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Spaceface Halloween at Crosstown Theater

CREDIT: Erika Mugglin

Spaceface is bringing its annual Spaceface Halloween concert to Crosstown Theater this weekend, and Jake Ingalls, singer and guitarist for the psychedelic rock band, promises an epic party.

Spaceface, known for its visually appealing backdrops, will be turning the theater into a Stranger Things-themed upside-down Snowball Dance (season 2, episode 9, for reference).

“Our goal with every show is, from the get-go, for people to walk in and see a completely different place than the one that they’ve been in before,” says Ingalls.
Erika Mugglin

To further set the scene, Spaceface will be dressing up like Stranger Things characters.

“I’ll be dressing up like Steve,” he says. “I’ve already got my Scoops Ahoy outfit.”

The other band members will dress like Hopper (Eric, singer), Eleven (Matt, guitar), Billy (Griffin, bass), Dustin (Peter, keys) and Barb (Big Red, drums).

For the first half of the show, Spaceface will be accompanied by the UpsideDown Ensemble (a 10-piece ensemble from Memphis Symphony Orchestra), two or three extra horn players from Louise Page’s band, and some Demogorgons.

“My friend Natalie is flying down from Grand Rapids,” says Ingalls. “She’s made a lot of props for us before, and she’s made an actual Demogorgon costume that she’ll be doing wacky stuff with.”

Ingalls says this show will double as a single release party for retrofuture tune “Panoramic View,” which will be dropping the day before along with a music video.

“For people who’ve been seeing us from the beginning, it’s actually one of our first songs from our first show that we played at Poplar Lounge back in 2012,” says Ingalls. “We sort of just let it fall by the wayside for some reason.”
Spaceface Halloween with The UpsideDown Ensemble, Crosstown Theatre (right behind the Central Atrium?), Saturday, October 26th, 7-11:30 p.m., $10 in advance, $15 at the door.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

A Face In The Crowd Predicted The Trump Era — in 1957

Andy Griffith as Larry ‘Lonesome’ Rhodes in Eliza Kazan’s A Face In The Crowd.

Merriam-Webster, the internet’s favorite dictionary, defines a “demagogue” as “a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power.” The American fear of the persuasive power of demagogues in a democracy goes all the way back to the Founding Fathers, who fretted that a “man of low cunning” might some day rise to be president. Welcome to 2019.

At the movies, there have been numerous cautionary tales of demagoguery, such as All The King’s Men, Bullworth, and Network. The granddaddy of them all is Eliza Kazan’s 1957 film A Face In The Crowd. Written by Budd Schulberg, who had collaborated with Kazan to create On The Waterfront three years earlier, it tells a distinctly American story that will seem all too familiar today. Larry Rhodes is in a chain gang in Arkansas when he’s discovered by radio host Marsha Jefferys.  He’s a singer, guitar player, and master country-boy bullshitter. It’s the third part that gets him the farthest in life. After Marsha dubs him “Lonesome” Rhodes, he becomes a favorite guest on her radio show, before spinning off into his own program. Wildly popular with the rural heartland crowd, Rhodes gradually evolves into a political commentator, then becomes a political figure himself.

Kazan and Schulberg said Rhodes was originally inspired by comedian Will Rodgers, but he’s got a distinctly Elvis feeling to him, which is not surprising, considering the film was being conceived in Elvis’ miracle year of 1956. To play the lead, Kazan tapped an unknown young actor named Andy Griffith, and he absolutely knocked it out of the park. It’s hard for audiences familiar with his wholesome sitcom image and second career as crusading lawyer Matlock to image Griffith as “edgy” and “dangerous,” but he drips with Trumpian malevolence, as you can see in this clip, where he plays opposite Patricia Neal as his mentor Marsha.

A Face In The Crowd Predicted The Trump Era — in 1957

A Face In The Crowd screens at 7:30 on Thursday, September 19th as a part of Crosstown Theater’s Arthouse series. Tickets are $5 at the door. 

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Looking Back at the Continuum Music Festival 2019

CREDIT: Jamie Harmon

Jamie Harmon

Project Logic, with DJ Logic, Vernon Reid, MonoNeon, and Daru Jones

The Continuum Music Festival has come and gone once again, leaving many reeling from over two solid days of innovative sounds. Here, we present a slideshow of some highlights, by photographers Jamie Harmon and Jillian Baron.

Your faithful correspondent was able to witness one highlight of the weekend, Opera Memphis’ staging of the modern opera As One, by composer Laura Kaminsky and librettists Kimberly Reed and Mark Campbell. Since its premier in 2014, this has become the most produced new opera in North America, and upon seeing the performance at Continuum, it was easy to see why.
Jillian Baron for Opera Memphis

Blythe Gaissert, mezzo-soprano, and Michael Kelly, baritone, in As One

Featuring Blythe Gaissert, mezzo-soprano, and Michael Kelly, baritone, singing with the  Blueshift Ensemble String Quartet (Marisa Polesky, Jessie Munson, Beth Luscombe, Alisa Horn), the piece tells a heart-wrenching saga of a transgender person grappling with her identity. The two singers orbit around each other throughout, each furthering the tale of a young boy’s struggle with, and gradual acceptance of, his often secret female identity. The effect of the two singers inhabiting different aspects of one life is indescribably captivating; coupled with the string quartet, it is gripping.

The music ranges from the hypnotic or pastoral pulses of childhood, to ever more strident and dissonant harmonies as the dual protagonist, Hannah after and Hannah before, confronts misunderstanding and threats from the world at large.

For impressions of the remainder of the festival, I asked Paul Taylor, aka New Memphis Colorways, to describe his impressions of the festival’s second day.
Jamie Harmon

New Memphis Colorways

Paul Taylor: There was a restorative yoga thing led by Sean Murphy and Anne Froning. That was a nice addition to both days. Sean does a really interesting looping with a bunch of wind instruments and delay pedals. Pretty cool.

The Theremin-Lap Steel duo was super beautiful and tranquil. It was really refreshing and surprising. They took it in a direction that was totally not directly linked to the expected sounds of those instruments.

Then I played my set, which was a re-imagining of my New Memphis Colorways Vignettes. That’s a project I’m doing on social media this year, releasing little 60-second video clips that are intended to exist only on social media. They’re not advertisements for anything else. They’ve just reached their destination and I’m done with it when they wind up on social media, as art intended to live there.

But I decided, for this show, to reanimate them into longer versions by mapping out sections of each of the videos to a MIDI controller, so I could trigger start points in the video and audio in each of them, and spontaneously improvise longer compositions. And that sort of created new chord changes and beats by utilizing different start points as they were not originally intended to be. And I think I survived relatively unscathed.

Directly after me it was the Blueshift Ensemble playing music by ICEBERG. And the pieces they played were just astonishing. I was absolutely blown away at the breadth and scope of those tunes. They’re really challenging, they’re really enlightening.

And after that was Project Logic. That was a really interesting show, in that I think a lot of people expected Vernon Reid to just be a shredder, which he is, but man, he was playing the holy hell out of funky neo-soul repetitive groove guitar, and those guys were in a trance for, like, two hours straight. They had the audience completely entranced. And the venue and lights were fantastic.

[slideshow-1]

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Do The Right Thing Returns for 30th Anniversary Screening

Bill Nunn as Radio Raheem in Do The Right Thing

What we call the indie film movement has its roots in Kubrick, Corman, and Cassavetes, but it really popped off in 1989 with a pair of films: Stephen Soderberg’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing. It’s hard to overstate the impact of Spike Lee on a generation of filmmakers. He’s like Jimi Hendrix was for guitarists. You either embraced his approach and iterated on it or you consciously rejected it and went in another direction. There was no ignoring him.

Lee has made some great films in the last three decades, such as last year’s epic BlacKkKlansman, but Do The Right Thing remains a towering masterpiece of a film. It has also remained stubbornly relevant. The proxy fight over who gets to be on Sal’s Pizza wall is reflected today in a hundred conversations on representation in media. The senseless police brutality inflicted on Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) looks like a dress rehearsal for the 2014 choking death of Eric Garner. The dilemmas faced by the protesters were hashed out by Lee before many of them were born.

The cast is among the most amazing ever assembled: Samuel L. Jackson, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Giancarlo Esposito, Martin Lawrence, the recently deceased Paul Benjamin, and, in her film debut, a former Soul Train dancer named Rosie Perez. Lee opened the film with Perez dancing to Public Enemy’s anthem “Fight the Power” in what the film criticism website The Dissolve called the greatest pop music moment in film history.

Do The Right Thing Returns for 30th Anniversary Screening (2)

Crosstown Theater’s Arthouse film series will present the 30th anniversary of Do The Right Thing on Thursday, August 8th, at 7:30 p.m. The Memphis Flyer is giving away free tickets to the screening. If you would like to be in the drawing for two free tickets to the film, you can either email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com or send a message to our Facebook page. We’ll draw names for the winner at noon on Thursday.

Do The Right Thing Returns for 30th Anniversary Screening

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Fredrick Wiseman’s Memphis Documentary “Juvenile Court” Screens At Rebranded Crosstown Arthouse Film Series

Crosstown Theater has rebranded their weekly film presentations as the Crosstown Arthouse Film Series. This better reflects the series’ content and mission of bringing classic, rarely seen, or overlooked films to Memphis audiences.

Case in point is tonight’s film, Juvenile Court. Director Fredrick Wiseman was one of the early practitioners of what was called “Direct Cinema”, a kind of American answer to cinéma vérité. Enabled by the development of the kind of handheld camera and audio equipment we in the digital age take for granted, filmmakers of the 1960s were able to capture reality in a way that their predecessors simply could not. Wiseman’s films like High School, Basic Training, and Missile were all about capturing everyday life in various contexts. In the early 1970s, he turned his camera on the Memphis justice system for what would become Juvenile Court. Wiseman doesn’t editorialize — although he was a pioneer of using editorial techniques to construct a narrative out of seemingly disconnected images and events, which producers of today’s reality shows have weaponized. Instead, he simply captures the faces and interactions of normal people in the abnormal circumstances that they are placed in.

Tonight’s screening will be introduced by filmmakers Joann Self-Selvidge and Sarah Fleming, who are currently engrossed in creating Juvenile, which traces the experiences of five people from all over the country who have been caught up in the tangle of the American juvenile justice system, and what lessons we can learn from their experience.

Tickets to the show are $5, and can be bought at the door only. Showtime is 7:30 PM at Crosstown Theater.