After U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Tuesday that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which allows young undocumented immigrants to avoid deportation, would be rescinded with a six-month delay period, the city’s immigrant community is disappointed, but not deterred.
The six-month delay or “orderly wind down” is designed for Congress to construct its own immigration legislation before the program is phased out in March 2018.
Sessions says DACA, created during former President Barack Obama’s era was an “unconstitutional exercise of authority by the executive branch.” He continues that DACA allowed hundreds of illegal aliens to take jobs from American citizens.
Tennessee representative Steve Cohen disagrees, saying in a statement that the decision to end DACA is “heartless, illogical, and un-American.”
“DACA is a commonsense, compassionate program that helps protect from deporting young people who were brought to the United Sates by no choice of their own,” Cohen continues.
He says that according to the Center for American Progress, 95 percent of the DACA participants are either working or in school.
“The decision in not only harmful for the DREAMers, but also for America which relies on them for a more effective and productive workforce,” Cohen says. “I urge Congress to move quickly to protect these bright and talented young people who have significantly contributed to what makes America great.”
Eliminating DACA will affect about 800,000 young people, in some cases, paving the way for them to be deported. Of that number, more than 8,000 are Tennesseans, according to officials with the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC).
Officials with TIRRC, along with those from Latino Memphis, are pushing for legislation that would protect the DREAMers. Latino Memphis officials say the bipartisan Dream Act is a “good step toward fixing a broken and outdated immigration system.”
Tony Westmoreland and Nick Scott, the owners of Alchemy Memphis, and Ed and Brittany Cabigao, the owners of South of Beale and Zaka Bowl, bought Interim Restaurant & Bar from Eat Here Brands, the owners of Babalu.
David Krog will remain as executive chef. Krog’s culinary career includes working at Erling Jensen: the Restaurant and The Tennessean. He also opened the old Madidi restaurant in Clarksdale.
Said Krog: “I’m grateful to Eat Here Brands and excited about the next chapter. And the breath of fresh air from this local group.”
Officers manning a protest a the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue in Health Sciences Park on Aug. 18
The Memphis Police Department (MPD) spent more than $55,000 in overtime dollars in just the second half of August while manning rallies and protests at Graceland, Health Sciences Park, and Memphis Park, according to Deputy Chief Don Crowe.
Crowe told a Memphis City Council committee Tuesday that in addition to those overtime dollars, the department spent just under $9,000 for on-duty officers to keep a presence at the two parks which are both home to controversial Confederate statues.
That’s a total of $63,826. Councilwoman Patrice Robinson says “that’s a lot of money to spend on overtime.”
Robinson asked Crowe if boarding up the Confederate statues would cause fewer people to visit the parks, and result in a need for less police presence. Similarly, council member Janis Fullilove suggested adding more cameras to the parks, which would allow officers to only respond when necessary.
But, MPD officials told council members that the department doesn’t “want to be reactive, but proactive,” and that the around-the-clock patrolling would continue indefinitely.
Crowe, along with Deputy Director Mike Ryall, adds that MPD is patrolling the parks solely to protect the people, and not the statues which council member Robinson says is a common notion among the community.
“I can assure you that that’s not the case,” Ryall said. “Our stance is the protection of life.”
Minor league baseball never feels more minor than when the playoffs arrive in September. This is especially the case at the Triple-A level, where eight teams — four from the Pacific Coast League and four from the International League — vie for championships at the highest level below the majors. When big-league rosters expand on September 1st, many of the finest Triple-A players in the country are given lockers in major-league clubhouses, leaving playoff teams — like the 2017 Memphis Redbirds — with unfamiliar faces in the batting order and pitching rotation.
Stubby Clapp
St. Louis Cardinal fans were thrilled to see Harrison Bader launch a tie-breaking home run in Sunday’s win over the Giants in San Francisco, the Cards still clinging to hope for a wild-card slot in the National League playoffs. Those with an interest in Memphis winning its third PCL title would prefer to see the 23-year-old Bader in centerfield at AutoZone Park Wednesday night when the Redbirds and Colorado Springs open their best-of-five semifinal series.
Pitchers Luke Weaver and Jack Flaherty combined to win 17 games for Memphis this season. At the front of the Redbirds’ rotation, they would make Memphis the prohibitive favorite to win the PCL championship. Instead, they’re now 40 percent of the Cardinals’ rotation. (Adam Wainwright landed on the disabled list with a back ailment and Mike Leake was mercifully — for St. Louis — shipped to Seattle last week for a minor-leaguer and a Starbucks gift card.) Relief pitcher Ryan Sherriff was a PCL All-Star each of the last two seasons, but can now be found in the Cardinal bullpen.
The roster depletion is ugly on paper, but hasn’t yet impacted a Redbird season that is already historic by a few measures. Not even two months into the season, Memphis set a franchise record with an 11-game winning streak. (Back then Paul DeJong was clubbing baseballs for Memphis. He’s now the Cardinals’ everyday shortstop.) The 2017 Redbirds are the first PCL team in 11 years to win 90 games and the first in 36 years to win its division by more than 20 games. (The last Memphis baseball team to win 90 games was the 1955 Chicks.) Few postseason awards are more predictable than Stubby Clapp’s PCL Manager of the Year hardware. In his first year at the helm, Clapp has filled slots with the bats and arms St. Louis allows him, while retaining cohesiveness in the clubhouse consistent with five months of sustained success.
Dakota Hudson will take the mound Wednesday for Game 1 against the Sky Sox. One of the top pitching prospects in the Cardinal system, Hudson went 9-4 at Double-A Springfield before a late-season promotion to Memphis (one that coincided with Weaver’s move to St. Louis). Hudson will likely be throwing to a catcher — Gabriel Lino, Jesse Jenner, or Jeremy Martinez — who spent most of the season below Triple A. The Cardinals seized both the Redbirds’ starting catcher (Carson Kelly) and backup (Alberto Rosario) for their playoff push. After Hudson, Clapp will give the ball to the likes of Kevin Herget (62 innings pitched for Memphis this season) or Matt Pearce (54 innings). They’ll be tasked with winning a championship for some teammates nowhere near AutoZone Park.
Another irony of the PCL playoffs is empty seats. With school having resumed and football season underway, small crowds are the norm as the best teams in Triple A face one another for a crown. It will be a shame if Memphis baseball fans don’t find a way to properly salute this year’s club. Pending another Cardinal promotion, Patrick Wisdom (31 home runs and an all-league selection) remains a Redbird. So do Breyvic Valera (.314 batting average), Nick Martini (.303), and Rangel Ravero (.314). With the recent addition of outfielder Tyler O’Neill (a combined 31 home runs for Tacoma and Memphis), the Redbirds present a formidable lineup even with the mass defection to St. Louis.
Baseball measures greatness with flags. Having posted the greatest regular season in franchise history, it’s now time for the 2017 Memphis Redbirds to raise their own.
EDITOR’S NOTE: On Tuesday morning, St. Louis promoted Valera, a reinforcement for Cardinal infielder Matt Carpenter (currently nursing a shoulder ailment).
Well, he went ahead and did it. Last Friday, President Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff who illegally used racial profiling to enforce immigration laws.
Trump has the legal power to pardon pretty much anyone. But pardoning Arpaio sends the message that state and local officials can aggressively enforce federal immigration law, even if it risks racial profiling and violating the due process rights of both citizens and noncitizens.
Joe Arpaio
Arpaio’s Violations:
Arpaio was for decades the elected sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, the county that includes Phoenix. He has long been known for his harsh practices like requiring inmates to work on chain gangs and live in outdoor tent cities in the scorching Arizona heat. He prioritized immigration enforcement at the expense of crimes like sexual assault. He also jailed some people who criticized him, including two reporters who successfully sued him for false arrest.
In 2011, a federal court found that Arpaio’s sheriff’s department unconstitutionally racially profiled Latinos. Basically, he had his deputies stop, detain, and interrogate Latino people — U.S. citizens, legal immigrants, and undocumented immigrants alike — on suspicion of immigration violations, without probable cause.
The court later noted that state and county officials had no authority to enforce federal immigration law without authorization from the federal government. Arpaio had no such authorization, because Homeland Security stripped Maricopa County of such authority, based on U.S. Justice Department findings of rampant abuse.
State and local cooperation can be helpful in enforcing federal law, but when it comes to immigration, federal law usually preempts state law. State over-enforcement of immigration law can interfere with federal policy. So, state officials should enforce federal immigration law only where the federal government asks them to.
More fundamentally, no federal or state official can legally target people for immigration-related stops and questioning just because they look Latino. And as the Supreme Court has stated, even non-citizens have the right to due process and to be free from racial discrimination, as long as they are present in the U.S. Arpaio thus broke the law by violating individuals’ Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.
The court ordered Arpaio and his office to stop using race as a factor in its enforcement decisions. His deputies could detain individuals based on probable cause that they had violated some state law, but not merely because they suspected them of being in the U.S. illegally.
In July, another federal judge convicted Arpaio of criminal contempt for intentionally violating the first court’s prior orders. His sentencing hearing (now moot) had been set for this October.
The Pardon’s Effects:
It’s very unusual for a president to pardon someone before they’re sentenced. Doing so suggests that Trump felt Arpaio did nothing wrong. Trump made that clear by publicly praising Arpaio for his “admirable service” and saying he was “convicted for doing his job.” (Apparently, a sheriff’s job includes harassing Latinos and violating privacy rights.) Phoenix mayor Greg Stanton called the pardon “a slap in the face to the people of Maricopa County.”
The pardon could encourage other like-minded state and local officials to racially profile Latinos. More broadly, it may encourage state and local officers to aggressively enforce federal immigration law. Many experts and law enforcement officials criticize such state and local enforcement, saying it erodes trust with immigrant communities, making them too fearful to report local crimes and cooperate with police.
Arpaio’s pardon does not mean a complete clean slate for him. It would not erase a separate court ruling from 2016 that found him in civil contempt of court. Civil contempt is a non-criminal finding, which could require remedial measures like court-ordered reforms, reporting requirements, and the like. These do not fall under the reach of the president’s pardon.
Nor does a pardon mean that he or his department are allowed to return to their unconstitutional practices. Arpaio himself is now out of office, having lost his most recent election. And the Maricopa County Sheriff Department is still under a court order to refrain from racial profiling and other illegal immigration enforcement efforts.
But the pardon may embolden immigration hawks and infuriate Trump’s opponents — which, in the end, might very well be the intention.
Former County Commissioner Steve Mulroy teaches constitutional and civil rights law at the University of Memphis.
Francois Truffault as Claude LaCombe in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
A fully restored, 4K version of Steven Spielberg’s 1977 classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind is currently in theaters to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its release. In this edition of Never Seen It, I took Memphis experimental filmmaker and Memphis Flyer contributor Ben Siler to see the film at the Malco Paradiso. It’s one of my desert island, all-time favorites, but it seems Ben and I had very different experiences at this screening.
Before Close Encounters:
Chris McCoy: What do you know about Close Encounters of the Third Kind?
Ben Siler: The song, mashed potatoes, beautiful UFOs at the end, Francois Truffaut is somewhere inside.
Afterwards, we retired to Whole Foods for lunch of chicken and mashed potatoes.
BS: It’s my knee jerk response to be critical about Spielberg.
CM: What’s your beef with Spielberg?
BS: Well, he’s schmaltzy, and he doesn’t know how to end a movie. He hasn’t for fifteen years. He’s a very skilled person, and great and wonderful, but I think he’s had enough praise, and it’s right to be skeptical of him. He’s not a wunderkind any more, I guess, so what he’s selling is a little more obvious. But this was a great film.
CM: So you just knew the highlight reel scenes, right? The infamous mashed potatoes, and the pretty spaceships at the end. What about the rest of it? Did it go where you thought it was going to go?
BS: It reminded me of Lost. J. J. Abrams was in the [retrospective documentary] short at the beginning. I loved the tension, and the buildup—basically, the globetrotting, finding the elements and putting them together to solve the mystery. I thought it was really nicely handled.
But again, I have a knee jerk thing against Spielberg. It all built up to the pretty lights and the schmaltz. Which is OK. I like different things to be emphasized when you’re dealing with the unknown and spirituality. It’s pretty spiritual and religious. It was a movie that, on my best day, I could dream about making maybe one frame of. But still, my favorite thing about that whole last sequence was Richard Dreyfuss kissing Melinda Dillon. That was tacky and kind of offensive and gross, and that’s what real life is like. It’s not hermetically sealed pretty lights that take you away out of your crappy 1970s marriage to Terri Garr. I feel like it needed more details like that, which was really a tone deaf thing put in there by Spielberg.
The movie is saying that you’ll transcend through your obsessions. I feel like Star Wars is much healthier when it comes to technology, and I’m not the first to say this. In that, technology is clunky and old, and you can bend it to your will to do amazing things. You can travel the universe, but it’s clunky and crappy and it’s old and you have to work with it to go really fast. In this, [Roy Neary’s] obsession is just this spiritual thing. He has this marriage that is really…loud. There are a lot of loud things in the foreground, throughout the entire movie. The TV is always on, and five different people are talking while they tell the story visually. There’s a lot of people speaking French and Hindi.
Again, I’m primed to pounce on him. But the message is, your obsession will save you, it will be transcendent, it will carry you away, and it will be beautiful. In my experience, that’s just not the case.
Richard Dreyfuss as Roy Neary, model maker.
I was most excited about Terri Garr and Richard Dreyfuss’ crappy marriage, and how unhappy it was. I like angry Terri Garr. I love Lost, and J. J. Abrams makes facsimiles of other people’s work. He made Super 8, which works for about 30 minutes, then it’s complete shit. This is what he was imitating. It’s a silver platter, a beautifully made film. I felt all of the emotions I was supposed to be feeling: Awe, wonderment, but tinged with horror.
I was just listening to a thing about those pilots who were lost in the Bermuda Triangle. Spielberg takes the unknown, and answers it with this quasi religious thing where they come back from the dead.
Bob Balaban finds Flight 19.
CM: I think you’re really onto it with the spiritual aspect. This is a non-religious, religious experience. That’s what this is about. Have you ever read Childhood’s End? It struck me this time that there’s a lot of Childhood’s End in Close Encounters. It’s a first contact story: What does first contact look like? Why is first contact with aliens even important? Why do we even care? It’s a transcendent, quasi-religious moment. Is there a sense that the aliens were going to come and solve everybody’s problems?
BS:That may be something I was adding into it.
CSM: They solved Roy Neary’s problems. But they also caused a lot of Roy Neary’s problems.
BS: They didn’t solve Mrs. Neary’s problems. They took away her husband.
Terri Garr as Ronnie Neary.
CM: He was a pretty crappy husband, anyway. Spielberg said the only thing he regrets about this movie is that Roy Neary goes away with the aliens at the end and leaves his family. He said if he made it today, Roy Neary wouldn’t leave his family.
BS: I feel that would weaken it. He’s not interested in his family.
CM: I think the character also has to make a sacrifice to make what happens next meaningful. The sacrifice is his normality.
BS: You said first contact. I read this book about Captain Cook. It was just a long list of first contacts with people in the South Pacific. They were kind of interesting and fun. His main thing was, he would talk to people, and they would have a different concept of ownership than him. They would end up stealing one of his men’s canoes. Then he would go with a gun and an armed guard, find the chief of the town, and take him back to his ship and say, ‘You’ve got to return my canoe. Until then, I’m holding your chief hostage.’ That’s how he got killed. He tried that in Hawai’i, and someone brained him. That’s what first contacts are like. They’re not like, a spiritual transcendence. I looked at it through the lens of his marriage. She said they needed to go to couples’ therapy. Yeah, he should have gone to couple’s therapy.
CM: Terri Garr is fantastic in this.
BS: Old Terri Garr got angry. There’s a long interview in the AV Club where she says everyone she ever worked with was a sexist asshole. She names names…It’s refreshing to see elderly Terri Garr get angry about that. I thought their marriage was funny. I would like to see a movie about their failing marriage, and at the end, something unhappy happens. That would make me so much more excited. He has a marriage, for conditioned reasons, and three kids in Speilbergian suburbia. It’s not doing it for him. They don’t even like Pinocchio. I’m assuming because he’s a protagonist in a movie that he’s unhappy at first. Then he gets a new religion, which is, pretty lights in the sky, they’re special, and they’re special to him. I didn’t notice if the dudes in the red suits went off in the end. Did they just choose the obsessive nerd?
CM: Yes
BS: Only Richard Dreyfuss got to go off with the aliens in the end?
CM:He was the one they invited. If Melinda Dillon had been in the front row, they would have taken her, too. They were invited.
BS: Not a great use of Melinda Dillon, I thought. She’s much better in Christmas Story and Slap Shot, when she’s being sarcastic and mean. My favorite part with her was when her little boy was running away from her, and she was running after him. Your little boy is about to get run over! When she was the beleaguered housewife, that was better than her being sad all the time.
Spielberg was obsessed with film. He snuck onto the lot of Universal and he started making movies. His obsession rewarded him many times over. He’s a billionaire. I feel like, for most people, it’s not good advice to follow your dreams…
CM: Well that’s horrifying.
BS: …at least not at the expense of your children. Maybe I have a really big axe to grind with Spielberg.
CM:I think it doesn’t work if he doesn’t go with the aliens. The crying in the shower scene was cut from the 1977 version. It goes straight from the mashed potatoes to working on the model train set. He wakes up and sees his kid there, watching a Marvin the Martian cartoon, and decides this whole thing has been stupid. Then when he tries to tear down his Devil’s Tower model, his obsession is renewed. He goes on to build an even bigger and better Devil’s Tower model that leads to the end of his marriage.
But this version we saw had the crying in the shower scene. That’s the most intense family conflict part. I think it’s an entirely different movie with that scene in it. You see the effect of Roy’s obsession on his family.
BS: Well, the kid was crying with the mashed potatoes.
CM: Yeah, but when they’re screaming and banging the door, it’s really intense. It’s hard for me to watch.
BS: I really liked that part.
CM: So basically, you just want to see scenes from Roy and Ronnie’s marriage.
BS: It’s more what life is like. Inside the spaceship, it could be like “To Serve Man”. It could be a slaughterhouse in there.
Roy Neary is chosen by the aliens.
CM: It’s difficult to separate this from the 1970s. There was a huge interest in the paranormal. It was the second American UFO wave—the 1950s and the 1970s. I love it that the Air Force guy is actually telling the truth. People shot six billion pictures in 1977 and none of them had any aliens in them. One of my favorite lines from the Ferguson Era has been, “Before everybody was running around with cameras in their pockets, we thought that UFOs were real and there was no police brutality towards black people. But now that everyone’s carrying a camera, there are no UFOs, and there’s police brutality towards black people.”
There was a huge cultural obsession with all of that stuff: The Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, all of it…When the neighbor lady wakes up, she has a paperback on her chest that she had fallen asleep reading. That’s where all that stuff lived, in cheap paperbacks. People read a lot more, and cheap paperbacks about paranormal stuff was a huge industry. J. Alan Hynek, the guy with the goatee and the pipe who had an unexplained close up in the finale, was credited as technical advisor. He was selling millions of books about UFOs, and that’s what Spielberg was reading. The whole UFO myth is a redemption myth. They’re angels. My life is crap. Take me away. I think that’s what the UFO stuff in the 1970s was about, a longing for transcendence.
Carry Guffy as Barry, about to be taken away by the aliens.
BS: Spielberg said in the intro that this was inspired by Watergate. If there was a conspiracy to cover up Watergate, then there could be an even larger conspiracy to cover up aliens. I think that’s a strange lesson to take from Watergate.
I used to watch TV shows about aliens, and then I would have trouble sleeping at night. I remember one night, I saw a reflection in my window. It was probably my own reflection, but I interpreted it as possibly an alien. So I froze, slowly lowered the blinds, and backed away. I was terrified of shadows. You take the unknown, and it’s exciting. But there needs to be a messiness to it. That ending is really clean.
I really love this YouTuber…actually, I don’t love him…This guy has made a three hour documentary called Ancient Aliens Debunked. He’s an archeologist, and he takes every episode of Ancient Aliens and inserts his debunking of each and every single claim. One of the guys from the show is Erik von Däniken, who wrote Chariots of the Gods. I bought that book for 50 cents at Burke’s Books and tried to read it. I got like four pages into it. It was fucking terrible. Spielberg is a better writer and craftsman than Erik von Däniken, but he’s selling a similar story: Not that aliens helped build ancient civilizations, but that aliens are some sort of place to look to. What about Larry, the guy who got gassed and couldn’t see the aliens? Nobody in America got to see that stuff, just some self-appointed assholes in government had a transcendent moment. Everybody else got screwed.
CM: But that wasn’t the aliens’ intention. The aliens invited all these people. It was the government assholes who got in the way.
BS: There was only transcendence for one person. I find that lousy.
CM: That’s very interesting, because one of the things I love about Spielberg is that he makes almost Soviet movies. This is a movie about a mass movement of people, like Battleship Potemkin. There is no real single antagonist, a group is the antagonist—the government. Roy is the one that we follow, but there is a whole movement of people who saw the UFOs and want to meet them at Devil’s Tower. There are whole groups of people who do things, and that things happen to, in this movie. 1941 is the same way, and the first half of Jaws is like that, before they get on the boat. It’s about what happens to Amity, the beach town, not just to one or two people. American movies are much more individualistic than Soviet movies, but not how Spielberg makes them. Amistad is about a mass movement of people. A group of people is a single character.
BS: Yeah, but in War of the Worlds, the aliens are mean, and Tom Cruise is trying to connect with his son. When I was a little kid, I read Jurassic Park. I loved evil John Hammond in the book. I thought the addition of Alan Grant’s problems with kids and divorce had nothing to do with Jurassic Park. It was just cynically put in to sell tickets. It doesn’t matter if Jeff Goldblum is there to say stuff about lunch boxes.
I wanted to say, the Ancient Aliens Debunked show, in the end, it turns around and becomes a commercial for “The Bible is real!” The archeologist who put this on his YouTube channel literally thinks that giants and angels are making all this stuff. It’s insane. What’s so lovely about that is, you start off thinking this guy is skeptical about all this stuff, then he turns around a makes a ridiculous claim. He’s an unreliable narrator, and kinda crazy. That’s awesome. He also has a very calming voice, which is good to fall asleep to.
Never Seen It: Watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind with Filmmaker Ben Siler (2)
As the debate over Confederate statues and monuments heats up across the country and in Memphis, it is intensifying in the state’s capital as well.
The Tennessee Capitol Commission voted Friday 7 to 5 in favor of not acting to remove a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest from the state Capitol.
This comes even after Gov. Bill Haslam encouraged the commission to act, releasing a statement supporting the removal of the Forrest bust and its relocation. “Forrest should not be one of the individuals we honor at the Capitol,” Haslam said in a statement.
The motion to request a waiver for the bust’s removal and relocation to the Tennessee State Museum was made by the chair of the commission, Larry Martin, while the vote included several state officials, lawmakers, and individual citizens.
Among those who voted in favor of the bust remaining at the Capitol was state treasurer David Lillard who says he believes the bust and other artifacts like it should be displayed at the Capitol for historical purposes.
After Tropical Depression Harvey swept through Memphis and surrounding areas Thursday, Memphis Light, Gas, and Water (MLGW) officials say some 40,000 homes and businesses lost power.
As of Friday morning, MLGW officials report that that number is down to 15,000.
CEO of MLGW Jerry Collins Jr., says the storm system “wreaked havoc” in the area, leaving fallen trees and power lines. Its crews began restoration efforts Thursday night.
Those efforts, he says, address the outages that affect the greatest amount of people first, working down to the outages impacting the smallest amount of customers.
Outside contracted crews are expected to join restoration efforts by noon on Friday.
Though Collins says the utility has “several hundreds of points to repair,” he anticipates all customers’ power will be restored by the end of the day on Sunday.
In Memphis, it’s only mildly uncustomary to walk into a bar where a woman wearing bunny ears is seated in an armchair surveying the scene. This particular woman is Hayley Milliman, one half of the duo behind Dream Bars. She and business partner Miles Kovarik have just launched their latest concept (they’re also the team that created Potterfest) in a seldom-used corner of Cafe Society.
The idea behind Dream Bars is ambitious: Every few weeks, they stage another pop-up bar with a new theme in a new location. From now through September 30th, it’s Wunderland, with an Alice in Wonderland theme. The next pop-up, launching in early October in a different place … who knows? Though we might see the pop-up bars resurface at Cafe Society again one month, we’ll never see the Alice theme again. With this sort of turnaround, you’d expect a lackluster presentation. But Hayley and Miles, I learned, don’t half-ass anything.
A friend and I visited the Wunderland bar last week, and the bartender immediately handed us two apothecary bottles marked “Drink Me.” This is a good way to get people to hang out at your bar. Another great way to get people to hang out at your bar is to offer a selection of drinks that include an alcoholic hot tea and an absinthe cocktail. We got one of each, then we got another of each, and then we hung out with Hayley and Miles and yammered for several hours.
Normally, I credit the alcohol for any ability to talk to strangers, but Miles and Hayley are easy to talk to and eager to share their ideas about moving forward with Dream Bars. Miles excitedly explains his vision but credits Hayley with bringing all the intelligence to the table (“Duh, she’s a woman,” I wrote in my notes). Their passion is obvious, as anyone who has attended one of their Potterfest events knows well. They have an ease with discussing their hopes for Dream Bars that is refreshing and, for a cynic like me, inspiring.
After traveling extensively and hanging out in concept bars all around the globe, Hayley and Miles figured they could pull off a similar deal in Memphis. Their goal is to get their patrons to re-think their bar experience, and to head home and, as Miles put it, say to themselves, “Well, that was interesting.”
Here in Cafe Society, they’ve provided a full experience, from a lavender scent to a playlist wherein each song vaguely references Alice in Wonderland. The drinks are served in teacups, many of which Hayley found at Goodwill. The Alice theme, while by no means an easy undertaking, is just the start. They promise that each concept fuels the next and each idea will be a little more out there, but we won’t know what’s next until October.
Hayley Milliman
The awesome thing about Dreams Bars is that it promotes a symbiotic relationship between the company and the host bar/restaurant. Dream Bars will use an under-utilized space in a host bar and not only take advantage of the spare room but also provide exposure for the place. The chef of each host restaurant will provide insight for the menu. Cullen Kent, the chef and owner of Cafe Society, worked with Dream Bars to craft a themed food menu for the Alice concept. (They had a mushroom appetizer called “Eat Me,” but I had already been down the absinthe road and so I tapped the brakes.)
Providing exposure for existing spaces isn’t the only way that Dream Bars embraces Memphis, of course. They also craft their drink menu using local spirits from Old Dominick, and 10 percent of their profit is donated to a different local charity (the charity, like the theme and location, will change each time).
The sort of innovation that went in to Dream Bars, from the décor to the drinks, is what makes it stand out. In a city full of fun and interesting bars, it’s hard to come up with something new. They’ve succeeded. The drinks are fantastic (I tried them all, even one made with spiced rum that ended up being delicious), and the atmosphere was a perfect backdrop to make two new friends and somehow end up talking about Vin Diesel and the correct pronunciation of “Budapest.” Alice welcomes visitors Thursday through Saturday nights, from 7 p.m. until midnight, and I urge you to approach that fun couple, one of whom will be wearing bunny ears, and introduce yourself. We wouldn’t want to lose them to some other city.
Dream Bars Wunderland at Cafe Society (212 N. Evergreen) through September 30th.
With the ideology of white supremacy on the ascendant under the current president’s reign, the activism that blossomed after a police officer killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri three years ago is more relevant than ever. And Whose Streets?, the new film by directors Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis, traces the events of Ferguson from the activists’ point of view. It lends a sense of hope to a story built on tragedy and deadly frustration.
Activist Brittany Ferrell marches in Whose Streets?
Be prepared for a very different documentary experience, as this film forgoes many of the tropes of the nonfiction genre. There is no narration, only a few brief title cards that set the time and place, or frame the events with powerful quotes by the likes of Maya Angelou or Langston Hughes. The bulk of the footage is built from live phone videos. The opening scene intercuts the earliest cell footage of action on the streets with tweets posted at the same time by eyewitnesses.
Presenting the events from street level footage, without benefit of an all-knowing narrator, immerses you in the shock and chaos of the moment. You see the immediate rage from neighbors and Brown’s family, as tweets broadcast the details of an unarmed teen shot down and left in the street for hours before being retrieved by a police SUV. And you see the immediate reaction by the police force, brandishing machine guns and a massive show of force from the very beginning. Most importantly, you see Michael Brown’s community at a personal level, not merely as a mob. This immediately sets Whose Streets? apart from most of the media footage we’ve seen again and again.
The humanization of those touched by Brown’s killing is carried throughout the film. Further footage recorded from the streets as police shoot huge rubber bullets or tear gas into crowds, or even at people standing in their own yards, is broken up by portraits of activists’ family life. Brittany Ferrell, a young student drawn into activism by Brown’s death, is seen teaching her daughter about social justice, then accepting a marriage proposal from her wife-to-be. David Whitt, a Copwatch videographer, is seen with his family as well. Such scenes of family love and support not only bring home the anguish of Brown’s mother lamenting her dead son, but underscore the community interdependence that make the activists’ work possible.
As the demonstrations surge, go quiet, and then surge again in response to new developments, one gets a sense of the deep investment these protesters have made in their fight for justice. This may be the most humanizing quality of all: the long term commitment of these families and friends is perhaps the most powerful counter-narrative to the “chanting mob” images disseminated in the mass media at the time. We hear the testimony of a white driver who tried to run down several protesters, claiming she was terrified of their “tribal chants”; but after having hearing these people speak articulately on camera, we see that testimony for the hyperbole it is.
The dignity and soulfulness of the activists is evoked with a moody score by Samora Pinderhughes. One can only hope that the soundtrack is released in its own right. I recently heard Pinderhughes lead a jazz quartet through the music at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis, and it revealed the power and depth of the music when allowed to breathe. It is only used fleetingly in the film, perhaps because it could easily overpower the images.
All told, this documentary is not to be taken lightly. It is grim, but as political protest becomes a near-daily requirement in the face of a race-bating, corporate-coddling administration, the message of resilience and support among these community activists can inspire us all keep our eyes on the prize.
Interim, Facebook 
