Month: April 2015

Categories
Art Art Feature

“Between the Eyes” at Crosstown Arts

I once took an art history class for which we were required to buy a textbook called Living With Art. The teacher joked that it made art sound like a terminal disease, like the cultural equivalent of Living With Heart Failure. It was funny and unfortunately apt: Critical and curatorial discussion around art too often feels like people whispering at a funeral. It is a task to not get sucked into all the morbidity.

Which is why it is great that “Between the Eyes,” the current exhibition of abstract painting at Crosstown Arts, stakes no great critical claims. It asks us, instead, to embrace the openness of artistic questions. Make something weird and see where it takes you. Figure out the question after you have the answer.

The 14 featured works were brought together by curator Laurel Sucsy, a Memphis-based painter whose abstractions are featured alongside works by Marina Adams, Joe Fyfe, and Rubens Ghenov, among others. Sucsy says that compiling the show was an “extension of what I do in the studio anyway.” The works are intuitively paired and quietly presented. Move too quickly and you’ll miss all the best things about this show.

Marina Adams’ Four Worlds

A good starting place, if you’ve got an hour or two, is Adams’ muddled green-whites and deep indigos in her painting The Wild Feminine. This painting is deceptively simple on first glance, but pay it some attention and it gives a lot back. I have jotted in my notes “this painting makes me want to live inside color.” Likewise with another large-scale (74″ x 74″) work by Adams, Four Worlds, which features several large color fields connected by an undulating line. That one is all about the yellow.

Opposed to Adams’ work are two large canvases by Iva Gueorguieva. Gueorguieva’s paintings are harshly layered with an angular, futurist bent that recalls broken cityscapes. They remind me of drawings by the late visionary architect Lebbeus Woods, whose manifesto claims that “architecture is war.” Color and line frantically vie for attention in Vanishing (after Perugino), a yellow-and-black piece built out of shifting planes. This piece is more effective than Gueorguieva’s Scarlet Squall, where much of the action of the piece takes place in a weird, circular foreground.

Rubens Ghenov’s Slow Ektaal

Ghenov’s paintings are also architectural, but these buildings exist in the uncanny valley. Ghenov makes what I like to call “sky hole” paintings: bits and pieces of geometry that seem grafted onto the infinite. These void-collages couple well with Fyfe’s sparse assemblages. Fyfe’s so-called paintings strike me as too bare bones to stand alone, but they do interesting things for the rest of the exhibition.

Rob de Oude’s Fanning a Recurring Past

Rob de Oude’s square canvases are pseudo-mechanical productions of hundreds and hundreds of overlaid lines. The resultant visual effect is something along the lines of what it looks like to take a picture of a computer screen with your phone. As Sucsy put it, de Oude works with “familiar optics” in a way that dissociates them from their usual context.

Sucsy’s work is a highlight of the show and a touchstone for any experience of the other pieces. During a gallery talk this past week, someone remarked that Sucsy’s paintings are “finished with a lowercase f” — meaning that what resolution they have is tenuous at best. Her small abstractions composed of murky diamonds are careworn, worked-over. They have an evasive quality, like afternoon light.

The art writer and artist John Berger once posed the question, “Where are we when we draw?” This applies here: Where are we when we paint? A good painting (and there are plenty of good paintings in this show) creates a kind of commons — a place where an artist can share subtle perceptions, extended across space and time. You could easily walk away from any of the works in “Between the Eyes” none the wiser. Or you could live with them.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1366

Smoked Meats

The cost of a crack rock: $10. The cost of a trailer full of lunch meat: $50,000. Viral exposure after some lunkhead truck driver trades a trailer full of lunch meat for crack: priceless.

Larry Ron Bowen became world famous last week after the Arkansas truck driver was sentenced to drug treatment for trading a trailer full of lunch meat for an undisclosed amount of crack cocaine. Bowen, who was apprehended eating a lunch meat sandwich in the parking lot of a Memphis service station, described the transaction as “inadvertent.” Naturally, this story was picked up by news media around the world, but nobody did a better job of telling it than WTFark’s Mark Rylander. “We’ve all been conditioned to believe “there’s a certain way drug deals go down,” the satirical online news reporter noted. “But what happens when the traditional ‘money for drugs’ system collapses?”

“Hey, you! Wanna buy some crack?

“I don’t have any money, but I do have $50,000 worth of lunch meat.”

Neverending Elvis

Good news for Elvis fans who’ve been wailing and gnashing teeth since it was announced last year that Elvis’ planes might soon be leaving Graceland. On Sunday, Graceland issued a press release noting that the planes would stay in Memphis, and Presley’s daughter Lisa Marie took the opportunity to say that the aircraft would be at Graceland “4 ever.” TCB.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Hope and Change in Nashville?

Over the course of time — and quite a lot recently — we have had much to say about the Tennessee General Assembly’s annual legislative value judgments (if that’s not too oxymoronic a term). More than once, we have

characterized them in cartoons as hillbillies (and that was if we were feeling kindly.)

That kind of rude jesting on our part had actually begun well before the state’s voting population began its pell-mell rush to the flag of Tea Party Republicanism. Since that happened, beginning with the election of 2008, more or less, and proceeding geometrically in that direction ever since, we have often been stupefied — uncertain as to how much further we could go with such ad hominem characterizations without being considered either too rabid or, worse, guilty of gross understatement.

We’re still a little buffaloed, frankly, as to how and why the Tennessee GOP was able to expand so far beyond its East Tennessee hinterland, where a relatively genteel and moderate version of Republicanism had flourished since the Civil War, as a result of the region’s hill-country pro-Unionism, and how and why the party’s philosophy had shifted so far rightward.

Our puzzlement was amplified by the fact that those original advances into Middle and West Tennessee (in the direction of what was then called a “two-party system”) were facilitated by Memphis’ own Lewis Donelson, a genteel presence whose protégés — office-holders like Howard Baker and Winfield Dunn and the early version of Lamar Alexander — were thoughtful additions to a thriving political debate that for some gave Tennessee the reputation of a bellwether state, one that could go back and forth between the two major parties in tune with shifts in the regional and national mood.

All that began careening to an end in 2008, more or less simultaneously with the election and then the administration of an African-American president. Or maybe that was just a coincidence. In any case, Tennessee is now, like the rest of the South, and in some ways more so, resolutely red, with only trace amounts of Democrats, mainly in Nashville and Memphis.

But we have come to praise the General Assembly, not to bury it. Granted, in the last session, there was yet another gratuitous firearms bill, which our well-intentioned but, er, gun-shy governor signed into law after pointing out concisely its more dangerous attributes. And there was the expected bill adding new anti-abortion restrictions to state law. Worst of all, there was the refusal to accept a badly needed Medicaid-expansion bill, largely because the word “Obamacare” was attached to it by opponents.

On the plus side, this Republican super-majority legislature refused for the third year in a row to devalue public education with a school-voucher bill, approved a halfway decent educational-standards measure, rejected a Bible-as-state-book bill that would have trashed the barrier between church and state, gave the concept of medical marijuana a fair hearing, and, arguably best of all, came within a single vote — that of an absent Democrat — of approving in-state tuition allowances for children of undocumented aliens, with a bill that is said to be sure of passage next year (see Viewpoint).

All things considered, this is progress. Maybe something like a normal political spectrum has reasserted itself within the confines of our one-party state. We are entitled to hope.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Swamp Rock, Shape Shifters, and Southern Blues

Rollin’ on the River …

The amazing career of John Fogerty

Do you remember the first time you heard a song that changed your perception of popular music? For me, it was “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Growing up, my parents frequently listened to oldies stations as we drove to school or soccer practice (I remember wondering as a child how my mom knew every song on the radio), and I can still recall the first time I heard Fogerty’s voice come over the airwaves. This was a very significant moment in my life for two reasons. Number one, the song is absolutely flawless. And number two, I had never heard an anti-war song on FM radio before. What was this guy who was singing about silver spoons and senators’ sons even talking about? Was this even legal? Hell, yes, it was legal, and I wanted more of it.

As a pre-teen, I dug deeper into Creedence Clearwater Revival, downloading their albums on file-sharing sites like Limewire and Napster and buying their greatest-hits compilations at Best Buy. Around the age of 15, I discovered vinyl and sold my collection of CDs to places like Cat‘s Music and Spin Street (Turtle’s Records + Tapes at the time), but my Creedence CDs stayed put.

Creedence Clearwater Revival only existed from 1967 to 1972 (even though the trio of John Fogerty, Stu Cook, and Doug Clifford had been playing together since 1959). Think about that for a minute. Think about churning out that many gold records and huge hits in such a small amount of time. Think about writing one good song that would become synonymous with the late 1960s, let alone a handful. In five short years, Fogerty went from being discharged from the Army to being a rock-and-roll star with one of the most recognizable voices in modern music.

All this success came at a price, and Creedence Clearwater Revival went through their fair share of turmoil, even at the peak of their popularity. Their headlining performance at Woodstock was not included in the original Woodstock film because Fogerty claimed the performance was subpar (Cook disagreed – one of many disagreements between Cook and Fogerty). Ultimately, it was the rough relations between Fogerty and the rest of Creedence Clearwater Revival that led to their break-up in 1972. Fogerty addressed his hard-nosed ways in an interview with The Guardian in 2013.

“Yes, I was very disciplined,” Fogerty said. “Were there any drugs involved? Yeah, I smoked a little pot. I think my bandmates smoked quite a bit more pot. I had rules: Never do that when we‘re recording; never do that when we‘re playing. To me it was a competition. You‘d have the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane talking like: ‘We don‘t want to be successful, maaaaan.‘ For one thing I wasn‘t sure I believed them and for another, why would I go to all this trouble and only sell one record to my mom? I wasn‘t embarrassed that I was ambitious. We wanted to be the best we could be.”

Fogerty kept his discipline as a solo artist and started cranking out more hits, first under the name the Blue Ridge Rangers and later as John Fogerty. When Creedence Clearwater Revival was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, Fogerty refused to perform next to Cook and Clifford and was instead joined by Bruce Springsteen and Robbie Patterson to perform three classic Creedence songs. In 2011, Fogerty told Rolling Stone that his anger toward his former bandmates had diminished and even went as far to say that a full-scale reunion was possible. Pretty impressive for an artist who wouldn’t even play the songs he wrote for Creedence Clearwater Revival live for 25 years after their 1972 split.

Sure, Neil Young is great, but he didn’t write “Someday Never Comes,” “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” “Long As I Can See the Light,” or even “Run Through the Jungle,” and for that reason I can comfortably say that Fogerty is one of the best, if not the best, American rock-and-roll singers of all time. Don’t miss his first performance in Memphis in 20 years when he plays Beale Street Music Fest on Saturday night, because someday never comes. – Chris Shaw

John Fogerty plays the Rockstar Energy Drink Stage Saturday, May 2nd, at 10:15 p.m.

St. Vincent …

The evolution of Annie Clark

I first fell in love with Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent, when I saw her do a searing cover of the Pop Group’s “She Is Beyond Good and Evil” on a summer music festival webcast. Before that, I had been aware of her mostly as the former guitarist for folk rocker Sufjan Stevens. But there she was, absolutely killing it in front of a huge crowd, not with some big party anthem, but with a fairly obscure English post-punk song. If anything, her interpretation was even weirder and harder than the original. Every time she stepped back from breathily reciting the lyrics, she strangled out squalls of No Wave noise from her guitar. Then she leapt into the crowd and proceeded to sing her song “Krokodil” while her tiny frame was being thrown around by a few thousand sweaty festivalgoers. Then, after barely escaping with her life, she did an encore.

Clark was born in Oklahoma and grew up in Dallas. She took to guitar at the age of 12 and showed immediate talent. Her first taste of a musician’s life was touring with her aunt and uncle, the jazz duo Tuck & Patti. Clark played in punk bands in high school and then attended the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. She dropped out due to frustration after three years and landed a job playing guitar with the psychedelic folk group Polyphonic Spree, before hooking up with Stevens. She struck out on her own in 2006 with Marry Me, an album of meticulously arranged songs that showed the influence of the baroque popsters for whom she had been serving as side-woman. By the time of 2011’s Strange Mercy — recorded over a month in self-imposed isolation in Seattle — she had found a voice and a sound that were entirely her own. It was Bowie-descended art rock with teeth, and like the Thin White Duke, she had an ear for taking the best quirks of any genre that caught her fancy and recombining them into something new, yet still tantalizingly familiar.

Annie Clark, aka St. Vincent

As more people turned up at her shows, the introverted musician gained the confidence to charge headlong into crowds, Iggy Pop­style. But it was her absolute mastery of the guitar that transfixed audiences. On such songs as “Cheerleader,” she proved she could switch from an Athens jangle to a noise meltdown and back, effortlessly, unafraid of either crunchy power chords or twisted jazz phrasings.

Then, in 2012, she completely switched gears, collaborating with the legendary David Byrne on Love This Giant. The album was noticeably short on guitar but heavy on horns, with many songs constructed more like marching band arrangements than traditional rock or pop songs.

Like Byrne and Bowie, her collaborations are not just pickup bands, they’re learning experiences. With a new record contract and a fresh set of ideas, 2014’s self­-titled St. Vincent was her best work yet. Always sonically restless, Clark delved heavily into guitar-­triggered synths, creating tones that managed to recall both pre-­King Crimson Adrian Belew and 1980s electro-pop. The ingenious arrangements and song structures were still intact, as on album standout “Huey Newton,” which starts out as an airy synth pop number before turning on a dime into a square wave, Black Sabbath cruncher. The single “Digital Witness” sounded like nothing else in pop music, but still captured the selfie­-obsessed zeitgeist. You never know what’s going to happen next in a St. Vincent song, but the weirdness is always in service of real emotion.

If St. Vincent marked a musical turning point, her stage show had also undergone its own radical change. Instead of the blood and guts, punk girl with an axe and amp, she and her band carefully choreographed everything that happened on stage. Like Bowie, the stretches of strict control had the effect of amplifying the moments when the mask falls and the audience catches a glimpse of the turmoil going on inside her head.

Clark has a reputation for being tight-lipped about her personal life, preferring to focus on the music, which she says reveals all that needs to be revealed. The reticent performer is always intriguing, which makes her first single of 2015, the frank memory “Teenage Talk,” a tantalizing sample of a more intimate musical direction. St. Vincent’s set on Sunday is not to be missed. — Chris McCoy

St. Vincent plays the FedEx Stage Sunday, May 3rd, at 7:30 p.m.

Ghost Town Boys …

A closer look at Ghost Town Blues Band

Ghost Town Blues Band is one of the few Memphis-based groups (along with Star and Micey and Prosevere) who have been asked to play Beale Street Music Fest (BSMF) for the past few years. Formed in 2009, Ghost Town Blues Band is led by Matt Isbell, a multi-instrumentalist and tour-tested musician who also fashions instruments out of everything from cigar boxes to broomsticks in his spare time. When asked at what moment Isbell knew he wanted to play Beale Street Music Fest, he recalled seeing one of his favorite guitarists play the festival as a teenager.

“I remember being around 14 years old and seeing Todd Snider playing at Beale Street Music Fest and just being blown away,” Isbell said. “I had talked to him a little bit before and seen him play around town, so it didn’t just seem like some huge rock star playing on stage; it actually seemed like a touchable dream.”

Ghost Town Blues Band

Snider would later invite Isbell to hang out at Ardent Studios and sit in on a recording session – his first opportunity to see the legendary music studio in all its glory. Fast forward to 2013, and Isbell’s dream became a reality.

“The first time we played Beale Street Music Fest was in 2013 at the Southern Comfort Blues Shack,” Isbell said.

“When we started, there were about 30 or 40 people watching us play, and by the end I’d say there were close to 400 people standing there — and not just because we were playing next to the port-a-potties. I guess that’s when I felt like we belonged at a festival like Memphis In May. After that performance, I felt like we deserved to be there.”

A mentor like Snider helps, but that’s not what has landed Ghost Town Blues Band a spot on three consecutive BSMF lineups. Since forming six years ago, Ghost Town Blues Band has grown ever more popular with their infectious blend of modern blues and Southern rock. The band has toured the States numerous times and been championed in publications like Living Blues Magazine.

Their list of awards is impressive: 2014 International Blues Challenge, Second Place; 2013 Memphis Blues Society International Blues Challenge Winner; 2012 Rosedale Blues Society Winner; and a 2010 Independent Label Music Award in Germany. Their latest album, Hard Road To Hoe, is more introspective than anything the group has created before, with songs referencing the death of Isbell’s mother and other hard life lessons. Released in March, the album has received rave reviews and debuted on the Living Blues Chart at number 18.

Isbell said the first opportunity to play Beale Street Music Fest came before the band had finished playing all their sets at the 2013 International Blues Challenge.

“Mike Glenn [former owner of the New Daisy] is the artist relations guy for Joe Whitmer from the Blues Foundation, and they pretty much run all the blues tents at Beale Street Music Fest,” Isbell said.

“I don’t know how he got my number, but Mike gave me a call before we had even finished playing the 2013 Blues Challenge and asked me, ‘How do you feel about playing Beale Street Music Fest?’ Since then, they’ve always taken real good care of us; they put us up in a trailer and make sure we always have cold beer.”

Isbell said playing multiple Beale Street Music Fests has brought the band notice in some of the strangest places. “We could be playing a show in Canada and someone will come up to us and say they saw us play Memphis In May,” Isbell said.

“That’s when it kind of hits you just how big the festival is. Being from Memphis, I think people kind of take for granted how special the event really is. People from all over the country come to Beale Street that weekend and we don’t try to use it as a booking tool or anything, but we definitely feel the result of playing the festival when we are away from home.”

As for what to expect from Ghost Town Blues Band at this year‘s Beale Street Music Fest, Isbell said they plan to show the crowd what Memphis is all about.

“We are extremely grateful for the opportunity to play a third year and to show people from out of town how Memphis does it,” Isbell said.

“We were grateful to play the Southern Comfort Blues Shack that first year, so moving up to the Blues Tent is really cool. I mean, we would play in the bathrooms of that place if it meant getting a chance to perform. I guess our biggest hope for this year‘s music fest would be for Robert Randolph to come and sit in with us.” — CS

Ghost Town Blues Band plays the Pearl River Resort Blues Tent on Saturday, May 2nd, at 2:10 p.m.

Q&A … with Memphis In May President and CEO Jim Holt

Jim Holt has been with Memphis In May since the beginning. He’s watched the festival go from a two-night event on Beale Street to a three-day and three-night experience at Tom Lee Park for 100,000 people. Deep in the throes of last-minute planning and preparations, Holt was kind enough to let me ask him some questions about the origins of the festival and what makes Memphis In May one of the most attended music festivals in the South. — CS

Flyer: Can you tell me what the transition was like when the festival moved from Beale Street to Tom Lee Park?

Jim Holt: We had been operating a smaller music festival with the Merchants Association, where we would put a stage in Handy Park and program the nightclubs with bands, but it wasn’t financially successful. There was talk in 1989 about doing away with the music festival, but we didn’t want to see it go away.

We came up with the idea of doing it at Tom Lee Park because the barbecue festival and the Sunset Symphony were successful there. I was working for a company called Mid-South Concerts at the time, and we ended up doing a sponsorship with the festival in the fall of 1989. I think the first festival [at Tom Lee Park] was held on April 27th and 28th of 1990. Mid-South Concerts sponsored the event, along with AutoZone and Budweiser.

What were those early Beale Street Music Festivals at Tom Lee Park like?

It started off with two outdoor stages and was two days long. There were way fewer artists because there were way fewer performance stages at that time, and Tom Lee Park was only six to eight acres. In the mid-1990s, the city of Memphis added 15-plus acres to the park, which allowed growth for both the barbecue festival and Beale Street Music Fest.

How many months of planning does it take to pull off a festival of this size?

We have a staff of 14 people who work year-round. There is a lot of cleanup that goes on in June and July and then August 1st is when we start our fiscal year and do our annual review. It’s a long process. We sent out our first talent offer for this year on August 26th, and that same week we issued seven offers to artists. We’ve got 67 artists this year, maybe 66, and we place offers on probably 124 different acts.

At what point did you have to embrace the typically poor weather as just a part of Beale Street Music Fest?

I like to look at the blue skies and sunshine in life, that’s my philosophy. We track the weather, and if you look at the last three years, there’s only been rain on one of the weekends. In 2013, it was just freakishly cold, but I don’t remember that much rain. Some weekends in the past we have had fabulous weather, and when that happens there’s really just no better place to be.

I read an article where someone was joking about Tom Lee Park becoming the fourth largest city in Tennessee during Memphis In May. How does the festival function like a miniature city during Beale Street Music Fest?

We lay down a plumbing grid and an electrical grid, and we build an infrastructure in Tom Lee Park that costs nearly $1 million. Over the course of the month we flip the park three times, so there is a lot of detail and hard work that goes into making everything function properly.

If you had to pick some of your favorite artists who have played Beale Street Music Fest in the past, who would they be?

I tend to bounce around from stage to stage and check on problems, but I thought that Stevie Ray Vaughan playing on April 28, 1990, was just incredible. The park was about a third of the size it is now and there were 17,000 or 18,000 people in attendance. He died four months later in that helicopter crash, so that was a very special performance.

James Brown’s first performance in 1993 was also unbelievable. Stevie Ray Vaughan stands out, but there’s been so many memorable performances over the years, from B.B. King to Etta James and Little Richard. ZZ Top were amazing when they played.

We also have an incredible lineup for this year’s festival. Lenny Kravitz hasn’t played in the market since 1996, Ed Sheeran couldn’t be any hotter, and everyone is excited for Hozier. It’s tough when you look at this year’s schedule. People are going to have to make decisions.

How do you go about picking the local bands? Any tips for local bands interested in playing?

We have a committee that is really knowledgeable about what is going on musically in the city, and we solicit input from them. We look at who is really at the cusp of breaking nationally and we try to pick the artists who are getting ready to pop. There are so many great artists in this town that you could book a whole weekend of local talent if you wanted to. We’ve had locals like the Memphis Dawls and Amy LaVere, and they both did a great job. We are always excited to have artists like Al Kapone and Three Six Mafia and Yo Gotti. We always try to get the best of the best in Memphis.

Categories
Music Music Features

Bob Dylan at the Orpheum

The legendary Bob Dylan comes to the Orpheum this Thursday night. Not one to be outdone by the likes of Lenny Kravitz (playing Music Fest the next day), Marilyn Manson (playing Minglewood the same night), or Dick Dale (playing the Hi-Tone on the same night), Dylan decided to join the party and make this one of the most memorable music weekends in recent history. You’ve got some decisions to make when it comes to planning your Thursday night, but seeing Dylan at a place like the Orpheum would never be a mistake.

Although Dylan has been written about roughly seven trillion different times, it’s important to remember that this is someone who shaped the face of American pop culture, folk rock, country music, and rock-and-roll. Some of his most legendary songs have taken on new forms when tackled by the likes of the 13th Floor Elevators or the Chocolate Watch Band, but the fact that you still know a Dylan song when you hear one is a testament to the strength of the man’s songwriting capability.

Dylan isn’t a stranger to Tennessee, and his album Nashville Skyline is almost required listening material when making that 200-mile drive east on I-40. Released in 1969 with Bob Johnston at the helm, Nashville Skyline saw Dylan fully submerged into country music, and the opening track that features Johnny Cash is almost like a competition for best vocal performance. Nashville Skyline is one of Dylan’s most “happy” albums, with no tales of political injustice.

With dozens of albums under his belt, it’s impossible to predict what Dylan and his band will play this Thursday, but no matter which era of his music he draws songs from, it’s sure to be an unforgettable performance. Tickets are still available.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Action!

CREDIT: Sandra McDougall-Mitchell

Actor Peter Coyote calls Corey Mesler’s Memphis Movie (Soft Skull Press) “spot-on” in its re-creation of what it takes to make a movie. But what Coyote maybe doesn’t know is that Mesler — co-owner, with wife Cheryl, of Burke’s Book Store — went into this, his eighth novel, with only a vague idea of what he was doing.

“I read a few books for background,” Mesler told the Flyer. “But, honestly, I had no idea whether my depiction of a film set, film folks, or the entire film milieu was at all accurate, until Peter Coyote and [actor and former Memphian] Chris Ellis both told me I nailed it.”

Courtney Love, you might say, started it years ago. According to Mesler: “She came into the bookstore with an entourage. I thought, This is strange. This is not usually how a day in Memphis progresses.

Sandra McDougall-Mitchell

Corey Mesler

“I started Memphis Movie like I start all my novels: with an amorphous idea of what I’m doing. When the character of Eric Warberg began taking shape is when I thought I might be onto something good.”

Warberg, a onetime Hollywood success story but with a few recent flops under his belt, is Memphis Movie‘s central character, and he’s returned to his hometown, Memphis, to get his directing career back on track. How? By making a movie. About what? Even Warberg isn’t so sure. But no problem. The action in Memphis Movie is more off the set than on, and so is most of his cast and crew — on the make and bedding every which way.

Chaotic, crazed? That describes the action in Memphis Movie, and Mesler said so. But he also recalled his role as an extra when the Metropolitan Opera, on tour, would come to town: “I hate opera, but backstage it was exhilarating. I was struck by how chaotic and crazed and downright ornery it was behind the curtain, and then, suddenly, when the action moved out onto the stage, it was magic aborning. There was an artistic whoosh. Beauty from chaos. Hey, there’s my theme in Memphis Movie!”

Categories
Film/TV TV Features

Web Streaming Brings Music Festivals to Your Home Screen

This weekend, tens of thousands of music fans will strap on their mud boots and floppy hats and head down to Tom Lee Park for the Beale Street Music Festival. There’s a lot to love about the modern music festival: The opportunity to get exposed to new sounds, the possibility of seeing a superstar like Paul McCartney, and the short-term camaraderie you develop with a hundred thousand like-minded individuals.

But festivals are expensive, and you’d like to find a place to pee in peace. As Apple TVs and Rokus have brought streaming video to your living room flatscreen the past few years, music festival webcasting has come of age. And while the Music Fest isn’t webcasting as of yet, it’s now possible to watch almost all of the lineup of at least 100 music festivals live on the web. YouTube has some of the biggest festivals, such as the just-completed Coachella, the electronic music festivals Tomorrowland and Ultra, and Austin City Limits. For 2015, Bonnaroo left YouTube to sign on with the Red Bull TV app, which has also landed Lollapalooza. Some festivals, such as Pitchfork, go exclusively through their website, which can cause a hassle in getting it from your computer to your TV. The iTunes Festival, on the other hand, was created with streaming in mind, and is integrated into the Apple music player.

Categories
News The Fly-By

Attorney/Joker: Part Sign at TheatreWorks

There are few sounds that have rattled my bones like the sound of metal dog tags falling to the ground and piling up. And there are few lines that have gutted me like the frequently repeated refrain, “I had to put the flag in the washing machine to get all the dirt out of it.” These images are taken from Our Own Voice Theatre Troupe’s production of Goodtime Speech, a play by Memphis poet Randy Wayne Youngblood, who passed away last year at the age of 56.

Youngblood once toured as a roadie with the rock band Yes. He was a cofounder of Our Own Voice (OOV). He was also diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1984 but never let his obstacles prevent him from making art. This week, Youngblood’s fellow company members celebrate their friend’s life and work by staging his last play, Attorney/Joker: Part Sign.

“It’s a challenge to reduce Randy’s writing to just a statement,” says frequent OOV contributor Alex Skitolsky, who has been working on the script on and off for the past 12 years. “Randy gave me a notebook containing all the text when I was directing Goodtime Speech,” Skitolsky says.

OOV artistic director and choreographer Kimberly Barksdale Baker describes Attorney/Joker as a reunion. “It is lovely to see Alex taking the helm,” she says, noting that several past OOV players are coming back to Memphis for the show.

“Randy references a lot of stuff,” Skitolsky says, attempting to explain the experimental work. “I caught myself Googling pretty much the entire play because he references so much. There are song lyrics, pieces of a novella, the old [vampire] soap opera Dark Shadows, and lots of ’70s and ’80s rock. There is one scene that is structured entirely around the lyrics of ‘Hotel California.'”

Categories
News The Fly-By

Grassroots Projects Get Funding Through ioby.org

CREDIT: Tolitsayala | Dreamstime.com

Bats may have a scary reputation as blind bloodsuckers, but a few residents in the East Buntyn community actually want the winged mammals in their neighborhood. And after crowd-sourcing on ioby.org, they’ve raised the funds to build 10 bat houses (and one tower for Chimney Swift birds) in the East Memphis neighborhood.

Tolitsayala | Dreamstime.com

Residents of the East Buntyn neighborhood are building bat houses.

They’re hoping the $2,000 project will bring mosquito-eating, plant-pollinating bats and birds back to their neighborhood after years of roost disturbances and habitat loss have pushed them out of the area. The “Bring Back Bats and Birds to Buntyn” is just one of 67 projects in 17 zip codes being funded after a spring match funding campaign on ioby.org.

Ioby stands for “in our backyards,” and the site is used to crowd-source civic projects across the country. The website has had a Memphis presence for a couple years, but between March 30th and April 15th, ioby.org offered up $50,000 in match funds for Memphis projects that fund-raised during that period. Livable Memphis got involved, too.

“Livable Memphis was so excited by all the projects that we decided to put in additional dollars, and we still have some match funds that didn’t get spent out [during the matching period], so we’ll get to spend those on projects throughout the year,” said Ellen Roberds, creative placemaker at Livable Memphis.

Another of the funded projects will place 24 seats at Memphis Area Transit Authority (MATA) bus stops around the city. They’re focusing specifically on stops that don’t have bus shelters. To qualify for a bus shelter, a stop must have more than 50 riders per day. But some smaller stops still serve a large number of people but lack seating.

“The plan is to look at stops where fewer than 50 people board every day but still have enough people who board that it would be useful for people to have seats,” said Emily Trenholm, executive director of the Community Development Council of Greater Memphis. Trenholm is the project coordinator for the bus stop seat project.

Project Backboard

Project Backboard makeover at Charjean Park

Some other projects funded during the matching period include Project Backboard, which will use $6,125 to restripe and paint goal posts at 15 inner-city basketball courts, $3,125 for enhancements at the DIY Altown Skate Park at Lamar and Rozelle, and $6,000 to install new trail markers through Overton Park’s Old Forest.

Another group raised $1,195 to create a rock garden and “labyrinth green space” under the new “I Love Soulsville” mural at Mississippi and McLemore. And $5,761 was raised to throw a community party called Roundhouse Revival at the Mid-South Coliseum on May 23rd. A $410 project will provide helmets for young bicyclists.

“There’s a group that wants to put in herb gardens in vacant lots and eventually use the herbs to make tea,” Roberds said. “Vegetable gardens are pretty labor-intensive, but herbs are perennial and don’t require as much work.”

Although the matching process is over, some projects, such as the basketball striping project, are still working to raise some additional funds. And ioby.org accepts new Memphis projects all the time.

“We encourage people to start small,” Roberds said. “The best projects are the ones that are visible to the public and can be built upon.”

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Memphis Mayor’s Race is On

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Janis Fullilove may be feeling lonely, but she’s not going to complain. As of the end of Monday, the Super District 8, Position 2 councilwoman was the only incumbent running for reelection in this year’s city election who did not have a declared opponent. All other city races are contested at this point (which is to say that multiple petitions have been drawn for each of them, actual filing having occurred so far in only a minority of cases). 

The other council seats would seem to be assured of contests, with District 5 and Super District 9, Position 2 — the seats vacated, respectively, by mayoral candidate Jim Strickland and Shea Flinn — attracting the most action. There are eight entries so far for District 5, most of them with enough backing to appear serious, and something of the same situation exists for the Super District 9 vacancy, where six petitions have been drawn up to this point.

By contrast, Position 3 in Super District 8, which, as was recently announced, will be vacated by council Chairman Myron Lowery, has so far seen only three petitions drawn. One of those was by the incumbent’s son Mickell Lowery, and the legacy name may be enough to dissuade most comers. District 4 incumbent Wanda Halbert‘s announcement of non-candidacy (she’s a candidate instead for City Court clerk) is too recent to have occasioned a rush of would-be candidates. Four petitions have so far been drawn for that seat.

Another mayoral candidate, Harold Collins, will be vacating his District 3 seat, and that one has generated a fair amount of action, with five petitions drawn so far.

The race for mayor has seen 13 petitions drawn; and it is a safe bet that more are coming. Meanwhile, the first mayoral debate — or forum, as emcee Kyle Veazey of the sponsoring Commercial Appeal, preferred to call it — of the 2015 city election season took place before a good crowd at the old Tennessee Brewery Monday night, and, while there were no winners as such among the five hopefuls invited, it was possible to make out some distinctions. 

To start with, Justin Ford, the youthful county commission chairman, demonstrated likeability but nothing much to anchor it except a recap of his résumé and prerogatives (“I make appointments.”), a recommended slogan (“Listen, Assist, and Invest.”), and enough platitudes and expressions of good will to start a smarm farm.

This is not to doubt Ford’s capability, merely to suggest that he was short on specifics, no doubt on purpose, and did nothing to counter a widespread impression that he is in the race not so much with expectations of winning it as to extend his name recognition for some future electoral purpose.

By contrast, Memphis Police Association President Mike Williams, generally considered a long shot, was all agenda. Pledged to represent the interests of city employees and ordinary citizens, Williams talked up small business and deplored the strategy of enticing big industries here by means of PILOT (payment-in-lieu-of- taxes) arrangements. Indeed, he went so far as to suggest that Electrolux, a relatively recent acquisition on the city landscape, is already looking to go “out the door” because “they didn’t get the profits they thought.”

Williams suggested that Memphis’ problem was not limited revenue but over-spending. He said the city should stick to basics and hire more fire and police. He also weighed in on behalf of those citizens who want to save the Mid-South Coliseum. More than the other candidates, he had audible boosting from a claque of supporters on hand.

Councilman Collins, whose task is to expand on his sprawling Whitehaven base and to convince voters that he and no one else is the legitimate alternative to incumbent Mayor A C Wharton, sounded notes akin to those of Williams, advocating a focus on education to create the basis for “professional” jobs at a “living wage” and against the “$9- or $10-an-hour jobs” available at “Bass Pro and Mitsubishi.”

Collins also joined with Williams in taking a dim view of bike lanes, an issue that separated the five hopefuls into two camps. Collins and Williams made the point that Memphis has an automobile culture and that bike lanes in what Collins called “major neighborhoods” (meaning Frayser, Raleigh, and Whitehaven) were impediments to necessary transportation.

Ford disagreed, pointing out that the bike lanes were paid for by federal “pass-through” money, a point made also by Councilman Strickland, who took Mayor Wharton to task for having “zero bike lanes in the budget” until prodded by the council, after which the mayor allegedly “relented.” Wharton, who had touted the bike lanes early in his remarks as part of his vision of planning for the “city on the move” and the citizens of the future rather than “through the eyes of today,” seemed irate at Strickland’s allegation and insisted that his “plans underway” for the bike lanes were retarded by one city engineer but had been re-established, at the mayor’s insistence, by a “new engineer.”

That bit of sniping seemed more in line with the “debate” that Veazey suggested the CA would be sponsoring down the line than with the informational forum he had in mind for Monday evening. But in fact, everybody but Ford, who was careful to praise his fellow participants, did a little mud-balling. 

The most obvious confrontation was between Strickland, the former two-time budget chairman and self-proclaimed “fiscal conservative” who has been aiming at the mayoralty for years now, and the increasingly beleaguered Wharton, still too spry to be a sitting duck but, clearly, Target Number One for the others in this year’s mayoral race.

Although circumstances could turn out to belie the premise, most observers (and virtually the entire media) see the rest of the mayoral field as being made up of supporting players, while the real drama is the one-on-one between Strickland and Wharton, both well-endowed financially, essentially by donations from the same business interests, and waging an intense battle for the hearts and minds of the Poplar Corridor.

Strickland’s tough-love pitch is to arrest what he sees as the city’s dangerously dwindling population base by practicing fiscal efficiency and focusing on “basic services” and eliminating frills (the city’s “Music Commission” was one he named) and a superfluity of “deputy directors and P.R. people,” while simultaneously attacking blight and crime.

Wharton counters this image of “gloom and doom” with a concept of “revitalizing the entire city in growth mode” and concentrating on “quality of life” issues. This week’s grand opening of the Bass Pro Shop monolith in the Pyramid did not go unspoken for as an exhibit of the mayor’s vision (although the project, brainchild of city housing and community development director Robert Lipscomb, was actually hatched during the mayoralty of Wharton’s predecessor Willie Herenton). 

What gives the notion of a Wharton-Strickland race some validity is the fact that the councilman’s presumed lower profile in African-American communities is balanced by potential inroads there, at Wharton’s expense, by “neighborhood” advocates like Collins and Williams.

There are other candidates, to be sure, including many who were not included in Monday night’s event (several were seated or standing in the audience, however, and Collins gallantly gave shout-outs to several of them), but the distribution of voices Monday night gave some preliminary sense of how this election will play out. If firebrand pastor/former school board member Kenneth Whalum ends up in the race instead of Williams (as per their agreement that one of them, and one only, will run for mayor), the kaleidoscope could shift and radically so.