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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Waiting on Judgment Day

CREDIT: The Squirrel Hill Cafe | Facebook

I lived in Pittsburgh for nine years. I know Squirrel Hill well. It’s a storied neighborhood of big sycamores, winding streets, and lovely old houses. It’s near Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, where I used to spend a couple evenings a week teaching writing to eager and not-so-eager freshmen. It’s close to WQED, where I used to work, editing Pittsburgh, the city’s magazine. Fred Rogers worked in the same building and lived nearby. I used to drink and eat at the Squirrel Hill Cafe, aka the “Squirrel Cage,” a great old neighborhood bar.

So when the news of a shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue appeared on my laptop last Saturday morning, I didn’t have to imagine the scene; I could easily visualize it. The latest episode of the American Horror Story was playing out in one of my old haunts — just as it’s played out in Las Vegas, Charleston, Parkland, Sutherland, Texas, and 151 other American hometowns since 2016. Just as it also played out in Kentucky, last week, and in Florida, where a would-be assassin attempted to kill two former presidents and a host of other notable Democratic politicians with pipe bombs.

The Squirrel Hill Cafe | Facebook

America is infected with hate and violence, and the disease is spreading. Most presidents, when they have seen a divide in the country, have sought to heal it. This president sees the divide and seeks to exploit it. Polarization and rage have become the new normal, and it’s coming from the top down.

Can we change course? Yes, but it’s going to take dedication and commitment and time and unrelenting activism — the kind of citizen involvement that drove the civil rights movement and stopped the Vietnam War — the kind of activism that jams the gears of power and changes the country’s direction. As Patti Smith sang, “the people have the power.” We just have to tap it.

It’s easy to be cynical, but if you doubt the power of activism, I point you to Memphis, Tennessee, where in just the past couple of years, activists have stopped the city council from letting the Memphis Zoo take over Overton Park’s Greensward for parking; brought down Confederate statues in city parks; stopped the TVA from drilling wells that would tap our precious aquifer; joined with ACLU to stop the Memphis Police Department from surveilling citizen activists; and halted (as I write this) the city council from using tax-payer funds to promote three self-serving ordinances.

That doesn’t include the women’s marches, the Black Lives Matter march on the I-40 bridge, the marches against this administration’s inhumane immigration policies, and numerous other citizen-led movements. The pot has been stirred. The people are woke. And we are a week away from judgment day — or, better said, the first judgment day, for this will not be a quick change.

I do not for a minute allow myself to believe there will be a magical “blue wave” that will transform the country’s zeitgeist next Tuesday. I do believe there will be gratifying and surprising victories, just as I believe there will also be depressing and frustrating defeats. But I am hopeful the pendulum has swung as far as it can toward “nationalism” and the open promotion of ethnic hatred and divisiveness. And I am hopeful the plague of angry male white supremacists wreaking havoc and terror on innocent Americans on a weekly basis can be stopped, or at least forced back into the sewers from whence it came.

After the attack on the Tree of Life, the Pittsburgh Muslim community immediately offered aid and comfort to their Jewish brothers and sisters. That is America at its best, and it’s who we can be if we resist seeing each other as “globalists” or “nationalists” or “bad hombres” or “Fake News” purveyors or “Pocahontas” or whatever other hate-boxes the president seeks to put us into. I believe Americans are better than the president thinks we are. We just have to show it. Starting next week.

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Politics Politics Feature

Defining the Divide on the Shelby County Commission

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

In the month and a half that the current version of the Shelby County Commission — the one in office as of the August 2nd county general election — has been meeting, it has become clear that serious division of opinion exists on the body, more or less along party lines.

But, so far, no open antagonism has manifested itself. That fact would distinguish this commission from its two immediate predecessors — the commission of 2010-2014, which saw animosities flare between members, and the one of 2014-2018, which saw open warfare between a bipartisan contingent on the commission and the county mayor’s office.

Two key votes at the commission’s Monday meeting indicated the divides of this commission. One vote was to approve a vote of no confidence in the recent decision by the U.S. Department of Justice to terminate a Memorandum of Agreement with Shelby County providing continued DOJ oversight of problems with Juvenile Court.

Jackson Baker

As Democrat Tami Sawyer (right) speaks to a no-confidence resolution on end of DOJ oversight of Juvenile Court, Republican Brandon Morrison looks on disapprovingly.

Both a commission majority and County Mayor Lee Harris have publicly disapproved of the decision to end oversight, and on Monday the vote on the no-confidence resolution, co-sponsored by Commissioner Tami Sawyer and Commission Chair Van Turner, both Democrats, passed by a 7-4-1 vote, with the four opponents being four of the commission’s five Republicans — Brandon Morrison, Amber Mills, David Bradford, and Mark Billingsley — while the fifth GOP member, Mick Wright, abstained.

A second resolution, this one co-sponsored by Sawyer and Edmund Ford Jr., requested that the Memorandum of Understanding between four major law-enforcement branches — the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office, the Memphis Police Department, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, and the Shelby County District Attorney General — be amended “to include TBI’s investigation of critical injuries” resulting from law enforcement shootings.

The resolution’s essential point was to enlarge TBI oversight of such incidents. The vote was similar, another 7-4-1 vote, with Wright joining the dissenters this time and Bradford abstaining.

This basic divide, along party lines, is likely to continue, especially on issues of social significance.

• Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, made a stop in Memphis on Saturday at the National Civil Rights Museum for an installment of the DNC’s “Seat at the Table” tour, designed to galvanize the involvement of African-American women in the party.

In his farewell message to attendees, Perez took note of one of the major issues on the November 6th ballot — the referendum for Memphis voters on repeal of Ranked Choice Voting, a method for determining winners, sans runoffs, in multi-candidate races in which no candidate has a majority.

“I’ve spent a lot of time on that issue,” said Perez, after giving a hat-tip to Steve Mulroy, the University of Memphis law professor and former county commissioner who has been a major proponent of RCV (aka Instant Runoff Voting), scheduled to be employed in the 2019 city election, unless repealed.

Perez suggested that “the Republicans” were “trying to take it away,” though in fact it was incumbents of the nonpartisan Memphis City Council who implanted the repeal referendum on the ballot.

“If I were living here, I’d vote no on that referendum, because you’ve already voted for it,” said Perez, who referred to a previous referendum, in 2008, when Memphis voters approved the process by a 70 percent majority. “It forces candidates to talk to everyone, instead of just that one base. It fosters civility because you can’t ignore 70 percent of the people.”

Perez went on: “Talk to them! What a radical concept. That’s why y’all voted for it, and that’s why they don’t want it.”

• Three weeks after Mike Stewart of Nashville, the Democrats’ caucus chairman in the Tennessee House of Representatives, came to Memphis to investigate Republican House candidate Scott McCormick, Stewart returned to reveal his findings.

What he’d been looking for was the absentee record from Shelby County Schools board meetings of McCormick, who is trying to unseat Democrat Dwayne Thompson, the upset winner in 2016 of the District 96 House seat.

Back on October 10th, Stewart and fellow Democrat Marjorie Pomeroy-Wallace spent an afternoon in the county Board of Education building waiting in vain for McCormick’s attendance records.

That was then. On Monday, Stewart and Wallace were back in front of the Board of Education building — but this time with a large standing chart showing, line by line, the apparent actual record of McCormick’s attendance on the board committees he has belonged to.

The chart purported to show that McCormick had missed “at least 72 of 94 committee meetings,” which translates into an absentee rate of 76 percent. “It is a record of chronic absenteeism,” said Stewart. “He consistently missed critical meetings on critical subjects.” Stewart gave as an example the issue of academic performance, which has been the focus of much concern in regard to Shelby County Schools.

“Of 25 meetings on academic performance, Scott McCormick attended just five. What can we expect when he gets into the legislature and nobody’s watching? He was AWOL and obviously should not be promoted to a new assignment. What are you going to do in Nashville when nobody’s supervising you?”

Stewart said the SCS office had not furnished him with written attendance records, but only with recordings, from which he and others had determined McCormick’s attendance record from listening to roll calls. “We had to listen laboriously to every one of them,” he said.

Asked for a reaction, McCormick said Stewart’s figures were misleading. “First of all, committee meetings on the school board aren’t like those in the legislature, which conform to a fixed, predictable schedule.” The School Board meetings were arranged around members’ convenience and availability according to ad hoc questionnaires, he said.

Moreover, said McCormick, “no action is taken at the committee meetings, nothing is voted on,” and any material developed in them is made available to board members in the monthly work sessions that precede by a week the board’s public business sessions. McCormick claimed an attendance rate of 22 out of 23 public business meetings at which votes were taken. And, he said, his attendance record at the evaluations committee, which he heads, was 100 percent.

McCormick said, in effect, that the focus on his attendance record was a red herring and that the main issue of the House race should be the matter of who best could benefit Shelby County in pushing for advances in education and economic development. He said that, as a member of the legislature’s majority party, he was better poised than Thompson to be effective in those regards.

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News The Fly-By

Sacking the Bag

CREDIT: Maya Smith

A new Memphis City Council rule would place a seven-cent tax on each plastic bag consumers take from retailers that are 2,000 square feet or larger.

Council chairman Berlin Boyd said the motive behind the move is not to make a profit, but to help sustain the environment. Specifically, Boyd wants to protect the city’s waterways, which he said are overly polluted by plastic bags.

“It’s all about protecting our waterways,” Boyd said. “Because once those bags get out in the environment and they blow around, they’re going in drainage ditches, under your car, in a tree, and in the water. It’s about protecting the aquifer.”

Maya Smith

Plastic bags like these could cost you 7 cents apiece.

Scott Banbury, conservation program coordinator of the Tennessee Chapter of the Sierra Club agrees that the use of plastic bags should be limited, as they are contaminating waterways and causing a slew of other issues in the environment.

“Plastic bags are a primary source of microplastic pollution in our waterways, the main cause of the rejection of curbside recycling, and clog our storm water drains, contributing to local flooding problems,” Banbury said. “Short of an outright ban, a tax on bags will cause people to reconsider their use and choose reusable bags.”

However, Banbury said plastic bags are not an immediate threat to the Memphis Sand Aquifer, the source of the city’s drinking water.

“Plastic bags could lead to eventual contamination of the aquifer with microplastics, but it would take a long time — decades, or hundreds of years, depending on whether the microplastics find their way to a breach in the clay layer that protects the aquifer,” Banbury said.

Keith Cole, executive director of the Wolf River Conservancy, said it’s for that reason that his group supports the proposal, as “plastic bags are a nuisance.” Rain and gravity often move plastic bags from the ground to a waterway, he said.

“Anyone who spends time outside in an urban area would probably agree that plastic bags are an environmental concern,” Cole said. “Unfortunately, we find them in many many places, whether it’s on the ground or wherever. Anything that ends up on the ground can end up in a river. If it ends up in the Wolf River, it ends up in the Mississippi River, the Gulf of Mexico, and eventually out into the ocean.”

When the plastic breaks down, the particles can be consumed by fish that could ultimately be consumed by humans, Cole said. Research is showing that chemicals from plastic are starting to end up in humans’ bloodstreams.

Plastic bags also often interfere with the recycling process, causing machinery at the recycling facility to malfunction, Joyce Williams, Memphis’ Solid Waste recycling administrator said.

“Probably the most confusing thing about plastic bags is that they often have a recycling symbol printed somewhere on the bag,” Williams said. “Within the recycling facility, plastic bags and plastic films get caught within the machinery and cause work stoppage, broken belts, and damaged machinery.”

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News The Fly-By

Fly on the Wall 1549

Uranus Breakdown

WMC has something to say about Uranus. Actually, they have quite a lot to say about Uranus.

In an episode of “Breakdown,” a weekly programming segment aimed at kids, meteorologist Sagay Galindo explained why conditions were perfect for looking at Uranus with or without magnification.

The online copy is written straight, but it’s a joy to read aloud: “On most nights Uranus is hard to see even with a telescope but for the rest of the month, you may be able to spot it without one or with binoculars, according to NASA. Uranus is going to be in a good place for viewing the next few days.”

As is the case with most of WMC’s “Breakdowns,” this was good, science-oriented content. But it’s a proven, scientific fact that Uranus will always be funny. Especially when it’s visible.

CA Watch

The Commercial Appeal’s been hiring new reporters, but is the paper still shrinking? On October 23rd, a memo was sent to CA employees offering retirement to Memphis-Newspaper-Guild-covered people in the newsroom who are 55 and have worked with the company 15 years or more.

“The Commercial Appeal is offering an Early Retirement Opportunity Program (“EROP”) to eligible Guild-represented employees in the newsroom,” the memo said. “Time is of the essence. We, therefore, ask that that you sign and return this document to me within 48 hours. The severance deal is based on 30-35 weeks’ pay with a transition bonus of up to $5,520 determined by years of service.”

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Cover Feature News

Radical Humanity: Indie Memphis 2018 Reflects Its Roots — and Memphis

When Miriam Bale came to Memphis last November to be on the jury for the 20th annual Indie Memphis Film Festival, she didn’t know it would change her life. “It was very well organized and warm,” she says. “It was one of my best experiences at a festival. There are a lot of places that don’t have that loving vibe.”

As the festivities wound down, she found out that festival programmer Brandon Harris had been hired away by Amazon Studios. “So a window opened up, and the sun came out,” she says.

Bale is a Bay area native who has interned for legendary documentarian Les Blank, programmed film for museums and venues on the East and West Coasts, and written film criticism for The New York Times. At first, she was hesitant to apply for the job of Indie Memphis programmer, but by the time 2018 rolled around, she found herself tasked with filling up multiple screens over seven days in November.

Miriam Bale

Along with shorts programmer Brighid Wheeler, she has assembled an ambitious and inclusive lineup for what promises to be the biggest Indie Memphis yet.

Asked if she had a guiding philosophy behind her film choices, she says “It was just to do what you guys had always done, but ramp it up. … The structure was already there, and so was the idealism. It’s not the Memphis Film Festival. It’s the Indie Memphis Film Festival. It’s all about independence.”

Indeed, many of the films on offer at Indie Memphis 2018 feel like a call back to the festival’s formative years, when heart was valued over polish, and unconventional voices were not only tolerated but embraced and celebrated.

Bale says working as a film critic opened her eyes to the predominantly white, male power structure that has historically dominated the mainstream film industry, shutting out the voices of women and people of color.

“As a writer, I would criticize that, but it seemed like I was writing the same thing over and over again. So instead of criticizing, I was able to work with [Indie Memphis Executive Director] Ryan [Watt] and Brighid [Wheeler] to create a utopian version of what film not only could be, but could be really easily with just the resources we have around. We wanted to create a utopian world, and that’s what we did. … We were very adamant about the festival reflecting the city. We’ve tried to make an effort to find programming that would appeal to everyone.”

Sorry To Bother You

Boots and Barry

When Bale was tapped for the Indie Memphis programming position, the first film she thought of was Sorry to Bother You. “I heard about this film when it was in grant stages,” she recalls. “I thought it was perfect. It’s smart and political, but at the same time it’s creative and imaginative.”

Director Boots Riley struggled for years to get Sorry to Bother You made. Riley first gained attention as the founder of The Coup, a hip-hop group from Oakland, California, whose songs are stridently anti-racist and anti-capitalist in the tradition of Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine. His debut film reflects the same concerns, but with a much more surrealist, satirical bent.

Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) is a struggling 20-something living in an Oakland that is at once familiar and hyper-real. Frustrated by his lack of opportunity and sick of living in his uncle’s garage, he applies for a job at RegalView, a telemarketing company that Green soon learns has some shady and sinister connections. He’s good at the job of selling strange stuff to random people, because he has an excellent “white voice” (dubbed by comedian David Cross), and is quickly promoted to the rank of Power Caller.

But when he is tasked with selling people on joining WorryFree, an all-inclusive community that treats its members as slaves in all but name, he comes into conflict with his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson), a politically radical artist, and Squeeze (Steven Yeun), a union organizer who leads a strike against RegalView. Things turn wildly science-fictional once Green is introduced to Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), a Silicon Valley-style entrepreneur who inspires cult-like reverence from his employees/followers.

Sorry to Bother You debuted at Sundance, where it was quickly snatched up by Annapurna Pictures and became a surprise hit upon wide release last summer, earning $17.5 million on a $3.2 million budget. When an Indie Memphis screening with Riley in attendance was first announced for Studio on the Square at midnight on Friday, November 2nd, it quickly sold out, and the festival added a second screen to satisfy audience demand.

Earlier that day, Riley will deliver the keynote address at the first Black Creators Forum (November 1st, noon, Hattiloo Theatre), an event organized by Bale and produced by Jason Farmer. The highlight of the Black Creators Forum is a pitch rally where 12 African-American directors will put forth their ideas for films to be made in Memphis, with the winning pitch receiving a $10,000 grant.

Brazil

Riley will also host a screening of a film that was a major inspiration for Sorry to Bother You. Terry Gilliam’s 1985 masterpiece Brazil (November 2nd, 9 p.m., Studio on the Square) shares the theme of a somewhat timid man taking on an insane, surreal world gone mad.

If Beale Street Could Talk

In another big get for Indie Memphis, Saturday night will see the regional premiere of the highly anticipated new film by Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk (November 3rd, 6 p.m., Studio on the Square). Jenkins, who appeared at Indie Memphis 2006 with his first film, Medicine for Melancholy, won the 2016 Best Picture Oscar with Moonlight, an unprecedented feat for an independent film with a $1.5 million budget. If Beale Street Could Talk is an adaptation of the 1974 novel by James Baldwin, which, despite the Memphis-centric name, is set in Harlem, where a pregnant young woman played by KiKi Layne must prove the innocence of her finance, played by Stephan James, who has been falsely accused of a crime.

Bale says Riley and Jenkins are perfect fits for Indie Memphis. “To me, both of these filmmakers represent great filmmaking, great black filmmaking, and great political filmmaking that is imaginative and creative in different ways.”

Rukus

Bring the Rukus

Indie Memphis 2018 features work from a record 112 Memphis-based filmmakers. When Brett Hanover’s first documentary short “Above God” premiered at Indie Memphis 2006, he was one of about a dozen directors competing in the Hometowner category.

The subject of “Above God” was Gene Ray, who became one of the first internet celebrities when his strange website filled with borderline nonsensical ramblings about a “Time Cube” went viral. “I was interested in internet cultures,” says Hanover, who was 16 when he made the film. “I was interested in how this one guy’s words got spread and interpreted by so many people.”

Another internet subculture that fascinated Hanover was the Furries, a small group devoted to dressing up in elaborate costumes that transformed them into anthropomorphic animals. Back then, furries were picked out for ridicule as weirdos with an incomprehensible sexual fetish. But Hanover saw something deeper in their endless Livejournal posts and secretive conventions. That’s when a mutual friend introduced him to a person in the online furry community who called himself Rukus. “Initially, I had a lurid fascination with what he was writing, because it was really intense, personal, and raw.”

But Hanover soon discovered that Rukus was different things to different people. Little of his life story checked out, and he maintained a number of conflicting online personae.”It became an interesting mystery, to figure out what was real and what was embellished. … If he’s not telling the truth about something, that means he’s not telling the truth about it for a reason. It says something about him.”

Hanover and Rukus became online friends and even met in person after a Memphis furry convention. But eventually they drifted apart, and in 2008, Hanover got word that Rukus had committed suicide. “I became very obsessed with finding every trace of him online,” Hanover says.

In 2008, Hanover, with the help of his collaborators Alanna Stewart and Katherine Dohan, set out to make a documentary about Rukus and the online world where he had found connection. But Rukus (November 3rd, 6:30 p.m., Playhouse on the Square) could not be a conventional film. “If I’m going to make a documentary about someone else that’s really personal, I need to do the same thing with myself. I had not done that, put myself into my other films.”

Rukus, which Hanover worked on for a decade, in which he went to college and became a teacher of film and media, mixes verité footage, recreations of actual events, and fictional scenes. “The reason it’s like that is that everyone who is in it has different personae, who are all sort of real depending on what media they’re using to communicate or who their audience is. Rukus had all these different characters that he would use. I think now there’s more of a sense of, ‘here’s your real identity, and if you’re pretending to be something else online, that’s fake.’ Back then, it was understood that these different facets of you would be expressed through different identities.”

Hanover and Stewart co-wrote and acted in many of the staged sequences, some of which reflected the ups and downs of their own relationship. “I think the closest you can get to capital-T Truth in a documentary is to show your perspective. Give people a sense of your own biases, of how the thing you’re watching is being framed. Making myself into a character is a way of doing that, as opposed to saying that this is the story of Rukus. Which it’s not. It’s the story of Rukus told by this kid who was going through stuff.”

Mr. Soul!

He’s With The Band

Music documentaries have traditionally been popular at Indie Memphis, and this year’s opening night film is an exceptional one.

In 1968, Ellis Haizlip was a struggling producer in New York who got an opportunity to produce a talk show on the proto-public television station NET. But this would be no ordinary Tonight Show clone. Over the next five years, Soul! would become a vital voice in the African-American community, as the first and, at that time, only hour of television devoted to shining a spotlight on black culture.

Mr. Soul! (November 1st, 6:30 p.m., Halloran Centre), directed by Ellis’ niece Melissa Haizlip, begins with an electrifying performance of “Tired of Being Alone” by a 25-year-old Al Green. It’s just the first of the stunning array of musical guests Haizlip, who apparently knew everyone worth knowing, had on his show. Patti LaBelle, B. B. King, Wilson Pickett, Gladys Knight, Billy Preston, and Stevie Wonder all make an appearance in Mr. Soul! Many acts, including the Delphonics, Rasheed Roland Kirk, Kool and the Gang, and Earth Wind and Fire made their television debut in Haizlip’s well-appointed studio.

But the music, which serves as the hook for Mr. Soul!, was only part of the story. Haizlip was an intellectual who studied at Howard University, and despite a rough beginning as “about as bad an interviewer as you can imagine,” he booked fascinating guests, such as Harry Belafonte, Muhammad Ali, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. He put poetry and modern dance on the air when no other outlet would touch them. During one riveting sequence, Haizlip, who was gay, takes Louis Farrakhan to task for his homophobia while surrounded by uniformed cadres of the Nation of Islam.

Soul! sought to put black arts and culture on an elevated intellectual plane that it was afforded nowhere else, and Mr. Soul! is appropriately framed as a prestige documentary. But it’s equally fascinating and fun. As Haizlip says, “Place your hand on the television to feel the vibes we’re sending out to you!”

Clara’s Ghost

A Family Affair

One of the unsung heroes of David Letterman’s reign on network television is Chris Elliott. The writer and performer helped create the chaotic atmosphere of ’80s-era Late Night with characters like The Guy Under the Seats, before moving onto Saturday Night Live and a career in film and television that continues to this day.

Bridey Elliott, one of Chris’ two daughters, makes her feature-directing debut with Clara’s Ghost (November 4th, 4:30 p.m., Studio on the Square) , which features the whole Elliott clan, including her mother Paula, and SNL alum Abby.

Clara’s Ghost unspools like a darkly comic take on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Bridey and Abby play a pair of former child stars of a show called Sweet Sisters. One of the now-grown sisters continued to have an acting career after the show ended and is now preparing for her wedding. The other sister is struggling to get by, and dating an older man as a sugar daddy. Their mother, Clara, has retreated into alcoholism and has started seeing a mysterious woman who might be the long-dead wife of the sea captain who first built the family’s sprawling, old home in Connecticut.

Clara’s Ghost can be cuttingly comical and shockingly honest, often in the same scene. This is the kind of family who openly discusses mom’s cocaine habit around the dinner table, who waterboard each other for fun, and where the bride-to-be muses “I need to write an email to the bridesmaids with everyone’s goal weight.” Haley Joel Osment plays a weed dealer who gets drawn into the family’s drunken psychodrama and mom’s possible demonic possession. It’s an uncompromising, but ultimately endearing portrait of a showbiz family held together with equal parts love and dysfunction.

Cabin Boy

The paterfamilias Elliott will also host a screening of his Tim Burton-produced feature film Cabin Boy. It was greeted as a baffling mess when it was released in 1994, but the over-the-top nautical comedy has earned a cult following over the years and is now considered a founding document of contemporary alternative comedy.

DIY World

Since the 2000 debut of Craig Brewer’s The Poor & Hungry, Indie Memphis has been a champion of the scruffy, do-it-yourself digital film underground. The movement, which began in Denmark in 1998 with Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, presaged both YouTube culture and the social realism of today’s prestige TV. Two very different films in Indie Memphis show the power and enduring appeal of street level digital rebels.

Korean director Sang-soo Hong is incredibly prolific, but his works are rarely seen in America. Indie Memphis is featuring four of his films that have never screened in the region for a special retrospective. Claire’s Camera (November 2nd, 7 p.m., Studio on the Square), was shot on location during the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. The delicate piece is a master class of elliptical storytelling and subtle character development that begins with a young woman Jeon Manhee (Min-hee Kim) losing her job as a film sales agent after her boss decides she is no longer trustworthy. The layered story plays out patiently through the eyes of Claire (Isabelle Huppert), a French woman whose photography hobby turns out to be a critical fulcrum in the lives of people she barely knows. The subtle story plays out in riveting long takes, and the bilingual production finds commonality in the human stories of characters who come from very different cultures.

Sepulveda

On the other side of the world is Sepulveda (November 3rd, 10:30 a.m., Hattiloo Theatre). Directed by Brandon Wilson and Jena English, it’s a tribute to friendship and a love letter to the trashy glory of Los Angeles. Kristina Amaya, Karla Jovel, and Leslie Reyes star as three old friends trying to navigate life five years after high school graduation. One night at a house party, they spontaneously decide to go on a road trip through L.A. by driving the longest street in the city, the 73-mile long Sepulveda Boulevard. Armed with raging hangovers and a trusty red Prius, the trio tackle gentrification, growing up Hispanic in America, and the urgent task of finding a place to pee in Los Angeles.

Sepulveda echoes the pleasures of Indie Memphis classics such as Blue Citrus Hearts and Team Picture — deeply considered characterization, improvised dialogue that spins off into either hilarious riffs or profound emotional revelations, and the sheer joys of getting your friends together and turning on a camera. It’s this radical humanity, so often lacking in mainstream film, to which Indie Memphis has always been passionately devoted.

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We Recommend We Recommend

Outdoors Inc Cyclocross Championship Race in Greenbelt Park

CREDIT: Outdoors, Inc. Facebook

This year, Outdoors, Inc.’s annual Cyclocross Championship race celebrates its 32nd birthday. That makes the USA Cycling-sanctioned event the longest running cyclocross race in the United States.

“Cyclocross is older than that, but other races have come and gone,” says Outdoors, Inc. owner and cycling enthusiast Joe Royer. “And we’re still here.” The Memphis tradition has attracted racers from coast to coast, including both national and world champions. The event’s continued to grow and, according to Royer, the sport is more popular now than it’s ever been.

Outdoors, Inc. Facebook

Down by the river — Cyclocross 2018

Cyclocross is a winter cycling sport that mixes riding with running and throws in plenty of obstacles. Sometimes racers carry their bikes. “They go over barricades. Run up hills with bikes over their shoulders. It’s the coolest thing in cycling,” Royer says. “Fans will come out with cowbells, horns, and signs.”

Not everybody who participates on race day is an elite cyclist. While some take the sport seriously, others are in it for fun. There are kids races for children 2 to 12. There’s a B-Race for more seasoned riders, and a race for professional level riders.

Royer’s not just a casual fan. He’s been an avid cyclocross racer. More recently, he attended the world championships in Innsbruck, Austria. He bikes the Big River Crossing daily and is inspired by Memphis’ expanding, bike-friendly infrastructure. A decade ago, the race settled into its current home in Greenbelt Park in order to take advantage of the unique Downtown landscape and showcase the river.

“We’re just really proud,” Royer says. “We’ve attracted racers from Durango, Colorado, Los Angeles, Canada. Everybody knows it’s going to start on time, and it’s going to be very precise.”

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We Recommend We Recommend

Bettye LaVette at the Halloran Centre

Bettye LaVette was 16 when she cut her first single for Atlantic: “My Man, He’s a Loving Man.” “In 1962 in Detroit, that’s just what you did,” she has since explained, describing her Motown experience as something relatively normal for the time and place. “Everybody had a record or was cutting a record,” she says. But unlike many up-and-comers, after LaVette’s record came out, she hit the road, performing her songs in a package tour headlined by Ben E. King and showcasing the talents of a young singer named Otis Redding.

Bettye LaVette

LaVette’s early discography includes stunners like “Let Me Down Easy” and “He Made a Woman Out of Me,” but her husky voice sounded more like Wilson Pickett than Dionne Warwick and record labels didn’t always know what to do with that. Her Muscle Shoals-recorded Child of the Seventies LP was infamously shelved for 30 years while LaVette continued to record, tour, and find new audiences. She even spent six years on Broadway in the cast of the Tony-nominated musical Bubbling Brown Sugar. This week, the 72-year-old, Grammy-nominated soul survivor brings her act to the Halloran Centre where she’ll perform songs from Things Have Changed, a new album of Bob Dylan covers.

Things Have Changed came about after LaVette’s friend and sometimes photographer Carol Friedman pitched her on the idea of an all Dylan record. “I told her find me a record deal and I’ll do it, and, damn, if she didn’t come up with Verve Records,” LaVette says.

“I go to my keyboard player, and I sing a song the way I want to sing it,” LaVette says, describing how her distinctive arrangements come together. “He plays it that way so the band can get an indication of how I want to do the song, which usually has absolutely nothing to do with the former record.”

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Music Music Features

Bela Fleck Brings Exotic International Trio to GPAC

CREDIT: Alan Messer

Collaboration has been an essential element in the distinguished careers of master musicians Béla Fleck, Edgar Meyer, and Zakir Hussain, each of whom has achieved iconic status on his respective instrument: banjo, double bass, and tabla.

An intriguing scenario emerged when Fleck and Meyer — whose musical relationship goes back 35 years to their days on the New Acoustic Music pickin’ circuit — reached out to Hussain to help compose a triple concerto commissioned by the Nashville Symphony to commemorate the grand opening of its new home, the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, in 2006. This cross-cultural dream team yielded a Grammy-nominated recording, The Melody of Rhythm: Trip Concerto & Music for Trio, in 2009, and the trio realized their collaboration was a particularly fruitful one.

“In the case of Edgar and Zakir, I feel that there is still so much left for us to do,” Fleck wrote in a response to questions sent ahead of the trio’s sold-out Friday show at the Germantown Performing Arts Center. “We have not squeezed all the juice out of it.”

Alan Messer

Bela Fleck

Hussain, the son of Alla Rakha, a longtime tabla accompanist to sitar icon Ravi Shankar, was born in Mumbai, India, and has played in famed collaborative projects such as Shakti (with Mahavishnu Orchestra guitarist John McLaughlin) and Planet Drum (with Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart). He stressed that this trio’s creative success is built on deep personal chemistry.

“We first came together as composers who were going to write this piece for a symphony orchestra to play,” he says by phone from his home in Marin County, California. “[Playing as a band] came together over a period of time. What was interesting is our relationship as friends really grew, and our families got together and socially we were hanging out together a lot, and I firmly believe that is the reason we are able to make music like we do, with such comfort and ease.”

Fleck, 60, says he became fascinated with Indian classical music and music theory during a State Department-sponsored tour of India in the 1980s with his acoustic ensemble New Grass Revival. “It was clear that there was quite a lot that naturally could be assimilated into my musical consciousness,” he says. “The math is immediately usable to build new ideas, and also to understand the ideas I was already having.”

The trio lately has been augmented by a fourth member, Rakesh Chaurasia, who plays a bamboo flute called the bansuri that, like Hussain’s hand drums, is common to Hindustani (North Indian) classical music. His uncle, Hariprasad Chaurasia, now 80, is a renowned virtuoso on the bansuri who has recorded with Hussain and even contributed to “The Inner Light,” a 1968 Beatles track.

“Rakesh is a worthy successor to Hariprasad, and probably finest Indian flutist at the moment,” says Hussain. “One thing about young Indian musicians today, they not only grow up learning Indian music but simultaneously learn about all music around the world.”

Fleck says the group is performing compositions that incorporate Chaurasia’s flute melodies and the plan is to record another album as a quartet. “Rakesh is the new wild card,” he says, “who will alter all of us by his contributions.”

The group setting for Friday’s GPAC show might seem unfamiliar to fans who have seen Fleck play with his futuristic jazz-fusion combo the Flecktones or who caught his 2015 Beale Street Music Festival acoustic set with wife Abigail Washburn, but he says he thrives on such variety.

“It’s like playing different games, really,” he says. “If you get tired of Monopoly, you can play Sorry. Most of the music I play has improvisation, but the improv may have different rules. It keeps your mind alive and responsive. Life will change on you whether you want it to or not, so you better be prepared to respond to the challenges!”

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Opinion The Last Word

Dia de los Muertos is About Honoring Those Who Came Before

CREDIT: Krookedeye | Dreamstime.com

My first memories of Día de los Muertos are of the long hallways of an elementary school over on Winchester Road. I was 12, and having never witnessed a Day of the Dead celebration of any sort before, I took my time walking down the hallways of the school. With a book in my hand, I walked and found myself stopping at each altar and studying them. There was so much information to take in all at once. I didn’t open up my book much that day.

Altars were placed up and down the hallway on tables and the floor. The ones on the floor rose high above the ground because of the tiers that were shaped by a mix of large and small cardboard boxes and covered by cloth. Pan de muerto, sweet rolls of bread topped with sugar, sat next to collections of candy and bowls of fruit. While the types of food differed between each altar, they each had unlit wax candles or those small battery-operated candles that you find in the dollar store.

As I walked further down the hallway, I looked at each framed photo that appeared to have come from family photo albums. Some altars had images that I could recognize like famous musicians, artists, and actors. Others were prepared by organizations, and instead of having individual photos of people, they would have ofrendas that represented images of people. One table had materials that symbolized construction workers with bright orange vests, hardhats, and work boots. This altar remembered the lives of workers who died while working in construction due to unsafe work conditions.

Krookedeye | Dreamstime.com

Further down the hallway into the main lobby of the school I saw an altar by Danza Azteca Quetzalcoatl, one of the Aztec dance groups in the city. Like the other altars, it had multicolor papel picado, breads, food, and candles. It lay on the ground with incense bowls and was much larger than all other altars in the hallway. Cempazúchitl (marigold) flowers painted the white tile floors in a sea of yellow and orange.

I later learned some of the different elements and significance of Día de los Muertos. The celebration pulls aspects from Catholic Church rituals and pre-Columbian religious traditions going as far back as 3,000 years. The Aztec deity Mictecacíhuatl, or Lady of the Dead, is the protector of the dead and is more commonly referred to as La Catrina, whose image was popularized by Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada. Traditionally, the dead were honored during the month of August. Along with music and processions, altars celebrated their life with the favorite food and drink of deceased. The month of celebration was condensed to November 1st and 2nd, All Saints Day and All Souls Day, with the arrival of Spanish missionaries who, realizing a resistance in the forceful converting of Native people to Christianity, could not do away with all aspects of indigenous culture and tradition.

Today, across cities and regions in the U.S. and Mexico, the traditions of Día de los Muertos take on various interpretations. Since walking down the halls of that elementary school many years ago, my understanding of Día de los Muertos has grown along with the reach of these celebrations across Memphis. This year, there are at least four public Día de los Muertos events around our city organized by or in partnership with Mexican and Latinx people and organizations. The Memphis Day of the Dead that was once held at an elementary school and other venues will now be held for the second year at El Mercadito on Ridgeway on November 4th (1p.m.-7p.m.).

Because I didn’t grow up celebrating Día de los Muertos in my home, it took a few years of listening and observing to learn, and I continue to learn each year. Día de los Muertos has taught me to value not only the people in our life but also to honor those who have passed on from our life — to value and celebrate what they have taught us and what they continue to teach us beyond their own lived years. The lives de los muertos, the lives of the dead, that we remember on these two days in November and beyond teach us how to love and that we should extend that love to everyone. We extend that love to our folks like the TPS Journey for Justice Caravan that visited our city. We welcome you. We extend that love to the caravan of the south, the caravan of refugees from Central America who, like many before them, are seeking asylum in Mexico and the U.S. To the people walking hundreds of miles on foot with their children and to those walking alone, we welcome you.

And following Día de los Muertos, we recognize where we have failed at the lessons of love and growing taught to us by Día de los Muertos, among its many lessons.

Of utmost importance this Día de los Muertos, we must remember all those folks who were not welcomed and loved, those who were not given the chance to live their life to the fullest and to teach and grow with us. To Roxana Hernandez, a transgender woman and asylum seeker from Honduras who died in ICE custody, one of nine people to die in ICE custody this year … we failed you. And, in the spirit of this beautiful holiday, we will hold your name and your life with us, remembering your legacy, recognizing that we need to do better. Who will you remember to honor this Día de los Muertos?

Aylen Mercado is a brown, queer, Latinx chingona and Memphian pursuing an Urban Studies and Latin American and Latinx Studies degree at Rhodes College.

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Opinion Viewpoint

The American Health-Care Nightmare

Last month I got a curious envelope from the health insurance company Humana.
My wife and I are both self-employed freelancers. With no employer group plan to join, we must buy our health insurance on the individual market. 

Every year for the last decade, I have spent hours researching our options, trying to find the best coverage for the best price. Before the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, aka Obamacare), we were paying ruinously high premiums and receiving only the barest of benefits. Pre-ACA, a single emergency room visit that turned out to be a false alarm ended up costing us more than $5,000. When the ACA took effect in 2014, we were among the first wave of customers to find coverage on the Health Care Marketplace. It was a dramatic improvement over the former, so-called “free market” for health insurance. Our premiums immediately dropped by more than 50 percent, and our coverage improved dramatically. A recent emergency room visit that was not a false alarm cost a little over $800.

But last year, as the Trump regime came into power, our choices on the Health Insurance Marketplace dwindled to one company. Now we were in the same boat with the hundreds of millions of Americans who get their health insurance through their employer: health insurance “choice” in name only. The real decisions are being made by unaccountable bureaucrats your workplace and the monolithic, uncaring health care companies that can endanger a company with a single price quote, and bankrupt families at their whim.
That’s why the envelope from Humana was so curious. Humana had been our health insurance company for two years, but not in 2018. When they announced their pullout from the individual health insurance market in 2017, they claimed they were losing money because by were taking on too many sick people and not enough healthy people to balance out their risk pool.

So, when I opened the envelope, I was shocked to see a check from Humana, along with a letter explaining that it was a rebate required under the ACA’s Medical Loss Ratio provision. That section of the ACA mandates that health insurance companies selling policies on the individual marketplace must spend at least 80 percent of the money that comes in as premiums on actual medical care. The other 20 percent can be used for overhead, paying salaries, and taking profits. The ACA’s Medical Loss Ratio for employer-provided health insurance is only 15 percent, meaning the individual market is, by law, the most profitable segment of health insurance industry.

The letter, which was signed by Bruce Broussard, CEO of Humana Insurance Company, informed me that, “In 2017, Humana spent only 78.1 percent of a total of $372,479,024 in premium dollars on health care and activities to improve health care quality.” That means that, after rebating $7,077,191, Humana took home $74,495,804 from Tennessee premium payers in 2017. I don’t have an MBA, but that doesn’t sound like losing money to me. And yet it was not enough to keep Humana in Tennessee. According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, Broussard personally took home $19 million in salary, bonuses, and stock options in 2016, so you’d think Humana would need that $74 million to keep him in the manner to which he is accustomed. My attempts to get Humana to comment for this piece by calling the number they provided in their letter went comically awry.

In retrospect, Humana’s decision to leave $74 million on the table by withdrawing from a profitable individual health insurance marketplace looks less like a business decision and more like a political decision. When the company announced the decision in February 2017, it had just been denied permission by the Justice Department to merge with Aetna, and the Republican drive to repeal the ACA was in full swing. Humana’s announcement was trumpeted by Trump on Twitter as proof that “Obamacare continues to fail.” Did Broussard decide to see if he could curry favor with the president and get a favorable ruling on future mergers? We’re about to find out: Wal-Mart, which runs thousands of pharmacies across America, is currently in talks to buy Humana, which is valued at $37 billion. If that happens, people like Broussard, who own thousands of shares of Humana stock, will profit handsomely.

Lying and bad faith by a major health insurance corporation is not an aberration. As anyone who has received a baffling “benefit statement” from their insurer already knows, it’s the norm. The deeper lesson here is that health insurance companies simply cannot be trusted. Barack Obama won the presidency with a promise to fix America’s broken health-care industry. The Affordable Care Act was not a socialist government takeover of health care. It is a market-based solution designed by the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation, and first implemented in Massachusetts under Republican governor (and Obama’s opponent) Mitt Romney.

It was a typically Obama-esque attempt to carve out a compromise with the Republicans, and those same Republicans have spent the last four years throwing that compromise back in our faces. First, they sued to allow states to opt out of the law’s Medicare expansion, which is why tens of thousands of poor Tennesseans find themselves without health care today, and rural hospitals in the state are closing. Then, when they gained control of Congress, they voted dozens of times to repeal Obamacare. Once Trump was elected, even though their repeal attempts were thwarted by massive public outcry, they have still attempted to sabotage the ACA by any means means necessary. As I write this, Newsweek has reported that the repeal of the ACA’s individual mandate will increase health insurance premiums by 16 percent next year.

It’s clear from their actions that the Republicans and their corporate paymasters will never accept a deal on health care, even one like Obamacare that guarantees them tens of millions of dollars in profits. Nor do they intend to honor any agreements with Democrats. The time for compromise and half measures has long passed. With support for single payer health care currently polling at 52 percent nationally, it’s time for Medicare For All. For-profit, employer-based health insurance is the reason it’s so hard to find a full time job even at a time of low unemployment. It has produced the only nation in the developed world where health care costs are the leading cause of bankruptcy. The United States not only has the highest health care costs in the developed world, but also the worst health outcomes. We’re paying too much for too little.

When you go to the polls next week, remember that Democrats like Congressman Steve Cohen want to fix the system, and gubernatorial candidate Karl Dean has vowed to make expanding Medicare in Tennessee a top priority, while Republicans like Marsha Blackburn only want to see you stay sick, broke, and indentured to your health insurance company. Medicare For All is an idea whose time has come. For the sake of your health and wealth, vote on November 6th.