Month: February 2015

Tennessee Equality Project Gumbo Contest 2015

Post author By Jackson Baker
Post date February 8, 2015

CREDIT: JB

Lee Harris, Raumesh Akbari, Jonathan Col, Joan Robinson

The 2nd annual Gumbo Contest of the Tennessee Equality Project was held Sunday night at Bridges downtown, and, like last year’s event, it could boast a jampacked room and a diverse, bipartisan attendance. This year there were special honors given to four “Champions of Equality.”

The recipients were: Chef Kelly English, City Councilwoman Janis Fullilove, Former City Counciman and state Senator Lee Harris, and Sheriff Bill Oldham.

(List of Gumbo Contest winners to come.)

Pics 11 through 16 courtesy of Gale Jones Carson

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Art Art Feature

“I Thought I Might Find You Here” at Clough Hanson

Post author By Eileen Townsend
Post date February 8, 2015

CREDIT: Chip Pankey

Brian Pera’s sculptures about the suicide of his friend, Papatya Curtis, are not sentimental. They are colorful and brave and wildly sad, but they use none of the available sentiment — words and shapes and colors all comfortably ordered around grief — to explain loss.

The pieces that make up Pera’s “I Thought I Might Find You Here,“ at Rhodes Clough-Hanson Gallery, are yarn, fabric, and wood assemblages in matte orange-red, black-currant purple, patagonia yellow, or not-my-first-rodeo teal. They look vital.

Pera first met Curtis in his neighborhood, at her yarn store, where he attended a weekly knit night. After her death in 2012, the yarn from the store was given away, and much of it now forms the raw materials of Pera’s sculptures.

The five sculptures that comprise the visual center of the show are organized around a film and a slideshow. The film, screened in a small side-gallery but ambiently available throughout the main gallery, shows visuals of knitting alongside audio interviews of Curtis’ friends, members of her knitting circle. The women talk about their late friend’s warmth, her bad luck in love, the day of her death, and how they each, individually and as a group, encountered what happened. In the slideshow, typed sentences broadcast in sheets of color against a back wall, Pera tells his version of the story. He describes Curtis and he describes his grief, but he disclaims both descriptions, saying it isn’t enough. “I won’t hold your attention,” he writes.

But he does hold our attention. The sculptures, the core of the show, have a progression. It is not clear if the emotional progression of the work matches the chronological order in which Pera built the pieces, but there is a definite spiritual chronology to the pieces — an invisible mountain, and Pera there climbing it. These are not memorials in the usual sense; they are the shapes grief makes in the body of someone grieving.

The first sculpture, your entry point, is freestanding but tethered to the low ceiling with a couple of bright chains. The body of the work is squarish, made of raw wood, some of the wood flecked with blue paint, some covered in orange muslin. There are spare knobs attached to odd sides of the work; a red belt; a line of hanging embroidery circles; a small wheel … elements strapped together in slightly organized chaos; details sans the thing they are detailing. In the belly of the sculpture there is a child-sized bundle of chicken wire wrapped in plastic and bright cloth, left exposed.

Behind the first sculpture, backed up against a wall, two posts from a deconstructed bed frame stand at an angle. Between the posts is a waterfall-like sheet of yellow thread. Bound in the thread are about 50 doll-sized, porcelain arms. The arms were made by Pera’s friend and collaborator, Nikkila Carrol, whose creations are anti-anatomical, shoulderless and strange, each frozen in a different gesture of failed defense. Next, there is a simple wooden chest attached to a hitch and mounted on wheels. The chest is draped with a colorful shawl, and the shawl is in turn draped with orange plastic construction fencing. This piece is compact but it has an implied motion. It asks to be taken somewhere. That call is answered by the fourth sculpture, a tower-like structure made of scrap wood and adorned with teal chimes and a heavy pink yarn hanging. If the chest asks to be dragged up a mountain, this tower is located at the summit of that climb. All the elements of the piece seem meant to blow in the wind.

Finally, there is a compact, animal-like form made with blue and purple shag layered over a tight wrap of teal fabric. This last piece feels more born than made. If the rest of the sculptures can be read as a kind of frantic organization undertaken during the journey of grieving, this final work feels like what is allowed to stay on in the world after that process — something entirely new, created under circumstances of dangerous necessity.

Tags 'I Thought I Might Find You Here, Brian Pera, Clough-Hanson, Papatya Curtis, Rhodes College

Film/TV TV Features

The Man In The High Castle

Post author By Chris McCoy
Post date February 8, 2015

Early numbers indicate that last weekend’s Super Bowl matchup between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks drew 114 million viewers, making it, in terms of raw numbers of viewers, the most-watched TV show in history. Most of us viewed the game on NBC, either via their cable service or over-the-air broadcast. But for the first time, 1.4 million people watched the game streamed on the internet by YouTube. It was a move that the networks had been resisting for years, and an admission that the TV industry is in the early days of a profound revolution.

Another sign of change afoot could be seen at the Golden Globe awards, where Transparent won both Best Comedy or Musical Series and Best Performance for its lead actor Jeffrey Tambor. The unusual part is that Transparent was made by Amazon.com, and streamed exclusively on their Prime Instant Video service.

The Man in the High Castle

The show was a product of the second Amazon Pilot Season, a unique experiment in TV production that has so far been bearing fruit for the internet giant. Usually, a TV network will take pitches from producers and then order pilot episodes of several different shows each year. Then the network brass will pick what they think are the best two or three shows and pay for entire series. It is a notoriously wasteful process that yields questionable results.

But once Amazon got into the content-production business, they decided to show all of the pilots they order, and then ask the audience which ones should become series. It highlights a couple of important differences between the business models of traditional TV channels and the upstart internet producers. NBC, CBS, ABC, and FOX make money by using their programming to sell advertising, so that means their real customers are the ad buyers, not the viewers. Amazon, Netflix, and HBO are in the business of selling subscriptions, which means their primary customers are the viewers themselves. Without the fear of alienating advertisers and without the constraints of a schedule, they are freer to develop productions the networks would deem too risky.

This year’s crop of Amazon pilots includes The Man in the High Castle, an adaptation of a classic science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick produced by Ridley Scott. The premise of the 1962 Hugo Award winner is simple: What if the United States had lost World War II? In Dick’s alternate history version, the Greater Nazi Reich now rules the East Coast, while the Japanese Pacific States occupy the West Coast. Between them is a semi-lawless Neutral Zone, occupied by refugees deemed undesirable by the two Axis powers: Blacks, homosexuals, Jews, and other untermenschen.

The first of the series’ twin leads are Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank), a young New Yorker setting out cross country on his first mission for the beleaguered resistance. The second is Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos), a San Franscisan first seen taking Aikido lessons and fending off the advances of her Japanese instructor. Crain’s boyfriend, Frank Frink (Rupert Evans), works in a factory making fake antiques to sell to the Japanese. His co-worker Ed McCarthy (Hustle and Flow‘s DJ Qualls), is a gossipy source with the latest news from inside the Reich. It seems the now elderly Hitler is at the end of his life, and when he dies, his successor will most likely declare war on the Japanese and claim the entire continent.

Dick’s strongest suit was always his elaborate world-building, and the show’s impeccable production design is rich with detail. Supersonic Nazi rocket planes land in San Francisco at Hirohito International Airport. Newsreels depict happy white Americans working in Volkswagen factories in Detroit underneath a flag whose 50 stars have been replaced with a single swastika. The taut pacing and slowly building tension is reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica at its best. The characters, which also include an I Ching-obsessed Japanese embassy official played by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, all show promise, even if the acting was a bit stiff in this pilot episode.

Ambitious and brainy, The Man in the High Castle is unlike anything else on television, and a good argument in favor of the Amazon way of doing things.

News The Fly-By

Tennessee Joins Multi-State Lawsuit Against President Obama

Post author By Louis Goggans
Post date February 8, 2015

Latino Memphis Executive Director Mauricio Calvo came to Memphis from Mexico City two decades ago to attend Christian Brothers University. Since then, he’s witnessed close friends, who were in the U.S. without proper documentation, deported from Memphis back to their native countries.

“When [undocumented immigrants] say goodbye to their loved ones [in the morning], they don’t know if they’re going to come home that night,” Calvo said. “And that’s a real hard thing to live with.”

A coalition of 26 states, led by Texas, has filed a lawsuit against President Obama, alleging his recent executive actions on immigration are unconstitutional. Tennessee was among the last states to join the multi-state coalition.

Latino Memphis’ Mauricio Calvo speaks with immigrants.

Last November, Obama introduced his “Immigration Accountability Executive Action” to provide relief to undocumented immigrants nationwide.

The executive action seeks to enable undocumented immigrants who have been in the U.S. for at least five years or are the parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents to remain in the country temporarily. They would have to pass a criminal background check and pay back taxes. Those who qualify would be eligible to receive a three-year work permit.

Under the new policy, Obama would also expand the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The program currently prohibits the deportation of people brought into the U.S. illegally as minors by their parents before June 15, 2007. The expansion would extend the cutoff date to January 1, 2010.

There’s a substantial number of immigrants in Tennessee, many of whom are undocumented. According to the Pew Research Center, around 300,000 Hispanic immigrants reside in the Volunteer State. More than 130,000 are undocumented.

According to a statement provided by Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slater, Tennessee joined the lawsuit because “the executive directives issued by the White House and Homeland Security conflict with existing federal law. They replace prosecutorial discretion, normally determined on a case-by-case basis, with a unilateral non-enforcement policy protecting over four million people.”

In addition to Texas and Tennessee, other states in the lawsuit include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, and several others.

Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris (R-Collierville) supports Slater’s decision to join the lawsuit. He said Obama’s executive action is an abuse of regulations that’s contrary to the law.

“Somebody has got to stand up and push back against this madness,” Norris said. “As the attorney general put it, it’s not about immigration as much as it is about regulation and the illegality of extending regulations beyond what the law will allow.”

There are estimated to be more than 11 million undocumented immigrants in the nation, according to the Pew Research Center. More than four million will be able to benefit from Obama’s new deportation relief programs if a judge doesn’t rule in the states’ favor to block the executive action.

“It’s a waste of resources,” Calvo said. “With all of the things that we have to do as a state, we’re allocating tax money to fight the federal government on something that’s a dead end. The president acted within his power, regardless of how they feel about this. We are wasting money on a lawsuit that makes no sense.”

Tags Barack Obama, Latino Memphis, Mauricio Calvo

Sports Tiger Blue

Temple 61, Tigers 60

Post author By Frank Murtaugh
Post date February 7, 2015

CREDIT: Larry Kuzniewski

Temple reserve guard Josh Brown hit his first field goal of the game — a bank shot from about ten feet — with two seconds to play to give the Owls the win this afternoon at FedExForum. The loss all but crushes the Tigers’ chances for a conference championship, and compounds the agony of losing their star player for what looks like two weeks, minimum.

Junior guard Kedren Johnson converted a driving layup with 7.6 seconds to play to give the Tigers a 60-59 lead, but without using a timeout, Temple got the ball to Brown with two lengthy passes for his game-winner. “I knew once it left his hands it was going in,” said Tiger coach Josh Pastner. “We practice a lot of time-and-score situations, late-game stuff. I told the guys, after we score, we gotta get back. I think the excitement of the crowd going wild . . . . We did a good job of stopping Will Cummings. You gotta give him credit: he threw it to Josh Brown, and he hit a shot. A tough shot off the glass.

Larry Kuzniewski
Kedren Johnson

Making matters worse, sophomore forward Austin Nichols fell awkwardly with 7:10 left in the game, injuring his right ankle. He left the court with help, not placing any weight on his right leg. Pastner said the initial diagnosis is an ankle sprain, but Nichols will have an MRI and is expected to miss two weeks (four games). At the time of the Nichols injury, Memphis led 52-48. Even missing the last seven minutes, Nichols led all scorers with 17 points, blocked six shots, and pulled down eight rebounds. His 78 blocks this season are the eighth-most in Tiger history.

“Not having Austin makes a big difference for us,” said Pastner. “Guys know he’s our best player, the anchor of our team. That was a punch in the gut to our guys. They love Austin Nichols. I was proud of our guys to rally, not be discouraged. We put ourselves in a position to win the game. Temple has more experience; they’re a very good team.”

Pastner acknowledged 15 turnovers hurt his team’s cause. And some woeful shooting. “We had some open threes we didn’t stick,” said Pastner. “If we hit two of those, we win.” The Tigers missed 15 of 19 shots from long range. Johnson, Avery Woodson, and Trahson Burrell combined to hit but one of 11.

The Tigers raced to a big, early lead, a Johnson jumper putting them up 22-12 with just over 10 minutes played. The lead grew to 15 (32-17) before Temple closed the deficit to 10 (38-28) at halftime. The Owls didn’t lead until Jaylen Bond hit a pair of free throws to give Temple a 56-54 lead with 4:40 to play. Temple’s backcourt trio of Cummings, Jesse Morgan, and Quenton DeCosey combined to score 39 points, precisely the total they’ve averaged for the season. Morgan hit all 10 of his free throws to help the Owls improve to 17-7 (8-3 in the American Athletic Conference). Overall, Temple hit 20 of 32 free throws while Memphis made 12 of 18.

The loss took some shimmer off a stellar game by Memphis forward Shaq Goodwin. The junior pulled down 17 rebounds — a career high — in the first half alone, and finished the game with 23, the program’s first 20-rebound effort since Joey Dorsey pulled down 22 in a 2008 game against Houston. Ronnie Robinson has held the Memphis single-game rebound record (28) for 44 years.

“It’s a game of runs,” said Goodwin. “They made the last big shot. We can’t dwell on losses. We’ll start getting prepared for East Carolina tomorrow.” As for his night on the glass, Goodwin said, “I guess the ball found me today. It was a magnet. But none of that matters in a loss.”

Johnson scored 11 points for the Tigers in a season-high 37 minutes of action. Burrell was the only Tiger to play more than 10 minutes off the bench but missed all three of his three-point attempts.

“It stings,” said Johnson. “It’s a terrible way to lose. “The guys in the locker room aren’t going to give up. We’ll keep fighting. Toward the end of the first half, we took our foot off the pedal a bit, and they took advantage of it.”

Now 14-9 (6-4 in the AAC), the Tigers travel to play East Carolina next Tuesday. They won’t return to FedExForum until UConn visits on February 19th.

Politics Politics Beat Blog

Jobe, Former Fox 13 News Head, Takes Job with State House Democrats

Post author By Jackson Baker
Post date February 6, 2015

CREDIT: JB

Ken Jobe

The man who, as news director, raised the profile — and the ratings — of WHBQ-TV, Fox 13, for several years of late, and who served in the same capacity for WMC-TV, Action News 5, before that, has a new job and a new challenge.

As of this week, Ken Jobe began serving as press secretary of the House Democratic caucus in Nashville. He serves as a media spokesman for the 26 Democratic representatives (out of 99 in the full body), and, as those numbers indicate, has yet another up-by-the-bootstrap circumstance to deal with.

Jobe’s new position represents a homecoming of sorts. He is a former resident of Nashville, and his mother still lives there.

During the past week of an aborted special session on “Insurance Tennessee,” Governor Bill Haslam’s proposal for health-insurance reform, Jobe was kept busy organizing individual and group availabiliites for members of the caucus.

Beyond the Arc Sports

Introducing the Beyond the Arc Podcast

Post author By Kevin Lipe
Post date February 6, 2015

Here’s something I’ve been talking about for a long time and just hadn’t put together: the first episode of the Beyond the Arc podcast, with my friend Phil Naessens of the Phil Naessens Show. I promise this will turn into more of a thing as we continue to do it—we aren’t on iTunes yet, and we don’t have the artwork in place, but we just recorded the first episode this afternoon and I didn’t want to wait too long before sharing it with you.

Show Notes (which will get longer as the show goes on, because as we all know, I am incapable of actually writing short things):

Kevin Lipe from the Memphis Flyer and Phil Naessens from the Phil Naessens Show talk Memphis Grizzlies and NBA basketball. This week the guys look at how different things look for the Grizzlies this time this season as opposed to last season, the games ahead with the Atlanta Hawks and Oklahoma City Thunder, the return of Lionel Hollins to FedExForum and much more Memphis Grizzlies and NBA talk.

You can download the episode here or listen online:

News News Blog

V-Day Monologues to Combat Violence Against Women

Post author By Louis Goggans
Post date February 6, 2015

Jakatae Jessup performs an excerpt from ‘The Vagina Monologues.’

Local women will share real-life stories of happiness, heartbreak, and hardship during the fifth annual presentation of Memphis Monologues this Saturday.

Inspired by Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, a stage play that highlights various female experiences ranging from birth to rape to menstruation, Memphis Monologues will put a localized spin on the production. Instead of revisiting stories from the play, ladies will share their own accounts of life as a woman in the Bluff City.

Memphis Monologues will be the first of three productions presented locally to celebrate V-Day, an international movement dedicated to ending violence against women and girls. Each February, groups worldwide reenact Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, along with other plays promoting female empowerment, to raise money for projects and programs that combat violence.

Money raised locally will benefit Planned Parenthood Greater Memphis Region (PPGMR), specifically funding its women’s healthcare services. Among the resources offered to women by PPGMR are wellness exams, contraception, and sex education.

Already sold out, Memphis Monologues will take place Saturday, February 6th at Amurica Studios (410 North Cleveland). It begins at 7 p.m.

Although the local production is influenced by The Vagina Monologues, PPGMR’s Aimee Lewis assures the presentations are not solely for women’s enjoyment nor centered on sex.

“It’s real Memphis women telling their story and it’s been phenomenal,” said Lewis, vice-president of external affairs for PPGMR. “The ladies are asked to speak to what their experience is as a woman. So, we’ve had women talk about difficulty breastfeeding, what it’s like to be a woman working in a male-dominated field, the experience of pregnancy or not being able to become pregnant, and things like that. The subjects aren’t always as taboo as they might be in The Vagina Monologues.”

Ladies slated to grace the stage this year include Deidre Malone, Chloe Evans O’Hearn, Holly Whitfield, Christine Davenport, Leah Keys, Adriane Williams and Gale Jones Carson.

Next Thursday, locals will act out excerpts from A memory, A monologue, A rant and A Prayer, a collection of essays addressing violence against women from various aspects. Maya Angelou, Jane Fonda, Slavenka Drakulic, Michael Eric Dyson, Edward Albee, and Michael Cunningham are amid the book’s contributors.

The event will take place Thursday, February 12th, at the Circuit Playhouse (51 Cooper St.). It starts at 7:30 p.m.

The last gathering of V-day will be for the reenactment of The Vagina Monologues.

On Friday, February 13th, the first installment of the play will be presented at the Circuit Playhouse. It begins at 7:30 p.m.

A matinee performance will be provided on Saturday, February 14th. It starts at 2 p.m.

“It speaks to the female experience, everything from coming of age, puberty, child birth … it runs the gamut,” Lewis said. “To be a woman and sit there and hear other women speak about things that have touched me in some way and really see that things I may have thought or issues I may have had now have a voice, it’s a very moving and empowering experience. It gives us a wonderful, deeper perspective on what each one of us is going through.”

Since V-day’s emergence over a decide ago, it’s helped raise more than $100 million to fund resources that aid girls and women impacted by violence worldwide.

More than $15,000 was raised in Memphis last year from both Memphis Monologues and The Vagina Monologues. Ten percent of the funds raised locally each year are contributed to V-Day’s movement.

For ticket information on the forthcoming V-Day events, click here.

Tags Louis Goggans, Memphis Flyer, News Blog, The Memphis Monologues, The Vagina Monologues

News News Blog

Brewery Untapped Will Make a Comeback

Post author By Bianca Phillips
Post date February 6, 2015

The spring beer garden that created so much buzz last year about the previously doomed Tennessee Brewery building is making a comeback in spring 2015.

There are no details available yet. But the folks at Doug Carpenter & Associates posted this image on the Tennessee Brewery Facebook page this morning.

Screen_shot_2015-02-06_at_3.24.16_PM.png

From late April to early June last year, a group of investors — restaurateur Taylor Berger, attorney Michael Tauer, commercial real estate executive Andy Cates, and communications specialist Doug Carpenter — organized a pop-up beer garden inside the brewery to raise awareness about the need to save the historic building on Tennessee Street. Late last year, cell phone tower developer and Shelby County Schools board member Billy Orgel purchased the building, which was set to be demolished if no one bought it, and he intends to transform it into residential housing.

For more on Untapped, check out the Flyer’s cover story about last year’s event.

Tags Tennessee Brewery, Untapped