Tag: Tav Falco

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Music Music Features

Memphis Concrète Festival: Making Synthesizers Weird Again

CREDIT: Jamie Harmon

Just up the river from Memphis, in 1944, one of the first compositions known as musique concrète was presented, The Expression of Zaar, using manipulations of wire recordings to create an audio collage independent of the sources it was based on. The composer was Halim El-Dabh, and while he was closer to Memphis, Egypt, than the Bluff City, it’s somehow fitting that by the 21st century, his approach has gained a foothold in Tennessee. Nowadays, of course, synthesized sound permeates nearly every genre, but it generally owes more to the tradition of disco or synth pop. Yet the tradition of musique concrète lives on as well, and Memphians will get a heavy dose of it in this weekend’s Memphis Concrète Festival.

It may come as a surprise that most of the festival’s acts are local or regional. While Tav Falco combined synthetic noise with rock-and-roll as early as 1979, a torch now carried forward by the NOTS, the textural (as opposed to melodic) use of synthesizers among locals has otherwise remained under the radar for most labels and media. But Robert Traxler, who organized the festival, found that once he began looking, an entire world of such artists emerged. “You start talking to people, and it kinda snowballs,” he said. “I’m hearing so much stuff that was completely new to me. And some of it just right here in town. You may not see them a lot, but you know there are more people out there than what you see firsthand. So a lot of my drive was to find people that are in fragmented scenes and bring them together.”

Traxler notes that, out of more than two-dozen acts, “the majority are from Memphis.” Even among these local acts, “the variety is pretty exciting. You have some ambient, drone, experimental dance music, noisier stuff, and some that’s more abstract. A lot of different artists representing different subgenres.” Among the Memphis acts, >manualcontrol< is arguably the best known and the most original, with a reputation for completely extemporaneous performances that solicit much audience participation. This is partly due to their unique human/machine interface, relying on light-activated audio processing rather than keyboards, which responds to both the performers and audience movement. Other locals range from Nonconnah, who purvey ambient textures using effects-laden guitars, to the beat-driven approach of Qemist. The latter act is associated with Rare Nnudes, a homegrown label whose growing profile is another indicator of a more robust Memphis scene.

What surprised Traxler most was the variety of artists emerging from Mississippi, including the noise textures of Pas Moi and the edgy dance sound of Argiflex from Cleveland, Hattiesburg’s NEPTR and Division of Labor, Jackson’s Blanket Swimming, and Oxford’s Ben Ricketts, who is also known as a more traditional singer/songwriter. Beyond our neighbor to the south, look for artists from as close as Nashville and as far afield as Virginia. Pittsburgh’s snwv (pronounced “sine wave”) is notable for his generative, systems-based approach, which sets up sonic layers that interact according to loose parameters that evolve independently.

This “generative music” can also be experienced in one of the free exhibits that open each day of the festival. Saturday’s exhibit, called “You Are Standing in a Room,” involves a feedback system based on noises from the surrounding space, which processes and re-processes them into new sounds that gradually amplify the room’s particular overtones. Traxler himself developed this for the festival, inspired by the work of experimental composer Alvin Lucier. Sunday’s free exhibit, “Hand–>Ear,” while not premised on any particular conceptual approach, will feature a theremin (the world’s first electronic instrument, invented in the 1920s) and various materials connected to microphones that patrons themselves can play and process with effects.

Finally, Saturday’s grand opening will include a screening of Forbidden Planet in its entirety, with the original score replaced with compositions by Traxler and other collaborators. While the original dialogue will remain in the mix, scenes without dialogue will be re-imagined with the new music performed in real time. All in all, it promises to be a unique event for Memphis: an ambitious weekend of experiments for the aurally adventurous.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Tav Falco Premieres New Feature Film Urania Descending

Tav Falco, long known for his game-changing musical ventures with the Panther Burns, will forever be associated with Memphis, for it was here that he and Alex Chilton collaborated in the late 1970s to found the group. But ultimately he doesn’t feel bound to any one place or time. “I’m an American living in Europe,” he says. “I’ll always be that. I’m not trying to be what I’m not. But even in Memphis, I was always on the outside looking in. And that is the fate of artists in many cultures. In fact, it could be the job of the artist. To exploit this perspective.”

Indeed, he was very much an outsider when he first arrived here. “One day I just rode my Norton motorcycle up to William Eggleston’s house on Central Avenue, after I’d moved here from the hills of Arkansas. And he comes out of the house, and greets me in the driveway, and we spoke a few words and he said, ‘Well come into the lab, let’s just start right now,’ and that’s what we did.” Falco also learned from Carl Orr, another photographer/filmmaker living in Memphis at the time. “Both of them had the idea that if you want to learn something about film and images, just get into the middle of it and start doing it. Like William Burroughs said, you ask enough questions, you’ll find the answers. Don’t worry about the answers, just ask the questions.”

While Falco has labored for decades asking the musical question, “got WHAT??”, he has of late returned to his original passion for the image, culminating in Wednesday’s Memphis premiere of his new feature length film, Urania Descending, Pt. 1, the semi-mythic tale of an American woman caught up in a dark Viennese mystery. “It’s predicated on the serial films of Louis Feuillade, Les Vampires, or the Fantômas series, based on the intrigue crime novels of the time. These were an inspiration in part for my film. In this particular triptych of stories, black and white is the only possibility. Color would have killed it.”

“I think of silent film as visual music,” he goes on. “If you add sound, it becomes something else. However, in my film, I have somehow captured the timeless, or outside-of-time, quality of silent cinema with sound effects. With no lip sync dialogue to speak of, but very little dialogue disembodied from the characters. Someone said, ‘The footsteps in your movie are almost another character unto themselves.’ It has an atmosphere and an ambiance that is really off the grid, outside the box. People somehow get drawn into this movie, even though the production values are nothing like you see today.”

But, lest we think of it as pure nostalgia, he adds: “It’s not a period piece. It’s set in the near future. In a place like Europe, Austria, Italy, Baroque architecture exists right alongside very state-of-the-art, contemporary architecture. So it’s not a museum piece. It’s a world in which the past has been cultivated, where that which was built to last for generations and generations is not destroyed and not discarded, but cultivated and lived in and maintained alongside truly modern architecture. So this is a movie where the past overtakes the present and the present overtakes the past. It is a continuum.”

Falco’s partner in intrigue was Richard Pleuger, the director of photography. “He’s a film correspondent from Munich, Germany. I met him after a Panther Burns gig in San Francisco in the 80s. He was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. And we became immediate friends. He came to Memphis in the 80s and made ‘Shade Tree Mechanic,’ a short film dealing with one of the songs I had recorded. He came to Austria to do the camera work on Urania Descending, and he had a lot of good ideas about lighting. He knew I wanted an expressionistic atmosphere. We both are totally into the films of Louis Morneau , G.W. Pabst, all the great expressionistic filmmakers.”
Summing up, Falco says: “This is not a profound movie, on the surface. This is not a grand exercise in theatrics, or classic acting, or realistic acting. Far from it. It’s more expressionistic acting. It’s acting that suggests something. I think it’s convincing, but that’s not the point. It’s trying to make a gesture, working with gesture rather than psychological verisimilitude of some kind. It’s not a psychological drama. It’s symbolic. It’s a little bit of an exercise in semiotics, signage. It’s like what a poem can do.” And when it’s over, don’t expect any tidy sense of resolution. “People will come away from the theater,” Falco reflects, “with a certain residual experience.”

Urania Descending premieres Wednesday, June 21, 7:00 PM at Studio on the Square. Tickets are available from the Indie Memphis website.

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Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Saturday: The Klitz with Ross Johnson’s Panther Burns

If you haven’t seen the footage of the Klitz at the Orpheum from 1979, put down that goddamn baloney sandwich and watch the video below. Once the video is over, wipe the mustard off your face and get ready for Saturday night at the Hi-Tone, when the always editorially unconscionable Ross Johnson takes over the Panther Burns and opens for the Klitz. Dear God. 

We talked to original member of the Klitz Gail Elise Clifton, who is excited to play these songs to honor Panther Burns founder Tav Falco. Clifton, her sister Marcia, Amy Gassner, and Lesa Aldrege were the original members. More below.

Saturday: The Klitz with Ross Johnson’s Panther Burns (2)

“It’s totally a tribute,” Clifton says. ” I love Tav. We opened for them back in the day, and we’ll open for them, I guess in spirit. But Panther Burns is opening. So I guess that means we’re headlining. But we did happen before the Panther Burns if we’re going in chronological order. I have taken my two favorite Panther Burns songs, and I am going to perform them. I hope we have blessings. I ask Ross all the time, and he keeps saying yes.”

Since the band claimed the title of Memphis’ first lady punk rock ensemble, the band has reunited to play in 2006 and to cut some records with Greg Roberson and Adam Hill in 2011. But Clifton is psyched about this gig and pleased to honor Falco and Alex Chilton, who produced the Klitz.

“I know that Alex’s death had something to do with it,” Clifton says. “We can always feel close to Alex through those early tracks. He was my producer. He was Amy’s first producer. Since his death, people are interested in those tracks. It made Amy and Marcia want to rejoin. We’ve got three songs from Like Flies on Sherbert and one song from Sister Loves. The interesting thing about Hook or Crook, which was a song Alex recorded on us that had been on Like Flies, but he rewrote the words for us to do at Sounds of Memphis. We’ll be doing that Saturday.”

That night at the Orpheum is a special memory for Clifton.

“I love Cordell Jackson,” Clifton says. “She saw us perform. When we played at the Orpheum she saw us perform in ’79. There was a Memphis Press-Scimitar article, and they quoted her. She just loved us. She got the Panther Burns, she got the Klitz, and she got the Cramps. At that time, we all had rockabilly roots. So, it’s exciting that I’m able to do that.”

[Correction: I misstated Tav Falco’s age in an earlier version. I apologize and regret the error.]

Saturday: The Klitz with Ross Johnson’s Panther Burns

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Cover Feature News

Meanwhile At Indie Memphis

What: A four-day multimedia event with dozens of film screenings, entertainment and technology panels and discussions, parties, live music shows, and food programs.

When: Thursday, October 31st, through Sunday, November 3rd

Where: Numerous Overton Square venues, including Playhouse on the Square, Malco’s Studio on the Square, The Circuit Playhouse, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, and Local Gastropub; and downtown sites, including Earnestine & Hazel’s and The Warehouse

Full schedule: IndieMemphis.com

The 2013 Indie Memphis film festival kicks off not with a movie but with food. At 5 p.m. on Thursday, October 31st, the “Best Bites” reception at Playhouse on the Square features selections from winners of this year’s Memphis Flyer “Best of Memphis” poll (shameless plug). For the rest of the evening, you have your pick of the horror films (this being Halloween night) Escape from Tomorrow, James Whale’s classic Frankenstein, and Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, the TV pilot to Fox’s J.J. Abrams-produced Almost Human (which won’t air for a few more weeks), Touchy Feely, a buzzy ensemble drama starring Rosemarie DeWitt and Ellen Page, and local indie-pop group Star & Micey, who are starring (and Micey-ing) at an after-party concert at Earnestine & Hazel’s.

Thus, Indie Memphis in a nutshell: killer movies that haven’t opened here, classic films you can’t usually see on the big screen, the best of local music and food, and scores of filmmakers (note: Polanski will not be in attendance), performers, patrons, and scenesters all ambling between a diverse set of venues magnetized to Overton Square.

When Indie Memphis wraps up Sunday evening with an awards show and encore screenings of the fest’s best, it will have presented 50 feature films, 82 shorts, 13 panels, conversations, and seminars, and 11 parties and social events. It’s fiercely local — see our significant artistic talent on display in short films such as I Wanted To Make a Movie About a Beautiful and Tragic Memphis — but notably national, with Memphis premieres of major, Oscar-contending films (August: Osage County, Nebraska, and Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom), indie behemoths (Drinking Buddies, As I Lay Dying, Zero Charisma, The Sacrament), critical darlings (Short Term 12, Touchy Feely, Computer Chess), and diverse documentaries (Hit & Stay and The Great Chicken Wing Hunt).

It is a multimedia, multisensory extravaganza, arguably (or maybe definitively) the Mid-South’s annual cultural high-water mark.

What follows is a list, admittedly subjective, of some of the highlights. You can sleep on Monday.

— Greg Akers

Meanwhile in Memphis directors Nan Hackman and Robert Allen Parker

Meanwhile in Memphis: The Sound of a Revolution

Saturday, 6 p.m., The Circuit Playhouse, with a filmmaker Q&A after the screening

Would you like to see Tav Falco take a circular saw to his guitar while onstage with Mudboy & the Neutrons? Or tug on the narrative thread connecting Furry Lewis to contemporary Memphis rap and indie rock? Or would you just like to hear an amazingly powerful, sometimes terrifyingly aggressive collage of sounds that prove without question that the music didn’t leave Memphis when the music industry did?

Fans of modern Memphis music, especially those who were drawn to Chris McCoy’s Antenna documentary, a hit at the 2012 Indie Memphis film festival, will want to check out Meanwhile in Memphis: The Sound of a Revolution, an exhaustive look at the Bluff City’s underground music scene in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, directed by Mid-South musician Robert Allen Parker and videographer Nan Hackman. The film features engaging and insightful interviews with Falco, Jim Dickinson, Sid Selvidge, DJ Spanish Fly, Monsieur Jeffrey Evans, DJ Squeeky, members of the Oblivians, the Grifters, and the Klitz, and numerous other scene-shaping performers. While Antenna captured the essence of Memphis’ punk and DIY culture as it coalesced in the ’80s and ’90s, Meanwhile in Memphis looks far beyond the iconic Midtown venue to consider the music itself, the musicians, and the not always evident connectedness between generations and genres, which makes the scene seem like a sprawling, occasionally dysfunctional family.

Meanwhile in Memphis introduces viewers to a city in decay: Stax is closed and American Recording is boarded up. But there’s life in the ruins. Weeds spring up in abandoned lots, and the musicians who came of age in Memphis in the ensuing decades were every bit as hearty as wild grass.

Meanwhile in Memphis, Jim Dickinson

It’s the first feature film for both Parker and Hackman and was shot over a period of seven years. Like the subject at hand, what’s missing in terms of polish is more than made up for in smarts and substance.

“I really wanted these musicians to tell their story,” says Parker who, when not working his day job selling records at the Memphis Music store on Beale, plays guitar in three area bands.

The film tells the story of two distinct scenes with common roots, evolving alongside one another and sometimes converging in surprising ways: the predominantly white Midtown/downtown rock scene as defined by artists ranging from Alex Chilton to Alicja Trout and the buck-and-crunk scene that blew up in North Memphis and Orange Mound.

Meanwhile in Memphis, The Grifters

Fascinating interviews capture the essence of contemporary artists like Harlan T. Bobo and the North Mississippi Allstars, with supporting commentary from Boo Mitchell of Royal Studios, Shangri-La founder Sherman Willmott, and music writer Robert Gordon.

Oblivians/Reigning Sound frontman Greg Cartwright defines both the film and its cast when he attempts to describe the feeling you get when you realize you’re part of a legacy and connected to something much bigger than you could have ever imagined. Meanwhile in Memphis isn’t about famous people. It ignores revolutionary figures like Elvis Presley and Otis Redding and, in doing so, makes a strong case that the revolution continues. — Chris Davis

Orange Mound, Tennessee director Emmanuel Amido

Orange Mound, Tennessee: America’s Community

Saturday, 10:45 a.m., Playhouse on the Square, with a filmmaker Q&A after the screening

Fans of local history will appreciate the documentary about a Memphis neighborhood, Orange Mound, Tennessee: America’s Community. Filmmaker Emmanuel Amido captures the testimonies of past and present residents of Orange Mound regarding the struggles it’s endured, its many successes, and the unprecedented events that took place there.

Orange Mound, Tennessee: America’s Community begins with an a cappella performance of “My Soul’s Been Anchored” by the Melrose High School choir. This is followed by a visual history lesson on the neighborhood.

The area was once a plantation owned by John Deaderick in the 1820s. In the mid-1890s, real estate developer Elzey Eugene Meacham purchased the land and divided it into small, narrow lots and marketed them exclusively to African Americans.

The area became the first African-American neighborhood in the United States to also be built by African Americans; residents constructed shotgun-style houses on the lots that were sold to them by Meacham. These homes would go on to house generations of families. And many of these families built and owned their own properties, churches, and schools in Orange Mound.

Other facts, such as how the neighborhood earned the moniker Orange Mound, are highlighted in the documentary. (The area boasted countless Osage orange trees during its early days.)

Grammy Award-winning jazz saxophonist Kirk Whalum, National Civil Rights Museum president Beverly Robertson, and University of Memphis professor Charles Williams are among those who make appearances in Orange Mound, Tennessee: America’s Community.

Amido makes sure to not only focus on the positive attributes of Orange Mound but also the less fortunate characteristics as well. The documentary explores how the neighborhood went from being one of Memphis’ most thriving areas economically to one of its most impoverished and crime-ridden. This is largely attributed to many of its residents migrating to other areas of the city during the civil rights era, which left a void in the sense of community that Orange Mound once enjoyed.

A solid effort to say the least, Amido does an excellent job of capturing the meat and potatoes of what the documentary form can entail and the message that’s most significant: Orange Mound is an area with a rich history, unique culture, and strong sense of community. — Louis Goggans

Being Awesome

Being Awesome

Sunday, 12:30 p.m., The Circuit Playhouse, with a filmmaker Q&A after the screening

This feature from Memphis director Allen C. Gardner stars Drew Smith as Lloyd, a divorced art teacher who’s lost his passion for life, and Gardner as Teddy, the lovable basketball jock who still thinks of high school as the glory days. At their high school reunion, the pair connect over their unhappiness with the way life turned out. Idealist Teddy suggests the two stop being depressed and just be awesome.

For a while, Lloyd has a bit of a harder time finding his artistic muse than Teddy, who seems to jump headfirst into something meaningful. Being Awesome‘s emotional dialogue, the real meat of the film, sometimes is all too real — awkwardness and all. It’s a charm that leaves you to cheer on Teddy and Lloyd during this coming-of-middle-age story. — Alexandra Pusateri

What I Love About Concrete

What I Love About Concrete

Saturday, 1:30 p.m., The Circuit Playhouse, with filmmaker Q&A after the screening

A young girl gets out of a stranger’s bed in a house where she’s never been before. She’s covered in downy white feathers. She pulls back the covers and finds a dead bird.

Ah, the perils of being a teenager! Which is exactly the premise of What I Love About Concrete, the debut feature from local filmmakers Katherine Dohan and Alanna Stewart. The lovingly made, sweet bildungsroman finds Molly (Morgan Rose Stewart), a junior at Black Swanson High School (fictional, alas), who is struggling to make sense of her body’s changes and her burgeoning sexuality. The film swaps the horror-repulsion of adolescence in Carrie for the magical unrealism of seeing but not understanding what it means to transform into an adult.

What I Love About Concrete does a lot with a little budget, including some inspired human-sized bird costumes. The film also features hilarious supporting turns from local talent including Markus Seaberry, Bill Baker, Kimberly Baker, Sara Chiego, and The Commercial Appeal‘s John Beifuss (swoon!).

— Greg Akers

I Am Soul, Tonya Dyson

I Am Soul

Saturday, 3:30 p.m., Playhouse on the Square, with live music by Tonya Dyson before the screening and a filmmaker Q&A after the screening

I Am Soul poses the question “What is soul music?” then attempts to answer that question by spotlighting one Memphis soul artist — Tonya Dyson, a singer/songwriter from Covington — introducing us to her family, church, and other aspects of her life that have influenced her music, and culminating with Dyson’s first Beale Street gig at B.B. King’s Blues Club. I Am Soul is a touching story of a talented, homegrown artist navigating her way through a city with a renowned musical legacy.

Alternating between Dyson’s story and the story of Memphis’ rich music history, I Am Soul shows that it takes more than just talent to make it in Memphis. In the film, Dyson calls Memphis a “music mecca” and says, “If you’re dedicated, and you’re focused, and you’re smart about how you do things, you can get a lot done in Memphis.” Her perseverance through life’s difficulties supports that assertion and shows that the artist is really what makes the music when it comes to soul.

— Hannah Anderson

“Secret Screening”

Saturday, 1:45 p.m., Studio on the Square, with audience and filmmaker discussion after the screening

I can’t say what the subject of the secret screening on Saturday will be. But, based on what I know, I will be there sight unseen, and if you are in any way interested in history related to Memphis, civil rights, and/or black power, consider taking the plunge with me. The audience will be the first to see a cut of a new documentary, produced by Craig Brewer, and to participate in a discussion about what you have seen. — Greg Akers

Escape from Tomorrow

Thursday, 7 p.m., Playhouse on the Square, with live music by John Lowe before and an actor Q&A after the screening

Few sights evoke more middle-class existential dread than that of a family trying to enjoy itself at a theme park. But that image is the linchpin of writer-director Randy Moore’s Escape From Tomorrow, which was secretly shot without permits at Walt Disney World in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.

Moore’s film begins inauspiciously: Family man Jim (Roy Abramsohn) is fired via telephone while on vacation with his wife and two kids. Suddenly, the tram Jim and his family must ride to reach the Magic Kingdom feels like a train headed somewhere far more sinister — a corporate-sponsored, all-ages concentration camp where bands of bored, diseased humanity trudge around mindlessly trying to survive in Mouseschwitz, frittering away the hours by waiting in line for rides and attractions that can turn threatening at any moment.

As Jim and his family try desperately to enjoy their time together, Escape From Tomorrow starts to look and feel like a lost or missing episode of Louie. Jim’s deep ambivalence about marriage, fatherhood, and basic human interaction (and his frequent, mournful sex daydreams about a pair of underage French girls he keeps seeing at the park) further underscore the film’s debt to the rhythms and ideas of Louis C.K.’s innovative, unpredictable TV series.

The opening 50 minutes of Escape From Tomorrow effectively and repeatedly prove that the Most Magical Place on Earth is as awful and alienating as Anytown, USA. But Moore loses steam after an eerie nighttime sequence set near Epcot. Yet the film’s uneven, increasingly paranoid and nonsensical final third includes a grim fairy tale about a former Disney worker driven mad from faking happiness all day long. When Mickey, Donald, and Pluto finally appear, they look as creepy as something conjured up on Bald Mountain. And after the film’s final image, you’ll never look at Tinker Bell in the same way again. — Addison Engelking

August: Osage County

August: Osage County

Friday, 6:15 p.m., Playhouse on the Square

I’ll risk the hyperbole. In its original dramatic form, Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County stands up alongside the works of playwrights like Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard, and Arthur Miller. It is one of the greatest American family tragedies ever written, with a little something guaranteed to offend everybody: marital infidelity, incest, child molestation, Eric Clapton records, fibs, lies, falsehoods, etc. In spite of the unsavory ingredients, this dish comes together like apple pie — crusty, sweet at the center, and full of spice.

Set in Oklahoma during a blazing hot summer just before and after the drowning suicide of the Weston family patriarch, Letts’ drama plays out like a middle-class King Lear but with a stronger focus on the female characters and the legacies of dysfunctional relationships. The story gets darker and darker at every turn, but Letts’ breezy dialogue and his ability to find screwball humor and unforced slapstick in crisis and ensuing chaos is what makes him such an exciting voice for the theater and film.

The much-buzzed film adaptation was helmed by producer/director John Wells, with Letts adapting his own script. It features an all-star cast that includes Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Benedict Cumberbatch, Juliette Lewis, Dermot Mulroney, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, and the aforementioned Shepard. — Chris Davis

Short Term 12

Short Term 12

Saturday, 6:15 p.m., Playhouse on the Square, with live music by Mark Allen before and a filmmaker and actor Q&A along with reps from Youth Villages after the screening

No matter how many self-deprecating anecdotes they share — or how many self-inflicted physical scars they show — the youthful but wary optimists of Destin Daniel Cretton’s Short Term 12 are never sure how much they’ve actually helped the deeply damaged teens and tweens in their care. That’s because the kids they work with have been hurt so deeply and so often that they automatically distrust anyone who peddles any form of “I’m your buddy” BS.

But Grace (Brie Larson) and her colleagues at the titular foster-care facility keep trying anyway. Cretton follows Grace as she tries to separate the chaos of her work life from some unexpected developments involving her co-worker and live-in boyfriend Mason (John Gallagher Jr. in a sweetly lower-case performance).

Mason, who tells two stories that serve to open and close the film, is not as passionate and reckless as Grace. But he’s still very good at his job. The long scene where he provides the beat while a young man (Keith Stanfield) shares his anxiety about leaving through some brutally personal hip-hop lyrics is one of the film’s many emotionally complex high points.

Grace remains the focus of Short Term 12, though. Larson’s layered, unpredictable acting here should garner plenty of accolades. However, Kaitlyn Dever, who plays Jayden, a cagey, raccoon-eyed girl determined not to play nice, is also superb. The relationship that develops between the two women further articulates Cretton’s belief in the power and necessity of unconditional love. Which is not to say that there’s no darkness before the light: The long scene that unfolds on Jayden’s birthday, for example, was one of several that brought me to tears.

Tender, tragic, and ultimately overflowing with compassion, Short Term 12 is more than a highlight of Indie Memphis. It’s one of the year’s best films.

— Addison Engelking

For full coverage of Indie Memphis, including reviews of dozens of narrative, documentary, and short films updated daily through Sunday, go to the Flyer’s entertainment blog, Sing All Kinds.

Categories
Music Music Features

Approaching the Unapproachable

Since the last time Tav Falco and his “unapproachable” Panther Burns played Memphis, in 2000, much has changed: Musical iconoclasts like Cordell Jackson, Sam Phillips, Otha Turner, Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside, and Jessie Mae Hemphill — all championed by Panther Burns — are dead, while many of the group’s hang-outs, like Pat’s Pizza, the Beer Joint, and the Pop Tunes record store on Summer Avenue have bitten the dust as well.

From a telephone in a friend’s Paris apartment, Falco sighs. “All that is inevitable,” he declares, “but there’s something eternal about the ethos and the spirit in Memphis that cannot be denied or extinguished. Even though some of the great artists and landmarks have vanished from the Memphis scene, the legacies live on.”

Evoking a wise line uttered by his friend and co-conspirator, the late Randall Lyon, Falco says, “Let it go — it all moves anyways.

“That’s where Panther Burns come in,” he continues. “We started performing with the notion that you can’t look at the future without looking at the past. We always represented that missing link to more archaic forms of art, like rock-and-roll and tango music. We’re interpreters of this exuberant, un-self-conscious musical form.”

When he launched Panther Burns at the end of the ’70s, Falco’s single-minded inclination toward artifice, theatrics, and an honest-to-God appreciation for regional folk musicians like Burnside, Turner, Jackson, and Charlie Feathers, photographer William Eggleston, and painter Carroll Cloar, shocked and befuddled most Memphians — most notably, WHBQ-TV morning host Marge Thrasher, who declared the group’s appearance “an all-time low” for local television.

Nevertheless, Falco’s infamous rendition of Leadbelly’s “Bourgeois Blues” — in which Falco, dressed as Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, delivered an earsplitting guitar solo via an electric chainsaw — amazed others, including Box Tops/Big Star frontman Alex Chilton and a cast of hundreds, including Doug Easley, Ron Easley, Eric Hill, Jim Duckworth, Ross Johnson, Jack Yarber, and Scott Bomar, all of whom have backed Falco at one time or another, and Lorette Velvette, Lisa McGaughran, Diane Greene, and Misty White, who operated as Panther Burns’ all-female side group, the Hellcats.

To say that Panther Burns inspired an era of Memphis music would be an understatement: The oft-disparaged, loose-knit, seemingly a-step-away-from-utter-chaos band dominated and defined the Midtown scene for an entire decade.

Yet, Falco claims, “We were always on the outside in Memphis. We were never part of the establishment. We had a group of people who played with us or came to see us who were very eccentric in their own right.

This month, Falco — who currently lives in Paris, on Rue des Solitaires (“I finally made it to the ‘Street of the Lonelies'”) — is bringing his latest incarnation of Panther Burns to the U.S. for three gigs: in Los Angeles, in New York, and a Memphis appearance this week at the New Daisy Theatre.

“Once you’re in Panther Burns, it’s not so easy to get out,” he says, noting that Ross Johnson, the band’s beleaguered former drummer, will also perform at the Memphis show.

Asked about Johnson’s legendary “Panther Burns Confessional,” published by Shangri-La Records in the mid-’90s, Falco says, “I endorse the diatribes.

“There’s an element of truth in it which makes it even more piquant and interesting,” he says, obviously relishing remembrances of endless squabbles (“a band full of drama queens” is how Johnson described the group), critical commentary (“All the wasted effort and heartache, and still the records sounded like toilets flushing,” Johnson wrote of albums produced by Chilton and Jim Dickinson), and touring with the Clash (in Johnson’s words: “After the opening date in Nashville, a member of the road crew asked which one of us was Alex Chilton. The reply: the one eating ice off the stage”).

Falco, who makes semi-annual pilgrimages to visit family in his tiny hometown of Whelan Springs, Arkansas, will have just 24 hours in Memphis this go-round.

“I really feel like a citizen of the world,” he says. “Or maybe the cosmos. Sometimes I miss listening to Eggleston playing Chopin on his Steinway at 3 a.m., but other than that, I’m okay over here.

“I’m going back to Beale Street, which has been paved over and changed so much, but somehow, the blackness, the blues, are still around. Those street corners are really haunted — in the middle of the night, you can still feel it, even though Uncle Ben [Perry, a street musician] is gone. While it’s lost some of its indigenous qualities, the vibe, the Beale Street mambo, is still there, and I want to be connected to that.”

Falco also plans to take a jaunt down to the riverfront, where, in his words, “the Mississippi, deep and wide, with Arkansas on the other side, is something to behold. I feel compelled to have a look at that once again.

“Then it’s back to Europe,” Falco says, “where the topic around Panther Hall is our ongoing struggle and the battle to place our next album, Wellfire: Séance for Deranged Lovers, with the proper record label.”

www.MySpace.com/PantherBurns

Tav Falco’s Unapproachable Panther Burns

New Daisy Theatre

Saturday, October 21st

Doors open at 7 p.m., tickets $10