Nashville Scene 4-23-20 by FW Publishing

APRIL 23–29, 2020 I VOLUME 39 I NUMBER 12

NASHVILLESCENE.COM I FREE

GENORA (92) AND BENJAMIN FLAGG (96) AT THEIR ANTIOCH HOME

QUARANTINED A MONTH AFTER THE IMPLEMENTATION OF ‘SAFER AT HOME,’ WE LOOK AT HOW NASHVILLE IS DEALING WITH THE FALLOUT OF COVID-19 INCLUDING: PORTRAITS OF NASHVILLIANS IN QUARANTINE | TALKING TO METRO’S PUBLIC HEALTH OFFICIALS HOW RELIGIOUS LEADERS ARE ADAPTING | MORE

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NASHVILLE SCENE | APRIL 23 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; APRIL 29, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

Contents

apriL 23, 2020

God Was in Our Response .........................6

On the Resilience of Nashville’s Restaurant Scene

City Limits

An interview with the Rev. Kira Austin-Young on faith amid tornadoes and a pandemic

food and drink

By Steven Hale

How our beloved food-industry community is weathering tornado damage and a global pandemic

This week on the Scene’s news and politics blog

By Jennifer JuStuS

Scenes From Nashville ..............................8

Attitude With a Dash of Tenderness

Pith in the Wind .........................................7

Cover story

Shots from around the city during the COVID-19 pandemic

Samantha Irby takes on middle age and mixtapes in Wow, No Thank You By Hamilton cain and cHaPter 16

The actions of Metro’s public health officials have likely saved lives

By J.r. lind

The Doggy Boom ..................................... 12 Amid quarantine, many Nashvillians are looking to a familiar source of happiness: dogs

musiC

Freak Out, If You Wanna ......................... 25 By Sean l. maloney

Nashville’s Muslim community prepares for a Ramadan unlike any other

Nashville’s DJs keep the scene they’ve built alive and kicking online By SetH graveS

What gardens can teach us about art and survival during a global pandemic

The Scene’s live-review column checks livestreams by Liza Anne, Jason Eskridge & Matty Ride and more

By erica ciccarone

Sex Working From Home........................ 16

How the sex industry is handling the COVID-19 pandemic By laura HutSon Hunter

Mileage May Vary .................................... 16 Nashville is seeing just how essential delivery drivers are By aleJandro ramirez

On the Inside ........................................... 17 A COVID-19 outbreak in Tennessee’s prisons and jails is no longer hypothetical By Steven Hale

Marking Time .......................................... 18 Working musicians are hopeful, if uneasy, about their industry in the wake of COVID-19 By StePHen trageSer

Chefs Pitch In to Feed First Responders Local Makers Team Up to Build Ventilators, Seek Volunteers

on the Cover:

Genora (92) and Benjamin Flagg (96) at their Antioch home Photo by John Partipilo

Keep on Turning ...................................... 25

By StePHen elliott

Weed It and Reap ................................... 14

Tennessee Businesses to Reopen May 1, Except in Big Cities

Brendan Benson’s Dear Life is an oddly perfect album for odd times

By Ben oddo

A Holy Month at Home ........................... 13

Country Westerns Warp Time and Space in ‘Times to Tunnels’

Books

By JoHn PartiPilo

The Greater Good .................................... 11

this week on the web:

The Spin ................................................... 26

By edd Hurt, StePHen trageSer, ron Wynn and cHarlie zaillian

28 fiLm

Primal Stream V ...................................... 28 Kaiju chaos, body horror and a dose of Florence Pugh, now available to stream By JaSon SHaWHan

This Is the Body ....................................... 29

Corpus Christi offers valid critiques, but tries a bit too hard to do so By Steve erickSon

31 31

NEW YORK TIMES CrossWord

CritiCs’ piCks

Follow Adia Victoria on Instagram, explore VHS rallies on YouTube, build your own streaming Stephen King film fest, stream Amanda Shires’ “I So Lounging” series on YouTube, celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday with Nashville Shakes, watch the Nashville Scene’s No-Contact Shows and more

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FROM BILL FREEMAN THE AFTERMATH OF THE CORONAVIRUS: HOW WILL IT IMPACT NASHVILLE?

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Throughout its history, Nashville has been a strong crossroads where people have gathered for trade and other social activities. In recent decades, we have become known for music, sports, tourism, logistics, health care and more. We attract strong, established businesses right alongside new and trendy ones. Not too long ago, we were regularly ranked — as a February CNBC article did — as one of the top 10 cities to move to. We must wonder whether those kinds of rankings will hold true in the near future. In the midst of COVID-19, our city, state, nation and world are being impacted. Things will change, even after the greater threat of the virus has passed. Just as 9/11 took its toll on everything, from our personal lives to the way our national security operates, COVID-19 will change us also. It affects us at every level, from our physical and emotional health to our intellectual and financial well-being. Yet many still dismiss the pandemic’s seriousness. Since its entry into the U.S., the coronavirus has killed more than 42,000 Americans as of April 20, and that’s with virtually every type of gathering place closed. As of Monday, Tennessee had recorded 7,280 cases with 152 deaths, 20 of which took place in Metro Nashville. The number of cases jumped by more than 300 in a span of 24 hours. This is not going away. We have no vaccine, and no one knows when we’ll have one. Intellectually, we may understand the situation — but emotionally, many of us are plummeting. Some are saddened from being separated from loved ones, while others are angrily fighting for their rights, unphased by the insidious nature of this virus’s transmission. In denial perhaps, some think we can resume “normal” activity with little consequence. Those people are wrong. Financially, we don’t know if the recovery will be fast or slow, or both. Some areas may bounce back more quickly than others. In Nashville, our hotel and tourism business is reeling, with events like March’s Southern Women’s Show, June’s CMA Fest and July’s NAMM Show all canceled. The CMA Fest draws tens of thousands of attendees to Nashville each year, with an economic impact of $65 million in 2019 alone. According to reports, nearly 600 meetings and conventions had been canceled as of March 31, with lost direct spending of about $187 million. Nashville is projected to lose $500 million in revenue before the end of April. Universities are suffering, as potential students are unable to visit campuses to make matriculation decisions, and enrollment numbers and housing income is deteriorating. Well-endowed universities can tolerate such hits, but smaller ones cannot. Nashville is Music City, but bars and music venues are closed, musicians and artists are without work, and as a community, our hands are tied. Artists are wisely turning to their social media networks for support. But speculation is

that the music industry globally could lose well over $5 billion in revenue as concert and festival cancellations continue. In football season, if still under current protocols that limit congregating in large groups, there will be no arena crowds. Millions upon millions of dollars normally generated for the teams, universities, vendors and communities will be lost. Even if President Trump’s threephase reopening plan is immediately implemented here, we are still six weeks away from being able to gather in larger groups and from all the final “at-home” protocols being removed. Further, the president’s plan stipulates implementation should begin in only areas where virus numbers have been going down for at least 14 days. Our numbers are still climbing. What will happen when we reopen? How will things change? Some experts say continued social distancing for months or even years will be a must if we are to avoid another resurgence. Others say another wave of the pandemic is inevitable, especially if regulations are relaxed too soon. Citizens fear pandemonium or violence if we are kept restricted for too long, and more fear the possibility of being headed for another Great Depression. We have no idea. Some will be fearful and stay fearful. Some will stay angry, and some will continue to go about their day as if nothing has happened — until it happens to them. Whatever happens, we’ll evolve and adjust to whatever changes we need to make to protect our community and our families, just as we did after 9/11. As University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban says: “One thing about championship teams is that they’re resilient. No matter what is thrown at them, no matter how deep the hole, they find a way to bounce back and overcome adversity.” Nashville is just like that. We always find a way.

Bill Freeman Bill Freeman is the owner of FW Publishing, the publishing company that produces the Nashville Scene, Nfocus, the Nashville Post and Home Page Media Group in Williamson County.

Editor-in-Chief D. Patrick Rodgers Senior Editor Dana Kopp Franklin Associate Editor Alejandro Ramirez Arts Editor Laura Hutson Hunter Culture Editor Erica Ciccarone Music and Listings Editor Stephen Trageser Contributing Editors Jack Silverman, Abby White Staff Writers Stephen Elliott, Nancy Floyd, Steven Hale, Kara Hartnett, J.R. Lind, William Williams Contributing Writers Sadaf Ahsan, Radley Balko, Ashley Brantley, Maria Browning, Steve Cavendish, Chris Chamberlain, Lance Conzett, Steve Erickson, Randy Fox, Adam Gold, Seth Graves, Kim Green, Steve Haruch, Geoffrey Himes, Edd Hurt, Jennifer Justus, Christine Kreyling, Katy Lindenmuth, Craig D. Lindsey, Brittney McKenna, Marissa R. Moss, Noel Murray, Joe Nolan, Chris Parton, Betsy Phillips, John Pitcher, Margaret Renkl, Megan Seling, Jason Shawhan, Michael Sicinski, Ashley Spurgeon, Amy Stumpfl, Kay West, Cy Winstanley, Ron Wynn, Charlie Zaillian Editorial Intern Bronte Lebo Art Director Elizabeth Jones Photographers Eric England, Daniel Meigs Graphic Designers Mary Louise Meadors, Tracey Starck Production Coordinator Christie Passarello Circulation Manager Casey Sanders Events and Marketing Director Olivia Moye Events Manager Ali Foley Publisher Mike Smith Advertising Director Daniel Williams Senior Account Executives Maggie Bond, Debbie Deboer, Sue Falls, Michael Jezewski, Carla Mathis, Heather Cantrell Mullins, Stevan Steinhart, Jennifer Trsinar, Keith Wright Account Executive William Shutes Sales Operations Manager Chelon Hill Hasty Account Managers Emma Benjamin, Gary Minnis Special Projects Coordinator Susan Torregrossa President Frank Daniels III Chief Financial Officer Todd Patton Creative Director Heather Pierce IT Director John Schaeffer For advertising info please contact: Daniel Williams at 615-744-3397 FW PUBLISHING LLC Owner Bill Freeman VOICE MEDIA GROUP National Advertising 1-888-278-9866 vmgadvertising.com

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city limits

God Was in Our Response

I think one of the things — whether or not “normal” was good for everybody or promoted human flourishing for a lot of folks — we are kind of grieving a loss of normalcy, a loss of knowing what the next day is going to be.

Speaking of grieving things that we had been planning on, I noticed you mentioned on Twitter that you were supposed to be baptizing babies right before Easter. Yeah. Traditionally, Easter

An interview with the Rev. Kira Austin-Young on faith amid tornadoes and a pandemic

vigil, which is the first service of Easter, takes place after sunset on Saturday night. It’s one of my favorite services of the whole year. It can be anywhere from like 90 minutes to three hours long. But traditionally, in the early church, that’s when converts to the faith were baptized. So it’s one of the traditional occasions for baptism, and even when there isn’t a baptism, we renew our baptismal vows at that service. It’s just a really powerful service and even more so when there are actual baptisms. So, instead I did the service in my backyard. My fiancé built me a fire pit just so I could have my Easter vigil fire. There’s a long song that gets sung, so I just lit this fire and chanted this song in my backyard and renewed my baptismal vows. We kind of tell the story of our faith, and of God’s acts of liberation and restoration in the world, starting from Creation and going through the flood and leading the Israelites out of Egypt and Ezekiel and the dry bones, and then it all culminates in the proclamation of the resurrection. … I kept reminding myself, there have been a lot of Easters in the world and around the world and in the history of Christianity that have looked [different]. There have been Easters under religious persecution, and there have been Easters in prisons and in hospitals, and it’s still Easter.

By Steven Hale

Am I right to assume that you’ve been sort of learning how to lead a church congregation during a crisis on the fly here? We’re in uncharted territory, right? Yeah. I mean, we all kind of joke how we missed the “How to Minister During a Pandemic” class in seminary. Normally, in kind of a normal ministry situation, you have any given group of people that may be in crisis at a given time. Somebody’s going through a divorce, somebody’s had a death in the family, somebody’s having an issue with addiction in their family. So your pastoral energy is channeled in specific ways. But since the tornado and now with

The Rev. Kira Austin-Young COVID-19, literally everybody is in crisis. Including me.

My understanding is you’re a chaplain at one of the hospitals, right? I’m a contract chaplain for Vanderbilt. … My normal role there is I’m the Wednesday night overnight chaplain. So from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. I’m on call from home. Mostly when I get called in in normal times it’s for deathbed situations, emergency situations, things like that that are critical needs at a given time. I actually haven’t been called in since COVID-19 protocols went into place, in part because one of the main things I do as a chaplain is really minister to families of patients, particularly in deathbed scenarios where the patient isn’t necessarily responsive but the family might need support. And because there aren’t any visitors allowed, there hasn’t really been a lot of immediate need for the type of chaplaincy work that I do. But in my conversations with the other chaplains, I think they’re really trying to do a lot of staff support. Because the people who are medical workers, the nurses and doctors and staff, are really having their own kind of struggles with the situation and how to be health care providers right now.

We haven’t necessarily gotten to this point yet in Middle Tennessee, but you know stuff that I’ve listened to about situations in Italy where you’re making decisions about who lives and who dies, who gets a ventilator and who doesn’t — there’s a lot of what we call moral injury that comes with that, even if you’re trying to do the best that we can or you’re following hospital or state guidelines. You’re still the one who’s kind of saying, “You get the ventilator, you don’t get the ventilator.”

I wonder how you’re thinking about grief in this time, and how we’re all feeling certain sorts of grief. Yeah, I think just the acknowledgement that we’re all grieving. Unfortunately, I think we get into this situation where somebody always has it worse, so I don’t feel like I’m necessarily allowed to grieve that my long-planned trip to Europe with my kids was canceled, because somebody else over here has a loved one in the hospital. We kind of do this comparative grief thing where we don’t necessarily allow ourselves to grieve what may seem like a privileged thing to grieve, but it’s still grief. We still have to let ourselves feel that and acknowledge it and name it.

Photo: Daniel Meigs

hen I ask the Rev. Kira Austin-Young, who leads St. Ann’s Episcopal Church in East Nashville, what the past month-anda-half or so has been like, she goes immediately to the supernatural. “Um, it’s been hell,” she says, laughing. “The last kind of normal day I remember was, like, March 1,” says Austin-Young. “We had church, my fiancé and I went for a walk in Shelby Bottoms, and the sun was shining and we went out to dinner. It was just a normal day. And then, Tuesday morning.” Tuesday morning was March 3, when a devastating tornado ripped through Nashville in the dark of night. Two people were killed, hundreds were displaced, and buildings and homes from North Nashville to East Nashville, Donelson and beyond — those that weren’t completely destroyed — bore the scars. Austin-Young says she managed to sleep through the whole thing, but awoke to a barrage of text messages that gave way to panic about the state of her East Nashville church. For more than 150 years, St. Ann’s has stood east of the river, and this was not its first storm. In the spring of 1934, a tornado destroyed the church’s bell tower. In 1998, a tornado claimed the church’s historic nave and chancel, which had stood since 1882. A stone carving commemorates the old structure with the words, “God was not in the tornado but in our response.” On March 3, 2020, the church was spared — although it lost a large hackberry tree, the only tree that had survived the 1998 tornado. But ever since that morning, Austin-Young — who is also a chaplain for Vanderbilt University Medical Center — has been shepherding a flock through what is essentially an unprecedented moment in modern history. “From there,” she says of March 3, “everything changed.”

You talked about restoration. It’s impossible not to notice that we’re in the middle of a historic event and there’s going to be something on the other end of this. It seems like a lot of the work to be done right now is figuring out how we’re going to get through this but also to figure out what kind of world we’re going to have after this. Absolutely. All through Holy Week and the latter weeks of Lent, we’re reading through some of the exile prophets, and during Holy Week we’re reading through Lamentations. And that hits differently this year. It hits in a way that I’ve never really fully appreciated before, this kind of sense of being in exile some ways. All throughout the Bible and especially through those prophets, God is saying to the Israelites, “I despise your festivals.” It’s not about religious observance, it’s about justice and about justice for all of God’s creatures. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it would look like for us to be more committed to economic justice and the folks that we are saying are essential workers and yet a lot of them are not making a living wage. How might this time affect our relationship with climate change? I feel like very few of us, myself included, have been willing to make the sacrifices needed to make a difference in terms of climate change, and now we’re being forced to make some of those sacrifices. We’re not driving — I don’t remember the last time I filled up my tank on my car. We’re working from home, as difficult as that is. What would it look like to acknowledge that maybe productivity — the kind of productivity

Nashville Scene | April 23 – april 29, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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4/20/20 6:22 PM

CITY LIMITS that our economic system values — is not the most important thing?

I saw you mention in a tweet following Easter that the burial liturgy is an Easter liturgy. I was quite moved by that, and I wonder if you could explain it. I love our burial liturgy so much THIS WEEK ON OUR NEWS AND POLITICS BLOG: Hundreds of protesters descended on Legislative Plaza on April 19, demanding an end to the state’s stay-at-home order and a shift from mandatory to recommended social distancing. There were similar protests — openly defying guidelines from the CDC, as well as Gov. Bill Lee’s edict limiting gatherings to 10 people or fewer — across the state, joining a movement of others nationally. That movement appears to have started in Michigan, one of the states hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. It was similar to other libertarianish protests that have occurred at the Capitol in the past quarter-century or so, with vehicles circling the marchers, honking horns and cheering, reviving the once-ubiquitous Nashville traffic snarl. While it’s unclear if he was acquiescing to the protesters (whose desire for liberty apparently extends so far they dismiss standard rules of punctuation), Lee announced Monday that he intended to let the statewide order expire April 30 and begin a phased-in return to normalcy. Contra Lee, Metro Nashville Mayor John Cooper said he’s likely to extend the local “Safer at Home” order after positive test rates increased. For now, Lee says the state’s

PHOTO: MATT MASTERS

because the way that it’s formulated is that death is not the end. It’s very much a proclamation of the Christian truth that death is not the end, that we find the meaning of life in Christ’s resurrection, and that in our baptism we’re baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ. In the rubrics, in the back of the liturgy, one of my favorite things it says is, “But grief is not unchristian,” and points to the fact that even Jesus wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus. So the burial liturgy is an Easter liturgy, but it’s not a celebratory liturgy. So that kind of tension. We celebrate the resurrection, but we’re also grieving the loss of something. That’s kind of what this Easter felt like to me. We were saying alleluia, and one of the phrases of our liturgy is that, “Even at the grave, we make our song alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” And I saw something that a friend of mine wrote, addressing some of the kids in her parish who kind of said, “I don’t really feel like saying alleluia this year, it doesn’t feel joyful to me.” And she kind of said, “Alleluia isn’t necessarily about joy, it’s actually about protest.” It’s about protest against death and darkness and the forces of evil, and so we say “alleluia” not because we’re happy, but because we believe that there is more. EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

change won’t apply to major urban areas, and city orders can remain in place. But if there’s a change in that posture? Well then, it may be time to brush up on Dillon’s Rule, friends. … All this came after a statewide blitz in which COVID-19 tests became available to anyone, not just those who met the symptom screening criteria. … The Tennessee Supreme Court reset the scheduled June 4 execution of Oscar Smith for February 2021, citing the ongoing pandemic situation. … Handy types from Fort Houston, The Wondr’y and Make

Nashville are chipping in, using their skills to build open-source designed ventilators, implementing, among other things, windshield-wiper motors donated by Nissan as well as pool noodles. … Local activist and Vanderbilt divinity student Justin Jones failed to meet the 25-signature threshold to make the August Democratic primary ballot. Jones intended to challenge Rep. Jim Cooper, but the election commission certified only 24 of the 30 signatures Jones’ campaign submitted. NASHVILLESCENE.COM/PITHINTHEWIND EMAIL: PITH@NASHVILLESCENE.COM TWEET: @PITHINTHEWIND

nashvillescene.com | APRIL 23 – APRIL 29, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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Quarantined A month after the implementation of ‘Safer at Home,’ we look at how Nashville is dealing with the fallout of COVID-19

n Sunday, March 22, Mayor John Cooper announced a “Safer at Home” order, closing all nonessential businesses and urging Nashville residents to stay home. In the month since, we’ve seen Nashvillians of all stripes adjust to life amid a global pandemic. In this week’s issue, we explore how the city has adapted — from the response overseen by Metro public health officials to the adjustments made by folks including delivery drivers, sex workers, musicians and religious leaders. We also take a look at how some Nashvillians have chosen to spend their time in self-quarantine, and examine the response to COVID-19 in Tennessee’s jails and prisons. Also in the issue: photographer John Partipilo’s portraits of Nashvillians from all walks of life as they practice social distancing at home.

photos: John Partipilo

Lendora Smith and her daughters Da’Riya (5) and Dynesha (19) at their home in Madison

Angel Funk stands outside her Holly Street home, which was damaged by last month’s tornado

Pastor Enoch Fuzz stands amid the empty pews at his Corinthian Missionary Baptist Church

Nashville Scene | April 23 – april 29, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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Quarantined

clockwise from top left: Cliff Ballard, who is currently homeless, wears a mask while waiting for a bus on Eighth Avenue South Beth and Hunter Groves and their family The Sharanshi family, from left: Susveen (17), Sorgal (13), father Nazar and Dilan (8) Dilan playing in her yard

photos: John Partipilo

Mario Oranday and Jason Ownbey with their dog Browny

nashvillescene.com | April 23 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; april 29, 2020 | Nashville Scene

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4/20/20 6:53 PM

Quarantined

clockwise from top left: Laotian Buddhist monks Phra Somxay Sayavong, Phra Sit Sayasith and Phra Wan Kaewphokha of the Wat Lao PhraThatLuang of Tennessee Keith and Camilla Spadafino, their daughter Alexandra and dog Cheyenne Patton James quarantined in his pool in East Nashville

photos: John Partipilo

Manuel Cuevas and his wife Ofelia make face masks at their shop in Berry Hill

Nashville Scene | April 23 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; april 29, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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4/20/20 6:54 PM

The Greater Good The actions of Metro’s public health officials have likely saved lives By J.R. Lind

he tents were up, the volunteers were trained, and the medical professionals were briefed. The tests were ready, and the labs were prepared for their allimportant duty. There was only one problem. “We were literally waiting for the cotton swabs,” says Dr. Alex Jahangir, chairman of Metro Nashville’s Board of Health. Yes, those giant swabs that look like they were designed by Tomás de Torquemada to prod the brains of heretics were nowhere to be found. As Nashville’s testing centers — strategically located to best serve populations without reliable access to health care — marked time, Jahangir and Mayor John Cooper coincidentally had a meeting with Gov. Bill Lee. The governor asked why testing hadn’t actually begun, so Jahangir explained: Those massive swabs, the ones that look like the pugil sticks from American Gladiators? Nashville didn’t have any. Lee was heading to Memphis later that day, and American Esoteric Laboratory’s facility there also happened to be one of the testing labs. “He brought back 1,000 swabs on his helicopter,” Jahangir says. “[State Health Commissioner] Lisa Piercey got us 2,000 more swabs. They sent them over in a TEMA truck.” And with that, Nashville was ready to start testing for the disease that has brought numerous cities to their knees. This is just one of a million anecdotes about the battle with this invisible enemy. It’s these kinds of breaks that help to win wars — but nothing replaces decisive action and implementation of years of planning. Due to the daily updates from Cooper’s office, these public health officials — Jahangir, along with Metro Director of Health Dr. Brian Caldwell and others — are suddenly public figures. “Prior to three weeks ago, you had no idea who the hell I was,” Jahangir says. “What’s been great in this capacity is that I’ve had the opportunity to meet people from different parts of Nashville. And people, I know, are taking huge hits, but they say ‘I get it,’ and they’re on board. I see people wearing masks, I hear about people making masks. We are flattening the curve.” As far as this story goes, that’s the end of Act II. Act I was back in February. “We were monitoring everything that was coming out of China, and things were rapidly changing,” says Rachel Franklin, head of the health department’s Communicable Disease and Public Health Emergency Preparedness Bureau. “Early February was when we said this was going to hit home and be in our backyard. We’ve got a lot of people in our staff that had never been in a response, who had never looked at the pandemic response plan, and it needed

Quarantined to be updated.” Nashville’s response, though, was built around an influenza outbreak. Coronaviruses are different beasts. “A plan is a nice structure to get started, but you have to tailor that to the particular circumstances,” Franklin says. And what does updating and tweaking a plan involve? Parts of it are almost banal, according to Dr. Gill Wright III, associate medical director for clinical services at Metro Nashville’s Public Health Department. “We started to look at what was in our stockpile for [personal protective equipment], how it’s to be used,” says Wright. “What’s our communication with the hospitals? Did we have the best contacts, the right phone numbers?” Meanwhile, there was another pressing matter: Nashville didn’t actually have a permanent director of health. Dr. Sanmi Areola, the deputy director, was acting as the interim, and the board had decided to extend an offer to Caldwell for the permanent post. Jahangir recognized the urgency to have someone in place, so he called an emergency meeting for Feb. 20, moving with unexpected alacrity due to, of all things, the quirks of the calendar. “Part of the urgency getting [Caldwell] on board was that if we waited, the Metro Council couldn’t approve him for another two weeks, and we wanted to make sure we had a director of health, because we saw this coming,” Jahangir says. “Fastforward, Caldwell … met me at the Urban Juicer — I call it ‘smoothie diplomacy.’ We spoke for 30 or 40 minutes. We started those conversations within a day or two.” The staff was updating the plan. The board was getting a medical director in place and setting up a smooth transition — ideally, Caldwell would overlap with Areola before the latter started his new job as director of health in Johnson County, Mo. Then in the wee hours of March 3, a tornado ripped across the city. The health department had to suddenly walk and chew gum at the same time, continuing to get ready for the outbreak of a new disease while contributing to the recovery efforts after a deadly storm. “Luckily, we had done a lot of the planning piece, and we were able to focus for that first week [of March] on the tornado piece,” Wright says. Caldwell worked at the Office of Emergency Management headquarters in the wake of the tornado while not under contract. Then the inevitable call came. “We had an idea that a few specimens we’d sent to the state could be positive [for COVID-19],” says Franklin. “And sure enough, we did get a call from the state. And then my phone started buzzing.” Nashville’s first confirmed case of COVID-19 was announced March 8, just five days after the tornado, and with the new health director still working without a contract. “He has had the worst onboarding I’ve ever seen,” Jahangir says with a laugh. While it may have appeared to the layman that things escalated quickly from “Wash your hands” to “Avoid large events” to “Shelter in place,” the declarations and instructions were all in the pipeline. “We were working on the emergency declaration and various orders before they went out,” says health department policy

dr. alex Jahangir director Tom Sharp. “When you start to see community spread, we cranked down the restaurants, and then at the same time we were working on the ‘Safer at Home’ order. All that was in the works. The [initial] declaration was March 15. The next Sunday, [March 22], was the ‘Safer at Home’ order, and then we amended it. ... In the meantime, the state put out theirs. By that point, we’d had a week or two of input from [community-input portal] hubNashville, and our inspectors had been out. Things were evolving all the time, so it could reflect what real life actually looks like.” Of course, no one can plan for everything. “It was a very steep learning curve, and that plan we reviewed got thrown out the window pretty quickly,” Wright says. “You can plan all you want to, but until it happens, you never know. The process is no different than the hepatitis A outbreak we have ongoing. … [Our staff] reaches out to the individual, collecting all this contact information, and then reaches out to the people identified as at-risk. We reached out ... to the [patient’s employer], and the building and their cleaning service.” Disease mitigation and prevention are critical concerns, but public health isn’t just about avoiding sickness. “Public health includes not going stir-crazy or going broke,” Sharp says — and thus the compromise of allowing restaurants to offer curbside service while

barring sit-down dining. The bars and restaurants had to close to stem the spread — and the decision to shutter them on the weekend, rather than waiting until Monday, likely saved lives and prevented a nightmarish task of contact tracing. “I’d love to be told we overreacted,” Jahangir says. “We realized that weekend that if we waited until Monday or Tuesday, we’d have Broadway packed for a few more days. The [SEC] basketball tournament was going on. We needed to do something quick.” Mid- to late March is spring break season. What if a visitor had symptoms after returning from a trip to Nashville? And what if that person had spent two hours at a crowded bar, then two hours at another? And infected others, who then flew home? “And we might never find out about them,” Wright says. The focus is shifting now at the health department as conversations begin regarding how to reopen the city and pull out of the crisis earlier than expected. “This is speculation, but our city acted faster with stay-at-home orders, and I think we have to give credit to shutting those places,” Franklin says. “Because Nashville has not been very hard hit, we have to look at mitigation.” And maybe a little credit should go to a fortuitous stockpile of giant cotton swabs. Email editor@nashvillescene.com

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Quarantined

The Doggy Boom Amid quarantine, many Nashvillians are looking to a familiar source of happiness: dogs By Ben Oddo

hile many of us consume chocolate and debate the merits of showering, a large swath of Nashville — and indeed, America — has been preoccupied with a different task: tending to their newly acquired pups. Welcome the COVID-doggy. With Nashvillians confined to our homes, there has been a surge in dog adoption, purchases and fostering in recent weeks. In essence, just as the postwar years brought us the baby boom, so too has the coronavirus brought us the doggy boom. Minus the prosperity and wealth. “We figured we were about to be sitting at home for the foreseeable future,” says Morey Hill. “What better time to get and train a pup?” Hill and his fiancée Bobbe Chaffin recently welcomed Jimmy, a Bernese mountain dog, into their lives. Kara and Harrison Tucker had a similar idea — they’re now the proud owners of a Labrador retriever named Maggie. “We were going to wait a little longer, but now Harrison is working from home for a little bit,” says Kara Tucker. “He wanted a puppy, and they require so much work. So we knew this was the right timing for that.” While jerks might claim that the concept of a doggy boom is purely anecdotal, the numbers at certain shelters are striking. After temporarily closing its doors on March 17, the Nashville Humane Association put out a plea for foster assistance and received nearly 1,000 replies. With 200 dogs in need, the response “was completely and utterly overwhelming,” says executive director Laura Chavarria, adding that the NHA was able to share its list of potential doggy foster parents with other local shelters like Metro Animal Care and Control, Crossroads, New Leash on Life, and the

Williamson County Animal Center. “The community needs are matching with our shelter needs, and it is an absolutely beautiful thing.” As to whether there is any concern that adopters might be acting impulsively, Chavarria says, “It is important for potential adopters to understand that if the animal isn’t a good fit during ‘normal/nonpandemic’ times, then the animal would not be a good fit now.” So now that the ’rona dogs are here (’rona dog, COVID-doggy, essential boy — use whatever term you’re feeling in the moment), do they sense something is amiss with our society? “I think they think the opposite,” says Huntley Robinson, who — with her husband Wilson — recently rescued Lewis, a wirehaired pointer mix. “For them, everything is finally right in our society right now.” “I don’t think Jimmy understands how good he has it,” notes Hill. “He gets roundthe-clock attention from both of us and gets to go outside almost whenever he wants. Someday in the future we will leave the house for several hours, and it’s going to rock his world.” Margaret Renkl, author of the acclaimed Late Migrations and a former Scene staffer, observes, “The lovely thing about dogs is how they just roll with puzzling stuff.” Renkl is among the “canine-curious” — those who have considered getting a puppy but have yet to pull the trigger. “I check Petfinder.com every morning just to torture myself. But so far I haven’t seen a puppy I like better than staying married.” Fortunately, there are ways to get involved that are less likely to wreck your marriage. Dog fostering allows folks to provide temporary love and housing while advocating on social media for a dog’s adoption (assuming they don’t end up adopting the animal themselves). Nashville Humane is calling its process “Foster to Adopt,” since dogs cannot technically be adopted while there is a ban on elective pet procedures like spaying and neutering. Adoptables are posted to social media, and then Zoom meet-and-greets are scheduled between foster parents and potential adopters. “Right now, folks are bored and have a lot of time to spend at home,” says Chavarria. “What better way to give back

a puppy at Nashville Humane gets ready to travel to his foster home

Photos: Daniel Meigs

Bobbe Chaffin, Morey hill and their dog Jimmy

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Quarantined to the community than to foster?” The easiest thing to do is follow the Nashville Humane Association on social media (@nashvillehumane on Twitter and Instagram) and continue to advocate for their animals. Those who have the capability to foster and are interested in adopting can sign up to do so. Currently, foster animals from the NHA’s domestic violence program — an unfortunate necessity in the wake of the stay-at-home mandate — are being placed. It’s a unique program involving pets from homes affected by domestic violence. Foster parents will have to return the animal once the home environment is deemed safe, and are asked not to share pictures or info about the pets on their social media accounts. So in a time when things are uncertain and good news is scarce, what can dogs teach us? For one, that happiness still exists. “We should all be more like dogs,” says Tucker. Email editor@nashvillescene.com

Kara and Harrison Tucker with their dog Maggie

A Holy Month at Home

Nashville’s Muslim community prepares for a Ramadan unlike any other By Stephen Elliott

Photo: Eric England

he Prophet Muhammad was wise to the concepts of pandemic and quarantine. “If you hear of an outbreak of plague in a land, do not enter it; but if the plague breaks out in a place while you are in it, do not leave that place,” Muhammad said more than a millennium ago, as recorded in the Hadith. In Nashville, members of the Muslim community are heeding that advice — as well as that of contemporary public health officials and government leaders. Friday prayers and sermons have moved to Zoom. Weddings are delayed or conducted virtually. Funerals, a deeply significant ritual in the faith, are being stripped of their large crowds. But with the holy month of Ramadan beginning Thursday, the Muslim community in Nashville is being deprived of the traditional activities of its “most special month of the year,” says Ossama Bahloul, imam at the Islamic Center of Nashville. Each night during Ramadan, Muslims fast from dawn until dusk, and many gather at their mosque at sundown for a communal dinner and prayers. At ICN, 250 to 300 people gather to break their fast each night. But this year, the celebrations will take place in homes across the city, among small family units. Aliya Aqeel, a kindergarten teacher at a local Islamic school and the wife of an imam, is among the parents trying to make Ramadan special despite the lack of large public gatherings. She has three kids — ages 5, 10 and 13 — and they have decorated their home and purchased food for the holiday. It’s her 5-year-old’s first Ramadan fasting (young children are not expected to fast), and she says, “We’re looking to see how that works with him.” Fatima Nawaz, a board member at ICN, says she’s teaching her 4-year-old daughter the call to prayer. Her young daughter will issue the call from the landing at the top of their stairs rather than from a mosque’s minaret.

Ossama Bahloul at his home

“We’re trying to ritualize as much as we can,” Nawaz says. Her daughter is also a big fan of the Disney film Tangled, in which floating lanterns play a role. Nawaz is working with her daughter to build lanterns of their own for Ramadan. (Muslims around the world use lanterns to celebrate the holy month.) The remote Ramadan won’t be entirely new for Sabina Mohyuddin, executive director of the American Muslim Advisory Council. She lived with her family for 16 years in Tullahoma, where there was no mosque. Ramadan meant breaking the fast and praying either in her home or that of a close relative who lived in the area. “Being away from a mosque, I would always make sure my kids had a special experience,” Mohyuddin says. “We would decorate the house with … I called them Ramadan lights. That was a way of making the

time special.” Mohyuddin’s father, AKM Fakhruddin, was among ICN’s founders. But he’s now in his 80s, and faltering health prevented him from attending prayers at the mosque even before the spread of coronavirus forced it to close. The mosque’s closure has actually been a blessing for him, Mohyuddin says — at least once she was able to set up Zoom on her father’s phone. Now he can attend seminars and other mosque activities virtually. Bahloul, ICN’s imam, says attendance is up compared to the center’s physical gatherings — it’s what he calls a rare silver lining of the closures. Another aspect of the new way of worship in which Muslims can take solace? The theological demand to prevent harm. Both Bahloul and Ibrahim Yousef, principal at the Nashville International Academy — an Islamic school on Charlotte Pike — point out that,

according to Islamic teachings, it is more important to prevent harm than it is to seek beneficial experiences like those associated with communal gatherings. “People’s safety, nobody getting harmed, reducing the spread, flattening the curve,” Yousef says. “Those are all theologically connected to Islam. If we’ve come to accept the duty of preventing harm and preventing the spread and securing human life as our priority in Islam, then that alone is fulfilling.” The members of the Islamic Center of Nashville and other area mosques will not be able to gather in their traditionally large numbers for Eid, marking the end of Ramadan late next month. But Bahloul hopes the time of self-quarantine can lead believers to “a new way of reaching out to God and building a relationship with him.” Email editor@nashvillescene.com

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Quarantined

Weed It and Reap

What gardens can teach us about art and survival during a global pandemic By Erica Ciccarone photos by Eric England

fter I put in my spring seed order at my regular supplier a few weeks ago, I was surprised by the notification I received. Due to an unprecedented demand, the Vermont company would not be shipping orders for 14-20 days — far longer than it usually takes to receive my little packets of seeds each year. Indeed, the prevalence of backyard gardeners during the COVID-19 pandemic is being compared to the victory gardens that sprang up after both world wars. Planting a garden can give us a sense of control, order and agency when the future appears uncertain. A circular garden structure encourages contemplation, and that’s the shape chosen by painter Karen Seapker. She and her family grow strawberries, vegetables, mammoth sunflowers and zinnias in their big, sun-filled backyard. In February, I helped Seapker start seedlings that she would grow at Zeitgeist Gallery during her current exhibition Circuities, with the goal of giving them to gallerygoers at a closing reception. Due to the pandemic, the gallery closed shortly after the exhibition began, so the artist took her seedlings home. The tomatoes, kale, coneflowers and more have thrived under Seapker’s grow lights, and she’s now sharing them with friends and neighbors to plant at home. Even though the process didn’t work out the way Seapker planned, it still reflects some of the themes of Circuities — of groundedness and caring for others in an inconsistent world. Seapker’s project got me thinking: What’s the relationship between art making and gardening? Both are generative processes that present problems to solve. Both bring many elements into play. Both have been making me feel hopeful during these dark times. And so I asked Seapker and other artists about their gardens. “I’m drawn to the garden as a space that surprises me with incredible generosity, and provides endless paths for learning and experimentation,” says Seapker. “We began this garden only last year, and this year we have expanded it a little more. I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface, really, but feel magnetically drawn to it for some reasons that I can easily identify and also some that I don’t even understand. It is not lost on me that when working in the garden, I am quite literally brought to my knees and connected to the earth. Beyond the physical pleasures, I also always feel better when I have things that I am working on that are in progress, populating my brain, which can be painting ideas, but gardening as well.” Husband and wife Brady and Jennifer Haston are visual artists who find commonalities in their studio and gardening practices. The couple’s backyard garden extends to their stand-alone art studio.

karen seapker

brady and jennifer haston

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Quarantined When fully in bloom, it’s full of fruit trees and shrubs, garden beds where they grow vegetables and pollinator-attracting flowers, potted bonsai trees, and a lily-pad-filled pond — not to mention their small flock of hens and assortment of cats. The front yard is similarly packed with vegetation, another small pond and a sculpted hedge. The Hastons invite the weird into their space, like odd concrete statues and disembodied doll heads that are fixed on poles. “The garden is a way for us to decompress,” says Jennifer. “For me, there is no separation between creative processes. The garden is a constantly developing, integrated creative space. The ponds and the hedge that’s cut into wave shapes give the garden sculptural forms. We have turned a blank privacy fence into a canvas for the muscadine. When the doors to the studio are open, the garden and the studio become one space. Brady and I can work together and separately with room to breathe. Brady has been working on bonsai for over 20 years. His patience for bonsai is similar to his studio practice. I find a similar relationship to time when comparing the gardening to quilting. We are constantly collecting objects like mirrors, bones and fossils that become elements that add to the garden’s visual experience. The arrangement of these elements also relates to how we approach art.” Theater actor Garris Wimmer has

burdell campbell

jo-jo jackson been a mainstay in the Nashville theater community for 40 years. Wimmer is the caretaker of a Germantown garden that was started by Burdell Campbell and her husband Ernest decades ago. At a quarter-acre, the garden is now part of the Tennessee Land Trust, and Wimmer manages it from the carriage house on

garris wimmer

Campbell’s property. Wimmer calls it a “wild garden” — Campbell instructs him never to plant in rows. Jonquils, tulips, azaleas and more are now blooming in the space. “With the virus and with the tornado, and not having any way to work, I’m out there four, five hours a day,” says Wimmer. “It literally is keeping me sane. There’s tons of weeding to do, and the whole thing is exploding right now. It’s beautiful. It kind of reminds me that the problems we are all looking at — that plants don’t care. The world is bigger. You have to pull back and take a broader view, and for some reason, the garden gives me that bigger view. You’re seeing the cycle of life. It’s been really a good thing.” Bassist Jo-Jo Jackson started gardening with her mother in her childhood backyard

in Queens, N.Y., and the habit has traveled with her around the country. Now in Nashville, she has a 10-by-15-foot garden plot where she grows garlic, onions, Swiss chard, arugula and more. Also a yoga instructor and Ayurvedic counselor, Jackson sees backyard gardening as an opportunity for connection. “If we’re able to cultivate a healthy relationship with our ecosystem and our environment, we can also cultivate a healing within ourselves,” says Jackson. “This comes from being with the land, being in tune with the seasons and living in accordance with nature. I feel like there’s a shift in the way that we coexist with nature [that’s] opposed to thinking that nature is a resource to exploit. … We can approach our environment with a sense of stewardship that can start in our backyards. There’s so much we can learn from gardening, not only to be sustainable and self-reliant, but to learn about our highest selves, our true natures.” Email editor@nashvillescene.com

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Sex Working From Home

How the sex industry is handling the COVID-19 pandemic By Laura Hutson Hunter

efore the pandemic hit, Kelsey Louise had put her OnlyFans account on the backburner. The 29-year-old stripper had started an account on the content-subscription social media site with her then-boyfriend as a way to make money for a down payment on a house. After the relationship fizzled, Louise all but forgot about the online platform. But when the COVID-19 pandemic kept her from working outside the home, she did what sex workers across the globe have been doing — she went online. “Going virtual with my services was something I was looking to implement to supplement my income anyway,” Louise tells the Scene by phone. “But now instead of going into my savings account, it’s going into my checking account so I can eat.” Louise, who is also pursuing a master’s degree in mental health counseling, has amassed a large social media following in her five years as a sex worker — her Instagram account, @tennesseequeen, has 13.6K followers. When she started putting content on OnlyFans, she was among the legions of sex workers turning to online services to maintain financial stability during the COVID-19 pandemic. OnlyFans reported 3.5 million new sign-ups in March, and 60,000 of them were new creators, according to the Daily Beast. But not all sex workers are quite as comfortable working in the online arena. Spit-

Quarantined fire, a Nashville-based stripper who says she’s danced in every club in town that’s still open — and a few that aren’t — remains reluctant to go online. “I know a lot of girls are getting into camming and bumping up their OnlyFans,” Spitfire tells the Scene. “But I don’t put any media online that I would not want to show my parents.” Be that as it may, people are turning to online porn more than ever. According to Pornhub, the popular porn site’s activity was up 41.5 percent in the U.S. on March 25 — after the site offered free subscriptions as a way to encourage people to stay indoors. As of April 14, traffic in America remains up 14 percent. Still, the disconnect between making porn and viewing porn remains. “As someone who has the privilege of being out [of the closet] as a sex worker, it is an honor to be able to switch up my hustle,” says Louise. “It’s a challenge, but it’s also an honor to be able to still serve the people and entertain the people. However, I feel for the folks who can’t be publically out with their work because of stigma, shame, court orders. On the one hand, it’s an opportunity for the opportunists, like me. But on the other hand it’s a shame for those who are in the shadows of sex work.” Individual sex workers aren’t the only ones making the move to online production. Hustler Hollywood has begun curbside pickup at its store on Church Street as a way to continue to employ its staff, and the company’s VP of retail, Philip Del Rio, tells the Scene that online sales are up 60 percent. Members-only BDSM club The Mark by CPI closed its doors in early March, and has begun hosting sexpositive educational seminars and weekly “dungeon-side chats” on Zoom. The Mark has also opened a chat channel on gamingbased social platform Discord as a way to

Kelsey Louise after a strip tease

spitfire keep its members socially engaged while physically apart.

But even in the midst of a pandemic, the sex industry is about more than just sex — it’s about all types of intimacy. In The Mark’s Discord chat rooms, there are specified spaces for sharing recipes and cat photos. The classes offered include makeup tutorials, and as a way to close the dungeon-side chats he hosts, The Mark’s director Mercury often reads stories. “People are dying to connect right now,” says Louise. “They’re just so lonely, and they want to be seen. I thought that it would be more that they’d just want to get off, but I think more so they just want me to pay attention to them. So of course there are sexual elements, but I think the basis of what’s actually going on is that people are lonely. Lonelier than ever.” Since pivoting to online work, Louise has created custom content and subscriptiononly strip-teases for fans who helped her raise money to cover adoption fees for her new puppy. She’s comfortable putting work online, and says she’ll probably continue to update her OnlyFans after the pandemic ends. But she’s also eager to return to in-person work. “What I make in a week right now is what I usually make in a day,” she says. “But when I’m stripping I make really good money, and right now I still make a decent wage. I’m making more than I would on unemployment.” “As soon as the clubs reopen, I’m sure we’ll have customers,” says Spitfire, who is relying on savings to get her through this time. “The thirst level is insane, and as wonderful as camming is, it’s not an interpersonal relationship.” “The cool thing about sex workers is they’re so resiliant and creative,” says Louise. “It’s just the nature of the business — they’re gonna make it happen. And people, they’re just gonna pay.” Email editor@nashvillescene.com

Mileage May Vary

Nashville is seeing just how essential delivery drivers are By Alejandro Ramirez

ince the COVID-19 pandemic began, the definition of essential workers has come to include not just doctors and nurses, but also the delivery workers — drivers who bring meals, groceries and packages to people’s homes during these days of social distancing. “They’ve always been essential — our country now is just seeing how essential they are,” says Lendon Grisham, president of Teamsters Local 480, the union representing Tennessee drivers at UPS and other freight and shipping companies. While there have been reports of UPS workers around the country going to work sick and fearful they’d lose their jobs otherwise, Grisham says thanks to negotiations early into the pandemic, Teamster members in Tennessee have access to supplies they need to stay safe. They can also get paid time off for days spent in self-quarantine. But there have been plenty of challenges during the pandemic, particularly in its early days — in part due to the rush on essential supplies like cleaning products. “Many times, early on especially, we were

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transporting goods that we didn’t have access to,” says Grisham. But he says now most work sites are making protective and sanitation equipment available for workers and drivers, and letting their members know where they can resupply. The Teamsters have also negotiated with companies to ensure some financial support for drivers who are forced to isolate themselves if the driver or a family member tests positive for COVID-19. “In most instances they will be paid an out-of-work benefit or for their lost time during that quarantine,” says Grisham. “Of course, there’s a lot of nonunion workers that are essential too, and they don’t have that benefit.” In March, Amazon and Instacart workers across the country held a one-day strike to protest their working conditions. Amazon workers called for safer workplace conditions, hazard pay and paid sick leave regardless of diagnosis — that last item is in response to the lack of access to COVID-19 testing. Gig workers like Instacart grocery deliverers — as well as ride-share and food-delivery drivers for companies like Uber and Postmates — may find themselves risking not just their health but their income. The tech companies behind these services consider their employees to be independent contractors who aren’t entitled to certain benefits and protections, making it more difficult to get paid time off if they fall ill. One Postmates driver tells the Scene: “I think gig-economy workers like delivery drivers and ridesharing-services drivers already are ... kind of a victim of capitalism, in that these companies are using models where they’re not required to pay benefits or guarantee hours.” The driver — who asked to remain anonymous to avoid punitive action — says he was concerned that Postmates wasn’t stressing safety strongly enough to its drivers, and that the company should have better explained the need to use personal protective equipment and provided guidelines to maintain proper safety practices. Postmates and similar companies have taken some actions in response to coronavirus concerns. Postmates established a fund to help provide up to two weeks of paid leave for drivers who have to selfisolate due to contracting COVID-19. The company also began offering a no-contact delivery option to protect customers and drivers from exposure. However, reports from outlets like the Los Angeles Times reveal that gig workers still find themselves struggling to receive those sick-leave benefits, and can still feel unsafe on the job. “It’s lip service for the customer side, and nothing really for the drivers,” says the Postmates driver. The Postmates employee says he’s especially concerned about spreading the disease to customers who may be most at risk, like senior citizens or those with compromised immune systems. Many vulnerable populations, like the elderly and people with disabilities, were already reliant on delivery services before the pandemic, but COVID-19 makes it especially dangerous for them to shop in public. Some companies have begun to address these concerns. For example, Walmart — which had already established an early-morning shopping hour exclusively for seniors — is also adding curbside pickup hours for people most vulnerable to the virus. According to health experts, customers are unlikely to get COVID-19 from packages or food deliveries themselves. The coronavirus doesn’t survive as long on porous materials like cardboard as it does on solid surfaces, and there’s no evidence the virus can spread from food or food packaging, especially when proper hygiene is observed. Even so, workers are nevertheless facing high risks for inadequate pay. The driver who spoke to the Scene says he hasn’t sought work via the app in a few weeks. “The money wasn’t worth putting myself and my family at risk.” Email Editor@nashvillEscEnE.com

On the inside

Quarantined

A COVID-19 outbreak in Tennessee’s prisons and jails is no longer hypothetical By STEVEn HAlE

e don’t know when exactly the coronavirus breached the walls of Tennessee’s prisons and jails, but now the outbreak is on. The first case of COVID-19 in a Tennessee prison was confirmed on March 28, when an employee at CoreCivic’s South Central Correctional Center in Clifton tested positive. Less than a month later, on April 20, the Tennessee Department of Correction announced that 170 prisoners at four prisons had tested positive for the virus, 162 of whom are incarcerated at Bledsoe County Correctional Complex. The department noted that the “vast majority” of the prisoners who tested positive were asymptomatic. Those numbers may change by the time you read them — and really, they only provide a partial picture due to the way the virus has raced ahead of testing. But they’re worth noting if only as proof that the hypothetical scenario reporters, lawyers, activists and public health experts warned of is now reality. On March 24, dozens of criminal justice and prison advocacy organizations filed a petition asking the Tennessee Supreme Court to take broad action to release vulnerable prisoners, including anyone who had been incarcerated for more than 25 years as well as those over the age of 50. The argument for releasing prisoners is essentially that reducing prison populations will mitigate potential outbreaks and make them easier to handle if and when they occur. Studies show older prisoners are at a higher risk of dying from COVID-19, and are less likely to reoffend if they are released. But the court declined to take any such action, and Gov. Bill Lee has not used his authority to commute any sentences or release a single prisoner. As of this writing, although the TDOC says that all inmates at the Bledsoe County prison are being tested, tens of thousands of prisoners statewide are still not being tested — even as the virus is now known to be largely spreading among asymptomatic people. The situation is just as dire at the local level. A new report from The Sycamore Institute — a nonpartisan Tennessee public policy research organization — shows that 46 of the state’s 116 active local jails had more inmates than beds at the end of February. On March 26, the Tennessee Supreme Court ordered local judges to come up with plans for reducing jail populations, but just how aggressive those plans are varies greatly. In Nashville, criminal justice officials have largely worked together to release vulnerable inmates. Davidson County

Sheriff Daron hall District Attorney Glenn Funk and Metro Public Defender Martesha Johnson have worked out agreements to release dozens of inmates. After some public pressure from Davidson County Sheriff Daron Hall, the Metro Nashville Police Department has shifted toward issuing citations in lieu of arrests for many misdemeanors. Hall has used his own authority to furlough inmates. Even so, Nashville judges rejected a request from Johnson to release large categories of local inmates. Hall told the Scene in late March that Nashville’s jail population was hovering right above 1,100 and that he hoped to get it below 1,000. As of April 19, the number sat at 1,006 according to the sheriff’s office. But Hall has also been saying for more than a month now that he fully expected the coronavirus to show up inside his jails. He was right. The first case was confirmed on April 1 when a sheriff’s office employee tested positive. The first inmate tested positive on April 6. As of April 20, 11 inmates and seven staff members have tested positive. (The first staff member has since recovered.) In Nashville, Rahim Buford — who manages the Nashville Community Bail Fund — has been putting on a mask and gloves and heading to the now mostly empty courthouse to bail people out. Buford says the Nashville bail fund has paid $40,000 to bail out 17 people in April so far. The bail amounts he’s paying have gone up, he says, but that’s actually a sign of the work other Metro officials have been doing. Inmates are typically referred to the bail fund by the public defender’s office, but with an increase in pretrial releases, most referrals now are coming from inside the jail or from family members whose loved ones are facing higher bail amounts. The pandemic, Buford says, has further exposed the injustice of the bail system. “People shouldn’t be held in jail pretrial if they don’t have to be there,” Buford says. “To me that’s at the core of the issue. COVID-19 really has highlighted the problem that we have with money bail.” Even with the system-wide effort to release vulnerable inmates, there are still troubling cases to be found. On the morning he speaks to the Scene, Buford has his eyes on a man who was arrested for criminal trespass and is being held on a $1,000 bond. Buford, who was formerly incarcerated, has already brought an urgency born of experience to his work. Amid the pandemic, that has only increased. “My fear is that somebody is going to end up dying.” Email Editor@nashvillEscEnE.com

nashvillescene.com | APRIL 23 – APRIL 29, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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Quarantined

Marking Time

Working musicians are hopeful, if uneasy, about their industry in the wake of COVID-19 By Stephen Trageser

Photo: Eric England

n the best of times, it’s a challenge for the majority of musicians to make a living. Even in Music City, where music is a cornerstone of our economy and our cultural heritage, many musicians rely on a patchwork quilt of income sources. Those might include touring, playing on records, running sound at a venue — and often, another job or a parallel career. That other work needs to be flexible, which frequently means working in bars or restaurants. Since slowing the spread of COVID-19 means people can’t safely gather in public spaces, both the entertainment economy and the service economy have practically ground to a halt, and many music business folks have seen all of their income streams dry up at once. Some musicians are playing livestream shows from home, with tips collected via online-pay apps — which are often divided among paying their bills, paying their bands and donating to relief funds. Venues have launched crowdfunding campaigns to cover their expenses and help support their employees. Organizations like MusiCares, a health-care-focused nonprofit started by the Recording Academy, have launched relief funds for music industry workers. MusiCares’ COVID-19 relief fund, established March 17, recently topped $10 million in donations. Despite Gov. Bill Lee’s initial hesitation about following the guidance of the CARES Act, he relented on April 7, and self-employed individuals (including musicians who work on a contract basis) are now able to file for unemployment benefits via the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development. This new support system, patchwork as it is, is encouraging. But the wait for the crisis to end is anything but comfortable. “I see all these GoFundMes or these charities that are asking for donations, and I want to help these people,” Ryon Westover tells the Scene. “But at the same time, I’m one of these people.” Westover, who records and plays with the heavy-psych band ElonMusk, made his living working the door and as a barback at East Nashville’s 3 Crow Bar, and tending bar at nearby venue The 5 Spot. His girlfriend Kalaway Voss worked at High Garden Tea. The deadly March 3 tornadoes destroyed High Garden, badly damaged 3 Crow and cut power to The 5 Spot, leaving both out of work. On March 23, Gov. Lee ordered all nonessential businesses closed. Westover and Voss are getting by for now, thanks to help from their families, deferred bills and aid from local nonprofit The Heartstrings Foundation. Still, uncertainty about when and how the pandemic will end leaves Westover concerned. “I don’t know what it’s going to be like once we open back up and bands are playing shows again — if people are still going to be kind of wary … or if everyone is going

ryon westover to be straight back into it,” he says. “At the same time, I’m in a room with a whole ton of people, with the potential of getting sick or spreading things to other people.” Larissa Maestro, a highly trained cellist

larissa Maestro

and vocalist, has spent more than a decade establishing herself in Nashville’s music community and economy. Though she’s worked in restaurants before, until recently she had a schedule filled with music work.

That included recording at studio sessions, writing string arrangements, performing with beloved ’90s tribute group My SoCalled Band and a kaleidoscopic array of freelance performance gigs — most of which is on hold for now. Maestro has received aid from MusiCares that’s helped with her mortgage, and her partner and bandmate Dan Sommers has a full-time job that he can do from home. She’s also attempted every day to file for unemployment, but has been frustrated by an overloaded system that’s been hastily retrofitted to serve self-employed workers. She points out how this has exposed serious flaws in the gig economy, which has always been a way of life for musicians, but has been an increasingly large part of the global economy in recent years. “Even if we’re successful in our field — working really hard, making decent money and own our own home, all those things — we still don’t have a safety net,” Maestro says. “It’s ridiculous that selfemployed people haven’t been able to apply for unemployment in the past, and the fact that they haven’t been able to means that the whole system is set up for them to not be able to access it. And now we need to access it, and we can’t.” Email editor@nashvillescene.com

Nashville Scene | April 23 – april 29, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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CRITICS’ PICKS FOLLOW ADIA VICTORIA ON INSTAGRAM

I’ve been in love with Southern Gothic literature since high school, hungering for the genre’s imagery of Spanish moss and screen doors slamming shut, as well as the frequent theme of amputated limbs. Maybe that’s because I’m a native Yankee, and growing up it was always easy to romanticize faraway lands. But beneath the surface of works by William Faulker, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor and others lurk some dark truths about transgressive desires and what it means to live in a region that seems to be forever wrestling with its past. Acclaimed Nashville blueswoman Adia Victoria is also drawn to the Southern Gothic — she once tweeted “Faulkner is truly that bitch!” at me — and she’s supplying some premium content by reading short stories from the genre live on Instagram. She began with O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” exploiting the story’s dark sense of humor with her lively rendition. After a recent reading of Faulkner’s “The Tall Men,” she said this: “Literature reminds me that whatever pain, whatever terror I’m going through, it’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last time.” As this pandemic continues to stun our country — and indeed the world — we are all dealing with our own “little deaths,” she says, and reading gives us a chance to

D I S T A N C I N G

[DEAR STRANGER]

PARTICIPATE IN THE SHUT-IN SOCIAL CLUB

Sending mail gets my mind off of my own dang self — and that’s good right now. When I send a note, I wonder what the person receiving it might need to hear. What can I say or draw that they will find amusing? What do we have in common? I vigilantly focus on choosing the right gel pen for this particular message, then on creating a perfectly balanced collage of Lisa Frank stickers. But starting now, I’m taking my letter-writing process to the next level — I’m writing notes to strangers. I actually really miss interacting with strangers these days, and Shut-In Social Club is helping with that. Nashville-based letter-writer Courtney Cochran started the group as the Snail Mail Social Club, inviting people to meet as a way to share supplies and make beautifully themed mail for their loved ones. Now she’s pivoted to a new kind of group. If you fill out the form in the bio of the @shutinsocialclub

SPORTS

Instagram account, Cochran will send you the address to either a health care facility or a nursing home. You just have to send one letter to them. If you want, you can also link up with fellow quarantining letter-writing individuals while being added to the pool to receive letters. I’m going to try to get creative with the materials I have around my house to make my own stationery and envelopes. And remember — we’re not licking the envelopes or stamps, just to be on the safe side. HANNAH HERNER

both honor and mourn the passing of our erstwhile illusions about security. It makes sense that this sense of security, based on the myth of American exceptionalism and invincibility, can be found in the Southern Gothic, a setting in which people grapple with the legacy of a violent past. Victoria’s readings tend to be sporadic, so follow her account (@adiavictoria) for updates. And throw her a few bucks via Venmo if you can — our musicians are struggling right now, and she’s among the very best. ERICA CICCARONE

E D I T I O N

[GONE SIDEWAYS]

EXPLORE VHS RALLIES ON YOUTUBE

If you’ve never seen (or even heard of) rally racing, don’t feel bad. This particular flavor of motorsport has roots that go back to the dawn of the automobile, and the current form has been immensely popular in Europe and elsewhere for about five decades, but it has yet to catch on in America. In modern rallies, driver-and-codriver teams compete in a series of time trials on all kinds of terrain in all kinds of weather, rocketing their highly tuned cars down narrow public roads and remote logging tracks with the grace of an Alpine skier. Thanks to the nonprofit American Rally Association, founded in 2016, we may

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION yet establish a robust rally circuit here in the States, once the COVID-19 pandemic is under control. But until then, there’s scads of rally footage you can check out online to get familiar, and a great place to start is the YouTube channel VHS Rallies. It features a shedload of high-quality broadcast reports, mostly British, from the 1980s, ’90s and 2000s. Among the highlights is in-depth coverage of the U.K.’s Lombard RAC Rally (now called Wales Rally GB), one of the most difficult events in the top-tier World Rally Championship series. The full multiday BBC reports on the RAC in 1984-1986 offer spectacular drives in incredibly powerful cars from legends like Hannu Mikkola, Michèle Mouton, Malcolm Wilson, the late Henri Toivonen and many others.

can stream the 2002 version and the 2013 version with Netflix and Amazon Prime memberships, respectively (that said, I wouldn’t bother). The 1980s were King’s decade, and tough as it is to narrow down the picks from that decade, we’ll call these five essential: Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking 1980 adaptation of The Shining ($4 on Amazon Prime), which is a masterpiece even if it was famously loathed by King himself; 1984’s iconic Children of the Corn (free on Prime and Hulu); 1986’s universally beloved Stand by Me ($4 on Prime); Paul Michael Glaser’s 1987 adaptation of The Running Man ($4 on Prime), just to get some Schwarzenegger in there; and 1989’s delightful Pet Sematary (which is free on Prime, as is last year’s genuinely solid remake, featuring John Lithgow in the Fred Gwynne role). For bonus points, STEPHEN TRAGESER consider 1983’s Christine (free on Crackle and $4 on Prime) or 1986’s dreadful Maximum [THIIINNNERRRR] BUILD YOUR OWN STREAMING Overdrive, the latter of which is King’s only STEPHEN KING FILM FEST attempt at directing. (If you watch it, you’ll understand why the peerless writer In recent weeks, we’ve recommended permanently hung up his director’s beret curating your own film festivals from the immediately afterward.) The early ’90s comfort of your couch using titles available were somewhat spottier for King properties, to stream right now — from the works of but Rob Reiner’s 1990 adaptation of Bong Joon-ho and Martin Scorsese to standout performances from Misery ($5 to buy on Prime), which Philip Seymour Hoffman, won Kathy Bates an Oscar, is a EDITOR’S NOTE: Jennifer Jason Leigh and must. Also clutch are Frank AS A RESPONSE TO METRO’S STAY-AT-HOME ORDER TO HELP Nicolas Cage. Now that Darabont’s two ’90s King SLOW THE SPREAD OF COVID-19, we’re heading into our adaptations, 1994’s The WE’VE CHANGED THE FOCUS OF OUR sixth week of social Shawshank Redemption (on CRITICS’ PICKS SECTION. RATHER THAN distancing, let’s really dig Netflix) and 1999’s The POINTING YOU IN THE DIRECTION OF in with a catalog that’s Green Mile ($4 on a variety EVENTS HAPPENING THIS WEEK IN NASHVILLE, HERE ARE SOME ACTIVITIES almost absurd in its depth of streaming platforms). YOU CAN PARTAKE IN WHILE YOU’RE and diversity of subject Thinner from 1996, available AT HOME PRACTICING SOCIAL matter — films adapted for $4 on Prime, is more of a DISTANCING. from the work of Stephen cult hit, but worth watching for King. There are somewhere in its camp value alone. Bring it into the neighborhood of 50 movies inspired the 21st century with another Darabont by King’s books and short stories (that’s joint, 2007’s The Mist, which King has praised not even counting television), and the best for its third-act deviation from the source place to start is also chronologically the material. Some might tell you to bring it beginning: 1976’s Brian De Palma-directed home with the recent It adaptation and its sequel, or even last year’s Netflix original Carrie. That one’s available for rental on YouTube ($3) and iTunes ($4), though you In the Tall Grass. But for my money, just about FILM

[GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE]

ART

LITERATURE

S O C I A L

nashvillescene.com | APRIL 23 – APRIL 29, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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CRITICS’ PICKS the most overlooked and underrated King adaptation in years was 2019’s Doctor Sleep, a follow-up to The Shining that is available for $6 on several streaming services.

MUSIC

D. PATRICK RODGERS [THE OL’ ROUTINE]

STREAM AMANDA SHIRES’ ‘I SO LOUNGING’ SERIES ON YOUTUBE

I’m a very lucky person during this pandemic. Unlike plenty of other folks, I can keep my job and stay safely out of public spaces, and that’s also mostly true for my loved ones. But I’m still uncertain and uneasy about how everything is going to turn out. In that light, I’m grateful to all the musicians who have gone to the trouble

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of navigating the technology to livestream concerts from their homes. That’s partly because their streams give me hope that there will still be a rich and vibrant music industry to cover in the future, and partly because they’re doing a great job of performing and engaging with an audience that they can’t see. In the case of expert roots-schooled songwriter and bandleader Amanda Shires, I get the added bonus of the show being a comforting routine. She’s self-isolating with her husband, fellow ace songsmith Jason Isbell, and another married couple: Kelly Garcia Plemmons (Shires’ longtime friend and assistant) and Seth Plemmons (Shires’ guitarist). The four of them, often joined by the Plemmons’ dog Zeyk, play songs and chat from their home most days at 5 p.m. via Shires’ YouTube channel — it’s about as regular as All Things Considered and far more relaxing. Whether the songs come from Shires’ catalog, Isbell’s catalog or their deep well of covers, they’re superbly played, and they come between laugh-out-loud anecdotes and poignant reflections on current events. It feels like you’re just hanging out in their living room, and it’s among the most precious feelings you can get right now. STEPHEN TRAGESER FOOD & DRINK

WE’VE PARTNERED WITH BATCH NASHVILLE TO DELIVER YOU NASHVILLE GOODS FOR A GOOD CAUSE!

[ROMAN EMPIRE]

USE ALISON ROMAN’S COOKBOOKS

I never really learned to cook — frozen pizza doesn’t count — but New York Times columnist Alison Roman’s bestsellers Dining In and Nothing Fancy have taught me it’s never too late to start. Both books reject the pretension typical of “foodie” culture with recipes that, put into practice, prove the barrier of entry for making quality meals at home is lower than you think. Roman’s pithy prose is conversational but clear — no sitting through the writer’s life story before getting to the recipe here — and signature dishes like her caramelized-shallot pasta are built on ingredients you likely already have in your pantry. Her recipes school you on herbs, spices and the myriad flavors they can unlock when deployed creatively — and

being housebound indefinitely allows the requisite time for more involved ones like the pozole from Dining In (a slow-cooked dried-chile, pork and hominy stew) that I’m now obsessed with trying to perfect. One way to ensure you’ll feel a whole lot worse during a pandemic is to eat garbage. Thanks to Roman, there’s no reason to. Dining In: Highly Cookable Recipes and Nothing Fancy: Unfussy Food for Having People Over are available for purchase via Parnassus Books, or wherever books are sold. CHARLIE ZAILLIAN THEATER

A LOCAL CURE FOR WHAT AILS YOU

[CELEBRATING SHAKESPEARE]

CELEBRATE SHAKESPEARE’S BIRTHDAY WITH NASHVILLE SHAKES

April marks William Shakespeare’s 456th birthday, and The Nashville Shakespeare Festival has cooked up a special social distancing celebration. Nashville Shakes will be streaming its 10th annual Bard’s Birthday Bash via Facebook Live on Thursday, April 23, at 7 p.m. Actors will be on hand to share favorite scenes and songs, including Morgan Davis and Mason Conrad (from Nashville Shakes’ 2017 production of Romeo & Juliet); Eddie George and Nat McIntyre (Othello, 2014); Joe Leitess and Delaney Keith (The Tempest, 2019); Christopher Joel Onken (Julius Caesar, 2019); Carrie Brewer and Caroline Amos (Richard II, 2017); and Denice Hicks (King Lear, 2016). There will even be an edited version of the Biggest Balcony Scene Ever — a mass recitation of Romeo & Juliet’s famous balcony scene that includes contributions from local fans. Theater lovers can also mark their calendars for an encore streaming performance of The Comedy of Errors from Nashville Shakes’ 2016 Shakespeare in the Park, on Thursday, April 30, at 7 p.m. To learn more, visit nashvilleshakes.org. AMY STUMPFL

BOOKS/PODCASTS

BOX

[WILD THING]

READ AMY RIGBY’S MEMOIR AND LISTEN TO HER PODCAST

I caught singer Amy Rigby’s June 2018 appearance at Dee’s Country Cocktail Lounge in Madison, and it was one of the finest performances I’ve ever seen by a singer-songwriter. That term doesn’t fully describe Rigby’s immense gifts and her devotion to the kind of pop and rock music that singer-songwriters often neglect. The Pittsburgh native debuted with the

NASHVILLE SCENE | APRIL 23 – APRIL 29, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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critics’ picks

[DUST OFF YOUR DANCE SHOES!]

Take Online Dance classes WiTh nashville BalleT

ART

If your quarantine has involved a bit too much carbs-and-couch time, Nashville Ballet has a great solution — virtual classes. Live adult ballet classes are available via Zoom Monday through Friday, and are led by some of your favorite Nashville Ballet instructors. Plus, the School of Nashville Ballet is offering a free class livestreamed via its Instagram account Monday through Saturday at 11 a.m. (Follow them at @schoolofnb.) And for those needing a bit more flexibility, there are plenty of ondemand options — including everything from high-energy DANCEFIX workouts to Pilates and even modern dance. Individual classes are $15, but new students can try their first class for just $5. And as a special thank-you, Nashville Ballet is inviting health care workers to check out its on-demand classes for free. Visit nashvilleballet.com for complete details. AMY STUMPFL [STREAM A LITTLE STREAM]

sTream sOme GreaT arT DOcumenTaries

If your social distancing lifestyle is anything like mine, you’ve got comfort media down pat and don’t need me to recommend reruns of Living Single or Frasier. What you need these days is intellectual stimulation, preferably the kind that has nothing to do with either disease or politics. I’ve done the hard work of exploring the entire internet and have returned with a short list of the best art docs to keep your mind active, but not too active (let’s not overwhelm ourselves), during these nerve-racking times. Start with the BBC series Ways of Seeing, which is on YouTube. The seminal documentary by John Berger is filled with big ideas made digestible through common language, and if you haven’t seen it since art school, now’s the time to revisit his ideas about looking. If you subscribe to Hulu, you must watch Burden, the incredible film about performance artist Chris Burden that will fascinate fans and novices alike. And don’t forget about the extensive catalog of shorts available in the PBS series Art21: Art in the 21st Century, which are all available online. Since 2000, the series has put out nine compelling seasons of episodes that center on a theme, with profiles of artists whose work fits into that niche. Art-world luminaries Kara Walker, Mike Kelley, Kiki Smith, Matthew Barney and James Turrell are included in the practically encyclopedic series. Watch them all at art21.org/watch/ library, where you can find each profile

MUSIC

alongside other docs the Art21 team has made, including a great one with Marcel Dzama and Amy Sedaris. LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

A Division of The Heritage Foundation of Williamson County

(615) 538-2076 • WWW.FRANKLINTHEATRE.COM •419 MAIN STREET, FRANKLIN, TN 37064

[CROSSING THE STREAMS]

WaTch The Nashville sceNe’s nO-cOnTacT shOWs

As many businesses and public spaces remain closed in an effort to curb the spread of COVID-19, the live entertainment economy has ground to a halt. While livestreams can’t replace going out to a show (economically or otherwise), they’re a great way for artists to raise funds to help replace lost income from canceled tours, or to support important causes. Just as importantly, streams let musicians carry on the important work of connecting with an audience. In that spirit, we at the Scene have launched No-Contact Shows, our very own livestream series. Ace songsmith Liz Longley helped us kick it off on April 9, and outstanding songwriter and rocker Liza Anne played the second round on April 16. What was going to be a once-weekly show has expanded a little bit to Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6 p.m. R&B-schooled pop singer-songwriter R.LUM.R will join us on April 23, rap duo Smashbrothers — a tag team consisting of longtime local MCs Top Notch and Broadway Rapper (the latter of whom you’ve seen spitting bars outside the bars on Lower Broadway) — on April 28, and glamkissed rockers The Blam Blams on April 30. There’s lots more to come, so keep an eye on nashvillescene.com/music and our social media (facebook.com/thenashvillescene, @nashvillescene on Instagram and Twitter). STEPHEN TRAGESER WRITING

DANCE

1996 full-length Diary of a Mod Housewife, which garnered much-deserved praise from critics and listeners. After a stint in Nashville in the early Aughts, Rigby spent time in Ohio and France before settling in New York. She’s continued to record great albums, including 2018’s The Old Guys. Rigby wrote an account of her education as a musician, 2019’s Girl to City: A Memoir, in which she describes how she was shaped by the work of rockers like The Troggs. Read it, and listen to her equally compelling podcast, also titled Girl to City. I don’t often invoke the Velvet Underground song “Rock & Roll,” but Rigby’s artistry proves the music can change your life. EDD HURT

[TIME TO WRITE THAT NOVEL]

Take a WriTinG class WiTh The POrch

There is truly no time like the present to tackle your long-put-off literary ambitions. The Porch Writers’ Collective is amping up its online course offerings to give you that extra push. Instructors are teaching classes online and offering private editorial and coaching services. You can develop a short screenplay with Janlatae’ Mullins (May 4-June 8), write about nature with Melissa Jean (May 7-28), and jumpstart your novel with Mary Adkins (May 14-June 4). If that sounds like too much of a commitment, The Porch offers one-day workshops, including Writing Through Fear (April 23), The Elements of Flash Fiction (April 25) and Camped Settings: Lee Connell on Writing Through the Lens of Class and Urban Life (April 25). The cost of classes ranges from $40 for an afternoon workshop to $240 for a six-week class. Your dollars will be well spent. Sure, you can technically take an online course that’s based anywhere in the world. But The Porch is the heart of Nashville’s literary community, offering public programs year-round. If you’re not in the position to take an online class right now, The Porch still has you covered with daily writing prompts delivered via social media and an email list, and some upcoming live literary watch parties. The nonprofit’s May 13 Brown Bag Lunch with Melissa Jean is free. Keep tabs on the activity at porchtn.org. ERICA CICCARONE

AN INTIMATE NIGHT OF SONGS & STORIES WITH

THE ISAACS

SANDI PATTY Friday, July 17

BRIDGES & BACKROADS ACOUSTIC TOUR Thursday, July 23

RICKIE LEE JONES

DEBORAH ALLEN

Saturday, July 11

HOT TUNA (ELECTRIC) Saturday, July 25

JOHN FORD COLEY, BILLY DEAN & TOM WURTH

Thursday, August 6

Saturday, August 15

2020-21 PERFORMING ARTS SEASON FEATURING

GREAT PERFORMANCES, CELEBRATION OF DANCE & FAMILY SPOTLIGHT SERIES

THE SPIN

YOUR TICKET TO SHOWS...

REVIEWED nashvillescene.com/music/spin

nashvillescene.com | APRIL 23 – APRIL 29, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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food and drink

How our beloved food-industry community is weathering tornado damage and a global pandemic By Jennifer Justus

n that small sliver of space between the overwhelming urgency of Nashville’s tornado recovery efforts and the lonely, shuttered days of COVID-19, chef Margot McCormack managed to slip in a quick party. Looking back, it had the spontaneous feel of a night that goes down as legendary. Kind of like when parents go out of town and you get away with something. It wasn’t so much about what happened at the March 5 get-together outside of Margot Café & Bar, McCormack’s Five Points restaurant — it was more about the people who happened to come together sharing a moment. In this case, it was a moment to take a collective breath between two very different kinds of storm. “Is that your baby?” I remember Margot hollering across the crowd. She was pointing at a longtime server with a toddler on her hip. She knew good and well it wasn’t her baby. But this was Margot in a good mood, teasing in her dry wit. The light had turned golden, and the air smelled like spring as burgers sizzled on grills. Long tables in

front of her restaurant held the love and weight of a church-style potluck: collards, beans, potato salad. Like Margot Café, neighboring 3 Crow Bar also was closed from tornado damage, but its employees sent a cooler of meat from their walk-in. The Farm House sent chicken. Lyra, Sweet 16th Bakery, Woodland Wine Merchant and Weiss Liquors pitched in too. “I don’t even know how many people contributed,” Margot says. “All of a sudden food would show up on the table. Thank goodness, because we had way more people than I even imagined.” Just a few days prior, Margot had awoken in a panic, not knowing if her longtime restaurants — Margot Café and Marché next door — remained standing. She rushed into a dark, wet mess, where she found parts of the cafe’s awning and the patio roof ripped off and windows blown out. Neighbors weren’t so lucky. The building once home to a Family Dollar on the same block had been leveled. Burger Up, BoomBozz and The Soda Parlor, all devastated. But later that week, as regulars and friends rolled up in work boots — most of

margot cafÉ’s post-tornado gathering on March 5

them on foot due to squad cars blocking roads and yellow tape cordoning off destruction — the dinner party spilled into the street. People hugged — so many hugs back then! We thought we were on the other side of tragedy. We knew we had plenty more grieving and work to do. But the power had flickered back on for a moment. “You’re healing the neighborhood with your food,” a neighbor told Margot. None of us would have expected, as we huddled so close together, that just a few weeks later the restaurant would be shuttered indefinitely due to the pandemic, with more than 50 employees laid off. “I felt like I was on this weird game show — a cross between Top Chef and The Amazing Race,” Margot says. “It was some crazy challenge every day.” When I think about the reasons I love Nashville, I always come back to the hospitality and community of this place. I know I’m biased, but I think we’re pretty good at it — throwing a party, putting on some music and working together in creative ways to invite strangers to the table. Even when we’re complaining about bachelorettes, we’ll find them a vodka soda and show them a good time. It’s like those of us who love it here are in on a family joke, or inside story. Yeah, we’ve had our wild nights under neon moons, Ryman shows followed by beers at Robert’s or raucous Preds games. But the quieter, magical moments happen too — stumbling upon a special show at the Station Inn, a bowl of soup at Mas Tacos, a backyard cookout when you find out for the first time that your neighbor sings. We know

Even while many of the places where we eat and drink and listen to music remain closed, music and food are still keeping us together — even from afar — and helping us adapt and reach one another in new ways. we love this place for better, deeper reasons than simply the parties — it is our community. Even while many of the places where we eat and drink and listen to music remain closed, music and food are still keeping us together — even from afar — and helping us adapt and reach one another in new ways. Near Margot Café at Lockeland Table, co-owner Cara Graham created Community Hour a few years ago as a way to raise money for local causes. Recently, when the restaurant ran out of pizza boxes, Five Points Pizza shared some of theirs — a small kindness showing community solidarity among two restaurants that had experienced weeks of closures following the tornado. Julia Sullivan of Henrietta Red, also af-

Photo: Eric England

On the Resilience of Nashville’s Restaurant Scene

Nashville Scene | April 23 – april 29, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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fected by both the tornado and coronavirus, helped form a group called Tennessee Action for Hospitality, which lobbies lawmakers and raises money for restaurant workers. It all started with a mass text to industry friends from chef Bryan Weaver of Butcher & Bee and Redheaded Stranger. “I think we all needed something to do and band together,” Margot says of the efforts to form Tennessee Action for Hospitality. Though many unknowns remain, I see on social media that both Margot and Sullivan seem to be looking for hope in their backyard gardens. It makes me think of “No Hard Times,” the old Jimmie Rodgers song that Marty Stuart sang on the Opry recently, playing to an empty house. It’s all about finding gratitude in the things that help us make meals, whether it’s “corn in my crib,” a “bale of flour” or a “bucket of lard.” When it comes to cooking, Margot says she’s buoyed to see employees make her dishes at home. “My staff is cracking me up,” she says, “They’re calling me up asking for recipes.” Sometimes they post in groups with names like “Cooking Through COVID.” That Facebook group — started on a whim by Belcourt Theatre communications and marketing director (and longtime friend of Margot) Cindy Wall — now has more than 3,600 members sharing their dinners, from French stews to Pop-Tarts. Elsewhere, offline, music publicist Maria Ivey is compiling a community cookbook called All the Thyme in the World. The recipes come from music-industry folks including interns, artists and more, and all proceeds benefit the Music Health Alliance. In my job at The Nashville Food Project, community is baked into our mission to “grow, cook and share nourishing food with the goals of cultivating community and alleviating hunger in our city.” We’re also navigating community in this time of social distancing. Under normal circumstances, TNFP serves an average of 5,500

meals a week, often from large hotel pans and mostly in communal settings. One of my favorite examples is Trinity Commons, a family-style dinner that has happened weekly for six years and draws folks from all walks of life. I met a woman there who lived in transient motels and saved every paper name tag she received at those dinners, sticking them all in a composition book. We see the power of coming together. Yet the Trinity meal goes on, as do others — served from to-go boxes instead. The organizers say the need for food has increased, and even folks who once volunteered now find themselves in need of a meal. That all brings me back to the restaurant community. At The Nashville Food Project, we have leaned on the extraordinary generosity of the hospitality industry over the past decade, with dinners and auctions helping us raise funds to feed so many in the city. Now, as the helpers need our help, we’re working with Fat Bottom Brewery on a weekly grocery-share initiative called Community Cupboard for out-of-work industry folks. We’ve also launched a satellite-kitchens concept we hope to expand. We’re partnering with Henley Nashville on a model we hope keeps restaurant employees working, while expanding our meal output to those who need them. “That’s what community is,” I remember our CEO, Tallu Schuyler Quinn, saying not long ago, “a give-and-take.” And that’s the message I hope we all can keep showing one another. These places that have made impressions on our hearts may have switched off their lights for a while — the restaurants, the Ryman, the shops where owners know our names and make us feel like we’re a part of something. But community stands stronger than walls, and it always will. We’re not going anywhere. We’re here for one another now, and we’ll keep coming back when the yellow tape finally comes down. Email arts@nashvillEscEnE.com

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Each day we’ll give you a critic’s pick for a restaurant and a dish, as well as a running list of restaurants still open that you can support.

NashvilleScene.com/food-drink nashvillescene.com | APRIL 23 – APRIL 29, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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Samantha Irby takes on middle age and mixtapes in Wow, No Thank You By Hamilton Cain

I fRee

cover_10-17-19

er After Happily Ev

Attitude With A dAsh of tenderness

t’s Unhappy Hour in America, and we all need a drink. Samantha Irby’s new collection of essays, Wow, No Thank You, is a spicy cocktail that will intoxicate readers — a few fingers of Dorothy Parker and a splash of comedian Wanda Sykes, as bracing and delicious as a cosmopolitan. The author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life riffs on dating, not dating, eating, not eating, her Crohn’s disease and makeup routines, the pitfalls of the internet, and a tentative happiness in rural Michigan, where she now lives with her wife. Salud! Irby casts her net widely. Her chapter titles reveal a mind in constant motion: “Girls Gone Mild,” “Lesbian Bed Death,” “Season 1, Episode 1.” Some of her funniest pieces delve into the peculiar niche of Gen Xers, insecure in their demographic trough WoW, No ThaNk You between boomers By Samantha IrBy VIntage and millennials: 316 pageS, $15.95 “Will anyone notice ... that I messed up my eyeliner? ... if I wear underwear that goes all the way up to my chin? ... that this ill-fitting bralette is giving me quadraboob?” Her technical choices are engaging, whether she’s compiling commentary on her perfect ’90s mixtape (Side A includes Tori Amos and The Cranberries, while Side B features Ani DiFranco and PJ Harvey) or dispensing sex advice in potty-mouthed sentences that would make Dan Savage blush. Beneath the irreverent humor is a more trenchant look at who we are: There are two types of old people. There are (1) the silently awful who grind their rear molars into stumps … as some teenager tries to record them for their story and (2) the “put your phone away, young lady, and pretend to be interested in this New York Times article about charter schools I am misquoting” awful. If zingers were money, she’d be a zillionaire. A self-described “egomaniac,” Irby successfully made the jump from blogging to books, and her pieces crackle with conversational electricity, equal parts stand-up comedy and literary craft. If I’m not mistaken, I detect influences from Roxane Gay to George Carlin. She mocks herself even as she craves fame. When the “Very Famous” Abbi Jacobson, co-creator and co-star of Broad City, emails a fan note out of the blue, Irby blows it off, circling back to Jacobson only months later, contrite. But there’s a tenderness beneath the attitude. Irby approaches personal experience with a keen clinical eye, fearlessly exposing herself in anecdotes ranging from her skittishness with children to her search for love “in the pre-swipe stone age,” with an occasional scatological aside thrown in. Her

photo: tEd BEranis

MARCH 12–18, 2020 I voluMe 39 I nuMbeR 6 I nAsHvIlles Cene.CoM

books

most poignant writing probes the dread and relief she feels on the cusp of middle age. She dizzies her reader but never disorients. More is more here. Immersed in the sparkling flow of Irby’s prose, it’s almost possible to forget there’s a pandemic happening. Nurses and doctors are our new superheroes. Social distancing trumps late nights and hangovers. Irby offers a toast to frivolity and cultural investigation as a deadly microbe threatens our species. Wow, No Thank You — like Tiger King, Baby Yoda and Lizzo’s performance on Saturday Night Live — is a pop-culture pleasure of the moment, suitable for tucking in a time capsule as the world hurtles into an uncertain future. Now was such a long time ago. For more local book coverage, please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee. Email arts@nashvillEscEnE.com

NASHVILLE SCENE | APRIL 23 – APRIL 29, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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music

Freak Out, If You Wanna Brendan Benson’s Dear Life is an oddly perfect album for odd times By Sean L. Maloney

here are two things that just might hit you when you drop the needle on Brendan Benson’s new LP Dear Life. The first is just how well Benson’s wild new sounds fit our wild new times. The second is the wave of guilt that comes with enjoying anything right now. Dear Life was in the can back when COVID-19 was still a rumble in the distance, and yet the album feels extremely of-themoment. The themes and feelings Benson conveys are so thoroughly washed in the big fears and tiny joys of our collective crisis — the ones that have always bubbled under the surface — that it’s understandable if you feel guilty for drinking deep. It’s a weird time for progressive power pop, which means it is the perfect time for progressive power pop. On his first record Dear Life out April 24 since via Third Man Records 2013’s You Were Right, Benson dives headlong into the world of contemporary sounds, with synthesized drums and electronic flourishes woven into his guitar-heavy style. He sounds like he’s having as much fun as humanly possible with this sonic departure: You can hear the enthusiasm of a musician refreshed and a creative mind recharged. It is also classic Benson, in that melodies are stacked on top of melodies, hooks on hooks, riffs on riffs. With nary a bar that isn’t trying to burrow deep into your ear hole, Dear Life shoves a humanist, heartwarming philosophy in the face of life’s letdowns and indignities. It goes down easy, but the observations are keen-eyed and canny. “I wanted to be home more with my kids, so I thought I would co-write and produce other people’s records,” Benson tells the Scene. “But it was harder than you think, or at least I thought, to make money. A lot of people are just doing it themselves, for better or for worse. And to make a long story short, the record kind of snuck up on me.” Getting back in the groove of writing felt good. One thing led to another, and Benson found he had a stack of songs that he was proud of — surprisingly, more so than his most recent solo efforts. “I really wanted people to hear these songs,” he says. “My last album, I think I phoned it in a bit. I’m embarrassed to say that, but whatever, you’re allowed to make a crappy record.” And while I might argue that Benson’s

assessment of You Were Right is, well, wrong, there is a noticeable uptick in joie de vivre on Dear Life. The angry young man of Benson’s 1996 debut One Mississippi has become a husband and father, and is all the better for it. As the horns swell and drums thump in “Richest Man,” he sings, “I’ve got twice the love and half the money / I feel just like the richest man alive.” He delivers all the swagger we’ve come to expect from the guy who co-fronts The Raconteurs with Jack White, and none of the slouch we expect from dad rock. “Good to Be Alive” finds the polymath channeling Trevor Horn-era Yes prog-prop through the tonal swirl of pop’s contemporary benzo binge. At the other end of the journey, he’s arrived at a psychedelic mental state in which the past, present and future are on a single plane of existence.

And while that happiness might have been cool in, say, February, right now it feels absolutely essential. The global pandemic has made it easy to listen to nothing but the dour and distant, the cold and uncaring — to retreat to the safety of sounds that don’t remind us of the good times. It’s normal and human. But it is also normal and human to find joy in even the darkest time. While we might never get back to what we thought was normal up until a few weeks ago, we can take solace in a lot of (small, human, fundamental) things that we have a tendency to take for granted. Benson finds many of those things among the big bass tones and propulsive hooks of Dear Life. The album was assembled under adverse conditions — the synth drums came about because Benson no longer had a place to play real drums — and the end results reflect adaptations that wouldn’t have arisen in a typical recording process. The feeling of pulling off something ingenious and not entirely expected is the kind of thing Benson is always looking for when he makes music. “Sometimes power comes from something like a ballad on a classical guitar, sometimes that power comes from a sound effect or a bass drum or an 808 kick drum,” Benson says. “So wherever that power comes from is where I want to be. … That’s what makes it fun.” It feels strange to talk about having fun while the industry around us feels frozen in carbonite. But it also feels like a good reminder of why we’re all staying home, testing the limits of our sanity and coping the best we can: The joy on the other end will be worth it. Email music@nashvillescene.com

Keep on Turning

Nashville’s DJs keep the scene they’ve built alive and kicking online By Seth Graves

ver the past two years, the collection of diverse scenes that make up Nashville’s dance music ecosystem has blossomed. When I profiled electronic music label and dance party promotions Visit nashvillescene.com enterprise TRAM Planet for links to local DJs’ in 2018, the organizers livestreams pointed out a growing audience for what they were presenting, though the biggest hurdle seemed to be finding places to play. By the start of this year, anyone looking to dance had a broad choice of weekly and monthly events, showcasing local and touring DJs spinning house music, techno, drum ’n’ bass and tons of other styles. The wide range of offerings included a series called N/A spotlighting rising talent at all-ages spot Drkmttr, the queer-focused Bitchfit party that regularly packed out a warehouse space in Inglewood, the Decompress house night at Germantown bar The Back Corner and many more. “Rewinding back to December, I remember looking at the calendar trying to coordinate with other promoters,” says Jason Code, organizer of the monthly multigenre Terminal 8 party on the East Side. He’s referring to United Perception, a relatively new calendar created for the use of promoters and organizers who’ve been hand-picked by local DJ and promoter Paulo Ventura. “There was a lot of back and forth,” says Code, “because everyone was trying to throw an

nashvillescene.com | April 23 – april 29, 2020 | Nashville Scene

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MUSIC event every month while not having conflicting dates.” Then, in March, venues shut down as social distancing to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic became the norm. Not to be deterred, many of Music City’s DJs have joined the ranks of musicians taking their shows online, hoping to maintain a presence and continue cultivating an audience. As with other livestream concerts, the experience is meaningful, though it isn’t the same as an in-person event. Neither is the compensation, which in normal circumstances comes from a percentage of bar sales or the cover charge at the door. Before the pandemic, Justin Tarrents, who DJs as Spice J, supported himself with multiple weekly gigs at East Side spots like The Crying Wolf, The Cobra, The Dive Motel and CAMP (formerly Bar No. 308), as well as a residency at Church Street staple Canvas. Like other DJs, he has a virtual tip jar for his livestream, which helps make up some of his lost income. But the limitations of the streaming experience also affect how often he can perform. “Twice [is] the most I would ever do in a week,” says Tarrents. “I want to stress how thankful I am for

THE SPIN AS LONG AS I CAN SEE THE LIGHT BY EDD HURT, STEPHEN TRAGESER, RON WYNN AND CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

he pandemic situation we’re in right now is far from normal, but the need to ground yourself is very real. In between songs during her livestream April 16, which was part of the Scene’s NoContact Shows series, Liza Anne shared some advice about how she’s been coping. “I’ve felt like this last week has been the hardest of them all,” said Liza Anne. “But something that’s been really helpful to me is getting outside and just walking around and getting outside of my own dialogue of all the things that are going wrong — giving myself space to breathe that and feel that, while also trying to find little moments of normalcy in every day.” She adapted the distinctive rock arrangements of her outstanding songs very well to a self-quarantine setup. From a freshly decorated corner of the apartment she shares with her partner Josh and their newly adopted cat Ralphie, Liza Anne played five fan requests. She started with “Panic Attack” and “Turn for the Worse,” both from 2018’s sterling Fine But Dying, which spotlight how well she and her band play together. By stripping down the tunes to just her vocals and electric guitar, she showed just how much her parts are contributing to the whole. The final three songs were singles Liza Anne has released over the past six months: “Devotion,” “Desire” and “Bad Vacation.” Each rocked out a little harder than the one before. All of them showed off the challenging work of trying to communicate emotional truth — one reason why it’s important to keep making music. Back in February, East Coast indie-rock impresario Dan Goldin’s Exploding in Sound label celebrated its 100th release: Away Team, the stellar first full-length from artful Music City punks Shell of a Shell. The four-

DJ JANE DUPREE

SPICE J

those tips, but there’s no way I could make a living from it. I’m really just doing it for my sanity and the sanity of my friends watching.” Whether it’s online or in a venue, a good DJ set provides a human element that a playlist or jukebox simply can’t. Having a driver at the wheel, guiding the musical journey, is what makes DJing an art. DJs need some had an ambitious tour planned behind the record before the coronavirus turned everything upside-down. Down but not out, Shell’s Chappy Hull — along with other EIS labelmates like Steve Hartlett of Ovlov and Stov — tagged in for back-to-back micro-sets April 16 on the label’s Instagram account. You can’t hug a sweaty friend through an electronic screen, or feel the power of a Marshall stack moving the air, but squint hard enough and you could pretend you were at a DIY show. There were obligatory mic checks, “stage” banter, the odd flubbed note and most of the performers taking a come-as-you-are approach, going unplugged in messy whitewalled rooms with the doors closed so as not to bug roommates or neighbors. Hull, by contrast, put some thought into the look and sound of his stream, wilding out on gently amplified acoustic guitar while cast in ghostly light inside Shell’s West Side practice space. Hull admirably carried the weight of the full band with his intricate, rambling fretwork on Away Team’s twangy “Find Me a Field,” plus a Pixies cover (“Bird Dream of the Olympus Mons”) and fragments of three new tunes. Sitting barefoot on the stage of the temporarily closed Nashville venue Springwater on Saturday afternoon, singer, songwriter, prose writer and rock ’n’ roller Marshall Chapman streamed an hourlong set that exemplified Nashville singer-songwriterdom. The South Carolina-born musician — who moved to town in 1967 and released her debut LP Me, I’m Feelin Free a decade later — has a new collection of cover tunes, Songs I Can’t Live Without, set for a May 15 release. The Music City legend’s weekly livestream is a continuation of a residency she began in December, and she’s directing fans to donate to a GoFundMe campaign that’s been launched to support the venerable venue’s staff during the shutdown. Alone on the stage, Chapman sang some of her great songs, told stories and did shtick, accompanying herself on minimalist bluesfolk guitar. What Chapman has, above all, is style as a performer — a built-in ease that makes her the ideal singer of her subtly turned country-pop-rock tunes. She isn’t exactly a coun-

to be able to read the room, and with just a comment panel to react to during a livestream, they’re in a kind of vacuum. Still, streaming provides an opportunity for a different kind of connection and communication with fans. “I started in college radio, and it’s a lot like that,” says veteran club DJ Jane Dupree, whose residency at Canvas has been her main gig for years. She sees the present situation as an opportunity for DJs to resume their sometimes-forgotten role as tastemakers. “You get to see DJs play tracks they couldn’t play in the club, because it doesn’t entertain the crowd and sell drinks.”

TEST PATTERNS: LIZA ANNE SHELL COMPANY: SHELL OF A SHELL

try vocalist. Her gliding vocal presence is an extension of her rich speaking voice. She is, however, a canny singer and songwriter whose work sits in the shared territory of rock ’n’ roll, country and pop. Chapman kicked off Saturday’s set with one of her odes to rock, “Why Can’t I Be Like Other Girls,” which tells truths about the music business, as well as idealism and self-assertion. The spare drive of her guitar playing underscored her gift for narrative, and the music hit home — when she sang her 2013 song “Blaze of Glory,” you could hear the soundness of its structure. Sunday, April 26, marks the sixth anniversary of singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jason Eskridge’s Sunday Night Soul at The Five Spot. Though this weekly showcase for local, regional and national performers

Other DJs see a chance to expand the art, too. Before COVID-19 made livestreams the only safe way to see many performances, Steven Fort — who gigs as MilkChalk — was routinely streaming cooking shows, video games and DJ sets. Early on in the pandemic, he launched a Facebook group called QuaranStream Concerts that has hosted an array of locals’ livestreams. Many of the group’s members are taking cues from younger streamers and experimenting with multiple camera angles, creative lighting setups and video effects to try and make the experience more exciting. “Kids and teenagers have been in the streaming scene a lot longer than us adults,” says Fort. “I believe this quarantine will turn more artists onto streaming and keep more people viewing.” What the future of local dance music will look like is anyone’s guess. For now, the livestream sets are a reminder that someone out there is thinking about what you want to hear — what will help you chill out, what will make your heart pound a little harder, what will make you want to get up and dance — and that makes the loneliness of self-quarantine just a little more bearable. EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

doing originals and covers of classic soul and R&B tunes has been affected by COVID-19, it hasn’t been stopped. Instead, Eskridge and his guests offer a version of the event via Facebook that’s condensed and more intimate, but just as strong as it is in person. It’s a throwback to the days of seeing soul or blues acts in small clubs where their only accompaniment would be a guitar, or maybe an electric keyboard. On April 19, Eskridge was joined (at what appeared to be a safe distance of at least six feet) by fellow singer-songwriter and instrumentalist Matty Ride. The two exchanged songs and banter during the two-hour program, streamed from Eskridge’s rehearsal space in the heart of East Nashville. Ride played all originals, with a mix of pungent humor, reflective musings and poignant romantic expressions. High points included the tunes “Your Best Worst Thing Ever” and “Sugar on the Side.” His love songs aren’t so sentimental that they become annoying, and they’re voiced with a sincerity and expressiveness that gives them authority and power. He’s also a fine guitarist, although the licks and lines are more musical framing and support than an illustration of solo prowess, as was the case when he moved over to play a nearby keyboard. Eskridge continues to grow as a vocalist and guitarist. Always a powerful stylist on up-tempo material, he’s become equally adept with ballads and confessional pieces. His set was a 50-50 blend of originals and standards. The standout covers included a dynamic version of Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine,” while one of his most compelling originals was a memorial salute to his hometown of Rockwood, Tenn., and his adopted hometown of Nashville. Throughout their set, Eskridge and Ride occasionally harmonized on each other’s songs, demonstrating a closeness and camaraderie that was just as impressive as their consistently excellent performances. Eskridge later told the Scene that he plans to continue the streaming programs as long as the coronavirus situation lingers, and will have a special anniversary edition of the show for the April 26 stream with a special guest yet to be determined at press time. EMAIL THESPIN@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

NASHVILLE SCENE | APRIL 23 – APRIL 29, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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film

Primal Stream V

Kaiju chaos, body horror and a dose of Florence Pugh, now available to stream By Jason Shawhan

quick change

lady macbeth

nother week of social distancing means another week of recommended viewing from yours truly. Be sure to look back at the past four issues of the Scene for more examples of films to stream while you’re in quarantine, and read on below for some kaiju chaos, body horror and much more.

Lady Macbeth on Amazon Prime

If the combination of last year’s Midsommar, Little Women and Fighting With My Family got you on board the Florence Pugh train — and you’ve caught up with her AMC/ BBC One television series The Little Drummer Girl with Park Chan-wook — there’s still another incredible Pugh performance awaiting you: Lady Macbeth (not a Shakespearean adaptation). This movie, Pugh’s grand arrival on the global film scene, is a brutal masterpiece. It never played in Nashville theatrically because of how wrecked it left the press-screening audience, and it is a perfect, ruthless blend of realism and heightened drama. This film will not make you happy, but you will feel a lot of emotions. With this performance, then-20-yearold Pugh let the world know up front she was going to be running things.

Friday the 13th (The Paramount Eight) on Shudder

If you’re in a pandemic position of having a lot more time to catch up on media — or you’re just pushed to your limits by what’s happening on a daily basis — the time might be right for you to catch up on the Friday the 13th movies. (Well, the first eight of them anyway — the ones distributed by Paramount Pictures in the U.S. between 1980 and 1989.) You can do your own USA Up All Night-style marathon at any point in the day, and there’s a lot to be said for letting all eight of the films blend together as a continuous experience. Part I has Betsy Palmer (the best acting in the series, followed closely by Crispin Glover in Part IV). IV is the best one by the standards of real movies. V is the sleaziest and the one that doesn’t get nearly enough respect, and they’ve all got their charms (yes, even VIII). Dead teens in abundance, the concept of the Final Girl developing in front of your eyes, and a perfect, decade-size look at the history of “spam in a cabin” cinema.

Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby on Amazon Prime

Violent, transgressive, deeply funny and upsetting to say the least, Freeway II is a meth-addled take on Hansel and Gretel — much as 1996’s Reese Witherspoon-starring Freeway, also streaming on Amazon, reworks Little Red Riding Hood. It stars Natasha Lyonne as a young bulimic woman breaking out of juvie with a serial-killer friend and trying to get to Mexico to seek refuge at the home of a renegade nun (Vincent Gallo) with a cosmic secret. Matthew Bright is a very special filmmaker, and this

film — while not for everyone — goes there. You already know if this is right for you.

Quick Change on Vudu

Pushed to their limits by a city that’s grown uncaring and economically predatory, a trio of friends decides to pull off a bank heist. Unfortunately, in what is a most relatable twist even 30 years on, getting to the airport through a city strangled with traffic and cruelty and the reminders of one’s own faded glory is a much more taxing challenge than pulling off an ingenious bank robbery. Bill Murray (who co-directed) is at his best, and Geena Davis and Randy Quaid match him. Consistently one of the funniest films ever made. Also, Phil Hartman, Tony Shalhoub and Bob Elliott!

eXistenZ on Hoopla

Gojira tai Hedorah (Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster) on The Criterion Channel

This psychotronic freak-out is one of the best (and oddly least successful) offerings in the Godzilla series. Godzilla vs. the Smoke Monster is weird, surreal, hallucinatory and upsetting in a way that only some of the series aim for. Conscious of environmental chaos decades before it became part of the mainstream discourse, this 1971 offering has a great villain and grand kaiju chaos. That said, “Save the Earth” — the Englishlanguage theme song from the old vintage American International Pictures dub — is not here. But you can’t beat this film for sheer imaginative fantasy terror.

existenz

Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby

Building on our recent Critic’s Pick (Build Your Own Streaming Jennifer Jason Leigh Film Festival, in the April 9 issue of the Scene), this 1999 David Cronenberg masterpiece is one of the unheralded sci-fi classics of that decade. Leigh is majestic as Allegra Gellar, the “goddess of the game pod,” a designer of video games in a future where gaming is now a biological process you stick into the base of your spine. There are deep-seated conspiracies, body horror in abundance, weird critters, bone guns that fire teeth, Willem Dafoe with a pneumatic press, and everything you could want from one of the greatest filmmakers of our time diving deep into the plasma pool. Email arts@nashvillescene.com

Nashville Scene | April 23 – april 29, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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Daniel has a genuine religious awakening. In an irony that seems a bit too convenient, he’s able to live out his fantasies in his dream job. Even if he’s improvising, his charisma makes his sermons believable — and because he’s not a real priest, he can party with Eliza and her friends. The power of Corpus Christi rests upon by Steve erickSon the performance of Bielenia and his frighteningly intense blue eyes. Director Jan Komasa lavishes many close-ups upon orpus Christi recycles a Bielenia, who effectively brings out the premise we’ve already seen character’s passion and physicality. (Near in Sister Act and We’re No the end of the film, Daniel stands in front Angels: a criminal disguisof the image of a nude Christ on the cross ing himself as a cleric. (Hell, and takes off his shirt, revealing tattoos and there’s a Muslim version of scars.) The Catholic Church has replaced the story in the Iranian film The Lizard as communism in a Poland as a repressive well.) This version takes a story whose twists force hurtling toward the far right. Corpus verge on soap-opera-like, but tells it in a style Christi critiques the church — Daniel has a that shouts This is serious art. The film looks direct connection with his faith, but we see like it was shot at the end of a winter afterhow the church’s institutional power has noon — made in Poland, it feels more like the turned it into yet another corrupt force in Sweden of Ingmar Bergman. Polish society. Daniel (Bartosz Bielenia) stands watch in Corpus Christi treats Daniel’s faith rea juvenile detention center as a boy is bruspectfully while showing the flaws of orgatalized in the film’s nized religion. We see the hypocrisy of an opening scene. The Corpus Christi NR, 115 miNutes; iN institution that professes a belief in forgive20-year-old Daniel Polish with eNglish ness and redemption but practices the sort is soon released and subtitles of gatekeeping that would forbid Daniel celebrates with alcoAvAilAble to stReAm from becoming a “real” priest, no matter hol, cocaine and sex Now viA belcouRt.oRg how much good he does for his community. in a bar bathroom, Pinczer (Tomasz Zietek), the priest for but he faces a future of dead-end manual whom Daniel takes over, had kept labor. Though Daniel’s a devout up appearances while hiding just Catholic, his criminal record as many secrets as the former prevents him from becoming inmate. As one might expect, a priest. As Daniel prays in a AvAilAble to stReAm Now Daniel uncovers the small Catholic church, Eliza (Eliza viA belcouRt.oRg town’s secrets, initially small Rycembel) strikes up a conbut ultimately spiraling out to versation. He tells her he’s the far more dangerous ones. local priest and starts dressing The film settles into a groove the part — the church’s actual in its middle act, but then introduces priest is suffering serious health dramatic elements that shake up Daniel’s problems caused by his drinking, so Danlife. Corpus Christi maintains the same iel is able to take over. But soon he’s in over dour style, despite a few moments of black his head due to the level of trauma suffered comedy. The promise of Daniel’s attempts by the entire town — trauma that arrives in to pass as a good priest is ultimately lost. By the wake of a serious car accident that killed the end, Komasa tries too hard to convince seven people. us how important and sober his film is, even When Daniel was still imprisoned, he if its critiques are valid. heard a priest say, “Everyone is a priest of Email arts@nashvillEscEnE.com Christ.” Despite the dark secrets in his past,

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crossword EditEd by Will Shortz Across 1 5 10

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No. 0319

LEGALS

Non-Resident Notice Chancery Court Docket No. 2326A

ABRAHAM SCHARIA

PUzzLE BY WAYNE BERGMAN AND GARY OTTING

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showed obvious interest Like summer in the south on pins and needles Pal of Piglet Place to set a TV remote Hit that goes over the infielders’ heads Disney movie with fewer than a thousand words of dialogue “That’s awesome!” Jeans that have been summerized standing on the street “That’s funny!,” in a text You might see right through it “___ Almighty,” 2007 film It’s what you would expect “Way to go!,” to an antiques buyer Little ___ (state nickname) Possible symptom of an allergic reaction List curtailer Just the facts

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S T A I N S S C A R L E T T

T A E D L E L G B A P A R I T D T H E Y N L E W O R A O S L S L E E R

In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant ABRAHAM SCHARIA is a non-resident of the State of Tennessee, so that the ordinary process of this court cannot be served upon ABRAHAM SCHARIA is, therefore, herby required to appear before the Clerk of the Chancery Court of Williamson County, at her office in Franklin, Tennessee on or before the 31st day of May, 2020 and make defense to the bill filed against ABRAHAM SCHARIA by BRETT ALEXANDER WARD, INDU ROSE NALINI WARD AND BINDHU ABRAHAM or otherwise the allegations of said bill will be taken for confessed, and the cause set for hearing ex parte as to April 30, 2020. It is further ordered that a copy of this notice be published for four consecutive weeks beginning on April 9, 2020 in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Franklin, Tennessee. Elaine Beeler, Clerk Deputy Clerk Date: April 2, 2020 VANEZZA SAENZ Attorney for Plaintiff NSC 4/9, 4/16, 4/23, 4/30/20

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EMPLOYMENT

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE C A N A A B O R F O R S S O U P E N R U M G R A S E R N E I A S A N N E V E S R I W E A S E N T I R E E N

BRETT ALEXANDER WARD, INDU ROSE NALINI WARD AND BINDHU ABRAHAM vs.

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Senior Developer – .Net (Multiple Positions. GEODIS Logistics, LLC, Brentwood, TN): Reqs Bachelor’s or equivalent in Comp Sci, Eng, or related (will accept 3 yr or 4 yr Bachelor’s); 6 yrs web app dev exp using Microsoft .Net; 2 yrs app dev exp using C# in 2.0, 3.5 & 4.0 frames; proficiency w/ CSS, HTML, & Java Script; exp in app dev methodologies such as Agile, Extreme Programming, or similar; ability to debug & test computer programs. Qualified applicants a p p l y via www.workatgeodis.com using Ref# SRDEV10213. COMPUTER/IT: Vanderbilt University Medical Center seeks a Sr. Application De- veloper in Nashville, TN, responsible for developing and modifying software inde- pendently functioning as project lead. Designing, coding, performing benchmark testing, debugging and docu- mentation of programs. Im- plementing small projects or components of large projects. Solving medium to complex problems. Bache- lor’s degree in Computer Sci- ence or closely related field + 5 years exp as Software De- veloper or related position. Must have exp in developing applications in .net environment, reporting services SSRS and standard operations within SQLserver Envi- ronment. Mail resume to Jes- sica Lucas-Stroud, VUMC, 2525 W. End Ave, Ste 500, Nashville, TN 37203;; reference Job Code 5818. No phone calls please.

Trinisys, LLC. Brentwood, TN. Senior Healthcare Data Engineer. Extract, transform, & load healthcare data to support data archiving and migrations between EHR/EMR Systems. Analyze client requirements, develop extraction & transformation plans, & implement plans. Master’s in Info. Sys., Comp. Science, Comp. Engin., or rltd field & min. two (2) yrs of programming &/or systems analysis & developing complex data integration solutions exp. or Bachelor’s in Info. Sys., Comp. Science, Comp. Engin., or rltd field & min. five (5) yrs of programming &/or systems analysis & developing complex data integration solutions exp. Exp. in technologies such as client/server, relational database mgmnt systems, data mgmnt. Strong tech. skills around data access & transformation - must have ability to write complex SQL queries firsthand, analyzing & tuning complex SQL statements, supporting high-performance, multi-tenant databases. Exp. w/data integration & data transformation, development of End to End ETL architecture using MS SQL, SSIS, Oracle, TSQL. Exp. architecting & building processes that extract, process & add value to data sets from multiple source systems. Exp. reverse engineering systems. Ability to write tech. specs & create diagrams such as data flow diagrams. Ability to analyze & manipulate clinical data, & work w/ different healthcare data types HL7, CLD, XML. Strong analytical skills w/ ability to collect, organize, analyze, & disseminate significant amounts of info. w/ attn to detail & accuracy. System-level design expertise such as operating system drivers, file systems, access methods, query processing, query optimization, memory management, multi-threading & concurrency control, & networking. Proficient in Structured Query Language (SQL), Oracle, data mining, & pattern recognition in large datasets, including ability to develop customized queries to successfully complete tasks. To apply, please visit https://www.trinisys.com/about/#careers. ENGINEERING: Vanderbilt University Medical Center seeks an Operations Improvement Engineer II in Nashville, TN, responsible for the following: Guide support services to improve operations from a systems approach. Conduct current and future process mapping, recommend and implement changes that add to the value stream in order to meet financial targets and improve quality of care, patient safety, and overall patient satisfaction. Share knowledge of lean tools, methods and principles for continuous improvement and guide others in financial analysis of projects. Develop project plans to include problem statement, current state, root cause analysis, future state, solution, action plan, expected benefit, verification and follow up. Lead continuous improvement projects that improve Patient Care Center (PCC) operations. Master’s Degree in Industrial Engineering, Health Administration or related, + 12 months of experience in the job offered or any related position in lean healthcare operations improvement role. Must have one year of experience in application of lean methodology in healthcare setting, must have one year of experience in operations improvement engineer position, must have experience with process mapping and value stream mapping with large multidisciplinary groups, and A3 problem solving experience. Mail resume to Jessica LucasStroud, VUMC, 2525 W. End Ave, Ste 500, Nashville, TN 37203; reference Job Code OIE-2. No phone calls please.

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