Month: August 2014

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We Recommend We Recommend

Mood music this weekend: Wattstax and Memphis Music & Heritage Festival

This is a great week to binge-consume regional culture, to celebrate where we’ve been, sample where we are, and catch a glimpse of where we’re going. It kicks off Friday night with a screening of Wattstax at the Levitt Shell and continues through the weekend with the Center for Southern Folklore’s annual Memphis Music & Heritage Festival celebrating the life and legacy of bluesman and big panty enthusiast, Bobby Rush.

Wattstax is the soulful 1973 documentary/concert film about the epic 1972 music festival, sometimes called “the black Woodstock.” Wattstax was organized in Los Angeles by Memphis’ Stax Records to mark the 7th anniversary of the Watts riots. It featured comedian Richard Pryor and showcased performers like Rufus and Carla Thomas, the Staple Singers, Johnnie Taylor, the Bar-Kays, and Isaac Hayes, among others.

Bluesman Bobby Rush

It’s hard to imagine Bobby Rush as anything other than an energetic blur of bling and bawdy shenanigans, stalking the stage like a funky tiger, shirtless but wearing a brightly colored suit trimmed out in spangles and sequins and singing about the pleasures and the difficulties of making love to women who are bigger than you are. Now 80, Rush is a blues and soul institution who spent a portion of the past year serving as a visiting scholar of popular song at Rhodes College. His annual performances at downtown’s Music & Heritage Festival have marked summer’s end for many years now. This year, the festival is dedicated to the undercover lover himself and features two days of arts, crafts, and dance, in addition to a wall-to-wall slate of blues, rock, soul, country, and folk concerts performed by a wide range of area performers.

The Center For Southern Folklore’s Memphis Music & Heritage Festival is downtown’s best party. As always, it’s free and open to music lovers of all ages.

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News

Wait ‘Til This Year?

Frank Murtaugh takes an in-depth look at the University of Memphis football team and Coach Justin Fuente, and says this could be the year.

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Film/TV TV Features

TV Watch: Doctor Who

CREDIT: BBC.co.uk/doctorwho

Doctor Who is now entering its 51st year. The BBC sci-fi TV show is older than Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Star Trek. Its first episode, which was delayed because of BBC’s coverage of the Kennedy asassination, debuted in England the same year that Astro Boy, the first ever anime, debuted in Japan. Can a show that is as old as an entire genre still have something to say?

The first actor to play the Doctor was William Hartnell, who was 55 years old at the time of the 1963 debut. After three years galavanting through time and space in the TARDIS, Hartnell’s deteriorating health forced him to retire. So the writers came up with a way to keep the popular show going without its star. When Time Lords like the Doctor are near death, their bodies regenerate, changing appearance and giving them new life. The number of total regenerations a single Time Lord could get was set at 12, which, in 1966 probably seemed like a large enough number that the writers would never have to deal with what happened when the Doctor ran out.

BBC.co.uk/doctorwho

Peter Capaldi as Doctor Who

After being cancelled in 1989, Doctor Who regenerated in 2005. For the first 26 years of the show’s run, it was a series of half-hour cliffhangers that bound five or six episodes together under one long story arc. When it returned, it was as series of one-hour, stand-alone episodes with only the loosest of a season-long arc. The new Who was instantly popular, thanks in large part to the onscreen chemistry between the ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and Rose (Billie Piper), the Doctor’s human traveling companion. When Eccleston decided that one year as the most recognized man in nerddom was enough, he was replaced by the 10th Doctor (David Tennant), and Piper stuck around long enough to get the new guy established and set the new Who up for its best years. Long-form television was back in fashion, and Doctor Who‘s plot machinations became increasingly byzantine, as the Doctor’s troubled past in the Time War caught up with him. When Tennant left the TARDIS in 2010, he was replaced by the 11th Doctor (Matt Smith), who was initially well received but never achieved the same depth of fan love as Tennant. Smith stayed for three years until being killed off during the show’s emotional 50th anniversary special. And so, here we are, with Peter Capaldi premiering as the once-thought-impossible 12th Doctor.

Doctor Who fandom is the oldest and most fanatical of the nerd subtribes, and during the run up to the 50th anniversary, showrunner Steven Moffat seemed determined to serve up as much red meat to the fans as possible. The series immersed itself in its own mythology, becoming a show mostly about itself, a recursion that the character of the Doctor, who once famously described the universe as a “big ball of wibby wobbly timey-wimey stuff,” would appreciate.

Moffat surrounds the new Doctor with fan-favorite characters Madame Vastra, Jenny Flint, and Strax, their Sontaran comic relief. But Moffat doesn’t give the new guy much to do. When Capaldi is finally unleashed late in the show to confront the cyborg villain, he hints at a new iron hand under the Doctor’s jolly velvet glove. But overall, Capaldi’s first episode seems flat and uninspired. If he is to be the actor to regenerate a franchise crushed under the weight of its own history, Moffat is going to have to find new places for the TARDIS to go.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Stick Fly at Hattiloo Theatre

The Hattiloo Theatre’s founding director Ekundayo Bandele is often described as tireless, but that’s not the case. A week before the opening of Stick Fly, the second production in the Hattiloo Theatre’s new, custom-built theater in Overton Square, Bandele has the stunned look of a brand new parent of multiples.

“I’m dizzy,” he says, walking into the theater bright and early after a long night of working at his new Edge district jazz venue Dizzy Bird. He’s also dedicated and checks in on his set construction crew before heading back to his office to start the morning.

The new Hattiloo opened to the public in July. Since then, Bandele has struggled with an overly complicated HVAC system, commodes that conspired to back up in unison, and all the other normal, terrible stuff that happens as you settle into a new space. Between smoothing the wrinkles and launching Dizzy Bird, Bandele has also managed to sell an unprecedented number of new Hattiloo subscriptions and open a crowd-thrilling Once on This Island, showcasing everything good about the new Hattiloo and a lot of local talent.

Stick Fly, which opened last week and runs through September 14th, is a different kind of show. The classic family drama follows one eventful weekend in the life of an affluent, African-American family with secrets that are determined to come out. It’s set in a posh Martha’s Vineyard home and echoes of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, as brothers Kent and Flip bring their girlfriends home to meet their parents for the first time.

“Once on This Island was a pace car. Everything following is going to have to measure up,” Bandele says.

Hattiloo is also hosting Broadway’s Stick Fly star Ruben Santiago-Hudson, who will conduct a two-hour workshop Saturday, September 6th. Tickets and details are available at hattiloo.org.

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Music Music Features

Kings of Kiwi-Pop

CREDIT: Tim Soter

This Thursday night one of the most imitated and influential bands in indie rock comes to the Hi-Tone. Started in 1978 by brothers Hamish and David Kilgour, The Clean have long been considered the embodiment of Kiwi Pop and the go-to band when researching the epic Flying Nun record label. Along with their peers in bands like the Bats, the Chills, and the Verlaines, the Clean helped make the scene in Dunedin, New Zealand, world renowned, and bands like Pavement, REM, and Yo La Tengo have all cited the Clean as a major influence.

Tim Soter

The Clean

So what exactly is Kiwi Pop? By today’s standards, it’s equal parts psychedelic rock, Brit-pop, and post-punk, which means most of it is mellow, off-kilter, and played by musicians infinitely cooler than everyone else. Most of the Clean’s recorded output has stood the test of time, and their music wouldn’t be out of place on any modern college radio station across the country today. And while some of the more obscure releases on Flying Nun fetch insane prices on eBay, modern indie labels like Merge, Captured Tracks, and Goner Records have been diligent about keeping The Clean’s output in print and available to consumers.

While drummer Hamish Kilgour played an acoustic set at Gonerfest 9 a couple of years back, this will be the first time the Clean plays Memphis with their reunited full lineup. They should be well received, as a contingency of Memphians have been trying to get The Clean to play here for the past four or five years. On tour with The Clean is Brazilian band Boogarins, a psychedelic garage rock band on Fat Possum Records that owes as much to the Kiwi Pop sound as they do the Kinks.

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Music Music Features

Ten Strong Songs

CREDIT: John Pickle

Last January, the three members of the Strengths, vocalist Alyssa Moore, guitarist Will Forrest, and drummer Daniel Anderson, were living together in a condo off Sycamore View when a neighboring unit caught fire. Forrest recalls that, as the flames spread to their home, “The firemen had time to run in and get some stuff for us, so they asked what to grab. I said ‘Instruments! Anything that makes noise!'”

Soon, a pile of instruments grew in the yard: five or six guitars, drums, an autoharp, and a couple of accordions. Once the fire was contained, a paramedic came up to Forrest and said, “So, you play music?”

Forrest, his head spinning from having his house burn down, said, “Yeah.”

“What kind?” asked the paramedic.

“I don’t know,” Forrest said. “Rock?”

That sums up the Strength’s strength and the thorn in their collective side. “We can’t even describe our music when our house is burning down,” Anderson says.

Listening to their new self-released album Ten Strong Songs, it’s quickly apparent that no other band in Memphis sounds like the Strengths. They combine stunningly complex instrumental workouts with Moore’s dreamy vocals, turning from one genre to another on a dime.

“It’s great to be in Strengths because you can be pop punk for a few seconds, then metal for a few seconds, then whatever else,” Forrest says.

John Pickle

Strengths

He and Moore both come from musical backgrounds. “My dad’s been playing down on Beale Street for 30 years in blues and R&B bands,” Forrest says. “I grew up jamming with him and his friends. I had to learn how to make my guitar solos a little more atonal when I got to be a teenager.”

Moore is the daughter of Mike Moore, a veteran of the 1980s Antenna Club-based punk scene and co-founder of Truant Records. “I was friends with Noel Gallimore, who is Stan Gallimore’s (from the Grifters) son,” she recalls. “I was at their house once, and Tripp Lamkins was there with Stan. I picked up a guitar and started playing, and Tripp said ‘You’re not a guitarist, you’re a bassist.’ I had never even played bass before, but he said, ‘When you get older, you’ll realize you’re supposed to be a bass player.’ And he was right.”

Moore holds down the low end on Strengths’ technically challenging songs while singing. Her vocal melodies unify the quick-cut music on songs such as “Slugfest,” which veers between haymaker power chords and dreamy pop, while she coos “Nothing is cohesive.”

“My sister was pursuing opera for a long time,” Moore says. “She is just an amazing singer. When we were growing up, she would show me choir pieces she had, and I would sing the harmony. So I’ve been singing with other people since I was a little kid, and I’ve been playing the guitar since I was 8. I was always writing my own songs, not learning other people’s songs, so it just made sense for me to sing and play at the same time.”

“Just remembering these songs and trying to play them is hard enough,” says Forrest, “But trying to remember all of the lyrics, and singing, and all of the things that go along with singing …”

“It’s really impressive,” says Anderson.

The young trio has been playing together since high school at White Station, and they can finish each other’s sentences musically as well as in conversation. Most recently, they provided muscle for Whose Army?, making a name for themselves among the Midtown rock cognoscenti, even though they mostly played house shows. “I don’t think we ever played to more than 20 people,” Moore says.

But when that group dissolved, Moore stepped up as lead singer. “When I was little, I would listen to Hole and Nirvana. When we were in Whose Army?, people constantly compared me to Kim Deal, which I thought was goofy, since I was obviously ripping off Courtney Love.”

Their idiosyncratic sound evolved organically from constant exposure to Midtown Memphis punk. They played with other bands such as the venerable Adios Gringo, whose taste for complexity and uncompromising spirit were influential on the Strengths. “They’ve got a lot of weird time signatures,” says Forrest. “To me, it’s metal, but I don’t think you can call us metal. But I’ve always loved them because they’re so not boring.”

But once Ten Strong Songs drops, everyone will have a chance to decide for themselves what exactly the Strengths are.

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Film Features Film/TV

If I Stay

If I Stay is a movie that asks whether an acceptance letter from a prestigious college can resurrect the dead. It’s also a genteel teenage melodrama whose plates are galvanized from time to time by arresting, unexpectedly acute lines of dialogue or self-sacrificial acts.

Chloë Grace Moretz plays Mia, a well-spoken, well-adjusted teenager whose life is in flux: She seems happy, but she may have issues. However, before she — or the audience — can figure out exactly what those issues are, Mia, her parents (Mireille Enos and Joshua Leonard) and her little brother (Jakob Davies) get into a serious car accident. Mia ends up in a coma, but her mind remains restless and active. The rest of the film follows Mia’s disembodied spirit as it wanders barefoot around the same hospital where determined medical professionals work to save her and her family’s lives. As she sees scenes from her life flash before her, she is faced with a simple choice: Does she return to her body and live out her life or go into the light and leave our world? And if she does remain on earth, which direction will her life take?

Like other YA novels-turned-movies like The Fault in Our Stars and The Hunger Games series, If I Stay‘s protagonist is a smart girl. Moretz is comfortable in this role; she played a cute, damaged smart girl in last year’s underrated Carrie remake, and she played a cute, psychotic one in the Kick-Ass movies. She’s a teen titan who shape-shifts like Ant-Man or Giant-Man. She’s tiny and soft-voiced enough to disappear into the crowd or the shadows, but her heart-shaped face and elfin friskiness propel her into the center of a scene whenever she chooses.

Chloë Moretz is trapped between worlds in If I Stay.

At my other job, I see and work with smart girls like Mia all day long. It’s funny; to many of their peers, these girls’ intelligence, beauty, and sensitivity are intimidating and scary because they get their teenage kicks from unusual places. In a series of flashbacks, we see that, for Mia, it’s the cello: she resists her parents’ love of rock-and-roll and pursues classical music instead. Practicing Beethoven may limit her circle of friends, but she soon catches the eye of handsome, chivalrous rocker Adam (Jamie Blackley).

Prefabricated conflicts aside, Adam is a harmless, boring drip, just like Mia’s insufferably tolerant and cool ex-punk-rock parents, who are always one straggler’s dinner party away from their own Portlandia sketch. Yet in spite of this ballast, If I Stay floats above a tar pit of sentimentality for three-fourths of its run time, and when the sentimental goop finally bubbles up onscreen, it’s not so bad.

This kind of shrugging praise probably makes If I Stay sound pretty run of the mill. It is, for the most part. But this kind of teenage tearjerker touches on more of the human experience in any given scene than most current blockbusters do in their entire run time. Few people can remember the first time they killed a man or saved the galaxy from Ronan the Accuser, but plenty of people can remember their first crush. When Mia sits down cross-legged on her bed and talks to Adam, who’s climbed up the side of the house to see her, the scene evokes the thrilling fear of letting someone else into your life for the first time. Scenes like these are rousing accidents in movies like this, which are as glossy and visually exciting as the average USA Network family drama.

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Editorial Opinion

Keeping Hospitals Alive

The pending shut-down of Crittenden Regional Hospital in West Memphis, which followed several months of highly publicized financial crisis, should sound the alert for medical authorities in Memphis — especially at Regional One Health (formerly known as The Med), which will inherit much of the now stranded patient load at the expired hospital.

The loss of Crittenden Regional and the resultant further shift of the medical burden to Regional One highlights once again still unresolved questions of the degree to which both Arkansas and Mississippi should compensate the Memphis facility for taking care of underprivileged patients from those states who seek medical assistance on our side of the state line.

And the closing of the facility in Tennesssee’s neighboring state should stand as both a warning and a reproach to Governor Bill Haslam and the Tennessee General Assembly — the latter for its callous indifference to the needs of our state’s stressed and financially challenged hospitals, as evidenced in the Republican-dominated legislature’s persistent refusal to consider Medicaid expansion funds available through the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and the former for letting himself be cowed into acquiescing in that refusal.

As Tennessee law now stands, the General Assembly having passed legislation in last year’s session giving itself de facto veto power over any future decisions Haslam might make on the issue, the governor’s hands are more or less tied. But he had ample opportunity before that point, when hospital administrators all over the state were begging him for financial relief, to avail himself of Medicaid expansion funds. He should have accepted the funds, even at the potential cost of inviting threats to his reelection. No profile in courage there, Gov.

It is true, of course, that Crittenden, like other public hospitals in Arkansas, had the benefit of Medicaid expansion funds, thanks to the fact that the state’s governor, Mike Beebe, is a Democrat, like the president, and therefore is not bound to an ideology of refusal that too many Republicans, for purely political reasons, are bound to. That fact alone kept the hospital alive for a season or two. But a pair of serious fires at the facility, one as recently as this year, pushed the hospital over the fiscal cliff.

There are numerous hospitals in Tennessee that are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and, failing the kind of unforeseen accident that happened in Crittenden, could easily survive with a fair share of the $2 billion that our state officials have opted to deny them.

Back to Arkansas: Another Democrat, U.S. Senator Mark Pryor, is running for reelection with a campaign that features public speeches on behalf of Obamacare/Medicaid expansion (both of which, however, he, rather too cautiously, calls by euphemistic names), pointing out that he himself was able to survive a bout with cancer in the 1990s, despite the fact that his insurance company back then declined to pay for the expensive treatment he required, which he then had to pay for out of pocket.

Obamacare, Pryor notes, prevents insurors from doing that to others. It can help keep hospitals alive, too.

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News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1331

Vanishing Memphis

It was bad enough when we lost the “Superman Dam Fool” graffiti. But now the best part of Memphis’ weirdest mural has been painted over in favor of this beige wall.

So how weird was the parking lot mural at the downtown Fogelman YMCA? Well, it included this painting of a little girl extracting something from (or inserting something into) a toddler’s bottom. And now it’s gone forever.

Thankfully a portion of the mural remains. Here we see Jesus and hippy Jesus doing something behind a bush that has resulted in two people shaking their fists and one man’s heart attack.

Neverending Elvis

According to Adweek, “Elvis is back in the building.” Sort of. Authentic Brands Group (ABG), which manages Elvis’ estate, is teaming with Pulse Evolution and will use 1,500 moving parts to reanimate the King as a hologram. What then? Apparently, ABG intends to “have Elvis shake, rattle, and roll in live shows, commercials, and movies.” We guess that means Clambake 2 and Rocky vs. King Creole are just around the corner. Hooray?

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News The Fly-By

Fed Program Puts Little Military Gear in Memphis

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Military fighting gear has made its way from the Department of Defense to the Memphis Police Department (MPD) over the past decade. But Mayor A C Wharton said the city has only “what we need” with access to more gear if a situation arises. 

When officers from the Ferguson Police Department in Missouri clashed with protesters there earlier this month, the nation got a good look at some of the gear that has flowed from the military to local police agencies over the past decade. Police in Ferguson drove armored vehicles, wore body armor, and pointed high-powered rifles at crowds of protestors. The sights made federal leaders uncomfortable, and they are promising action. 

U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, of Memphis, demanded a House hearing on the militarization of police forces two weeks ago. U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, of Missouri, promised a similar Senate hearing next month. Obama administration officials said they will review the federal military surplus program and training programs that go with them.

Since 2004, MPD has received five automatic rifles, two boats, and two armored personnel carriers from the Defense Department’s 1033 surplus program, according to the Tennessee Department of General Services. 

Jackson Baker

Memphis Police don body armor for last year’s KKK rally.

MPD public information officer Sgt. Karen Rudolph said the M14 rifles are kept in storage and have never been used. 

The two bridge erection boats, she said, are “basic, flat-bottom, metal boats” that would be used to patrol the Mississippi River, the Port of Memphis, or to rescue passengers from a river boat. But the boats sit in surplus storage, she said.

The MPD’s two armored personnel carriers, which look basically like Army tanks, were built in 1979, Rudolph said, but the department has never used them since they arrived here in 2004. MPD has them, she said, if the need arose to carry officers into a dangerous zone with an active shooter. Also, the carriers’ tracks can travel over terrain too rough for trucks or ATVs. 

Wharton said he oversaw the acquisition of all of the surplus military gear here when he served as the district chair of the Tennessee Homeland Security Council. Though he said he “was a bit concerned about it” at the time, he didn’t see “what I would call excesses.”

“Perhaps [using military gear] ratchets things up, things that wouldn’t reach such a fever pitch if it weren’t for the introduction of that kind of foreboding, frightening equipment that makes folks want to take you on, quite frankly,” Wharton said. 

He preferred to keep police responses “toned down,” he said, but noted that the city could get more heavy response gear from neighboring communities if it was needed. 

But the show of force displayed last year during the Ku Klux Klan’s protest at the Shelby County Courthouse was anything but toned down. It was “overwhelming,” according to an on-the-scene report from Memphis Flyer reporter John Branston.

“There were hundreds of officers in riot gear, scores of vehicles, canine units, horse-mounted units, TACT units, armored vehicles, motorcycles, fire trucks, mobile command posts, and enough firepower to repel, or at least mount a fair challenge, to General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Virginia,” Branston reported.

Rudolph said she would not compare MPD officers to those in Fergurson but defended last year’s response.

“However, as seen during the KKK rally, the Memphis Police Department is adequately equipped with the personnel, equipment, and training needed to address any incident that may occur within our city,” she said. “Our primary goal is to keep our citizens safe.”