Month: January 2016

Categories
Music Music Blog

Weekend Roundup 49: Divine Interface, Impala, Faux Killas

CREDIT: Josh Miller

Josh Miller

RPLD GHSTS plays the Hi-Tone on Friday, January 8th.

Happy Friday and welcome to the 49th edition of my Weekend Roundup. By now you should know the drill: I pick the shows, you attend them, and everyone wins. Sounds easy right? Let’s get it on. 

Friday, January 8th.
Reba Russell Trio, 6:30 p.m. at Lafayette’s Music Room. 

Cities Aviv, Fit Of Body, Divine Interface, RPLD GHOSTS, Duma, 9 p.m. at The Hi-Tone Cafe, $10.

Weekend Roundup 49: Divine Interface, Impala, Faux Killas

Clay Otis and Luke White, 9:30 p.m. at Bar DKDC, $5.

Weekend Roundup 49: Divine Interface, Impala, Faux Killas (2)

Shane Smith & The Saints, 10 p.m. at Lafayette’s Music Room. 

Weekend Roundup 49: Divine Interface, Impala, Faux Killas (3)

Saturday, January 9th.
You’re Not Alone Project featuring What We Do In Secret, Eleutheria, They Will Fall, Forsake Your Nets, Our Dearly Departed, and Susceros 7 p.m. at the Hi-Tone, $10.

Star & Micey, The Black Cadillacs 7 p.m. at Minglewood Hall, $15-$17.

Weekend Roundup 49: Divine Interface, Impala, Faux Killas (4)

XLM, 7 p.m. at the 1884 Lounge, $10.

Faux Killas, 9 p.m. at Murphy’s, $5. 

Devil Train, 10 p.m. at Lafayette’s Music Room. 

Impala, 10:30 p.m. at Bar DKDC, $5.

Sunday, January 10th.
Strong Martian, Tamarron, Dryspell, Zuster, 9 p.m. at the Hi-Tone, $5.

Weekend Roundup 49: Divine Interface, Impala, Faux Killas (5)

Occasional Caucasians 9 p.m. at The Buccaneer, $5. 

Categories
News News Blog

Urban Child Gets New Board Chair, New Gifting Strategy

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burkes

Justin Fox Burkes

The Urban Child Institue Headquarters on Jefferson.

The Urban Child Institute [TUCI] will give away $8 million this year to organizations supporting children’s needs and has a new board chairman, Jill Crocker, a Bank of America executive.
 
All of this was decided during a regularly scheduled meeting of the TUCI board Thursday, according to information sent by Crocker Thursday evening.

TUCI board members approved a 5 percent gifting strategy for 2016. That means $8 million will go this year to “community organizations working to support children’s needs.”

Crocker said more details on the strategy (such as which organizations will get the money) will be revealed later.

The new gifting strategy seems to be a major change for TUCI. The nonprofit has long been criticized in the community for sitting on a large investment fund but giving little of it to Memphis charities that actually help children ages 0-3 years, the group of children TUCI focuses its research work. 

The board also approved Crocker as its chairwoman. She replaces Dr. Hershel “Pat” Wall who announced his resignation from the board in late December.

“I am honored to be elected as board chair of The Urban Child Institute,” Crocker said in a statement. “Our organization’s support is critical to community organizations working to help improve the health and well-being of children. Our board is committed to upholding that mission.”

The board also approved the re-election of Jim Witherington, managing partner at SSM Partners, one of the largest private equity firms in the Southeast. Also, the board re-elected Dr. Cyril Chang, a healthcare economics professor at the University of Memphis. The board elected Jon McCullers, chair of the department of pediatrics at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.

The nonprofit organization has also been long criticized for paying Eugene Cashman, its former CEO, a top of the line salary. TUCI saw some major leadership changes the year. Cashman announced his plans to retire from TUCI in early December 2015.

Categories
News News Blog

Parents of Truant Students Given Second Chance

CREDIT: Thomas Favre-Bulle

Thomas Favre-Bulle

Parents who have pending court summonses for their child’s chronic truancy will be given a chance to resolve those issues next Monday without the threat of jail time.

The Shelby County Sheriff’s Department Fugitive Squad has summonses pending for parents of 117 Shelby County Schools students who have missed five or more school days without an excuse. On Monday, January 11th, those summonses will be addressed during Operation Safe Surrender at Mt. Moriah Baptist Church between 4 and 7 p.m. At that event, parents will be placed on a General Sessions court docket, and a remedy plan will determined for each case.

“No one is going to jail,” said Megan Pietrowski, program coordinator of the Shelby County District Attorney’s Mentoring Based Truancy Reduction Program. “This will be a safe environment.”

Parents of students who have five or more days of unexcused absences can be charged with a misdemeanor and sentenced to up to 11 months and 29 days in jail or fines of up to $2,500.

Through the D.A’s office’s truancy reduction program, truant students are paired with mentors, who provide encouragement and support for at least one year. The program has assisted more than 4,000 students since it began in the 2006-2007 school year.

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Resolved: No Resolutions

CREDIT: Sebastian Czapnik | Dreamstime.com

I love this time of year. I always think THIS is the year I’m going to make those curtains/win the lottery/paint the shutters/wear pants every day. It never is, but somehow this never bothers me that it’s not. I keep reading these articles about how Pinterest makes us horrible slatterns who never feel adequate because we haven’t actually made our own laundry detergent or have a perfectly labeled basket for every pair of socks. Well, I have made my own laundry detergent, and it sucked the color out of my clothes. I think if you’re the kind of person who must decant all dried spices into handmade Egyptian mud canisters decorated by service dogs, you’re pretty much going to feel inadequate without Pinterest and Martha Stewart.

Sebastian Czapnik | Dreamstime.com

My home style can best be described as “there appears to have been a struggle.” I love our home, despite the fact I still haven’t committed to rugs that didn’t come from Big Lots, and, for some reason, each room has approximately three desks. What I need is to find a pin that tells me how to turn desks into comfy chairs. Seriously, let me know if that exists.

We have recently acquired a dog solely for licking plates before they go into the dishwasher. We have a new washer that is the worst. Super Poodle is in charge of prewash because the new dishwasher doesn’t have enough water pressure to rinse broth out of a bowl. Plus it runs for like four hours. What is that? Four hours to run a wash, and I still have Cheetos dust on everything.

We have a corner of our den dedicated to junk to be burned in the fire pit. Every now and then I think we should have a better system than a pile, but then I get distracted by the new issue of Living and consider making my own leather purse with gold foil accents. Then I laugh hysterically at myself and turn clothesline into a “gallery wall” for my photos because I’m “too lazy” to go get frames. It’s a style I like to call Rustic Sloth.

If our homes are a reflection of ourselves, you can see from mine why my therapist sends me thank-you notes. Sometimes I want antique Swedish furniture and whitewashed walls. Other days, Danish modern makes sense. Early American is always nice, but I do love a good Chippendale sofa. The period I gravitate to most is Found in My In-Laws’ Basement. This look starts as soon as you walk in the front door and see where I have painted swatches of four different shades of coral I thought I wanted for the living room three years ago before I decided maybe blue would be better. I guess I could build a frame around the swatches and call it modern art.

This time of year I also always think I’m going to cook really interesting meals on Sundays and use the leftovers different ways the rest of the week. I love reading how these thrifty homesteading mommy bloggers in Utah buy one chicken and use it for a month. The reason I love it so much is that I get so tired from reading about all the prep, planning, and couponing that goes into the process, I get a really good nap in afterwards. Look, I love to cook for the most part, and I’m pretty good at it. But seriously? I don’t really need to take the fat from my pot roast and turn it into candles.

Speaking of reuse, I saw — no kidding — how to make a greenhouse out of plastic water bottles. The one thing I am not inspired to do this time of year is to make mirror frames from toilet paper rolls. I have seen how to make animals from dryer lint, turn old Converse high-tops into fingerless gloves, create a chandelier from plastic spoons, and turn old toothbrushes into bracelets.

No, I don’t ever get depressed because my house doesn’t belong in House Beautiful. It doesn’t bother me that I can’t make a single hamburger patty last 12 meals. I’m not even worried my pantry doesn’t hold an emergency stash of Greek brined anchovy eyeballs, magnolia-infused peppermint onion bitters, or Parmesan-crusted chocolate blue cheese wafers for spur-of-the-moment cocktail parties. I’m not even depressed because I never have spur-of-the-moment cocktail parties. Reading about insane Type A’s who drain their own salt-water backyard pond to source their own salt and recycle hair dryers into robot car ice melters makes me feel downright grounded and, dare I say, sane.

Now, you must excuse me. I’ve just found a recipe to turn cauliflower into beef Wellington and need to get it cooked and into labeled, single-serving containers in the freezer I made from old laundry baskets and dust bunnies.

Susan Wilson also writes for yeahandanotherthing.com and likethedew.com.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Hateful Eight

In 1977, an ad touted the Heroes album with: “There’s Old Wave, there’s New Wave, and there’s David Bowie”. Like the Thin White Duke, Quentin Tarantino has become a genre unto himself. There are thrillers, there are mysteries, and there are Tarantino movies.

The buzz going into The Hateful Eight was characteristically bizarre: a Western shot on 70MM film in the age of digital. For the cinephile, anything that starts with the Cinerama logo raises expectations of wide-open vistas, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey. After the opening overture, The Hateful Eight seems like it’s going to deliver on that promise with a series of shots of a stagecoach plowing through Montana’s snowy vastness. But then the stage is stopped by a lone black figure: Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a former Union calvary major-turned-bounty hunter, sitting atop a pile of dead bodies. The horseless man asks the coach’s charter John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell) for a ride so he can escape the coming blizzard. Ruth is reluctant to help, because he is transporting his own bounty to Red Rocks, a woman named Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and she’s extremely valuable. But Warren is very convincing, and since they once had dinner together in Chattanooga long ago, Ruth agrees. Then, the action shifts to a long conversation inside the stagecoach, and we’ve seen the last of the beautiful western landscapes. After picking up another hitchhiker, racist sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), the stage arrives at Minnie’s Haberdashery, a frontier tavern where the inhabitants hope to hunker down to avoid the snow. Needless to say, things go spectacularly wrong.

Kurt Russell and Samuel L. Jackson

From there, The Hateful Eight resembles Reservoir Dogs more than How the West Was Won. The motley crew trapped in the blizzard slowly circle each other spouting stupendously flowery dialogue as they look for an opening for murder. If there’s one thing QT is good at, it’s writing a menacing speech leading up to mayhem, and his language machine is cranking double time. Jackson and Russell provide ideal vessels for the profane wordsmith, but from Tim Roth to Bruce Dern to Michael Madsen, there really are no weak links here. Lies are told, identities shift, Pynchonesque names are checked, and poison surreptitiously administered. Tarantino uses the fantastically expensive and obsolete camera technology not to open up spaces, but to present the whole of the interior of Minnie’s as a single stage set where he can move his crack actors around like a theater director.

SLJ. ’Nuff said.

There are a hundred reasons why a three-hour widescreen epic that devolves into an Agatha Christie play shouldn’t work, and yet, at least after the first viewing, The Hateful Eight comes off as more satisfying than Inglourious Basterds or Django Unchained. It’s the critic’s job to explain this stuff, but Tarantino creates alchemy that defies easy description. Sometimes things just work.

Categories
Style Sessions We Recommend

At Home Style with Scot Robinson of Pavo Salon

As stylist and co-owner of Pavo Salon, Scot Robinson has built a reputation for creating beautiful hair in an environment that gives attention to design and hospitality. It’s not surprising his own home does just the same.

In the comfort of his home, we introduce a more personal side of Scot before introducing his professional side. Here, we’ll see just how easily his sense of style carries through many aspects of his life.

“Style is a great way of saying who you are without speaking. I would like to say that mine says classic, bold, confident, comfortable, and relaxed. Whether it is selecting art, a piece of furniture or choosing something to wear, these characteristics always seem to show,” he says.

[jump]

With his dogs Toby and Marlie, we tour his mid-century modern home, which has already hosted a small wedding and previous photo shoots. Livability was evidently the top priority in the design of the home, inside and out. A well-manicured courtyard extends along the living spaces, both visually connected with a nice span of glass.

“I love house projects! I very much enjoy my yard. I’m always wanting to change something,” Scot professes.

Scot took on much of the interior design himself, though calling on Chris Crawford of CKC Design to completely renovate the master bath. Custom built in 1957, the home went through a thoughtful restoration and reflects both a modern and classic style.

When it comes to time away from home, Scot couldn’t pin point a so-called typical work day, especially since he and co-owner Shawn McGhee recently opened their second salon location in Midtown.

“There is nothing typical about any of my work days. It can be as simple as just standing behind the chair and getting to create beautiful hair or I can be in the office with my team working on what’s next. One thing you can count on is that I’m always moving,” Scot explains.

Another thing Scot is certain about is his choice to style hair, an interest that began very early on.


“As far back as I can remember, I was always fascinated by hair. I’m not sure if I always knew it would be my career but I knew it was something that came very natural to me. I chose not to go off to college after high school. I was 17 and not quite ready. I played for about a year, and my parents weren’t very happy with my choices. They were cutting me off and telling me I had to enroll in school immediately. Forced to make a decision, I knew that if I was going to spend my life working, I was going to do something fun and exciting. Hair was an art form for me and it certainly has been entertaining and exciting. 

The great thing about choosing this industry is you can create exactly what you want. I would have to say that it has been very rewarding in a lot of different ways. I’ve never second guessed my decision,” he explains.

Scot is a Memphis native who spent some time in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, right out of high school. His eventual return to Memphis was a welcomed return. He took ownership of his own salon in 1994, and in 2000, Pavo Salon was born when fellow stylist Shawn McGhee became co-owner.

“Memphis has been very good to me!” Scot exclaims. 

“Memphis can certainly get a bad rap sometimes, but the most amazing thing about Memphis is that it is genuine. We have such strong communities and that is very important to me. We have so many talented and successful people that have come out of Memphis and layers of all types of art. Why wouldn’t I want to be a part of that?! I can only hope that I am leaving some type of mark!”

///

Stay tuned for the second part of this feature where we will visit Scot in the new location of Pavo in Midtown to see his work and the newly renovated space.

Outfit Details
Diesel jeans, which can be found locally at Baer’s Den. Shirt, H&M. Boots, Cole Haan

Home Details
Art by Ken Lecco and David Mah. Venice Tile: source for all tile. Ray Baudoin Interior Design: furniture and wallpaper. Mitchell Gold: lighting as well as some furniture.

Categories
Beyond the Arc Sports

Spears: Grizzlies to cut Ryan Hollins, sign Elliot Williams

CREDIT: Larry Kuzniewski

Larry Kuzniewski

I don’t have a picture of Ryan Hollins in a Griz jersey so here’s Dave Joerger.

According to Marc J. Spears of Yahoo Sports, the Grizzlies are going to cut newly-signed Joerger favorite reserve center Ryan Hollins in order to make room to sign Elliot Williams of the Santa Cruz Warriors to a 10-day contract.

The tweets below:

The Grizzlies waived Russ Smith in order to sign Hollins, after the Brandan Wright injury (among other things) had the Grizzlies thin in the frontcourt. Pretty much immediately, Mike Conley got injured, only now the Grizzlies only had Conley and Mario Chalmers on the roster to run point.

I’m not a believer that Hollins is anything but a replacement-level NBA player at best, so I’m not really upset if this report turns out to be true. And the Grizzlies (or Dave Joerger anyway) had clearly given up on Russ Smith’s prospects as an NBA point guard.

As long as the Grizzlies don’t do anything that jeopardizes their future flexibility (see today’s rant about the state of the team) I don’t have a problem with this. But if things continue to get worse with the injury situation, the Griz will have to start doing something more drastic than fiddling with the end of the bench to clear space. Maybe some two-for-one trades for expiring contracts?

Oh yes, about those.

Sam Amick reported in a video that the Timberwolves have been trying to pull off a Courtney Lee/Kevin Martin swap. Both players are underperforming their season averages, but Martin has another year on his deal, so… if the Grizzlies take back Kevin Martin’s contract, I think it’s a mistake, unless they can (1) stretch provision Martin this summer and (2) get Tyus Jones, who they liked in the draft, in the deal. I doubt that happens, so hopefully they don’t do the deal and waste time/money/my emotional injury on another over-the-hill wing player instead of bringing in youth and athleticism.

At any rate, don’t be surprised if this Hollins/Williams business happens sooner rather than later.

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Bogie’s Pimento Slam

If you haven’t tried one of Bogie’s deluxe grilled cheeses, you’re missing out big time. There’s so many to choose from, but the Pimento Slam was screaming my name.

The Pimento Slam is homemade pimento cheese on wheat berry bread ($5.29). The bread tasted like French toast. It was lightly toasted, buttery, crunchy and sweet… exactly how bread on a grilled cheese should be. The pimento cheese is really interesting melted. It’s hot, creamy, cheesy and a bit spicy. It wasn’t gooey like I thought it would be. I can also tell that the pimento cheese is homemade. It’s excellent. I loved that the sandwich didn’t fall apart, making it easy to eat.

This sandwich is the perfect kind of comfort food. Let’s just say it was gone quickly.

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

“The Brothers Size” opens at the Hattiloo Theatre

“The Brothers Size”—  the standalone centerpiece of Tarell Alvin McCraney‘s Brother/Sister trilogy — is easily summarized, but hard to encapsulate. McCraney takes a cue from William Faulkner, building a fictional, but intensely representative Louisiana town similar to the Mississippi author’s Yoknapatawpha, Co. The plot revolves around Oshoosi, a young ex-convict torn between two competing visions of freedom. Oshoosi’s brother is committed to his his car shop and the idea that success is the result of sacrifice and hard work. His former cellmate offers alternatives that grow less tempting in light of a sticky, biased justice system.

McCraney takes a formal approach to his intensely theatrical storytelling. Actors speak their stage directions. His narratives aspire to myth and are often driven by percussion, calling to mind 20th-Century reformers like Peter Brook and Sam Shepard‘s work with Joseph Chaikin. 

I don’t have any clips from the Hattiloo’s production of The Brother’s Size, which opens this week and runs through Feb 7. There are, however, a few available scenes from the theater’s recent production of McCraney’s In the Red and Brown Water.

‘The Brothers Size’ opens at the Hattiloo Theatre

‘The Brothers Size’ opens at the Hattiloo Theatre (2)

Also, here’s a fantastic compilation video from Tea Alagić’s production of The Brothers Size. 

The Brother Size – excerpt from M. Milanovic on Vimeo.

‘The Brothers Size’ opens at the Hattiloo Theatre (3)

Categories
Intermission Impossible Theater

Star Trek in Concert?

Yes, Star Trek in concert. And I’m not talking about Spock Rock either.

On January 29 Star Trek: The Ultimate Voyage is coming to the Orpheum Theater. Fans can see their favorite characters from the past 50-years of film and TV shows projected on the big screen while a live orchestra plays selections from the iconic soundtrack.

Star Trek in Concert?