Month: February 2017

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: Six.oh.xis

It’s Music Video Monday, and you need to chill out.

Six.oh.xis is the chillwave project from Memphian Christopher Osborne, who describes his approach as “lofi”, using only a “clunky 2GB RAM 250GB Dell wielding Windows XP” to create dreamy musical pastiches. The first song from his new album Antichronicles, “Hiding Place”, samples Inception, and comes with a video that is similarly assembled from cut up anime images. If you’re having a stressful Monday, take three minutes of this.

Music Video Monday: Six.oh.xis

If you would like to see your music video on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com

Categories
News News Blog

Downward Cat: Yoga With Kitties

“Lift your hips and press back into downward dog — I mean, downward cat,” instructs yoga teacher Adriene Holland, as the class of 15 or so students giggle and transition out of a plank pose to thrust their butts into the air.

Holland, who teaches regular yoga and hooping classes at Co-Motion Studio, worked as many cat puns and feline phrases into her two 30-minute yoga sessions at Saturday’s Yoga with Cats adoption event at Crosstown Arts. Hands became paws, and of course, she worked in a little cat/cow pose. As she led the class, several adoptable cats from Memphis Animal Services (MAS) slinked around the corners of the art gallery.

The event took place on the final day of Crosstown Arts’ We Need to Talk exhibition, which featured break-up art and artifacts from more than 40 local artists. Some of the artwork was humorous, but much of it — about broken marriages and broken hearts — had a bit of depressing feel. But with the combination of restorative yoga postures and free-roaming cats, everyone seemed to be in positive spirits.

“We’ve seen cat yoga in some other cities and thought it would be such a fun thing to bring to Memphis,” said Alexis Pugh, administrator of MAS. “We love that our sponsors, Crosstown Arts and Co-Motion Studio, are just as excited as we are to give our feline friends a chance to find forever homes.”
By the end of the event, which ran from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., four of the 10 cats that MAS brought to the event had been adopted.

The hope was that the cats would be a little more participatory — maybe disrupting poses by laying on mats or curling up with students during the final corpse pose. In reality, the cats didn’t start to warm up to new people and a new environment until the end of Holland’s second class. Several chose to stay in their kennels, but volunteers from MAS stayed on the sidelines of class, coaxing a few of the more sociable kitties to get more involved. A few cats allowed students to hold them as they sat in seated postures. By the end of the second class, a black cat named Zepp tucked underneath one 
student’s hips as she lay in a supine twist (back on the floor, knees bent, and lying to one side)
(Former Flyer staffer Bianca Phillips the communications coordinator for Crosstown Arts.)

. 

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

Final Four Emerges in Our Beer Bracket Challenge

We have our Final Four.

Ghost River and Wiseacre have two beers apiece in our remaining matchups. Those beers — and those breweries — go head to head as we enter the final days of voting in our 2017 Beer Bracket Challenge.

Emerging in our Final Four is an achievement in its own. Those beers won their categories. In our bracket, those categories were light beer, dark beer, IPA, and seasonal.

• Ghost River’s Golden Ale is the best light beer from our Big Four breweries, according to our readers.

• Wiseacre’s Gotta Get Up To Get Down is the best dark beer.

• Wiseacre’s Ananda is the city’s best IPA.

• Ghost River’s Grindhouse Cream Ale won our seasonal category.

Monday’s voting pits Golden Ale against Gott Get Up To Get Down. The winner there moves on to our final matchup and will be a contender for the “Best Beer In Memphis.”

Tuesday’s votes for either Ananda or Grindhouse will decide the other finalist.

Those two beers will square off in our final day of voting Wednesday. We’ll announce the winner of our challenge Thursday.

We’ll wrap up our bracket challenge results and some fun beer news and stories in our March 9 issue.

If you don’t know by now, you should TOTALLY go vote!

Categories
From My Seat Sports

How to Fix Baseball

Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred is up in arms over the speed of his game. The commish wants to move things along, spur action, eliminate delays, make silent moments loud with the cheering of sellout crowds. The MLB players union has been reluctant to adopt most of the changes — a clock for pitchers, to name one — so Manfred finds himself grinding his teeth, awaiting the authority to unilaterally impose new rules for the 2018 season. (The two parties managed to agree on pitchless intentional walks. Starting this season, a batter can be sent to first base merely with a signal from the opposing manager. No more staring at four wide ones. Former Cardinal and Met Keith Hernandez would at times lean on his bat as though it were a cane during an intentional walk. Other than losing the chance for such an image, this is a good modification.)

While we start processing the idea of a clock factoring in a game long known as timeless, here are a few creative suggestions for making baseball a quicker experience, one the modern attention span might better fancy.

• Three balls for a walk and two strikes, you’re out!
If intentional walks are so mind-numbing, why are we drawn to five- or six-pitch at-bats? Step into the box and be ready to swing. And no third chances if you can’t handle a pitch in the strike zone. If reality television has taught us anything, it’s that drama is tight, abrupt, and in your face. (Foul balls will no longer keep a batter alive, either. Put the ball in play — no more than two swings — or take a seat.)

• Seventy-foot bases.
We want more offense, more scoring, right? Let’s get more hitters on base. And around those bases quicker. For safety’s sake, we can’t move the pitcher’s mound closer to home plate, so it will now sit virtually on top of second base. So be it. About the only way we’ll be bothered with double plays will be grounders back to the pitcher. The ol’ 1-3 DP.

• Two-out innings for teams with a lead.
Why does a team leading on the scoreboard get three outs when it bats, just like the team trying to make a comeback? We want excitement, tight scores, and yes, comebacks. A team protecting its lead better hit early (in an inning) and often. And let’s see if a team ever bunts with a lead. Won’t happen. That’s sissy stuff.

• One-pitch warm-ups for relief pitchers.
That flame-throwing righty has been tossing in the bullpen for 15 minutes. Upon entering the game, he needs to “get familiar” with the mound? This isn’t a first date. One pitch to your catcher, and game on.

• No more mound visits . . . ever.
We have technology that will allow pitchers to wear an earpiece, one connected remotely to his catcher and the pitching coach. Let those two get in the hurler’s head (literally) all they want: strategize, energize, discuss appropriate wedding gifts, whatever. But no man will ever again walk to a pitcher’s mound merely to have a conversation.

• Seventh-inning wave.
Stretching? What sport is so boring it requires its fans to stretch before the game is over? No more “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” Moving forward, ballparks will play the Surfaris’ “Wipe Out” after the top of the seventh inning and fans will do the wave. Then back to baseball, hopefully a two-out inning for the home team.

More than three hours is required to complete an NFL game and there are about 25 minutes of what can be called action on the field (including one-yard runs and incomplete passes). An NBA game takes 150 minutes to play but look at the clock: 12 minutes times four quarters (plus halftime) equals 48 minutes. By my count, that’s more than 100 minutes of waiting for the next dribble, shot, or pass.

Never mind those sports, though. Baseball season is almost here. And it’s been here since long before horseless carriages became the rage. It’s about time we fix it.

Categories
Sports Tiger Blue

Houston 72, Tigers 71

CREDIT: Larry Kuzniewski

The Tigers’ tailspin continued Sunday afternoon at FedExForum. When Jeremiah Martin’s desperation shot was partially blocked as time expired, Memphis left the court with a fourth consecutive defeat, a .500 (8-8) record in the American Athletic Conference, and the likelihood of having to win four games in four days at the AAC tournament in Hartford for a cherished NCAA tournament bid.

Freshman forward K.J. Lawson summarized the latest defeat for each of his teammates, and much of the remaining Tiger fan base: “Every loss is the same. I don’t like losing. I treat it like someone died. I’m a sore loser.”

“Losing four in a row is something I haven’t done, ever,” said K.J.’s brother, Dedric Lawson. “It’s not the end of the world. We’ve just got to turn it around, get a winning streak going. Stay grounded. Don’t get too low.”

Larry Kuzniewski

Jeremiah Martin

A likely first-team all-conference pick, Dedric earned his 19th double-double of the season with 12 points and 13 rebounds, but missed seven of ten shots from the field and an important free throw that would have tied the game at 69 with 1:51 to play. The sophomore forward was to receive the ball on the game’s final play, but K.J. chose to target Martin with his brother in traffic near the basket.

The Cougars led for the first 36 minutes of the game, by as many as 13 in the first half, and by five (40-35) at halftime. But Memphis closed the deficit, and with reserves Jake McDowell, Craig Randall, and Christian Kessee on the floor for a key first-half stretch after Dedric Lawson went to the bench with two fouls. Markel Crawford hit three-pointers — one from the left side, the second from the right — on consecutive Tiger possessions to tie the game at 66 with just over four minutes to play. A Jimario Rivers free throw gave the U of M its only lead, 67-66, with 3:22 to play.

But Cougar guard Rob Gray (17 points) converted a three-point play and Damyean Dotson (31 points) hit a jumper to give Houston a 71-68 edge. Dedric Lawson converted a three-point play of his own to tie the score, but Rivers was called for hand-checking Dotson with three seconds to play. Dotson made the second of his two free throws for the decisive point.

Tiger coach Tubby Smith said he was too far away to judge the accuracy of the foul call on Rivers, but acknowledged his players are taught to back away when a player brings the ball to waist level, to avoid precisely the foul Rivers was given.

“We had no answer for Dotson,” said Smith. “We did some good things, but we just didn’t finish the right way.” When asked about his team’s losing skid, and how it might be reversed, the coach seemed to be in search mode.

“When the pressure’s on,” he asked, “how are you going to respond? We’ve come close. But we haven’t had that intensity level we’ve needed. For the most part, our guys give us all they have. Their attitudes have been good. I’ve probably been a little more chippy.”

K.J. Lawson led the Tigers with 20 points and pulled down nine rebounds. Martin had 16 points and five assists. The Tigers shot better from the field (48 percent) than did Houston (42 percent), but the Cougars made nine treys to the Tigers’ five.

Houston has now won seven of eight games and improves to 20-8 (11-5 in the AAC). The Tigers have lost five of six and are now 18-11 overall.

The Tigers host Tulane Thursday night before finishing the regular season with a trip to SMU on Saturday.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Surprises Galore at Local GOP’s Lincoln Day Dinner

CREDIT: JB

Two revelations in particular stand out from Saturday night’s Lincoln Day banquet, the Shelby County Republican Party’s annual ceremonial event.

• JB

Mayor Strickland (r) shmoozing at Lincoln Day

The first concerns Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland, whose busy schedule takes him to any number of after-hours public events of this sort, regardless of their politics. (After a fair amount of hand-shaking and dutiful schmoozing with attendees at the Lincoln Day event, held at the University of Memphis Holiday Inn, the Mayor left early, destined for a Young Democrats event featuring Nashville Mayor Megan Barry.)

The revelation is that Strickland has a personal policy of reading no newspapers and not availing himself of news reports on TV or in social media, as well. Really. “Never,” he insists.

“I find out what I need by going to the source of things, the people I represent,” the Mayor said. He asserted that he has no home subscription to the daily newspaper, for example, though his press assistants, Ursula Madden and Kyle Veazey, keep him briefed on news of importance from that and other sources. As might others in the administration.

Strickland sounded almost like another well-known chief executive when he said the media tend to focus on sensation and irrelevance instead of the actual substance of city government.

That other chief executive, President Donald Trump, figured large, though mainly by cautious and critical indirection, in the remarks of Lincoln Day keynoter Alberto Gonzales, former U.S. Attorney General under President George W. Bush, and currently Dean of Belmont University School of Law in Nashville.

JB

A presidential quartet at Lincoln Day

•And that’s the other main revelation from Saturday night. At a time when polls show Trump’s approval ratings going south among Democrats and independents but mounting sky-high among Republicans, Gonzales, who underwent ample controversy of his own during his tenure as Attorney General, was more than willing, as one prominent GOP voice, to dissent from party orthodoxy vis-à-vis both Trump and the Republican Congress.

Hardly had Gonzales got beyond the opening courtesies of his address to the Lincoln Day audience when he declared, “We have just endured one of the most remarkable and bitter presidential campaigns in recent memory. Our new President has now begun the business of carrying out an aggressive agenda that he promised the American people, and those efforts have not been without some mis-steps, and I would be less than honest if I said that nothing that has been reported in the press or tweeted directly by the President concerns me.”

JB

Gonzales signing copies of memoir, ‘True Faith and Allegiance,’ for Republicans at Lincoln Day

Gonzales promptly softened that rebuke by noting “how hard it is to govern a nation as vast and diverse as ours,” that “mistakes are going to happen,” and that “we should be careful about rushing to judgment.” He further acknowledged, “It is a dangerous world, and we need Donald Trump to be strong.”

The former Attorney General then announced he would concentrate his attention on two subjects: immigration and the Supreme Court.

Approaching the subject of immigration “from the standpoint of a grandson of Hispanic immigrants,” Gonzales declared, “Diversity is one of the great strengths of the United States — diversity by the migration of cultures, ethnicities, and ideas.” While paying homage to the need for secure borders, he said that goal was “best achieved not through executive action, but as part of an effective, comprehensive immigration law.”

Gonzales, who had earlier gone public with the notion that Trump’s declaration of an immigration ban had been “botched,” went on to call for a policy that could “accommodate an effective but controlled response to humanitarian crises around the world.

Further Gonzales pronouncements on immigration, all contrasting with the current Trump administration line: “Let there be no question about this. Our government is incapable of forcibly removing 12 million people,” and “mass deportation of millions of workers would hurt our economy.”

Those illegals who have stayed out of trouble and been good citizens, by “paying a fine and back taxes, for example, should be able to remain in the country and obtain some kind of legal status” even to the point of ultimately “qualifying for citizenship.”

Amnesty? The word was given too broad a definition by immigration foes. The wall? Much of the “problem” with illegals in this country results from people who overstay their Visas, and “not even a 50-foot wall is going to address this problem.”

And, as for “the fate of immigrant children brought unlawfully to this country, Gonzales pronounced himself “in favor or comprehensive federal legislation that gives these children [“these dreamers, he would call them] the opportunity to seek legal status.”

All in all, about as thorough a deconstruction of Donald Trump’s immigration policy as could be imagined — though couched here and there with faint praise for the President’s determination “to make America great again” and an insistence that he be given “an opportunity to succeed.”

Pivoting to his other main topic, the United States Supreme Court, the former U.S. Attorney General made a point of praising as “well qualified” former President Obama’s Court nominee of 2016, Merrick Garland and, after chastising Senate Democrats for withholding approval of past Republican nominees, said “I believe that obstruction by Senate Republicans over the Garland nomination was also wrong.”

Gonzales got firmly back on base by praise of Trump’s current Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, as “exceptionally well qualified” and called for Senate Democrats to do the right thing by allowing a floor vote where their GOP colleagues had done the wrong thing by refusing to do so with Garland.

In sum, however heterodoxical it was in relation to current GOP strategy, Gonzales’ speech was thoughtful and well received by his local Republican audience. In a sidelight to his remarks, Gonzales had been asked, in  JB

Gubernatorial candidate Bill Lee with pollster/consultant Steven Reid, a campaign associate

a pre-speech chat with reporters, whether he had any interest in joining the growing field of Republicans who intend to run for Governor in 2018. “I’m happy where I’m at,” was the firm response of the Dean of the Belmont Law School.

•If Alberto Gonzales, a transplanted Tennessean, was hesitant to join the crowd of GOP gubernatorial candidates, there were no few Republicans on hand at Lincoln Day who were more than eager to profess their willingness to run. Whether announced or not, these worthies were already running, and their presence attested to the fact.

Among them were U.S. Representative Diane Black (R-6th District), whom Rep. David Kustoff (R-8th District) had described as his “mentor;” state Senator Mark Green (R-Clarksdale); Shelby County’s own state Senator Mark Norris (R-District 32), the Senate majority leader; businessman and recently resigned state director of Economic Development Randy Boyd; and Nashville-area businessman Bill Lee.

(So far, only one major Democrat, former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean, has announced for Governor,  via a weekend statement in the Nashville Tennessean, although others are considering a gubernatorial race.)

•Also on hand at Lincoln Day on Saturday, and looking to be in prime shape after a lengthy battle with cancer, was former longtime  JB

Uhlhorn (l) with Germantown Mayor Mike Palazzolo

Germantown alderman Frank Uhlhorn, who pronounced himself a candidate for the now open District 95 seat in the state House of Representatives. That is the seat previously occupied by Curry Todd, who incurred multiple controversies and was ousted in the 2016 election by businessman Mark Lovelll. In his turn, Lovell was forced to resign his office amid charges of untoward sexual conduct (which he denies).

In the short term, Lovell’s successor will be an interim appointee by the Shelby County Commission, which, in a unanimous vote just last week, put prospective candidates on notice that opposition to the currently proposed school-voucher bill in the General Assembly is a de facto prerequisite for appointment.
Uhlhorn, for one, had no trouble with that and declared himself an exponent of public education.

•The voucher bill’s sponsor, state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-District 31), was also at the banquet. He declared himself unfazed by the Commission’s position on the issue. “My concern is for these children who have been condemned to attend failing schools for 13 years in a row, and they need help this year,” Kelsey said, boasting that his bill, with Democratic co-sponsors Sen. Reginald Tate (D-District 33) and state Rep. John DeBerry (D-District 90) had bipartisan support.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Sun Records Episode 1: A Positive Note

It’s finally here! Sun Records the CMT series formerly known as Million Dollar Quartet, was filmed here in Memphis last summer. Like everyone in the city, the crowd at the official red carpet premiere at the Paradiso was eager to see the results. Local cast and crew, as well as a smattering of political dignitaries, munched hot dogs and heavy hors d’oeuvres, swarming the table for slices of cake during the commercial breaks. The mood was jubilant and, by the time the closing credits rolled, satisfied with the first of eight episodes retelling the story of the birth of rock and roll.

Drake Milligan as Elvis Presley

The opening image of S1:E1 is instantly familiar for Midtowners—an exterior shot of one of the 50s era apartment complexes that dot the Parkways, standing in for Lauderdale Courts. We meet The Man Who Will Be King (Drake Milligan) as a shy teenager strumming his guitar in the breezeway, talking to his mother Gladys (Walking Dead vet Ann Mahoney) through the open door. Vernon (Joe Crest, most recently of Stranger Things), just wants his progeny to get a haircut and be a man. After Gladys calls him out on his drinking, Vernon storms out, leaving Elvis to sing “Are You Lonesome Tonight” in an angelic voice to his mom.

Elvis’ prodigious vocal gifts being ignored is a recurring theme in this episode, as is Presley’s penchant for crossing racial lines, which both enriches his musical and spiritual side and makes him even more of an outcast than the poor Mississippi boy already is. His music at first endures him to Trixie (AlexAnn Hopkins), and then, when her parents see him out front of a black church on Sunday morning, it alienates her.
Milligan, who has only ever played Elvis on screen—having being cast for the part on the strength of his performance in the 2014 short film “Nobody”—is the most promising characterization in the series. This is excellent news for the future of the series.

Chad Michael Murray as Sam Phillips

Arguably, the main character of Sun Records is Sam Phillips, played by Chad Michael Murray, a North Carolina actor who got his start on Gilmore Girls. This first episode introduces Sam and his wife Becky (Jennifer Holland) as Sam drags her to see Dewey Phillips (Keir O’Donnell) doing a live broadcast from a 

Margaret Anne Florence as Marion Keisker

juke joint. Sam is trying to stand up his Memphis Recording Service with the help of Marion Keisker (Margaret Anne Florence) in time for a first recording session with the Skunk Mountain Boys, an Arkansas hillbilly combo clearly ripped off from O Brother! Where Art Thou?. Unlike the doubting Becky, Marion shares Sam’s vision, and by the end of the episode, an affair breaks out in the claustrophobic confines of 706 Union Ave.

Murray looks the part of Sam Phillips more than Milligan looks like Elvis, but his performance in the initial episode is shakier. It’s hard to portray people like Sam Phillips, who was larger than life in real life, without tipping over into cartoon character territory, and Murray occasionally seems like he’s doing a Hunter S. Thompson imitation. But I did leave episode one encouraged by Murray’s serious commitment to the role.

Less encouraging is Sun Records’ handling of Johnny Cash. Arguably the most fascinating real life character in the Million Dollar Quartet, Cash is played by Kevin Fonteyene, who neither looks the part nor shows the ability conjure The Man In Black’s sad-eyed gravitas in the initial episode. Admittedly, Fonteyene starts with a disadvantage of following up Joaquin Phoenix’s star-making turn in Walk The Line (a film which just gets better with each passing year), but the writers are doing him no favors, introducing him long after the life-derailing death of his older brother, opting instead to give him a cornpone monologue at his brother’s grave site that is clearly just a prop in an Arkansas field. Maybe it will improve when Cash joins the Air Force, but right now what should be the most fascinating subplot seems like an afterthought.

Kevin Fonteyene as Johnny Cash

The forth major player introduced is Col. Tom Parker, played by comedian Billy Gardell. In no uncertain terms, Col. Tom is drawn as a shyster, as his “dancing ducks” act at a county fair is revealed to be a big scam, angering the local hayseeds so much that is is only saved from a riot by the swift intervention of Eddy Arnold (Trevor Donovan).

Billy Gardell as Col. Tom Parker

Parker’s promotional antics for Arnold echo John Landis’ comedy scenes from The Blues Brothers, illustrating a go-to strategy by director Roland Joffé. There’s a lot of history to be covered in a short time, and the production needs to find shortcuts to get the information in the mind of the audience without sacrificing time better spent on character beats. Gardell’s performance is the most assured and confident in the show, which also bodes well for the future of the series as Parker’s dark side emerges more fully.

The brightest spot in the first episode is Memphis itself. The city looks great, and the mix of studio and location shooting is flawless. The lighting, set design, and art direction are as good as anything currently on television that’s not called Game Of Thrones. Memphis audiences will enjoy looking for easter eggs and critiquing the jumps of logic and landscape. In one particularly hilarious (to me, anyway) moment, a geography challenged Elvis forgets the Mississippi river runs North/South instead of East/West. But those quibbles will mean nothing outside our borders, while the potential for introducing new audiences to the richness of Memphis music history is vast. With the first episode, Sun Records is off to a promising, if imperfect, start.

Categories
Art Exhibit M

Art Stuff To Do this Weekend

Richard Knowles Legacy Project

When I was a freshman art student at the University of Memphis, I was fortunate to be able to take a drawing class from Richard (Dick) Knowles. He would come into class and walk straight into the storage closet and shut the door. Knowles would start to talk to us about our projects as if he were in the classroom. After five or ten minutes he would test our visual memories by having us draw what he was wearing that particular day, to see if we were paying attention to him during the three seconds it took to walk into class and in the closet. I always thought this was an odd exercise.

HE WORE THE SAME THING EVERYDAY. A blue long-sleeved button down tucked into blue jeans. The particular shades of blue were the only thing to ever change, and that was only because they would fade over time in the wash.

Knowles, who passed away in 2010, is being recognized with the inaugural Richard Knowles Legacy Project currently on view at Circuitous Succession. On Sunday, February 26, 2-6pm, there is the closing reception, and his partner Carol Knowles, former Memphis Flyer art writer, and Larry Jasud, retired Professor at the U of M, will be giving a gallery talk about the life and times of Dick Knowles. There are so many stories about this man, it should be a fun event sharing these with those that knew him best.

Katie Murray

• The Memphis art scene is notorious for not showing up and supporting art exhibitions on a regular basis. This is even more so if the exhibiting artist happens to be from out of town and especially if the work in the exhibition is not about Memphis in any way. Well, this is the case at Tops Gallery for its opening tonight. “Katie Murray: That Shadow, My Likeness” is an exhibition of a small group of photographs centered around her community in Queens, New York. There is also a video inspired by the footage Murray shot of her husband’s audition tape for the metal band Slayer. What is not to like about that? The opening reception is tonight 6-8pm, 400 South Front Street.

• Last week I mentioned the current exhibition at Orange Mound Gallery, “The Black Experience. Tomorrow 2-4pm there will be a Q&A with the participating artists in the exhibition. There will also be two guest speakers. Dr. Ernestine Jenkins will talk about Black History in America, and Dr. Simone Thomas will talk about her book, 365 Days of Black Men in History.

Cat Pena

• Have you been to the Edge district recently to see all the improvements to the neighborhood? They have repaved and painted in new bike lanes and parking spaces. There are also, what seems like hundreds, of large planters everywhere. I do not even know where to drive on the street anymore. Go find out yourself this weekend as Cat Peña’s installation There’s More to be Proud Of at the corner of Marshall and Monroe will be on view to the public. The piece is an homage to the neighborhood as Automobile Row from 1911-1950’s.

Image Credits:

Dick Knowles installation courtesy of Circuitous Succession.
Katie Murray installation courtesy of Tops Gallery.
Cat Peña digital rendering courtesy of the artist.

Categories
Food & Drink Hungry Memphis

The Beer Bracket Challenge heads to the Round of 8

We are down to the Elite 8 (Can we use that without getting sued? Guess we’ll find out.) in our 2017 Beer Bracket Challenge.

Hundreds of votes have been cast in the Challenge, hosted by the beer-thirsty folks at the Memphis Flyer and graciously sponsored by the beer-friendly folks at Aldo’s Pizza Pies.

The Challenge started with 16 beers when voting opened on Wednesday. Those two days saw voting on light beers, dark beers, IPAs, and seaosnals from Ghost River, Memphis Made, High Cotton, and Wiseacre.

Match-ups in the categories were picked out of a hat (my Bass Pro drinking hat), by me, wearing a tie (my tie) over my eyes, at Aldo’s Downtown, drinking a beer (a Southern Prohibition Crowd Control IPA), on Facebook Live.

There’s no doubt that Wiseacre and Ghost River have emerged as powerhouses in our Challenge. Their beers represent seven of the remaining eight slots left on our bracket. Plaid Attack, from Memphis Made, is the only beer not from Ghost River or Wiseacre that’s left.

Its unclear how the two breweries have dominated. Their size may dictate their fanbase. Or, have the breweries ignited their fans to log in and mash their buttons?

Voting is going RIGHT NOW and those votes will determine what beers move on the Final Four (Again, sued?). That’s exciting here because our Final Four will be the winners of their respective categories.

That is, after the votes are tallied, we’ll know what out readers think is the best light beer, dark beer, IPA, and seasonal beer from our Big Four breweries.

So, look, it’s so nice out today and tomorrow the high is going to be, like, 50. I’m not much on giving advice but here’s some: Take off early, find a patio, grab a local beer, pull up our Challenge, and vote for your favorites! (I promise we won’t tell your boss.)

Point your browser back here Monday for an update on our Challenge and see who made our Final Four!

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

I Am Not Your Negro

Midway through I Am Not Your Negro, director Raoul Peck takes a moment to give us a peek at author James Baldwin’s FBI file. According to the G-Man who wrote the memo, Baldwin was a black agitator, a homosexual, and a “very dangerous individual.” By this time in the film, we have gotten to know Baldwin beyond just the usual blurb points: the guy who wrote The Fire Next Time and Notes on a Native Son, parts of which you might have had to read in school during Black History Month. The FBI is supposed to deal with murderers and criminals, and the erudite, quietly passionate man the documentary audience has seen chatting with Dick Cavett and debating at Cambridge University does not look like someone the FBI would describe as a “dangerous individual.”

But Baldwin would have instantly understood why J. Edgar Hoover’s boys were afraid of him. “The root of the white man’s rage is terror,” he says a few moments later, of a figure “who lives only his mind.”

Baldwin is a fascinating figure of the civil rights era, but in recent years he hasn’t gotten as much attention as leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X. Part of that might be that he came along earlier than the others — his first novel was published in 1953, when King wasn’t even a pastor yet and Malcolm had just met Elijah Muhammad. For Baldwin, the writer’s life meant being an observer. He was neither a Christian nor a Muslim nor a member of the NAACP, but first and foremost a man of letters. Still, it was hard to maintain his objectivity in the waning days of Jim Crow. In a televised debate from the early 1960s, Baldwin found himself between Dr. King and Malcolm X as they outlined their competing visions for black liberation in America. The excerpts chosen by Peck for the documentary are extraordinary, both for the power of the two men’s personalities and the clarity with which they speak (especially in an era when a president can respond to allegations of treason with “No puppet! You’re a puppet!”). “The line that divides a witness from a participant is a fine one,” Baldwin would later say about his time in the civil rights struggle.

Both Malcolm and King would be dead before the decade was out, but Baldwin would continue to write well into the 1980s. In 1979, he wrote a 30-page outline for a book that would be called “Remember This House,” where he proposed to outline the struggle through the stories of three martyrs: King, Malcolm, and Medgar Evers. The book was never completed, but Peck took the framework, added quotes from Baldwin’s massive corpus, and layered in some choice archival footage to create I Am Not Your Negro. Samuel L. Jackson reads Baldwin’s words in something that is not quite an imitation of Baldwin, but quite different than the actor’s usual speaking voice. Jackson’s virtuosic voiceover performance is a reminder that one of America’s greatest living actors has been relegated to a caricature of himself while white actors his age still get juicy parts. This would not surprise Baldwin, who hated Stepin Fetchit and revealed to white audiences that black people disliked the Academy Award-winning 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, because they thought Sidney Poitier was “being used against them” to neuter their movement. There are choice revelations like this about every five minutes in I Am Not Your Negro.

We’re in the middle of what has been called the Golden Age of Documentary, but cultural docs have triumphed at the Oscars every year but one this decade (the exception being 2014’s Citizenfour). This year, however, an issue documentary is almost assured to win. On the race relations front, I Am Not Your Negro is nominated alongside Ava DuVernay’s 13th and OJ: Made in America, while Fire at Sea takes on the Syrian immigrant crisis in Europe. I think it’s unlikely that Academy voters will choose the refined rthymns of I Am Not Your Negro over the epic sprawl of OJ: Made in America, but that doesn’t mean that Peck’s work is less worthy. Thirty years after his death, Baldwin’s words and deeds still speak to an America that needs to listen.