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Get the Blues

On July 14th, people will have the chance to see the regional impact of blues music in photographs. Then, they’ll get to hear the music for themselves.

“Blues in the Park,” a concert series in West Memphis put on by the Crittenden Arts Council, is in its second year. Saturday’s event also includes a special viewing of the Center for Southern Folklore’s archival photo exhibit “Memphis Rhythms” at the Crittenden Arts Council, from 4 to 6 p.m. The blues/gospel concert follows at Worthington Park.

“The concert is a way to honor our blues heritage in West Memphis,” says Janine Earney, executive director of the arts council. “In the ’40s and ’50s, West Memphis was the incubator for electric blues.”

The concert kicks off at 5:30 p.m. and will feature the gospel group Spirit of Memphis, 1983 inductees into the Gospel Hall of Fame. Blues music will take over at 7 p.m. with Blind Mississippi Morris and Brad Webb. Morris has been rated among the top-10 harmonica players worldwide by Bluzharp magazine. Webb has played the blues since age 13 and has been performing with Morris for more than 20 years.

“Blues music brings people together and crosses all barriers,” Earney says. “It’s indigenous to the area and reaches everyone, no matter what race, age, or sex. It’s a wonderful unifying music.”

The culmination of the concert series will take place October 20th with an amateur blues/rhythm competition. But for now, park-goers won’t be competing — just listening and, most likely, moving their bodies.

“Blues in the Park,” Saturday, July 14th, 5:30 p.m., Worthington Park (South Worthington Drive, West Memphis). free.

“Memphis Rhythms,” AT Crittenden Arts Council (1800 N. Missouri Street, West Memphis), 4 to 6 p.m. For more information, call 870-732-6260.

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Food & Wine Food & Drink

Lounging Around

Although Karen Carrier once said she has no interest in adding another restaurant to the four she currently owns (Automatic Slim’s, Cielo, the Beauty Shop, DŌ), that doesn’t mean she’s going to sit back and relax. It’s just not her style. So Carrier recently set out to reinvent Cielo, her fine-dining restaurant in downtown’s Victorian Village.

“I’m not fine-dining,” Carrier says. “I’m casual. I’m funky. I want my restaurants to reflect that. I don’t want this place to be a special-occasion place. I want it to be a place where people can hang out, listen to live music, have a couple of drinks, and order a few small items from the menu without busting their wallets.”

In true Carrier fashion, Cielo has been turned upside-down and inside-out, stripped, painted, and wallpapered to re-emerge as the Molly Fontaine Lounge, scheduled to open in about two weeks.

Molly Fontaine Lounge

“I’ve been going to estate sales for seven months. I have looked at books of European lounges from all eras over and over again, and I have this picture in my head of social clubs in New York City years ago,” Carrier says, describing the concept for the lounge.

“To me, making this home into a lounge is like taking it back,” Carrier says. She’s referring to the mood set a few decades back by a previous owner, a notorious ladies’ man, and his friends. “It was a big party house with a different woman on every floor,” she says.

The building that houses the soon-to-be lounge was built in 1886 as a wedding present for Molly Woodruff Fontaine and is one of the few homes of its type in Victorian Village that didn’t get torn down during the 1960s. Carrier’s late husband Bob bought the house in 1985.

Initially, the house was both home to the couple and an outlet for Carrier’s newly established catering business, Another Roadside Attraction. A few years later, with a $35,000 loan from her dad, Carrier renovated the home’s carriage house and moved her catering business there. Eventually, the couple started to look for a place that was better suited for a growing family. In fact, Carrier even tried to sell the main house.

“I knew I wanted to keep Roadside where it was, but nobody wanted to buy just the main house, so I decided to turn it into a restaurant,” Carrier says. She started the rezoning process in 1994 and opened Cielo two years later.

More than 10 years have passed since opening day, and Carrier says it is time for a change.

“We are still going to be very accessible for everybody,” she explains. “We can still accommodate private parties, because we can mold the space according to the event. One of my guys from the Beauty Shop custom-made the bars and put them on casters so they can be rearranged or moved out of the way if needed.”

The Molly Fontaine Lounge will offer a Mediterranean and Middle Eastern-influenced small-plate menu and a happy hour with cool cocktails, as well as live music.

Molly Fontaine Lounge, 679 Adams

(524-1886)

Encore chef/owner Jose Gutierrez will be offering Saturday cooking classes. The summer cooking series starts on July 14th with a class on crepes, followed by a class on brunch, Bloody Marys, and champagne cocktails on July 21st. On July 28th, students will forage for fresh produce at the Memphis Farmers Market to prepare a summer meal.

Classes are held on Saturdays at Encore from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. except for the Farmers Market class, which will meet at the market at 11 a.m. Classes are $50 per person plus tax, and registration is required.

Encore, 150 Peabody Place (528-1415)

Summer cooking classes are also available at Mantia’s in East Memphis. This Saturday, July 7th, learn the differences between pure olive oil and extra virgin olive oil by participating in a blind tasting. On Thursday, July 12th, Marisa Baggett, former sushi chef at DŌ will share the secrets of making classic sushi rolls in your home kitchen. A “Picnic in Provence” is the theme on Thursday, July 19th, and a Spanish garden dinner is on the menu for Monday, July 30th.

The olive-oil tasting, which is $15, begins at 3:30 p.m. All other classes are at 6 p.m. and cost $35 per person.

Mantia’s, 4856 Poplar (762-8560)

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Music Music Features

Second Time Around

The Final Solutions are celebrating the release of their second full-length album, which marks the latest chapter in the surprising story of what is, at this writing, Memphis’ best punk-rock band.

Named after the classic Pere Ubu song, the Solutions are an amalgam of local talent that avoids taking itself too seriously yet has emerged as an amazing live act with four singles and (now) two albums, both on Goner, under its belt. The cast is as follows: vocalist Zac Ives (co-owner of Goner Records), bassist Tommy Trouble (a high school honors English teacher by day), guitarist Justice Naczycz (leader of local hard-boogie enthusiasts Secret Service), and drummer Jay Reatard (you name it, but recently blowing minds with his solo album, Blood Visions).

For the sake of chronology, let us briefly travel back to the mid-’90s, when Ives, Trouble, and Naczycz were friends at Rhodes College. Those who paid close attention to show flyers or haunted Barrister’s during this period may remember a short-lived garage band by the name of the Jack Monkeys. “Tom was in a pop-punk band called Squirrels. They sounded like the Descendents or All, and Justice and I were in the Jack Monkeys with a drummer named Pete Nasty, who hadn’t played drums outside of the music room at Rhodes. We were really bad,” Ives says.

Reatard and Ives met at an Oblivians show when the former was in his mid-teens, and Ives began to give the future Reatard rides to shows. “During one of my last years at Rhodes, we put together a band for the talent show in the cafeteria and did Oblivians covers. That was one of the first times that Jay played drums,” Ives recalls.

Following graduation, Ives took a job in Washington, D.C. He returned to Memphis in 2000 to work for Archer Malmo and to eventually join Eric Friedl in the running of Goner Records. By this time, Trouble was teaching, Naczycz was following an acoustic singer-songwriter muse, and Reatard had retired the first version of his teen punk/garage band the Reatards to focus on the Lost Sounds.

“I started circulating compilation tapes of old Scandinavian punk rock,” Ives explains. “I’ve always been into the Television Personalities, especially the song ‘Part Time Punks,’ which I obsessed over for a while.”

Ives speaks loosely of the late-’70s/early-’80s “DIY” movement spearheaded by the likes of early Simple Minds, the Desperate Bicycles, the Homosexuals, and the aforementioned Television Personalities. The aesthetic was cheap, handmade packaging, marginal playing ability, and a turn away from the careerist direction that higher-profile punk rock had taken.

The four Memphians soon came together with Ohio transplant Quinn Powers on guitar (he was with the band for just over a year) and started making a mess of local club stages. “Our shortest show was probably one song, but we don’t really like to do that,” Ives says. “We want to put on a good show for everyone.”

Band activity ebbed and flowed over the next five or so years, resulting in a respectable discography and a much-talked-about live show.

Whereas the first Final Solutions LP was a mishmash of material, recorded at different stages in different places and pulled together to fill out an album, the new Songs by Solutions was a conscious effort. “We were writing for an album on this one,” Ives says. Recorded entirely by Reatard, Songs shows a band growing, even if they’re growing in a weird way to allow for the primary concerns of each member. “Reatard’s gotten extremely good at recording and knows exactly how he wants everything to come out,” Ives explains.

Everything came out nicely, albeit in very short, buzzsaw bursts of catchy aggro-pop. “Mental Shark Bite” and “Tammy” start things off in now-standard Solutions style, with repeated, almost spoken hooks, anthemic howls, smashed drums, and jagged or furiously strummed guitar. The minimal “I’m a Lightning Bug” sounds like pop music from an alternate universe that never experienced pop music, and the astonishingly long “Little Man in My Mind” clocks in at a whopping four-and-a-half minutes, which is like the Final Solutions doing Rush’s “2112.” (Not really, but you get the point.)

“Our songs are written in practice. One of us will bring in something, and everyone else will just work on top of that,” Ives says. “Tommy is responsible for most of the songs on Songs by Solutions. He’d just bring in a riff, and Justice would lay some guitar on top. Things would go from there.”

When asked about how pop and catchiness play into it all, Ives explains, “I have to have a hook. I can’t stand it when a singer is yelling at me.” Songs by Solutions is undoubtedly hummable in its frantic fury.

Fans of incendiary, unpredictable performances and bands who deliver without taking themselves too seriously are encouraged to witness just how far the Final Solutions have come.

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Brainiacs

Use it or lose it.

The saying rings especially true for the brain. Now, a workshop led by the Alzheimer’s Association will instruct people how to use it to prevent memory loss.

“Once we get into habits, we don’t stimulate different parts of our brains. It’s important to do things outside of your comfort zone,” says Sheryl Ludeke-Smith, the association’s regional director. “The key is to stimulate the whole brain so that if you do have a stroke or get dementia, you can use other parts of your brain.”

The July 10th workshop will reinforce the significance of whole-brain stimulation by providing information and introducing interactive exercises. Among those exercises are working a Sudoku puzzle and a challenge in which participants must remembering color names that are written in different colors.

“We’ll also be talking about the Nun Study,” Ludeke-Smith says. The ongoing study began in 1986, using nuns to identify risk factors for Alzheimer’s. In part, thanks to the study, doctors now know that eating well, exercising regularly, not smoking, and interacting socially can all strengthen brain synapses.

But an especially beneficial activity might come as a surprise: ballroom dancing. As Ludeke-Smith explains, “You’re learning and being social, and it’s physical activity.”

Though aimed at baby boomers, the workshop welcomes all ages. “You’re never too young or too old to start protecting your brain for the rest of your life,” Ludeke-Smith says. “Very small changes over the course of your lifetime can make a big difference. Your memory is who you are.”

“Maintain Your Brain” workshop, Alzheimer’s Association, Tuesday, July 10th, 6:30 p.m. the village at Germantown, 7820 Walking horse circle. Free but limited registration. Call 565-0011 or e-mail lisa.bobal@alz.org for required pre-registration.

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Heads Up

CREDIT: Tose | dreamstime.com

Attention, residents: An invasion of crystal skulls is coming! No one can agree on where they come from or what they mean for our future. They are a mystery — but there’s hope! The balm of understanding can be yours at the Sanctuary for Mind, Body, and Spirit.

No, it’s not a New Age update of The War of the Worlds, and it’s not a convention of enthusiasts for the comic strip The Phantom or the film The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. It’s actually — okay, this is going to sound mundane, but it’s not — a workshop.

Crystal skulls — the subject of the workshop, being held this Saturday at the Sanctuary in Bartlett — are objects said to possess powers beyond normal human experience but not necessarily beyond the limit of human understanding. They may come from the Mayans, the Micronesians, or aliens. Opinions vary. Skulls have been said to have the power to pass on the wisdom of ancient peoples, to heal sickness, to facilitate self-discovery and connection with the earth, even to communicate and pass on information with other crystal skulls.

The workshop is for both the uninitiated looking to find out more and those already practicing crystal-skull enlightenment. (Bring your own crystall skull if you have one.) Madra Little will teach people how to activate and to learn to communicate with crystal skulls through meditation.

And that’s not all. On August 10th-12th at the Sanctuary, the ancient crystal skull “Synergy” and its caretaker Sherry Whitfield Merrell will be on hand for workshops and group and private sessions. There are only six found ancient skulls in the world — legend has it that there are 13 in existence — so Synergy has attained something like rock-star (pun intended) status. This is one play date you’ll want your crystal skull to attend.

Crystal-skull workshop, The Sanctuary, Saturday, July 7th, 7 p.m. 6266 Stage Plaza (Bartlett). $20 pre-registration/$25 at the door. For more information, call 377-6488.

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On the Move

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Café de France, inside Palladio Antiques & Art, will close on Saturday, June 30th. Jeanell and Donnie Morris, the café’s owners, have recently decided to revive the French Bakery, their wholesale operation, which has been dormant for a year.

“It took us a while to decide what we ultimately wanted to do with the French Bakery,” Jeanell Morris says.

One of the problems the couple faced at the French Bakery was the repair of some of their expensive baking equipment.

“Our big French mixer, which holds more than 200 quarts of dough, had broken, and it seemed impossible to find someone locally who could fix it,” Jeanell says. “If you have to fly in a specialist from France every time something breaks, you’ll run out of money very quickly.”

Because the Morrises’ business was almost exclusively wholesale, except for the items they baked for their own café, using an 80-quart mixer that can only hold a 50-pound bag of flour wasn’t an option. Quitting was never really an option, either.

“My heart is in this,” Jeanell says. “And we have a lot of customers who kept asking if we would ever open a retail bakery. Memphis needs a bakery.”

So, even though Café de France is closing, the Morrises have plans to open a retail bakery in East Memphis. The couple hopes to find enough investors to open Café de France Bistro and Bakery in the former Honeysuckle Health Foods space on Mendenhall near Poplar in October.

When the Morrises first took over what’s now the French Bakery in 1998, they had no clue what they were getting themselves into. Neither of them had any experience baking or working in a bakery. But fate put the bakery in their hands.

Guy’s Bakery was owned by Guy Pacaud, a Frenchman who had moved to Memphis in the 1970s and worked at La Baguette before opening his own bakery and later, La Patisserie, a restaurant in the space that is now occupied by Jarrett’s. Jeanell and Donnie were close friends with Pacaud, who died in a car accident in 1998 while delivering bread. In his will, Pacaud wanted Donnie to take over the bakery and buy his wife Libby out.

“This was really hard for my husband because he felt that the bakery killed Guy,” Jeanell explains. Nevertheless, the couple dug in. Donnie went on to learn the ropes of bread baking from master baker Didier Rosada at the American Institute for Bakers, and everything seemed to fall in place. “Donnie always felt like Guy’s spirit was around to help us make this work,” Jeanell says.

The couple focused on the wholesale business until four years ago, when the opportunity for the new venture at Palladio became available. At Café de France, the Morrises served lunch and the occasional dinner when the antique store received shipments from France. The menu was simple: a cheese plate, smoked chicken, tuna, shrimp, and pasta salads, salade Lyonnaise, and an extensive sandwich list that included baked brie, marinated eggplant, and corned beef brisket.

The lunch menu at the new Café de France on Mendenhall will be similar, and they’ll also serve breakfast. Plus, customers will be able to pick up freshly baked croissants in the retail space at 7 a.m.

Red Robin Gourmet Burgers has opened its first location at the Avenue Carriage Crossing in Collierville, with a second location on Germantown Parkway coming soon. A total of five locations in the Memphis area are planned for the Colorado-based burger chain.

Started in the 1940s as Sam’s Tavern in Seattle, Washington, the restaurant then became Sam’s Red Robin before finally transforming from a tavern into the first Red Robin restaurant in 1969. Now the company has 350 restaurants throughout the United States as well as Canada.

Red Robin serves every sort of burger: chicken, “Bleu Ribbon,” guacamole/bacon, sautéed “‘Schroom,” “Honky Tonk BBQ Pork,” etc. — all accompanied by its signature “bottomless” steak fries.Red Robin, 4641 Merchants Park Circle (854-7645)

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Music Music Features

Nashville to Saturn

Most Memphians don’t think of Nashville as having a booming soul scene, but as the group Charles Walker & the Dynamites attest, the town’s legacy is more than just twangy country tunes.

“The history of Memphis soul music is a big deal to the band, and we’ve looked at Memphis from the get-go as a second market,” says Doyle Davis, owner of Nashville record store Grimey’s and an ardent supporter of the Dynamites.

This Friday, June 29th, the group will roll into The Hi-Tone Café for a release party for Kaboom!, their debut album, released on Outta Sight Records, which is co-owned by Davis and the Dynamites’ founder/guitarist Bill Elder, aka Leo Black.

“We had to get the CD out for Bonnaroo,” Davis says, noting that the Dynamites played the East Tennessee music festival on June 16th:

“It was awesome. The Dynamites were on one of the small stages, but they packed in over 1,000 people. There were kids up front dancing up a storm and screaming, ‘Who are you?’ Charles kept screaming back, ‘I’m Charles Walker, and these are the Dynamites!’ It was the most enthusiastic crowd we’ve ever had, and the band ended up throwing away their set lists, because Charles took it and ran.”

Kaboom! features 10 show-stopping, James Brown-styled funk numbers, ranging from the propulsive “Body Snatcher” to the deep groove “Killin’ It.” The album has already garnered a distribution deal for Outta Sight with RED, which has placed it in mom-and-pop record stores and at national chains such as Barnes & Noble and Borders and online stores such as Amazon, iTunes, and Miles of Music.

“We pressed 5,000 copies to start with, which is our break-even point,” Davis explains. “We put this record out with the hopes that we can make some money and put it back into the label. Daptone (the Brooklyn-based label that’s home to Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings) has been a huge inspiration for us. We see ourselves as the Southeastern complement to what they’re doing.”

Locally, the explosive Kaboom! is available at several stores, or you can pick up a copy at the Hi-Tone on Friday night. Memphis DJs Buck Wilders and The Hook-Up will open the show, which costs $8 in advance or $10 at the door. For more information, go to www.MySpace.com/TheDynamitesBand.

“You have to use your imagination to tap into what really went on, and that’s what I like about rock-and-roll.”

So says local filmmaker John Michael McCarthy, best known for films such as Teenage Tupelo, E*vis Meets the Beat*les, and The Sore Losers.

This summer marks the 30th anniversary of Elvis’ death, but right now, all McCarthy can talk about is David Bowie.

“I’m looking for anybody who has stories about Bowie in Memphis,” McCarthy says. “His second Ziggy Stardust show in America took place at Ellis Auditorium in September 1972. The next year, he did Aladdin Sane at the Coliseum. And back in ’72, he visited Dolph Smith at the Memphis College of Art and bought some work from him.

McCarthy’s new Bowie-esque band, Fingers Like Saturn, will make its debut at The Madison Flame on Friday, June 29th, with openers The Limes and Sector Zero.

Although most people on the Midtown scene know McCarthy primarily as a filmmaker, the Tupelo native made his local debut 23 years ago as a guitarist in the punk group Distemper.

“I’m just lucky that all of these talented people help me with my crazy ideas,” he says of Fingers Like Saturn, which features Jonathan Wires, Susie Hendrix, Jonathan Kirkscey, Steve Selvidge, Cori Dials, and George Takaeda, McCarthy’s former musical partner in Distemper and its follow-up, The Rockroaches.

“When I saw Cori sing in her group The Splints and talked with George, whom I haven’t played with in 15 years, it was like the planets lined up,” McCarthy says.

Playing the Madison Flame, site of the old Antenna club, also makes sense, he says, citing the 1986 date when Distemper played the club’s first all-ages show and the numerous gigs that the Rockroaches performed there.

“My new songs,” McCarthy says, “are like short stories. They’re tightly structured glam pop songs about the South in a ‘what if Bowie came from Mississippi?’ kind of way.

“I think it’s interesting that with most bands in town, there’s no front person. I don’t want to be the front person myself. I like being behind the scenes or to a little left of the scene. Cori has the charisma to do it: She doesn’t just sing songs. She invades space.”

For more info, visit GuerrillaMonster.com.

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Heart & Soul

Wednesday’s all about celebrating the grand U.S. of A. for the Fourth of July. So what about the 29th of June? That Friday, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art will hold a screening of the documentary Above the Line: Saving Willie Mae’s Scotch House as part of its “Soul Food” exhibition. And while this is certainly a regional affair, the film — which details the efforts to rebuild 91-year-old Willie Mae Seaton’s Hurricane Katrina-devastated restaurant — gives witness to traits so admired of people in this great land of ours: the can-do attitude, pride, ingenuity, steadfastness, and loyalty.

For decades, Seaton drew praise for her fried chicken, which she cooked up in a deep fryer in a shotgun house, half of which served as the restaurant and the other half as her home. The recipe for her chicken she kept secret; that it was damn good was widely known, so much so that she was honored with a medal from the James Beard Foundation only months before the restaurant was seriously damaged in the wake of Katrina. For a year-and-a-half after the storm, volunteers from the Southern Foodways Alliance led by Oxford, Mississippi, restaurateur John Currence worked weekends to restore the Scotch House. Last May, the Scotch House was once again open for business.

SFA resident filmmaker Joe York and SFA director and noted food writer John T. Edge will be at the Brooks to present Above the Line. And if the film’s not enough to have you God-blessing-America, after the screening, there will be food from Gus’s Fried Chicken and other restaurants.

“Above the Line,” Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Friday, June 29th, 7 p.m. Tickets are $10 for members, $20 for nonmembers.

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News

Megan Fox Is Foxy — And From Memphis

Move over, Ginnifer Goodwin; you have some competition. The title of hottest Memphian celeb — subclass: Still Living; subclass: But Not in Memphis; subclass: Female — has become a two-way race.

Bluff City native Megan Fox is smoking hot. She’s set to take the nation’s movie screens by storm with her costarring turn in Transformers (alongside Shia LeBeouf and lots of CGI-pixilated alien robots), due to be released July 3rd.

The Australian Herald Sun reports, “When Fox was brought into the hospital room in Memphis on May 16, 1986, her mother was watching the Elvis movie Blue Hawaii.” (Hopefully, it wasn’t during the part where Elvis is singing “Do the Clam.”)

Earlier this month, at the MTV Movie Awards, Fox talked about another Mid-South homeboy, Justin Timberlake: “I’m going to get myself in trouble for saying this, but I will pee in my pants if I see Justin or smell him or get anywhere near him.”

Hmmm. So we’re not the only ones?

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Pink Palace Will Rock Thursday Night

The second of four “Rock the Palace: Summer Tour 2007” events will take place Thursday, June 28, at the Pink Palace Museum.

Also presented by 93X radio’s Traveling Twisted Thursdays, each after-hour music party provides live entertainment, an exhibit tour, food, a cash bar, and a live remote appearance by 93X.

This Thursday, featured local bands will include Chemical Zoo, Organ Thief, Roger Mexico, and Arma Secreta.

The museum exhibit throughout the summer is “Access All Areas: Your Backstage Pass to the Music Industry.”

Rock the Palace is for adults, 21 and up. Doors open at 6 p.m. For more information, call 320-6320 or visit the museum’s website.