Music fans, mark your calendars for these upcoming dinners:
A Heart Full of Soul at the Napa Cafe on August 19th and 20th, benefiting the Stax Music Academy.
A Fine Country Dinner at Whitton Farms in Tyronza, Arkansas, on September 9th, benefiting the Johnny Cash Boyhood Home Project.
Bruce VanWyngarden says two fantasies are propelling the gun debate following the Colorado shooting.
In many ways, The Dark Knight Rises is the movie of the year, and here at Sing All Kinds we seem to have a disagreement on our hands. Chris Herrington thinks The Dark Knight is the best film in the trilogy. Greg Akers finds The Dark Knight Rises to be the superior film. This week we’re hashing it out here. NOTE/WARNING: Spoilers will be flying like batarangs.
Tuesday, Herrington made a “sprawling,” “commanding,” and “entertaining” case that The Dark Knight (DK) is the best in the bunch. Yesterday, Akers wrote the War & Peace of off-the-cuff Batman blog posts in trumpeting The Dark Knight Rises (DKR). Today, Herrington is back to respond to Akers’ tome:
Herrington: Fine, Greg, you win. Your post exhausted me almost as much as the opening-hour set-up stuff in Batman Begins, which, by the way, our Flyer film colleague Addison Engelking would like to point out is his favorite of the Nolan/Batman trilogy, along with asserting that he is not, in fact, “no one.” Chiming in via e-mail, Addison offers this:
For the record, I think BATMAN BEGINS is the best movie of the trilogy because it goes the furthest in answering the most interesting questions about the Batman story worth answering:
1. Why would you become a crime fighter?
2. Where would you go to train for this, who would train you how to do this, and how would you go about fighting so many people at once?
Still stand by my view that THE DARK KNIGHT is the weakest of the trilogy, but it makes more sense as the middle of one long 9-hour film.
I guess I don’t care quite as much about the answers to those questions as you guys or have as much interest in pondering the Batman universe. Your thoroughness in all things Batman has worn me down, Greg, and I no longer have it in me to argue over the Big Themes and plot points. You make a pretty strong case for the thematic/political/sociological aspects of DKR, but I still think it flirts with ideas and imagery of income inequality more than really dealing with it. We’ll agree to disagree.
But there are some other aspects of your opus that I want to respond to, and some other side issues I want to toss out.
Nolan clearly wants to play in the Heat sandbox, but it comes at the expense of the comic book characters. Was Batman actually in DK? I can’t remember. He’s virtually a non-factor. I acknowledge that you probably don’t see that as a negative, but since they got everyone all dressed up for a Batman movie, I wish it was a little more Batman-y.
I’ve got a newsflash for you: Batman — meaning Bale when he’s in that kinky black rubber suit, riding around in those overblown tank-like vehicles — is the least interesting thing about these Batman movies. Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne is a different matter, but Batman himself is just not that compelling an on-screen figure. More Bale, more Bane, more Dent, more Joker, more women (please), and less Batman proper is a fine recipe as far as I’m concerned.
The Tigers and Ole Miss will renew their series on the gridiron in 2014, when Memphis travels to Oxford. There will have been four years without a Tiger-Rebel game, the longest such drought since they didn’t play from 1943 through 1948. (Qualifier: Memphis didn’t field a team from 1943-46, due to World War II.)
What is the Tigers’ longest winning streak in the series, and when was it?
Memphis beat Ole Miss three straight times, starting with a 17-13 win in Jackson in 1973. The Tigers won again in 1974 (15-7) at the Liberty Bowl and in 1976 (21-16), also at the Liberty Bowl. (The teams didn’t play in ’75.) Having won two of three against the Rebels, Fred Pancoast (1972-74) is the only Memphis coach with a winning record against Ole Miss.
Are these the “end of days”? Sometimes it seems that way.
How does the Bluff City look through the eyes of a seventh grader? That’s what the Memphis Tourism Foundation aimed to find out when it armed middle-schoolers with cameras this past June.
Throughout the month, Memphis kids snapped photos of things they considered to be representations of the city as part of the “Memphis: Through the Lens of a New Generation” competition.
On July 19th, the first through fifth place winners were honored at an awards ceremony at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. All five contestants received certificates and an autographed image of the 1968 “I Am a Man” protest taken by civil rights photographer Richard Copley. The top three winners won digital cameras and $175, split among the contestants.
Geneva Paulk, a seventh grader at White Station Middle School, won first place for her portfolio that included pictures of the Pyramid and the Pink Palace Museum.
“I took one of the Pyramid, because I think it’s just a big part of Memphis. It’s been down there for a really long time, and I think that it’s kind of cool,” the 11-year-old Paulk said.
Paulk said the contest photos can help both locals and tourists gain a broader perspective on the city.
“I think [the pictures] will help people go around to places like the Pyramid, the river, downtown in general, and just have a good time,” Paulk said.
The kids were provided a disposable camera with 27 color shots and given two weeks to photograph things that embodied Memphis history, culture, and local issues.
“The competition provided us with an opportunity to encourage those children to take a look at their city, where they live, where they play, where they go to school, and where they worship, and take pictures of things they thought were some of the best images representing Memphis,” said Memphis Tourism Foundation’s Deanie Parker, who helped coordinate the competition.
Prior to taking their own photos, the kids received mentoring and tips from experienced photographers on how to aim the camera, set up shots, and get close to their subjects.
“We talked about what Memphis meant to them,” said Veronica Birmingham, a professional photographer for nearly three decades and one of the mentors. “It was important for them to put together their personal experiences with their interpretation of their environment and represent it on film.”
Peyton Westbrook, 12, took second place in the competition with her photos of the Liberty Bowl Memorial Stadium and the Bellevue Baptist Church crosses.
“When you think of Memphis, you automatically think of the Mississippi River and the bridge, but there’s so many more things that should be recognized,” said Westbrook, a seventh grader at Dexter Middle School. “I picked things that were interesting and I thought would be different and not just like regular Memphis.”
Other recipients included sixth graders Anfernee Little and Ashlee Edwards and seventh grader Nicholas Edwards. Some of the other photos included the Memphis & Arkansas Bridge, FedExForum, and the Memphis Queen.
The legend of the insanely prolific Memphis musician Alicja Trout is firmly established in this town. From her earliest work in the mid-’90s with the synth-pop trio the Clears to the present, her many musical incarnations — which include past projects the Lost Sounds (a collaboration with the late Jay Reatard), the Ultra-Cats, and Black Sunday, as well as her current bands, Mouserocket and the River City Tanlines — have always been reliably entertaining, as well as just plain good. And despite her tough punk-rock image and penchant for noise guitar and blood-curdling screams, there are few songwriters in Memphis with a better sense for simple, soaring pop hooks than Trout.
Bolstered by the dynamic rhythm section of bass player Terrence “T-Money” Bishop and drummer John “Bubba” Bonds, said hooks are on full display on the River City Tanlines’ latest, and perhaps best, album to date, Coast to Coast, which comes out this week on the Fat Possum subsidiary Big Legal Mess (also the label home of local acts Jack Oblivian and John Paul Keith, among others). In fact, the overall tone of the album is much more tuneful and calmed down than one would expect from a Tanlines offering, especially considering the band’s origins as Trout’s more traditional punk-rock outlet.
“I had been living a constantly touring life, doing my mail-order website, selling and trading records on the road, and I needed a touring band,” Trout says. “I ran into Bubba at the Buccaneer and liked his drumming style. When I asked him if he’d like to try to play a few songs, he brought Terrence into the deal. It was my first ‘power-trio.’ They were easy to work with and played loud!”
The newly formed band quickly gelled and cut a string of 7-inch vinyl singles (which were eventually collected on the 2005 compilation All the 7 Inches Plus 2 More) before releasing what would become the band’s excellent debut LP, I’m Your Negative, in 2006. A handful of smaller releases (as well as two excellent Mouserocket albums, 2008’s Pretty Loud and last year’s Cicada Sounds) arrived in the bins before the River City Tanlines finally decided to record a follow-up full-length earlier this year. Enter Bruce Watson, of Fat Possum/Big Legal Mess fame.
“For me, he is the perfect match for a label/producer, because he has strong opinions and cuts to the chase, yet he’s open to something not sounding like he’d expected,” Trout says. “I felt able to experiment at Dial Back Sound [Watson’s studio in Water Valley, Mississippi], and Bruce and our recording engineer, Lynn Bridges, were encouraging and open-minded, so we got interesting tracks.”
Indeed, Coast to Coast is full of unexpected lyrical themes and musical moments. Highlights include the straightforward plea “Pretty Please” and the album’s closer, “Waiting for Nothing,” which showcases Trout’s underrated lead-guitar skills on the song’s outtro.
“The theme for this record is definitely less about anger and frustration and more about light for most of the songs,” Trout says. “Having a daughter changes your outlook on the world in so many ways.
“I’ve had to get rid of the screaming stuff. Some of the songs are a little more poppy and simplified, and maybe there are more medium-paced songs and less really fast songs.”
Drummer John Bonds also influenced one of the album’s most effective and collaborative tracks.
“We added ‘Dark Matter’ to the mix late in the game as Bubs [Bonds] was going through a Black Sabbath phase for the fourth or fifth time in his life,” Trout says. “That was a band concoction. We worked all day at the studio until our ears were melting off, then we slept there in the apartment, even when it smelled like a dead mouse or squirrels were chewing through the walls.”
The River City Tanlines will celebrate the release of Coast to Coast with a show this Saturday at the Hi-Tone. According to Trout, the band’s schedule only gets busier from there.
“We are doing a short Midwest tour right after the record release and then going to the New York area at the end of August,” she says. “In October, we’ll go to Europe for two weeks, and after that, hopefully we can get back to being creative again.”
http://www.myspace.com/ rivercitytanlines
River City Tanlines Coast to Coast release show,
with the Manatees
The Hi-Tone Café, Saturday, July 28th
Doors open at 9 p.m.; $5
A couple of years ago, at a Memphis Pops Festival at the Hi-Tone Café, longtime Memphis scene stalwarts Dave Shouse (Grifters) and Steve Selvidge (Big Ass Truck, Hold Steady) played a great set. But it wasn’t with the Bloodthirsty Lovers, the Shouse project of which Selvidge was once a member. Instead, they were back-up players for Neil Bartlett, a then generally unknown young Memphis musician, in Bartlett’s band Hi Electric. The band — and Bartlett — seemed like a potentially major new force on the Memphis indie-rock scene, but neither has been heard all that much since. At least until recently.
It turns out Bartlett was holed up in the studio crafting an eponymous debut album that’s one of 2012’s best local releases. And, now a trio with bassist Alan Yee and drummer Henry Talbot, Hi Electric is back to performing live.
“I was a huge Beatles fan growing up, even as a really young kid, and that’s carried over through everything,” Bartlett says of his current band’s heavy but extremely melodic rock sound.
Bartlett, a guitarist, went through a psychedelic rock phase in middle school and then got into playing jazzy/jammy stuff inspired by Medeski, Martinw & Wood in high school. (He graduated from White Station in 2003.) But when he got serious about his own music in college, at the University of Memphis, he returned to the basics.
“I needed something else, and I returned to the simple song structures that had impressed me with the Beatles,” Bartlett says. “Nirvana was huge when I was growing up, and I got back into them too — grungy but with pop songs underneath it all. And that became a good ideal for me musically. I’ve played with the idea of going weirder and more psychedelic, but I just don’t think I’m very good at it.”
In college, Bartlett did solo home recordings, posting them on MySpace. One drunken night, he sent messages to local musicians he admired, asking them to check it out.
Bartlett got a response from Selvidge, who had been an early influence via Big Ass Truck. Selvidge worked with Bartlett on some initial demos as a duo and then wrangled a band — including Shouse and former Big Ass Truck drummer Robert Barnett — for live shows and more extensive recording.
“Steve was a really good mentor. He showed me how things work,” Bartlett says. “But I was about 24 or 25, and it was impossible for me to go to these practices and tell them what to do. I think they wanted me to be a little more of a leader, to be more vocal. I can see that now in hindsight, but it was just impossible for me to do.”
Working with local luminaries was instructive (“Bouncing ideas off Dave Shouse was extremely rewarding,” Bartlett says) but not meant to last. Before long, Bartlett was reinventing Hi Electric with Yee, who had been part of the initial live band late in its run, and high school friend Talbot and going into the studio with producer Kevin Cubbins.
“It feels good as a trio,” Bartlett says of pursuing a “heavier, grittier sound” in Hi Electric 2.0. “There’s something simple and primal about guitars, bass, and drums.”
Bartlett, Cubbins, and the band started recording Hi Electric in late 2009.
“In the studio, I was like a fish being thrown into water for the first time,” Bartlett says of the too-lengthy process. “I wanted to do it every day. To me, that’s the most rewarding aspect of it. So I completely stopped booking any shows, which was a terrible idea.”
While a long time in coming, the result is impressive. Hi Electric is a heavy, guitar-drenched take on the tradition of classic rock sans blues that evokes such ’90s modern-rock staples as Teenage Fanclub, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, and Foo Fighters.
“That period of music has a huge influence on me, because that’s when I was growing up,” Bartlett says. “But also we’re fans of the Beatles and British rock and the Velvet Underground. It’s just power pop with fuzz pedals; that’s what 90 percent of ’90s alternative rock was.”
Now, with a terrific new album in tow, Hi Electric is trying to find its place on a local scene where rock successes tend more often toward rootsy or punk directions.
“We’re swimming against the current,” Bartlett says. “It’s hard to build an audience in this town if you don’t fit into those molds.”
Hi Electric plays the Poplar Lounge on Friday, July 27th. Admission is free.
A few weeks ago, the Flyer‘s annual summer reading issue offered an overview of some of the season’s better books. What that issue didn’t include were two of the season’s best books — both of them on subjects given a fresh look.
In the case of one, Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay (Putnam), Benjamin Taylor considers a city if not off the beaten path then too often a mere stop for travelers making their way south from Rome to Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the Amalfi Coast of Italy. In the case of the other, All We Know: Three Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Lisa Cohen reconsiders the private and public lives of three 20th-century women themselves off the beaten path in standard studies of the period. Both books are first-rate.
Who are the women who led the lives of Cohen’s subtitle? They are Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland, and, as Cohen writes in her preface, the goal in All We Know is “to make these three women visible again” when, in the 21st century, they run the risk of being forgotten altogether. They were not exactly invisible in their lifetimes.
Daughter of the head of the Mark Cross leather-goods company and sister of the famed expatriate and party animal par excellence Gerald Murphy, Esther Murphy was as prodigious a talker as she was a drinker. She was also, in Cohen’s words, “a perfect failure” — a woman whose life of Madame de Maintenon was never finished, but, boy, was it talked about, chiefly by Murphy herself. Equally discussed in certain illustrious circles of the day: Murphy’s failed marriages and emotional attachments to the women writers who surrounded her and who did succeed.
Mercedes de Acosta? She was, in Cohen’s words, “a tremendously important cipher” — important not for de Acosta’s career in Hollywood as a scriptwriter, not for her objects of affection (Eleonora Duse, Isadora Duncan, and Marlene Dietrich, to name a few). The all-important object of desire was Greta Garbo. Were they or were they not lovers? Was de Acosta the first celebrity stalker? And what do de Acosta’s private papers say about the nature of devotion? Cohen seeks an answer.
And what has Cohen to say about Madge Garland, who helped bring British Vogue in the 1920s into the modernist vanguard?
“She became a public figure whose organization of her life around self-display was bound up with a need to actively, continually conceal herself,” according to the author.
What Cohen writes of here may be only three lives, but she uses those lives to address a multitude of larger themes: the irrational, the trivial, the paradoxical, the profound, and the “seams between public and private.”
A seamless performance, bridging matters great and small, is how to describe Lisa Cohen’s biographical meditation on modernism, which is All We Know.
Seems every reference to Naples you come across these days is some urban horror story: If it isn’t the city’s garbage piled high, it’s the city’s gangs that murderously rule its neighborhoods, with, behind both, Naples’ native brand of doing business: the Camorra.
What a relief, then, that the Camorra makes a late appearance — on page 178 out of a total 182 pages — in the handsomely designed pages of Naples Declared. There are other matters on the mind of its author, Benjamin Taylor — matters that begin in Naples Declared with a Naples specialty: a miracle.
The passport that Taylor thought he’d lost inside the city’s Duomo was in fact not lost. It was found and in the hands of an elderly gentleman who was using it to fan himself in the shade of the cathedral. He was waiting for Taylor to return, which Taylor did and Taylor has: nearly a dozen times to Naples over the course of 16 years.
He returned to this city (Neapolis, or “New City,” founded circa 600 B.C. by the Greeks) whose “eternal paganism” lies just beneath its Christianity; to this city with its long and glorious and inglorious history; and to Naples’ unexpected delights.
One such: the Neapolitan woman whom Taylor met one day inside the city’s national library. Her knowledge of idiomatic English wasn’t so great, but her admiration for one American writer and for one his works in particular was great indeed.
The author in question: William Faulkner. The book: Absalom, Absalom!. And what could Naples, Italy, and Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, possibly have in common?
See Naples Declared for Benjamin Taylor’s answer and for his uncommon understanding of the workings of history and of human nature, no matter the time or the place.
About “Another Shooting Massacre, Another Call for Prayers” and predictable non-responses to the Colorado “movie theater massacre”:
“I fear gun control. I fear criminals. I do not fear guns. I don’t fear myself, and I do not fear the infinitesimal chance some lunatic will choose my theater to commit mass murder. Those are not rational things to fear, and gun control is not a rational answer to the rampage of a mentally depraved individual. It is reflexive, lazy, and short-sighted.” — bighouse
“I’m 100% behind the 2nd Amendment, but to think this tragedy would have been avoided simply by having one moviegoer with a gun is utter stupidity.” — Midtown Maven
“Absolutely NOTHING positive or productive will happen as a result of the tragic shootings in Aurora. NOTHING. Just as nothing happened as a result of the shootings in Columbine or Virginia Tech. … Lobbying groups like the NRA and their political whores in (ironically) the government hold all of the power right now. And these people have decided that the daily carnage of gun violence in this country is an acceptable cost for the right of personal gun ownership. ‘Dead children? No problem. We can always make more. AND, we still have our guns!'” — beeswax
“The same crime could have been committed with a baseball bat, bow and arrow, flame thrower, or any number of mechanical devices.” — CHG
Comments of the Week:
About “Pigging Out on Riverfront Projects” and our city’s seemingly desperate attempts to get things rolling on the river. Haven’t we seen this before?
“Hook, line, and Shlenker.”
— MichaelC
