Tag: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

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Art Art Feature

A Q&A with the Brooks’ new director Emily Ballew Neff.

Last week, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art announced that it’s hired a new executive director to fill the spot that has been empty since Cameron Kitchin left for the Cincinnati Art Museum. Emily Ballew Neff, who hails from Texas and has spent most of her career as a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will join the Brooks in mid-April. Dr. Neff is an Americanist with a resume that also includes research in African and European arts, as well as degrees from Yale, Rice University, and the University of Texas Austin.

Neff took time to speak with the Flyer from Oklahoma last week, where she recently left a job as director and chief curator of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma.

Flyer: It seems as if Western American art has had a big influence in your career. While in Houston, you curated exhibits such as “The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950.” How do you think your past curatorial focus will relate to your work at the Brooks?

Neff: As an Americanist, I have done projects on painting and photography of the American West. I’ve also done projects on 18th-century Transatlantic British and American art. As an undergraduate, my senior thesis was on African art, and then my master’s thesis was on 19th-century French art. I have a broad background, but in terms of what I want to do — I don’t want to impose too much on Brooks and on the community until I get there, get to know the community, and try to figure out what would be a good fit. I’m a very firm believer that the wrong thing to do would be to come to a cultural climate that is as sophisticated and developed and historically important as Memphis’ is and impose my will. It needs to be a reciprocal — a conversation.

If I do come in with any agenda, it is to make sure that the art collection itself, which is terrific, is absolutely central in everything that the museum does. The museum has a great reputation for its education, its community outreach, and engagement. I would like to be able to enrich that already-great tradition. But the collection is really very fine, and I am all about the art. The Brooks has a major collection of encyclopedic art. That is an amazing legacy. I like to see the art of various cultures kind of bump up against one another in interesting ways … that kind of depth and breadth.

What is first on your agenda when you arrive? I know the Brooks has its 100-year anniversary coming up in 2016, and there are renovations planned to make the museum more accessible to visitors.

I need to hit the ground running. I know that the staff and the board have already been working hard on the 100-year anniversary. I think that it is an extraordinary opportunity for a new director. One of the questions I got yesterday from someone was, “Doesn’t this seem a little daunting, to come in right before this is all happening?” and I said, “It is the challenge that any museum director would want.” It gives you that opportunity to really focus on the institution and its history. It is a process that is going to involve the Memphis community in a very deep way, and I hope that what comes out of it is something that is a kind of strategy for the next chapter of the Brooks history … I like that sense of urgency. People care so much about this institution, and so we better do it right.

There has been an ongoing effort within the Brooks to incorporate more contemporary work and to have exhibitions that are not only about contemporary work at a national level but at a local level. Can you speak to your goals in terms of that effort?

I am really interested in contemporary art. I don’t know yet if this would be right for Memphis or not, but I am very interested in site-specific contemporary work. I think that is a fantastic way for the community to become kind of invested in [art]. I think that Overton Park is such a beautiful, exceptional treasure in Memphis, and I can see artists coming in and doing something that is temporary and site-specific — a kind of intervention. You don’t need to go inside the museum walls to experience art — you can also experience it while you are having a picnic at the park. I can’t wait to learn about the Memphis art scene; I know it is a very creative city, and it is going to take me awhile to get around and get to know people and to see it. This is a challenge, a challenge that I welcome, to balance the local with the global.

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Hallelujah Screening at the Brooks

Mystery Train, a moody comedy by envelope-pushing director Jim Jarmusch, is generally regarded as a landmark moment for modern filmmaking in Memphis. A historical marker in front of the Arcade restaurant at the corner of S. Main and G.E. Patterson commemorates Mystery Train, and the numerous subsequent films that were shot in and around the refurbished district, including early features written and directed by local filmmaker Craig Brewer. But Mystery Train is hardly Memphis’ most historically important film. That honor goes to King Vidor’s Hallelujah, which was released exactly 60 years before Jarmusch’s soulful meditation on time, distance, and decay, and is screening at the Brooks Museum this week.

Hallelujah

Hallelujah, which was shot in and around Memphis, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1929 and is identified by many contemporary critics as a film of note. It never had a chance at the box office. It’s not that there wasn’t a market for the innovative talkie, but the film simply wasn’t made available. Hallelujah’s cast was entirely African American, and nobody had ever seen that before. The novelty, however, was no match for institutional racism. In Chicago, theater owners, with the exception of a lone indie, passed on the first run of the film, fearing that it would attract a large audience — but a black one. The casting made the film a non-starter for theater owners in the Jim Crow South.

Although it was unprecedented, Hollywood producers knew Hallelujah was a risky proposition from the beginning and wouldn’t have made it in the first place if King Vidor, a proven director, hadn’t agreed to forego pay and roll his salary into production costs. And even if Vidor’s depictions of African Americans seem stereotypical by modern standards, the filmmaker clearly set out to buck norms and make the best film white Hollywood could make about black culture in the South. The story of sin, seduction, and salvation stars Daniel L. Haynes as a good man who makes bad decisions, especially when he shares the frame with Nina Mae McKinney, an actress known as “the black Garbo.”

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Film Features Film/TV

“We Are the Best”

“Punk is dead, don’t you know that?”

That’s what the kids in school yell at Bobo (Mira Barkhammer) and Klara (Mira Grosin), the pair of misfit seventh grade girls in director Lukas Moodysson’s We Are The Best. Since the film is set in 1983 Stockholm, Sweden, we, the audience, know that Bobo and Klara are right and their schoolyard taunters are wrong. Punk would die and be reborn many times in the next 30 years. But from the girls’ perspective, sitting in a freshly scrubbed, urban social democracy, surrounded by cookie cutter normals and sneering metalheads, it looks true. But that doesn’t stop them from picking up the punk mantel and doing their self-imposed duty of keeping the music, and the attitude, alive.

The film opens on Bobo’s divorced mother’s 40th birthday party. In true punk fashion, everyone around her is having fun but Bobo, a pouty, plain-looking 14-year-old in frail round glasses whom, everyone notes, has just cut her hair short. She just wants to be left alone in her room to listen to her favorite bands, like Mongo and the Incest Brothers.

Bobo’s bestie Klara, on the other hand, has both parents and a set of brothers and sisters who bicker and argue constantly. Klara has gone a little further down the punk path, already sporting a mohawk and an inherited record collection courtesy of her older brother, Linus (Charlie Falk) a former punk who views his little sister’s rebellion with a combination of wry amusement and loving, not-quite condescension.

We Are the Best’s three terrific, first-time actors.

Linus’ view of the girls most closely resembles Moodysson’s take on the story, which is an adaptation of his wife’s graphic novel memoir Never Goodnight. Barkhammer and Grosin give tremendous performances, especially considering they are both first-time actors. But Moodysson maintains a safe distance, visualizing their world not as they see it, but as we see it looking back from the 21st century. When someone asks Klara what her band’s one song “Hate Sport” is about, she answers “We hate sports, and we want others to hate it as well.” It’s a laugh line, but it’s delivered with the same deadpan Scandinavian earnestness as her answer to the next question, “What is punk about?”

“Standing up for the weak.”

Klara and Bobo’s band starts almost by accident. While building a “nuclear meltdown” sculpture for an art class, they are bullied by a bunch of older boys in a metal band named Iron Fist. But when they discover that Iron Fist has neglected to sign up on the calendar for the youth center practice space, they hijack their practice by claiming to have a band of their own. It’s the first of many off-the-cuff poses that slowly turn into reality for the girls. They’re turned down for the school’s fall talent show, but when they see a talented young guitarist named Hedvig (Liv LeMoyne, another first timer) they decide to recruit her into the band, despite the fact that she is a straight-laced Christian. Hedvig accepts their invitation (“I hate sports too!” she says before teaching them to sing the song in key.), but the culture clash with her devout family is more profound than either Bobo’s or Klara’s. When they attempt to play a song called “Hang God,” Klara calmly explains to Hedvig that “It’s a Christian song. If he didn’t exist, you couldn’t hang him.”

The plot arcs through some familiar territory, as the girls learn to play together in the band, confront their philosophical differences, and fight over a boy in another punk band (whose one song is called “Reagan/Breshnev”) on their way to a climactic appearance at Santa Rock where they once again confront their nemesis Iron Fist. But it’s the details of the journey that matter in this good-natured film. Bobo, Klara, and Hedwig’s story of Sweden’s finest teenage girl punk band will feel universal to everyone who has ever set out to prove that punk won’t die on their watch.

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Film Features Film/TV

Nam June Paik at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

It’s been two years since Luis van Seixas, preparator for the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, put out a call to musicians and composers asking for contributions to a special soundtrack project. Nam June Paik’s Vide-O-belisk, the tower of cabinet televisions, video loops, and neon that dominates the Brooks’ rotunda, is adorned with images of musical notes and musical imagery, but it is entirely silent. “The Paik Sessions, Volume One,” gathered the first 10 pieces of music created in response to Paik’s site-specific sculpture, which was installed at the Brooks by the artist in 2002. On Thursday, July 24th, the Brooks celebrates what would have been the visionary artist’s 82nd birthday with the release of “The Paik Sessions, Volume Two.” The Korean-born artist passed away in 2006.

Celebrating Nam June Paik

This week’s Art & A Movie night at the Brooks doubles as a party in Paik’s honor and features local cellist Jonathan Kirkscey, performing music created for the Vide-O-belisk. The musical performance is followed by screenings of three of Paik’s films paying tribute to a range of composers and artists including John Cage, Lou Reed, Allen Ginsberg, Charlotte Moorman, Joseph Beuys, Keith Haring, and Philip Glass. The Paik films include Global Groove (1973, 28 minutes), Bye Bye Kipling (1986, 30 minutes), and MAJORCA-fantasia (1989, 5 minutes).

Participants will also be able to design their own Vide-O-belisk-inspired artwork using a retro TV photo frame, wire, and a photographic image created onsite by Amurica.

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Art Art Feature

“Akin” at Crosstown Arts

Last summer, New York art critic Christian Viveros-Fauné wrote in The Village Voice that folk art is merely the new fad in big-business art collecting and that folk artists have “precious little to say about our time’s most pressing issues.” Folk artists, wrote Viveros-Fauné are “Sunday painters, stitching septuagenarians, and religious cranks” who are usually “dead, mentally impaired, or can barely speak for themselves.”

Royal Robertson’s art piece in “Akin”

Viveros-Fauné’s so-called Sunday painters would probably include reclusive spiritualist Royal Robertson, a New Orleans-based artist who used tempera paint on wood or posterboard to make work about the end of days, as well as Memphian Joe Light, a self-taught painter and driftwood sculptor. Work by Robertson and Light and eight other folk artists is currently on display at Crosstown Arts Gallery as part of the show “Akin,” through July 6th.

“Akin,” curated by Southfork gallerist Lauren Kennedy, is meant as a companion show to the Brooks’ upcoming “Marisol: Sculptures and Works on Paper” exhibition. The works all come by way of the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, Texas. The Web Gallery, according to its website, is interested in “painted or repaired objects, fraternal lodge items, carnival banners, tramp art, memory jugs, quilts, and just killer oddball stuff.”

Ike Morgan’s Mona Lisa

Like the work of the genre-bending sculptor Marisol, who often used a folkish style (despite her formal training), the works in “Akin” have range. There are oblique hubcap sculptures by Hawkins Bolden alongside Ike E. Morgan’s grotesque canvas paintings of George Washington. Kennedy says, “Looking at Marisol’s work, there was a quality that struck me the way folk art does. The materials and the way you can see her hand in the work … the work felt akin to a lot of folk and outsider art that I enjoy.”

“Folk art” is a loose category. Though it usually describes work by untrained or informally trained artists, it has also come to describe a style, the hallmarks of which are cheap or found materials, obsessive mark-making, and a disregard for formal perspective. Painters like Esther Pearl Watson, whose landscapes are featured in the show and often include sparkly UFOs and scrawled writing, are more D.I.Y than traditionally folk. The same is true of Fred Stonehouse, a featured surrealist painter who holds a B.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Stonehouse and Watson aren’t exactly outsider artists, but their work is in the folk canon, alongside Robertson’s rough drawings and Light’s Old Testament-inspired sculpture and painting.

Watson’s paintings, particularly, unify “Akin.” Her 2012 painting Bail Bonds shows a small female figure walking in front of a storefront. Yellow balloons float to the sky, and a UFO hovers unobtrusively over a leafless tree. It is a barren scene in what looks like a warm, Texas winter. A notation at the top of the painting reads, “Dad is in Jail in Florida. He gets released the 29th. Mom is upset. He doesn’t know if he wants to come back or not.” There is something flexible and self-conscious about Bail Bonds. It is accessible like a comic but has the depth of a much-worked-over painting; perhaps Watson gave the work a folkish look to create this effect.

“Akin” does well by the “religious cranks” that Viveros-Fauné maligned. The critic’s wording is reactionary and rude, but he touches on something true: Folk artists could usually give a flip about big art world business, and so folk art has always been a weird bedfellow with the gallery scene. What is called for is more shows like “Akin” that embrace a broad and warm aspect of an important community of artists.

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“Marisol: Sculptures and Works on Paper” at the Brooks

When Marisol Escobar premiered her 1969 sculpture The Family at the Brooks Museum of Art, it stirred up a lot of local controversy. “The Family is a work to be contemplated and meditated on,” wrote the art critic for The Commercial Appeal, “no matter how much it hurts you to look.”

The controversial works by Marisol.

Viewers were cautioned that The Family, the Brooks’ first-ever commissioned work, is an unorthodox depiction of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and Joseph. The three figures all wear neon halos and are painted in bright, Popish colors. And if those details didn’t rile museum visitors, Marisol’s infant Jesus is, ahem, anatomically correct. In a segment on the work, WMC Action News 5 cautioned museum visitors that “we’re used to halos and heavenly light being represented by paint and gold and silver — but not by the more effective neon tubing.”

After many years in storage, The Family is now on display at the Brooks as part of an expansive retrospective of Marisol’s (she rarely used her last name) work. It is the entry-point to the story of Marisol, an avant-garde female artist who moved lithely between genres and styles in 1960s Greenwich Village and whose career has often been understated in the cultural memory of the era. Marisol was a sculptor, printmaker, and draftsman, a Warholian It Girl, a social critic, and feminist who sometimes disowned her own sharp-eyed criticism in favor of maintaining a mysterious presence.

The retrospective, which opens June 14th, is the summation of 10 years of effort by curator Marina Pacini, who began her work with Marisol around the time she joined the Brooks. Pacini’s mission is to give Marisol’s work the space and attention it is due. Says Pacini, “This is an amazing model of a very successful woman artist who was making works on her own terms.” The exhibit is the first of its kind — a definitive look at an artist whose long history with Memphis is, four decades after The Family‘s debut, finally getting proper context.

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Art Art Feature

The Brooks’ “The Eclectic Sixties”

CREDIT: courtesy Philip Pearlstein

courtesy Philip Pearlstein

Philip Pearlstein’s Female Model On Bed, Hands Behind Back

Of the roughly 9,000 works in the Brooks Museum collection, only about 3 percent are on display at any given time. Of that displayed 3 percent, fewer than half of those are delicate works on paper that are only allowed (by curatorial dictum) to see the light of day once a decade. A fraction of that fraction are contemporary and modern works on paper.

Courtesy Red Grooms / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Red Grooms’ Portrait Of Paul Suttman

With this circumstance in mind, you should really make a trip to see the masterful 1973 Philip Pearlstein drawing Female Model on Bed, Hands Behind Back, currently on display in the Brooks exhibition “The Eclectic Sixties.” It is not one of Pearlstein’s more famous works (the artist is better known for his mammoth and psychologically rigorous nude oil paintings), but it is a candid and beautiful example of what simple line work can do to describe the human body.

The Pearlstein drawing, along with other works in the “Sixties” exhibition, is on display through September as part of the Brooks’ summer focus on the decade. “The Eclectic Sixties” and another small show are intended as support for an important retrospective of the works of mid-century artist Marisol, set to open in June. Marisol’s work will dominate the museum’s lower galleries with “The Eclectic Sixties” operating as a descriptive entry-point to the retrospective.

Courtesy Estate of ted faiers

Ted Faiers’ Woman With Cat

“The Eclectic Sixties” is entirely comprised of works culled from the Brooks’ permanent collection, including a loosely brush-worked portrait of sculptor Paul Suttman by Red Grooms, a 1971 psychedelic bust of a woman holding a cat called Woman With Cat by Memphian Ted Faiers, and a neon Andy Warhol series, “Electric Chair.” There is a cool 1966 “photolithography concertina” — an accordian-style photo book — by Edward Ruscha titled Every Building on Sunset Strip.

Courtesy David Parrish

John Parrish’s The Eagle Has Landed

The exhibition is almost evenly divided between collage and assemblage-based works — the sort that might have been made from Alphabet City garbage and old Polaroids — and colorful pieces in the Pop Art canon. Most works are from the ’60s or early ’70s, though a few pieces are from much later and reflect a strong period influence. One of these later works, John Wesley’s 1998 Showgirls, is the purest Pop piece in the entire exhibition; it would be difficult to guess that it was painted 35 years after the peak of the style.

The inclusion of later works and the exhibition’s loose approach to hard genres (Pop! Op! Surrealism! Assemblage! et cetera) is refreshing. Too often, work from the period is curated with stiff reference to over-defined mid-century art movements or with reductive historical explanation about American counterculture and societal shifts. The Brooks exhibition sidesteps that. The works in the show feel intimate, left to their own devices.

Courtesy Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Andy Warhol’s Electric Chair

The Eagle Has Landed, a large photorealistic oil painting by John Parrish, is the poster-child for the exhibition, not only because it is dominant and flashy (it depicts a greaser with his motorcycle on the moon), but because it brings together many of the other works in the show — it is figurative, accessible, and very human but has a hard-edged chromatic coloration that seems advertising-inspired. The headspace of the painting also seems dead-on: a moon that is a fantasy landscape that is the desert, somewhere between Las Vegas and the stratosphere.

“The Eclectic Sixties” at the Brooks through September 21st.

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Music Music Features

Hell on Himself

Prolific is the type of word reserved for someone like Richard Hell. Born Richard Meyers, Hell dropped out of high school and moved to New York at the age of 17, had his poems published by Rolling Stone and New Directions before he was 21, then grew tired of the whole aspiring-writer thing and became one of the founders of the New York punk scene.

After putting down the typewriter and picking up the bass, Hell played some of the first punk shows on the CBGB stage and released iconic records with his bands the Neon Boys (later Television), the Heartbreakers (featuring Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan), and finally Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Hell isn’t on tour supporting his new autobiography, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, but he will be speaking and doing a book signing at the Brooks Museum of Art this Thursday evening. The Flyer caught up with him to ask some questions about his latest project.

Memphis Flyer: You started writing the autobiography in 2006. How did you approach writing it, did you turn to old journals or is it mostly from memory?
Richard Hell: I am lucky that I have a lot of background material to reference. Not only was I publishing writing as a teenager but there was a fair amount of coverage in magazines and papers that was really useful. Plus my mother is a pack rat; she’s kept boxes and boxes of things from my childhood. The homemade pamphlet from when I was eight years that supplied the title for the book came from her. I’m almost neurotically serious about being as accurate as I possibly can, and since the publication of the book I’ve discovered one or two things I’ve got wrong and I fixed them for the paperback. As far as the process of writing, I just winged it and went with the flow. When it came to me reaching back to the earliest days, there was no system or organization, I just trusted that the stuff that I remembered would be relevant.


Was there anything that you’d forgotten that came back to you once you started writing?

It’s always cool to get a flash of recollection of something really vivid that you hadn’t remembered, no matter what it is. When you write something like this you realize that you do kind of just naturally create this narrative of your life as you go along. You know how when you’re first starting to fall in love or something like that, you and the person you’re falling in love with tend to gradually reveal to each other the stories of your past and your life? It was like that. Things you’re proud of, or find amusing, or sometimes ashamed of, they all get revealed when you become close to someone. There’s this whole repertoire of the things that you’ve been through that you remember gradually.

So if you moved to New York City to be a writer, when and why did you pick up the bass?
It was a conjunction of things. When I came to New York at 17 I started to get frustrated, it just seemed really isolated, there wasn’t much audience for young writers. It’s a specialized acquired taste, poetry. It washard to imagine where (being a writer) would lead because I didn’t like having jobs, I sure didn’t want to go to school, and I didn’t want to become a teacher even if I did qualify. I just couldn’t see how to make my life as a poet work, and I wanted my work to be my life. I wanted it to be interchangeable, and at the same time my best friend (>>>>>)was an aspiring professional musician, he was in a similar position and didn’t know where to get started. But anyway, this was when the New York Dolls were just starting, they were an example of these kids who just decided to put themselves out there. They felt like they were just being themselves, not adhering to a pre-established audience, and they were really popular but not about being commercial. They served as an example of how it was possible to get out there and do what excited you and make it work. All of those things taken into account, we got the idea to start a band and so I picked up a bass and started coming up with a way to express how things looked to us in songs, using whatever writing skills I had already developed.


There’s been a lot of talk that most of what’s published in the book on NYC punk Please Kill Me is either embellished or just completely made up. What’s your take on that book?
There’s a lot of like inaccuracy, some of which coming from people twisting stories to serve their own purpose. There’s no fact checking. That being said, being true to the spirit of what went on, in terms of just conveying what it was like it to be there, it’s by far the best picture and the most accurate. There are specific things that aren’t true, overall the whole impression of what went down is really on the mark. I like the book, there are a lot of books about that time and place that are just silly and stupid, and they get credence and stuff gets perpetuated in the press that is just wrong, but Please Kill Me is a great book.


Did you see your autobiography as a way to give a different take on what those parts of your life were really like?
Not really, it came very low on the list of my incentives to write the book. It was good to have the chance here and there to correct false stories that had been distorted and had been reported. The main reason I wrote the book was because I was curious to see what it would add up to if I put this whole sequence side by side. I wanted to see what the picture ended up looking like; I wanted to find out for myself. At any moment you have this perception of who you are and what you’ve been through, you have this vague idea of what the whole picture is like but it just happens in little fragments moment to moment. I wanted to see what it looked like if I made it all into one object.

How is writing different for you, does it provide a spark that playing music didn’t?
I mean the thing for me about writing is that it’s a relief from life and music. Music entails all this other peripheral stuff, touring and being a public figure and having to make a lot of money. It’s not easy to survive as a writer but it’s sure not as expensive as making records. I mean you’ve gotta be conscience of your popularity all the time in music. There are a lot more peripheral demands in music. The thing that I really liked about music was making records, writing songs and making records, but there is so much else you have to do, including feeding all these mouths. It’s not just expensive to finance a music career, you have to work really hard to sell a lot of records to make it feasible. Writing is so much simpler; I’ve always loved writing and loved books. It wasn’t much of a sacrifice to move on, I do sometimes get wistful about all the songs I could have written, but I don’t really have any regrets.

How difficult was it writing an autobiography compared to the works of fiction that you’ve published? Was there anything that was intentionally left out?
Well in some ways it was easier because I had all the material, I didn’t have to wonder where things were going. But that’s the fun part of writing fiction is surprising yourself every day with where the story goes. The main difference is the weird challenges and problems created by writing about yourself. You have to be conscience of the temptations of anyone who has written an autobiography, to have everything you write be self-serving. But at the same time I didn’t want to misrepresent myself, I mean yeah I’m pretty egotistical so I didn’t want to be falsely humble but at the same time I didn’t want to misrepresent anything that happened, so that got a little tricky. It’s interesting to see the responses to the book, the way people react to what I wrote, but I basically feel like I pulled it off. I’m satisfied with how I dealt with that problem. I think the book is a fair representation of what happened and who I am. I said a lot of ugly things, one odd thing is that people sometimes talk about what I creep I am. Maybe not that word but it boils down to that, sometimes people actually do say creep, but often enough people don’t take into account that I chose what to say. They say that I am a creep because I’m calling myself a creep. It’s not that I’m calling myself ugly but I chose to say those things and to reveal those things about myself. I could have done it differently.


Do you think that people who don’t know you as someone who shaped American punk rock will still enjoy the book?
I will flatter myself and say that the ones who are literally minded will enjoy it, I think it’s a good book (laughs). Part of the motivation was to describe what a life like mine was like, what it was like to be an aspiring young artist in NYC in the 70s. A lot of the great works in history are about the young person coming to the city to create their life. It’s an inherently interesting subject. It is almost just incidental that it has to with music. I don’t even pick up the guitar until a third way through the book.


In the book you talk about how the Sex Pistols owe more than a little to you for your look that they adopted through there manager Malcolm McLaren. What are the differences between a statement like “I belong to the blank generation” as opposed to “Anarchy in the UK.”

I don’t really think about either of those things, I wrote that song and I put it out into the world, But I don’t really know how to answer because I’m not a student of the Sex Pistols.
Are you a fan of any rock and roll memoirs or autobiographies by musicians? Is there anyone from that New York Scene that you think needs to write a book?
I think please kill me is the best book easily. It’s true there are a lot of mistakes on it, I disagree with a lot of the emphasis, certain people get more attention than what is warranted, but still it’s by far the best if you’re looking for a fan literature.

An Evening With Richard Hell

Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

Thursday, October 17th, 7 p.m.

$6 museum members/$8 nonmembers

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Sound Builders

CREDIT: Image courtesy of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

Visitors to the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art are greeted by the sight of the massive 19-foot Vide-O-belisk by the renowned Korean-American artist Nam June Paik, the father of video art. Built from antique television cabinets and adorned with neon eyes and musical notes, the obelisk, the last major work Paik finished prior to his death in 2006, silently watches over the museum’s rotunda. And there’s something not quite right about that. A piece as epic as Paik’s, in a place as rowdy as Memphis, needs its own soundtrack, and the Brooks is hoping that area musicians and composers will step up to fill the void.

“This is Memphis,” says Luis Seixas, a conservator at the Brooks, referencing the city’s rich sonic heritage, the inspiration for something he calls “the Paik project.”

Seixas has a history of working with musicians. Before coming to the States, Seixas co-founded a record label that put out 65 CDs in only 10 years. The first round of soundtracks for Vide-O-belisk was created by a handpicked crop of local players, including Jonathan Kirkscey, Pieter Nooten, and Shelby Bryant. Now that the first compilation has been assembled and is available for download online, Seixas is putting out an open call to locals.

“There’s not a deadline,” Seixas explains. “When we have enough, we’ll make another compilation.”

Paik was a musician before he was a video artist, and many of his installations have included original compositions. The Vide-O-belisk plays loops of instruments and images of musical innovators like Laurie Anderson and Elvis Presley. Now the time has come for this quiet giant to make some noise.

For additional information, visit brooksmuseum.org.

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Film Features Film/TV

Indie iconoclast on an under-explored American conflict.

A major name in American indie cinema in the 1980s and ’90s, writer-director John Sayles has seen his star dim over the past decade via a still-prolific series of increasingly unhip and politically uncompromising — if often awkwardly earnest — features.

Even at Sayles’ best, his films struggle with stiffness. His 1979 debut, Return of the Secaucus Seven, sometimes has dialogue that sounds copied from a pamphlet. But it’s also a truer portrait of boomer friendship entering adulthood than the later, more celebrated The Big Chill. Matewan, from 1987, is as politically transparent as a folkie protest song but is still arguably the best fictional film ever made about labor history. And Sayles’ finest film, 1996’s Lone Star, isn’t exactly subtle but is still one of American cinema’s most crucial investigations of race and community.

Those last two starred Chris Cooper, who returns in Sayles’ latest, Amigo, which isn’t getting a full theatrical run locally, instead garnering a one-time screening at the Brooks Museum.

Amigo is set in a village in the Philippines in 1900, during the Philippine-American War. It was shot on location with a Filipino crew, features four languages, and tells its story from multiple viewpoints.

Amigo‘s opening depicts an island village going through its daily routine before it’s overtaken and controlled by American soldiers, who — under the order of a passing colonel (Cooper) — attempt to use the village as a garrison. Meanwhile, the village is surrounded by armed insurrectionaries.

Sayles’ depiction of this comparatively underexplored conflict in U.S. history feels, like all his films, finely researched, with even the seemingly topical use of “the water cure” by American soldiers on one villager historically accurate. (The use of waterboarding by U.S. troops apparently started in the Philippines and was a scandal at the time.) But he also pointedly situates this first American imperialist (mis)adventure in history, portraying this endeavor as a continuation of Manifest Destiny and a prelude to Vietnam — with notes of hubris and racism animating most scenes.

After one firefight leaves three Americans dead while taking five of the “enemy,” Cooper’s crusty colonel complains to the soldier he’d put in charge of the village, “We let the monkeys get away with those numbers and they’ll never give up.” When the lieutenant counters that he has to live with the villagers, the colonel corrects him: “No, lieutenant, you need to make war on these people. Let the bleeding hearts sort out the rest when we’re gone.”

There’s the potential for a terrific film here, but as that scene illustrates, the people onscreen too often feel like constructs designed to impart a political critique rather than full-fledged characters. Like so many of Sayles’ most recent films, Amigo is studied, well-meaning, and honorable but too schematic and aesthetically clumsy to fully connect.

Amigo

Brooks Museum of Art

Thursday, March 8th, 7 p.m.

$8, or $6 for members