Tag: Chris McCoy

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Music Video Monday: “Little Icarus” by Louise Page

One of the hallmarks of Louise Page’s sound is the arranging skill she brings to her songs. Her solid piano playing always keeps things grounded, but her crack band often supplements that with horns, inventive rock guitar, and other elements. That’s not the case with her latest album, though. The whole point of Play Nice, an album written and recorded during the first year of the pandemic and released in 2021, is to strip all of that away. Befitting the isolation of those times, the album presents only a singer and her piano: intimate, raw, and real.

The unvarnished sound is matched with some of her most personal lyrics as well, and that’s one of the striking qualities of this single, “Little Icarus,” where she questions both her own trustworthiness and that of her lover or other person in her life. And yet, like the fabled mortal of Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun and suffered for it, there’s a romantic yearning in the song as well. It’s a theme ripe for bringing to life visually, and Page, director Ben Siler, and producer Chris McCoy (the Memphis Flyer’s film editor) have done so with stunning clarity.

As Page herself writes, “I’ve always loved using mythological references in my music, and the story of Icarus has been one that I’ve loved for quite some time — it has inspired so much art, both ancient and contemporary. Something I loved about working with director Ben Siler was his interest in making homages both to the original story of Icarus and also to the various works across time inspired by Icarus.”

Look for local rapper and producer Lawrence Matthews for his star turn as Icarus here. Often celebrated for crafting his own videos with a painterly sense of the visual, he brings that same attention to detail and artful integration to this project. And if the song asks some tough questions, it also revels in romance, with palpable chemistry between Page and Matthews as the video progresses.

“Little Icarus”

As Page further contemplates the song and the video, there is certainly love here, but … it’s complicated. “From my perspective as the writer, the song ‘Little Icarus’ is a love song, albeit a tragic one, that the Sun is singing to Icarus,” she writes. “My thought process was, while the sun isn’t a personified character in the original myth, the sun is responsible for melting Icarus’ wings. One might say the sun is responsible for his downfall — although most would say his own hubris brought about his fall. This thought process of personifying the sun became a metaphor for myself and my own fears about hurting others and being hurt by love.” 

Page is also quick to share the credit for this vivid teleplay with her collaborators. “Ben Siler, the director, had the idea of there being two Louises in the video — one inspired by Sun God imagery and one more inspired by David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth. These two versions of self are open to interpretation by the viewer. Is one version of Louise reality and the other fantasy? If so, which is which? It’s up to the viewer to decide.” 

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Film Features Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Indie Memphis 2022 Friday: Antenna

Jack Oblivian on stage at the Antenna club circa 1993.

One of my first questions for director Chris McCoy after watching Antenna was what punk rock means to him today. To this, he responded, “I don’t know. What do you think punk rock means today?” Being born in the 2000s, I don’t think I have ever really listened to punk. Not being born in Memphis, I had never even heard of the legends from the Antenna club, until I watched McCoy’s documentary.  

The story of the Antenna is told through the many faces of punk rock, including writer and stealth narrator Ross Johnson, director Chris McCoy (who is also the film and TV editor for the Memphis Flyer), editor/producer Laura Jean Hocking, Antenna club owner Steve McGehee, and former Flyer music writer John Floyd. All together, this team took three years to create the documentary. Hocking details the beginning stages of the film where they started “with more than a hundred hours of archival footage. We had 1,100 still images and 88 interviews, some of which were three and four hours long.” Hocking describes her editing process as “a big project that at the time, when I was making it, I had a lot of nervous breakdowns.” 

The inspiration behind Antenna was McCoy’s desire to tell “a story about Memphis that needed to be told, that had not yet been told.” This was the story of the Antenna, a punk rock club that stood on Madison Avenue from 1981 to 1995, a forgotten era of Memphis music — specifically Memphis punk rock music. McCoy calls it a “weird mutant strain of music that grabs little bits from a whole bunch of different kinds of music.” 

Jimmy Barker at the first Antenna party, 1980. 

As such, the Antenna club was “a place where you could be weird,” Hocking says. The club was not your usual Beale Street bar but an eclectic refuge where outsiders, weirdos, gays, and anyone without prejudice could be their authentic selves. Especially in its early days, Antenna’s punk rock spirit made it a place for experimentation, dedicated to the fight against conformity. A specific example McCoy uses is “one of my favorite shots in the movie is the video we found of that dude heckling The Replacements, saying, ‘We don’t care how famous you are!’ That’s the essence of the entire club right there in one moment.” 

Between the crime, the poverty, and the political turmoil, Memphis can sometimes seem cursed and hopeless. This is even mentioned with Johnson’s opening line of the film: “Memphis is cursed.” McCoy comments on this idea saying, “I always call Memphis your drunk uncle. I can complain about him and what a deadbeat he is, but nobody else can say something about it.” This spirit is encapsulated in the Antenna’s story, in “the story of those musicians who are still here and who didn’t get the recognition that they deserved,” McCoy says. Indeed, the Antenna club hosted various artists like R.E.M., Big Ass Truck, The Panther Burns, and The Modifiers, but these are just some of the artists that defined the era of punk rock and the resistance against conformity. 

Outcasts like Milford Thompson, Melody Danielsen, Alex Chilton, and The Klitz were able to express their true selves to the world. When daytime talk show host Marge Thrasher told The Panther Burns they were “the worst thing that ever came out on television,” bandleader Tav Falco just smiled. The Modifiers took pride in being “the most hated band in Memphis.” They were simply just, being themselves, and any hate or fear simply fell at their feet as they performed. “The attitude was, we dare you to like this music,” says McCoy. 

Tav Falco and the Panther Burns on Marge Thrasher’s talk show. 

This film is truly a labor of love and takes the audience back to the time where music not only united a community but also created a place to escape from the prejudices of society. McCoy remembers “hanging out at the Antenna from ’89 to ’95, when it closed.” Watching the film, I understood what it might feel like to be transported back to the ’80s, with a front row seat at the Antenna. Hocking says this was intentional. “We wanted you to feel like you’re at the club or hanging out with these people or in a round table discussion with them.” 

Framing the film this way makes for a very intimate connection with something that to me, previously seemed foreign. Throughout the film, I found myself identifying with the Antenna crowd and their love for a place that shielded them from the rest of  society. Seeing the many faces of punk rock and former Antenna attendees profess their love for the Antenna club, made me wonder if there was anything similar to the Antenna club today. When the film ended, I felt like I had just been to my first and favorite rock concert in my life. 

Lisa Alridge singing with The Klitz.

Antenna speaks for itself with its continued and growing popularity even after its premiere 10 years ago in 2012 at the Indie Memphis Film Festival. The film has been awarded the Audience Award, Special Jury Prize, and other various awards at the Oxford Film Festival, and it is recognized as one of the most popular films in the 25 year history of the Indie Memphis Film Festival. Although the film has an immense love among its audience, it cannot currently be released commercially because of issues with obtaining music rights for the 50 different songs present in the film. McCoy and the film’s producers have spent the last 10 years trying to raise money to pay the artists for their songs and give them the recognition they deserve. Despite several investors’ and distributors’ interest in the film, fundraising efforts have always come to a halt and been unsuccessful. Thus, the film can only be caught at film festivals and on rare occasions. 

The next screening of this film will be on Friday, October 21st, 8:45 p.m., at Playhouse on the Square during the Indie Memphis Film Festival to celebrate the film’s 10-year anniversary. Tickets ($12/individual screening) can be purchased online or at the door if not sold out already.

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Film Features Film/TV

A Conversation With Jamie Harmon

When the COVID-19 pandemic exploded in March 2020, photographer Jamie Harmon set out to document the unique moment by taking portraits of Memphians in their homes. Now, the Memphis Quarantine project is a massive new photography exhibition at the Crosstown Arts gallery.

I spoke with Harmon about his work, his history in Memphis, and the weight of bearing witness to history for WKNO-TV. “In Conversation With Jamie Harmon” will air on April 8, 2022 — but since that’s the same weekend the exhibit will be closing, WKNO has made the full interview available on its YouTube channel. You can watch the entire interview below, and check out the exhibit for free inside Crosstown Concourse.

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Film Features Film/TV

Never Seen It: Watching All the President’s Men with Memphis Flyer Editor Jesse Davis

Robert Redford as Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein in All the President's Men.

In my semi-regular Never Seen It column, I find an interesting person and sit down with them to watch a classic (or sometimes, not-so-classic) film they have missed. This pairing of subject and object may be the most perfect one ever. Jesse Davis recently took over the reins of the Memphis Flyer from his semi-retiring predecessor Bruce VanWyngarden. Davis had never seen the greatest film about journalism ever made, the 1976 political epic All The President’s Men. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Chris McCoy: Jesse Davis, what do you know about All the President’s Men? 

Jesse Davis: Almost nothing. I know it’s based on a book of the same title by Woodward and Bernstein, and that it’s about their investigation into the break-in at the Watergate hotel. And that’s it.

138 minutes later…

CM: We’re on the record with Memphis Flyer editor, Jesse Davis. You are now a man who has seen All The President’s Men. What did you think?

JD: I really enjoyed it. It was absolutely excellent. It was a great story. I know Watergate and Nixon is one of those areas of U.S. history that attracts a lot of people, and for some of them, I’m sure, it’s because they have seen this movie. But it has struck me as something that was kind of like JFK’s assassination. There were a few events that are understandably interesting, but some of the people who are really, really, really into them do not … um … do not emit an aura of being really well put together.

CM: That’s diplomatic.

JD: I mean, like I said, I can understand the interest, but … 

CM: They’re obsessions of the dirtbag left, is what you’re trying to say.

JD: That might be one way of putting it.

CM: Guilty as charged.

JD: You know, there are some things where most of the people who are interested in it, you’re like, “Oh God, are you guys okay?” I think some of my first contact with people who were really obsessed with Watergate was like that. But not everyone. I mean, it’s notably interesting. The whole truth and power and accountability dynamic is just as important today as it was in ’72. So, I mean, it’s understandable why folks would be interested. But I say all that to say that I never dove really deep. I’ve not read the book. It’s absolutely interesting to see them follow the trail.

CM: It’s a journalism procedural story, which you don’t see a lot of now. I mean, procedurals are like three hours on CBS every night, but it’s always law enforcement. It’s never journalists anymore. One of the things that’s interesting to me about this film is that journalists are the protagonist. You know, Superman was a journalist. Then there’s My Girl Friday, and lots of others. Wasn’t Mary Tyler Moore a journalist for a news station? But you don’t really see that much anymore. There was Spotlight a few years ago, which was great. Maybe part of it is that it’s just people sitting around in rooms talking.

JD: Or talking on the phone!

CM: But also, part of it is, there was a shift where people don’t trust journalists absolutely anymore. Watching it this time, I think it’s interesting that a lot of what they were doing seemed to be responding to a narrative that the Washington Post and other papers were creating together at the same time. It struck me that a lot of what the disinformation plague does is to destroy the possibility of a central narrative. So you don’t have to prove that you didn’t lie. You just have to make it so the truth is not actually knowable. That’s a big question that’s hanging over this movie: Is the truth knowable? Or are these people, in fact, like you said, “not very well put together”? Bernstein is clearly not very well put together.

JD: This is true. He’s smoking cigarettes constantly — in a restaurant, in other people’s homes, in other people’s cars, in the elevator …

CM: The elevator smoking is funny. It’s the only time anyone comments on it.

JD: Whoever the cinematographer is, [ed note: Gordon Willis] is doing things to make shots of people talking on the phone visually interesting. Maybe that’s one of the main differences, but I’m sure a lot of law enforcement is actually pretty boring.

CM: Those procedurals on CBS every night, they’re just mostly people talking in rooms, too. But every now and then, they run around and wave guns at each other.

A split diopter shot from All The President’s Men. Notice the blurry region between Redford in the foreground and the group gathered around the TV in the background.

CM: I pointed out a couple of split diopter shots, which is a thing you put on the front of a lens that has two tinier lenses with different focal lengths. There was the one shot where Woodward’s on the phone in the foreground, and I guess they’re watching some kind of sports match in the background. There’s two different planes of focus in the same shot. This is not done in post-production. It was done in-camera, live. Right when Woodward gets the information he’s looking for, the people in the background cheer. It’s real subtle. You just don’t see that anymore. 

JD: It was set up under the sign for the national news desk, which I thought was nice. There’s whatever game was on the TV, and then there’s this national game going on, and Robert Redford just scored.

JD: Another thing I noticed is, when Redford’s going into the parking garage, and when they’re at work, you see all of this space around them. They’re lost in all this, whether it’s the architecture of the parking garage or the columns in the newsroom, and trying to find their way out. We know that they’re the figures we’re supposed to be paying attention to, but you see all of the Washington Post newsroom, or all of the parking garage, or a big part of the D.C. skyline. At one point, I think it was Robert Redford, maybe, walking with the Washington Monuments behind him. They’re these huge buildings, and he’s just this tiny little figure. I loved that repetition, and the difference in scales. 

CM: There’s very much a sense of millions of people going on with their lives who have no idea that what this guy is doing is going to change history. It’s going to bring down the president.

Woodward meeting “Deep Throat” in a parking garage.

JD: A line I love, early on, is when their editor says about the story, “It may just be crazy Cubans.” The idea of someone saying that about this story! As an editor, that’s a pratfall. You just don’t know. There may not be a story. 

CM: That was going to be my next question. You’ve been editor of the Memphis Flyer for what …

JD: Six weeks now.

CM: Ben Bradlee, who was Jason Robards, is just an absolute legend in the industry. What were you thinking about when you were watching him?

Jason Robards as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee

JD: In the beginning, everything is set up to make you feel like he is maybe one of the forces who wants to kill the story, for whatever reason. Then there’s a scene where they talked about how it could put them in legal trouble. And for all you know, it could. There’s a little while before he has this moment where he tells them about a time he screwed up, but he got the story right. But it’s a while before we get to that point, and all of his concerns are completely justified. He’s just like, look, you’ve got to have multiple sources, especially if these people aren’t letting us name them. You have to corroborate this. But we can’t know if that is really his justification, and it’s all in service of good reporting. If so, that’s great, but there’s a little bit of tension there — especially the more you start to think, “OK, there are some layers of conspiracy going on. How do I know that they didn’t get to him?” When [White House spokesman Ken W. Clawson] calls him panicking and says, “I got a wife and a family and a dog and a cat,” he’s on a first name basis with [Bradlee]. And you’re like, he’s editor of a big paper. Maybe pressure has been put on him. But then, once he gets to the point where he’s satisfied, he puts out his statement: “We stand by the story.” I’m going to keep these guys on it.

CM: And that was a crisis point in the story. That’s after they’ve been burned by their sources on purpose, to throw them off.

 JD: He sensed that was what was happening.

CM: What’d you think about the actual, nuts and bolts of reporting in 1972? How does it compare to what the experience is like today?

JD: Well, first of all, Memphis Flyer is not a daily, so it’s a completely different thing.

CM:  You do one layout a week. Those guys were doing layouts every day. You know, the editorial meeting scene is so fascinating to me.

JD: I love that scene. They go around, and everybody says what they’re working on, and then it’s okay, go around again. This time it’s just the really short pitch. And this is how much space you get. That was, that was great, and very different.

Hoffman, Redford, Robards, Jack Warden as Post local editor Harry M. Rosenfeld, and Martin Balsam as managing editor Howard Simons.

CM: Currently, our editorial meetings take place on Slack. But we still sit around and talk about what we’re going to put in the paper. There’s still magic in that moment, to me. There’s a romance to it, I guess.

JD: I think so, too. I mean, it’s different. They’re the Washington Post, and we’re an alt-weekly, we’re the Memphis Flyer. It’s the ’70s. It’s 2021.

CM: Not a computer in sight.

JD: When they’re going through the list of names, I thought, “Oh my God! Imagine doing this without the internet!” It’s a completely different thing. But there’s still a huge amount of talking on the phone. Now, it’s just Slack, but before the pandemic, when I was the copy editor, I walked back and forth between different parts of the office all day, every day. So there are still elements that are the same. But yeah, the editorial and layout meetings, I think are incredibly magical. They have a big enough staff that it’s like, “What things have y’all been working on that are now ready for us? What’s ripe?” There’s an element of that, but I expect you’re going to have a film review every week.

CM: There was the moment where they’ve been knocking on doors, and they haven’t produced any copy for two weeks. You know how much copy I’m expected to produce in two weeks?

JD: Oh yeah.

CM: They have an enormous amount of resources we don’t have, that barely anybody has outside of The New York Times or the Post or the Wall Street Journal has now.

JD: To just be able to send somebody on assignment, and tell them to keep going until you turn something up or don’t … If someone’s working on a cover story, sometimes there’s a really quick turnaround, but often, that’s something you are taking back and forth between the back burner and the hot burner until it’s scheduled to go. But it’s not like we don’t do research.

CM: Oh, I didn’t mean to imply that we don’t do research, because we absolutely do. That’s most of my time, really. But to be able to fly down to Miami, barge into the D.A.’s office, and demand they talk to me, I can’t imagine doing that and being treated with anything but contempt. It’s a great moment in the movie, because he plays this trick on the receptionist, but there’s no way I could get into the D.A.’s office, and then the D.A. does anything except have me arrested.

Hoffman, Penny Fuller as Sally Aiken, and Redford work the phones.

JD: Sometimes, you see, in a work of fiction, someone who’s a magazine writer or a newspaper writer, and they appear to have a huge budget and really flexible deadlines. And you’re just like, “Well, that’s fiction. That’s based on an old idea, a different time period.” It kind of makes me think of hard-boiled films and private detectives. How would Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade go over today? The industries are different, and the laws that have continued to grow up around policing and investigative journalism are different.

JD: One thing I noticed in two of the TV clips was, you’ve got someone talking about their sources and he uses the word “unsubstantiated.” In another, they were talking about the political leanings of the editor of the Post. First of all, just to have someone holding national office say the word “unsubstantiated,” that felt very strange, um, particularly after the last four years or so.

CM: Trump would have said, “Fake News! Enemy of the state!”

JD: Exactly. It’s the same with, “I think we can make a safe assumption about his political leanings.” I’m paraphrasing there, but that’s very different from “They’re the crooked Democrats, and we all know they want to take us down!” But it’s all of a piece …

CM: It’s the evolution of that rhetoric, which began with Nixon.

JD: You could say it’s based on logic, and maybe it is. Now, we have mutated or evolved this line of defense so it is just the quickest and most direct route to an emotional reaction: I’m under attack by these people, and you should — to use the phrase they used in the movie — circle the wagons. I’m going to protect my president from these rats.

CM: You got the sense that the people who were in Nixon’s inner circle, the Republicans he was ordering to take these illegal actions had a lot more autonomy back then. The give and take in this part of the drama is, are they going to do their duty to the country and the Constitution, or are they going to put party first? You know what they’re going to do now.

JD: Oh, well, of course!

CM: They’re going to put party first. Donald Rumsfeld died today, the day we’re recording this. Back in the Rumsfeld era, the ’00s, after 9/11, I used to sometimes read this blogger — it was the blogger era, too — called The War Nerd. One of the things he liked to say was, the more organized side is the one who usually wins. He also used to say, “The end of the world is what you call it when your tribe loses.” I feel like what we’re seeing today is like the evolution of that thinking, which is, frankly, pure fascism. That’s the definition of fascism: I have loyalty to this narrow in-group, right or wrong, rather than loyalty to the Constitution, or to the greater good, or to the nation. My faction is what’s more important. And I felt like it was really obvious from this film how far we’ve sunk.

JD: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s without question.

CM: And yet, in the Trump years, or so far, anyway, the same systems held that held against Nixon, pretty much. It just felt like a much closer thing this time.

JD: Yeah, I think so, too.

CM: Did it make you reflect on what your duty is as an editor of a paper?

JD: Well, first of all, I gotta get a good “shut the hell up” look.

CM: You gotta get that.

JD: That’s important. I’ve got to stay cool under pressure, and then know when it’s time to start dropping F-bombs, and just say, “Well, it’s only the fate of democracy and free speech. Don’t fuck it up, or I’ll get mad.” His responsibility to the truth, and to getting the reporting right, seemed to be the highest ideal. Obviously, how that affects our paper and our image is incredibly important. Everything flows from telling the story accurately. That seems to be his primary action in the film. So that first day you’re not reporting it well enough, I gotta tell you to dig deeper, and then recognize that we’re now in hot water. I will stand up. I’m with you guys. You’re showing up at my door. It’s late at night. You’re saying it’s not safe to come inside.

CM: I’m telling you we’re being bugged by the CIA. Do you believe me?

JD: Okay, let’s have this conversation on the lawn. I like to think that if any of our writers show up at my house and tell me that, I’m glad it’s the CIA! I’ll say, “God, we’ve got an amazing story here.”

CM: I’d say, “You’re aware you work for the Memphis Flyer, right?”

JD: In some ways, they lucked into things because of having people just take calls, which doesn’t happen now. Someone got into the rhythm of answering questions and said something they shouldn’t have. I don’t know that we’re necessarily going to get that as frequently as they did just by cold-calling people. Then there’s their little routine of casually dropping a piece of information that we want confirmed.

CM: We’ll pretend we already know it.

JD: Yeah, exactly. Or, we’ll argue about the details of something that we think we know, but we’re not sure we know. And then, if there’s no issue from your interview subject about the thing in question, it’s like, okay, now we really are talking about it.

CM: I actually had an opportunity several years ago to pull the “I’m going to give you some initials, and I want you to say yes or no” gag. I felt like such a badass! But the only reason I knew to do it was because of this movie. So would you recommend All the President’s Men to people?

JD: Oh, wholeheartedly. I think if you walk away from it feeling like, “This was a David and Goliath story, and I believe that can happen because it did happen and they were successful,” then that’s great. If you walk away from it thinking, “Those were some cool shots,” that’s great, too. If you walk away from it with “The truth matters and I want to help tell it,” well, that’s even better.

 

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Film Features Film/TV

18th annual Oxford Film Fest Features a Weekend of Pop-Up and Drive-In Screenings

Cassie Hay and Amy Winston’s Queens of Pain follows the Gotham Girls Roller Derby league.

A year ago, Melanie Addington, executive director of the Oxford Film Festival (OFF), was faced with a terrible choice: cancel the annual festival, throwing away months of planning and jeopardizing the survival of the 17-year-old Mississippi cultural institution, or go ahead with the event as planned, which would pack people from all over the country into movie theaters and risk spreading a deadly disease about which very little was known. Thanks to the timing of the spring festival, Addington was among the first people in America faced with that decision, but she wouldn’t be the last. Days after she announced Oxford’s postponement, the gargantuan South by Southwest festival followed suit.

OFF would go on to become one of the pioneers of the virtual festival, teaming up with the Memphis cinema services company Eventive to stream the films online for a quarantined audience later in the spring. Hundreds of other festivals followed, to varying degrees of success, including Indie Memphis and Sundance.

Now, a year later, with the pandemic still dangerous but the vaccine campaign going full steam, OFF is back in hybrid form for its 18th year. Films will screen in three outdoor locations on March 24th-28th. “We want to be very clear about the aggressive steps we are taking in order to make our film festival safe so our patrons can begin to get back to enjoying the movie-going experience in the company of other people again,” Addington says. “Therefore, we are being very careful with a measured approach utilizing the open-air theater we have designed specifically for this purpose, with safety always first, so we all can enjoy one of the best groups of films we have ever had this year.”

In Jake Mahaffy’s Reunion, a pregnant woman returns to her recently deceased grandparents’ family home.

Opening night films will screen at the Oxford Commons lawn tent, located across the parking lot from the Malco Oxford Commons Cinema Grill. The Passing On is a documentary by director Nathan Clarke about the tradition of Black funeral homes in San Antonio, Texas, and the conflict that breaks out when embalmer James Bryant taps a gay man, Clarence Pierre, to take over his business.

A short drive away, the Oxford High School will host a pop-up drive-in theater in the east parking lot. There, the festival opener will be Drought, directed by Megan Petersen and Hannah Black. Set in 1993, Drought tells the story of Carl (Own Scheid, who is on the spectrum in real life) who, during the historic North Carolina drought of 1993, discovers his uncanny ability to predict the weather. The third screen, located at the Oxford Conference Center, will open with Murder Bury Win. Writer/director/producer Michael Lovin’s film takes place in the world of board games, where three young men have created a game whose object is to get rid of a body. Then, when they are suddenly involved in a freak accident, they try to apply the corpse disposal methods they learned while researching their game.

“The events of the past year have required that filmmakers and festivals alike find creative and innovative avenues for storytelling,” says OFF programmer Greta Hagen-Richardson. “With a narrative feature lineup composed almost exclusively of filmmaker submissions, we spent the year truly embracing our role as a discovery festival. Our filmmakers have taken limited resources and made exciting, fresh, and compelling work for our audience. The unique perspectives presented speak to who we are as a community in a time when circumstances have forced us to exist separately.”

Among the documentaries that will screen throughout the weekend are Queens of Pain by Cassie Hay and Amy Winston, which follows the women of the Gotham Roller Derby league through a season of wheeled combat, and Bleeding Audio, director Chelsea Christer’s portrait of pop-punk band The Matches, who achieved cult success in the ’00s, only to get lost in the transition between the CD era and streaming music.

On the more experimental side, Oxford’s Powerhouse venue will play host throughout the weekend to a series of video projection installations. The program includes 5000 Space Aliens by animator Scott Bateman, a feature-length experimental film that promises some eye-popping visuals that will have its world premiere at the festival on Friday night.

After the in-person weekend, the festival will continue online for the entire month of April, with films streaming on the Eventive platform. The kickoff party for the virtual festival will be held on Friday, April 2nd, with a pop-up drive-in at Cannon Motors with Labyrinth, the fantasy film starring David Bowie considered by many to be Muppet creator (and Mississippian) Jim Henson’s masterpiece.

Check memphisflyer.com for ongoing coverage of OFF throughout the in-person weekend and continuing through the month of April. Tickets and passes are available at oxfordfilmfest.com.

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Cover Feature News

Take Heart! Stories of Love Going Right When the World is Going Wrong

Morgan and Webb

Morgan Stewart lives alone. A self-described workaholic, she likes it that way — or she did until the coronavirus upended the world last March. “I was lonely and bored,” she says. “Before, I had the excuse of, ‘I don’t have time to date.'”

Webb Hunt works at a Covington Pike car dealership. He was having no luck meeting people. “I thought, maybe I just need to go outside of my bubble and date people. But I don’t know how to do that.”

So, in April 2020, Morgan and Webb both decided to download the dating app Tinder. “I matched with her because she was cute, and she liked charcuterie and Sailor Moon.”

Morgan and Webb

“I thought he was a little bit too cute for me,” says Morgan. “But in one of his pictures, he had a carrot butt in his eye like a pirate, and was kind of scowling. That made me think he’s silly enough for me. The thing that got my attention about Webb when he started messaging me — and I feel like men on dating apps don’t do this — he asked me personal questions about myself based on the information I provided in my pictures in my biography. There was a lot of witty banter back and forth between us, then I gave him my phone number.”

“From my perspective, that was the most important part of it — letting her decide,” Webb says.

For date nights, Webb would have a meal delivered to Morgan, and they would watch You’ve Got Mail and the Sharknado films in their respective homes. Morgan sent Webb chocolates from Phillip Ashley, and they started exchanging love songs on Spotify. They were on FaceTime every night. “We read a book together,” Morgan says. “We have a lot of overlapping nerdy interests. He’s a sci-fi person and I’m a children’s book person. So we read a sci-fi children’s book.”

“It was just really cool,” Webb says. “It seemed like an active relationship, even though we’d never met in person yet.”

Finally, in May, they decided to take the next step. “I had a lot of anxiety about deciding to meet each other,” says Morgan.

They took COVID tests, and then he came over for grilled cheese sandwiches. “I’m adding one person to my household,” Morgan says. “For as long as this thing is going on, I have one human being in the whole world who I’m allowed to touch.”

Lyncola and Markus

“I will tell you the truth,” says Lyncola Odell. “I was just dating little fuckbois, who didn’t want to grow up and be a man.”

One night, she told her friend Angela Field she was ready to start dating seriously, and asked her to “please pray to God to send me the right one.”

“She said she prayed and saw my face,” says Markus Seaberry.

Lyncola and Markus

Markus had met Angela while acting in an Anwar Jamison film. He was going through a rough patch. “I’m going to be real — 2009 sucked,” he says.

Markus had had an allergic reaction to a medication, which laid him up for a while. His work was suffering. His love life, nonexistent. “I’m a nerd. I’m weird. I have no game with the ladies,” he says.

Lyncola friend-requested him on Facebook, followed up by a message from Angela. “Yo, that was my friend, and you should meet her. Y’all should go out, and you’re welcome,” Markus remembers.

Markus thought Lyncola was cute, and they went on a date to Chili’s in Southaven, then to see the Steve Carell/Tina Fey movie Date Night. They started seeing each other regularly. “I think it was Memorial Day 2010. She was like, ‘If you want to tell people that we’re boyfriend and girlfriend, that’s okay.’ I was like, ‘Wait a minute! New information!’ I felt like I was Charlie Brown, and I finally kicked the football!”

They dated for almost four years before deciding to get married. Lyncola, whose grandparents were married for 70 years, says she was thinking long-term. “I was collecting data. I can see us being husband and wife someday, and him being a great father. We don’t have children yet, but eventually we do want to foster or adopt and mold a young mind. My parents will be married for 50 years in June, so that’s what I wanted. One thing both of them told me, they said, you gotta communicate with your spouse. If you don’t communicate with him, it’s not gonna work. Even if there’s something you don’t want to tell him, it will eventually come out.”

The pandemic hit the Seaberrys hard. Both were forced to change jobs during 2020. They lost three members of their extended family. Lyncola went back to school to earn an education degree. The isolation started to wear thin. But they had each other. “There were just moments where I honestly had to tell Lyncola, ‘You know what? I am not okay.’ Thankfully, my severance pay did include a little therapy. I really need Black people to get off their hang-ups. They say in the Black community, ‘Just pray.’ And I’m like, ‘Perhaps God made therapy.'”

Michaela and Mitchell

It was the fall of 2019, and Michaela Walley was done with Tinder. “I hate this app. It’s trash. I don’t want to use it. Then I pulled it back up, for whatever reason.”

When they opened the app, Michaela found a response waiting. It was from Mitchell Carter, and it said: “Out of all of the people on here, you look like you’re having the most fun.”

Their first date was to the Black Lodge Halloween Ritual — even if they didn’t quite know it was a date at the time. “It was a really interesting dynamic, because I’m very much an extrovert, and he’s an introvert. I’d want to go out all the time, and he would be very shy, and didn’t know how to talk to people. We’d even discussed it. ‘Hey, if you want to stay in, we can.'”

Michaela and Mitchell

Michaela was successful at pulling Mitchell out of his shell. “I still remember the date, weirdly. It was March 13th, the Black Lodge goth party. We got all dressed up in makeup and stuff, went out, and had a really great night. Then the pandemic hit, and we all had to quarantine. It was fun getting to experience that with this person, like having that outward fun in public. But then I felt like, when we had that time to be alone with each other, it made us a lot closer.”

In November, Michaela’s roommate, Lisa Michaels, a comedian and beloved figure in the Memphis trans community, died suddenly. “He’s helped me in getting through that loss. I know that I’ve put a lot of stress on him, but him showing me that he’s there to stand by me no matter what is really all I needed to know. Even though it hurts, I don’t have to go through pain alone. … Dealing with heavy grief in the midst of a relationship, that’s also the atmosphere of 2020. Everybody’s stressed, everybody’s upset, everybody’s grieving their losses.”

Mitchell doesn’t know their relationship is being featured in the Flyer. Michaela wanted it to be a Valentine’s surprise. “I have definitely picked a person who I want to love for a very long time.”

M ❤ M

Matthew and Joy

Matthew Marseille met his future wife because he skipped a training session. In the summer of 2014, he was a counselor at a Christian sports camp. “We were working with kids between ages nine and 12. … I missed the staff training weekend. So to kind of bridge the gaps and fill me in on things I missed, Joy decided to reach out.”

Joy was his counterpart on the girls’ side of the camp. “From there, we sparked the whole conversation,” she says. “It was very clear, I think, to both of us that we would hit it off, at least as friends. I don’t think either of us were looking for a relationship at all. … That’s when you tend to find your spouse, I think.”

Their jobs threw them together for eight to 12 hours a day. “Everyone picked up on our chemistry,” says Matthew. “It was hard to deny it.”

Matthew and Joy

One person who noticed their attraction was Joy’s father. He came to camp for a birthday visit. “It was just me and my dad in the car,” Joy recalls. “He said to me, ‘I think Matthew is in love with you.’ And I was really thrown.”

The next day, on a boat in Missouri’s Table Top Lake, Matt made his move. “I was like, ‘Yeah. So you’re my girl now.'”

“Do I have any say in this?” Joy responded.

“Sure, what do you have to say?” Matthew said.

“Oh my God. Okay!” says Joy. “We decided to keep it a secret for the rest of the summer. I think it was pretty obvious to most of the staff, but we were trying to keep things on the low key.”

The couple pursued their careers while keeping up a long-distance relationship before eventually landing in Memphis in 2018. When the pandemic hit, the busy couple found themselves thrown together once again.

“Our biggest struggle has been wanting to hang out, hanging out a lot, annoying each other, and then having to take some space, and then being like, ‘I want to hang out again,'” Joy says. “We’ve done that in three- to 14-day cycles throughout the quarantine.”

But the crisis has been good for their marriage. “I think there’s physical evidence of a baby that would argue that it has drawn us closer together,” says Joy. “We had been talking about having kids. We had not planned to have them now, but potentially starting a family in the next year or two.”

Matthew says the pregnancy in the midst of a pandemic is a blessing. “I really wasn’t concerned about the pandemic. Joy does a great job of keeping away from people during the shut-down. She gets on me when I don’t wear my mask when I’m out. I knew she wouldn’t put herself or the baby at risk. This is just another part of life that we have to figure out and navigate around, as opposed to freaking out about it.”

Mark and Ben

“My stepsister Ruth was getting married,” says Ben Helm. “I was living in San Francisco at the time, so I flew home to Memphis for the wedding. It was one of those weddings where there are a lot of parties. The maid of honor threw a party, and I didn’t really know anyone there, so I was just standing there awkwardly. Then Mark comes up to me and introduces himself. Within a few minutes, he’s like, ‘Oh, I’m gay, by the way.'”

Mark Jones’ friend group in Memphis was full of actors and filmmakers, including Ben’s stepsister Ruth. “Ruth had told me that Ben was coming, and she did try to play matchmaker. She had us sit next to each other at the rehearsal dinner. She knew me a lot better than she knew Ben.”

“We were a newly blended family,” Ben says. “It was a family joke for a good decade that Ruth had fixed up her new, gay stepbrother, but not her sister.”

Mark and Ben

Nevertheless, something clicked, and when Ben moved to New York City for graphic design school, Mark followed. “It was a double whammy,” Mark says. “I went from living in a 1,600-square-foot house on Roland that I owned to a two-room apartment on the fourth floor of a five-story walk-up. And we moved there in the coldest of winters.”

The couple bonded through the hard times by going to Broadway shows. When Ben graduated, they decided to return to Memphis, where there was less competition in his chosen field, and Mark was preparing to direct his first film, Fraternity Massacre on Hell Island. “I love New York, but living in New York was rough for me,” Ben says.

Now, years later, the experience prepared them for COVID life. “We’ve been together a lot more. It’s kind of like New York during the day,” says Mark. “Thankfully, we’re not sharing the phone line for the internet.”

They are comforted by memories of their 2019 wedding at Idlewild Presbyterian Church. Mark proposed with a replica of his Christian Brothers high school ring and a shower of white rose petals. “Looking back, that was the last time we saw so many people before COVID hit,” Mark says.

Ryan and Xanthe

Ryan Saucier met Xanthe Mumm just as he was about to move to Miami. His band was playing a farewell gig at Murphy’s when she walked up to him at the bar. “I thought she was kind of crazy, or already too drunk, because women like her don’t usually approach me.”

The next night they met up at the P&H Cafe. “We talked and talked and talked, and she just blew me away. It was karaoke night, and she got up and sang a couple of songs, and my jaw dropped. Of course I’m meeting this amazing woman right before I’m leaving!”

They closed down the bar, and kept talking on the back patio until early in the morning. “We left, giving each other the most awkward hug, and that was basically it.”

Ryan and Xanthe

They kept in touch, and Xanthe flew to South Florida for a visit. “Everyone thought I was crazy,” she says. “‘You’re flying to see a man that you’ve met twice?’ We had been talking almost every day. It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. We obviously liked each other in a romantic way, but because he was living so far away, that wasn’t even an option. We were just so much ourselves. We weren’t trying to impress each other. We were just real and raw.”

Ryan took her to a romantic spot on the beach to watch the sunset. “That’s when I almost kissed her. We were such good friends, I don’t want to ruin that.”

After less than a year, Ryan returned to Memphis. They went to a Blink-182 show, and later that night at Murphy’s, Xanthe made her move. “At the time, we were still drinking pretty heavily, and I guess that kind of helped with it all, because I decided to kiss him.”

Five months later, they moved in together and started a band called Lipstick Stains. But their drinking was becoming a problem. “Long story short, it caught up with us,” Ryan says. “It was definitely having a negative effect on our relationship. We decided, if we’re going to be together, both of us are quitting drinking, or we’re going our separate ways. For me, that’s all I needed to hear.”

They had been sober about six months when the pandemic hit. “It was definitely hard at first, because there were a few moments when I thought I was going to break,” says Ryan. “She was like, ‘No, you’re not doing that.'”

The couple had originally planned on throwing a big wedding in June 2020. As the pandemic dragged on, the date was pushed back to October. “I think around August we said, ‘This is clearly not gonna happen,'” says Xanthe.

Instead, they had a small ceremony with only family present. “It was an awesome wedding. I would tell people to keep it as small as possible, even not during a pandemic. It’s just so much more chill.”

Now, the Saucier-Mumms are ready for normal life to resume. “We’re testy with each other sometimes,” Xanthe says. “And we’re bored a lot of times, but I’d rather be bored with him than anyone else.”

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: 1000 Lights

1000 Lights began in 2018 as a band on a mission: recreate the Stooges’ Fun House for a Halloween party at Black Lodge Video. And they assembled an all-star cast to do, starting with Flyer film editor Chris McCoy (Super Witch, Pisshorse) on bass, and Russ Thompson (The Margins, Static Bombs, Pisshorse) on drums. To this solid rhythm section they added Joey Killingsworth (Joecephus & the George Jonestown Massacre, Super Witch) on guitar, and, in a masterstroke, Jesse James Davis (Yesse Yavis, Model Zero, The Tennessee Screamers) on vocals. Davis was the perfect fit for the manic, yet devious, rock ‘n’ roll energy exuded by Iggy Pop in the classic Detroit band, being no stranger to stripping off his shirt and gyrating with abandon.

And yet, though 1000 Lights channeled Fun House beautifully, their own personalities came more to fore as they pursued original material. Shedding their tribute-band origins, they emerged as something closer to The Damned with echoes of Tin Machine: Both more frenetic and more atmospheric than the Stooges, depending on their mood, but always bringing the reliable riffs.

The capstone of this was their show at the Crosstown Theater in 2019. As McCoy explains, “Last year, 1000 Lights was asked to be a part of Crosstown Arts’ silent film live scoring series. We chose to do Häxan, the 1922 film by director Benjamin Christensen that is both a documentary about the witch hunts of the Middle Ages and a precursor of the modern horror film. We incorporated our existing songs into the score, and wrote a lot of new material to go along with the film. Justin Thompson and Dawn Hopkins recorded the show, and we took the tapes to Dik LeDoux for mixing and mastering. We took the best parts from the 104 minutes of the live score and created an album which we’re releasing on Bandcamp this week. We couldn’t be more pleased with the results. It doesn’t sound like a live album at all, despite the fact that it was recorded in front of a large audience.”

Today, the world gets its first taste of Häxan, the album on Bandcamp, with this, the first video spawned by the project. Davis steers clear of any obvious Iggy-isms, creating his own Southern take on the more panicked sounds of punk. He is hurtling toward the Bluff City from a devilish distance, perhaps about to slam the city from above like a meteor? The frantic apprehension is captured beautifully by McCoy’s wife, director Laura Jean Hocking. “We shot at Black Lodge,” McCoy notes, “using projection art she created and the big screens they have in their theater. Then she incorporated images from Häxan into the final video.”

Says Hocking, “I wanted to portray Jesse as if he was a denizen of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Jesse has a dynamic, androgynously sexy stage presence and I used it to convey the punk urgency of the song. The layered images and projection give it a fever dream meets Exploding Plastic Inevitable sense, like Jesse is fighting the Devil with rock & roll.”

Music Video Monday: 1000 Lights

1000 Lights celebrate the release of Häxan with a live-streamed concert at Black Lodge, Halloween night, October 31, 9 p.m.

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

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

Rhodes Scholar: The College That Made Amy Coney Barrett

CREDIT: Wikipedia: CSPAN

When White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany mistakenly called Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett a “Rhodes Scholar” a couple weeks ago, I nodded in recognition.

I came to Rhodes in the fall of 1989, a time of great change in America. After two Ronald Reagan landslides and the election of George H. W. Bush, the conservative revolution was in full swing. Generation X, as we would come to be called, grew up in the shadow of the Cold War. I was in a political science class when we got word that the Berlin Wall had fallen, making our textbooks instantly obsolete.

Wikipedia: CSPAN

Amy Coney Barrett before the Senate Judiciary Committee

In the 1970s, when Rhodes was called Southwestern, the student body had a hippie reputation. In the 1990s, things were different. The college’s president, James Daughdrill, was involved in a push to eliminate the term “liberal arts college” because it contained the word “liberal.” This was a place where the Kappa Alpha fraternity dressed up as Confederate soldiers to throw an annual “Old South” party. Meanwhile, the biggest band on campus — Neighborhood Texture Jam — sang “Wanna see the rebel flags?/Wanna go see ’em?/They’re next to the swastikas/In a museum!”

The divisions on campus presaged the divisions of today, starting with class. Rhodes is an expensive, selective college. Many Memphians think of Rhodes students as a bunch of stuck-up rich kids, but that’s not entirely true. If you qualify academically, the school is generous with need-based financial aid. As a working-class kid from a rural Tennessee public school, I had never been around such wealth and privilege. The student body was mostly white, but it was much more diverse than where I grew up. Reading Toni Morrison in a literature class with the first Black teacher I ever had was an eye-opening experience.

The most important course I ever took was called Global Change. Only three years after NASA climate scientist James Hansen’s testimony before Al Gore’s Senate committee, we were creating models of the Earth’s climate in Rhodes’ computer lab. Watching my carefully balanced simulation go haywire after adding a little extra CO2 to the atmosphere taught me the precariousness of life on Earth.

The 1980s saw the emergence of the AIDS epidemic, which Reagan’s conservative administration had ignored because it mostly affected gay people. By the early 1990s, it was obvious that using condoms could stop the spread of AIDS, yet Daughdrill’s conservative Rhodes administration forbade student groups from distributing them. Some of my friends, including Ashley Coffield, the current CEO of Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi, took to the weekend party circuit toting buckets of free condoms camouflaged by a layer of candy on top.

Like Amy Coney Barrett, I was an English major. I am sure we had classes together, but I don’t remember her. Those who do remember her describe her as quiet and studious. Rhodes was a competitive environment. People could be jealous and petty; I used to say the most popular intramural sport was character assassination. If she had been a monster, we would know it by now.

Academically, Rhodes is difficult. To this day, my anxiety dreams are still set in those Gothic collegiate classrooms. I barely managed to graduate with a 3.0 GPA; Barrett was summa cum laude. The Honor Code, which forbids lying, cheating, and stealing, is taken very seriously. Barrett was vice president of the Honor Council.

Producing a second Supreme Court Justice (after Abe Fortas in 1965) would increase Rhodes’ prestige. But I was one of more than 1,500 alumni to sign a letter opposing Barrett’s nomination. My reasons are rooted in the education I received on North Parkway.

In her Senate hearing, Barrett, whose father was an oil company lawyer, refused to admit climate change is real, saying, “I’m not a scientist.” That alone is disqualifying for someone whose decisions have the potential to affect the fate of civilization.

As a freelance writer, I depend on the Affordable Care Act. The Trump administration, having failed to legislatively strip 20 million people of healthcare, is currently suing to have the ACA declared unconstitutional. It will be one of the first cases Barrett hears on the Supreme Court. Trump wouldn’t have nominated her if he thought she would rule against him.

Her record indicates that her attitudes toward a woman’s right to choose and same-sex marriage have the potential to gut Americans’ individual liberties. And finally, accepting this nomination against the dying wish of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, from an impeached president who is openly threatening the rule of law, is unworthy of someone who signed the Rhodes Honor Code.

Barrett has put her personal ambition over the needs of the nation, and I fear her appointment to the highest court of the land will be a permanent stain on the honor of the college that I hold dear.

Chris McCoy is the Flyer’s film and TV editor.

Categories
News News Blog

The Flyer’s April 22nd Digital Issue

Here’s the story lineup for this week’s virtual issue. Enjoy! We’ll be back in print next week, April 29th. — BV

Letter From the Editor: Blue Skies From Now On — Bruce VanWyngarden

MEMernet: A Very Memphis Easter, a New Bar — Toby Sells

The Week That Was: Data, Abortion, and Domestic Violence — Maya Smith

The Fly-by: Displaced Actor Finds Work, Purpose Serving the Underserved — Toby Sells

Politics: Commission Gets $1.4 Billion Budget From Harris — Jackson Baker

Cover Story: Memphis Cultural Organizations Learning to Deal with the Pandemic — Jon Sparks & Chris McCoy

Steppin’ Out (Stayin’ In): Silky O’Sullivan’s Hosts Virtual Happy Hour — Julia Baker

Books: Corinne Manning’s We Had No Rules — Jesse Davis

Music: Chris Milam’s Meanwhile is a “Good Album for Quarantine” — Alex Greene

Food & Wine: The Rendezvous Adapts During Quarantine — Michael Donahue

Film: Oxford Film Fest Debuts Pioneering Online Format — Chris McCoy

Last Word: Coronavirus is a Dress Rehearsal for Global Warming — Alex Greene

Categories
Cover Feature News

20 < 30 The Class of 2020

CREDIT: Photographs by Justin Fox Burks

This is the eleventh year the Memphis Flyer has asked our readers to tell us about outstanding young people who are making the Bluff City a better place. We had a record number of nominees, so narrowing it down to 20 was more difficult than ever. We do this so Memphis can meet the leaders who will be shaping our future. Even though we live in a time of uncertainty, speaking to these talented 20 never fails to fill us with hope.

Here they are: Your 20<30 Class of 2020.

Photographs by Justin Fox Burks

Special thanks to Central Station Hotel for hosting our photo shoot.

……

Austin Rowe

Austin Rowe

Realtor

Austin Rowe wants you to Make Memphis Home. He adopted the motto three years ago when he got his realtor’s license, and he’s been putting people in houses ever since — he’s on track to sell $4.5 million worth this year. “I tell people all the time that Memphis has an undercurrent of soul that can’t be seen, it can’t be heard, it just pulls you in.”

Rowe lives in Midtown with his partner Taylor and their corgi Rivendell. He is active in Friends For Life and president of the Memphis chapter of the National Association of Gay and Lesbian Real Estate Professionals. “I like the diversity in my neighborhood the most. You have African-American families, young white families, and older retired people living here. You have Latino families, Asian families. It’s everything about what America is supposed to be.”

……

Jared Boyd

Jared “Jay B.” Boyd

Reporter, Daily Memphian

After three years in Mobile, Alabama, Jared Boyd couldn’t wait to return to Memphis. “You know, home is home.”

When the University of Mississippi School of Journalism and New Media graduate was offered a job at the Daily Memphian, he jumped at the chance. “I think the big thing about working here is how many well-respected stars are in this newsroom,” he says. “It’s like coming to work for the Avengers every day.”

Boyd’s other passion is music. “I started writing and recording in my bedroom when I was 12,” he says.

These days, he is the co-host of Beale Street Caravan, the long-running syndicated radio show that highlights music from Memphis and beyond. On the weekends, he can be found in the DJ booth. “Central Station is my home base … People come there and visit from as far away as London, and I love having conversations with people about music. It’s fun to be in that space and be the total brand ambassador.”

……

Paris Chanel

Paris Chanel

Modeling Agency Owner, Social Media Influencer

This is not the first time Paris Chanel has been on the cover of the Memphis Flyer. Most recently, the owner of the Paris Chanel Agency graced these pages on Valentine’s Day 2019. “I started [modeling] when I was 12,” she says. “It was love at first sight, and I haven’t stopped.

“Growing up in the industry, there weren’t a lot of girls who looked like me. And I thought, the lack of diversity is deep here. So I wanted to do something different. I want to be able to show diversity in all forms. We represent models who aren’t the standard shape and size. We have plus-size models, and we’re looking to get plus-size men on board, too … Everybody deserves a time to shine. So that was my thing — I wanted to create a new avenue for people who probably wouldn’t have been given the chance to explore their dreams.”

……

Ethan ferguson

Ethan Ferguson

Tech Entrepreneur

The first company Ethan Ferguson founded was Augseption XR, which offered augmented reality services for education uses. The second was Cinilope, which is developing new uses for drones. The most remarkable part of the story is, Ferguson is a 20-year-old sophomore at Rhodes College. “I decided  to put down roots in Memphis during high school. I had clients in my hometown, and I really wanted to keep working with them in the future. Being able to stay in Memphis to grow my business has been an amazing opportunity for me.

“Things are changing, and much of that has to do with the education system. We need to put education first. We need to be ready for the new, more automated, high-tech economy. Many of our students are being underserved. Fortunately, it doesn’t take a lot to upgrade from the old way of thinking to a  new one because the technology is everywhere.”

……

Ayo Akinmoladun

Ayo Akinmoladun

Dean of Instruction, Cornerstone Preparatory Elementary

“I graduated from Georgetown in 2013,” says Ayo Akinmoladun. “When I was in D.C., I did student teaching, and I realized that a lot of educational inequality popped up in D.C. So I looked all over the world until I saw Teach For America. They matched me here in Memphis. I’ve been here for seven years. I’ve seen the effect the political and the educational landscape has on students. I think, how can I change the narrative as a black educator here? As a rising principal, how can I change the narrative so students have access to college and [the same] opportunities as their peers?”

Akinmoladun says just seeing someone who looks like them at the head of the class can help encourage students who might otherwise get discouraged. “Black male teachers make a difference for low-income black boys. [With them], they are 29 percent more likely to pursue college and 39 percent less likely to drop out of high school.”

……

Terrica Cleaborn-Thornton

Terrica Cleaborn-Thornton

Lil’ Miracles Food Truck and Catering

Terrica Cleaborn-Thornton says she got her gifts from her mother. “We’ve catered for dignitaries. We’ve catered for Tom Shadyac, the Hollywood producer and U of M professor.”

When Cleaborn-Thornton thought it was time to upgrade to a food truck, she approached her mother with the idea. “We went to her right after she found out she had stage one cancer. ‘Mom, we have a gift. People flock to your home for food — all races, nationalities, and classes. Let’s serve.’ She said she wouldn’t do it unless we were giving back. I said, ‘We’re going to make it our mission that every homeless person, or someone in need, gets to eat for absolutely free, no matter what. That’s when we came up with the Pass Forward initiative.

At Lil’ Miracles Food Truck, what would usually be tips are put toward feeding anyone in crisis, no questions asked. Thornton calls the needy people who come to her for help Wandering Angels. “If you give people a reason to give back, they will.”

……

Deveney Perry

Deveney Perry

Resilient Communities Manager, BLDG Memphis

This Spelman College alumna and native Memphian is taking on equitable community and economic development in Memphis. “I’ve been working on a national initiative that works with communities to ensure community voices and decision-making guide equitable growth and development. The growth and development will benefit their health as well as their economic opportunities.” 

Perry’s work for BLDG Memphis includes things like supporting North Memphis communities to achieve and maintain land ownership, revitalizing public spaces that actually work for the people living there, and building the trust that society needs to thrive.

“We start community engagement at the point of a transactional need. We don’t start at the point of just building relationships. … Community engagement is not a one-time thing that is based on a need or an agenda. It’s a relationship that’s built over time. That’s how we’re able to support and revitalize Memphis neighborhoods.”

……

Gene Robinson

Gene Robinson

Germantown High School Football Coach

“I played football at Whitehaven High School, and that was my way to a free education,” says Gene Robinson. “I got a full scholarship to the University of North Carolina. It was there I got my passion for being able to come back to Memphis and show these young people the opportunities. When I got there, I was like, wow, there are all types of people here, and we’re all getting a free education through the game of football. You hear, ‘This kid can’t succeed,’ but get them on a college campus and get them a degree … well, most of my friends now have good jobs.”

When Robinson returned to Memphis after his collegiate career as a letterman defensive back, he became a coach for Fairley High School football, where he led the Bulldogs to three consecutive regional championships. As 2020 dawned, he moved to Germantown High School.

“I wanted to come back to Memphis because this is where I learned my grit, my grind. I wanted to give these kids a way out.”

……

Rod Erby

Roderick Erby

IT Auditor, International Paper

Roderick Erby has always been a good student. Looking back, he says he realized that he didn’t succeed alone. “I’ve had many informal mentors who, throughout the years, have taught me things that, at the time, I didn’t know I needed … I didn’t realize the gravity of that until I got to college.”

When he’s not keeping the information systems humming at IP, he devotes himself to mentoring people. “I have a mentee in graduate school and one who is about to graduate from high school. Here at International Paper, we have a scholar group of eight or nine kids we meet with every other Monday. They’re juniors in high school. One thing I always find I can help people with is professional etiquette … More recently, I’ve become interested in positive mental health practices. That’s where I’ve helped a lot of my friends who are even my age understand what it means to take care of their mental health, to get a therapist, and to be really intentional about making sure they’re okay mentally, as well as physically and spiritually … That’s what it comes down to for me: helping people. I’ve learned things. I’ve had a lot of experiences. Anything I can do to pass that along to other people to help them, that’s what makes me feel good.”

……

Kevin Brooks

Kevin Brooks

Filmmaker

The two-time Memphis Film Prize winner, Sundance fellow, and youngest-ever board member for the Memphis and Shelby County Film and Television Commission started his trajectory when he saw The Matrix at age 6. “I just really loved how that movie was very entertaining, but at the same time, it has moments that I felt were deeper than just action … That’s just kind of always stuck with me. I want to make entertaining films, but I want it to cause you to really think and leave the theater different than when you came in. That same year, my dad came home with a camera, so it’s like everything kind of played together. It was just meant to be, I guess.”

After the success of “Night Out,” the short he co-directed with Abby Myers, Brooks is working on a documentary and his first-ever feature film, which he plans to shoot in Memphis. “The best artists are the ones who know how to kill the ego and know it’s about serving the audience. That’s what you’re doing: You’re making something that can touch someone, and change someone’s life.”

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Victoria Young

Victoria Young

Attorney, Baker Donelson

Before Victoria Young went to law school, she was a teacher. “I love teaching, but the changes I want to see made aren’t going to be done in the classroom. In order for me to have the effect I want to have, I would need to understand policy and how policymakers and legislators think. … It feels like the manifestation of a dream. I am blessed not only to practice law, but to be able to practice law in Memphis at a firm that has such a rich tradition and a rich history.”

For most people, that would be enough. But not for Young. She started spin classes while in college at Duke University, and when she returned to Memphis, she started Spincult, a boutique cycling studio in the Medical District.

“I wanted Spincult to be a hub for the anchor institutions of the Medical Center, but I was also building a place for me, as a grad student, to enjoy. … I wanted it to be a place where people who do the heart work can come and get a hard workout in.”

Earlier this month, Young welcomed her first daughter into the world. “Now, it’s even more important that I’m able to show her that you have to genuinely invest in the people you care about, and the places you care about.”

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Kevin Woods

Kevin Woods

Urban Farmer

“When I came to Memphis about six years ago, I saw opportunity. There was so much blight around, vacant lots that I could utilize. I started looking at how to acquire some of these lots and went to the land bank and purchased a few. I was just trying to make urban farming a viable option for people in the city. … My urban farm is where all the blight is, where people are not likely to end up. People don’t want to live there. I was in those kinds of communities, trying to inspire people to either grow their own food to eat or to make a viable income for themselves. I haven’t reached that point, where you can sustain yourself from urban ag, but I’m going to keep working until I can do that.”

Woods, who also works as a project coordinator for Memphis Area Legal Services, renovated a formerly blighted house where he lives with his new baby Uriah. “I think we’re fighting toward a Memphis for everybody. Memphis has so much personality, so much flavor. It’s unfair to keep it in just one neighborhood.”

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Joi Taylor

Joi Taylor

Alumni Director, Choose 901

Joi Taylor’s job is to keep talented young people in Memphis. “I was born and raised here. This is my city.”

She started working at Choose 901 in May 2017. “We have five local partner schools in the City of Memphis,” she says. “The whole idea is, after these kids graduate from these partner schools, they enter our program. Right now, we have over a thousand alumni in this program. Our objective is to connect them with opportunities, to mentor them. Anything they need to get ahead in life, it’s our job to connect them with that. But at the same time, to equip them with the skills and know-how to apply what they’ve learned from their mentors to the workplace. … Our whole thing is to make sure that the next generation of leaders in Memphis is well-equipped to take over and be the best that they can be. We want to improve the city of Memphis and [to help people] understand the leadership that’s in place now, so they won’t be clueless when it’s their turn to follow their dreams and take their rightful place as leaders of this city.”

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Cara Greenstein

Cara Greenstein

Senior PR + Social Media Manager, Doug Carpenter and Associates

Cara Greenstein started her first food and lifestyle blog while she was in college in Austin, Texas. “Caramelized was a school project I started in a public relations writing class in 2012. It combines my passion for writing and story time with cooking and entertaining. When it originally started, it was just to practice my writing skills in the blog medium. But after I turned it in for a grade, I wanted to keep doing it.”

Her writing gained the attention of the Austin Chronicle, and her readership has continued to grow from there. “More recently, I’ve been working with national brands and products to be their lifestyle ambassador while also balancing the great food and lifestyle scene of my city.”

As soon as she graduated, she came back home. “I was watching Memphis’ development get started. I was seeing Downtown and the energy that was being reinvested, and I wanted to be a part of it. I actually met Doug Carpenter, who is now my boss at DCA, when I was a senior and considering my next move. It was even more compelling after that conversation. … I’m looking to build a city that is better connected.”

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Katherine King

Katherine King

Senior Engineer, FedEx

“I am looking at what FedEx will be five to 10 years out,” says Katherine King. “My work involves looking at vision systems, robotics, and exoskeleton technology, which falls into general human augmentation technology. I get pretty excited about my job!

“When I was first looking for a way to connect with Memphis, I looked for places where I could find people like me, people in my community. Coming from Mississippi, and as someone who came out in college, I didn’t really have a community that identified with me as being part of the LGBTQ community. OUTMemphis was one of the first places that I looked. They just had so many opportunities to get involved.”

King has been an advisor for the OUTMemphis PRYSM youth group and met her future wife through the Metamorphosis Project. For the last two years, she has been the director of the Outflix Film Festival. “One thing I’m excited about, and have really tried to push for at the festival, is to broaden the idea of the LGBTQ voice when it comes to film. … I think there will always be a place for the coming out story in our community, but there’s room for more stories beyond that first step out of the closet.”

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Daniel Bastardo-Blanco

Daniel Bastardo-Blanco

Ph.D. Student, UTHSC St. Jude Integrated Biomedical Science Program

“We are interested in understanding how the immune system works — how the body defends itself against cancer, against bacteria, and infection. In particular, I’m interested in understanding the molecular processes that drive the development of specialized immune cells. We use a number of tools to dissect which molecular players are key in the development of T-Cells, highly specialized white blood cells.”

Bastardo Blanco has a talent for communication that is the envy of many in his field. He has been published in everything from Nature to The Commercial Appeal. He is a freelance journalist and blogger who has advised his colleagues on “Bringing your science out of the journal and into the world.

“I am truly fascinated by the power of science,” he says. “I really believe science has the power to change life and to make the world better. But since I have become a scientist, I have come to realize there is a disconnect between scientists and the general public. We don’t really make a big effort to bridge the two, and we depend on each other.”

He is the founding president of the Venezuelan Alliance of Memphis and the former head of the UTHSC Graduate Student Executive Council. Next month, his research in Memphis will reach its climax when he defends his Ph.D. thesis.”This is coming in great timing for me because it’s really a conclusion of a very big chapter of my life.”

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Carrington Trueheart

Carrington Trueheart

Cellist, Iris Orchestra

Carrington Trueheart didn’t start playing cello until the eighth grade, a full decade later than most people who perform at his rarified level. But that didn’t stop the Raleigh/Frayser native from obtaining his master’s degree from the University of Memphis and playing with some of the best conductors and musicians in the world. “One thing that music has taught me is, the more you know, the more you don’t know. I feel like every time I enter a new chapter of my life, that circle becomes bigger and bigger. So if you ask me if I’m a natural, I say maybe. But I have to work at it a lot.”

Trueheart is currently the Artist Fellow for the Iris Orchestra. “Part of the fellowship is addressing social inequity in the arts,” he says. “It’s a wonderful program that allows us to do a lot of community outreach. We get to play for kids at Le Bonheur and Hope House. We travel all over Memphis teaching kids in schools. It’s been a big part of my transition from being in school to being a professional.”

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Goldie Dee

Goldie Dee

Entertainer

Goldie Dee, aka Micah Winter, thrives in the spotlight. “What really gives me anxiety is being in a room that is uncontrolled. When I go into an event space and I’m not an MC or a performer, I want to control it. If things are going off the rails, I feel it is my duty to jump in and contribute to the success of it. I get more anxiety being offstage watching people fail than I do being onstage failing.”

As the new historical marker at Evergreen Theater attests, there has long been an underground drag scene in Memphis. By performing in nontraditional venues and prestigious events such as the Cotton Carnival, Goldie Dee has been instrumental in bringing drag into the mainstream. “I’m on the board of Friends of George’s. It was one of the original discos here in town, which operated from the 1970s to the 1990s. We now operate as a charitable group. We have about four big shows a year under the TheatreWorks umbrella. We do three major donations a year of $10,000-$15,000.”

During the recent holiday season, she estimates she spent upward of 50 hours a month on stage. “That is my goal with Goldie: To be very visible at all times.”

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Katrina Dorse

Katrina Dorse

Executive Director, Big Heart Fund

“I grew up in Memphis,” says Katrina Dorse. “I was one of those young people who … said ‘I’m never coming back.'”

She was pursuing a master’s degree in social work in Washington, D.C., when she became pregnant. “This was not in the five-year plan I had laid out,” she says.

Dorse returned to Memphis to have her baby with support from her family. “Kellen was born with seven congenital heart defects.”

About 1 in 100 babies are born with heart disease. Kellen spent three of his five months of life at the Le Bonheur cardiovascular intensive care unit, with Katrina by his side. “When I look back on our journey, I see I was very fortunate because we had a lot of support.”

But the other families in the ICU didn’t have that kind of support, so Dorse started the Big Heart Fund, which helps families of ill children with things like housing and other expenses. “You go through this experience that nothing in life can ever prepare you for, but at the end of it you’ve got this wealth of knowledge and experience that you can share with another family. If for nothing else, just to let them know that they’re not alone.”

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Sherrie Lemons

Sherrie Lemons

Communications Director and Clinic Liaison, Memphis Full Spectrum Doula Collective

In 2018, Lemons was named Planned Parenthood’s Young Volunteer of the Year. One factor behind the award was her work as an abortion doula. “We’re the hand-holders of the abortion procedure. We provide physical and emotional support for each patient as needed. If the patient wants us in there with them — consent is a huge factor in what we do — we go into the room with them, we are in there throughout the procedure. … We give them whatever they need.”

Lemons is a native Memphian who is clear-eyed about the kind of future she wants to help build for the Bluff City. “I really want an equitable city. I don’t want to see Memphis associated with the level of poverty that it is currently associated with. … I truly want Memphis to be for everyone. I don’t want that to just be a tagline, putting a smile on a city that has struggled.”