Month: May 2012

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Bring Me the Head of Philip K. Dick

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

In December 2005, renowned roboticist David Hanson caught an early-morning flight from Dallas to Las Vegas. He was carrying a head in a duffel bag. Hanson was coming off a few whirlwind months, during which he had displayed his “android” creation to thousands of admirers in the scientific — and science-fiction — communities. Now, he was off to demonstrate its capabilities at the booming Google campus in California. Hanson was exhausted, and after storing his cargo in the overhead bin, he promptly dozed off.

The head belonged to Hanson’s most ambitious project, an android re-creation of science-fiction author Philip K. Dick. It represented thousands of hours of work by a well-regarded but little-known academic institution housed at the University of Memphis. In just a few short months, it became a massive spectacle, capturing the imagination of science-fiction fans across the globe. Seven years later, one of the members of the team at the U of M, David Dufty, is set to release a book about the project, called How To Build an Android. But just as quickly as it surfaced, the project that brought Hanson and the U of M together disappeared. Call it the Case of the Missing Head.

The Brain Builders

Along with his interest in robotics, Hanson studied sculpture. He understood the way muscles in the face worked, and his robot faces were incredibly realistic. Though he was a rising star with his creations, he had little experience with artificial intelligence, and a robot without a brain is just a high-tech puppet.

Enter Art Graesser. Since joining the University of Memphis faculty in the late 1970s, Graesser’s work has been the study of intelligence and the mind. Graesser and his colleagues, Stan Franklin in computer science and Don Franceschetti in the physics department, founded the Institute for Intelligent Systems at the U of M in 1985. Since then, the institute has been a leader in the study of intelligence, in particular, the study of artificial intelligence as it relates to education. One of the institute’s most successful projects was an educational computer program called Auto-Tutor.

Auto-Tutor was a groundbreaking experiment in how artificial intelligence (AI) could be tailored to education. The program attempted to create a working personal tutor. Though the idea of a computer program designed to improve education seems almost quaint now, Auto-Tutor was among the first and most refined of its kind.

At the Cognitive Systems Workshop in 2003, Graesser saw Hanson present his latest creation, a robot head called “K-Bot.” For K-Bot, Hanson had created a new android skin called “Flubber.” The skin, combined with Hanson’s experience as a sculptor, created a remarkably lifelike android face. Impressed, Graesser approached Hanson about collaborating.

In the summer of 2004, Hanson brought an updated version of K-Bot, called “Eva,” to Memphis to visit the institute in its new offices at the FedEx Institute of Technology. During his demonstration, Hanson met Andrew Olney, a talented young programmer working on his Ph.D. in computer science at the U of M. Olney had left Memphis after high school to study cognitive science at University College in London and adaptive systems at the University of Sussex before returning to settle in the Mid-South.

Also among those gathered to see the lifelike robot was David Dufty. Dufty was doing post-doctoral work under Graesser at the University of Memphis at the time and is currently working in the national statistics office in his native Australia.

“It was Hanson who had the original idea of creating an android likeness of Philip K. Dick,” Dufty said. “The very idea of using his likeness in a complex android is brilliant. It was undeniable that this would capture the imagination.”

More Human than Human

Philip K. Dick was one of the most influential science-fiction writers in history. He wrote prolifically until his death in 1982 — completing 41 novels and 121 short stories. To date, eleven of his works have been adapted for film, including Total Recall and Minority Report. Dick was the first science-fiction author added to the collection of the Library of America.

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, later adapted into the film Blade Runner, Dick created a world in which androids were indistinguishable from humans. The androids themselves could be programmed to believe they were human. The University of Memphis group knew that creating an android of Dick would titillate science-fiction fans and push the bounds of what the young and talented crew could accomplish.

The team in Memphis agreed. The institute would build the brain, and Hanson would provide the body. Graesser put Eric Mathews, on his way to becoming the associate director of the FedEx Institute, in charge of the joint project.

Mathews began to look for a way to pay for the project, and after a few unsuccessful attempts at funding, convinced the FedEx Institute to invest $30,000 to build the android, a modest amount for a project of this complexity.

To make the android even more realistic, the team wrote some of Dick’s dialogue into a customized program, using the transcripts from hundreds of interviews and his many works of literature. The creation was not a puppet, however; the android had to be able to respond to questions on its own.

Though Olney is proud to talk about his involvement with the project, he’s still a bit surprised that it garnered so much attention. “A lot of the conversational stuff with the robot wasn’t that interesting,” Olney said. “What made it interesting was that it was Philip K. Dick. It had this resonance.”

Olney describes the program as basic, but Mathews suggests Olney is being modest.

“People don’t understand how complex the problems are,” Mathews said. “This robot listens to you; it then has to convert that speech to text. It then it has to parse the dialogue, pump it through a series of dialogue rules, and respond naturally.”

The android had two modes. A “chat bot” mode, which was essentially an interactive, scripted mode. The android was regularly asked, “What are you?” and the robot would respond, “I am Phil, a male Philip K. Dick android electronic brain, a robotic portrait of Philip K. Dick, a computer machine.”

The other mode was as much art as science. Using the massive transcript records, Olney’s program would look for keywords and context clues to formulate answers to the scientists’ questions. The android would then answer without prompting, which would occasionally spin the android into semicoherent ramblings that seemed nearly human.

“There was a dimension to it that was really authentic,” Olney said. “We have a video of this one conversation where we’re talking to the robot about religion. There’s a hilarious conversation, because they won’t let up, and they won’t change topics. Some of the stuff it came back with was surprisingly plausible.”

Dick’s own children witnessed this firsthand. Because of copyright concerns, Hanson asked the Dick family for its blessing, even promising the author’s daughters that they would have the right to kill the project if they didn’t like what the team created. Just a few days before the robot was set to be unveiled, Isa Dick visited the FedEx Institute.

“She had a moment with this robot that could’ve been a deal breaker,” Mathews said. “We didn’t know what it was going to say or how she’d react to talking to her robot father.”

Years later, Isa Dick told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times, “It looked very much like my dad. When my name was mentioned, it launched into a long rant about my mother and this one time that she took me and left him. It was not pleasant.”

Still, Isa Dick approved the project.

Later, the president of the University of Memphis, Shirley Raines, dropped by the FedEx Institute for a chat with the artificial author.

President Raines: “I give you credit for your work. I’ve noticed that …”

The android interjected: “Are you a man or a woman?”
Raines pressed on: “I am definitely a woman.”

“Me too! I am a she.”

“I am the president of the University of Memphis.”

“I knew he was president, but I never knew of the University of Memphis.”

“I like your blue eyes.”

“I haven’t heard anything like that before.”

“It’s a compliment.”

“Do you have any conditions I should know about?”

Olney stepped in and stopped the interview before the android went off on another tangent.

This Artificial World

The robot body was to be melded with the brain less than a week before the unveiling at Wired magazine’s 2005 NextFest. Wired promoted the event as an attempt to re-create the excitement of a historic World’s Fair, and the android was featured on the cover of the event’s program.

The conference environment presented its own set of problems. The robot’s ears — advanced microphones in the head — had to be finely tuned so it could tell when its questioner was finished speaking. Despite a headset to cut down on ambient noise, the team worried that the loud conference floor at NextFest would confuse the robot.

Mathews enlisted the university’s theater department to construct a soundproof room designed to look like Dick’s 1970s California bungalow. The Dick family donated some of the author’s personal effects to add to the experience.

“It even had shag carpet,” Mathews said, “and Dick’s Linda Ronstadt records.” The room’s authenticity added both another level of artistry and a massive headache to the project.

“This thing had to be shipped to Chicago from Memphis,” Mathews said. “There were so many points of possible failure for the project. I think we only really had about two months to make it all happen.”

Noise, heat, and thousands of visitors made the convention stressful, but for the U of M team and the Philip K. Dick android, it was a massive success.

“People waited hours to talk to it. The line would extend across the whole conference floor. We had to pack them in,” Mathews said. “Every 45 minutes we’d have to stop the line and open all the windows for about 15 minutes to let Philip K. Dick cool down.”

Journalists worldwide wrote about the android, turning David Hanson into a rock star in the world of robotics. Oddly, the University of Memphis team got very little press for its contribution.

Though the re-created room wouldn’t be shown again, there were already plans for the android to make a few more showings, including an appearance at an academic conference and then on to Hollywood.

Filmmaker Richard Linklater, perhaps best known for his film Dazed and Confused, was at Comic-Con promoting A Scanner Darkly, the latest Philip K. Dick movie adaptation, and Hanson (without Olney) agreed to have the android on the panel along with some of the filmmakers. Without his soundproof room or Olney to tweak the software, the android made an underwhelming appearance at Comic-Con. Despite the rambling performance, the producers of A Scanner Darkly hoped to have the android answer questions at press junkets promoting the film.

One last showing was scheduled: a command performance for the employees of Google. Olney and Craig Grossman, the new director of the FedEx Institute, made the trip along with Hanson to avoid a repeat of the android’s rambling Comic-Con appearance.

The Missing Head

Hanson fell asleep en route to the Google campus and, bleary-eyed, rushed off the plane in Las Vegas to make his connecting flight to California. It wasn’t until he boarded his next flight that he realized he’d left the head behind. The head was found and put on a flight to meet Hanson, but it never arrived.

A few weeks later, word of the missing head made it to the media, and once again, Dick’s android captured attention. The New York Times called it “A Strange Loss of Face, More Than Embarrassing,” and it even garnered attention from Middle Eastern news service Al-Jazeera. The android’s appearances promoting A Scanner Darkly were canceled, and hundreds of hours of work were lost. In less than a year, the android of Philip K. Dick had caught the imagination of the science and technology world and then had been lost forever.

For a few weeks, Hanson held out hope that the head would turn up. When it didn’t, he sued the airline, and, though he lost, the judge’s science-fiction-laden decision was almost worth the trouble.

“The Court must GRANT Defendant’s motion, but does so hoping that the android head of Mr. Dick is someday found, perhaps in an Elysian field of Orange County, Dick’s homeland, choosing to dream of electric sheep.”

David Dufty, in his quest to complete his forthcoming book, visited a central depot for lost baggage in Alabama without success. As time went by, it became clear that the head would remain lost.

While it would have been possible to rebuild the android, the cost and time commitment were beyond anyone’s interest. Hanson was ready to move on. Olney came back to Memphis to defend his dissertation.

Hanson’s next project was a collaboration with Korean roboticist Jun-ho Oh. The joint venture was another iconic melding of robotics and art: the head of Albert Einstein perched atop a small white astronaut-like robot named Albert Hubo. It famously shook hands with President Bush in 2005 at the APEC summit in Korea.

After graduating from the U of M, Mathews became the CEO of Launch Your City, Inc. and the interim director of Emerge Memphis, spending his day building high-growth-potential start-ups.

In the seven years since the android was built and lost, Olney has remained in Memphis, becoming assistant director of the Institute for Intelligent Systems. His fascination with robotics hasn’t diminished. Along with the android’s software, his personal website shows many other robot projects, including a hacked Billy Bass, a Tickle Me Elmo designed to do basic tutoring, and a project Olney calls “R2.”

He began R2 in 2008 in his spare time as an ongoing project. The title “R2” has a double meaning. The first is homage to the beloved Star Wars character R2-D2. The second?

“I’m actually building a robot of my wife, Rachel,” Olney admitted with a chuckle. “How could she be mad at me for spending all this time working on a robot of her?”

The Institute for Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis has grown steadily, earning millions of dollars in research funding and completing dozens of projects around the U of M campus. The descendants of Auto-Tutor continue to be adapted for various educational situations, though no project has garnered the attention that the Philip K. Dick android received.

We Can Remember It For You, Wholesale

In Philip K. Dick’s fictional world, reality was always subjective. He published his novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said to high acclaim in 1974. The novel is set in a dystopian future in a totalitarian state. A massive identity database called Pol-Dat, where individual identities can be stored and copied, controls the population’s every move. In a crucial moment, the protagonist, Jason Taverner, is on the run from the police and uses the giant database as an opportunity to claim a new identity and escape. Dick wrote:

“He thought, Thank God for the weaknesses built into a vast, complicated, convoluted, planetwide apparatus. Too many people; too many machines. This error began with a pol inspec and worked its way to Pol-Dat, their pool of data at Memphis, Tennessee.”

Sometimes fiction is stranger than truth.

Categories
News

Losing Proposition

CREDIT: Dreamstime

“I don’t understand why I’m gaining weight! I’m exercising, eating healthy, cutting my portions. If I’m doing everything right, then why don’t my pants fit anymore? What the heck is going on?” Sound familiar? Maybe you’ve said this or heard it from any number of unhappy people around you. Mighty frustrating to be trying your best and still find unwanted pounds creeping up on you. So much for positive reinforcement.

Turns out there are things you might not consider that are contributing to that extra weight. Medication. There are lots of meds out there that can pack on the pounds. Certain classes of antidepressants can stimulate your appetite. Antihistamines can interfere with your sleep patterns (see the next item for more on that). Other medications that can mess with your weight include diabetes drugs, migraine and blood pressure medications, steroids, and some cancer therapies. It might be a good time to take stock of what you’re putting in your mouth (aside from food) and review your medications. Many people take more than they need. A medication might no longer be necessary or might have become ineffective; or it can duplicate, or overlap, with the effect of another drug you’re taking for a different condition. Sleep. There are a few things at work when you don’t get enough of it. First, maybe it’s because you’re up later; more hours might translate into more snacking time. (Okay, I know — that’s obvious.) But the less obvious reason lack of sleep is bad for your waistline is this: Biochemically, your body is doing all sorts of things when you’re not sleeping enough. The production of two hormones, ghrelin and leptin, are busy getting all out of whack. Skimping on sleep drives leptin levels down. The result? Failure to wave the white flag when you’re full. And ghrelin rises as sleep quantity and quality fall, stimulating your appetite and setting you up for overeating. Eating after exercising. You’d think that an hour at the gym would give you permission to indulge in dessert. All that sweating had to burn a zillion calories, right? Um, no. It’s okay to eat after exercising, but so often we overestimate the amount of calories we burn. In fact, a study showed that overweight women who exercised one to two hours a week without dieting lost several pounds in six months. But women who exercised the most — about three hours a week — didn’t lose as much as they should have. Chances are they rewarded all their hard work with too many calories, consuming more than they actually burned. And if you’re showering your treadmill with kisses for telling you you’ve burned tons of calories, don’t be so lovey-dovey: Machines lie (or a better way to put it is to say they are inaccurate). Studies have found that both people and machines inaccurately perceive their calorie burn. Stress. Sure, life can get out of control and stress levels peak. We’re only human, after all. But what also peaks is secretion of the “stress hormone” cortisol, which causes an increase in your appetite. And when we’re stressed, we probably aren’t stuffing carrot sticks into our mouths but rather things like chocolate, ice cream, and chips. That’s because the fatty acids activate areas of the brain that boost our moods, according to research. Hypothyroidism. You might not realize the reason you’re feeling tired or sluggish, constipated, or have difficulties with concentration or dealing with cold temperatures might be a sluggish thyroid, which can also account for a slower metabolism and subsequent weight gain. Thyroid disease, which goes largely undiagnosed, affects far more women than it does men. Have you had yours checked lately? Usually it’s done with a simple TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) blood test.

Sheryl Kraft is a freelance journalist and essayist based in Connecticut.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Eleven, Eleven, Eleven

In ancient times, hundreds of years before the dawn of history, there was an ancient race of people called the Druids. No one knows who they were or what they were doing. But their legacy remains hewn into the living rock of Stonehenge, where the demons dwell. It lingers on and on and on like the sustained vibrato of a Les Paul guitar, thanks almost entirely to three visionary musicians: Nigel Tufnel, David St. Hubbins, and Derek Smalls of the groundbreaking heavy metal band Spinal Tap.

Well, only Tufnel and St. Hubbins are visionaries, really. But Smalls has had his moments in the sky, having taken acid 76 times. He’s the lukewarm water bridging the gap between Nigel’s fire and David’s ice. Together these three brothers in rock have played music together for half a century, first as the Originals, then as the New Originals, and finally as Spinal Tap. They know better than anybody working in the industry today that in this topsy-turvy world of heavy metal, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is often useful.

Spinal Tap’s sophisticated music treads water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry. The band has been known to make grown men cry (Tom Waits, for instance) with songs like “Lick My Love Pump,” the first part of a musical trilogy in D-minor, the saddest of all keys.

Rob Reiner’s fake documentary This Is Spinal Tap didn’t make much of a splash when it was released in 1984, with Michael McKean, Christopher Guest, and Harry Shearer starring as St. Hubbins, Tufnel, and Smalls. It found its audience on video and has become a kind of anti-scripture for musicians and one of the most quoted films of all time. Fans can check it out on the big screen at the Orpheum this week, providing that it, like the band’s original Memphis appearance, isn’t canceled due to a lack of advertising funds. (Tip: It won’t be.)

“This is Spinal Tap” at the Orpheum Theatre, Friday, May 25th, at 7:15 p.m. Tickets are $7. www.orpheum-memphis.com/

Categories
Music Music Features

Back to Where He Once Belonged

CREDIT: Todd Wolfson

Back in 1998, Austin-based singer-songwriter Alejandro Escovedo was trumpeted as the “Artist of the Decade” by No Depression magazine, the self-styled oracle of the then-ascendant “alt-country” scene.

Press that glowing is rarely a bad thing, especially for an indie cult artist like Escovedo, who had been a key member in a succession of bands — the Nuns, Rank and File, the True Believers — since the mid-’70s before finally going solo with 1992’s Gravity. But, for Escovedo, the rave came with a downside.

“Sometimes it’s a little disturbing that people think of me as alt-country. If you listen to my records, they’re really nothing like that,” Escovedo says.

If you want to hear Escovedo’s real roots, check out “Man of the World,” the opening track of his forthcoming album, Big Station, due June 5th on Fantasy Records.

“Man of the world/It ain’t no thing/I could take a punch/I could take a swing,” Escovedo, now 61, howls on a track that filters ’50s rock (think: Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran) through first-generation punk that echos the New York Dolls or Richard Hell.

“It’s always been funny that I get tagged with the cowboy thing or the alt-country thing,” Escovedo says. “Because really, I began in a band that wanted to be the Stooges and the MC5, the Velvet Underground, Mott the Hoople, Bowie, T.Rex — those kinds of bands.”

After growing up in California, Escovedo first began playing music in the mid-’70s in the San Francisco punk band the Nuns, via which he ended up opening the very last Sex Pistols concert. He reemerged in the ’80s, playing guitar for California post-punk band Rank and File and then founding the True Believers in his adopted home of Austin.

After beginning his solo career with quieter, more introspective material, Escovedo has returned to his guitar-rock roots, first with 2008’s Real Animal, then with 2010’s Street Songs of Love, and now with Big Station — a series of albums Escovedo views as a trilogy of sorts.

“Ten, 15 years ago, I was experimenting a lot with strings with guitars. Then, beginning with Real Animal, I wanted to get back to two guitars, bass, and drum format,” he says. “I think we made two great albums that way, with Real Animal and Street Songs of Love. And then, with this one, it’s a little more varied, I think. But it still has kind of that attitude to it.”

For Escovedo, this “back to basics” evolution has been invigorating.

“It’s where I began, and it’s where I feel most comfortable,” he says. “I love electric guitars and the kind of excitement we can create with that type of band, so it is very inspiring for me. The live show has a little more energy, a little more drive. We’ve got a great amount of material to choose from, but we draw mostly from the last three albums.”

In between the opening punk of “Man of the World” and the moody roots-rock of “Sally Was a Cop” or “Can’t Make Me Run,” Big Station has several propulsive, poppier tracks, such as the title song and especially “Headstrong Crazy Fools” and “Party People.”

“We wanted to make that kind of record,” Escovedo says. “We wanted it to have some bounce and rhythm to it. We wanted people to move a little more.”

Escovedo wrote 10 of the album’s 12 songs with San Francisco musician Chuck Prophet, whose old band Green on Red shared stages with Escovedo’s ’80s bands.

“There weren’t as many bands then that traveled across the country, and we did, so we’d meet up in unusual places,” Escovedo says. “I always thought Chuck was very brilliant. I’ve always been aware of his presence.”

The collaboration between Escovedo and Prophet manifests itself in the album’s strong sense of place, with references to Austin, San Antonio, California, and Mexico on the drug-trade report “Sally Was a Cop,” which cites some real-world cartel violence in its otherwise fictional depiction of a public servant forced to be more of a soldier.

“Chuck and I travel around a lot to write together,” Escovedo says. “I go to California. He comes to Texas. We’ll drive down to San Antonio to check it out. We’ll go to Mexico and meet up to go surfing down in Baja.”

Escovedo’s ’80s indie past also led to another connection of particular resonance as the veteran rock-and-roller returns to Memphis this week: Jim Dickinson, the late Memphis musician/producer who helmed the True Believers’ first and last studio album, back in 1986.

“We were the ones that brought him out of retirement, basically,” Escovedo remembers. “He produced the True Believers before he did the Replacements.” [Dickinson famously produced the Replacements’ 1987 album Pleased To Meet Me at Ardent.]

“He came out to Austin to do it,” Escovedo says. “I loved him. He was a hero to begin with, but I just adored him as a person. He was like an uncle to us.”

Alejandro Escovedo

1884 Lounge at Minglewood Hall

Tuesday, May 29th

8 p.m.; $16

Categories
Music Record Reviews

Local Record Reviews

The long-in-coming return of Memphis-bred troubadour Cory Branan.

It’s been six years since Memphis/North Mississippi-bred and now Nashville-based singer-songwriter Cory Branan released an album. And even that’s being generous. Branan’s first two albums — 2001’s The Hell You Say and 2006’s 12 Songs — were released via the now mostly dormant local indie MADJACK Records. Despite a publicity bubble that landed Branan in Rolling Stone and on David Letterman, the albums didn’t have much national penetration.

The years in between have seen Branan bounce around — Fayetteville, Austin, Nashville, etc. — and spend more time touring than he did early in his career. And now, with Mutt, released May 22nd on venerable Chicago-based roots-rock indie label Bloodshot Records, Branan’s recording career is getting a long-delayed second life.

Recorded a couple of years ago in San Francisco with help from another Memphis ex-pat, John Murry, the album opens audaciously: “The Corner” is a sardonic deconstruction of Branan’s own good press and gallows-humor appraisal of his wayward career. “I ain’t been transcending … much of nothing,” Branan sings, snickering at an ill-chosen word from an uncomprehending rave, before twisting the knife on himself: “I been down in it/I ain’t free/Weren’t no experiment/These seven years they went like life out of me.” But Branan also invests the song with a crack of hope — “almost gone but maybe not just yet” — and the rest of the album testifies to a talent that has remained sharp through the disappointments and delays.

“Survivor Blues” is an escape scenario in the Springsteenian (“Thunder Road,” “Born To Run”) tradition, but the romance is laced with a darker, more dangerous undercurrent. When a love interest asks the narrator if he’s got a car, the affirmation comes with a warning: “It’s parked out back/It’s pointed out of state/A recent acquisition/We should probably ditch the plates.” “Survivor Blues” is reprised at the end in a more subdued manner that highlights the song’s hard wisdom: “How about you wait to see just what you regret/Til we get what we get.” And the swaggering “Badman” doubles down on a similar scenario, with Branan pleading his case: “They say I’m a bad man … I think a bad man would do you good.”

“Yesterday,” with its hints of “Jack & Diane,” moves the record into sunnier but reflective territory, equating nature, memory, and eroticism in the manner of previous Branan standout “Tall Green Grass” and imbuing romantic recollections with comically religious significance (“When you walked on the waterbed”).

As on Branan’s previous albums, there’s full-band production here, with arena-ready guitar riffs, chiming piano flourishes, horns, and other sonic touches. More than just a folkie, Branan prefers to lace his words-first songs with a dynamic musicality that matches his at times overactive vocals. Harder to replicate solo-acoustic on the road, no doubt. But it generally makes for better albums.

When Mutt ventures furthest from folk and roots-rock, as it does in its second half, it feels less certain. The Tom Waits-style crooning of “There There Little Heartbreaker,” the Latin-jazz-flavored “Snowman,” and the multi-tracked, Beach Boys-esque vocals on “Jericho” are worthy experiments that don’t entirely come off. But it’s good to have Branan back on wax, so to speak. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait another six years for album number four.

Branan began a European tour as Mutt was released but will return to Memphis for a show at the Hi-Tone Café on July 20th.

— Chris Herrington

Grade: B+

Categories
Music Music Features

Jimbo Mathus & the Tri-State Coalition at the Levitt Shell

Outside of Mississippi, Jimbo Mathus may be best known as a founding member of the Squirrel Nut Zippers, the North Carolina-based outfit. Unfairly lumped in with the superficial swing revival of that decade, the Zippers were actually sophisticated stylists, blending hot jazz, ragtime, string-band, and any number of other styles. But over the past decade, via a variety of projects — including the Knockdown Society, the South Memphis String Band (with Luther Dickinson and Alvin Youngblood Hart), and his current band, the Tri-State Coalition — Mathus has devoted himself to the roots music of his home state, whether it’s blues, country, folk, jazz, or anything in between. Mathus’ most recent album, 2011’s Confederate Buddha, was directly inspired by the Alan Lomax Mississippi field recordings in the 1950s. It’s a collection of postmillennial country blues and Southern honky-tonk so deliriously slack it sounds like it was recorded in one take with no rehearsals. Jimbo Mathus & the Tri-State Coalition play the Levitt Shell on Saturday, May 26th. Showtime is 7:30 p.m. Free.

Categories
Food & Wine Food & Drink

Sullivan’s Travels

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

When Kevin Sullivan started working at Tsunami in Cooper-Young, he was a senior at Northside High School, content to bus tables for his summer job. In those 10 years, encouragement from Tsunami owner Ben Smith and Sullivan’s own curiosity transformed a summer gig into a culinary career.

“I was in such a nurturing environment that I stuck with it,” Sullivan says. “Over time, cooking has just become more and more of who I am.”

Earlier this year, he began working up recipes for a catering and personal chef business, Ki Kitchen. Ki is Japanese for “soul,” and Sullivan describes his cuisine as Asian-soul food fusion borne out of his experience with Pacific Rim dishes at Tsunami and his upbringing at a distinctly Southern table.

“Black-eyed pea hummus was my first idea, because it’s something I haven’t heard a lot about,” he says. “Growing up, black-eyed peas were a staple, so I wanted to take that and do something fresh with it.”

At first, he was a little wary about taking his new brand of Southern food back home with him.

“I thought my family wouldn’t be open to me changing the preparation of the black-eyed peas,” he says. “But they loved it. And now I’ve been talking with my mom and my aunt about what my grandmother used to prepare. We’ve been getting back to our roots, so it’s been a revival within my own family. It’s bringing us together.”

To black-eyed pea hummus, Sullivan has since added tomato jam, chow chow, collard green kimchee, Andouille sausage with risotto and red pepper coulis, pasta salads, and cornbread crostinis. He began selling his hummus at the Tsunami Winter Farmers Market to get his name out to potential clients. His tomato jam is available at Stone Soup Cafe, and he’s already got some catering gigs under his belt.

“I imagine that at the apex of it all, I’ll have a restaurant where I do dinner service and still do catering gigs on the side,” he says. “I just want to make good food more accessible. A lot of people think the more elegant the food is, the more it’s out of their reach. I want to get back to where food brings everyone together.”

If this chef-philosopher sounds like a far cry from the Sullivan of 10 years ago, a teenager not so much interested in cooking as a summer paycheck, it’s because he has dedicated years to learning from those around him.

In addition to Ben Smith, Sullivan counts Marisa Baggett, the Southern sushi chef, among his chief influences. While serving as her apprentice, Sullivan learned about more than sushi rolls. He credits her with teaching him about self-promotion and discovering his independence as a chef.

“I kind of fell into it,” he says of his career. “I started peeling potatoes and washing dishes, then moved on to mussels and calamari and shrimp, then making salads and desserts, and then finally progressed to the grill. I became curious about the food and started asking questions, and eventually they promoted me and allowed me to prepare foods.”

For those interested in working with Sullivan, or, he says, just sparking up a casual conversation about food, his Facebook page (www.facebook.com/chefsullivan) is a surefire way to reach him. Or you can email him at chefkevinsullivan@gmail.com.

Ki Kitchen’s menu is on the Facebook page as well. All selections cost between $4 and $5.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Tenacious B.

The shifty tonal ground where director/co-writer Richard Linklater has planted his new film Bernie is staked out in the opening scene. After two silent-movie intertitles announce “This You’re Fixin’ to See/Is A True Story” as melancholy string music plays in the background, we are shown funeral director Bernie Tiede (Jack Black) as he teaches a few mortuary-science students how to prepare a recently deceased person for viewing. Delicately yet firmly, Bernie explains and demonstrates the key parts of this process — glue the eyes shut, insert a piece of plastic to preserve the shape of the mouth, apply the right amount of makeup, and be sure to tilt the head to the left (“in greeting”). His performance is met with polite applause. It’s an informative, funny, strange opening for an informative, funny, strange, and possibly great film.

Adapted from a terrific 1998 Texas Monthly article written by journalist and co-screenwriter Skip Hollandsworth, Bernie is a tragicomic work noteworthy for the way it plays around with notions of authenticity, realism, and local color. For example, in addition to the usual dramatizations and embellishments, Bernie’s remarkable story is retold, added to, and complicated by witty testimonials from 21 residents of Carthage, Texas, the town where most of the events in the film take place. Even though their comments were pre-scripted, these nonprofessional actors sound down-home, informal, and sincere as they recount Bernie’s unusual relationship with rich, wicked old widow Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine). One man describes Nugent thusly: “That ol’ heifer — she’d turn down a loan for a hobby.”

And on at least two occasions, the film’s vox populi is more than just a bunch of gossips. They occasionally engage with and challenge the assertions made by the film’s stars, notably district attorney Danny Buck Davidson (Matthew McConaughey). These townsfolk (with some help from a couple of professional actors pretending to be townsfolk) get most of the film’s biggest laughs. They also emphasize the way that public perception shapes the contours of a life, especially in a small town.

The townspeople’s confusion and ambivalence about Bernie’s presence in the town — is he really as charitable and saintly as he looks? Why does he like old ladies so much? Is he, as one man posits, “a little light in the loafers”? — only increases during the second half of the film. But Jack Black’s quietly flamboyant performance generates an atmosphere of unease from the start. Black’s agility, grace, demonic eyes, and ski-jump belly (aided by some high-waisted pants) are put to maximum effect here. He’s soft-spoken, gentle, and kind, but there’s always a sense of something else lurking behind the curtain he draws back whenever he appears in public.

Like his contemporary Steven Soderbergh, Linklater’s films often function as an indirect commentary on whatever genre he happens to be working in. So while Bernie may look like Linklater’s version of a true-crime picture, it’s also, like the previous Linklater-Black collaboration School of Rock, a kind of musical. Bernie embraces both the hymns and the Broadway/Hollywood numbers he sings, and Black is clever and restrained enough to pull back from full-on parody whenever Bernie is in the throes of each song. Bernie’s enthusiasm and love of music is both genuine and sinister, adding one more layer of unease to this singular movie.

Bernie

Opening Friday, May 25th

Ridgeway Four

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Golden years travelogue goes against the summer movie grain.

The full title of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel includes the phrase “for the elderly and beautiful,” which is both a nice sentiment and an important clue about the potential audience for a film so pleasantly indifferent to the exigencies of the current summer movie scene. Directed by John Madden, the guy who made Shakespeare in Love, Best Exotic is a light-if-not-lite “tradition of quality” picture all the way. But has there ever been a time when there were so many quality movies in theaters that they could be freely ignored?

The film gathers up seven financially strapped (or just plain unhappy) aging Brits — among them a recently retired judge (Tom Wilkinson), a married couple (Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton) who’ve given their daughter their nest egg so she can finance an internet startup, an ornery old woman (Maggie Smith) looking for a cheap hip replacement, and a pair of aging swinger types (Ronald Pickup and Celia Imrie) — and sends them off to Jaipur, India, where they hope to spend their golden years in relatively inexpensive comfort.

Sending old people to India for relaxation is a pretty good running joke. I spent some time in Jaipur 11 years ago, and even as a hardy, well-traveled twentysomething, I was excited, overwhelmed, and exhausted by its abundance of people, sounds, colors, and commotion. (Over the course of a single afternoon, I saw a traffic fatality, a riot, and a wedding procession.) Best Exotic doesn’t have much to say about India beyond some similarly generic observations about the chaos of its big cities, but it does a very fine job at seeing the country from a befuddled tourist’s point of view.

Once the guests arrive and discover that their future retirement tabernacle is a far cry from the images in the brochure, the floor plan of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel starts to look pretty familiar. It’s easy to find your way around the story — just ask the right questions. Is the married couple really happy? Who is the judge looking for? Will the old swingers find love? Wouldn’t a few coats of paint brighten the old place up?

The film is an effective ensemble piece and a gentle satire of both master-servant dynamics and the outsourcing craze. It’s most successful, however, as a valentine to its star, 77-year-old Dame Judi Dench. Dench plays a recent widow headed to India to escape her husband’s bad debts, and the film’s most emotionally satisfying scenes occur when the other actors get to play off Dench’s unique, unflappable sensuality. Everyone — from Nighy and his stammering Bob Newhart-isms to Wilkinson and his tart kindness to Dev Patel and his double-talking hyperactivity — looks better after they spend some time with her.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Opening Friday, May 25th

Multiple locations

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Rant

Donald “Duck” Dunn used to say that Al Jackson Jr. was the greatest drummer he’d ever heard. With the recent passing of both Andrew Love and Charles “Skip” Pitts, the guys have all the makings of a smokin’celestial soul combo. Add Isaac Hayes and Otis Redding to the mix, and they’ve got a full-blown Stax/Volt Revue going on for the Heavenly Host.

If you’re inside the Memphis city limits and you’ve never heard of Duck Dunn, you must be a tourist. Dunn, who died last week in Tokyo at age 70, was one-fourth of Booker T. & the MGs, the house band during the glory days of Stax Records and among the greatest instrumental groups to ever record. Duck was in Tokyo for a series of gigs with his childhood friend, Steve Cropper, and Stax soul star Eddie Floyd. Cropper posted, “Today I lost my best friend and the world has lost the best guy and bass player to ever live.” Booker T. Jones said, “I can’t imagine not being able to hear Duck laugh and curse but I’m thankful I got to spend time and make music with him. His intensity was incomparable. Everyone loved him. None more than Otis Redding.”

Duck’s passing essentially ends the 50-year phenomenon known as Booker T. & the MGs. The band recruited another drummer to replace the late Al Jackson Jr. and played on for another 37 years, but nobody can replace Duck Dunn.

Listen to any track by Otis Redding or Sam & Dave. If Al Jackson Jr. was the pulse, then Duck’s bass was the propulsion. He not only supplied the bottom but also the energy for some of the 20th century’s most memorable recordings, like “Soul Man,” “The Midnight Hour,” and Otis’ remarkable “Try a Little Tenderness.” Watch those old, black and white videos of the Stax Revue in Europe, 1967, and you’ll see Duck’s characteristic neck-jerk in time with the music, increasing in fervor with the strength of the groove. 

Duck’s biographical information is familiar to friends and fans: a graduate of Messick High, where he and his friend Cropper had a band called the Royal Spades, which morphed into the Mar-Keys and had Stax’s first monster hit with the instrumental “Last Night.” When Cropper moved on to a fledgling label, he recruited his friend Duck to replace Lewie Steinberg in the MGs, and history was made. The MGs were Memphis’ first interracial band, something unheard of in the early Sixties. But those of us who were younger and aspired to a music career took pride and inspiration from the group during those turbulent times. In segregated Memphis, an integrated group would most likely be denied the right to share the same bandstand, but in the recording studio, nothing could stop a group of teenagers who all grew up listening to Rufus Thomas and Dewey Phillips on the radio and Willie Mitchell and the 4 Kings, Bowlegs Miller, and the 5 Royales in the clubs of West Memphis.

It’s worth noting that in his fellow musicians’ remarks, in the same breath that they praise Duck’s musicianship, they note that he was an even better human being. That’s what his friends recall first: that Duck was a humble man, unaffected by his worldwide fame. He loved to laugh, either at your jokes or his own, and he very well could have put a bumper sticker on his bass guitar that read, “I’d rather be golfing.”

Like most Memphians, I admired Duck from afar and regarded him as a soul  icon, until 1981, when we became acquainted. That was the year Huey’s restaurant made its first attempt at expansion with Louie’s, a converted eatery on Poplar Avenue in East Memphis, and had hired my band, the Radiants, to play on Sunday nights. While other local bands were covering Journey and Foreigner, we were still performing a venerable list of R&B classics, with a healthy dose of Stax songs. When Duck began to show up and we asked him to sit in, everyone so enjoyed themselves that we reserved a regular spot for him every Sunday. Our long-time bassist, Steve Spear, was leaving Memphis and I was in a bind to find a suitable replacement. I asked Duck if he knew anybody and he answered, “What about me,” and the next day, he was in the band.

Along with our Sunday gig, the Radiants began playing Tuesday nights downtown at Jefferson Square, and Duck propelled our band like he did the MGs. When our young saxophonist, Jim Spake, had to leave the band suddenly and I needed to replace him, Duck said, “I don’t think Andrew Love is doing anything.” The next week, one half of the Memphis Horns joined the band. Andrew stepped in seamlessly without need for rehearsal, and I suddenly found myself fronting the best soul band I ever had.

It couldn’t last forever. Andrew and his Memphis Horns partner Wayne Jackson went on the road with Robert Cray, and Duck got the call from Eric Clapton. Shortly afterward, in a memorable night at the Orpheum Theatre, Clapton headlined with Duck on bass while the warm-up act was Ry Cooder, featuring Jim Dickinson on keyboard. Then there was the night a rejuvenated Booker T. & the MGs made their first homecoming appearance at B.B. King’s on Beale Street. I was sardined into that packed house mainly to support my friends, but when the Hammond organ began a thunderous, roiling noise that ultimately became the introduction to “Green Onions” and the band kicked in, I leapt to my feet cheering like the Tigers had won the national championship. Duck found a groove and was snapping his neck sideways, always to the left, and a roomful of lucky patrons got to see the show of a lifetime. Duck was a cancer survivor and lived the past few decades in Sarasota, where he had moved for the golfing as much as for the nice weather. If Duck and Andrew had one thing in common aside from their music, it’s that they both were supported by wonderful spouses. June Dunn and PeeWee Love are two of the kindest, yet strongest, women I know, and the love both couples shared made it a delight to be in their company. I’m proud to have known them.

In Tokyo, Duck had just finished two shows at the Blue Note Nightclub, when he called home to say he wasn’t feeling well. Later that night, he passed away in his sleep. Like the true, musical road-warrior that he was, Duck Dunn died with his boots on.

Randy Haspel writes the blog “Born-Again Hippies,” where a version of this column first appeared.