Month: May 2019

Group Urges Resignation of ‘Foreign Mud’ Judge

Post author By Toby Sells
Post date May 9, 2019

CREDIT: Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action

Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action

MICAH calls for the resignation of Judge James Lammey.

Another group is calling for the resignation of Judge James Lammey after The Commercial Appeal reported last week that he’d posted racist links on his Facebook page and the group says it’ll take their case to the Shelby County Commission.

Lammey posted a link from a Holocaust denier that called Muslim immigrants “foreign mud” and said that Jews “should get the fuck over the Holocaust.” After the story published, Latino Memphis and commissioner Tami Sawyer called for Lammey to resign, according to the CA.

The Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action (MICAH) also called this week for Lammey’s resignation. A chief concern for the group, which advocates for immigration equity (among other things), is that Lammey “requires defendants he suspects to be undocumented to contact immigration authorities as a condition of probation.”

Here’s a statement from MICAH:

“In a county that pledges not to collaborate with (U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement), will we stand by judges who turn our courtrooms into ICE offices?

“In a city struggling to heal the wounds of racism, will we consent to be represented by judges who propagate insidious stereotypes?
[pullquote-1]”In a city striving to respect the rights of all, will we affirm judges who — in violation of their oath of office — treat people differently based on how they look, or the ethnic origin of their names?”

The group will take their concerns to the county commission next week. While no discussion of Lammey is formally on the agenda for the commission’s Law Enforcement, Fire, Corrections, and Courts committee, MICAH urged its members to speak about the situation at the meeting.

“Although the commission cannot act to censor or recall Judge Lammey, we are free to speak (if we sign up via comment cards) and get our opinion on the record,” reads the Facebook post.

The group’s concerns may fall on attentive ears. Sawyer chairs the committee.

“Tragically, we have permitted these injustices; it must end now,” reads a statement from there group. “MICAH calls on our leaders to stand against prejudice and for equal protection under the law. We demand the swift resignation — or, if need be removal — of Judge Lammey, for the sake of the people’s faith in an unbiased, un-bigoted, and un-compromised system of justice.”

Tags immigration, Judge James Lammey, Latino Memphis, Memphis Interfaith Coalition for Action, racism, Shelby County Commission, Tami Sawyer

Food & Wine Food & Drink

Whiskey Barrel Beers

Post author By Richard Murff
Post date May 9, 2019

On a ramble through Kentucky’s Bourbon Fest a few years ago, I happened across a most Kentuckian innovation: ale aged in bourbon barrels. These days, it isn’t as random — or Kentucky — as it seems. Goose Island Brewing has been monkeying around with a Bourbon County Stout since the 1990s. So, bourbon-barrel beer? It’s worth a try.

Likely as a result of the bourbon boom in the last decade, brewers have been trying the same technique with lighter styles. With the surge of popularity for bourbon, a “two great tastes that taste great together” experiment seems to be happening, making bourbon-barrel beer the boozy version of a peanut butter cup. The bourbon boom has also done something else — made used whiskey barrels a lot cheaper.

This is because bourbon distillers, by law, can use those charred white-oak barrels for mellowing moonshine into the nectar of the Gods only one time. Making beer, on the other hand, is a short-term process; no one wants a beer that’s a couple of years old. Whiskey needs several years in barrels to take away the harshness of the freshly made stuff. The barrels expand and contract with seasonal temperature fluctuations, so that the whiskey soaks into and out of the charred wood — which makes Kentucky, with its hot summers and cold winters, the perfect place to make the stuff. Wood is porous, so there is evaporation — called the “angels’ share” — of up to 1 percent of the volume per year. The angels’ share doesn’t all go into the air, however; a fair bit stays in the wooden staves.

The barrels are perfectly good, but can’t be reused if the product is going to legally be classed as bourbon. Traditionally, these gently used barrels were sold to Scotch distillers to help recoup costs. That still happens, but bourbon production is now so high that there are more barrels than the Scots need, so they are being used to age sherry, brandy, tequila, and, yes, beer.

Storing beer in whiskey barrels draws that angels’ share out and into the beer. Traditional stainless steel vats provide more precision in the beer-brewing process. No two used barrels are exactly alike, so what you get when you pull the bung and pour out the beer is always going to be a bit of a mystery. Which is a great story of craft, but how does it taste?

Brewery Ommegang out of New York has a smoked vanilla porter made with light, smoked malt as well as chocolate malt. The porter is aged in bourbon barrels for six months with whole vanilla beans. It sounds expensive, and it is expensive. It is also very deep and — words fail me — luscious. But with an ABV of 8.9 percent, no one is going to be funneling this stuff. It pours and looks like a Guinness, but although rich, sits a lot lighter. The weather and the seasons being what they are in Memphis, I was looking for a lighter version. Which led me to Boulevard Brewing Company’s Rye on Rye out of Kansas City. While I’m not a huge fan of rye ales, this one doubled down, aged in whiskey barrels from Templton Rye — which I really do like. Over all, it hit the spot. It was light enough, but had that lovely rye spice imparted by those wonderful whiskey-logged barrel staves. Spicy yes, with vanilla and hops, and a nice clean finish that doesn’t leave you looking for a toothbrush.

The great thing is that these two beers taste nothing alike. Barrel-aged beers are all different. To Memphis’ craft brewers, I say this: In a few years, Old Dominick is probably going to have a lot of whiskey barrels it can no longer use. Now you know what to do with them.

Tags beer, Boulevard Brewing, Brewery Ommegang, Goose Island Brewing, Rye on Rye, Whiskey

We Recommend We Recommend

Beale Street Blues Music Festival

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date May 9, 2019

CREDIT: F11photo | Dreamstime.com

It only makes sense. If you’ve got a ton of top musicians descending on Memphis for a weekend, why not have a festival? On Friday, May 10th, the Blues Foundation’s Blues Music Awards celebrates 40 years of calling its finest artists home to Beale Street, to honor the pickers, players, and belters who keep the party going through the best and worst of times.

“So blues musicians from around the world are coming here for this event,” festival promoter Jim LoSapio says. Now in its fourth year, the Beale Street Blues Festival brings some of the most exciting nominees to Beale’s stages for solo sets and jams with local favorites. On Friday, May 10th, a $10 wristband gets festival goers into 14 venues. Blues music award nominees will appear on nine, with local acts holding down the rest.

F11photo | Dreamstime.com

Festival highlights include appearances by Ben Rice, who’s nominated for three awards, including best emerging artist, best acoustic artist, and acoustic album of the year. At Silky’s, Memphis’ own Barbara Blue hosts a jam showcasing soul blues nominee Johnny Rawls and drummer Bernard Purdie.

Fans of Bobby Blue Bland’s gospel-fueled R&B will want to catch Rawls when he guests with Rod Bland, who’ll be hosting a Bobby Blue Bland tribute and jam at B.B. King’s

“We’ve partnered with the Blues Foundation to pull this off,” LoSapio says.

“All the festival stages are inside,” LoSapio says, acknowledging a fact the blues artists and May festival goers know all too well. “Sometimes it rains.”

Letter From The Editor Opinion

This Sucks

Post author By Susan Ellis
Post date May 9, 2019

CREDIT: Bianca Phillips

Bruce VanWyngarden has gone fishing this week. His column returns when he does.

A few years ago, I was having lunch with a coworker who proceeded to go on a long and sort of crazy rant about how much she hates it when restaurants bundle their straws with silverware. After that, when someone complained bitterly about something of no consequence, “straws” became a sort of shorthand dismissal.

So where do we stand, Memphis, on plastic straws? Is this as an issue “straws”?

Bianca Phillips

As a single-use plastic, plastic straws are pretty bad. Millions and millions of plastic straws are used each day in America and then tossed out to litter our lands and shores. Some cities, like Malibu and Washington, D.C., have already banned them. In New York and Hawaii, legislation is pending.

In Memphis, we’re seeing more and more restaurants abandoning the plastic straw.

Janet Boscarino, executive director of Clean Memphis, which oversees Project Green Fork, estimates that about half of Project Green Fork members (about 40 restaurants) have given up plastic straws. But, as of now, Project Green Fork does not include anything about straws in their “6 Steps to Certification” for local restaurants.

“We certainly push for the elimination of single-use plastics, which straws would fall into that category,” Boscarino says.

For Earth Day, Project Green Fork did a program they called “Don’t Suck,” which highlighted recyclable options for straws, including paper and bamboo. “We are certainly trying to raise awareness around eliminating [straws],” she says.

For Boscarino, straws are just once piece of the puzzle in reducing food waste — from bags to food containers to the food itself.

Deni Reilly, owner of Majestic Grille with her husband Patrick, says that restaurant has been straws-by-request since it opened 14 years ago. They only began to use coated paper straws about two years ago. (They go through 12,000 to 14,000 straws in a month.)

Reilly says they’ve always leaned toward being environmentally conscious. They don’t provide water, except for large parties. Their to-go glasses are biodegradable.

She says with a laugh that they do it for the sea turtles.

Octavia Young, the owner of Midtown Crossing Grill, began backing away from straws in 2016 about a year after she opened. She says she was thinking about joining Project Green Fork and started looking at what she could do. She then put up a sign: “Straws are a one-time use item that never biodegrade. Your server will only provide straws upon request in an effort to reduce our footprint. Thank you.”

Young says reaction was mixed, but ultimately, no one can argue, because as the sign says, if they want a straw, all they have to do is ask.

“Hearing about how much [waste] a restaurant produces and actually looking at it for myself, I wanted to be a better neighbor in the community that we serve,” she says.

Scott Tashie has been thinking about straws a lot lately. Tashie is owner of City Silo and three area I Love Juice Bars.

“It’s something we’ve been trying to come up with a solution on for a while, actually,” he says. “And it’s super challenging. Obviously, when you’re in a beverage-heavy business, you want to always take care of your customers, and we’ve tried different options. It’s been challenging to find something that actually works.”

At one point, Tashie was using glass straws, but then his source stopped making them. He tried a bring-your-own straw approach, too. He admits that a straw is not something that’s particularly easy to carry on you, like a reusable bag.

Tashie has been experimenting with different types of straws. Forgoing them completely won’t work because of the smoothies he sells. He recently settled on corn straws that he hooked up with through his association with Malco. (He has family ties to the movie theater chain). Malco is currently working to get corn straws at all of its theaters.

Tashie doesn’t mind the extra cost of the straws. For him, it’s worth it. “There’s only one Earth,” he says. “You can’t really put a price on it.”

Tags City Silo, Deni Reilly, I Love Juice Bar, Janet Boscarino, Majestic Grille, Malco, Midtown Crossing Grill, Octavia Young, Project Green Fork, Scott Tashie, Straws

News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1577

Post author By Chris Davis
Post date May 9, 2019

Hats Off

Nobody not named Trump, Mueller, or Barr got more media attention last week than Memphis’ own U.S. Congressman Steve Cohen, who brought a small, plastic chicken to work.

He also brought a bucket of KFC to flavor Attorney General William Barr’s failure to appear before Congress with 11 herbs and spices. The screwball stunt — perfect social media bait and late-night fodder — remains fairly ubiquitous and will no doubt be mentioned elsewhere in the pages of the Flyer as well.

But comedy matters here at Fly on the Wall. Even in Congressman Cohen’s moment of glory, Sarah Silverman’s professional advice can’t be overstated.

“The plastic chicken is funny,” Silverman tweeted. “But the plastic chicken AND bucket of chicken isn’t — it’s what we call in comedy a hat on a hat.”

Game of Elvis

If this column has illustrated anything over the years, it’s this: Sooner or later, Elvis eats everything.

This week, King culture collided with Game of Thrones. Sophie Turner (aka Westerosi badass, Sansa Stark) married Joe Jonas of the Jonas Brothers in an Elvis impersonator-officiated ceremony in Las Vegas on the 57th wedding anniversary of Elvis and Priscilla Presley.

But wait, there’s more. Cosmo reports that trash from the ceremony has become collectable, and a discarded Ring Pop wrapper is currently going on eBay for $1,325. The saga continues.

Cover Feature News

The radical quilt work of Paula Kovarik.

Post author By Michael Donahue
Post date May 9, 2019

People don’t sleep under Paula Kovarik’s quilts.

“No, not on the bed,” she says. “Some of them might be a little too disturbing.”

Kovarik loves traditional quilts, but she’s never made one with a flower on it. Her quilts aren’t the conventional patchwork quilt with stars and diamond patterns.

Round and Round It Goes, one of her quilts, is about “all the threats in the world,” she says. “Like earthquakes and oil usage and financial collapse and dictators and endangered species and overpopulation and forest fires.”

Her quilts, which hang on walls, deal with everything from cancer cells and radio waves to TV signals and computer circuits.

Paula Kovarik

Kovarik, 66, an internationally known quilt maker who lives in Memphis, will be included in “Stitched: Celebrating the Art of Quilting,” which opens May 10th at Crosstown Arts. The festival, which Kovarik organized, features quilts created by artists from around the world.

“Stitched” will include two exhibits: “Masterworks: Abstract and Geometric,” a traveling exhibition of art quilts, and “Blue: A Regional Quilt Challenge,” which Kovarik curated. “Stitched” will also include a series of workshops, gatherings, and presentations that celebrate the art of quilting.

Paula Kovarik

Round and Round It Goes

Martha Sielman, executive director of Studio Art Quilts Associates, curated the “Masterworks” exhibit, which includes Kovarik’s Round and Round It Goes quilt. “What fascinates me about Paula’s work is that it is extremely simple,” Sielman says. “It’s almost completely just a simple black line on a background, but it’s also incredibly complex. Because the imagery she uses is very complex. It’s a really powerful combination.”

“Blue: A Regional Quilt Challenge,” curated by Paula Kovarik, is on display at Crosstown Arts.

Round and Round It Goes was quilted on a round tablecloth with scalloped edges. The viewer’s eyes follow a continuous stretch of black-and-white line drawing-looking images, which include buildings, clouds, and birds, that goes around and around in a dizzying fashion.

Dixon associate curator Julie Pierotti is another Kovarik fan. “I’ve been amazed by Paula Kovarik’s work since I first saw it a few years ago,” Pierotti says. “She takes a medium, quilting, that has such a comforting and sentimental connotation and completely turns it on its head. So there is the initial shock reaction, but when you examine each work closely and see the lines of thread moving through each work, you see how intricate they are and the thought and care Paula puts in.”

Kovarik, who was born in Michigan City, Indiana, says she always made things as a child.

One of her influences was a grade-school teacher who had the class interpret poems with drawings. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, you can think about words in a different way,'” Kovarik says.

As a Girl Scout, Kovarik learned how to make a fire and build a tent, but she also “learned to use needles in many ways: knitting, crocheting, and sewing.”

Kovarik, who credits her mother as being her first sewing teacher, made her own clothes as a child. “I was a very small fifth grader or sixth grader, whatever. They didn’t have the style of clothes that everybody else was wearing in my size. I really don’t remember if they looked good or not.”

Paula Kovarik

Heartfelt

It wasn’t the finished product that intrigued her. “I love any kind of tool. My father taught me how to use saws and hammers and lawnmowers. Mom was a total teacher in terms of cooking and sewing and all of the motherly arts. I really loved any kind of tool. I loved drafting tools. I loved construction tools.”

A tool is a way to create things, says Kovarik, who uses a sewing machine as the primary tool along with hand stitching to make her quilts. “It’s a way to use my hands to interpret what I’m thinking.”

Kovarik received her degree in graphic design from Southern Illinois University. “Part of our design training at SIU was full-throttled. There was a wood shop. There was a metal shop. There were typography lessons. Things like that. I think I was really enamored of the drill press. I liked to drill holes into things.”

Kovarik met her husband, Jim Kovarik, at a house party in Chicago. “Jim’s had many careers. He’s a writer. He has a master’s degree in technical writing. He’s also a farmer and a carpenter and a woodworker.”

They were back-to-the-landers up in Southern Illinois. “We had an organic farm. We built our own home,” she says.

Kovarik designed the house with the help of her husband. “We had a house raising with design students. It was passive solar. Jim has expertise with concrete, so we built it four feet into the ground for insulation. Oriented it to the sun so it would heat itself.”

They moved to Memphis in the early ’80s after “a family event,” Kovarik says. Their son, Damien, who was three years old, had leukemia. “He got sick, and we really didn’t have any money.”

They got Damien into St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, but Kovarik wasn’t impressed with Memphis at first. “I didn’t like it,” she says.

In the early ’80s, Memphis was “hard to be in,” says Kovarik, who remembers Downtown at that time. “Everything was boarded up.”

She got a job as a graphic designer at the Ron Hoffman Group. “It’s a great training ground because it’s a small agency. And I learned everything. I had to do everything. I was the designer. I did production work and all kinds of things for graphic design. I learned the business pretty fast because I was the only designer on staff.”

Life kept her in Memphis, she says. “I had a job. Jim had a job. I had started plugging into friends. Slowly but surely it felt like we belonged. We bought a house in Cooper-Young when Cooper-Young wasn’t ‘Cooper-Young.'”

Damien got well. “He’s got two kids. He’s 41 now.”

Their other son, Miles, was born in 1988 in Memphis.

Kovarik opened Shades of Gray, a freelance graphic design firm, where she worked for 30 years. “It was before the books were published. It was pretty amazing when those books came out. People would start giggling when I would answer the phone.”

Her business began doing well. She concentrated on her job. “Didn’t sew a whit for maybe 35 years.”

Her mother got Kovarik back to sewing. “My mother was retired. She started quilting just out of the blue. I thought it was really the most boring thing I’d ever seen. It’s just so traditional,” she says.

It seemed tedious to take squares of cloth “and put them together again and again and again.”

But, she says, “I thought, ‘Well, something in common with my mother. I’ll try it.'”

Kovarik didn’t feel quilting was her medium. And she knew she didn’t want to make a quilt to be used as a bedspread or tablecloth. “Those are beautiful. I love them. But not for me making them,” she notes.

Then she saw some non-traditional quilts. “I thought they were just really more modern interpretations of quilts. They were hanging on a wall instead of a bed. I thought that’s where I could go with this.”

Paula Kovarik

Kovarik describes her first quilt as “just odd patchwork. No rhyme. No reason. No pattern. Just abstract. Abstract compositions. It’s yellow, red, black, and white.”

It took her awhile to find her voice. “I think it took me three or four years to really find out how I was going to approach this medium, experimenting with various techniques and ways of putting quilts together. The more I did it, the more I understood where my voice was coming from.

“Sometimes I come to a piece with an intention, with a communication that I want to make. Other times I come to them just from an emotional standpoint. That can change the technique. It can change the dynamics of the fabric that I use. It can change how I approach a piece.

“Now I’m a little more comfortable in terms of technique. I know how I can do things. Now I’m a lot more free about really approaching it with a free spirit.”

Her work is “really difficult and complicated, but it’s more of an intuitive work than it was in the past. In the past, I had to think about what I was doing and how to do it. Now it’s just doing it.”

Among her quilts is Signals, which took three weeks of stitching. She describes it as “a raw extemporaneous exploration of chaos.”

Paula Kovarik

Signals

Incoming, which is more peaceful, has “flying elements that come in from the left side of the piece.

Paula Kovarik

Incoming

“Watching an insect fly across the yard might inspire me to draw his flight path. Little things that we’re not aware of can affect our reality.”

She made a pair of quilted pillows, which she titled Insomnia. “This was during the economic collapse when you can’t go to sleep because you’re thinking, ‘I’ll never be able to retire.’ I did a ‘his’ and ‘hers’ on that.”

Paula Kovarik

Insomnia

The pillows are favorites of Sielman. “One of the pillow cases is about her experience with insomnia, and the other one is her husband’s experience with insomnia,” Seilman says. “Some of it you can interpret as a viewer, and some of it is symbolic and it makes sense to her. But all you can see is what’s happening on the outside. I love the idea of using a pillow to create an artwork about insomnia.”

Kovarik began making more politically themed quilts after the last election. “I was compelled to do it. I am still compelled. I think we’re at risk. It shows up in my work all the time. The anxiety that I feel comes into my work. The feeling of ‘This is not right. This is really seriously wrong.’ The fact that the public accepts lies every day is really beyond thought.”

Paula Kovarik

Beastie Boy and His Pals

Her brother, Charley Havelka, built a wooden TV for her 14-foot-long scroll quilt, which is titled I Watch Too Much TV News. Yvonne Bobo, the sculptor, created a set of gears that are attached to rollers that rolls the quilt on a continuous 14-foot-long loop.

A lot is going on in the quilt, which includes images made with black and white thread. “There’s a lot of media people that are spewing things and talking about what’s going on. It’s broadcast over satellites and spewed through the air. Then all these various people screaming or shouting or yelling. We have tsunamis and hurricanes. There’s climate change.”

Paula Kovarik

Punditocracy

Prior to the Robert Mueller report, Kovarik created a quilt titled Redacted. The stark black and white quilt features broken lines that evoke a heavily edited document.

Kovarik also does abstract pieces. “I’m experimenting with line and texture and fabric to create whatever comes out. I really try to let the needle tell me where it’s going.

“What I’ve been doing for quite a while now is experimenting more with not only the quilt form, but also drawing with thread.”

Paula Kovarik

Sightlines

Kovarik makes quilts every day, but, she says, “That doesn’t mean I’m successful every day. There are some times I ruin things. A lot of mis-stitches. I can fix them, but sometimes it’s not worth it. Sometimes the composition is bad. Sometimes it’s overworked.”

Her quilts may stay unfinished for some time. “Like this one here,” Kovarik says. “I’ve put together these pieces of fabric. That pieced fabric will sit on the wall maybe a week or two just [so I can] think about what else is going to be on that piece of fabric. ‘How does the texture change it?’ ‘Why would I have texture?’ All those questions come up. Then the actual stitching is extremely time consuming.”

Her feelings result in a “surge of ideas” instead of a surge of quilts. “This is a slow art. I can’t do this quickly.”

She might spend three weeks to a year on one piece. “It’s slow, which allows me to be more contemplative about the message. It allows me to take the spike off the emotions sometimes.”

Kovarik closed her graphic design business about five years ago because she wanted to focus on her art.

She’s in her backyard studio every day — except for an occasional weekend off — from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. “With a lunch break.”

To date, she’s made about 70 quilts.

“There’s a lot of things that inspire me. Things that I see in nature and in other artists.”

She held up her Pollinators quilt, which she describes as a self portrait. “It’s about the feelings that I have and about things that I’ve seen or thought about. This is very natural. There are a lot of nature references. I’m consistently using grids in my life, so there’s one of those in there. There’s interior thoughts that are coming out. There’s computer circuits. There’s a little bit of everything in there. Putting those all together is kind of my statement of ‘Okay. These are some of the ways I think.'”

The quilt is double sided. “There’s a dark side and a light side.”

Kovarik began showing her quilts — and getting recognition — about 10 years ago. “A friend of mine came in. She saw the pile of quilts under my table and said, ‘What are you going to do with these?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I’m just going to keep making them. They’ll end up in some garage sale after I pass away.’ She said, ‘You know, there are shows.’ She gave me a couple of names of shows. I applied to one and got in.”

That was Quilt National, a biannual show in Ohio. “I entered. I was accepted. They put me on the cover of the book.”

City, the quilt she entered, sold for $3,000. Her quilts now range from $2,000 to $12,000.

But, Kovarik says, “I’m not interested in selling my work as much as I am in showing my work. I want my art to travel. I have made it a focus to get my pieces in shows that move.”

Quilt National, she says, travels to museums for three years. “I get to think that my message, my piece, my work, is being seen by lots of different people. That’s the focus that I have gone to since I started my work.”

Terri Phillips, exhibitions coordinator for Crosstown Arts, is excited about “Stitched.” Kovarik, she says, has “worked tirelessly for more than a year” as the organizer. “The ‘Blue’ show has brought in over 200 artists, makers, and quilters from the community, which is fundamental to the mission of Crosstown Arts.”

Phillips first saw Kovarik’s quilts in the artist’s solo show, which was held last year at Dixon. “I was floored. For me, they are very intricate and beautiful drawings, the lines being stitched. They are epic, eccentric — the highest compliment — and creative.”

She visited Kovarik’s studio during the planning stages of “Stitched.” “Her studio was a place I could have hung out in all day. Peaceful and quiet. Beautiful light.”

If she tells people she’s a quilter, Kovarik gets the same reaction from them. “They say, ‘Well, my grandmother used to do that,'” she says. “They think I’m doing traditional work. Bedspreads and lap quilts. Sometimes they’re interested or they’re curious enough and they ask to see my work. Sometimes they’re kind of speechless. They don’t know how to react. Sometimes they really like them.

“I stopped saying I’m a quilter. I say I make art with thread and fabric because it stops that grandma discussion.”

Tags ' 'Blue', 'Masterworks, Crosstown Arts, Paula Kovarik, quilts, Stitched

Music Music Features

Nots’ 3

Post author By Alex Greene
Post date May 9, 2019

When I sit down with Natalie Hoffmann, singer and songwriter for the band Nots, I begin comparing that band with a more recent group she founded, Optic Sink. “The songs for Optic Sink,” I venture, “are like Nots songs, but recontextualized and sung an octave lower.” She laughs and says, “Yeah! I’m exploring another octave. It’s super fun.” But later, going back to listen to Nots’ latest album, 3, to be released this Friday, I realize that the contrast is not so apt. For while the new Nots album, sporting plenty of guitar feedback squalls and galloping, jagged rhythms, is certainly nothing like the sequenced synthesizer grooves of Optic Sink, it features less frenetic singing than their past efforts.

Ultimately, the record reflects changes the band has undergone since 2016. It’s not just called 3 because it’s their third album; it’s also the first release of the band as a trio. Pared down to Charlotte Watson on drums, Meredith Lones on bass, and Hoffmann on guitar and synth, the singing can afford to have more dynamics because there’s more room for it. As the night wore on, I asked Hoffmann about such transformations and more.

Nots

Memphis Flyer: So Nots are a trio now. How did that come about?

Natalie Hoffmann: So Ally [Alexandra Eastburn, synthesizer player] left after our second album, Cosmetic. She left after we went to Australia, in order to pursue her art, and we thought for a long time about finding another person to play synth, sticking with me on guitar and second synth. But eventually it became clear that we would be better as a three piece. The three of us have been playing music together for so long that we feel like siblings, so bringing someone else into to that dynamic would be a lot to think about. And honestly, sonically, it worked out to become a three piece again. I play two synths now and guitar.

Did you find yourselves doing more overdubs to compensate for Ally’s absence?

It still sounds a lot like the live set up. We did add some textural elements in the studio, but it’s never so far that it wouldn’t sound like the song live. We recorded with Andrew McCalla at Bunker Audio. He’s recorded quite a bit for us, but on this one I feel like he had made all these advances in his recording setup. And we had made a lot of progress in how we were writing. So making these songs was a perfect meeting of where everyone was at.

Now we’re leaning in to what space can provide. I think you can hear what everyone is doing a little better. It’s nice to hear the rhythm section, and sometimes what I’m playing is a texture complementing that. Rather than two instruments that live in the treble world, competing for the space, when Ally was in the band. I thought that sounded really cool, too, but with the new album it just made sense to play to our strengths. But it still sounds like us. There’s a connecting thread.

Even your guitar playing is very synth-like, in that it’s often bringing more sonic textures to the band than chords or riffs per se.

Yeah, I think that’s the most appealing thing to me. I never really properly learned to play the guitar. I do wish I had the range of tools in my array to be able to whip out some great solo, but that’s not really how it worked out for me. So my strengths are more in the textural realm. And then having a simple melody that’s catchy, or a simple hook. Like in a Ramones song.

One of the constants in your songs is a kind of anger or defiance.

I enjoy writing vocals that are in the punk vein; the singing becomes more of this percussive element. But the trope of the angry woman yelling on top of music gets pretty old for me. Of course, to exist in America now, you’re angry all the time, and that is in the songs — this inequality, this gross distortion of anything that can be called a fact. But, I mean, it’s 2019. Everybody’s gonna have a whole array of influcences. If you do hear a band that’s truly just punk, it’s probably kind of boring at this point.

Nots will play a free record release show at Goner Records on Saturday, May 11th, and headline at B-Side on May 25th.

Tags 3, Natalie Hoffmann, NOTS

Politics Politics Feature

The Casada Controversy

Post author By Jackson Baker
Post date May 9, 2019

Having just spent the better part of four months in the company of the ever-diligent press corps covering the state Capitol in Nashville, I am unsurprised at their effectiveness in turning up truly sensational news about some of the principal figures in state government.

Most recent have been revelations, in the immediate wake of the late 2019 legislative session, concerning Cade Cothren, chief of staff to the Republican Speaker of the House, Glen Casada of Franklin, an elite suburb of Nashville. Actually, Cothren is now the former chief of staff, having been forced to resign after successively (1) being accused of altering an email date with the aim of putting a civil rights activist in jeopardy of the law for violating a judicial ban on contact with the Speaker; (2) having to admit that he used cocaine in an office of the legislature; (3) being exposed as a horndog and serial sexual harasser of interns and other young women.

Glen Casada

Casada himself — and we’re talking about the most powerful single individual on Capitol Hill these days — may well be in jeopardy, since the news regarding Cothren’s sexual marauding included samples of emails in which the Speaker and his young assistant exchanged sexist remarks and predatory speculation about specific women.

Casada had only just come out from under a barrage of unfavorable scrutiny for his having appointed an accused statutory rapist, Congressman David Byrd of Waynesboro, to chair a major education subcommittee, and of offering spirited defense of Byrd for months before finally and reluctantly removing him as chairman. Byrd remains in the legislature, however.

For further background, I’ll take the liberty of reposting an article I wrote for the Nashville Scene back in February (before the forced ending of Byrd’s chairmanship):

“If there is one fundamental difference between the current Speaker of the state House, Glen Casada of Franklin, and his predecessor, Beth Harwell of Nashville, it surely is in the fact that Harwell could be discreet in the extreme — to the point that she had difficulty gaining visibility in her race last year for Governor — whereas Casada is a veritable lightning rod for notoriety.

“This past week alone, Speaker Casada has pulled off a two-fer on the gaffe scale:

“(1) He managed to provide cover for Rep. David Byrd, accused of multiple vintage incidents of sexual misbehavior and freshly under fire for violating the First Amendment rights of students from his district visiting the Capitol.

“(2) On top of that, Casada was involved in a shoving incident with a protester of the continued presence in the Capitol of a bust of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, pre-Civil War slave-trader, accused architect of a battlefield massacre, and supposed Ku Klux Klan founder.

“Actually, you could probably make that a three-fer, in that Casada was, at the very least complicit, after the second incident, in the shielding by state troopers of his getaway from media members seeking him for comment following an intervening event in the Old Supreme Court Chambers.

“Apropos this latter point, it should be remembered that Casada was an official representative of state government at the recent convention of the Tennessee Press Association at the DoubleTree Hotel, where he welcomed the assembled journalists with an expression of gratitude and encouragement for their commitment to an ‘open and free’ press.

“The degree of Casada’s devotion to free inquiry by the media was further clarified in a portion of his odd, Trump-like response in a front-page comment to The Tennessean regarding the Byrd affair, wherein he said, ‘Unfortunately, the media has irresponsibly taken it upon itself to reinforce the self-inflicted designation of “fake news” while displaying a complete lack of journalistic integrity when needed most.’

“That comment would surely apply as well to the presence of a CNN crew conspicuously situated for hours outside a House hearing room on the second floor of the Cordell Hull Building on Wednesday — lying in wait, as it were, for an elusive Casada.

“As it happens, Casada had already indirectly — perhaps unwittingly — made himself available on a cell-phone video recorded by one Justin Kanew, a former Democratic candidate for Congress in the 7th District. Kanew pressed Casada on his resistance to ‘allegations’ of sexual misconduct against Byrd from several women, who were juveniles at the time, during his service as a teacher and coach in Waynesboro.

“Though as Kanew noted, other Republican office-holders had called for Byrd’s resignation, Casada defended the District 71 legislator (whom he called ‘David’) against the women’s charges, which he described as ‘fake news,’ and expressed his continued confidence in his own appointment of Byrd as chairman of the House Higher Education subcommittee.

“Most controversially, Casada said, in a double non sequitur which would become notorious, that ‘if I was raped, I would move. And hell would have no fury.’

“Casada had all the fury he could ask for this past week. And it ain’t over yet. The David Byrd affair has been re-ignited big-time, and the shoving incident with the Forrest protester is still reverberating, to the point that Capitol observers are openly speculating as to what the next chapter in the Casada saga could be.”

The next chapter for Casada, as it turned out, was having a cup of coffee thrown at him as he was boarding a Capitol elevator by the aforementioned Forrest protestor. That was the origin of the aforementioned judicial ban on further contact with the Speaker by Justin Jones, the protestor.

Just last Thursday, on the last day of this year’s legislative session, a fracas broke out in the House of Representatives when Speaker Casada ordered that the doors of the House chamber be locked to prevent the body’s 26 Democrats from walking out en masse in protest of the Speaker’s refusal to appoint at least one of them to a joint House-Senate conference committee on the last unresolved issue of the session, a bill in favor of block grant control of Medicaid funding in Tennessee. Representative G.A. Hardaway of Memphis was roughed up in the process.

Still later that evening, minutes before final adjournment, one of the women from Waynesboro who had kept a constant vigil on the David Byrd situation stood up in the balcony of the House gallery and began shouting at Casada, demanding that he resign. Cowbells began ringing elsewhere in the balcony in defense of her demand, and, as troopers moved to carry the woman out, Casada began pounding his gavel on the dais as if he could thereby silence the general cacophony and the criticism in the same way that he was used to demanding order in the House itself.

The session shortly ended, but then came the Cothren matter, and the Casada matter itself may well have further resolution.

Several GOP lawmakers have begun, either privately or publicly, to align themselves with efforts to oust Casada from his leadership position. Among them are current Speaker Pro Tem Bill Dunn (R-Knoxville), who said on Wednesday about Casada, “He and I had a talk yesterday. I shared with him my feelings about how I thought it would be better for him to step down. The truth eventually comes out.”

UPDATE: The Tennessee Firearms Association, a pro-gun group with close ties to many Republican legislators, urged Speaker Casada’s ouster in a blistering statement released on Thursday.

The TFA statement follows:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Tennessee Firearms Association calls for House Members to remove Glen Casada as Speaker

Nashville, Tennessee – May 9, 2019. Tennessee Firearms Association is calling for members of the Tennessee House of Representatives to vote to remove Glen Casada as Speaker of the Tennessee House based on investigations surrounding the lewd text messaging, the attempted coverup, intentionally false statements to reporters, and related concerns.

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John Harris, Executive Director of the Tennessee Firearms Association, states “The Speaker of the House is the third most powerful position in state government. That office holds unilateral control over most of the significant affairs of the House, such as appointments and removals of committee chairs. It would be an unquestioned breach of the public’s interest and trust to have a person in that office who is now proven to be willfully false in his dealings with news reporters and in responding to matters of significant public interest.” Harris continued, “since the Speaker is selected by the House members, it is ultimately the duty of all House members under their oaths of office and as public stewards to make sure that their selected leader is a person of unquestioned truthfulness, integrity and character.”

News reports from Nashville over the last 48 hours document without dispute that Speaker Glen Casada has been willfully dishonest when he attempted to cover up his involvement in the lewd text messaging and misconduct scandal, some of which involved the use of illegal drugs by the Chief of Staff while in government offices, involving himself and his former Chief of Staff. These reports reveal that Glen Casada knew who released the text messages to Channel 5’s Phil Williams as early as Tuesday of last week but that Casada intentionally questioned the existence and source of the text messages in a subsequent interview with Phil Williams and in a radio spot with Phil Valentine of WWTN 99.7 FM (” Now we know that @GlenCasada lied to me when he made up this vast left-wing conspiracy theory (à la Hillary Clinton) just to cover for this idiot Cothren whom Casada had the bad judgement to make his chief of staff. Time to go.” – Twitter post on May 8, 2019).

Elected members of the Tennessee General Assembly take an oath that is set forth in Article X, Section 2, of the state’s Constitution which contains this sworn declaration: “… I will, in all appointments, vote without favor, affection, partiality, or prejudice; and that I will not propose or assent to any bill, vote or resolution, which shall appear to me injurious to the people, or consent to any act or thing, whatever, that shall have a tendency to lessen or abridge their rights and privileges, as declared by the Constitution of this State.” As such, the members of the General Assembly are sworn to protect the interests of the public and to do so with the highest fiduciary and stewardship principles.

Harris commented “the members of the Tennessee Legislature have an affirmative and fiduciary duty to the people of Tennessee to protect the office of Speaker from being held by people who lack the integrity, truthfulness or trust that must be unquestionably present to serve in that office. Speaker Casada, by his conduct and willful dishonesty in a matter of public interest, has unquestionably shown to the other members and the public that he is unqualified to serve in of the highest offices of public trust in the State.”

The members of the Tennessee Legislature individually and collectively owe a duty to the people of the state of Tennessee to set aside personal friendships, loyalties and partisan partialities that they may have and act now to remove Glen Casada from the office of Speaker and to carefully select a replacement who can be fully and unquestionably trusted by the people of this state in this high office. The public has a right, set forth in Article I, Section 23, of the state’s Constitution to demand of their elected officials that they take action now to restore the office of Speaker by purging its current holder from power and the public should be exercising that right to demand accountability and integrity in all branches of public service.

About the Tennessee Firearms Association. The TFA is a nonprofit Tennessee corporation that is recognized by the Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(4) issue advocacy group. TFA’s focus is on issues that relate the rights and interests of Tennesseans under the 2nd Amendment as well as related interests in hunting, sport shooting, collecting and state sovereignty. TFA has been repeatedly recognized by the Tennessee Legislature for its dedication to protecting the rights and interests of Tennesseans.

Tags Cade Cothren, Glen Casada

Politics Politics Beat Blog

New Filing: The Background Papers of the Michael Harris Case

Post author By Jackson Baker
Post date May 8, 2019

CREDIT: JB

The pending intra-party litigation by several members of the Shelby County DemocratIc Party seeking to invalidate the election of Michael Harris JB

Michael Harris

as chairman of the SCDP has been supplemented with an abundance of new documents for the state Democratic executive committee to consider — all this on the eve of the first planned meeting, Thursday night of this week, of the newly elected SCDP executive committee.

As it happened, the local committee, amid an oft-turbulent discussion, took no action Thursday night but agreed, on a decision by Harris himself, to hear out a petition by SCDP executive committee member Sanjeev Memula to hold a new election. Memula’s petition asks for the hearing within 20 days, in accordance with local party bylaws.

Before the state party issued its response remanding the issue back to the SCDP, members seeking Harris’ ouster had submitted a series of documents:

The first grievance to the state committee, filed on April 10, focused on possible discrepancies in the rules of election practiced by the SCDP executive and grass roots committees on April 6, when Harris, a lawyer who has been suspended from his practice for a five-year period, was elected by one vote over “None of the above.”

Subsequent supplements deal with what the litigants believe is the unsuitability of Harris for the position of chairman, given a lengthy and still uncorrected record of professional infractions and misdeeds by Harris. In one supplement, immediately below, the litigants cite these issues in a general way; they specifically seek a public hearing for their evidence, Harris’ disqualification, nullification of the election results, Harris’ disqualification, and ultimately a new election.

This supplement, like all the others gathered here, speaks for itself:
[pdf-6]
The second supplement, immediately below, repeats the requests made in the first supplement and cites facts relating to Harris’ frequent efforts to claim bankruptcy protection, claims that the United States Bankruptcy Court has now expressly prohibited him from renewing:

[pdf-5]
In support of this second supplement, the litigants cite the specific efforts made by Harris in his quests for bankruptcy protection, listed below in a timeline:

[pdf-3]

Next is the order from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court revoking Harris’ privileges even to file for further bankruptcy protection:

[pdf-2] The next supplement is an itemized record of actions taken by the Board of Professional Responsibility apropos Harris’ suspension:

[pdf-4]
And the final, and most lengthy supplement, is an itemized chronology of the aforementioned infractions charged to Harris during his now terminated practice of law:

[pdf-1]

Tags Michael Harris, Shelby County Democratic Party, Tennessee Democratic State Committee