Categories
Editorial Opinion

Fairer Sex

As becomes increasingly obvious, we are unmistakably in the middle of a sea change apropos relations between the sexes. That “we” clearly refers to the corridors of power in politics, media, entertainment, and elsewhere. And by the sexes, we mean something beyond the erstwhile binary sense of the word. It is obvious, in this polymorphing world, that a contemporary Noah would be hard put, in filling a lifesaving craft with representative survivors, to restrict himself to the ordinary one-and-one-makes-two.

There was a time when the mechanics of the existing sexual universe could be rendered by the old cartoon of a stone-age man using one hand to drag an unconscious female by the hair, while the other hand held the club that rendered her supine and the bully boy’s to dispose of, presumably as a guest, permanent or temporary, in his lair.

Crude as that old stock image was as a metaphor for primitive courtship, it bespoke an uncomfortable truth about the enduring algorithms, through stage after stage of social evolution and of gender and power.

Now all that is being called into question, and good riddance. The club — which is to say, the male dominance built into the prevailing social model — is being challenged with a vengeance. Maia and Isis are reincarnated as Wonder Woman, who is no man’s tool and won’t be dragged anywhere. The Playboy Philosophy has gone to its reward. The reversals of fortune that have seen Bill O’Reilly, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Charlie Rose, and seemingly countless others purged from their positions of acceptability have been quick and presumably irrevocable.

The parameters of the emerging new order are indistinct, as yet. The old order will no doubt reassert itself to some degree. The giddiness felt by some will doubtless subside. The boundaries between healthy sexual interplay (flirting, hooking up, etc.) and sexual harassment are in flux and are being redefined. And the challenge now is to reform and redefine stable and just forms of behavior. The boys club is being deconstructed.

This is a revolution that won’t be accomplished by elaborate blueprints nor by elites with specialized knowledge. It will be determined by men learning to behave and by women reporting bad behavior.

The only “guidance” the current moment of transformation has required is an old-fashioned one, summed up in the biblical phrase: “You shall know the truth, and it shall make you free.” The instigators of the powerful change now underway have, for the most part, been members of the American free press doing their jobs: afflicting the comfortable by exposing various male misbehavior and predation, previously behind facades of silence and acquiescence.

It is no accident that the deniers of this overdue revolution are represented by bona fide predators — in Washington as well as in Hollywood, New York, Alabama, and elsewhere. But it appears increasingly obvious that those who deny their acions and seek to sustain the dying male-dominated zeitgeist are doomed to be outed.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

“You got power?”

“You got power?”

It was the question of the week, everywhere you went, in the wake of a sneak attack from what looked like a typical line of thunderstorms last Saturday night. With little warning, winds whipped suddenly to 80-miles-an-hour-plus, and the city erupted with the sounds of popping transformers, falling limbs, and wailing sirens. The wind took a healthy piece of Memphis’ historic urban forest, knocking down more than 250 trees, most of them the great, top-heavy oaks that shade us from summer’s blaze and provide a dense canopy over our streets and lawns.

It’s little comfort to know that all of this is natural; that this is the way great trees often die, 100 years on. In a forest setting, trees are more constrained, forced to seek sunlight by growing upward. In Memphis, set on lawns with no arboreal competition, they spread their limbs far and wide, becoming the majestic behemoths we love. When they fall, the space above us they filled for decades opens to the sky.

And when they topple, they take cars and houses and memories and property values — and, of course, power lines aplenty. At the post-storm peak, Sunday morning, more than 188,000 Memphians were without power. MLGW called in 40 crews from out of town to help clear the streets and reconnect the grid. They told us it could take a week or more to hook everyone back up. That seems optimistic.

But we’ve been here before, haven’t we? We even name these things. Hurricane Elvis. The Great Ice Storm. I heard Hurricane 901 tossed around as a moniker for this one, but I don’t think anything has stuck yet.

And we know the post-storm drill: find ice; find a charger; find a cool, open bar; find a friend with that sweet, sweet electrical power. Neighborhoods have empty-the-freezer parties, sharing grills and cooking up their soon-to-be-thawed bounty. Some folks who have power run cords to their front sidewalk, inviting neighbors and passers-by to charge their devices. Local convenience stores give out free jumbo cups of ice. Eighteen-wheelers pull into parking lots and sell ice by the bag. We become a temporary third-world city.

Storm tourism abounds, as cyclists and strollers wander the neighborhoods, mouths agape at the great trees sprawled across the streets, the cars crushed like beer cans, the broken houses with rooms exposed. Social media sites are filled with pictures of the carnage. The long days resound with the growl of chainsaws and wood shredders. And soon, piles of limbs and brush line the streets, waiting for our over-worked sanitation and public works crews to haul it all away.

And then there’s the moment of glory, of relief, of resounding joy and celebration — the magical moment when the power comes back and the television and the lights and all the appliances you had on when things went dark spring to life. Huzzah! Hosanna! Hooray! You post the news to Facebook; you text your friends the sweetest words you’ll ever send …

“I got power!”

Bruce VanWyngarden

brucev@memphisflyer.com

Categories
Music Music Blog

Gonerfest Friday: Woozy, Brutal, Beautiful

Gonerfesters got a running start on Friday with an afternoon superkegger at Memphis Made’s taproom on Cooper. Memphis Made created a pair of custom beers for this year’s festival: A tart saison IPA and Gonerbraü, a smooth creme ale. Both proved popular with the rockers assembled in the sun to watch a four-band bill. New Orlean’s Trampoline Team turned in the most turnt tunes of the afternoon.

Yes, I just wrote that sentence. I probably should have just deleted it, but I’ll leave it to show the effects 48 hours of pounding beats are having on my synapses.

Trampoline Team riles up the crowd at Memphis Made.

The eventful Hi Tone Friday night got rolling with Opposite Sex from Deundin, New Zealand. They led with an impressive one-two punch in bassist/screamer Lucy Hunter and guitar squealer Reg Norris, who is able to get an huge range of sounds from just a wah pedal and a souped up stomp box. (TurboRat represent!)

Opposite Sex

The Hi Tone was filling up quickly as Memphis family affair Aquarian Blood howled to life. The husband and wife duo of Memphis hardcore OG JB Horrell and Laurel Fernden, supported by drummer Bill Curry and Coletrane Duckworth (son of Memphis guitar legend Jim Duckworth), gets better every time I see them. Between Horrell trying his best to strangle his ax into submission and Fernden switching between a clean microphone and one with rubbery echo effects—sometimes within a single lyrical line—they sound like no one else.

Aquarian Blood

When I walked into the Hi Tone Big Room to see Power killing it, I briefly wondered if I had stepped back in time to 1974. Like their countrymen Wolfmother, the Melbourne, Australia trio have embraced butt rock, mullets and all. And the Gonerfest audience went right there with them.

Power and the crowd.

I have to admit I totally missed Buck Biloxi and the Fucks. I was visiting the food truck out front for a much needed gutbomb burger when the party (it may have been a hip hop show, I wasn’t clear on the details) across the street at the erupted into a shirt-ripping brawl. There was at least one shot fired, but no one was hurt, and cop cars quickly swarmed the area. It was a strange, tense scene: on one side of the street, an African American crowd rapidly dispersing as police arrived; on the other side of the street, sweaty, mostly white punks from all over the world watching with a combination of horror and fascination, wondering if we were going to be witnesses to some kind of racially charged incident that has dominated the news in 2016. Fortunately, the first wave of cops to arrive seemed focused on de-escalating the fighting, and the situation cleared up without further violence or—judging by the lack of ambulance—injury.

The Blind Shake demonstrates unorthodox guitar technique.

Flashing blue lights provided the background as The Blind Shake took the stage. The Minnesota brothers Jim and Mike Blaha, who describes themselves as an “extraterrestrial backyard surf party”, are Gonerfest regulars. This year, they topped themselves with the tightest, snarlingest set I’ve seen from them. “Shots fired next door,” Jim said from the stage. “It’s an old marketing ploy.”

Black Lips

When 1 AM rolled around, the wrung out crowd milled around, trying to catch our breath as Black Lips meandered onto stage. The original Gonerfest grew out of a Black Lips show, and the band represents something of a garage rock ideal. The sound they have been chasing for the last decade and a half is something like a drunken 60s girl group backup band practicing in the stairwell where John Bonham recorded “When The Levee Breaks”. This is the strain of punk rock that originated in Memphis with the immoral Panther Burns. With the addition of a new saxophonist, the Black Lips pushed ever closer to the Panther Burns party vibe, gathering steam with each woozy rocker until “Katrina”, their 2007 underground lament of New Orleans devastation sent the crowd into a frenzy from which we didn’t emerge until the lights came up.