking toward the future,” Connolly says. “There’s potential out there for growth, and we’re looking for more mentors so we can start more classes.”

For more information, visit writememphis.org.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Not Our Party


Several important news items in the past week underscore the dire situation of the poor and the working class in the United States, but they got little attention from the corporate media or the political elite. The number of Americans in poverty has climbed to 44 million, the highest number in 50 years. In 2009 alone, 4 million people fell into poverty, and it would have been higher without the extensions in unemployment and other benefits Republicans opposed.


The number of people without health insurance climbed to 50 million. The health-care crisis continues to worsen, while the right wing calls for repealing the health-care program that will cover 30 million more people. Health insurance companies already are gouging people and dumping children and sick people before the law is fully implemented, while Republicans want to cut all public health-care programs and throw us all at the mercy of insurance companies.

While corporate profits and CEO pay continue to skyrocket, even after the Great Recession they created out of greed, the wages and income of working-class Americans continue to decline. There is a class war, but it is a war of the corporate rich being waged on the working class.


What I don’t understand is why the Tea Party, which claims to represent “we the people,” is taking the side of the corporate rich. They defend private insurance companies which are rationing health care based on the ability to pay while increasing their profits and CEO pay. They are siding with corporations against unions and the right of workers to organize and improve their working conditions.

Instead, the Tea Party is following millionaire corporate lobbyists like Dick Armey and corporate front groups like “Freedom Works” and “Americans for Prosperity,” which are nothing but cover groups for insurance companies and energy companies that oppose “regulations” which would protect the environment and increase access to health care.  


Tea Party members want to reduce the deficit and cut government debt, but they also want to continue to cut taxes on the corporate rich, without any cuts to pay for them. It is this combination of careless tax cuts favoring the rich, along with unpaid wars and increases in military spending, that has caused the explosion in the deficit, all the result of the policies of George W. Bush, which they want to continue.

The Tea Party is taking over the Republican Party, pushing a radical agenda to impose corporate and theocratic rule over the United States. They want to cut or eliminate Social Security, the most successful social program in history, which has nothing to do with the deficit. They claim to be opposed to “big government,” but they want to impose their religious beliefs on everyone, and they seem to love big business.

The Boston Tea Party was a revolt against unfair tax cuts for a multinational corporation, the East India Tea Company, which undermined the small businesses in the colonies. The British were imposing taxes on the colonies, while cutting the taxes of the East India Tea Company. We need a real Tea Party revolt against tax cuts and corporate welfare programs that favor the corporate rich and put the interests of Wall Street “banksters” over the interests of the American working class.

We need to pay more attention to the common good and less attention to the whining of rich people who don’t care about the general welfare of “we the people.”


On Saturday, October 2nd, in the “One Nation Together March” in Washington, D.C., thousands of people from labor, environmental, peace, and civil rights groups will stand up for “we the people” and demand the change we were promised and voted for.

Jim Maynard is a member and organizer of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall

Truth Hurts

There are moments when it seems like Memphis reporters are in a contest to see who can report the most over-the-top crime in the most sensational way. This good old-fashioned error says it all.

Filed under Arts & Entertainment? Somehow that seems about right.

Marriage Crisis

In an incredibly sensitive piece of writing, Commercial Appeal reporter Richard Morgan notes: “There are rare beauties in this world: Orchids, diamonds, panda cubs. But not single women in Memphis.” Morgan’s article about how the excess of single women in the Mid-South increases median bridal ages seems to have had two titles. It’s currently online as “Single Women too Plentiful in Memphis, Study Says,” but Google has it catalogued under its original title: “Potential Brides Age Like Fine Whine.”

Breaking!

Did you hear about the two scantily clad girls who posed for photos on an unattended police scooter? Of course you did! It’s big, big news, and everybody covered it.

In spite of all the coverage, nobody explained why the poor girls’ faces were so blurry.

Smash

According to the Memphis Business Journal, Memphis-based Frontier Beverage had inked a potentially lucrative distribution deal for a new herbal relaxation beverage called Unwind. Frontier has also developed a concentrated shot version of a drink called Bulldozer.

By Chris Davis. E-mail him at davis@memphisflyer.com.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor: A Farewell to My Father

I lost my father last week. He was elderly and in poor health, and it was not entirely a surprise, though it was difficult and sad, as death almost always is. He’d left instructions that no extraordinary measures be taken to prolong his life if the end seemed imminent, so a week ago Sunday, we took him off life support when the doctors said it was time. They said he might last a couple of days.

Removing life support means taking away feeding tubes and water. My father lived eight days off life support, the last few under heavy sedation. Suffice it to say, I now think Dr. Kevorkian was onto something. Letting a loved one starve and dehydrate for a week feels inhumane, no matter how sedated they may be.

Early in the week, he appeared to be comfortably sleeping. Nothing in his appearance gave away the fact that he was dying. He looked as though he could awaken and begin a conversation about Mizzou football or the damn Democrats or my mom’s cinnamon rolls. But he couldn’t and hadn’t been able to for months. His mind had moved on. His body lingered behind, shrinking before our eyes.

I heard a joke on the radio as I drove from Memphis to Mexico, Missouri, for my father’s final week: A well-dressed elderly gentleman walks into a bar, sits down, and orders a vodka martini. After a sip, he turns to the woman sitting next to him and says, “So … do I come here often?”

I laughed when I heard it and thought of my father, who would have loved the joke, as he loved all corny jokes. And as he loved his wife of 57 years, who at 90 was the only one who could communicate with him in these last months and who fed him and bathed him and picked him up when he fell — every time, until last week, when her magic finally ran out. The doctors made their pronouncement, and his family watched and waited, marking the last days of a good, kind man who played trumpet in big bands, fought the Japanese across the Pacific, drove a jeep through the ruins of Hiroshima, came back to his hometown, bought a house, fathered four children, joined the Kiwanis, played lots of bogey golf, and loved his wife to the end of his 88 years on this earth.

They’re not making men like that anymore. Get some rest, Dad.

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com

Categories
News The Fly-By

Art Fix

In the words of Crosstown Arts co-founder Todd Richardson, the neighborhood near the long-abandoned Sears Crosstown building “could use some love.”

Though the neighboring Evergreen Historic District is home to manicured yards and a close-knit community, the commercial district along Cleveland near the defunct Crosstown building is peppered with vacant storefronts and littered parking lots. So University of Memphis art faculty Richardson and partner Chris Miner formed Crosstown Arts in hopes of transforming the neighborhood into a thriving arts community.

“The location of Crosstown is tough to beat. It’s close to downtown, but it’s still Midtown, and artists tend to live in Midtown,” Richardson said. “It’s a cool neighborhood, and there’s already a lot going in terms of arts-minded things.”

Crosstown Arts is hosting MemFEAST, a community dinner to raise money for a public art project, on Friday, October 1st, at their office on North Watkins. At the dinner, which has already sold out, attendees will vote on proposals by seven artists. The winner will receive $1,500 to complete the project in three months.

Crosstown Arts was granted 501(c)3 status earlier this month, and Miner said the first order of business will be a year-long feasibility study to determine what sort of arts amenities the community can support.

“We don’t want to impose any ideas on the neighborhood,” Miner said. “We want to spend a year researching what’s needed and forming a business plan.”

They do have a few ideas in mind, including a multidisciplinary artist residency program, a contemporary arts center, and an artist resource center. The resource center would be like an “art gym” where artists could pay a fee to use studio space, photography equipment, or woodshop space.

“A lot of art students leave Rhodes or the University of Memphis and don’t have access to studio or lab space,” Richardson said. “People leave Memphis after college to have access to something like that, but this would bring artists here.”

Richardson said their idea for the arts center was inspired by several large centers across the country, like MASS MoCA.

MASS MoCA, in North Adams, Massachusetts, features 110,000 square feet of open, flexible space for large-scale art installations too big for conventional museums. The center opened in 1999 in a converted 19th-century electric power plant.

Part of Crosstown Arts’ feasibility plan involves determining whether or not the organization would convert an empty space or build a new structure for a potential arts center.

Though Crosstown Arts isn’t ruling out the 1.4-million-square-foot Sears building for such a center, Richardson said it would take more than an effort by Crosstown Arts to convert the massive structure. Real estate developer Andy Cates purchased the Crosstown building in 2007, but it still sits empty.

“It’s no accident that we’re in the shadow of the Sears building,” Richardson said. “It’s such an icon, and I’m hoping that things we do here, in some small way, will help bring attention to the possibilities of what could happen in that building.”