Author: Eileen Townsend

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Art Art Feature

Veda Reed’s “Day Into Night” at the Brooks.

It took the painter Veda Reed years to lose the horizon. In her younger years, the Oklahoma native would make landscape paintings about two things: land and sky. “Being able to see where the sky meets the land has always made me feel safe,” said Reed in an artist talk on Sunday, at the opening of her show “Day into Night.”

Reed didn’t want to remain safe. She wanted to lose her bearings, to lose the question of perspective posed by a hard horizon line. So she did what she had to do: She looked up. She began to paint the moon, and the sun, and especially the clouds. She joined a cloud appreciation society and read every book she could find about altocumulus, mammatus, nimbostratus.

If this sounds simple, it is. Reed’s oil paintings of clouds, brokered by moonlight or dawn, are simple in the way that faith is simple. They start at the heart of the mystery. They don’t attempt to offer anything beyond what’s there, the there-ness being both the most basic and most complex thing possible.

Looking at Reed’s 2011 painting King of Clouds (Cumulonimbus Incus with Mamma) — a mollusk-like formation suspended on the canvas in rosy browns — a John Donne quote came to mind: “That then this Beginning was, is a matter of faith, and so infallible. When it was, is a matter of Reason, and therefore various and perplex’d.” Per Donne, there is something “so infallible” about these paintings, which are about faith and not reason.

Reed has the uncanny ability, honed over decades of focus, to use two or three colors to describe sun streaks, or a wreathe of light around a full moon, or a scrim of clouds in the early morning. Her 2013 painting, Sun Streaks, involves deep blacks cut through with jet streams of yellow light. The light appears to emerge from inside the depths of the sky, a feature of the darkness rather than a separate entity.

Nightfall: Clouds and Moon 2006 from Veda Reed’s “Day into Night”

A painting like Nightfall: Clouds and Moon has the improbable effect of making you feel not as if you are in front of the painting, but as if you are surrounded by it. Likewise, the pendulous, green pouches of cloud in her 2000 work, Mammatus II (the mammary cloud), are perhaps not the literal visual description of a storm — but they feel like a storm.

When I look at paintings, I often ask myself something along the lines of what’s behind this painting? Why did the painter choose to combine these elements, in this style, to make this image? Reed’s work did not make me wonder, even for a second, what was behind the image. The clouds she paints are not images. They are symbols. Like symbols, they express meaning where the language has failed or not yet been invented.

Said Reed on Sunday, “I’ve always been interested in nature and its cycles, and I began to want to paint those in a way that would allow people to pause and think about them.” She has succeeded, to say the least.

A note: This is my last art column for the Flyer. I’ve loved writing about art in Memphis for the past three years. Listening to Veda Reed talk about her art to a packed room this past weekend, I have to admit that I cried more than is maybe appropriate in an artist talk. The love that people have for Reed and her work epitomizes, for me, the way that people in our small art community support each other. I’m so happy to be from this city. So thanks for letting me write about your art, and for reading, even when I got it wrong.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Me Before You

We begin our story in the women’s restroom of the Paradiso movie theater. I am peeing. I am also listening to the sound of five or six teenage ladies crying — full on, chest-heaving bawling. One of them is angry: “Why would they think that ending was OKAY?!”

I am ashamed to leave the stall. I did not cry at all during Me Without You, the summer’s romantic-tragic blockbuster about assisted suicide. I listlessly examine my ply of toilet paper and ask myself: What’s wrong with me? Am I even human? How did I get here?

Surely, it’s the algorithm’s fault. In bleak mid-winter, I began to see the ads every time I opened my browser. The plot of Me Before You is adeptly summarized by the estimated 18,000 different versions of the trailer, pushed to my smartphone via Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, whatever. Checking my feeds for the past few months has been like walking around wearing a human billboard that reads “EILEEN IS GONNA PAY 11 BUCKS TO SEE THIS SHIT.”

Me Before You starring Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin

You can learn this much from 30 seconds of nested advertisement: Louisa Clark (Emilia Clarke, or the Mother of Dragons) is a kind, small-town woman with wacky taste in sweaters and few ambitions. She becomes a caretaker for total babe Will Traynor (Sam Claflin), a paraplegic man whose life of wealth and success has been cut short by a spinal cord injury. He has a bad attitude, but Lou brightens it. You can tell when they fall in love because Lou starts wearing sexier outfits. Then we learn that Will has been planning to kill himself. Can her love save his life? Has it saved hers?

There should be an adjective for rom-com movie plots that are just Pride and Prejudice with modern gilding. We could call them Pri-prejudicial. They work off the Austenian premise that when a blank-slate woman meets a rich and smart and inevitably rude man, she can teach him about having a heart. He, in turn, will neg her into a broader understanding of the world.

These Pri-prejudicial plots are usually successful because women like myself pour ourselves onto the shell of a female lead. The fantasy is that we don’t need to offer anything, not even a whole human personality, in order to be loved by a man with limitless hotness and power. We are relieved of the burden of our own growth. When Lou proclaims to Will, “I have become a whole new person because of you,” it reverbs through an echo chamber built inside the hollow husks of a century’s worth of empty women characters.

This is where MBY gets interesting. Spoilers ahead. Instead of the usual ending, MBY kills Will Traynor. He sacrifices himself so that Lou can have a full life. He leaves her a trust fund and instructs her to enjoy herself.

We have our usual all-knowing paternal archetype in Will, a father, boyfriend, and omnipotent God wrapped into one, who teaches Lou to love classical music and watch movies with subtitles. But in order for Lou to fulfill the character growth portended by her sexy mid-movie makeover, the dude has to actually die. We get a Lou, then, that is both the perfect wife/caregiver heroine AND the perfect independent woman. Is this a radical feminist tale in which Lou, mother spider, must eat her husband post-consummation to gain her full power?

It is, at least, a working excuse for why I exited the bathroom and raised an eyebrow at my weeping peers. Toughen up, ladies. We’ve got some men to eat.

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Cover Feature News

A Night at The Ditch

It would be easy to miss the Riverside Speedway if you didn’t know where you were going. You can find the oval dirt track, known to regulars as The Ditch, at a sharp turn off I-55, just across the old bridge in West Memphis, Arkansas. There, a white building marked “American Legion” and a grassy parking lot backdrop the country’s oldest continuously operating dirt racetrack. If you pass by the track on a Saturday evening between 7:30 and 10:30, you’ll hear the unmuffled thunder of hand-built engines. It’s loud, but loud doesn’t quite get it. To explain the sound of 15 revving engines in musical terms: It’s as ugly as a Guns N’ Roses revival tour, but as exciting and all-around-American as Guns N’ Roses in 1987, in their “Welcome to the Jungle” era. The Riverside Speedway is a place worthy of a guitar solo, or six.

When I visited on an evening in late May, the races hadn’t started yet. The sun was setting and cut long shadows through the bleachers. A small crowd was gathered around the concession stand. I picked up my tickets from a booth with a sign on the front that read, in an emphatic red font: “NO WHINING, JUST RACE.” I made a mental note to not whine, and just race.

Beyond the gate was a mud pit, permanently indented with tire tracks, where the drivers and their crews set up white trailers for the night. The air smelled like burning rubber and fry oil, but not in a bad way.

The drivers, men and women from 16 to into their 60s, wore customized fire suits and tinkered with their cars. The cars looked, variously, like crumpled aluminum cans, or — in the case of the pint-sized sprint cars — like Mad Max for a tribe of post-apocalyptic fourth graders.

There were several different models lined up to race that evening, and the pit was crowded with “stocks,” “modifieds,” and “wing sprints.”

Dirt racing cars are distinct from their NASCAR cousins in that they have more character and variety. They are also more homespun. The stock cars at the speedway look like they are purely cage, motor, and sheet metal. The modifieds have a kind of aerodynamically raised back and special rear suspension, like country Batmobiles. Wing sprints look like single-rider cartoon go-carts, except with 800 horsepower and topped with tilted rectangles of sheet metal to keep them on the ground.

These cars are mostly built by the folks who drive them, or friends and relatives of the folks who drive them, and so it’s not wrong to guess at how the character of the vehicle relates to the character of its owner. Many have the driver’s name printed on the side, plus a number. I noticed one with a bold script across its back that read “2 Hard 2 Tame” and tried to imagine something similar printed on my Prius. No dice.

I traded a little cash for a corndog and a plastic bowl of fries before meeting up with Tommy Mullins, the speedway’s race director. Mullins has a kind face and the kind of Southern accent you might expect from a West Memphis racetrack director. He wore a ballcap, headset, and dirt-caked sneakers as he toured me around the track in his golf cart. Mullins, like virtually everyone at the races, is a dirt track lifer. He got hooked in his early twenties (later than most people, he pointed out) and has devoted himself to what he calls “a very expensive hobby” ever since, even though he doesn’t race anymore.

Speedway aficionados pause for snacks.

As Mullins and I talked, the stands begin to fill and dusk settled over the track. ‘Tween girls wearing pink noise-cancelling headphones self-segregated from their younger brothers. Grandfathers and babies and teenagers on dates all posted up in the bleachers. The pit was similarly age-diverse. People gathered around their trailers or assisted with the cars.  

“We’ve got kids out here now who are racing their grandmothers or grandfathers,” said Mullins. It makes sense: The Speedway has been operating since 1949, mostly with the same crowd of about 200 families from various corners of the Mid-South. When people talk about being “in the life,” they mean it. The Riverside Speedway must be one of the only spots in the world where you can drive a thousand pounds of sheet metal at 100-something miles an hour and be competing with your grandfather.

A family (above) prepares to race.

Mullins drove his golf cart over the crest of the dirt track and into the infield (“It’s pretty special to see things from out there”), where we watched as modifieds lined up for what are called heat races, or qualifying rounds. Before the races kicked off, we paused for a stadium-wide prayer. The announcer asked that God watch over recent graduates, the races, the armed forces, and the country. We sang the National Anthem, hands over our hearts.

The cars circled, bumper to bumper, before kicking into high gear. As they sped around the oval, flecks of mud and rubber showered over the thin divider fence and into the stands. At the turns, the bodies of the cars raised up so that the wheels slipped under them. The track is a classic short track, a quarter of a mile in all, as opposed to the two-mile-long superspeedways that you can find at Talladega. I felt as if I could barely glance at a car before it had already circled me again.

As the cars pulled through the infield to be weighed, Mullins pointed out last year’s winning drivers, and others who’d been around the track for years. He told everyone who drove through: “Good job out there.”

I asked him if he had favorite drivers. “Oh, you know, I try to stay impartial,” he said. “But I root for people who have either been doing it for a long time or young people with a lot of energy. And good sports. I appreciate good sports.”

Dirt track racing is a sport with a long history. Popularized in the 1920s, it is the progenitor of races like Talladega and the Indy 500 but remains as unpretentious today as it was in the early 20th century. You don’t need to know anything about the sport to have a good time at the races, but if you’re interested in the nitty-gritty, the best method might be just to go to the track and hunt down the oldest-looking guy or gal you can find, buy them a beer, and listen.

The weekly program, a glossy magazine full of pictures of racers and their cars, spells it out: “Come to Riverside International Speedway every Saturday night with your friends and family for a fun-filled night with thrills, chills, and spills, YOU WILL LOVE IT! COME ONCE AND YOU WILL WANT TO COME EVERY RACE NIGHT!!”

You can also do what I did to prepare and randomly search YouTube for “dirt track racing” and listen to a playlist of the top five songs about dirt track racing, the best of which is surely a rap-country crossover by a man named Kenny Montgomery, from his mixtape King of the Kuntry 4, called “Dirt Track Thing.” In “Dirt Track Thing,” a viral hit, Montgomery provides a complete lexicon of dirt track racing terms and talks about his “waffle house queen” (“Yeah buddy, that’s a dirt track thing”). It’s educational. Mullins drove me back to the pit when he went to turn on the stadium lights, a nightly task, and introduced me to a driver named Linda, who’d come out to compete in the stock car competition. Linda Kerbough had a new car, and, when I met her, she was frustrated that it wasn’t running like she wanted it to run.

Linda Kerbough works on her stock car.

“It’s a little loose,” she said, unapologetically. “I don’t usually look like I do out there tonight.” She was dressed in a fire suit with her name illustratively printed across the belt. Her blonde, layered hair was swept up in a casual ponytail. She was wearing diamond earrings, and, I noticed, she sported a French manicure. Stylish.

Mullins had described Linda as “a character,” which, after meeting her, I translated into “a powerhouse.” She told me that she’d worked a 70-hour week at her job in medical management, before spending her remaining waking hours trying to get her new car in order.

“You live, eat, breathe, and sleep it,” she said, casually removing a piece of sheet metal from the front of the car and peering in with a metal flashlight. “I built motors for 21 years. There’s not much I can’t do out here now.” Linda directed my attention to a crew of men that were busy with various tasks around her: “That over there is my ex-husband, and there is my … well, I guess you’d call him my ex-step-grandson, but he’s just my grandson. He’s racing tonight.”

The ex-step-grandson in question, a cherub-faced teenager named Clay Coldwell, walked over to us. I asked him what it was like to race against his grandmother. “We’re related most of the time,” Clay said, smiling. “But out there, it’s like we never met.”

Clay Coldwell

Linda nodded, “Yeah. He’s just another car. He’s competition. Everyone is your competition.”

When I settled into the stands to watch the stock car race, the announcer was talking about his grandkids over the PA system. “We’re really proud of the recent graduates,” he said. “I have a granddaughter who just graduated from LSU.”

I looked around at the kids and parents who’d made it out, imagining that they’d probably still be coming to the track however many graduations, marriages, funerals, and family reunions later. At that moment, dirt track racing seemed less like an event and more like a way to arrange your life — like collecting art or scuba diving or playing multiplayer video games. Only more fun and with your whole family. It’s just a guess, but families who built motors together and kick up this much dirt probably need less therapy than most.

The feature race for the stock cars started. I kept an eye on number 26, an apocalyptic-looking black car that looked like it had driven through several circles of hell to arrive in West Memphis. I also noticed Clay Coldwell, in an orange car, number 18, hanging out in fourth place. Coldwell’s car looked like it was made out of a fine foil and a sturdy set of K’NEX. Linda was somewhere behind, in a car emblazoned with a blue skull on the hood and the number 66. The front-runners were number 1001, Ricky Vandergriff — who, I was told, was last year’s champion — and, close behind him, number 53, driven by Nathan Brown.

For 15 laps, Vandergriff and Brown kept it neck-and-neck. At times, I would think that 53 was gaining, only to see 1001 pull into the lead. The cars got dangerously close to one another, to the point where I thought that they might knock each other off-course. I’ve driven a race car once, and not very fast, but the experience bears almost no similarity to regular driving: You can feel every effect of the G-Force. It’s like being on a roller-coaster that you are controlling. In this case, it’s like a roller coaster you are controlling on dirt.

As Vandergriff gained the lead, I overheard a small boy, a couple rows in front of me, yell, “Every race I come to! Every race I seen, he wins!”

An official in a box overlooking the track waved a white flag, meaning there was one lap left. The sound of the engines was overwhelming as Vandergriff roared into the curve. When the official waved the white checkered flag signalling the finish, many people were on their feet, cheering.

Vandergriff pulled through to have his car weighed, and then parked, as did Brown. Two teenage girls wearing racetrack tees carried a large stock card that proclaimed “Feature Winner!” to Vandergriff, a middle-aged man whose features I couldn’t make out at distance, except to see that he was smiling. Everyone posed for a photo in front of the car. Brown walked up, and he and Vandergriff also posed for a photo.

“Look, there’s Nathan Brown posing with him right after he almost spun him out,” commented the announcer. “That’s friendship right there, folks.”

If you’d asked me a few weeks ago to describe to you the most quintessentially American scene that I could possibly imagine, I’d have described something that wouldn’t even come close to the consummate American-ness of the Riverside Speedway, which may be the most American place in America. They have fast cars, country music, corndogs, hamburgers, Budweiser in cans, an American flag, enthusiastic crowds of 8-year-old boys with buzzed hair, women in jean cut-offs, and lots of mud. The drivers, Mullins mentioned, have plastic visors on their helmets that they can rip off and replace “when a big ol’ hunk of mud hits you in the face.”

It’s also American in that “make your own fun” kind of way. As the night went on, I watched cars catch on fire, run out of gas, spin out, and lose metal from their bodies. The modified race started with what looked to be 15 or 20 cars but stopped almost every other lap when disaster struck a driver, and his ride had to be towed off the track. The sprint races (two separate events — for “360 Wing Sprints” and “2-305 Wing Sprints,” which denotes a size difference) were even more high-octane, with the cars running at around 120 miles an hour in a muddy circle. I watched this last race from a set of stands in the pit, where it felt like at any moment the small cars might upend and crush us.

As the night drew to a close, the drivers loaded their vehicles into the trailers. It had been a quiet night at the track. I could see drivers and owners taking account, looking over the distress to their cars, calculating their chances for next Saturday.

I wandered the pit and ended up in conversation with a wiry man named Lynn Irwin, who has raced a modified and a stock car. Irwin’s elder daughter, April, also races, while his other daughter, Chelsea, who is 18, has been a trophy girl for several years. (“Being a trophy girl can be really nerve-wracking, especially when it’s your family out there!” said Chelsea.) April, Lynn said, was out for the season. He smiled: She’d just found out she was expecting a child.

Lynn smoked a cigarette as I asked him how the night had gone for him. “Well, one of the cars raced okay.” He nodded towards a second trailer, “The other, not so much.” He didn’t seem that concerned as he loaded the cars up and headed home for the night.

After all, there was always next Saturday.

Categories
Art Art Feature

Work by Josh Breeden and E.A. Chase.

St. Francis Elevator Ride, i.e. designer and artist Josh Breeden, makes digital collages that look roughly like what your grandmother might have seen if she took acid and spent a long time exploring her 1960s kitchen. Tequila-sunrise-tinted backdrops create a ground for bouquets of metallic machinery, while illustrative body parts float somewhere in the natural order.

In a new show, “Lush Interiors,” at the Memphis Botanic Garden, Breeden expands his practice into three dimensions: The collages are separated out on several wooden planes, which, in turn, are bolted together to create a layered image. Breeden makes the cuts using a CNC router, and so, like everything else on the Elevator Ride, the panels are cleanly designed. This approach is a step forward but not a departure from the artist’s earlier work, which variously portrayed the crystallized and melting visage of Miley Cyrus and mid-century dinner parties gone psychedelically haywire.

Tending the Typing Pool by St. Francis Elevator Ride

The collages in “Lush Interiors” bring to mind Renaissance botanical drawings. The outsized fruits of the artist’s imagination, coupled with some engineering-style linework, give the impression of a Taxonomy of the Weird. Even the assumed name seems to confirm: St. Francis, old world patron of the natural, goes on an elevator ride, otherwise known as the No. 1 American experience. So it makes sense that there is a good mix of gross Americana and transcendent florals visible in the work.

Breeden is a great designer, and his work as St. Francis definitely walks a border between art and design. But I’d be curious to see what would happen if he abandoned his spic-and-span design sensibility and let in some mess. After all, a 1960s grandma on hallucinogens would probably not have the time to clean.

Contemporary blacksmithing is not so much a job as it is a vocation, like nunhood or being a Hollywood stuntman. The average American teenager doesn’t just stumble into a smithy on the way home from Anime club, and so the few current-day souls who choose to spend their life in a forge are special. In my experience (and I used to work at the Metal Museum, so I get to have an opinion), the field is populated with people who love doing things the hard way, appreciate nature, make bad puns, and are usually very sturdy.

Bear these traits in mind when you go see the blacksmith E.A. Chase’s exhibit of engineering sketches, on view at the museum through October 2nd. The small exhibit is located on the first floor of the museum’s library building, and, though it isn’t the flashiest show in the museum’s history, it is certainly one of the most candid. You can imagine Chase, a white-bearded, veteran craftsman, sitting in his California studio and carefully shading in his imaginative designs of steel mermaids, copper monkeys, and iron dragonflies.

E.A. Chase’s Proposed Sculpture for the City of Exeter, California

Chase is one of the 20th century’s most noted blacksmiths, a New-York-educated craft revivalist whose designs are both innovatively engineered and unusually artful. The artist made his drawings of gates, lamps, railings, chandeliers, and fireplace sets for a seemingly whimsical and monied Californian clientele. His butterfly-shaped steel gates, lovingly sketched on velum paper, will make you want to acquire coastal property and grow citrus fruit. Hand-serifed letters and accompanying sketches of miniature blacksmiths only add to the candor and charm of the work.

The show of Chase’s drawings offers visitors a chance to visualize the labor and extensive planning that goes into large-scale metalworking projects, even those that never came to fore. There’s something sad and beautiful about the drawings for projects that were left somewhere in the balance. One structure, a proposed public commission, showcases the complete history of the city of Santa Cruz from indigenous history to tech economy. The drawing is elaborately made, but the gate never came to fruition. A brief note beneath the piece reads that it “floundered in politics.”

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Eye In The Sky

It took me a good five hours, a long bath, part of a novel, and a cute animal YouTube marathon to relax after seeing Eye in the Sky, the new movie about drone warfare. It is not a pleasant movie to watch — which is fine; a pleasant movie about drone strikes would be weird. But if a movie is going to deal in violence, you at least hope that there is a point. We should learn something. With Eye in the Sky, I’m not sold.

In a 2013 article for The Atlantic called “Killing Machines,” journalist Mark Bowden writes, “Drone strikes are a far cry from the atomic vaporizing of whole cities, but the horror of war doesn’t seem to diminish when it is reduced in scale. If anything, the act of willfully pinpointing a human being and summarily executing him from afar distills war to a single ghastly act.”

In theory, Eye in the Sky is a 102-minute exploration of the “single ghastly act” of a drone strike. Set between a British cabinet room, an arms sales conference in China, air force bases in Nevada and Hawaii, and a militarized Somali neighborhood in Kenya, the movie attempts to split the difference between the scale of drone warfare and the hyperlocality of the actual violence. We are asked to weigh the cost of one civilian girl’s life — the “65 percent chance of collateral damage” — against the military imperative to kill the terrorists. There is little movement throughout the film; instead, we get a thriller-esque focus on a few locations and characters. True to life, we often see what is happening through the lens of the drone.

Aaron Paul

Helen Mirren stars as Col. Katherine Powell, a British officer in charge of the time-sensitive operation to capture the terrorists. Either Mirren underplays the role, or the role is underwritten. Either way, the star power in the film is carried not by Mirren but by the late, great Alan Rickman, who stars opposite Mirren as Lt. General Frank Benson, the commanding officer in charge of clearing military decisions with the legal and political powers.

Rickman is great as Benson, even if you get the feeling that he can play the asshole-military-guy-who-is-not-really-an-asshole in his sleep. Both the film’s emotional depth and the rare moments of lightness are given to his character: At the start, we see Benson buying a doll for his daughter on the way into work. He realizes it is the wrong model of doll and asks a military assistant to replace it before he enters into the war room. At the close of the movie, [SPOILER AHEAD] just after we learn that Benson’s operation has killed the young Somali girl, the military assistant thrusts the correct model of the doll into Benson’s hands. Benson looks confused, then slightly horrified, then resigned. “Thank you,” he says.

Contained within a single, 12-hour military shift, Eye in the Sky follows the escalation of a planned “capture operation” in Kenya to a full-scale “elimination operation” when Col. Powell realizes that the subjects of the capture have on suicide vests. Military communication pings between two soldiers in Las Vegas, British and American politicians, and on-the-ground Kenyan spies. Meanwhile, we watch as young Somali girl, Alia, goes about her daily business: playing, reading, selling bread. We learn that her family are not militant. When Alia sets up shop next door to the military target, we get our ethical problem, contained within a single aerial shot.

From the get-go, it is easy enough to predict that the little girl is not going to get out alive. Alia and her family are tragic, sympathetic characters. But they, like everything else in Eye in the Sky, come off as canned. And that predictability, passable in rom-coms and sci-fi flicks, is a serious offense when you are trying to represent the very real lives caught up in hi-tech wars.

Eye in the Sky, in its attempts to frame everyone as just the right kind of ethical actor in a crazy world, is like The West Wing with more drones and fewer witticisms about the SATs. It plays on the most obvious of our sympathies (little girls are good; terrorists are bad; soldiers are just doing their jobs) and in so doing, 1) dismisses the more interesting underlying hows and whys of drone warfare, and 2) substitutes uninteresting fiction for facts. If you want facts, read journalism. Watch a documentary. Don’t listen to a character named General Frank Benson when he puffs up his chest and tells a crying female politician to “never tell a soldier he doesn’t know the true cost of war.” If that kind of sentimentality is your preferred mode of truth, let me instead direct you to some palatable Tim McGraw songs.

A more interesting film about the disconnected warfare might also include meta scenes in which, for 11 dollars a pop, an American moviegoing audience watches a fictional film about drone violence. It’s hard to feel, watching Eye in the Sky, like you are not somehow participating in the riddles of violence and scale that the movie attempts, but does not succeed, in answering.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Private Contractor Makes Millions Off GPS Trackers for Immigrants

Sofia Gonzales* had just gotten off a long shift at her weekend job when we met for coffee on a recent evening. The young woman, who carried herself with the confidence of a senior class president, was dressed in her work uniform: a T-shirt and black, bell-bottom pants. Despite being tired from work, Sofia introduced herself energetically, directing my attention to her feet. She explained, as she adjusted the fabric where it flared around her ankle, that she wore these pants for practical reasons. The loose fabric concealed a heavy, black device wrapped around her ankle. In Spanish, she called the device her grillete — or, in English, her “shackle.”

“I feel embarrassed,” Sofia told me through a translator, gesturing toward the plastic ankle bracelet. “This makes me feel like a delinquent. People look at me like I am a criminal.”

Sofia has no criminal record, neither in America nor in her Central American home country. She is a recent immigrant to the United States and is currently seeking asylum from violence that has affected her family. She wears the device, a GPS tracking bracelet, as a part of a controversial immigration initiative known as the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program. She wears the monitor 24/7, including when she sleeps and when she showers. Sofia is one of 178 adults and juveniles in Memphis, and of 497 in Tennessee, and almost 50,000 nationally who wear GPS ankle monitors. None of those wearing the shackles are considered criminal risks by the U.S. government.

From outward appearances, Sofia’s life seems like that of a well-balanced 20-something. She has a job and legal authorization to work. She lives with a few family members in Memphis and enjoys playing sports, though her participation is hindered by the half-pound monitor. She is learning English.

Despite having to charge the monitor for several hours a day, which requires her to tether herself to an electrical outlet, she is able to lead a semi-normal existence. She says that she feels like, even though she has only been in Memphis for a short time, she has already accomplished a lot.

But, like many undocumented individuals, Sofia is afraid that she will be sent back to a dangerous city in her home country where she is under threat of violence and where her relatives have been killed. She says that she wants to go by the rules here, that she has been fastidious about following immigration restrictions and guidelines. But while her case hangs in the balance, she is subject to what she, and others in her situation, see as a demanding, confusing, and unfair surveillance program.

“Why would I run away?” asked Sofia. “I don’t understand. I have done everything they asked. I want to be here.”

A Big Business

The 24/7 GPS monitoring of undocumented individuals is still a relatively new feature of the immigration system. The program was introduced in 2004 by Immigrations Customs and Enforcement (ICE) as a way to monitor and control the movement of immigrants who the government determines have no right to be in the country, but who, for any number of reasons, are not detained. Many are women and children. Since its inception a decade ago, the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) has expanded by tens of thousands of participants. It is promoted by ICE as an “alternative to detention.”

Advocates for the supervision program point out that GPS monitoring bracelets have the potential to be more humane, especially for juveniles and caregivers, than federal detention.

They also point out that the program saves the government money. According to ICE, the average daily cost per ISAP participant is $4.45, whereas detention can cost the government over $150 a day per participant.

But the program has come under fire from human rights advocates — including groups such as the Women’s Refugee Commission, Detention Watch Network, and, locally, Latino Memphis — who see it as offering a wrongheaded “solution” to something that was not a problem in the first place. Asylum-seekers such as Sofia, according to advocates, are not what ICE refers to as “flight risks” and do not deserve 24/7 surveillance. Critics argue that ISAP exists not for security, but for intimidation and private profit.

The GPS supervision of migrants is big business and getting bigger every year.

ISAP makes millions of dollars each year for the private contractor, GEO Group, that provides and monitors the bracelets. GEO Group is, according to their latest financial report, “the sixth-largest correctional system in the U.S. … including the federal government and all 50 states.”

In 2015 GEO Group’s total revenues were roughly $1.8 billion dollars. ISAP is one of its biggest contracts. GEO Care, the GEO Group subsidiary that operates ISAP, made more than $302 million for the company in 2015. ISAP is operated by a GEO Care subcontractor called BI, which stands for “Behavioral Interventions.”

Critics say that the profitability of the tracking program creates incentive to expand the program, which criminalizes asylum seekers. They also maintain that the way the program operates — locally, in Memphis, and nationally — can be opaque and even unconstitutional.

Casey Bryant, an immigration lawyer with Latino Memphis, sits for a portrait in Memphis.

Casey Bryant, an immigration lawyer with Latino Memphis, says, “They say they are helping, but they are actually just violating people’s human rights and trying to redistribute costs to immigrant families. In effect, immigrant, undocumented families are paying for other family members’ detention.”

Watched Women

Ana Ramirez* first came to the United States in the mid-2000s. A young refugee from a war-torn state, Ana has lived without papers almost her whole life. She lived and worked as a domestic employee in an abusive situation in Mexico before migrating to the states. She now has school-aged American-citizen children. Her husband, also an undocumented immigrant, is the sole provider for her and the children.

A year ago, Ana left the states to see family in Mexico and attempted to return. Upon her re-entry, she was detained and released with an ankle monitor. She was told by ICE that ISAP was optional, but if she declined the ankle monitor she could be detained.

“When I first came to the country, I walked in the desert for three days and nights to get here. I felt free,” Ana says. “Now, with the grillete, I feel like a prisoner. I feel ashamed. I don’t leave my house.”

Ana’s story is similar to the other four women who agreed to be interviewed for this article, all of whom requested to remain anonymous for fear of negative ramifications to their immigration cases. Compared to the younger Sofia, Ana has less mobility or agency. She has no means of regular transportation and cannot work. She is waiting for what’s known as a “credible fear interview,” which would establish in court that she has legitimate reason to fear a return to her home country.

A survivor of domestic abuse, Ana — and other women like her — is in a vulnerable position. She cannot speak English, and, though she has applied for work authorization, the stringent measures of ISAP would keep her from having a weekday job. She depends on her husband for transportation and support.

Unlike many, Ana does have legal counsel. She sought out a lawyer after an ICE officer told her, during a check-in, that she had to buy a plane ticket back to the country where she was born. When she said she did not have enough money to buy the ticket, she was told by ICE to go to a church and ask for charity. “I was scared,” Ana said. “I was confused.”

Since then, Ana’s lawyer has fought to get her case back into immigration court, where Ana could be granted asylum. In the meantime, Ana wears the monitor, which causes her headaches, and is often hot and uncomfortable around her leg. She says that the monitor is a source of constant stress.

But when asked whether, if she’d known she would be monitored, it would have dissuaded her from coming into the country to be with her children and husband, Ana’s answer is simple: “No.”

An Unclear System

Like all the women interviewed for this story, Ana does not know how or why her schedule of in-person check-ins is determined. She also does not know why she was selected for monitoring, when others with her same immigration status do not wear the monitors. She does not know when or if it will ever be removed.

A spokesperson for ICE told the Flyer that “when determining whether or not an individual should be enrolled in the ISAP program, numerous factors are considered on a case-by-case basis. These factors include, but are not limited to: current immigration status, criminal history, compliance history, community or family ties, being a caregiver or provider, and other humanitarian considerations.” Each person’s specific requirements under ISAP are also determined on a case-by-case basis.

Ana has a particularly stringent regime of check-ins: Once a week, her husband takes her to the immigration office to see her assigned ICE officer, a process that can take between one and seven hours. Also once a week, on another day, a representative from the private security contractor visits her at home. The contractor searches her home, though Ana has not been told why.

Ana’s lawyer is concerned about the legitimacy of the home searches.

“They have no warrant to search her home,” says her lawyer, whose name is withheld to preserve Ana’s anonymity. “But they are working under ICE, and ICE is getting away with violating their constitutional rights. But then when you go and complain, ICE tells you, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, this is in lieu of being detained.’ Well that doesn’t leave us with a lot of room to argue because we don’t want that for them, and they don’t want that for themselves. It is a hard case to make.”

Two of the four immigrant women interviewed for this story also reported that their homes had been searched. Another woman, Elena Vargas,* said that the private contractor told her that she was a social worker when she came to her house. “She said she was a social worker,” Elena said, “but I knew she was not a social worker.”

When asked whether these searches were protocol, representatives from BI and ICE did not comment.

Once, when Ana was on her way to see her lawyer, a BI employee called and asked her where she was going. She felt intimidated. Said Ana’s lawyer of the incident, “They are watching them very, very closely.”

Bryant said that she had a client who’d been in the country for months and was called into the ICE office on routine business. There, her client was, without warning, given one of the monitors. Bryant said that she has had difficulty interacting with representatives from BI on behalf of her clients and was told that BI case managers “don’t speak to lawyers.” When Bryant asked the case manager direct questions, the contractor avoided eye contact and spoke only to Bryant’s client.

Said Bryant, “A lot of people have no idea why they got [the monitor.] They say, ‘They basically just slapped it on me.’ And, you know, you don’t just slap someone in jail. You don’t just throw them in there and not tell them why.”

A History of Alternatives

The idea for alternatives to detention is nothing new, but the idea that those alternatives should involve 24/7 surveillance is something that emerged after 9/11, with the genesis of the Department of Homeland Security. Alternatives to detention (ATD) programs have grown and changed alongside greatly expanded immigrant detention programs.

Before 1996, the only non-citizens detained were those considered by the government to be a flight risk or a security threat. There were fewer than 10,000 beds reserved for detained immigrants in facilities around the country. There are now more than 30,000 beds in facilities across the country, many of them in private facilities operated by GEO and another private corrections company, Corrections Corporation of America.

Alternatives to detention programs have changed from focusing on social work to focusing on surveillance.

A 2012 report by the Rutgers School of Law-Newark Immigrant Rights Clinic, in conjunction with the American Friends Service Committee, contrasts the current iteration of ISAP with a pre-9/11 alternative, the Appearance Assistance Program, run by a group called the Vera Institute of Justice:

“The program was intended as a true alternative to detention, in that the Vera Institute screened detained immigrants in New York and New Jersey to determine eligibility for release from detention and acceptance into the program. The program assessed its 500 participants individually to determine the best methods of supervision in order to ensure appearance for court hearings and compliance with removal orders …

Over the course of three years, the Vera pilot program reportedly saved the federal government an estimated $4,000 per individual participant. Beyond being cost-effective, the AAP showed remarkable success in its goal of ensuring attendance at hearings.”

The Vera Institute’s program was aimed at making sure non-citizens met their court requirements. It did so successfully, without the need for surveillance, but surveillance by for-profit companies is becoming the norm in the international migration industry.

In an interview, Michael Flynn, executive director of the Global Detention Project, commented on the expansion of surveillance programs: “There is clearly and has been for the past 30 years an increase across the globe in using enhanced technology to ‘manage migration effectively.’ It runs the gamut from evasive and harsh practices such as ankle bracelets to things like exchanging databases across countries so that they can better identify people. This involves a lot of outsourcing [to private companies.] I’m not an anti-privatization activist, but one does have to wonder whether or not these practices are encouraged by companies that have something to gain.”

Elena Vargas says that, because of the monitor, she is ashamed to leave her house.

An Endgame

All four women interviewed for this story expressed that, while the physical and time requirements of being monitored are burdensome, the hardest thing for them is the stigma of wearing the monitor.

“People look at me like I have murdered someone,” Elena said. “I don’t want to go to the hospital when I am sick, or to the grocery store.”

The women feel intimidated and confused — something that, according to immigrant rights advocates, seems to be part of the point. They cite the opaqueness of ISAP as part of what makes it intimidating.

The 2012 Rutgers report on ISAP highlighted a number of flaws in the program, including ICE officers’ lack of “clear and up-to-date” guidelines, a lack of a public and standardized assessment tool for who participates in the program, a lack of consistency, and the inhumanity of constant supervision. Rutgers put forth suggestions for more community-based models as well as greater transparency on the part of ICE.

Those suggestions have not been answered, either nationally or in Memphis. Meanwhile, since 2012, the number of men, women, and children enrolled in the 24/7 GPS supervision program has grown by 20,000. Sofia, Elena, Ana, as well as their children and families, wait to find out what will happen to them.

“I feel like this is pointless,” Sofia said. “I could cut it off. I could run. But I don’t want to. So why are they doing this? It’s overdone. We get it. We are not supposed to be here.”

*Names, details, and photos were edited to protect the identities of individuals in this story.

Categories
Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

Is the RedBall a Veiled Comment on Mass Surveillance? (Probably Not)

CREDIT: Kurt Pershke, RedBall Project in Paris

Kurt Pershke, RedBall Project in Paris

The RedBall in Paris

The Brooks Museum of Art announced this week that as a part of its centennial celebration, it is bringing artist Kurt Perschke’s “RedBall Project” to Memphis. The “RedBall Project” is a temporary and site-specific installation piece that involves the placement of a giant, inflatable red ball at various significant points around town. The locations where the Ball will be placed are determined by Perschke, who spends time biking, walking and otherwise exploring the city in the months before the Ball is placed.

The Ball’s placement in other cities has looked loosely to be the work of some toddler-like deity: balanced at the edge of bridges, inflated in doorways, shoved beneath underpasses. It’s funny and unsettling without being too unsettling. It says, “Hello, this is an international city where inexplicable art stuff happens.” It’s the kind of thing Memphians will remember years out: “Ah yes,” we’ll murmur to our cyborg grandchildren, “2016… the year that we were visited by the Ball.” Here are some pictures of the “RedBall” in other cities, so you can get the idea.

In short: the Ball will be fun. The Ball will be different. The Ball should (but will probably not be) placed directly on top of the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, like a bloated clown nose. The Ball will introduce temporary and site-specific art to Memphis, and it will do it with cosmopolitan style. We are good with the Ball. But will the Ball be a veiled comment on mass surveillance? Let’s discuss.

A hypothetical situation: It’s a sunny midsummer day in Memphis. You’re walking down the street, drinking an iced latte, when you notice that your favorite intersection has been visited by a massive red ball. You stop drinking your latte, mid-sip. You feel suddenly more aware of yourself, of your puny human size, of how zoned-out and unquestioning you were moments before. The RedBall has seized your attention, changed your relationship to the corner and how your body feels as you approach the corner.
You move closer. The RedBall stays in its position. Maybe you put a hand out and feel its rubbery redness. But you can’t move it. It’s really heavy. So you circumnavigate. Your latte-infused commute has been effectively changed, forever. Meanwhile, the Ball is mute, unchanging, super-bright in its super-occupation of public space.

This is a weird experience, huh? Or maybe it is not so weird, because it triggers something in your brain. It triggers the memory of the other thing that was recently installed on your favorite corner: that blinking, blue camera box that provides the Memphis Police Department with 360-degree surveillance of your block. Operation Blue CRUSH, as the camera boxes are called, also made you check yourself in public space. The camera established a ball-shaped zone of spherical surveillance that, while invisible, is very much palpable.

Before you come at me with accusations like, “Oh, what, are chemtrails real too?”, ask yourself: What is the point in a big, red, ball? Our public art could conceivably be anything. It need not be static or silent. It need not be immobile or durable. It could ask things of us. It could tell a story. But a red ball does none of those things. A red ball is just a silent presence — an elephant in the proverbial “room” of the commons.

Is the “RedBall” a comment on the normalization of mass surveillance? Probably not. But will the way we meet it be more normal because Memphians are used to large and inexplicable presences in our neighborhoods?? It’s possible. Whether or not it is intended (and, let’s be real, it’s not), the fact is that in its red and spherical reticence, the Ball is like surveillance: whether or not it watches us is beside the point. The point is that it makes us watch ourselves more closely. Now excuse me while I go get a latte.

Categories
Fly On The Wall Blog Opinion

Meme the Malco Bootlegging Hoodie Guy, Please

You may not know that you know him, but if you have ever arrived at a Malco movie early enough to watch the pre-show trivia and ads for local dentists, you probably also have met Bootlegging Hoodie Guy.

See? Bootlegging Hoodie Guy — let’s call him Malco Jedi — is a local hero. He’s a friendly face that reminds us that, while recording films in theaters is illegal, it is also done by cool and weirdly handsome dudes in street wear. In Malco Jedi’s evil-but-slightly-amused expression, we have a memorable anti-hero, a small potatoes local villain who reminds you of that n’ere-do-well guy you dated in college. You know, the one with the contraband. 

Malco Jedi is a meme waiting to happen. He is the defender of the people. He doesn’t need the law because he makes his own rules. He hates authority but has a strong sense of interior justice. This is why Malco Jedi is the rightful defender of the good parts of Memphis. He’s anti-corporate, a skeptic with a cause, a guy you can call when you need someone who won’t tell the cops. 

Meme him. He deserves a meme. We deserve him to be meme-ed. Go forth, download the meme-making app on your smartphone, and put some text on this pic. Do it for the kids. Here are some (not as funny as they could be) examples. 

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

“Broad City” and “Girls” Vie For The Voice Of A Generation

Abbi Jacobson and Illana Glazer of Broad City

It is unfair that Broad City and Girls are so often mentioned in the same breath because the two shows’ differences are many, while their similarities are surface-level. Both are half-hour comedies about white, female friends in their mid-twenties as they navigate sex, jobs and friendship in New York City. Both are written, directed and acted by their female creators. And both are saddled, time and again, with defining Who Young Women Are for the dry sponge of baby-boomer-run media. With both series debuting new seasons this month (Girls on its 5th and Broad City on its 3rd), we should ready ourselves yet again for an endless puddling of comparative lit devoted to the shows, in the mediocre company of which we can count this blog.

Despite their skin-deep similarities, Broad City and Girls are different species. It’s easy to love Broad City and hate Girls. It’s fun to watch Broad City while, at times, it almost physically hurts to watch the self-defeating character machinations of the women and men on Girls. And while Lena Dunham’s sea-change of an HBO show tends to garner criticism for its white, middle class myopia, Broad City gets a critical pass, even a critical hi-five.

Broad City, a Comedy Central production, takes the classic plot approach pitting its odd couple leads against an episode-defining event. One of the show’s inaugural episodes follows Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer as they try to raise money to go to a Lil Wayne concert, navigating everything from Craigslist to the Q Train to make it happen. In its newest episode, Abbi and Ilana struggle to make it to a former roommate’s art opening, encountering rabid warehouse sales, a circus school graduation, and a moving porta potty along the way. The structure is predictable but the take is fresh — the show’s humor is expertly patched together from whatever was on Twitter last week and the fucked up story your friend from college told you about her crush. In this new episode as in the past two seasons, they pull it off.

Formally, Broad City is the “Frogger” episode of Seinfeld taken to its logical conclusion. Nothing ever happens. It doesn’t matter if George Costanza gets Frogger across the street or not. It doesn’t matter if circus school is in session. It is less about the characters, lovable as they are, than it is about the weird fabric of New York City. This bodes well for the series longevity, so long as the writing stays good.

But the by-the-book approach of Broad City also somewhat limits what I cringe at calling the “radical potential” of a show like Broad City, because, at the end of the day, this is a complex portrait of being young and loving weed and hating your job in New York City, but it’s a simple draft of what female friendship looks like.

Allison Williams, Jemina Kirke, Lena Dunham, and Zosia Mamet of Girls

Girls— frequently intolerable, unkind to its characters, caricatural, too white, set in New York City but never on the subway (this really annoys me) — nonetheless stakes a more difficult claim. It still seeks, and has always sought, to expand the category of what kinds of female relationships, bodies and emotions can be shown on mainstream television. In its 5th season, we meet Marnie (Allison Williams) on her wedding day, neurotically over-directing her doomed nuptials with chronically selfish boyfriend, Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach.) (If you don’t want spoilers, stop reading here.) Hannah is on hand, acting surly: “She has been so inappropriate and unsupportive of me all day,” Marnie complains to Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), while Jessa (Jemima Kirke) flirts with danger in the form of Hannah’s ex, Adam (Adam Driver). The episode switches lithely between the women’s wedding preparations and the men’s. The writing is good: “This conversation sounds like a fucking E. E. Cummings poem,” rails the series current hero, Ray, when Adam and Hannah’s new boyfriend engage in a long-form, male emotion-grunting session. 

As far as episodes go, the newest is far from the most challenging. Girls cut its teeth on crack, nudity, awkward sex, alcoholism, BDSM and (perhaps most offensive) painfully unlikeable characters. None of that here. The biggest success of the first episode of the 5th season of Girls is that we have the same characters, improbably intact, that we started out with years ago. They have changed the way real people change — subtly. They have not been good friends to each other, but they have not been entirely bad friends to each other. Instead, the quartet of women proves something that is very true but too rarely portrayed, which is that sometimes your best friends are not the people you most like, but the ones you end up with. And that is okay.

Yes: With the start of these new seasons, I still feel some aversion to watching Girls and I like watching Broad City. Both are good shows. Neither offers a good five point summary of what is means to Be Female and In Your Twenties Today (take note, think-piece editors of the world.) They aren’t really even comparable, except that when both premiere new episodes next week, I have to say — despite how much fun Broad City is, I’ll probably watch Girls first. 

Categories
Art Art Feature

“Blind Navigator” at Crosstown Arts

If someone were to draw a Venn diagram that had, on one side, a circle that held within it “truly funny stuff” and, on the other side, a circle that contained “contemporary painting,” the realm of overlap would be next to nonexistent. If you don’t immediately think, “Wow, contemporary painting, LMAO,” that is because the kind of contemporary painting that makes it to museums and galleries is not usually very funny, and when it tries to be funny, it is often becomes even more un-funny. Your standard art jokes are up there with the worst forms of humor — self-referential, often elitist, dumb.

We need funny art. Not knee-slap funny, George-Carlin-as-a-painting funny. Not puns. (Never puns.) What we need is the kind of work that makes you feel like someone has opened a window to let air into the room. What contemporaneity demands of us is art that is heavy as a Rothko chapel but light as a Kanye meme.

The best local entrants in the category of “it makes you laugh, but you’d also frame it” are painters Alex Paulus and Clare Torina, whose exhibition, “Blind Navigator,” is currently on view at Crosstown Arts. Both Paulus and Torina have a talent for making work that is visually and conceptually depthy and feels drawn from some kind of long-lost iPhone scroll. We need paintings like Paulus’ Forever Dog, which features a panther-like canine harbinger of an unknown apocalypse, infinitely looped into his own black shadow. Or Torina’s outsized Wet Wipe in Paradise, an LP-shaped version of a wet wipe, which neatly draws a through-line between Jimmy Buffett, sterile Floridian resorts, and bottom-of-your-pocket paper refuse.

From Wet Wipe in Paradise to That Seems Not Right, Clare Torina and Alex Paulus create dreamlike art that is simultaneously funny, familiar, and surreal.

Torina, who lives and works in New York but got her bachelor’s degree in Memphis, makes paintings that feel digitally collaged but with none of the tautness and restraint of Photoshop. In Torina’s paintings, shadows appear without whatever or whoever cast them. Dreamlike elements — temples, pets, pants, bones, and flowers in Styrofoam — coexist in an unnaturally immediate space. There is a feeling of the surreal-in-the-sharable that lends the work a familiarity.

Paulus has been making and showing paintings around Memphis for years. The work in “Blind Navigator” is his best to date. Paulus’ style, which is plasticky, grotesque, and always a tinge nihilistic, really hits its stride in paintings like No more P bear (a polar bear with a red “X” painted over its face) and Rig King (a goony blond guy shouldering a missile.) As far as names go, both Torina and Paulus follow Los Angeles-based artist Jim Shaw, whose sardonically titled “Thrift Store Paintings” recently merited a retrospective in New York’s New Museum. Paulus’ work, like Shaw’s, feels down-to-earth, only in a universe that has flipped its shit. Paulus’ work exists in a world of internet tabloids and Reddit. To quote the title of a Paulus painting that shows a series of messily skewed celestial paths: That seems not right.

Paulus and Torina arranged “Blind Navigator” so that nothing feels quite to-scale: a toilet paper roll the size of a toddler holds a silk flower while hand-painted human bones lie in a pile nearby. Another work by Torina is a pair of checkered pants, Freudian in proportion, called For Grandpa’s Ghost. These details chock up to a subtle Wonderland effect.

“Blind Navigator” is an uncommonly good show. It takes risks. It joins a dry sense of humor with an “only in Vegas for the night, baby,” bring-it-on sensibility. It is critical without being cynical. Paulus and Torina meet the challenges of making paintings in an image-saturated age smartly, and with warmth.