Nashville Scene 11-4-21

NOVEMBER 4–10, 2021 I VOLUME 40 I NUMBER 39 I NASHVILLESCENE.COM I FREE

CITY LIMITS: BUS DRIVER SHORTAGES ARE AFFECTING METRO SCHOOLS AT EVERY LEVEL

FILM: SEE OUR REVIEWS OF SPENCER, FINCH AND ETERNALS PAGE 34

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Fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid, is showing up in more street drugs and counterfeit pills — and killing people in Nashville at a staggering rate

BY STEVEN HALE

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11/1/21 5:07 PM

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NASHVILLE SCENE | NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

CONTENTS

6

CITY LIMITS

The Wheels on the Bus … ........................6 Bus driver shortages are affecting Metro Nashville Public Schools at every level

BY KELSEY BEYELER

‘All Fights Are Personal’: Caleb Plant Wants to Be the Undisputed Champ ........6

NOVEMBER 4, 2021 Future’s So Bright An introduction to the artists in the Scene’s Futurephilia show — art that fantasizes about the future

BY LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

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BOOKS

Middle Tennessee-raised boxer will face off with Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez on Saturday to unify the super-middleweight championship belts

Harm Reduction

BY ALEJANDRO RAMIREZ

BY ERICA CICCARONE AND CHAPTER 16

Pith in the Wind .........................................7 This week on the Scene’s news and politics blog

8

COVER STORY

The Other Epidemic

Sam Quinones’ The Least of Us makes a compelling case for our survival

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MUSIC

Another Look ........................................... 31 The Scene’s music writers recommend recent releases from Chuck Indigo, Jackson + Sellers, The Cancellations and more

Fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid, is showing up in more street drugs and counterfeit pills — and killing people in Nashville at a staggering rate

Promises Made Good ............................. 32

BY STEVEN HALE

The Spin ................................................... 33

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The Scene’s live-review column checks out Spencer Cullum and Skyway Man

CRITICS’ PICKS Kaki King: SEI, Next Generation of Classical Musicians, Medieval Bologna: Art for a University City, Vera Bloom w/Year of October & Leilani Kilgore, Dashboard Confessional, HalfNoise Album Release Feat. Louis Prince & Elke, Louise Erdrich in conversation with Ann Patchett and more

The fall menu at this speakeasy-style downtown restaurant is full of meatless surprises

BY MARGARET LITTMAN

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Margaret Verble Weaves the Real and Imagined in When Two Feathers Fell From the Sky

34 FILM

Spencer’s Gifts ........................................ 34 Kristen Stewart is a revelation in Spencer

BY JASON SHAWHAN

Rust Never Sleeps ................................... 34

Even at its clunkiest, Eternals is propulsive and addicting

Veg Out..................................................... 25

Nicky’s Coal Fired to Be Featured on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives

BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

On the Road Again .................................. 24

BY NICOLE HAMILTON

Legislature Passes COVID-19 Bills Despite Business Concerns

BY BRITTNEY McKENNA

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Punjabi Dhaba in Kingston Springs offers a taste of home to Sikh truck drivers

JEFF the Brotherhood to Play Exit/In Thanksgiving Eve

Heaven Honey’s Jordan Victoria gets by with a little help from her friends

Finch is a meditative sci-fi vehicle for the endearing presence of Tom Hanks

FOOD AND DRINK

THIS WEEK ON THE WEB:

BY CORY WOODROOF

Eternal Flame .......................................... 35

BY JASON SHAWHAN

37

NEW YORK TIMES CROSSWORD

38

MARKETPLACE

ART

Crawl Space: November 2021 November’s photography-heavy art happenings are cooking up plenty to be thankful for

BY JOE NOLAN

nashvillescene.com | NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 10, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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11/1/21 6:07 PM

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GOV. BILL LEE IS FAILING TO PROTECT OUR CHILDREN — AND THE REST OF US It is shameful seeing the safety of our children used as a pawn in a partisan political battle. Gov. Bill Lee issued an order undermining local leaders’ attempts to protect their communities with mask mandates for schools that continues to be fought in federal court.

Thankfully, U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw has ruled that Lee’s order violates federal law.

But now the Tennessee General Assembly has passed even more restrictive legislation that would further tie the hands of our local schools and businesses and limit their options for keeping our children safe and protecting employees and customers. The legislation essentially says COVID must be out of control (i.e., that infection rates must top the numbers seen in the highest weeks of the pandemic to date) before mask mandates can be implemented. You can rest assured that our governor will not take even a millisecond to consider the ramifications of this legislation before signing it into law.

With school-age children, teachers and administrators together in close proximity, our school systems are the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to COVID-19 surges in our communities. The legal challenges to Lee’s existing opt-out executive order argue that allowing parents to make the final choice for their children puts the health and well-being of our most fragile students in harm’s way.

How far are we willing to go to ensure our health and safety? It’s apparent that our GOP leadership isn’t willing to go very far.

Instead of making practical, common-sense decisions that help prevent exposure to this deadly virus, our governor and GOP leadership are thwarting attempts at every turn.

They continue to insist that simple diseaseprevention measures are a partisan issue.

In a recent poll by Grinnell College and reported on by The Washington Post, 80 percent Republicans polled think Americans NASHVIof LLE, TN THERE’S have the absolute right to opt out of a vacNOT NOT cine mandate from our government. That’s BOOZE a higher level of support from polled RepubIN HERE licans than even religious freedom or opencarry of firearms received. Reflecting the partisan nature of the debate, Republican support for the right to reject vaccine mandates was 44 points higher than Democratic support (though only a few points higher

than it was for independents) — the same differential as on the issue of the right to get an abortion.

That is astounding news.

OK, vaccine mandates are divisive. But why do so many of our elected leaders balk at simple measures like mask-wearing, which is shown to provide some measure of protection? Why do these leaders do little to encourage vaccination, which is shown to provide substantial protection? According to the latest data from U.S. News & World Report, Tennessee still has one of the lowest partial vaccination rates, with only 54.4 percent partially vaccinated.

This distrust of life-saving vaccines is reflected by the fact that Tennessee has a much higher infection rate than the national average. Slice the data however you wish, but the facts are clear: Vaccines help slow COVID-19’s spread, and they vastly decrease the likelihood of serious complications and death in those who still contract the virus. “In Tennessee, the infection rate is far higher than the national average,” reports news outlet 24/7 Wall St. “Since the first known case of COVID-19 was reported in Tennessee on Mar. 5, 2020, there have been 1,267,363 total infections in the state — or 18,720 for every 100,000 people. Of all 50 states and Washington, D.C., Tennessee ranks No. 2 by cumulative COVID-19 cases, adjusted for population.”

Fortunately, we’re seeing some signs of improvement. NBC News reported last week that new COVID-19 cases were down nearly 25 percent, and Tennessee’s new cases are down even more — 46 percent.

Vaccination, social distancing and maskwearing are paying off. We can be cautiously optimistic that we might continue to see numbers heading in the right direction, thanks to everyday people who have taken steps to protect themselves and each other.

But even so, Tennessee’s leaders continue to slow the process, trying to prevent us from heading in the right direction.

What’s wrong with this picture? It looks to me like many of our leaders care more about politics than human lives.

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 Editor Jack Silverman Staff Writers Kelsey Beyeler, Stephen Elliott, Nancy Floyd, Steven Hale, Kara Hartnett, J.R. Lind, Kathryn Rickmeyer, William Williams Contributing Writers Sadaf Ahsan, Radley Balko, Ashley Brantley, Maria Browning, Steve Cavendish, Chris Chamberlain, Lance Conzett, Marcus K. Dowling, 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, Betsy Phillips, John Pitcher, Margaret Renkl, Daryl Sanders, Megan Seling, Jason Shawhan, Michael Sicinski, Nadine Smith, Ashley Spurgeon, Amy Stumpfl, Kay West, Abby White, Andrea Williams, Ron Wynn, Charlie Zaillian Art Director Elizabeth Jones Photographers Eric England, Matt Masters, Daniel Meigs Graphic Designers Mary Louise Meadors, Tracey Starck Production Coordinator Christie Passarello Events and Marketing Director Olivia Britton Marketing and Promotions Manager Robin Fomusa Publisher Mike Smith Senior Advertising Solutions Managers Maggie Bond, Sue Falls, Michael Jezewski, Carla Mathis, Heather Cantrell Mullins, Jennifer Trsinar, Keith Wright Advertising Solutions Managers William Shutes, Niki Tyree Sales Operations Manager Chelon Hill Hasty Advertising Solutions Associates Jada Goggins, Caroline Poole, Alissa Wetzel Special Projects Coordinator Susan Torregrossa President Frank Daniels III Chief Financial Officer Todd Patton Corporate Production Director Elizabeth Jones Vice President of Marketing Mike Smith IT Director John Schaeffer Circulation and Distribution Director Gary Minnis For advertising information please contact: Mike Smith, msmith@nashvillescene.com or 615-844-9238 FW PUBLISHING LLC Owner Bill Freeman VOICE MEDIA GROUP National Advertising 1-888-278-9866 vmgadvertising.com

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NASHVILLE SCENE | NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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S A N T A ’ S

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nashvillescene.com | NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 10, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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CITY LIMITS

THE WHEELS ON THE BUS …

PHOTO: DANIEL MEIGS

Bus driver shortages are affecting Metro Nashville Public Schools at every level

BY KELSEY BEYELER

SPORTS

‘ALL FIGHTS ARE PERSONAL’: CALEB PLANT WANTS TO BE THE UNDISPUTED CHAMP Middle Tennessee-raised boxer will face off with Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez on Saturday to unify the super-middleweight championship belts

BY ALEJANDRO RAMIREZ

C

aleb “Sweet Hands” Plant is entirely focused on Nov. 6 — there’s no time to think about what happens after that. The boxer’s life could change drastically at the end of

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drivers are spread thin, running double — sometimes triple — their typical number of routes to pick up slack, fielding comments from angry parents and risking exposure to COVID-19. That’s on top of their normal duties, like keeping dozens of kids safe during their commute, sometimes on highways.

Battle says students often misbehave on the bus, too.

Metro Schools spokesperson Sean Braisted tells the Scene that the district needs 72 additional drivers. Battle says they need 200 more. The shortage isn’t affecting only bus drivers; teachers and other staff have been struggling as well, and the district also needs to fill more certificated staff and paraprofessional positions.

“The bus driver shortage in our district has created a crisis at all levels,” says Sara Duran, organizing director of Metropolitan Nashville Education Association, the city’s teachers union. “Educators are experiencing the added demand on their time to stay after school, waiting for buses that are having to do double and triple routes sometimes up to an hour. In addition, many of our non-classroom educators are being pulled from their duties to wait for late buses in the morning. This has placed an incredible

the night, but when he steps into the ring against Saul “Canelo” Alvarez for a super-middleweight fight to crown the division’s first undisputed champion, he says he won’t be thinking past that 12-round bout.

Plant (21-0 with 12 knockouts) already has one of the division’s four belts (boxing is lousy with sanctioning bodies) while Alvarez (56-1-2, 38 KOs) has the other three. Alvarez, a redheaded superstar from Mexico, has been on a mission to unite all the belts.

But when the dust settles on Saturday night, the undefeated fighter from Ashland City, Tenn., aims to be the one holding all the hardware.

“I sacrificed a lot for this moment,” Plant tells the Scene, calling from Las Vegas, “and I’m ready to just go out there and put it to work and properly introduce myself to the world and cement my name in the history books of boxing forever.”

The fight almost didn’t happen. After Alvarez defeated Billy Joe Saunders in May, it looked like the Tennessean was finally next in line. But negotiations went south, and plans for a fight on Sept. 18, the weekend after Mexican Independence Day — a sort of marketing tradition in boxing when it comes to Mexican and Mexican-American stars — were aborted. Plant said in interviews that Alvarez’s team made ridiculous demands. But a few weeks later, talks resumed and the fight was scheduled for Nov. 6.

And the two boxers have traded plenty of barbs

burden on educators that are already being stretched beyond capacity with new curriculum and district initiatives.

“Not only is the bus driver shortage requiring more from educators’ time outside of their assigned duties, but it is also affecting the social emotional health of their students,” Duran continues. “Educators are seeing students who come in late or miss entire class periods struggle to catch back up. We firmly believe that the district must significantly increase pay for our bus drivers so we don’t lose any more, and aggressively make financial investments to fill vacancies.”

MNEA has created a “Reclaim Our Time” petition in collaboration with the steelworkers union and SEIU Local 205, which represents other MNPS support staff. The petition calls for more protocols and transparency surrounding COVID-19; increased pay for substitute teachers, support staff and bus drivers; compensation or decreased expectations for extra work; more support for bus drivers; and “strict adherence” to memorandums of understanding.

Braisted says the district is exploring a number of different strategies alongside preexisting efforts such as hiring fairs and advertisements. “While we continue

PHOTO: SEAN MICHAEL HAM

M

etro Nashville Public Schools are in drastic need of bus drivers to transport students to and from their classes. The shortage — one of many throughout the nation — has put a strain on remaining drivers as well as teachers and the families of the students they serve.

On Oct. 22, roughly 30 bus drivers rallied outside MNPS’ headquarters with a message: They’re understaffed, and the issues that arise because of that are not their fault.

“I wanted to get the message out to the parents — stop calling on us because the buses are late,” says Pam Battle, an MNPS driver and president of Local 9426, the Nashville branch of the United Steelworkers union that represents school bus drivers.

(Battle is not related to Director of Schools Adrienne Battle.) “We will be there, we’re doing the best we can. But [also] to let you know that, if this trend keeps going, [if] drivers are leaving, not staying with transportation, then you may have to provide your child a ride to school.”

Even before COVID-19, MNPS needed more bus drivers than it had — but as with many industries, the pandemic made things worse. Now that students are back in school,

to seek out qualified applicants for our open driver positions,” says Braisted, “our transportation team is deploying all available strategies such as attendance bonuses to encourage staff to work full schedules, running A/B routes, combining routes, or having CDL-trained staff in supervisory or other positions go out to serve the needs of students.”

In the meantime, Braisted says, the district is working with schools to communicate bus delays and developing a new pay plan for support staff.

“I have got to say that my experience this year has to be one of the worst,” says Sandy Boles, a senior at Antioch High School. “The word ‘overcrowding’ does not do justice to the state of the bus. At times one bus driver is responsible for two routes at one time, and the bus is always over its capacity. In many circumstances I was forgotten at my bus stop in the morning and therefore arrived late to school. However, I do not blame the bus drivers for they cannot control their working conditions.”

Not all parents have had issues. Shemeka Reed has two children at Henry C. Maxwell Elementary School, and apart from initial struggles at the beginning of the year, she says transportation has been fine. “I wish every MNPS parent could feel the same level of comfort that I feel with the bus transportation provided by MNPS and Henry Maxwell Elementary,” Reed tells the Scene.

“Parents needed to know about this,” says Battle. “You may have to carpool — I don’t know what type of transportation [you] may have to get for your child, but if that trend continues, then something’s gonna have to be done. And I have no clue what. That’s why it’s [up to] the parents to reach out to the board, their elected officials — to get with Dr. [Adrienne] Battle and see, is there a plan? If your bus drivers keep quitting, is there a plan? How are students going to be transported to and from school?”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

CALEB PLANT (LEFT) FIGHTS CALEB TRUAX ON JAN. 30, 2021

in the meantime. After one of Alvarez’s stablemates tested positive for a banned substance, Plant took to social media to call Alvarez out for also failing a drug test in the past. Plant later called his opponent a cheat

at a press conference promoting the fight. In 2018, Alvarez tested positive for clenbuterol, which

THE FIGHT WILL STREAM ON SHOWTIME PAY-PERVIEW AT 8 P.M. CENTRAL SATURDAY, NOV. 6

NASHVILLE SCENE | NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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CITY LIMITS is used to treat asthma but regarded as a banned substance by the Nevada anti-doping agency. Alvarez was suspended for six months, but the boxer blamed the test results on tainted beef in Mexico.

Plant doesn’t buy that story.

“He’s a multi-, multi-, multi-, multi-, multimillionaire,” he says of Alvarez. “You think he’s just eating any type of food at any place anywhere? I’m not. … He’s got a nutritionist, he’s got a chef.”

At a September press conference to promote the fight, fans got an unexpected preview of the action. During a staredown, Plant called Alvarez a motherfucker, which the latter says he took as an insult to his deceased mother. He then swung at Plant. A few hands were thrown, and Plant ended up with a cut under his eye — his team says it was from Alvarez hitting his glasses.

So it would seem there is some genuine bad blood between the two boxers. And yes, this fight is personal for Plant — but he says that’s how he feels about every fight.

“All fights are personal to me,” he says. “Anytime someone is standing across from me, trying to ruin everything that I worked for and dreamed of and sacrificed my life to obtain — you know, to me that’s personal. It just seems to me like he lost his cool, and for some reason I’m under his skin. I’m not sure why, but November 6, I feel like once I get my hand raised, I’m really going to be under his skin.”

It’s been a difficult journey for the 29-year-old, who grew up poor in Ashland City and even experienced homelessness. In 2015, he and his then-fiancé made the difficult decision to take their 2-year-old daughter off of life support. (That relationship ended, and Plant is now married to sports reporter Jordan Hardy.) In 2019, Plant’s mother was shot and killed by a Cheatham County deputy. Through all the personal challenges, Plant managed to build an undefeated career.

But he’s still a big underdog in the fight, at least according to oddsmakers who mostly place Alvarez as an 8-to-1 favorite. Alvarez is ranked the pound-for-pound best fighter by Ring Magazine and ESPN, but he’s looked vulnerable at times. Floyd Mayweather shut him out in a decision win — Alvarez’s only loss. And many fans and ringside reporters think Gennady Golovkin, a fearsome heavy-hitter with a stiff jab, got the better of him in their two match-ups, which judges scored as a draw and an Alvarez win. But Plant says the odds “are just numbers.”

He was an underdog when he defeated José Uzcátegui for the IBF Belt in 2019, he adds.

“At the end of the day, the bell’s still gotta ring and two fighters still gotta go out there and fight.”

Plant certainly sees some advantages for himself in the fight. “[Alvarez has] had issues with certain fighters in the past, and I have a lot of those same qualities that those fighters have,” he says. “But I’m a full-fledged super-middleweight who’s 6’1” — I’m a lot bigger, a lot taller than those guys.”

Both fighters are technical, with good offense and defense, though Alvarez may have a bit more knockout power. Either man can deliver smart combinations, and they both have a good sense of pace and timing in the ring. Plant’s signature skill may be his outstanding jab and slippery lateral movement — he’s also younger, taller and a bit quicker. He’s scored some KOs thanks to smart flurries of punches. Alvarez is a tactical counterpuncher with great head movement who likes to control the space of the ring, bait opponents and create openings for perfectly timed combinations. He’s also faced more big-name opposition than Plant.

It will probably be a smart fight on Saturday, but don’t expect a slow-paced chess match — plan for some fireworks.

Plant’s come a long way, and it hasn’t been an easy journey. The Tennessean appreciates all the support he’s gotten from Nashville fans up to this point, and says he hopes to make them proud on Saturday.

“I plan on putting the city on my back and planting my flag as the face of boxing.”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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THIS WEEK ON OUR NEWS AND POLITICS BLOG: The Tennessee General Assembly wrapped up its breakneck-pace special session over the weekend, passing a flurry of measures largely aimed at local governments and businesses implementing COVID-19 mandates. Working into the wee hours of a Saturday morning and negotiating particulars behind closed doors, the legislature passed measures that ran counter to the wishes of their usual constituencies — business interests, notably. Businesses are banned from requiring COVID-19 vaccinations (they can still require masks) and employees can sue their employers if they suffer an adverse reaction to a vaccine they were required to take. (Bear in mind that this is seemingly contradictory to a move made in the regular legislative session that limited employer liability when being sued by workers.) Those fired for refusing to be vaccinated can now draw unemployment, a change that the trucking lobby in particular found galling. Even the usually GOP-adjacent National Federation of Independent Businesses was left scratching its head. Republican state Sen. Jack Johnson, who shepherded the measures through the upper chamber, admitted some of the bills were “contrary to some of the tenets we’ve held sacred.” The legislature also allowed for partisan school board elections, a move aimed at the boards in even deeply red counties implementing mask mandates.

And in a move that has basically nothing to do with COVID, the legislature created a pathway for a special prosecutor to be appointed in cases where the local DA states flat-out they won’t enforce certain laws. This comes after Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk has said he won’t prosecute low-level marijuana offenses or anti-abortion measures. … Memphis Sen. Brian Kelsey stepped back from his chairmanship of the Senate Education Committee following his indictment on federal campaign finance charges, which he blamed on a Biden administration political witch hunt despite the fact that the investigation began during the Trump administration. … The party-tractorindustrial complex hit the streets to push back against proposed regulations that would ban alcohol on the traffic-snarling woo wagons, among other things. In a baffling effort to show they are responsible and considerate members of the community, the booze barges simultaneously took to Broadway in the middle of the day, blocking traffic. … A week after the departure of Homeless Impact Division director Judith Tackett, Councilmember Freddie O’Connell drafted a bill that would create a new office to manage Nashville’s housing and homelessness services needs. The independent office would also be the new home for the Metro Homeless Impact Division, which is currently part of Metro Social Services. … Contributor Betsy Phillips wonders how Rutherford County Juvenile Court Judge Donna Scott’s heavy-handed methods escaped public scrutiny for so long before receiving attention in a recent WPLN/ProPublica report. Scott routinely incarcerates kids as young as 8, and according to WPLN’s story, sometimes on charges that don’t actually exist.

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nashvillescene.com | NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 10, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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11/1/21 5:37 PM

THE OTHER EPIDEMIC Fentanyl, a potent synthetic opioid, is showing up in more street drugs and counterfeit pills — and killing people in Nashville at a staggering rate

BY STEVEN HALE

ON APRIL 7, Tyler Smith graduated from a 10-week addiction treatment program in Athens, Tenn. His family traveled from Knoxville for the occasion and felt optimistic that, this time, his recovery might last. At 31 years old, he told his mother Danita McCartney that he was ready to be done with the cycle that had shaped his life for more than a decade.

Like many teens, Tyler partied in high school, drinking beer and smoking weed on occasion. But the beast got its claws in him toward the end of his senior year, when a co-worker at a restaurant — a work environment where drugs are often found about as easily as any other ingredient — showed him how to crush an OxyContin and snort it.

He spent the next 12 years in and out of the clutches of addiction. Danita would cling to hope where she could find it. As a young boy, Tyler had always been deathly afraid of needles — perhaps that would at least keep him from shooting up. It didn’t.

But Danita says there were wonderful seasons of sobriety. Tyler loved the Grateful Dead and the mountains. Despite it being where he was introduced to hard drugs, the restaurant industry had made him into an excellent cook, and he delighted in taking over the kitchen at holidays to make a meal for the whole family.

In between those seasons, Tyler wandered, living for short stints in various places around the country. When he struggled, he had the support of his family, and his mother says he found great treatment through urban rescue missions similar to the one where she works in Knoxville. He spent time in recovery programs in Alabama, Indiana and Florida before moving to Nashville, where he rekindled a relationship with a young woman he’d known in high school. He found a job at a downtown restaurant — there, again, he found drugs.

In January of this year, he survived an overdose after his girlfriend was able to revive him. That prompted his family to send him to the program in Athens, where he stayed for more than two months.

After he graduated from the program, Tyler returned to Nashville and got a job at an irrigation company, deciding to stay away from the kitchens where he’d been unable to resist substances. He talked on the phone with his mother frequently, never failing to end a conversation by telling her he loved her. But on the morning of Tuesday, April 14,

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Danita received the phone call she’d been expecting for years but could never prepare for. Tyler’s girlfriend had found him dead in the living room. A toxicology report later revealed what was in his system: meth and fentanyl, the latter a synthetic opioid that can be 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine and lethal in doses as small as 2 milligrams.

Tyler’s death inducted his family into a growing, grieving community — those who have lost loved ones to a raging epidemic of drug deaths, the majority of which have been caused by fentanyl. It’s the other epidemic, one that has been largely overshadowed by the global COVID-19 pandemic. But in Nashville, it’s claimed almost as many lives. From March 20, 2020 — the day of the first confirmed COVID-19 death in Nashville — to Oct. 16, 2021, the city reported 1,113 deaths from the virus. In that same time period, 1,070 suspected drug deaths have occurred in Nashville. That figure includes residents, non-residents and people whose status is unknown. According to the Metro Public Health Department, residents have accounted for around 70 percent of all drug deaths in Davidson County this year.

The coronavirus pandemic has made us all terribly familiar with the notion of the so-called curve. Fentanyl deaths are still rising, and this curve is showing no signs of flattening.

IT WAS 2017 when Candice Sexton started noticing more bodies coming into the morgue with fentanyl in them. By then she’d been investigating the dead and their bodies for around 20 years. A professional field that is morbidly repulsive to many came to her attention by way of the long-running HBO documentary series Autopsy hosted by Dr. Michael Baden.

“I watched that show, and when I did, I just knew that’s what I wanted to do,” Sexton tells the Scene.

This was back before shows like CSI popularized forensics — for better or worse — and it was a bit easier for someone with an interest in death investigations to get in the morgue door. Sexton looked up her local medical examiner in East Tennessee, and two weeks later, she says, “I was up to my elbows in my first body.”

The work felt deeply serious, almost sacred to her. She still remembers the name of that first person, a woman whose family had questions answered by the autopsy Sexton participated in. It’s that role that has buoyed her through more than two decades of traumatic work.

“How I cope with it is, I’m that final voice,” she says. “And if I don’t speak for them, who does?”

Sexton worked as a forensic technician — the person who assists a doctor during

autopsies — for years, spending time at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation as well as in Phoenix before returning to East Tennessee. Around 2010, she came to Nashville to work as an investigator — responding to scenes of unnatural deaths — at the Middle Tennessee Regional Forensic Center, which serves as the medical examiner’s office for Davidson County and provides autopsy services for 52 counties. In 2016, Sexton became the office’s director of investigations. Even before she became director, she’d made a habit of tracking the trends in death, particularly the kind of drug deaths that the office was seeing. It was a practice she started after a week in 2014 during which a streak of cocaine-related deaths caught her attention.

In 2017, she noted that more suspected drug deaths were coming in. But toxicology reports can take four to eight weeks, so it took some time for the pattern to emerge.

More and more of the people she was seeing had died due to fentanyl. She started tracking them and sounding the alarm.

“Everybody I could get to listen to me,” she says. “I mean, law enforcement would call in a death and it’s like, ‘Hey, look, we’re seeing this, what are you seeing?’ ” At first, fentanyl was mostly found in heroin, which had been cut with fentanyl to extend its supply. Fentanyl is cheaper and more potent, making it the perfect ingredient for a dealer looking to maximize their profits. But then it started showing up in cocaine, and then meth. Now, Sexton says, she sees it in all of those as well as in counterfeit but visibly indistinguishable versions of prescription pills like OxyContin, Percocet and Xanax.

At a press conference last month about the increase in counterfeit pills on the street, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Director David Rausch said that half of the “oxycodone” tablets the agency receives as evidence do not contain oxycodone at all, instead only fentanyl.

“Let me be clear,” said Rausch. “If you’re buying pills on the street in our state, you’re gambling with your life.”

As Sexton speaks, sitting in her office down the hall from the morgue, she pulls out four stacks of paper, setting them down on her desk one after another, each one larger than the one preceding it. These are her records of the fentanyl deaths her office has seen in 2018, 2019, 2020 and so far in 2021.

The number of fentanyl deaths her office has seen almost certainly represents an undercount. Although the office services 52 counties in and around Middle Tennessee, the Middle Tennessee Regional Forensic Center doesn’t end up performing an autopsy on every body from those jurisdictions. In any case, the surge is staggering.

In 2017, the office recorded 180 fentanyl deaths. In 2020, it handled 1,023 — a 468 percent increase in the span of four years.

TYLER SMITH This year’s deaths are on track to outpace last year’s.

On the day of our visit, the office has handled 20 death cases; 10 of those are suspected drug deaths.

Sexton’s staff, made up mostly of women (and one new male hire), is overwhelmed, as are the facilities. Down the hall, two large refrigerated rooms are full of bodies. Outside sits a refrigerated mass disaster truck.

It’s intended for mass casualty events, and the ubiquity of fentanyl has turned out to be one. Another refrigerated trailer from the Federal Emergency Management Agency is on site too. It was meant to help the facility handle the strain of the coronavirus pandemic. But many COVID deaths haven’t required a medical examiner, as the deceased were under the care of a physician when they died. The strain has come from the rapid increase in drug deaths, Sexton says.

The facility got permission to keep the refrigerated truck, and it’s now nearly a third full. The bodies are white, black and brown — Metro Public Health Department officials say the scourge is affecting all races, generally in proportion with the population.

“I lay awake at night and go, ‘What can I do?’ ” Sexton says. “I’m just such a tiny, small part of this puzzle. My team? So overworked. We’re constantly going out to these scenes, and it’s just overwhelming for us.”

DEEP INSIDE the Lentz Public Health Center on Charlotte Avenue, there is a small office labeled Metro Overdose Response Program. There, five people — led by director Trevor Henderson — are trying to track and fight the escalating crisis. Their resources are meager, although they represent a significant increase from when Henderson got the job several years ago.

In 2017, with the opioid overdose crisis still ravaging communities across the country, the Metro Public Health Department created a position for someone who would focus solely on overdose deaths. It was one position with no budget, and it went to Henderson. Originally from Northern Ireland,

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The data also shows in black-and-white numbers about how short it’s cutting the lives it claims. A commonly used statistic in public health is years of potential life lost — that is, the person’s reasonable life expectancy minus the age at which they died.

In Nashville, they calculate that the people dying from fentanyl would have had an average of 30 more years to live.

Henderson elaborates on this statistic: think of the impact of 30 years on families, communities, workplaces. Paradoxically, the statistic indicates a loss that is incalculable.

Drug deaths and near-deaths are now a constant hum in the background of daily life in Nashville — one that’s been getting louder every year. In 2016, Metro EMS responded to around 3,000 suspected overdose calls. In 2020, through several waves of the pandemic, they responded to around 6,000.

In 2016, the city recorded 300 drug deaths;

PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

IN 2016, ABOUT 1 IN 5 DRUG DEATHS WAS CAUSED

BY FENTANYL. BY 2020, IT WAS IMPLICATED IN THREEFOURTHS OF ALL NASHVILLE DRUG DEATHS.

TREVOR HENDERSON FROM THE METRO OVERDOSE RESPONSE PROGRAM HOLDS NARCAN

IF YOU OR SOMEONE YOU KNOW STRUGGLES WITH SUBSTANCE ABUSE, THE TENNESSEE REDLINE IS A 24/7 RESOURCE FOR SUBSTANCE ABUSE TREATMENT REFERRALS. ANYONE CAN CALL OR TEXT 800-889-9789 FOR CONFIDENTIAL REFERRALS.

OTHER RESOURCES: Community Overdose Response Team (615-687-1701); for Narcan training and information, visit Nashville Prevention Partnership (nashvilleprevention.org).

Comparison of a U.S. penny to a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl

SOURCE: DEA.GOV

he was familiar with the prospect of doing community work with life-or-death stakes.

In his home country, he did harm-reduction work with at-risk youth and worked to impress upon the paramilitary groups who were running drugs the ways in which substance abuse was destroying lives and communities. He also spent time working with people addicted to heroin in Hong Kong in the late 1990s. When he moved to Nashville around 2003, he had a girlfriend — now his wife — and some friends, but not much of an idea about what he would do for a living.

Appropriately, the Rev. Charlie Strobel took him in, and Henderson worked at Room In The Inn while he went through the immigration process. After that he spent some time working with Catholic Charities before ending up at the health department.

When he took the new job focusing on overdose deaths in 2017, Henderson had four basic if ambitious mandates: work on collecting and analyzing data to truly understand the scope of the crisis; expand the department’s partnerships with community organizations; find ways for the department to get involved in harm reduction; and work to reduce overdoses.

It was around that same time that Candice Sexton had started sounding the alarm from her perch at the medical examiner’s office, and Henderson was one of the people who heard it. They started collaborating and sharing data. That led to more data sharing with agencies like Emergency Medical Services. More recently, a U.S. Department of Justice grant allowed the Metro health department to hire an epidemiologist, Josh Love, for Henderson’s team. Love had spent time in the Peace Corps and had a background in public health emergency work and using data to inform action in the community. Love, Henderson says, has built a data surveillance system for drug deaths from the ground up — one that has attracted the attention of other states looking to create something similar.

On a recent morning in their office, Henderson and Love walk the Scene through the data the system has collected, sketching a fairly detailed picture of a crisis in progress. As Love notes, it’s the other ongoing federal public health emergency, along with COVID-19. A proper surveillance system — akin to the ones used by public health officials to track the pandemic — has allowed them to better understand the nature of the crisis, as well as its scope, which informs how we might best respond to it.

“The nature of the crisis has just really changed,” Henderson tells the Scene during a separate conversation. “We are not dealing with the opioid crisis that I started out working on. We can really see in the data where prescription pills drop off in our overdose deaths in around 2018, and at the same time you can see illicit fentanyl taking off in the community.”

Like Sexton, they’ve seen fentanyl move from heroin to the whole gamut of drugs that can be found on the street and in the rise of counterfeit pills. They’ve also seen the rise of fentanyl analogs, modified versions of fentanyl that in some cases are even more potent. Their data shows how fentanyl has become the primary cause of drug deaths in Nashville. In 2016, about 1 in 5 drug deaths was caused by fentanyl. By 2020, it was implicated in three-fourths of all Nashville drug deaths.

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lance data about suspected overdose activity. From their office they can pinpoint so-called overdose outbreaks on a map of Nashville. By now they know certain hot spots, although they declined to release them publicly to avoid stigmatizing particular neighborhoods. When outbreaks occur, they’ll work with community partners to spread the word and try to get area residents and businesses to carry naloxone, commonly known by the brand name Narcan — a medicine that can rapidly reverse an opioid overdose. They also urge anyone using drugs to reduce their dose and, if possible, use fentanyl test strips. The last recommendation is complicated by the fact that, under current state law, test strips are considered drug paraphernalia. Police and prosecutors in Nashville aren’t charging people for possessing them, but Henderson says the law has still made it more complicated for local agencies to obtain them.

In recent years, the Metro health team has been working more closely with the

ANGELA JAMES Metro Nashville Police Department. Henderson says it’s taken time for the relationship to develop but that there has been a notable change in the MNPD’s tone and approach to the drug crisis since the change in leadership a year ago, when John Drake replaced longtime Chief Steve Anderson.

Throughout multiple conversations about the crisis, Henderson emphasizes the need for acute and chronic responses.

Reducing drug deaths will mean taking immediate harm-reduction steps while also creating better links between the agencies fighting the crisis and treatment resources for people struggling with addiction. The emergency departments that treat people do great work, he says, but they aren’t social workers. One of Henderson’s projects right now is building better and quicker connections between emergency departments and treatment options.

Sitting in the team’s office with ODMAP pulled up on a television screen, he and Love isolate cases in which EMS respond-

ers had to use multiple doses of naloxone on someone, represented by purple dots on the map. Right now they’re non-fatal cases, but Henderson knows they’re not likely to stay that way.

“What I don’t want is, you know, that purple dot up there, they went to the emergency department, somebody saw them in the emergency department, stabilized them and sent them back out,” he says. “They’ve gone back to the same community, the same stressors, the same job, the same dealer.

They’re still exposed, they’re at a much higher risk of overdosing again once they’ve overdosed once.”

WHEN A SUSPECTED drug death occurs, the case is assigned to a police detective whose primary task is to piece together the person’s last 24 hours. The goal is to determine where the substance that killed them came from.

On an October morning at the Davidson

FENTANYL DEATHS IN AND AROUND MIDDLE TENNESSEE (Includes 52 counties)

In order to be included in this count, bodies had to be examined. Not every person who dies in a county will come to the forensic office for an examination and toxicology. It is up to the individual county medical examiner and/or their personnel to determine if a decedent will be sent to the regional center for an autopsy. The real number of fentanyl deaths per year is likely higher. Middle Tennessee is currently on track to exceed the 2020 number of fentanyl deaths for 2021.

1100

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SOURCE: MIDDLE TENNESSEE REGIONAL FORENSIC CENTER

in 2020, there were 620, and all signs indicate there will be more this year than last.

Currently, EMS responds to around 20 suspected overdose calls a day, and the city is averaging about two drug deaths every day.

The team has no idea when drug deaths will plateau. And one of the alarming effects of the rise of counterfeit pills is that it expands the likely universe of people who may come into contact with a lethal dose of fentanyl. Every person who dies a drug-related death matters, but as a matter of blunt mathematics, there are many people who wouldn’t do heroin but might take a couple Percocets from a trusted friend — pills that could turn out to be pressed fentanyl instead.

That’s what happened to Tre James, a 27-year-old who was staying at his mother’s house in Murfreesboro in August 2019 when he took what he thought were two pain pills.

His mother Angela James walked into his room hours later, believing he’d been asleep.

“When I turned the light on, the flip of that light changed my life,” she tells the Scene. After Tre’s death, Angela started a foundation in his name focused on helping youth in the community.

The small team at the Metro health department can’t single-handedly stop the supply of drugs or the demand for them, much less the rise of a terrifyingly lethal substance like fentanyl. It’s like a game of Whac-A-Mole where every mole can kill.

For now, they’re trying to track the crisis and respond in ways that might keep some people from dying.

One way they do that is by alerting the public to “overdose spikes” in the community using a text notification pilot program rolled out in June. It’s not dissimilar from warning the public about a viral outbreak.

The idea is to reach at-risk people or those who might be around them — that is, just about everyone — so they can take precautions against potential drug deaths. On Oct. 4, the department sent out an alert after EMS saw its largest spike in suspected overdose calls since Metro health started keeping track in 2016. The department is under no illusions about abstinence — the alerts urge residents to check in on loved ones and not to use alone.

The Metro health team goes even further.

Using a program called ODMAP, which has been implemented in cities across the country, they get near real-time surveil-

PHOTO: STEVEN HALE

PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

JOSH LOVE, AN EPIDEMIOLOGIST IN THE METRO OVERDOSE RESPONSE PROGRAM

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DRUG DEATHS VS. COVID-19 DEATHS IN DAVIDSON COUNTY From March 20, 2020, to Oct. 16, 2021 Suspected drug deaths include deaths that occurred in Davidson County. COVID-19 deaths include only Davidson County residents.

1200 1100 1000 900

SUSPECTED DRUG DEATHS IN DAVIDSON COUNTY 1070

COVID-19 DEATHS 1113 SOURCES: DAVIDSON COUNTY COVID-19 DASHBOARD, METRO PUBLIC HEALTH DEPARTMENT

County District Attorney’s offices, the Scene sits down with one of those detectives — a member of the MNPD’s Specialized Investigations Division who spoke on the condition of anonymity — and Assistant District Attorney Mindy Vinecore, who’s leading the office’s partnership with the police department on drug investigations. The two agencies constantly work together for obvious reasons, but this specific collaboration is relatively new as it’s focused on making prosecutable cases out of drug overdoses.

From their separate vantages, Vinecore and the detective have witnessed the same mutations in the world of street drugs as their counterparts in public health and forensics. Five or six years ago, Vinecore says, it was common for dealers to use ingredients from a vitamin store to cut their product. Now they’re using fentanyl. It’s cheaper, readily available and, of course, incredibly potent. The detective says with evident surprise that some dealers have seemingly made accommodations for that new level of risk.

“We’ve even seen where sometimes the narcotics dealers will distribute Narcan to their customers,” he says.

But most transactions aren’t that way, and a recent change in state law has made it easier for prosecutors to come after people who sell or distribute drugs. Tennessee already had a so-called death by distribution or drug-induced homicide law, which allows a person to be charged with seconddegree murder if they sell or provide drugs to someone who dies from the substance. In 2018, the legislature explicitly added fentanyl to the law. Prosecutions have ramped up in the years since.

The detective and Vinecore both say family involvement is often the most critical part when it comes to making a case. The families that the Scene spoke to were undoubtedly in favor of such prosecutions.

Tanja Jacobs expresses frustration with the pervasive use of the word “overdose” in media and by public officials, because it conjures up an image of someone on a bender or a person who is addicted and pushing their limit. Her son, Romello Marchman, died on Memorial Day 2020 when — struggling with the stress of work and depression exacerbated by the pandemic — he used what he thought was cocaine. It was fentanyl. When talking about what happened to him, she prefers the words “poisoning” or “murder.”

“A lot of our kids weren’t addicts,” she says. “They just got a drug that they didn’t ask for and they died from it.”

Even those who are fighting addiction in many cases likely wouldn’t have died if fentanyl hadn’t been in the substance they were using. Someone has been charged in connection to Tyler Smith’s death, and his mother Danita is fully supportive of the prosecution.

She notes with sympathy that many people who sell drugs may well need help themselves, but rejects the idea that people who are addicted to drugs should effectively be blamed for their own deaths in such cases.

“Tyler didn’t order up drugs that night with the intention of dying,” she says. “Just like, I think, with someone who stays in an abusive relationship and is maybe murdered at the hands of an abuser. You don’t criticize her for staying — you go after the person who did it to her.”

As in much of the criminal justice system,

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the idea of deterrence is at the heart of druginduced homicide prosecutions.

“What we’re hopeful [about] is that if we’re able to, you know, prosecute these cases, maybe the dealers get a little more careful about what they’re cutting in,” Vinecore says. “If they see somebody getting sentenced on a second-degree or some kind of murder charge, maybe that, you know, is more of a deterrent. ‘I’m not going to cut all of this drug in it.’ ” She suggests the office is mindful of the distinction between someone who is addicted themselves, selling to support the habit, and the hardened drug dealer in the public imagination. Vinecore notes that the law doesn’t draw such a line, but says prosecutors take it into account when it comes to sentencing.

But there is good reason to be skeptical about the outcomes of laws like Tennessee’s and prosecutions of this sort. Fentanyl, which is often though not exclusively made in China and brought to the United States through Mexico, has radically changed the drug trade. It’s cheap and thus massively profitable. Drug-induced-homicide laws also often miss the target many people might have in mind. A 2018 New York Times investigation detailed the way that, far from kingpins, it was friends, family members and fellow users who ended up charged across the country for sharing drugs.

There’s also a strong body of evidence suggesting that the threat of prison doesn’t deter drug crimes. A 2017 Pew analysis “found no statistically significant relationship between states’ drug offender imprisonment rates and three measures of drug problems: rates of illicit use, overdose deaths, and arrests.”

Like their counterparts, the detective and

the prosecutor are overwhelmed by the scale and human toll of the problem. The detective’s compassion for people who have lost loved ones to fentanyl and his drive to slow the flow of the substance that’s killing them are palpable when he speaks. But he acknowledges that he and his colleagues are trying to block a fire hose with their bare hands.

In June, the MNPD and agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency found 15 pounds of fentanyl, along with other drugs, at a home on Luton Street near Dickerson Pike.

In August, they seized more than 50 pounds of a white powder presumed to be fentanyl — enough to theoretically kill 11 million people — from a tractor-trailer on I-40 in Nashville. That’s not a drug seizure so much as it’s the discovery of a nuclear arsenal. And yet, while these seizures represent victories for law enforcement, they also stand as evidence of the massive failure of America’s War on Drugs.

And the detective readily acknowledges that this is just a fraction of the fentanyl coming into the city.

IN THE CORNER of a Mexican restaurant in Old Hickory one recent evening, a man sits over a margarita with a Scene reporter discussing drug culture, harm-reduction efforts and the rising death toll of fentanyl in Nashville. For him, it’s no abstract issue.

He’s lost seven people he knows to drug deaths this year, he says — three of them in Nashville in the past few months. He uses drugs too — cocaine every now and then, psychedelics, pot. He favors the legalization of drugs and the normalization of safe drug use, but he’s speaking on the condition of anonymity since those aren’t a reality yet.

Coming up in the punk scene and around

other subcultures, he was introduced to drugs but also to people who took harm reduction seriously. Now in his early 30s, he’s tried to spread those practices to people in his social and professional circles. He’s advocated for people in the bars where he’s worked to carry Narcan and thinks the kind of training course he’s taken in how to administer the medicine should be required in those sorts of workplaces. Some people react incredulously, he says, noting that they don’t do drugs.

“You definitely have friends who do,” he says. “We all do.”

He’s also tried to spread fentanyl test strips, but they’re expensive and can be hard to come by. He uses them sometimes to test drugs and has had drugs he would have used test positive for fentanyl. It scares him, he says, but he also confesses to being “reckless” on occasion.

“I’m definitely not always the safest person, but I try to be,” he says. “I usually don’t do random drugs. I try to get them from people [I know], but that’s still not safe, you know?”

Earlier this year, Oregon became the first state in the U.S. to decriminalize small amounts of most hard drugs. Policies like that, he believes, help destigmatize drug use and give governments more space to pursue policies that will keep people safe.

“I started doing harm reduction, but by no means am I like, ‘Don’t do drugs,’ ” he says. “I think smart drug use is better than being like ‘no drugs’ or whatever. I feel like educating people to do drugs smarter is the future. You can’t tell people no — they’re gonna do it. You can’t shame people — they’re gonna do it. They’re just gonna do it without telling you, and you’re gonna alienate them.”

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CONVERSATION WITH BILL ANDERSON 2:00 pm

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CRITICS’ PICKS W E E K L Y

Over the past two decades, Kaki King has made a great deal of solo guitar music that embraces unusual techniques and fascinating performative elements, and often tells stories without words. She’s figured out a way to involve pretty much every surface of the guitar in musical expression, including as part of a complex audiovisual presentation tied to her 2014 album The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body, which involved mapping projected video all over herself and the performance space.

In the wake of her 2020 album Modern Yesterdays, King has created a different kind of multidimensional program called SEI. Named for the Italian word for “six,” the piece involves choreography and performance on multiple guitars in conjunction with fellow guitarist Tamar Eisenman. The two interact with each other and move among a set of guitars propped on stands — sort of like Lou Reed’s Drones traveling installation exhibit, but without the amplifiers — playing with the notion of space and slowly unfolding a story using both dance and their instruments.

8 p.m. at City Winery, 609 Lafayette St.

CLASSICAL

STEPHEN TRAGESER [THE FUTURE IS NOW]

NEXT GENERATION OF CLASSICAL MUSICIANS

MUSIC

Nashville Symphony has long been a driving force in the development of young artists, thanks in large part to its Accelerando initiative. Launched in 2016, this intensive education program was created to help young musicians of ethnically diverse backgrounds prepare for opportunities at the collegiate and professional levels. Accelerando provides these students with a wide range of resources, including year-round instruction and mentorship, as well as performance opportunities and assistance in preparing for college applications and music school auditions. And this weekend, you can see two recent graduates of the Accelerando program — flutist Aalia Hanif and trombonist Bernard Ekwuazi. These promising young artists will be featured soloists in this special concert performance, with a program that includes François Borne’s Fantaisie Brillante (arranger: Reza Najfar); Lars-Erik Larsson’s Concertino for Trombone and String Orchestra; and Richard Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos Symphony-Suite (arranger: D.W. Ochoa).

Nov. 4-6 at the Schermerhorn, One Symphony Place AMY STUMPFL [TOUGH ENOUGH]

VERA BLOOM W/YEAR OF OCTOBER & LEILANI KILGORE

What’s interesting about Nashville singer, songwriter and guitarist Vera

T H I N G S

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D O

FRIDAY / 11.05 [BIG EASY]

SILVER SYNTHETIC W/ORNAMENT & RAYON CITY

Silver Synthetic is led by Chris Lyons of New Orleans garage-punks Bottomfeeders and Kunal Prakash, a longtime consiglieri (and spare guitarist) to JEFF the Brotherhood’s Orrall brothers. The Third Man signees dial back the hiss and fuzz of its members’ previous projects in favor of conversational dual-guitar action, steady motorik grooves and cool, calm introspection. Coming off appearances at Levitation in Austin, Texas, and Gonerfest in Memphis, the foursome — rounded out by Pete Campanelli on bass and Lyons’ fellow Bottomfeeder Lucas Bogner on drums — will at last unveil its COVID-delayed eponymous debut (in the can since 2019) on Friday. Expect to also hear two or three not-yet-released tunes — Lyons told me that much in a Q&A you can read on the Scene site. Locals Ornament and Rayon City open the Blue Room gig. 8 p.m. at Third Man Records, 623 Seventh Ave S. CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

MEDIEVAL BOLOGNA: ART FOR A UNIVERSITY CITY

SILVER SYNTHETIC

[NO PHONY BALONEY]

MEDIEVAL BOLOGNA: ART FOR A UNIVERSITY CITY

In my home office, where I now pretty much live, my laptop sits atop The Riverside Shakespeare, Second Edition. It’s the perfect height to bring my laptop level with my computer monitor. Although I’d much prefer a smaller book with larger print if I want to look up a passage, I have an emotional attachment to this tome. I so clearly remember the feeling of riding my Schwinn up to my liberal arts college on stately St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans,

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CUTTING FROM A CHOIRBOOK (ANTIPHONARY); EASTER SCENES: THE THREE MARIES AT THE TOMB WITH THE ANGEL OF THE RESURRECTION, AND THE RESURRECTED CHRIST APPEARING TO THE THREE MARIES (IN INITIAL A), NERIO

KAKI KING: SEI

MUSIC

[MAGIC FROM THE HAND]

O F

Bloom’s self-titled 2021 EP is how naturally it blends various rock genres. Bloom grew up in Seattle before attending Berklee College of Music, where she apparently didn’t unlearn the rock basics she favors on her EP. I hear echoes of Joan Jett in “Sharp Shooter” and “Bad Decisions,” but Bloom filters Rock 101 through grunge and late-’90s alternative sounds. Bloom’s efficient EP peaks with “Blue,” which isn’t the famed Joni Mitchell tune about the impossibility of meaningful relationships.

“Blue” has atmosphere — the simple chord progression comes dressed in textures that elevate it above standard rock fare. As well, Bloom comes across as a tough person who has thought about the complexities of authenticity. Also appearing on Thursday is Year of October, which plays wellconstructed post-Black Sabbath riff tunes on the band’s 2020 release Wastelands.

Rounding out the bill is blues-rock guitarist and singer Leilani Kilgore, who sounds like she’s listened to rock-blues guitarists like Freddie King and Stevie Ray Vaughan. 9 p.m. at The 5 Spot, 1006 Forrest Ave. EDD HURT

ART

DANCE

THURSDAY / 11.04

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CRITICS’ PICKS

ARLO McKINLEY

MUSIC

ERICA CICCARONE [DOWN TO THE BONE]

PHILLIP-MICHAEL SCALES ALBUM RELEASE

Phillip-Michael Scales — a Berklee graduate whose family’s relationship with B.B. King was so close that the late, great blues maestro referred to Scales as his nephew — has worked very hard to cultivate a distinctive musical expression that he calls “dive bar soul.” He has a penchant for big-voiced theatrical expressions that he describes in interviews as being inspired by indie rock. Scales also discusses how the blues began to interest him more as he’s grown older and found himself ready to tell stories about coping with the weight of history as a Black man and a Black artist in America, tied into songs about relationships and getting along on Earth. You can hear all of that at work in his debut full-length Sinner-Songwriter, released Oct. 29. (He also

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MUSIC

STEPHEN TRAGESER [VINDICATED]

DASHBOARD CONFESSIONAL

In the 20-plus years since the founding of Dashboard Confessional — that is, Chris Carrabba, his heart on his tattoo sleeves and a rotating cast of backing band members — the band has been through several phases. Though some readers may be too young to have experienced it or too old to have cared, Dashboard was a bona fide acoustic-emo phenomenon in the early to mid-Aughts thanks to hits like “Screaming Infidelities,” an iconic MTV Unplugged performance and, yes, a song on the Spider-Man 2 soundtrack. (No, not that Spider-Man, or that one … yeah that one.) The band was playing arenas. Then there was a somewhat more low-key period, when pop culture seemed to have moved on (although I have always quite liked 2007’s The Shade of Poison Trees). Then there was a period that, although it did include a new album, felt mostly fueled by the nostalgia that has brought many bands of the era and genre back to clubs. Now, on the other side of all that, is a chance to just enjoy the fact that this band and these songs have lasted this long. What better place than the Ryman and what better opener than Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace, an artist with her own catalog of songs tattooed on fans’ minds and, surely, some arms. Proof of full COVID-19 vaccination or a recent negative test is required for entry. 7:30 p.m. at the Ryman, 116 Fifth Ave. N. STEVEN HALE

SATURDAY / 11. 06 [PILL COMMUNICATION]

ARLO MCKINLEY

Arlo McKinley’s name might sound born of an Americana-artist word bank, but the 41-year-old tunesmith is the real deal. John Prine heard that authenticity in McKinley’s signature song “Bag of Pills,” making the southern Ohio native one of the final signings to his Oh Boy label before Prine’s passing in 2020. The rest of McKinley’s 2020 Oh Boy debut Die Midwestern is just as good — a taut, badass collection of songs born of the holler, honed in the clubs. For as much inspiration as McKinley’s drawn from his environs’ depressive aspects, he’s seeing a way out.

MUSIC

“The Midwest will always be home, but you get burnt out on a lot of what you see,” he told the Scene last summer. “There’s people who’ll fight me for saying that, but they’re delusional.” 8 p.m. at 3rd & Lindsley, 818 Third Ave. S. CHARLIE ZAILLIAN [BADU AS SHE WANTS TO BE]

ERYKAH BADU

Erykah Badu is, among many other things, a preternaturally gifted live performer. That alone would make her Saturday night show at Municipal Auditorium an unmissable event — a set list that should span her decades-long, highly decorated career is just icing on the cake.

This week, the multihyphenate artist will bring her Live From Badubotron show to Music City. The tour follows Badu’s virtual and interactive concert series, which she began online during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Badu’s most recent studio project is 2015’s But You Caint Use My Phone mixtape, though she did release a single, “Tempted,” in 2019. Special guests Goodie Mob, the famed Atlanta hip-hop collective that includes CeeLo Green, will join Badu as her opening act. 8 p.m. at Nashville Municipal Auditorium, 417 Fourth Ave. N. BRITTNEY MCKENNA MUSIC

released an EP with that name in 2018.) And on Friday, you can hear it in person when he celebrates with a show at The Basement; so far, the other performers haven’t been announced, but even if it ends up being Scales and his guitar, you’re in for a treat. 9 p.m. at The Basement, 1604 Eighth Ave. S.

MUSIC

the book wedged in the basket that flanked the rear tire, my mind soaring with ideas, my body sweating out a hangover. The privilege of this experience is not lost on me, but I still cherish the time when professors constantly affirmed that my ideas had value, and that a life of the mind was worth pursuing. I’m looking forward to tasting this milk and honey at the Frist Art Museum’s Medieval Bologna: Art for a University City. With manuscripts illuminated with silver and gold, paintings and sculptures, the exhibition illustrates how “medieval Bologna, with its porticoed streets, towers, communal buildings, main piazza, and mendicant churches, became a center for higher learning at the end of the Middle Ages.” Students from around Europe flocked to the city to attend the continent’s oldest university, creating a huge need for books. This brought about a revolution in the medieval book trade and a thriving market of scribes, illuminators and booksellers.

It was a heady time to be a scholar, and you can tap into that feeling with a slew of lectures and gallery talks offered by the Frist, including a series of Zoom lectures with Michael Norris, the former museum educator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Keep your eye on the museum’s event calendar for details. Nov. 5-Jan. 30 at the Frist Art Museum, 919 Broadway

development of ’70s jazz fusion. Besides being part of a magnificent Miles Davis ensemble, he also led several influential bands, most notably Circle and Return to Forever, and his lengthy list of compositions includes frequently performed numbers “Spain” and “500 Miles High.” Those and many other Corea tunes will be presented during trombonist Desmond Ng’s Chick Corea tribute show on Friday at the Nashville Jazz Workshop. Ng will lead a strong group — saxophonist Don Aliquo, guitarist Adam Davis, bassist Jonathan Wires and drummer Jordan Perlson. It’s an excellent opportunity to hear new versions of vintage tunes, and also celebrate a great jazz musician’s memorable contributions.

7:30 p.m. at the Nashville Jazz Workshop, 1012 Buchanan St. RON WYNN

MUSIC

PHILLIP-MICHAEL SCALES

[NARROW SPACE]

NARROW HEAD W/YOUNG GUV

“Sounds like a Deftones song title,” my friend and fellow Scene contributor Adam Gold accurately remarked before I even hit play on “Necrosis,” the downtuned opener to Narrow Head’s 2016 debut Satisfaction. Where that track would’ve

[VISITING COREA]

DESMOND NG: CHICK COREA TRIBUTE

Pianist, bandleader, percussionist and composer Chick Corea was a brilliant soloist and stalwart figure on the jazz scene from the early ’60s until his death in February. He was equally effective on acoustic or electric, and comfortable in every idiom from bop to avant-garde — though he also was a mainstay in the

ERYKAH BADU

NASHVILLE SCENE | NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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11/1/21 1:49 PM

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November 12 & 13

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STRINGS ON PARADE WITH JUN IWASAKI

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December 11

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THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 4 6:00PM

KEITH RYAN CARTWRIGHT

with MIKE LATTING, GLENN JACKSON, & ANDREW MARANISS on FACEBOOK LIVE Black Cowboys of Rodeo

PARNASSUS SUBSCRIPTION BOX CLUBS NOVEMBER SELECTIONS:

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 5 6:30PM

SAM QUINONES at PARNASSUS The Least of Us

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 8 6:00PM

ROBIN PREISS GLASSER

on FACEBOOK LIVE with KATIE VASILOPOULOS Grand Jeté and Me TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 9 7:00PM

LOUISE ERDRICH 6:30PM

MUSIC

on CROWDCAST with ANN PATCHETT The Sentence WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 10

LILY KING

at PARNASSUS with ANN PATCHETT Five Tuesdays in Winter 1:00PM - 3:00PM

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 11

SIGNING with GARY SLAUGHTER at PARNASSUS WW II POWs in America and Abroad

PARNASSUSBOOKS.NET/FIRSTEDITION-CLUBS FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 12

7:00PM

MICHAEL ERIC DYSON

on FACEBOOK LIVE with ANDREA BLACKMAN Entertaining Race 10:00AM

at MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. MAGNET HIGH SCHOOL

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@parnassusbooks @parnassusbooks1 @parnassusbooks

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 13

NPL LITERARY AWARD PUBLIC LECTURE with COLSON WHITEHEAD

made Chino & Co. proud, the Houston combo’s 2020 follow-up 12th House Rock upped the ante, adding dreaminess, color and velocity to already sturdy foundations.

The riff-tastic opener “Yer Song” is a shotsfired salvo on par with “Cherub Rock” from Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream; the chiming, ascending chord progression and soul-searching vocals of “Stuttering Stanley” recall the epic melancholia of Catherine Wheel’s Chrome; and the heartracing “Night Tryst” — a fraternal twin to “Winder,” from Hum’s cult-fave debut Electra 2000 — is a clarion call to grab a skateboard and find some excitement in your humdrum life. Each of those albums came out in 1993, which is around when Narrow Head frontman Jacob Duarte was born. Ouch. But since you’re already waiting for Deftones’ COVID-compromised Municipal date — pushed back for the umpteenth time to May 2022 — take a flyer on the pride of Sacto’s younger, hungrier sonic progeny. Also on the bill is Young Guv — a side project of Ben Cook, guitarist in Toronto’s post-everything hardcore punks Fucked Up. 8 p.m. at Mercy Lounge, One Cannery Row CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

3900 Hillsboro Pike Suite 14 Nashville, TN 37215 (615) 953-2243 Shop online at parnassusbooks.net

[EVANSVILLE]

LEMONHEADS

Onetime slacker-rock Adonis Evan Dando has not issued new material in 15 years. No matter. In 2019, supporting a modest covers album (Varshons II) just to get to tour, Dando’s Boston-based band handily packed out Exit/In. It was a short set, but it conjured the flannel-flying halcyon ’90s in the best ways. The shirt I bought that night, splashed with the artwork from Lemonheads’ ’92 breakthrough It’s a Shame About Ray, was my go-to festivalwear that summer — I haven’t gotten more frequent compliments on an article of clothing, before or since. This time around, Dando’s set list suggests an emphasis on 1990s pre-fame, Dino Jr.-esque Lovey, which had its 30th birthday during COVID, and ’96 fan-favorite Car Button Cloth, which kicked off with “If I Could Talk I’d Tell You” and its casual genocide-referencing couplet “Khmer Rouge, je ne sais quoi /

Your place or Mein Kampf?” and peaked with “The Outdoor Type,” a song that puts into words and music why, as a city kid, no, I will not come on your camping trip: “God bless the great indoors.” Amen. 8 p.m. at The Basement East, 917 Woodland St. CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

SUNDAY / 11.07 MUSIC

FREE PARKING!

East Nashville | Wed-Mon (closed Tues) 615.262.2717 | thewildcow.com

[NIGHTS OFF LOWER BROADWAY]

HALFNOISE ALBUM RELEASE FEAT. LOUIS PRINCE & ELKE

Producer, songwriter and multiinstrumentalist Zac Farro has been extremely busy over the past half-decade.

He returned to Paramore after a few years away as the band negotiated a tight left turn into dance pop for 2017’s After Laughter, and helped friend and phenomenal songwriter Becca Mancari bring her 2020 album The Greatest Part to life. He’s also been slowly but surely building up the catalog of his multifaceted enterprise Congrats Records and releasing EPs and singles from his solo project HalfNoise. Now HalfNoise is ready to release its first full-length LP. Motif, a collection of love songs steeped in lush ’70s pop — think a good helping of pre-disco Bee Gees, a dash of ELO and a little pinch of 10cc — is out Friday, and to celebrate, Farro is headed to The Basement East on Sunday. A couple of fellow devotees of shape-shifting pop will join him: Don’t miss out on Louis Prince, aka Jake McMullen, and Elke, aka Farro’s partner and labelmate Kayla Graninger, who both have malleable voices and a knack for danceable grooves.

8 p.m. at The Basement East, 917 Woodland St. STEPHEN TRAGESER MUSIC

To Order Call 615-321-8889

[LYNN’S IN]

LERA LYNN W/ANDREW COMBS

Lera Lynn is fresh off the release of the deluxe edition of 2020’s On My Own, which she expanded upon with a re-release earlier this year. Lynn is known for her singular brand of Americana noir, which gained especially widespread acclaim when several of her songs were used on the similarly gritty and dark HBO show

NASHVILLE SCENE | NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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11/1/21 1:49 PM

NOVEMBER 7 & 8

RUSTON KELLY

WITH SPECIAL GUESTS TIM ‘TK’ KELLY (11/7)

& MARGARET GLASPY (11/8)

NOVEMBER 12 & 13

ANDERSON EAST

WITH SPECIAL GUEST FOY VANCE APRIL 16

MAT KEARNEY

ON SALE FRIDAY AT 10 AM

DOWNTOWN

Saturday, November 6

Thursday, December 2

SONGWRITER SESSION

LIVE IN CONCERT

Jamie Floyd

Carly Pearce

NOON – 12:45 pm

7:30 pm

•

FORD THEATER

•

CMA THEATER

•

SOLD OUT

Saturday, November 13

Thursday and Saturday, December 9 and 11

BLUEGRASS AND BEYOND

LIVE IN CONCERT

Wil Maring and Robert Bowlin 11:00 am

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BLUEGRASS AND BEYOND

Kenny and Amanda Smith 1:00 pm

•

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Saturday, November 13 BLUEGRASS AND BEYOND

Jim Hurst 3:00 pm

•

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LIVE AT THE OPRY HOUSE

BERT KREISCHER

Keb’ Mo’ 7:30 pm

•

CMA THEATER

Saturday, December 11 SONGWRITER SESSION

Saturday, November 13

APRIL 21

Steve Dean and Bill Whyte NOON – 12:45 pm

•

FORD THEATER

Friday, December 17

APRIL 29

WALKER HAYES

WITH SPECIAL GUEST MACKENZIE PORTER ON SALE FRIDAY AT 10 AM

LIVE IN CONCERT

JUNE 24

The Soul of Christmas 7:30 pm • CMA THEATER

KRAFTWERK

Mike Farris Sings!

ON SALE FRIDAY AT 10 AM

Friday and Saturday, November 26 and 27 FAMILY PROGRAM

String City

Nashville’s Tradition of Music and Puppetry 10:00 am and 11:30 am

•

FORD THEATER

Check our calendar for a full schedule of upcoming programs and events.

JULY 6

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917 Woodland Street Nashville, TN 37206 thebasementnashville.com

CRITICS’ PICKS True Detective in 2015. Lynn has amassed a formidable catalog in the years since, with On My Own and its predecessor, 2016’s Resistor, receiving significant praise. Ace songwriter and vocalist Andrew Combs will join her. Combs will draw from his most recent album, 2019’s Ideal Man — and may even drop in a new tune or two as well. 8 p.m. at 3rd & Lindsley, 818 Third Ave. S. BRITTNEY MCKENNA

KOLBY COOPER // NOV 12 & 13 FT. PALMER ANTHONY & FT. COREY KENT

TUESDAY / 11.09 BOOKS

THE LAST WALTZ TRIBUTE // NOV 6

AFTER MIDTOWN // NOV 15 W/ DYLAN MARLOWE

CHLOE MORIONDO // NOV 16 W/ KID SISTR & SYDNEY ROSE

JOHN MARK MCMILLAN // NOV 17

HAYES CARLL // NOV 18

W/ THE GRAY HAVENS & ANTOINE BRADFORD

[GHOSTED]

LOUISE ERDRICH IN CONVERSATION WITH ANN PATCHETT

Fresh off her Pulitzer Prize for The Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich is back in Nashville (virtually) to celebrate her new novel The Sentence. Erdrich, who owns Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, sets the novel in an independent bookstore in the same city, so there’s plenty of observational humor. (“Small bookstores have the romance of doomed intimate spaces about to be erased by unfettered capitalism,” The Sentence’s bookseller narrator,

W/ CAROLINE SPENCE

Upcoming shows nov 4 nov 5 nov 6 nov 7 nov 8 nov 9 Nov 10 NOV 11 Nov 12 Nov 13 Nov 14 Nov 15 Nov 16 Nov 17 nov 18 nov 20 nov 23 nov 24

susto w/hotel fiction & Paul Whitacre lucie silvas ft. blessing offor & special guests The last waltz tribute halfnoise w/louis prince & elke the lemonheads w/hey rocco ayron jones w/hounds JP Saxe w/victoria canal SOLD OUT! Bre kennedy w/val hoyt & stephen sanchez Kolby Cooper ft. palmer anthony Kolby Cooper ft. corey kent MisterWives w/frances forever after midtown w/dylan marlowe Chloe Moriondo w/kid sistr & sydney rose John Mark McMillan w/the gray havens & antoine bradford hayes carll w/caroline spence andy frasco & the u.n. w/nick gerlach's cult conference post animal & ron gallo w/why bonnie

Powerslave: an iron maiden tribute

w/symptom of the universe: a Black sabbath tribute

nov 26

bendigo fletcher w/cece coakley

nov 27 nov 28 nov 29 nov 30

Guilty pleasures starbenders, olivia jean, & gyasi pi'erre bourne giovannie & the hired guns & dylan wheeler read southall band w/tanner usery levi hummon & roman alexander The Brook & The Bluff sold out!

The Brook & The Bluff w/lindsey lomis sold out!

Jeff Rosenstock w/slaughter beach, dog

dec1 dec 2 Dec 3 Dec 4 Dec 5

& abby hamilton

& oceanator

dec 7 dec 8 dec 9

delta rae w/frances cone Jason boland & the stragglers brittney spencer w/sam williams

dec 10 Dec 12 Dec 14 Dec 16

& camille parker

armor for sleep Julian Lage POUYA w/jasiah, kxllswxtch & lu baby sold out! katie pruitt w/ Tré burt

Tookie, muses.) Unluckily for Tookie, who is Ojibwe, the store is being haunted by her most annoying former customer, a “very persistent wannabe” indigenous woman. The Sentence begins on All Souls’ Day 2019 and ends on All Souls’ Day 2020, encompassing the fitful year scarred by George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis.

Kirkus Reviews calls it “a novel that reckons with ghosts — of both specific people and also the shadows resulting from America’s violent, dark habits.” Erdrich will be joined by Ann Patchett, whose interviews never fail to surprise me in the most pleasant of ways. Register before the event at parnasussbooks.net. 7 p.m. online via the Parnassus Books Facebook Page ERICA CICCARONE

WEDNESDAY / 11.10 MUSIC

thebasementeast basementeast thebasementeast

[CASHVILLIANS]

HEAL HOP FEAT. HERU HERU, NAKESSA FIELDS & MORE

Local rap trio Heru Heru is on a mission to keep the spirit and the sound of Golden Era hip-hop alive. The Golden Era usually refers to a period in the late ’80s and early ’90s when the genre grew in all sorts of ways, from new subgenres to new levels of exposure and record sales. Most associated with that timeframe are dusty samples and heavy boom-bap, and Heru Heru brings the noise on that front. The group also brings dense bars tackling everything from the impact of politics and capitalism on everyday people to bragging battle lines. The two-MCs-one-producer outfit will perform in the wake of its most recent release, The Legacy, at an event called Heal Hop, which is also what the group calls its lyrical throwback style of rap. Also on the showbill are singer-songwriter and Heru Heru-collaborator Nakessa Fields, DJ Top Notch and the Nashville Monday Night Jazz Band. 8 p.m. at The East Room, 2412 Gallatin Ave. ALEJANDRO RAMIREZ

HERU HERU

WHEELWRIGHT // NOV 12 & NOV 13

ESSY // NOV 6

FORMERLY JARED AND THE MILL

W/ GATTON

nov 4 nov 5 nov 6 nov 7 nov 8 nov 8 nov 9 Nov 10 Nov 10 Nov 11

W/ NAT BERGMAN & W/ KITTY COEN & BEAU TURRNETINE

UPCOMING SHOWS

waker w/crocodyle, peyton gilliland, & derik hultquist

philip michael scales essy w/gatton Danilo lopez w/ matt farley project & sophie and the broken things the silks w/ zach schmidt (7 PM) lombardy w/ watson maack (9 PM)

the imaginaries jeverson w/trey schafer (7 PM) jay allen, annalisa rose, and discofox (9 PM) the wooks

Nov 12 Nov 12 Nov 13 Nov 13 Nov 14 nov 15 nov 17 nov 17 nov 19 nov 20

Izzy heltai (7 PM) Wheelwright (Formerly jared & the mill) w/nat bergman (9 PM) dylan hartigan w/katie ruvane, maggie rose, them vibes, & more!

wheelwright w/kitty coen & beau turrentine nicholas jamerson & grayson jenkins toth w/love montage tristan bushman & evan bartels (7 PM) lynagh, matt koziol, and allie dunn (9 PM) THe deltaz & kristina murray the smokeshows, vera bloom, and badculture

1604 8th Ave S Nashville, TN 37203 thebasementnash 20

thebasementnash

thebasementnash

NASHVILLE SCENE | NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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11/1/21 2:22 PM

LIVE MUSIC | URBAN WINERY | RESTAURANT | BAR | PRIVATE EVENTS

11.04

11.07

Gaelic Storm

Kaki King’s SEI

We Missed You Tour

11.08

11.09

San Fermin

An Evening with

Damien Escobar

Voices Tour with Pearla

11.10 Woofstock at the Winery

11.11

Bob Schneider

ft. Emmylou Harris with Special Guest Buddy Miller

11.7

MUSIC ON THE MOVE HOSTED BY ERIN MCLENDON & THE HELLCATS IN THE LOUNGE

11.13

SAM BUSH

11.14

THE MAGNETIC FIELDS WITH CHRISTIAN LEE HUTSON

11.15 11.19 11.20

11.26

SOUL FOOD POETRY CAFE BLACK FRIDAY EDITION FEAT. NECI, DICHOTOMY, AND S-WRAP & RASHAD THAPOET!

11.27

CHRIS KNIGHT PRESENTED BY WMOT

SOLD OUT

11.28

NASHVILLE BEATLES BRUNCH FT. FOREVER ABBEY ROAD

DENNIS QUAID LIVE

11.29

WOOFSTOCK AT THE WINERY FT. EMMYLOU HARRIS & FRIENDS

12.1

A WINTER’S NIGHT WITH DEVOTCHKA WITH MILQUETOAST & CO.

12.5

JODY NARDONE TRIO - 6TH ANNUAL “A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS” - A TRIBUE TO VINCE GUARALDI

12.6

STREET CORNER SYMPHONY CHRISTMAS SHOW

12.7

MIKE PHILLIPS IN THE LOUNGE

ERIC ROBERSON SOLD OUT

THE HEATHER MCDONALD EXPERIENCE: STAND UP COMEDY AND JUICY SCOOP LOW TICKET ALERT

11.21

WE HATE MOVIES PODCAST

11.23

THE QUEBE SISTERS IN THE LOUNGE

nov 10

Pie & Wine Tasting

g! in t o v r o f s k n a Th

besetsy ch e bi t e s bessyt ch e e be e r n am e s Taste what you’re missing!

TWO LOCATIONS

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609 LAFAYETTE ST. NASHVILLE, TN 37203, NASHVILLE, TN 37203 @CITYWINERYNSH / CITYWINERY.COM / 615.324.1033

rockndoughpizza.com nashvillescene.com | NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 10, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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S I P W H I L E YO U S H O P A N D E N J OY C R A F T B R E W S A N D C R A F T C O C K TA I L S F R O M

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nashvillescene.com | NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 10, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

FOOD AND DRINK

KARAN SINGH AND KIRANJIT KAUR

ON THE ROAD AGAIN Punjabi Dhaba in Kingston Springs offers a taste of home to Sikh truck drivers

BY NICOLE HAMILTON

I

t’s 9 a.m. on a Sunday, and Punjabi Dhaba in Kingston Springs has already been open for an hour. The restaurant is serving sleepy-eyed truck drivers who shuffle in from the truck stop across the street for breakfast parathas PUNJABI DHABA and a curry to go be132 PETRO ROAD, fore another day on KINGSTON SPRINGS the road.

In India, roadside diners like these are known as dhabas, and while they’re dotted along the highway across the U.S., they’re especially common in the Punjab region of Northern India. In 2019, brothers Karan and James Singh opened Punjabi Dhaba about 20 miles west of downtown Nashville to serve the growing number of truck drivers in the U.S. from the Sikh community.

Here in the U.S., dhabas are popping up on popular trucking routes, especially along I-40. There’s Taste of India, located in the back of a convenience store at an old gas

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station in San Jon, N.M., and Spicy Bite in Milan, N.M. The latter features a massive lunch buffet with plenty of five-star reviews on Yelp from hungry travelers (semi and SUV drivers alike).

Continue east on I-40 beyond Amarillo and you’ll eventually hit an area where there’s not much on the horizon. That is, aside from a billboard for Truck Stop 40 Punjabi Restaurant towering over a stark stretch of highway between Texas and Oklahoma, advertising fresh food in the Hindi language.

Punjabi Dhaba’s first location was just off I-40 in the 101 Travel Plaza in Cedar Grove, Tenn. Word tends to travel fast within the Sikh trucking community, and business at the restaurant grew quickly and stayed steady. But the COVID-19 pandemic hit the trucking industry hard, and the Singh brothers decided to close the restaurant — although James Singh knew the closing wouldn’t be permanent.

“The pandemic just gave us a chance to shift our focus,” James says, pointing out that most dhabas are located inside a gas station or truck stop. “We wanted our restaurant to serve truck drivers, but also be something that people locally would want to visit.”

In March of this year, the Singhs opened Punjabi Dhaba at its current location in Kingston Springs. Now located off I-40’s

Exit 188 on Petro Road, the restaurant sits directly across the street from a mammoth Petro truck stop. And while the old location was as no-frills as you’d expect a truck stop diner to be, the new space greets roadweary truckers and Kingston Springs locals with chandeliers and colorful Christmas lights. The manufactured log cabin gives strong Tennessee country vibes, while the movies played on the television above the door are strictly Bollywood.

Punjabi Dhaba’s menu got an upgrade with the move as well. Now it’s more extensive, fulfilling James and Karan’s goal of catering to both truck drivers and locals — plus folks who make the drive from places like Bellevue for popular dishes like chicken tikka masala. Customers order at the register, and everything is made to order. Members of the Singh family, including Karan’s wife Kiranjit Kaur, work behind the register or in the large open kitchen while James and Karan make the rounds out front, talking to customers as they wait for their food.

Truck driver Jan Pal Singh visited Punjabi Dhaba on a recent Sunday morning to pick up potato- and onion-filled parathas and chai before heading to Florida. “I come here because everything is freshly made and healthy,” he says. “I don’t eat fast food.”

Abdi Ibrahim, a Texas-based driver, doesn’t eat fast food either. Instead, he stops at as many dhabas as he can along

his east-to-west route, including Punjabi Dhaba. “Nothing here is processed,” says Ibrahim while awaiting his order before a drive to Virginia. “Most truck stops only have fast-food options, and that’s a problem because a lot of truck drivers have health issues like diabetes, obesity and high cholesterol.”

Ibrahim is one of a growing number of truck drivers from East Africa and says that another reason he stops at dhabas is for food that’s very close — and in some ways the same — to what he’d eat back home in Somalia. “It’s the same spices,” he says. “I can call [Punjabi Dhaba] up and they can make me anything. They know what I like.”

On most days — between the morning rush of feeding time-pressed truckers and before drivers stop in for dinner and settle in across the street for their required 10hour rest (known as a “reset”) — Punjabi Dhaba is open for those who want to dine in for lunch or dinner.

That’s usually when the parking lot fills up with customers who roll in with something smaller than a semi. Inside, truck drivers and locals — and perhaps some road-trippers making their way across Route 66 — wait for homemade Indian food.

“We have a lot of customers who stop here whenever they’re on the road,” says James.

“Our regulars come from everywhere.”

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

NASHVILLE SCENE | NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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11/1/21 1:51 PM

FOOD AND DRINK

VEG OUT

House of Cards — Vegan Surf and Turf The fall menu at this speakeasy-style downtown restaurant is full of meatless surprises

S

ometimes vegans and vegetarians want to go out with their friends and family to a clubby, steakhouse-like dinner — where the lights are low, jazz music plays, and there’s a dress code. That usually means orHOUSE OF CARDS dering a collection 119 THIRD AVE. S. of sides to assemble HOCNASHVILLE.COM a meat-free meal on the fly. But it doesn’t have to.

House of Cards — the speakeasy-style restaurant known for its nightly magic shows and hearty steaks — recently introduced its fall menu, and it is full of meatless surprises. The menu’s pages reveal dishes that are intentionally crafted for people who don’t eat meat. The vegan surfand-turf ($38) in particular is a delight, made with marinated portobello caps,

haricots verts, roasted tomatoes, oyster mushrooms and pearl onions, all topped with a vegan “demi-glace.” The dish is plated like the others at the table, so it feels special and substantial. The green beans are hearty enough that you won’t need to order other sides, but there are certainly tasty options, including the asparagus and the garlic-roasted broccolini.

Cauliflower steak ($38) is an increasingly common vegetarian dish, and House of Cards’ kitchen makes a worthy contender with olive tapenade. Start the meal off with the beet-and-goat-cheese croquettes with spiced green tahini ($20).

Meatless dishes are clearly marked vegan or vegetarian. (Though if you’re older than 40, you might need the handy provided flashlight to read the menu … but that’s a different issue.) Dare I say, it all feels like magic? MARGARET LITTMAN

nashvillescene.com | NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 10, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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11/1/21 1:51 PM

ART

CRAWL SPACE: NOVEMBER 2021

November’s photography-heavy art happenings are cooking up plenty to be thankful for

“UNTITLED 30,” PHILIP HOLSINGER

BY JOE NOLAN

SOPO: A JOURNEY HOME AT CHAUVET

T

he December crawl will technically be a fall crawl, but we all know that once we cross over the turkey-gravy Rubicon we’ll all be walking in a winter wonderland of the mind, the calendar be damned. If we count November’s First Saturday Art Crawl as the final crawl of the fall, it seems that Nashville’s autumn art season has saved the best for last. We’re not exaggerating when we say that November is bringing the best roster of openings and happenings we’ve seen all year.

casus Mountains in the republic of Georgia.

Holsinger lenses white herding dogs blending into blizzards, gnarly trees clinging to jagged mountain sides, and the cloudlike clumps of white sheep herds moving and morphing across hard, jagged landscapes.

Holsinger’s use of black-and-white highlights the extremities of the setting, and his best images manage to capture both natural brutality and natural beauty in a crucible of intense isolation. The opening reception will take place from 6 to 9 p.m. at Chauvet on Saturday night.

EAST NASHVILLE

EDGEHILL

Nuveen Barwari opened Gul Barin at The Red Arrow Gallery on Nov. 2, and the gallery will

host an opening reception for the artist this Saturday night. Barwari grew up in Nashville’s Kurdish community, and “gul barin” is Kurdish for “the state of being showered with flowers.” Barwari works in a variety of media to explore her experiences as a woman with one foot in traditional Kurdish culture and the other in American contemporary art and pop culture. The artist herself is bright and hilarious, and it’s no surprise that her best works use humor and clever combinations of materials to translate her sometimes contradictory and mournful intercultural experiences into expressions that get at universal truths about our shared human experience.

If you’re looking for a jazzy way to kick off or wind down your creative wanderings on Saturday night, look no further than We Stand.

We Love. We Play. We Dance. at the W.O. Smith Music School from 5 to 9 p.m. This concert/art exhibition features celebrated trumpeter Rod McGaha’s jazz quintet performing alongside a display of McGaha’s own jazz-centric photography. McGaha’s images and new compositions focus on African American blues, jazz and gospel music to convey a message of joy and unity as our community emerges — hopefully — from this time of despairing and distancing. As of this writing, Nashville’s seven-day average for new COVID-19 cases is steadily decreasing after nearly breaking the 1,000 mark in September. And this trend definitely makes us feel like dancing.

DOWNTOWN

WEDGEWOOD-HOUSTON

We’d love to see more photography galleries in Nashville, but at least we’ll be getting plenty of creative snaps at this month’s crawl. Sopo: A Journey Home documents photojournalist Philip Holsinger’s three expeditions with the nomadic Tusheti shepherds on their 155-mile migration through the Cau-

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Adam Sings in the Timber brings his vibrant documenting of contemporary Native American culture to Coop on Saturday night.

The Apsáalooke (Crow) photographer was born in Montana and is currently based in Berkeley, Calif. His intrepid photojournalism captures traditional Native events

and foodways, activism and even a type of creative placemaking he refers to as the “indigenizing” of colonized spaces. That said, form outweighs content in art, and it’s the vibrant colors, emotional expressions and lively compositions in this exhibition that will move gallerygoers to look into the deeper themes in this display.

We gave Caroline Allison’s A History of Snow a Best of Nashville nod in 2020, and the photographer’s latest display at Zeitgeist expands her explorations of environmental themes in a display that blurs the strange and the serene.

Allison’s work once focused on documenting idiosyncratic interiors in unique spaces, but since she’s taken her camera outdoors her images have become much more abstract and compellingly mysterious.

Allison shoots on film using a large format 4-by-5 field camera, and she manipulates her images of oceans, moonrises, rivers and trees in-camera, sans Photoshop. She also uses cyanotype prints to capture dewy spiderwebs and to record the light leaking through the splat of exploded snowballs. It’s all gorgeous stuff, and we couldn’t be more excited to see Allison continuing to broaden this beautiful body of work in Behind the Moon. Zeitgeist will host an opening reception on Saturday from noon to 6 p.m., and Allison will be in attendance after 4 p.m.

Abstract painter Yuri Figueroa opens Repercussion at Channel to Channel on Saturday night. Figueroa’s show puts me back in the 1990s with its references to chaos theory, which posits that random-seeming systems and forms often hide intricate repeating and interconnected patterns. Figueroa has worked with pens, ink, paint and pencil — he’s even created displays of painted guitars. I’ve only seen one image from this show, but you can expect two of the elements that consistently inform Figueroa’s practice: restless curiosity and relentless combinations of color.

NORTH NASHVILLE

If you just can’t wait to get crawling this month, Elephant Gallery will open To Get to the Other Side: Death and Time Travel on Friday night. Themes can often make group shows limited and ineffectual, but Elephant’s themed exhibitions are always defined loosely enough to allow for inspired takes and outlandish asides. Of course, death is a perennial theme in art, but the time-travel pairing adds a new skin to the old ceremony of paintings of bloody martyred saints, abstract homages to lost lovers, and statues dedicated to stone-faced fallen soldiers.

This exploration of the afterlife and extratemporal experience includes work by more than 50 artists from around the globe in a broad range of mediums. Keep your eyes peeled for some of our local faves, including Benji Anderson, Omari Booker, Lindsy Davis, Devin Drake, Brady Haston and Christine Rogers.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

FUTURE’S SO BRIGHT

An introduction to the artists in the Scene’s Futurephilia show — art that fantasizes about the future

BY LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

I

t’s difficult to dislodge sex from science fiction in art — consider the horny surrealism of Salvador Dalí and Man Ray, or the sensual Afrofuturist visions of Chris Ofili and Juliana Huxtable. Especially in the wake of a devastating global disaster, the pull toward sci-fi and futuregazing can be extremely seductive. That’s the premise behind Futurephilia, the third installment in the Scene’s Adult Contemporary series of art exhibitions, which I FUTUREPHILIA: SEX AND curate. The exhibit, SCIENCE FICTION IN which opens Nov. 4 at CONTEMPORARY ART NOV. 4-28 AT MAIN STREET East Nashville’s Main Street Gallery, features GALLERY, 625 MAIN ST. 13 artists whose work involves fantasizing about the future.

Tennessee-based artist Benjy Russell has long incorporated ideas of science fiction and sex into his photography. In fact, Russell’s photographs in the exhibition are taken from various points in his career, and each fits hand-in-glove with Futurephilia’s themes. His artist’s statement includes a line that could stand in for the exhibition’s mission statement: “By creating a fictionalized version of the future we desire, we take the first step toward its existence.”

Chicago-based artist Dutes Miller’s paintings and sculptures share a similar vision: to utilize queer sex-positivity as a form of resistance against the dominant culture. Miller’s work includes futuristic glory holes — adorned with tendrils of synthetic hair, twine and horns — that are like props from a forgotten Cronenberg film.

The paintings of Nashville-based artist David Onri Anderson often include sexual elements — an apple core or a banana can take on decidedly carnal symbolism — and those are even more evident in his figurative work. His painting “Mosaiah, Diamond Being” depicts a monumental celestial goddess, all crystals and rainbow LSD tracers. And while legendary painter Judith Linhares doesn’t sexualize the trio of wild women in her 2006 painting “Star-Light,” the naked figures gaze at the moon in the sky like they know something we don’t. Mexico City-based artist Carlos Rodriguez takes a more literal view of lunar infatuation — his round-edged male figure, a recurring motif in his work, embraces the moon like a lover.

Dutch artist Anton van Dalen’s two drawings, both part of a 1983 series called Science Fiction, depict robots with cannons for breasts gliding past planets and commercial logos in space. A similar narrative can be seen in Nashville-based painter and longtime TSU professor Samuel Dunson’s diptych, which was painted specifically for this show.

Both the wallpaper and carpet by New Yorkbased artist Liz Collins were originally part of the New Museum’s 2017 exhibition Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon. Both works are based on a grid of film stills from the 1982 cult film Liquid Sky. At the moment a character experiences euphoria, brought on by either sex or drugs, the special effects ramp up to create a kind of visual equivalent of slurred speech — the image freezes, then quickly morphs into abstract shapes in DayGlo colors followed by a black screen.

NASHVILLE SCENE | NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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11/1/21 4:06 PM

ART

Adult

ART BY RAFAEL SANTIAGO

“MOON,” CARLOS RODRIGUEZ

Contemporary

“HEY BABY, I LOVE YOU,” FRANCES WAITE

PRESENTED BY

The triptych of self-portraits by U.K.-based artist Siena Barnes follows a similar color-filled abstraction, and is based on the artist’s research into the shadow side of the feminine through sacro-sexual archetypes.

New collages from New York-based artist James Gallagher place figures on top of images of wires that recall science-fiction stories and the human nervous system, using scraps of paper to build bodies that seem at once intimate and anonymous. Fellow New Yorker Rafael Santiago is also a collage artist, but his works appropriate ready-made images of graphic sex from vintage porn magazines. By layering them over and under digitally altered floral photography, he creates a new narrative that invokes everything from biblical mythology to the “Silence=Death” posters of the ACT UP movement.

Philadelphia-based artist Jonathan Lyndon Chase chose portraits that showcase the otherworldly influence of queer Afrofuturist icons Kevin Aviance and Abdu Ali. Frances Waite’s drawings take a darker but no less erotic perspective. Her intricately rendered works on paper imagine what she’s called horny postapocalyptic meltdowns, but there’s always an undercurrent of humor. The title of one drawing would have made a great Futurephilia subtitle: “Finally Found My Kink: The Looming Threat of Human Extinction.”

There are elements of the technosexual, the cosmic, the Afrofuturist and the postapocalyptic — but whether utopian or dystopian, the futures that Futurephilia envisions are filled with provocative ideas and great sex. We have something to live for after all.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

FUTUREPHILIA SEX AND SCIENCE FICTION IN CONTEMPORARY ART

NOVEMBER 4-28 MAIN STREET GALLERY 625 MAIN ST., NASHVILLE Curated by Laura Hutson Hunter

ADULTCONTEMPORARYART.COM nashvillescene.com | NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 10, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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11/1/21 4:07 PM

BOOKS

HARM REDUCTION Sam Quinones’ The Least of Us makes a compelling case for our survival

BY ERICA CICCARONE

J

ournalist Sam Quinones’ 2015 book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic laid bare how enterprising Mexican drug dealers and greedy pharmaceutical companies converged with the economic THE LEAST OF US: TRUE decline of American TALES OF AMERICA AND HOPE IN THE TIME OF towns to create what FENTANYL AND METH is perhaps the most

BY SAM QUINONES BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING staggering tragedy of our time. In that 434 PAGES, $28 book, he shows how QUINONES WILL DISCUSS companies like PurTHE LEAST OF US: TRUE due Pharma created TALES OF AMERICA generations of adAND HOPE IN THE TIME OF FENTANYL AND dicts and a demand METH 6:30 P.M. FRIDAY, for drugs unlike NOV. 5, AT PARNASSUS anything the country BOOKS. REGISTER AT had ever seen. In his PARNASSUSBOOKS.NET. new book, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth, Quinones finds that traffickers and dealers have filled that need with synthetic fentanyl — a substance far more dangerous and deadly than heroin — and a new, cheaper form of crystal meth that causes a shockingly steep deterioration of users’ mental health. Quinones describes this as “a time when drug traffickers act like corporations and corporations like drug traffickers,” and this book is nearly as harrowing as Dreamland. But there’s something more here: community, recovery and hope.

Neighbors band together to provide pepperoni rolls and shelter to the homeless meth addicts of Clarksburg, W. Va. A county drug court becomes a place where addicts at last find and use the tools of recovery. A man who hasn’t left his Muncie, Ind., neighborhood for decades keeps a community center running long after the city closes it. A sheriff employs a recovering addict whom everyone in town deems hopeless.

Can these small acts save us? Quinones — a visiting writer-in-residence in the Medicine, Health, and Society department at Vanderbilt University — makes a moving case for our survival. He answered questions via email.

Briefly, can you describe for our readers how fentanyl came to dominate street drugs? After Mexican traffickers figured out we were busy creating a big new population of opioid addicts with wanton prescribing of narcotic pain pills, it was only a matter of time before they discovered “synthetic heroin” — fentanyl. How that first happened is the story I tell early in the book. But fentanyl made business sense from the point of view of dealers/traffickers. You don’t need land to produce it, or seasons, no weather or irrigation, no farmers. You collapse the supply chain, reduce supply chain costs, and it’s easier to smuggle because it’s so potent and, of course, so immensely profitable. Fentanyl, cheap and made year-round in such quantities, has outcompeted heroin, which is

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fading and likely won’t exist in a few years in the U.S. Because it’s so plentiful, fentanyl is used by dealers like salt on food — it’s a cheap way of boosting whatever else you’re selling, like coke or meth or heroin. It’s also a way of creating an opioid addict from a customer who occasionally bought coke or meth from you. Once addicted to fentanyl, she has to buy every day to keep the dope sickness away. So it makes business sense from a street-dealing perspective to add fentanyl to everything.

These towns are also characters in a way. They have narrative arcs of their own. Together they create a portrait of America that is nuanced and pluralistic — but also united in struggle. What surprised you when reporting and researching this book? Yes, towns and neighborhoods can amount to character. What I suppose surprised me was that much more unites us than divides us. It sounds so trite, I know.

But so does the idea that we need to return to community rebuilding and repair as a defense against drug addiction. Trite doesn’t mean it’s not true. If we’re willing to look beyond cable TV news (which we do not have in our house) and social media, QAnon and cancel culture, and all the rest, we’ll see it. Generally, if we’re willing to meet each other in more personal ways, we’ll find the things that we have in common — common sense, for one.

Connected to that is the surprising idea that Americans are daily involved in the kind of unnoticed work — small steps, nonsexy daily work — that can be a bulwark against the worst forces out there.

That’s why I set out in The Least of Us to find these stories — of Americans in the quietest ways involved in community repair, of looking out for the most vulnerable, for the least of us. Not to give a prescription for how counties might battle these scourges we face, but rather to suggest an attitude — a DIY, don’t-ask-for-permission-or-credit, just-do-the-work attitude. I was very into punk rock in my younger years, promoted punk shows, etc. Those attitudes are what I admired about the music, and they certainly shaped my journalism career. So you could say that what surprised me most about America at its roots is, despite how corporatized our culture has become, how punk rock it still can be.

The Least of Us describes doctors over-prescribing OxyContin here in Tennessee. I was surprised to learn that, for several years, our state tallied more opioid prescriptions every year than it had people.

What made Tennessee a target of Purdue Pharma and drug traffickers?

Part of it is that the companies identified regions where doctors already prescribed a lot, then targeted those doctors. They had that data. That’s why Appalachia and the Rust Belt were where this started. Folks were already turning to doctors for help with economic as well as physical pain. Plus, turns out that the longer you keep folks on

pain pills at the outset, the greater chance they’ll be on those pills five years later — the companies had that data too. These companies, Purdue especially, flooded these zones — Tennessee among them — with salespeople, inundating doctors.

As the idea was accepted that narcotic painkillers, derived from the opium poppy, were nonaddictive for pain patients, of course the scourge spread to better-off areas, suburbs and big cities, because doctors there too began prescribing these pills in ever-growing numbers. To Nashville and Knoxville, etc. So Tennessee had both sides — rural and urban.

Then, too, there was just the feeling for so long that opioids were good for almost anything. Some doctors grew lazy — reaching for narcotic painkillers regardless of the patient’s problem. I just met a woman in East Tennessee who’s been addicted to opioids for 20 years, with horrific consequences. All that began, she says, with a prescription for Vicodin that a doctor gave her for a foot rash — an itch, in other words. Unbelievable.

Finally, though, once you forge a consumer base of people addicted and going to the street for their drugs, the trafficking world will figure it out. In Dreamland, I wrote about a town in Mexico where young men came to the U.S. to sell black-tar heroin like pizza, with their own delivery service.

They landed in Nashville and Memphis early on, in the early 2000s as prescriptions for pain pills were exploding. They were the first to see the coming market for heroin that wanton prescribing of pain pills would create — that was 20-plus years ago.

The Least of Us also gives us reason to feel hopeful. Tell us about that. We got into this horrid problem by believing in one Magic Answer to the complicated problem of pain: one pill for everyone. It created havoc we’re still living with. We need to get away from

the narcotic of one silver bullet to all our problems.

Yet when you get down to the ground, you find Americans doing great work — it’s just quiet, not sexy, no silver-bullet answer.

That’s where serious productive change takes place. Small steps, quiet daily work — that’s how we move forward. That’s how community is repaired — by people being out among their fellow Americans, not worried that they’re not saving the world. That’s why I set out to tell those stories in The Least of Us and why I’m feeling hopeful.

Also, the opioid epidemic is calling us to reexamine how we live and the consumer choices we make. It’s showing us, for one, that we all need to be accountable for our own wellness — that what we eat, how much exercise we get is crucial. It’ll keep us from demanding miracle cures to all our pain from doctors in the form of pills.

It’s showing us we need to be among others. Neuroscience, which I get into in the book, is illuminating so much. Helping us understand that our isolation is deadly — we’re feeling that now with the pandemic.

That we all have the brain chemistry to become addicted. We all can be that addict eating from the trash. Most of us have been addicted to something or another, legal or not: nicotine, alcohol, sugar, shopping, gambling, social media, meth, heroin.

After years of research, that’s what I’m left with. That the lessons of the epidemic, the pandemic and neuroscience are all the same and hopeful if we’ll learn them: that we’re strongest in community, as weak as the most vulnerable, and the least of us lie within us all.

To read an extended version of this interview — and more local book coverage — please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

NASHVILLE SCENE | NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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11/1/21 1:52 PM

OCTOBER 14 TO NOVEMBER 11

SUBLET

SHTETLERS

Thursday, November 4, 7PM

Tuesday, November 9, 7PM

A STARRY SKY ABOVE THE ROMAN GHETTO

SOROS Wednesday, November 10, 7PM

Family Screening for Grades 7 & above Sunday, November 7, 9:30AM

CLOSING NIGHT GOLDEN VOICES

Tuesday, November 11, 7PM

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RAGTIME Book by Terrence McNally Music By Stephen Flaherty | Lyrics By Lynn Ahrens Ragtime is an epic musical which tells the story of three families in pursuit of the American dream.

Set at the turn of the 20th century, three distinctly American tales are woven together – that of a stifled upper-class wife, a determined Jewish immigrant, and a daring young Harlem musician – united by their courage, compassion, and belief in the promise of the future. Together, they confront history’s timeless contradictions of wealth and poverty, freedom and prejudice, hope and despair... and what it means to live in America.

NASHVILLEREP.ORG nashvillescene.com | NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 10, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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11/9

RECKLESS DAUGHTERS

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MUSIC

ANOTHER LOOK

The Scene’s music writers recommend recent releases from Chuck Indigo, Jackson + Sellers, The Cancellations and more

BY EDD HURT, P.J. KINZER, LORIE LIEBIG, BRITTNEY McKENNA, STEPHEN TRAGESER AND CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

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o far, there’s no solid evidence for The Great Pumpkin flying through on Halloween night — unless, perhaps, he’s distributing records. Even while in-person shows and tours have FIND LINKS TO STREAM AND ramped BUY THESE RECORDS AT back up NASHVILLESCENE.COM/MUSIC substantially, Nashville musicians have continued to release a wealth of enticing material. Our writers have eight new recommendations for you, so add ’em to your streaming queue while you’re polishing off that leftover candy, or get a physical copy from your favorite record store. Or put them on your wish list for #BandcampFriday, the promotion in which the platform waives its cut of artist fees on the first Friday of the month — the next installment of which is Nov. 5.

CHUCK INDIGO, SHADES OF INDIGO EP (SELFRELEASED) Chuck Indigo has quickly become known as one of the city’s most dynamic rappers, thanks to a string of projects showcasing his quick, agile flow, the versatility of his voice and his surgeon’s precision for writing sharp lyrics. Indigo displays all that and then some on Shades of Indigo EP, assembled from the remains of a project that he decided to scrap. As he writes on Soundcloud, he wanted to “release what I felt was good enough for you to enjoy.” He also calls the record “a token of gratitude and a promise of better and greater to come.” Considering the variety and quality of what he didn’t feel would work for an official album here — including the tracks that show off his outstanding singing voice — that’s an exciting promise for sure.

Jackson each have made names for themselves by developing their own gritty, rock-edged flavors of country music. After playing back-to-back sets at AmericanaFest 2019, a simple Instagram DM from Jackson to Sellers led the pair to collaborate on a haunting cut called “Hush.” A creative spark immediately formed between them, and led to a string of co-writes and a studio session in East Nashville that resulted in a full album. Breaking Point, the duo’s fulllength debut, highlights their incredible ability to blend dreamy harmonies with fiery, guitar-driven breakdowns. From their standout cover of Julie Miller’s “Devil Is an Angel” to the ache of a crumbling relationship they explore in “Fairweather,” Breaking Point stands as an example of the rare magic that can emerge from open and honest collaboration. LORIE LIEBIG

THE CANCELLATIONS, LOVE LETTER (SELFRELEASED) Only eight months removed from the great, underrated debut Fist Fight, Nashville-via-Atlanta foursome The Cancellations return with a second set of world-weary, hook-heavy pop-rock. Where tracks like the first album’s “It Won’t Leave Me Alone” evoke Jimmy Eat World’s “The Middle” if it were played by Is This It-era Strokes, the band’s sonic palette continues to expand. Love Letter includes Prince-like funk rock (“Walk Away”), sweeping piano balladry (“Be on My Way,” “Drowning”) and more. Frontman Elijah Jones’ lyrics, documenting a life of regrets and near misses with a proud “fuck you, still here” attitude, ooze authenticity. You know it when you hear it, and these 10 tunes have got it.

CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

BRITTNEY McKENNA

LILLY HIATT, LATELY (NEW WEST) JACKSON+SELLERS, BREAKING POINT (ANTI-) Individually, Aubrie Sellers and Jade

Lilly Hiatt comes up with several memorable guitar riffs on Lately, but the record doesn’t sound like she designed it

to rock out. As well, there are moments on Lately that suggest country music without actually being country. Hiatt’s style is a hybrid that works in elements of rock and New Wave. As befits a singer-songwriter, Lately sports her subtly pained vocals, which put across a set of very internalized tunes. What’s happening in songs like “Gem” and “Face” isn’t unclear, but Hiatt seems to be navigating a set of conditions that are less than ideal. Lately is contemplative and haunted — late-night investigations of time, loss and contingency. EDD HURT

FREEDOM CLUB, THE NATURE OF FREEDOM (TRANCE/FURNACE) In the past few years, industrial music has emerged from its underground lair.

Most of the recent efforts lean safely toward the realm of dance-friendly synthesizer music. Freedom Club’s The Nature of Freedom is a caustic assault on that scene, breaking down electronic music to raw noise. On their 20-minute cassette, the duo creates terrific tension that calls to mind great horror directors. Much like their spiritual ancestors Whitehouse and Nurse With Wound, Freedom Club uses harsh noise in a way that feels like they’re drilling into your psyche. This release isn’t for dancing — more like the soundtrack to an autopsy tableau in a haunted house. And it’s all the better for it. P.J. KINZER

VARIOUS ARTISTS, BROKEN HEARTS AND DIRTY WINDOWS VOL. 2 (OH BOY) John Prine’s boundless influence on Music City and its songwriters has yielded two local-centric tribute albums since his death in April 2020. The first to arrive was Devil’s Tower Records’ Kiss My Ass Goodbye, a double LP with contributions from a variety of small-club pavement-pounders that the Scene recognized as Best Tribute Album in our recent Best of Nashville issue. At 12 tracks, Broken Hearts and Dirty Windows, Vol. 2 (a follow-up to a 2010 compilation) is shorter, but it doubles the star power with a cross-generational slate of country heavy hitters. Bonnie Raitt, whose 1974 recording of “Angel From Montgomery” made the song famous, offers a new rendition here, while Emmylou Harris does “Hello in There.”

Humboldt, Tenn.-born Valerie June takes on “Summer’s End” from Prine’s 2018 swan song The Tree of Forgiveness, while Sturgill Simpson closes the record with “Paradise,” an ode to what was lost as natural resources in his home state of Kentucky were exploited.

With Margo Price, Jason Isbell, Brandi Carlile and Tyler Childers also paying their respects, it’s a must-have for Prine admirers as well as a great gateway for fans of the featured artists who’ve yet to take the deep dive into the source material. CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

GREAT GRAND SUN, TERRA INCOGNITA (SELFRELEASED) SPOKEN NERD AND JUAN COSBY, GRAPES (FAKE FOUR) Speaking of horror scenes, longtime local rap ace Spoken Nerd and Cincinnati producer Juan Cosby drew inspiration for their collaborative LP Grapes from the beloved and influential anthology series Tales From the Crypt. While some of the ties between the album and the series are sonic and lyrical — Cosby’s love for John Carpenter’s music is clear — there are deeper thematic connections. Augmented by features from E-Turn, MC Homeless, Isaac Stinson, Darko the Super and 247, Nerd’s bars explore temptation, hypocrisy, jealousy and similar human failings that fuel many of the Tales stories. STEPHEN

TRAGESER

Great Grand Sun, the duo of None Intended Records chief Christopher Lord Byrd and multihyphenate producer and singersongwriter Joel McAnulty, chose Halloween to release their debut album Terra Incognita.

That might seem a bit odd, considering that the record doesn’t sound spooky at all, but instead skews toward upbeat, meandering dub and electronically enhanced folk-pop. However, the subject matter is highly appropriate for the peak of autumn, when the cycle of life is on our minds. Several years ago, McAnulty had a near-death experience that encouraged him to look closer at how various spiritual traditions explore the nature of existence, and the songs here are based on his observations. Or as McAnulty put it in an email to the Scene, “This is kind of like an agnostic gospel album with Robert Anton Wilson as our patron saint and Terrence McKenna as our guardian angel.”

STEPHEN TRAGESER EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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11/1/21 5:41 PM

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MUSIC

PROMISES MADE GOOD

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hen Jordan Victoria moved from Bloomington, Ind., to Nashville in mid-2019, the up-and-coming musician had no idea how the adventure was going to play out. But it seemed like her instinct to bring her knack for insightful and subtly literary lyricism coupled with shape-shifting rock ’n’ roll to Middle Tennessee was right on target.

“Those eight months were so good,” Victoria tells the Scene, calling after a rehearsal. “They really were. I was excited to move here, and then I started playing immediately. I didn’t, like, mean to. I was gonna settle in gradually, but then it all just fell into place. And I’m glad it did, because I had eight good months.”

Victoria, who performs as Heaven Honey, quickly found herself part of an eager, likeminded community ready to help her realize her vision. She wrote with new collaborators and played around town regularly with artists like Thelma and the Sleaze and Josh Halper, broadening her musical circle. Then, as we all know, life changed dramatically. A deadly tornado ripped through Victoria’s new hometown, followed in short order by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As with most anyone who works in or adjacent to the music world, Victoria’s life was turned upside-down. Once lockdown began in earnest, Victoria had to regroup.

Time spent at home — and largely away from music, aside from occasional virtual shows — was difficult and unsettling. But it also gave her space to think about her goals, in particular what kind of artist she wanted to be.

“I’ve been forced to come to terms with — and I feel like everybody has had to in some way — to reckon with the passing of time,” she explains. “And what I want to stand for, what I don’t want to stand for. I’m not unique, and my suffering is the suffering everybody’s going through in all different fields right now. But I’m also grateful, because I don’t think I would have thought about things this deeply.”

You can hear a shift in the Heaven Honey tunes that have come out in recent months. In the spring and summer, Victoria worked with a fellow former Hoosier, Oliver Hopkins of the band Volunteer Department, on a split single. Her side is the quasi-industrial rocker “Relate 2,” and his is the moody and dreamy “Shitten.” They also wrote and recorded a song together, a snarling Yo La Tengo-esque kiss-off called “Cows of Tomorrow.”

The newest Heaven Honey release is a cover of Lucinda Williams’ “Something About What Happens When We Talk.” The song ponders a particularly powerful connection between two people, which Williams explored in a Band-esque musical setting. In Victoria’s version, her voice emerges from a cloud of gentle, plangent

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guitars as the arrangement builds to a soaring, pop-rock anthem reminiscent of Mitski or Japanese Breakfast. There’s a deliberate searching in Victoria’s vocals — she sounds confident about what she wants to keep ahold of, even as the digital slurring of her vocal makes it feel like some powerful force is trying to wash her away.

Victoria is headed out on a tour with Detroit band Zilched, which includes a stop at Drkmttr on Nov. 6. It’s exciting for her to get back on the road, but the prospect of regularly performing for live audiences after lockdown also feels daunting. She’s trying to regain the momentum she developed in her early months in Nashville, among a scene of fans and musicians who are seeking some sense of normality in live performances while so much still feels uncertain in the broader world.

“There’s a lot of pressure, and kind of a desperate energy that I feel,” Victoria explains. “Pressure I feel to really go for it, and deliver at every show that I’ve been getting asked to play. After not being able to play for so long, it’s overwhelming just to be an artist and to put so much pressure on yourself, which we all do. As a perfectionist, that’s just kind of how it is. But I’m trying to navigate getting back into the swing of things.”

When we spoke, Victoria hadn’t yet played the next gig on her itinerary, an Oct. 30 benefit at Fran’s East Side meant to raise funds to help the beloved dive bar and karaoke room relocate. Since the landlord chose not to renew the lease, bar owner Frances Adams and mononymic karaoke maestro Gowa hope to find a new home

for the business, a social hub for Nashville indie musicians and many others. Though Victoria still considers herself a relatively new Nashvillian, Fran’s quickly became one of her most cherished local establishments.

She credits the spot as integral to finding a sense of home in her new city.

“That place became so important to me,” she says. “Just singing whenever I wanted, and becoming so close with everybody that works there. That place is a dream come true.”

Victoria sees community as essential to growing herself as an artist and as a professional. At the end of our conversation, she makes a point to ask that the names of collaborators like the aforementioned Zilched and the extended Volunteer Department family make it into this story. She makes it clear that it’s important to be a champion for the folks who welcomed her as a newcomer and helped her weather one of the more difficult periods of her life and career.

While Victoria is not yet ready to roll out a full-length album, she notes that she has new material on the way, which she’ll release in her own time as she regains her footing with playing live. She credits time at home during the pandemic with helping her realize she doesn’t have to achieve everything all at once — she just has to keep working.

“I draw much of my inspiration from moving about the world, and from other people. So, I had a hard time being creative in that way [during lockdown]. But now, after a year of not writing much at all, I feel more motivated. Now I’m ready, more than ever, to really push myself artistically.”

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NASHVILLE SCENE | NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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11/1/21 5:40 PM

MUSIC

THE SPIN

HOCUS FOCUS

BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

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cheduled for Saturday, Oct. 30, but moved last-minute to Sunday due to inclement weather, Spencer Cullum and Skyway Man’s benefit concert for Moving Nashville Forward — a nonprofit advocating for universal basic income for Nashvillians who need it most — put an exclamation point on a memorable Halloween weekend. Postponing the outdoor show, which was held at a private residence on the West Side, was a good call.

The air was cool, the sky clear and the atmosphere warm as I entered the backyard to the dulcet strains of Spencer Cullum and his band playing on the deck. Like a miniature version of Denver’s Red Rocks or L.A.’s Greek Theater, the hillside provided ample seating. Assorted colored lights reflecting off the trees recalled The Grove at Bonnaroo, a cozy spot to recharge when the crowds and conditions get to be too much. As grown-up house venues go, it was perfect.

Cullum, one-half of instrumental duo and longtime Scene faves Steelism, stepped out on his own about a year back with Spencer Cullum’s Coin Collection, a heady mix of pastoral folk and longform jams. The Essex, U.K.-raised musician’s “singing songs” nod to his English roots, evoking the likes of Nick Drake and The Kinks. This material

made up the first of two sets from Coin Collection, a coterie of musicians impressive in both quantity and quality. Among them: Erin Rae, harmonizing in lockstep with Cullum; Sean Thompson, dressed as a wizard and casually shredding on electric guitar; and vocalist Annie Williams, who was part of Nashville’s early-2010s singer-songwriter boom but has laid low in recent years.

In between Cullum’s two sets, Skyway Man made a welcome return to the town in which he honed his craft. Rooted in Richmond, Va., formed in Music City and now based in Oakland, Calif., James Wallace’s rotating-cast ensemble’s hourlong set took a deep dive into the realm of psychedelic country, with hints of baroque pop. Between the sound and the surroundings, the Laurel Canyon vibes were strong.

The final act, meanwhile, took the crowd back in time to early-1970s Germany, delivering on the promise of “a spooky krautrock space jam” advertised on the flyer. The set kicked off with the hypnotic “Dieterich Buxtehude,” a Coin Collection standout and homage to Neu!’s meditative Teutonic classic “Hallogallo.” The remainder of the show, Cullum explained in a post-show text to the Scene, was “improvised via lifting various Can riffs.” As the sweeping, sprawling jam unfolded, gusts of wind rolled through, scattering autumn leaves over the musicians and audience.

On a night refreshingly free of the stressors of our troubled times, it was a quietly beautiful moment. I hope to make the trek back up that hill for another show in the near future.

EMAIL THESPIN@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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11/1/21 5:39 PM

FILM

SPENCER’S GIFTS Kristen Stewart is a revelation in Spencer

BY JASON SHAWHAN

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hristmas can be stressy enough without having to worry about long-steeped family resentments and the death-by-papercuts that is a series of dinners with relatives who may or SPENCER may not despise you.

R, 111 MINUTES So imagine what an OPENING WIDE FRIDAY, emotional minefield NOV. 5 Spencer’s hypothetical early-’90s Christmas gathering was for the embattled Diana, princess of Wales. Tensions were high, the media was always on the hunt for images or information, and no matter where you turned there was a tradition designed to keep the royal family going as it had long been accustomed to. This is a film with angry wigs. Consider those hats that Laura Linney as Bertha Dorset wore in 2000’s The House of Mirth, the ones that could banish light and plunge the object of scorn into shadow with the tiniest tilt of the neck — that is the level of malign wig energy present in this film.

Spencer follows in the footsteps of Jackie, the 2016 film in which director Pablo Larraín cast a remarkable spell, with Natalie Portman crafting an excellent portrayal of Jackie Kennedy as a complex woman haunting the spaces of government and authority.

This film shares a similar thematic approach, as well as a stunning performance of a woman whose political influence and public profile remain relevant decades after her passing. (Though Margaret Trudeau is still with us, I would love to see Larraín’s take on her during the late 1970s.) Kristen Stewart’s Diana is the fire of life bound by tradition and couture and compelled to haunt the halls in which the entire family has gathered. And “haunt” is the proper word, because at no point can the viewer ever escape the knowledge that Diana’s life

RUST NEVER SLEEPS

Finch is a meditative scifi vehicle for the endearing presence of Tom Hanks

BY CORY WOODROOF

F

inch might be best described as what would happen if Cormac McCarthy’s The Road starred Short Circuit’s Johnny 5.

Director Miguel Sapochnik’s first feature since 2010’s underrated FINCH Repo Men is an odd PG-13, 115 MINUTES if touching sci-fi road STREAMING FRIDAY, NOV. 5, adventure in which the VIA APPLE TV+ titular reclusive inventor (Tom Hanks), his loyal dog and his bumbling, toddler-like robot with superhuman strength (a solid

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outside of the grasp of the royals did not last very long.

Stewart is a revelation in this performance. That’s not a surprise if you’ve been paying attention, because her one-two collaborative punch with director Olivier Assayas (2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria and 2016’s Personal Shopper) let everyone know that their Bella Swan jokes would hold sway no longer. There’s a kind of ritualized incarnation here — Stewart has walked the path of designer shoes, pointed expectations and red carpets lit by flashbulbs, and that familiarity allows her Diana to feel empathetically real. Cinematographer Claire Mathon (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Atlantics) finds the light that lets Diana push down dull maroon rage and vermilion embarrassment, letting alabaster foundation and the occasional flush of fury distinguish her skin from the myriad other royals who drift in and out of meals, events and dreams.

motion-capture performance from Caleb Landry Jones) survive in a postapocalyptic wasteland. Sapochnik tries to blend grim survivalism with childlike discovery and communal exploration, and he does so well enough with a story that will tug at your heartstrings, even while you chortle at how occasionally weird it all is.

At times, Finch feels like a darker version of Disney’s 1997 remake of Flubber: In place of Robin Williams’ absentminded professor and that kooky basketball game, sub in a dying Hanks who is trying to get his beloved pooch to a safer destination by building an A.I.-driven robot to guide him there in the event of Finch’s passing. It’s heavy for a film that was produced in part by children’s book company Walden Media, though Sapochnik still finds some fish-outof-water humor in Hanks’ scientist trying to guide a machine that looks like Chappie, acts like a Muppet and is very prone to accidents. Also, there are unseen murderous scavengers lurking around the corner.

The film I couldn’t get out of my head while trying to process Spencer — stirring up the deepest currents in the subconscious, unblinking, raw and red — is Marina de Van’s In My Skin. There’s an unsettling mood around stories in which women live their lives as metaphors, where it becomes impossible to accurately measure the damage done to heart and head from the outside. Here we see Diana, loving mother and free spirit, tethered and tackled by centuries of expectation, ground down. The world now knows all about Charles and Camilla. The world now sees what’s being done to Meghan and Harry. And all that’s required to see what was done to Diana is taking a chronological journey through her life in photos.

The film does offer Diana some kindnesses: her children; the head of the kitchen staff at Sandringham Estate (played with empathy and pragmatism by Sean Harris, whose proto-Roy Kent voice helped him

The whole ordeal simply wouldn’t work without Hanks, who seems to be testing out some inventorturned-father-figure character work for his upcoming turn as Geppetto in Disney’s live-action Pinocchio.

Actors of Hanks’ iconic stature can really get away with most any performance, and here he puts forward a sort of tender desperation. The film is at its best when Sapochnik centers Hanks’ performance — which

essay notable freaks and bullies in Prometheus and the last couple of Mission: Impossible movies); her dresser/confidante (Sally Hawkins, as always exceptional); and occasional visions that disrupt the tyranny of expectation, granting her (and the audience) a more heightened sense of what’s at stake during this fraught holiday gathering. Screenwriter Steven Knight (Eastern Promises, 2019’s utterly insane must-see Serenity) finds ways to reach out to those who might feel lost in Larraín’s labyrinth, little touchstones recognizable from more traditional biopics. And even if that creates moments of narrative discordance, I’m willing to call the use of a major-key stomper from a late-’80s Genesis side project an instance of pop grace — three-and-a-half minutes for Diana and William and Harry to exist outside of custom and expectation, blissfully free, unbound.

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the actor managed to turn in while playing against a dog and a mo-cap robot who every now and again sounds like a younger Borat.

Finch sometimes struggles to balance the heavy thematic nature of its story with the unavoidably hilarious dynamic between a very naive robot and a short-on-patience Hanks. But it works when Hanks really digs into the sorrow of isolation and the endearingly sweet relationships Finch builds with his non-human cohorts. As also shown in 2000’s Cast Away, the actor really can make any kind of movie work with just his empathetic presence. Even when Finch feels tonally awkward, its humanistic streak keeps the film afloat. When it’s really working, it’s almost as if you took the resonance from the best moments in Pixar’s WALL-E and combined them with the simple charm of a Wallace and Gromit cartoon.

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NASHVILLE SCENE | NOVEMBER 4 – NOVEMBER 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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11/1/21 1:50 PM

FILM

ETERNAL FLAME

Even at its clunkiest, Eternals is propulsive and addicting

BY JASON SHAWHAN

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exceptions (Captain America: The Winter Soldier because of its overwhelmingly slashy vibes that made the whole MCU course-correct into shaky straight-people foolishness; the amazing Tony Leung wuxia dance fights in Shang-Chi; Iron Man Three when the Christmas season rolls around), but for the most part they propel the viewer forward through the channel prepared for them. Eternals, however, has that bowl-of-chili/bare-legs-under-a-comfy blanket feel — it’s a film you can spend time with without the plot getting in the way of the mood.

I delight in Kumail Nanjiani’s Kingo, who’s spent the past century becoming a family dynasty of Bollywood stars, for well-timed comic relief and reliable laser hands. It’s also kind of hysterical that with as much attention and discourse that sprung up around Nanjiani’s training program/low-carb glow-up, The Powers That Be didn’t devote similar resources to extensive dance training. But honestly, Harish Patel (as Kingo’s valet Karun) makes a remarkable impression, taking a role that could have easily been a bundle of stereotypes and finding some remarkably effective moments with it. At its best, the Kingo/Karun pairing has the potential of a Morris Day/Jerome Benton-style spinoff, which would be a license to print money.

I’d also like to take a moment to trip out on how Angelina Jolie can take a supporting role and turn it into something more captivating than any of the A plots.

Yes, it’s Girl, Interrupted all over again, but here it’s worth noting that, like Brendan Fraser, Jolie made a point of learning the mechanics of how big-ticket effects movies work — the process of it all. Ever since 2004’s Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, she’s had this knack for meshing perfectly with the maelstrom of digital everything that defines so much of the modern blockbuster, and she shines, bending data to her presence before it’s even rendered. Her character Thena is a

fierce warrior battling the early stages of dementia, and it’s such an unexpected turn — not that she’s figured out the character with the most viscerally captivating arc, but that she goes hard and finds a real, live beating heart in the midst of a cosmic picaresque.

I mentioned Henry’s Phastos earlier, and he’s also very good, giving the Disney/Marvel empire its first queer character who isn’t a marketing decoy or afterthought. (Note: The gay power in this film is so real that Russia has rated it 18-and-up, which is utterly ridiculous, but so is any place that hates gays but is fine with autocrats … and that applies to more of America than I’m comfortable with.) He actually has the most intriguing arc in the whole film, because he goes through it for and with humanity — there’s a scene in the wreckage of Hiroshima that would set off warning klaxons that could be heard for a three-theater radius were it not for the fact that Henry digs in completely and finds the heart of it. You just have to respect that kind of gutsy swing.

When the advance word about the Marvel machine choosing Oscar-winning Nomadland director Chloé Zhao for this film broke, I was genuinely intrigued.

Directors come into the MCU with several previsualized CG sequences to work around, and we need only think back to the whole Edgar Wright/Ant-Man kerfuffle to remember how easily aesthetes can run into some corporate mandate bulwarks when heaps and heaps of money are on the line.

Zhao changes up the program in her own way, much as James Gunn and Taika Waititi and Ryan Coogler have — broadening the scope of these films, finding resonance beyond awe and narrative reversals. It’s not a drastic enough change to freak out the faithful or demolish the formula, but it’s a pleasant enough experience, and its aesthetic instinct skews toward the pretty and expansive.

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’ve gone on previously — most recently when discussing Halloween Kills — about the Marvel Cinematic Universe serving as big-budget, high-concept soap operas for modern audiences.

There are moments ETERNALS when it feels like PG-13, 157 MINUTES Eternals is fucking OPENING WIDE FRIDAY, with me along those NOV. 5 lines. Usually these films have some sort of grand McGuffin, some ancient artifact or exogoo that’s driving the narrative engine. Here we have Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry) — an ancient being of limitless power when it comes to innovation, technology and literally drawing component elements from the air and earth around him — who sets devices aside for a cutting quip or welltimed rejoinder. So call that an animating philosophy.

The thing about Eternals that confounds and enthralls is its insistence on foregrounding the emotional response to all the wild cosmic shit that’s happening.

People have tasteful, PG sex in this film, and it’s just as important to the story as the slavering monsters laying waste to the supporting cast. I have no idea how the general public will respond to it. I’m well aware that some folks read my reviews with a giant “Do the Opposite of What This Guy Says” banner superimposed over it, and I’m OK with that. But this film has me flummoxed in a way that is kind of enthralling. There are world-shaking stakes and CG monster fights (obviously, this is a Marvel movie), but it has this interesting quality where it doesn’t feel like it was made in a warehouse festooned with green-screen material. Some of that comes from extensive location shooting, and some of it is thanks to an elastic tone that encompasses ancient themes and modern execution. But I never felt bored or alienated; even at its clunkiest, the film has the bewildering propulsiveness that makes for low-key addictive storytelling.

You want to know where they’re going with all this.

Long story short: Giant Alien God makes ageless helperoids to be stewards of the earth, helping humanity along in its development with little nudges here and there. Of course, it gets more complicated than that (superhero cinema does love its twists), but you can start from there and be just fine. There are a couple of instances of trying to shoehorn our squad of Eternals into the larger Marvel universe with references to “The Blip” and some scattered talk of The Avengers, but it’s not important unless that 26-film-strong through-line is your foremost concern.

Like Dune, this is a several-hundredmillion-dollar hangout film, and it’s got a fairly nurturing vibe. Most Marvel films for me are one-and-done. There are a few

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NO. 0930

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