Nashville Scene 12-10-20

CITY LIMITS: MUTUAL AID EFFORTS HELP STRUGGLING UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

DECEMBER 10–16, 2020 I VOLUME 39 I NUMBER 43 I NASHVILLESCENE.COM I FREE

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FILM: THE BELCOURT SURVEYS THE ROMANTIC WORKS OF WONG KAR-WAI PAGE 39

THE BONER AWARDS From superspreader events to screw-ups by Bill Lee, Marsha Blackburn and beyond, here’s our annual list of bloopers and blunders cover_12-10-20.indd 1

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NASHVILLE SCENE | DECEMBER 10 – DECEMBER 16, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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CONTENTS

DECEMBER 10, 2020

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White People’s Work

CITY LIMITS

Power Dynamic ..........................................6 Two recent developments put Nashville on track for a more sustainable future

BY STEVEN HALE

Mutual Aid Helps Students Get By in Especially Difficult School Year ................6 Crowdsourced assistance helps struggling undergrads, but housing concerns still linger this winter

BY ALEJANDRO RAMIREZ

Nashville SC, by the Numbers ...................8 Taking a postseason look at how the team scored such a surprisingly successful inaugural season

BY STEVE CAVENDISH

Dispatches From the Race War exhorts white Americans to join the struggle for a fairer society

BY KIM GREEN AND CHAPTER 16

27 36

GIFT GUIDE

Silver Linings ........................................... 36

D’Llisha Davis of 2 L’s On a Cloud speaks on the evolution of Nashville hip-hop

BY SEAN L. MALONEY

Yule Variations......................................... 36

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The Boner Awards

Key Players .............................................. 37

BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

From superspreader events to screw-ups by Bill Lee, Marsha Blackburn and beyond, here’s our annual list of bloopers and blunders

Tennessee Surpasses 5,000 COVID-19 Deaths Butcher & Bee and The 404 Kitchen Have Your Hanukkah Meals Covered The Belcourt Will Be Part of Next Month’s Amended Sundance ON THE COVER:

Tiffany Minton’s new oral history project spotlights outstanding women who’ve been vital side performers in Music City

BY THE COMMITTEE OF BELLYACHERS

BY BRITTNEY McKENNA

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The Spin ................................................... 38 The Scene’s live-review column checks out Maren Morris at Brooklyn Bowl Nashville

Stream Taylor Mac’s Holiday Sauce ...

Pandemic!, stream State of the Word, stream Mayor via the Belcourt, watch Nashville in Harmony’s At Home for the Holidays, listen to Jacked: Rise of the New Jack Sound, join Lightning 100’s Save Our Airwaves campaign, get into chess and more

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CRITICS’ PICKS

Nashville Symphony Musicians Set for Weekly Stipend

MUSIC

Annual Tom Waits tribute and Second Harvest benefit Get Behind the Mule celebrates its 15th anniversary online

COVER STORY

THIS WEEK ON THE WEB:

Illustration by Holly Carden

BY LORIE LIEBIG

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FILM

In the Mood ... ......................................... 39 The Belcourt’s World of Wong Kar-wai takes a deep dive into the Hong Kong filmmaker’s romantic body of work

BY NATHAN SMITH

Sealed With a Fist................................... 39

FOOD AND DRINK

Archenemy is a sci-fi adventure for those willing to venture

Whiskey Business

Three local spirits entrepreneurs boldly sail into the headwinds

BY JASON SHAWHAN

BY CHRIS CHAMBERLAIN

Deepa Mehta’s Funny Boy is a mostly engaging story of gay love

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Every Step You Take ............................... 40

BY STEVE ERICKSON

CULTURE

Turnip the Volume

Turnip Green Creative Reuse responds to crisis with creativity

BY KELSEY BEYELER

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NEW YORK TIMES CROSSWORD

MARKETPLACE

BOOKS

Bookworms

The ongoing Nashville Jewish Book Series illuminates the Jewish American experience

BY ERICA CICCARONE

Walk a

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With feet on the street, we discover Nashville’s own unique beat – one mile at a time

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MAYOR COOPER MADE THE RIGHT CHOICE IN SELECTING MNPD CHIEF JOHN DRAKE On Nov. 30, Mayor John Cooper took the “interim” out of John Drake’s title, officially making the Nashville native chief of the Metro Nashville Police Department.

Drake, who had held the interim title since Chief Steve Anderson abruptly retired on Aug. 6, was chosen over four other finalists for the job.

During his announcement, Mayor Cooper highlighted that Drake needs “no introduction,” and said “no training would be required” as Nashville’s top law enforcement officer. Drake has built a strong record and reputation in his 32 years with the MNPD. Considering his years on the force, his familiarity with our city and the fact that he has served as interim chief for four months, Drake knows what Nashville needs. “John Drake is someone who can start on day one to make us a greater city, he knows what to do,” said Cooper. “He’s earned our trust and earned the job.” Fraternal Order of Police President James Smallwood said, “Chief Drake’s decades of service to Nashville provides the crucial knowledge needed to effectively lead this police department into the future.”

Though Chief Drake has the trust of many of his peers and the mayor, building trust throughout the community and with police department critics will be among his greatest challenges. His predecessor was criticized for not being sufficiently cooperative with — and for his lack of transparency with — the Community Oversight Board. Drake, on the other hand, already has plans for change, and recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the oversight board to offer better access to records and increase department transparency.

In August, Mayor Cooper created the Policing Policy Commission to develop and detail a “model of policing” that our city’s next police chief would work to implement.

In the commission’s report, four major goals are outlined: increased collaboration with community groups and other government agencies; increased gender and racial diversity at every level of the department; efforts to eliminate disparities in use of force and increased transparency about the uses of force; and training that emphasizes

“consistent and respectful” interactions with all Nashvillians. Drake has proven to be working toward each of these goals even while in his role as interim chief.

According to a Dec. 4 Tennessean report that offered info from the mayor’s Policing Policy Commission, only 11 percent of the department’s sworn officers in 2019 were women, and only 19 percent were officers of color. To handle this challenge, Drake is already adding staff to the recruitment department and partnering with colleges and churches to find more diverse candidates, a plan most would say is creative and shrewd. Further, he’s creating teams to oversee community outreach. The new chief has added six hours of new deescalation training at the police academy to dissuade officers from resorting to violence. In the same Tennessean article, Drake says he wants “officers to be friendly, to engage people all over Nashville,” a situation he didn’t have as a kid. He is open to collaboration with community advocates and nonprofit groups to improve community relations and create ways of policing that may not always include uniformed officers.

Perhaps one of my favorite things about Chief Drake is his individual transparency.

When he talks about memories of his dad, about growing up in East Nashville as a kid dreaming of playing football, about his love for Nashville or his desire to help young people realize they can be anything they want to be, it feels genuine.

Drake says that he “embraces change.”

For Nashville, he could well be the change we’ve been seeking. Ever since being appointed as interim chief, he has strived to help mitigate the effects of the pandemic while working on community outreach. He understands what it’s going to take for the MNPD to gain the trust of the people.

When announcing Drake’s appointment, Mayor Cooper said the new chief “has shown he is committed to collaboration, transparency and the dignity of every resident.” I believe that to be true.

Editor-in-Chief D. Patrick Rodgers Senior Editor Dana Kopp Franklin Associate Editor Alejandro Ramirez Arts Editor Laura Hutson Hunter Culture Editor Erica Ciccarone Music and Listings Editor Stephen Trageser Contributing Editors Jack Silverman, Abby White Staff Writers Stephen Elliott, Nancy Floyd, Steven Hale, Kara Hartnett, J.R. Lind, William Williams Contributing Writers Sadaf Ahsan, Radley Balko, Ashley Brantley, Maria Browning, Steve Cavendish, Chris Chamberlain, Lance Conzett, 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, Chris Parton, Betsy Phillips, John Pitcher, Margaret Renkl, Megan Seling, Jason Shawhan, Michael Sicinski, Ashley Spurgeon, Amy Stumpfl, Kay West, Andrea Williams, Cy Winstanley, 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 Moye Promotions Coordinator Caroline Poole Publisher Mike Smith Senior Advertising Solutions Managers Maggie Bond, Sue Falls, Michael Jezewski, Carla Mathis, Heather Cantrell Mullins, Stevan Steinhart, Jennifer Trsinar, Keith Wright Advertising Solutions Manager William Shutes Sales Operations Manager Chelon Hill Hasty Advertising Solutions Associates Aya Robinson, Price Waltman 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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Bill Freeman Bill Freeman is the owner of FW Publishing, the publishing company that produces the Nashville Scene, Nfocus, the Nashville Post and Home Page Media Group in Williamson County.

NASHVILLE SCENE | DECEMBER 10 – DECEMBER 16, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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— Maren Morris in a social media post about “Dear Hate,” a duet with Vince Gill.

The two performed it live together for the first time during All for the Hall New York in 2018, a fundraiser for the Museum.

Award-winning singer and songwriter Maren Morris has emerged as a leading voice in country music today.

Known for her songs “My Church” and “I Could Use a Love Song,” Morris is also a member of the acclaimed group The Highwomen, featured in the exhibit American Currents at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

Visit the exhibit to learn more about Morris, and the ever-evolving history of country music.

DOWNTOWN NASHVILLE Visit CountryMusicHallofFame.org to buy tickets.

Photo: Jamie Nelson

nashvillescene.com | DECEMBER 10 – DECEMBER 16, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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CITY LIMITS

POWER DYNAMIC

Two recent developments put Nashville on track for a more sustainable future

BY STEVEN HALE A FIELD OF SOLAR PANELS

I

n the summer of 2019, District 19 Metro Councilmember Freddie O’Connell introduced a suite of green energy bills he framed as a “green New Deal” for Nashville. The bills, which were unanimously approved by the council, put Nashville on track to transition to using 100 percent renewable energy, make Metro’s

MUTUAL AID HELPS STUDENTS GET BY IN ESPECIALLY DIFFICULT SCHOOL YEAR Crowdsourced assistance helps struggling undergrads, but housing concerns still linger this winter

BY ALEJANDRO RAMIREZ

A

s students across the country endure a strange and difficult school year, some are also struggling with financial hardships — but they’re receiving help from their peers along the way. At Vanderbilt University, undergrads are crowdsourcing resources for fellow students to directly benefit those in need.

“The concept of mutual aid is designed to provide for the community and make up and supplement where the institutions have failed in the community,” says Edie Duncan, a Vanderbilt senior and an organizer with the student-run Vanderbilt Mutual Aid. According to a post on the organization’s Twitter

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vehicle fleet 100 percent electric and adopt new green building standards for Metro buildings.

A little more than a year later, Mayor John Cooper’s office has made two announcements that bring the city closer to the future those bills envisioned.

The first is the mayor’s signature of legislation updating Metro’s building codes

account, the group has redistributed more than $6,000 in funds to more than 60 students during the fall semester. And there’s a no-questions-asked policy in place for those seeking help.

“We don’t ask people to prove their situations of hardship,” says Duncan. “We trust that we want to support each other and that ... people reach out when they have need and contribute when they’re able to.”

The mutual aid program has organized a food drive and taught students how they can share or donate food provided by their meal plans. But according to junior Matt Chvastas, a co-founder of Vanderbilt Mutual Aid, money is the most common need for students. Cash is usually distributed in $50 increments, and the most common need for that cash, says Chvastas, is housing costs.

Vanderbilt Mutual Aid has also done some direct work in that area. The program helped match students who needed housing over winter break with students who had a room off-campus to offer. Eleven matches were made, says Duncan, but some students ended up staying in campus dorms for the winter instead.

The housing-match initiative was especially urgent due to a controversy on campus regarding on-campus winter housing for students. Vanderbilt announced that students who wanted to remain in the dorms for winter break — which started early this year due to the pandemic — would have to submit an application, and if approved, pay a daily rate of $50.

Other students and alumni who spoke to the Scene were surprised, saying they usually stayed on campus free of charge during past fall and winter breaks.

Alumnus Sara Starr — who uses gender-neutral pronouns — says they spent past breaks on campus

and energy standards, which hadn’t been changed since 2012. The bill advanced by the administration had 15 co-sponsors on the council.

“Our homes — just like Nashville itself — require investments and modernized standards to operate more efficiently and more cost-effectively,” Cooper said in an announcement from his office. “When those improvements not only lower home energy costs, but also reduce the city’s carbon footprint and further protect homeowners, it makes even more sense to adopt them.”

O’Connell, who notes that District 17 Councilmember Colby Sledge largely drove the council conversation on building codes, says the updates are a big deal.

“My expectation is that what you’re going to see going forward after 2020 as Nashville continues to grow is that new buildings are going to be both more durable and more cost-effective for anybody who owns them and/or lives in them,” O’Connell says.

In announcing the new standards, the mayor’s office emphasized that “lowerincome residents are more vulnerable to higher utility costs that result from inefficient building standards.”

A second announcement days later detailed a partnership with Nashville Electric Service, the Tennessee Valley Authority and Vanderbilt University to construct 100 megawatts of utility-scale solar power.

That project will put Metro more than onethird of the way toward being sourced with 100 percent renewable energy, according to the mayor’s office — ahead of the schedule created by O’Connell’s 2019 legislation. It will also allow Vanderbilt to reach its own 100 percent renewable-energy goal.

In the meantime, the 100 megawatts of so-

“WE HOPE IN SOME WAYS THAT WE’RE REDUCING DEMAND FOR FOSSIL FUELS, COAL IN PARTICULAR.”

—FREDDIE O’CONNELL lar power will produce “the clean-electricity equivalent of carbon emissions from powering over 11,000 homes, or removing more than 14,000 cars from the road, every year for the 20-year term” of the agreement.

O’Connell says the TVA has not historically been leading the way when it comes to development of renewable energy resources, although the federally owned corporation does have a modest green energy portfolio. He points to the influx of large technology companies looking to build data facilities in Tennessee — and power them with solar farms — as a major factor in the TVA’s increased cooperation with solar energy efforts.

Put together, the two initiatives — updated building codes and investment in solar power — begin to change Nashville’s energy use from both sides.

“We hope in some ways that we’re reducing demand for fossil fuels, coal in particular,” says O’Connell. “But we also hope that we’re changing the way that we produce energy in the first place. So investments in solar are things that local communities can do.”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY

without ever being charged or having to submit an in-depth application. Starr worries this could disproportionately affect unhoused students or

those trying to avoid returning to abusive homes — especially LGBTQ students.

“We’re looking at students with unstable or unsafe

NASHVILLE SCENE | DECEMBER 10 – DECEMBER 16, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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housing,” says Starr. “Many of those students, even if they could get the money together, they would have to then explain [to the university] those unstable or unsafe housing situations, possibly abusive parents, things like that. …

And we worry that puts them at higher risk for backlash.”

Starr says they and other alumni have spoken with the provost’s office and were told the daily rate was to cover the costs of operations over the winter.

“I recognize obviously that with COVID we are all in an economic downturn,” says Starr.

“However, Vanderbilt’s endowment is in the billions. I think they’re much more financially secure than a lot of their students are.”

Other alumni set up and signed a Change.org petition calling on Vanderbilt to drop the housing rate. The petition received more than 1,000 signatures.

Students and alumni were also shocked when the school began rejecting applications to stay on campus. Days before the break began, the school reversed that decision and accepted all applicants.

Carlissa Arrow, a senior and the co-founder of the Vanderbilt chapter of the Student Basic Needs Coalition, was one student whose application was rejected before ultimately being accepted. Members of SBNC, a recent addition to the campus, had been vocal proponents of dropping the housing rate, and helped organize other student organizations around the cause.

Arrow adds that there was a lot of confusion surrounding the application process and how to qualify, saying “the onus of figuring everything out was on the students.” “You had to use the right language, use the right words, so you could fall under the umbrella of being an approved student,” she says.

One Vanderbilt senior who wished to remain anonymous tells the Scene she originally tried to qualify as an unhoused student, arguing that her family home in a rural area was an unfit environment for completing her final exams. She wouldn’t have easy access to the internet, she says, and likely would have couch-surfed during the winter. The university said she didn’t qualify as an unaccompanied homeless student per the state’s definition, and later on her housing application was denied. Like Arrow’s, her application would be approved days later.

A statement from Vanderbilt University to the Scene says all students who applied for housing have been approved, and notes that the school will provide financial aid for housing costs where needed. The statement also adds that Vanderbilt will provide meals at no cost to students remaining on campus. The university did not provide the number of students staying on campus.

Reads the statement: “We always support residential students with demonstrated financial need and will provide support through our normal mechanisms, including financial aid, waivers and hardship fund grants to students approved to stay on campus who are homeless or otherwise have financial challenges or hardships or extenuating circumstances. We are not decreasing and will not decrease that support.”

Vanderbilt University also set up a hardship fund for students in response to the pandemic, offering up to $500 to graduate and undergraduate students in need.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

8

PHOTOS: NASHVILLE SC

CITY LIMITS

NASHVILLE SC AFTER DEFEATING TORONTO SC IN NOVEMBER

SPORTS

NASHVILLE SC, BY THE NUMBERS

Taking a postseason look at how the team scored such a surprisingly successful inaugural season

BY STEVE CAVENDISH

N

ashville SC closed out a wildly successful inaugural season by making an improbable run to Major League Soccer’s Eastern Conference semifinals. The best way to understand the campaign is by considering the following set of numbers.

59,069

Here at the end of 2020, the idea of 59,000 people packing Nissan Stadium for Nashville SC’s first game seems bizarre. Thousands tailgated before the February game in the parking lots surrounding the stadium, oblivious to the coming pandemic that would begin shutting down all sporting events in a matter of weeks.

A little more than three years before, the MLS2Nashville bid barely existed, but billionaire John Ingram’s presence turbocharged the group, and Nashville vaulted ahead of several other leading cities to secure a franchise. In the press box before the start of that first game, Ingram seemed genuinely touched by the success of the event and the largest crowd in the state to ever watch a soccer match. CEO Ian Ayre talked of new fans sampling the team for the first time and hoping they would return. The team gave up an early goal to Atlanta, but center back Walker Zimmerman soon slotted home the team’s first goal. The roar that followed — deafening, shaking and wild — cemented Nashville as a soccer town.

would both make the conference finals — scoreless as their own offense struggled.

In the playoffs, the defense blanked Inter Miami in the opening round and Toronto FC in the quarter finals.

How did they do it? General manager Mike Jacobs was very deliberate in building a strong backline, trading for center backs Zimmerman (from LAFC) and Dave Romney (from L.A. Galaxy). The duo, along with goalkeeper Joe Willis (another Jacobs acquisition, from Houston), were iron men and played almost every minute of every game. Daniel Lovitz, who developed into a first-class outside back playing for Montreal and Toronto, became an attacking threat on the left side, while youngster Alistair Johnston eventually took the starting job on the right side.

Zimmerman’s exploits in front of his own goal as well as scoring three times on the other end led to his recognition as MLS Defender of the Year by the league.

4-2-3-1

Want to drive a coach nuts? Ask them about the X’s and O’s of soccer as though it were a football or basketball game. The game is too big and fluid to actually play

like a video game. But coach Gary Smith made a very important decision in trying to maximize the personnel Jacobs had given him — he employed what’s known as a double pivot in the center of the pitch. Captain Dax McCarty and fellow midfielder Aníbal Godoy operated as a tandem in the central midfield, protecting the backline from too many runners attacking directly and quickly distributing the ball when Nashville was in possession. By almost any advanced metric, both players had a better season than they did the past two years — not an inconsequential thing for two midfielders in their 30s.

The 4-2-3-1 formation Smith chose allowed NSC the flexibility to possess the ball and attack against inferior teams, and to stay defensively organized and counterattack when they faced better teams. Toronto fans howled that Smith was defensively “parking the bus” against TFC’s more talented side in the playoffs, but in reality it was McCarty and Brian Anunga, subbing for an injured Godoy, who consistently stepped into passing lanes and forced Toronto to the wings.

3

MLS employs a salary-cap system that prevents clubs from wildly overspending.

Critics argue that it puts a ceiling on teams’ success too, but as MLS finishes its 25th season, there’s a strong case to be made that the cap has ensured the viability of the league. The exception to the cap is the socalled “designated player,” created when the league wanted to lure David Beckham to the U.S. It allows teams to spend above the cap, but owners must do it out of their own pockets and not with league money, which pays player salaries.

After signing German Hany Mukhtar and Costa Rican Randall Leal to multiyear deals in the offseason, NSC’s ownership could probably be forgiven for not signing a maximum third designated player. After all, with no fans and almost no revenue, adding a third would be pure cost in a year when expectations are relatively low. But general manager Jacobs and the team’s brass, seeing how Nashville was struggling to produce goals early in the season, signed Jhonder Cádiz from Portugese side Benfica, and the effect was to jolt the team’s offense to life.

Either as a sub or a starter, Cádiz became a big target who could hold the ball up or score himself. And Daniel Ríos, whose position Cádiz threatened, became immediately more productive, scoring four goals in the regular season and a clincher against Toronto to send Nashville to the Eastern Conference semifinals.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

NASHVILLE SC’S TAYLOR WASHINGTON

.957

Nashville SC allowed .957 goals per game — a record for an MLS expansion team, with only Seattle in 2009 coming close. Only two other teams in the league allowed fewer goals. During one vital stretch as Nashville closed in on a playoff berth, the club held Minnesota and New England — teams that

NASHVILLE SCENE | DECEMBER 10 – DECEMBER 16, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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From superspreader events to screw-ups by Bill Lee, Marsha Blackburn and beyond, here’s our annual list of bloopers and blunders

BY THE COMMITTEE OF BELLYACHERS

W

e at the Scene didn’t name our annual Boner Awards what we did simply so we could make cheeky puns.

That’s just a bonus.

Other former mayors get parkways or Metro office buildings named for them. Bill Boner, mayor from 1987 to 1991, gets this issue — now in its 31st year — as an annual honor. Ultimately, Boner’s one-term tenure as mayor included a peculiar appearance on The Phil Donahue Show, among other very weird and wacky news items that secured his status as the namesake of this recurring issue of the Scene.

Over these three-plus decades, we’ve had plenty of fodder for our

If you were trying to spread the coronavirus in the douchiest way possible, you could hardly do better than the Boner convention thrown at an East Nashville home obnoxiously self-identified as The Fashion House.

A couple of world-class dickheads named Christopher “Shi” Eubank and Jeffrey Mathews threw a massive, maskless party at the house. Images from the superspreader soiree were widely shared, showing attendees smoking hookah, getting tattoos and, in one memorable case, performing analingus.

Astonishingly, Metro police officers stopped by the party but did not shut it down. Eubank — who could be seen on video the morning after the party declaring that he was “not gonna apologize for being legendary” — and Mathews were later charged and arrested for violating public health orders. You’re legends now, bros.

BUILD THE WALL

It was a banner year for gasbags moving to Nashville. Twitter user Tomi Lahren was the first domino to fall, announcing that she was “fleeing” liberal California. Among her first stops in Nashville, naturally, was the wings mural in the Gulch. Owner-of-Libs Ben Shapiro also made the move from liberal California, bringing his shitty culture war propaganda outlet The Daily Wire along with him, much to the acclaim of Gov. Bill Lee. Candace Owens, the Trumper who once famously said that Hitler was only bad because he tried to expand beyond Germany, is also joining the team. Though they all claimed to be fleeing liberal places, they ended up settling in a city that votes overwhelmingly for Democrats, just raised taxes and has had a mask mandate in place for months. Joke’s on them.

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STACY AND THE CASE OF THE BROADCAST BONER Even in the best circumstances, when local TV anchors get on Twitter it can feel a bit like someone let a grandparent loose with a Facebook login. But Fox 17’s Stacy Case earned this recognition back in the summer with her boneheaded commentary following the first wave of protests, and the setting of fires at the Metro Courthouse. Boosting our outgoing president’s announcement that the government was designating Antifa as a Terrorist Organization, Case said, “This designation of #Antifah says all we need to know about what happened in #Nashville last night after a peaceful rally.” In short, it did not, and Antifa is nothing like what the paranoid nightmares of the right wing suggest. When Tennessean reporter Natalie Allison said as much, Case threw a fit. First she asked if Allison had “built a business here” or if she “condone[d] the destruction of this beautiful city.” The city, of course, was not destroyed.

But perhaps best of all, Case followed up by claiming Allison was just fishing for social media engagement. “Everybody in media is required to get a certain number of clicks on their social media account,” Case said. That’s what the youths call telling on yourself.

ignorant and insulting remark that he admitted he has “said for years.”

GOOBERNATORIAL

It’s a bit hard to imagine why a person would feel compelled to spend time, energy and money to become governor if they didn’t think it’s the governor’s place to do much of anything. But that’s what we appear to have in Gov. Bill Lee. In early March, as COVID-19 cases were starting to appear around the state, he was slow to declare a state of emergency, coming around to it after at least a dozen other states had done so. He did not declare a statewide stay-at-home order until April, after urgent pleas from thousands of

doctors, nurses and average Tennesseans. He still has never issued a statewide mask mandate, despite the White House — yes, that White House, run by that guy — repeatedly saying he should do so. Instead, Lee has “encouraged” Tennesseans to wear masks, and the state has produced a number of television PSAs with the same message. But Bill Lee is rich, and he could have done that without being governor. Failure in the face of COVID is by no means a problem of one governor or one political party. But our guy could be doing better.

CALLING BULLSHIT

Honoring the dead is one of the state

COOPER CHROMOSOME

Longtime U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Nashville) caused a stir last month with an offhand remark made during a long interview with the Scene. Yes, he said, he would in fact be seeking another term in Congress, but what caught people’s attention was his comment that South Carolina voters must have “extra chromosomes” to keep voting for people like Lindsey Graham. The Tennessean, advocates for the disabled and bad-faith right wingers like Tomi Lahren quickly pounced on Cooper, who later apologized in an open letter for the

ILLUSTRATION: HOLLY CARDEN

GOING VIRAL

Boner Awards — countless items that have transcended the gaffes of its namesake — and 2020 is most certainly no exception. From local boneheads ignoring COVID-19 safety protocols to state and local leaders fumbling their handling of the global pandemic, from musicians and business leaders saying and doing all the wrong things to missteps by law enforcement agencies and sports radio broadcasters — this year, the Boner gods were smiling on Music City.

Read on for a list of this year’s biggest blunders. See also: our pettycrime roundup, in which we highlight some of the ding-dongs and dopes arrested for Boner-worthy behavior in 2020.

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FOR SALE: TESTING SUPPLIES, NEVER USED

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, it was extremely difficult to get a test. There simply weren’t enough supplies. That changed over time, at least in Tennessee, but it still came as a surprise when The Tennessean reported in October that the state was auctioning off pallets filled with test swabs and other supplies on a government liquidation site.

After the newspaper contacted the state to ask about the auction, it was promptly pulled off the site with just one bid, for $150.

LAX LEADERSHIP

It’s not like leadership from the state legislature has been anything special in the months since, but our representatives at the Capitol were especially bumbling in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. When a reporter asked about the “public health crisis” in March, state House Speaker Cameron Sexton laughed and said “you can use that word.”

On the same day that Gov. Bill Lee was announcing a state of emergency, lawmakers were upstairs debating a nonbinding resolution congratulating President Trump for fending off efforts to remove him from office. A group of middle school cheerleaders was on hand — free for the day because their own school was closed due to the spread of the virus. Since then, a nonzero but unknown number of legislators have themselves caught the virus, and thousands of Tennesseans have died. The legislature, meanwhile, returned to Nashville for a special session — not to help the unprecedented numbers of unemployed Tennesseans or throw a lifeline to hospitals under siege, but instead to make it a felony to spend the night on state property and make it easier for businesses to squash coronavirus-related lawsuits.

NOT GREAT, BOB

Bob Corker was gone. The former United States senator had retired and could have been simply enjoying his immense wealth in relative silence. Alas. It’s hard to believe this really happened now that we’ve seen the pandemic’s devastating toll in the months since, but Corker emerged in late March to express his support for Donald Trump’s batshit idea of reopening the country by Easter. In doing so, he proudly contradicted public health experts and offered people up for a sacrifice he would certainly not have to endure — that

ILLUSTRATION: HOLLY CARDEN

legislature’s simplest and least controversial actions. A representative from the fallen’s district files a resolution praising some recently deceased and beloved teacher or coach or community member, and it easily passes the House and Senate. But this year, House Majority Leader William Lamberth threw a wrench in the process and ignited a bitter dispute when he led opposition to just such a resolution honoring Ashanti Harris Posey, a Nashville teenager shot and killed earlier this year. Lamberth cited “the activity of her demise” — an unproven allegation of a small marijuana sale that may have preceded Harris Posey’s death — in opposing the resolution, a version of which easily passed in the Republican-led Senate. Memphis Rep. Antonio Parkinson called bullshit on the floor — rightfully so, given Lamberth’s happy coexistence with Rep. David Byrd, a fellow member whose past activities have included admitting to sexually abusing his teenage students.

is, illness with fear of crushing medical debt or a lack of access to adequate care. The Easter reopening did not happen, of course, but perhaps Corker is pleased now to see that the country’s leaders have largely given up on stopping the spread of the virus. We can only urge you now as we did back then: Ignore Bob Corker.

IT’S THE END OF THE BONER AS WE KNOW IT

OK, let’s state for the record that running a full-page ad in the Sunday paper that says Nashville will be nuked by Islamic jihadists on July 18 is a bad thing. We can all agree on that, right? (Put your hand down, state Rep. Susan Lynn.) Some nutbag end-of-theworlders snuck a full-page ad past the very stringent Gannett standards in June and claimed that the Bible foretold these events.

There are two ways to look at this debacle.

The first: This could be considered a teachable moment for Gannett about their ad process and how few people are actually looking at these things before they cash the checks. One ad manager got shitcanned, and we’re sure very stern things were said to everyone in what’s left of the ad department over there. But the bigger problem is that the ad ran in the paper the Wednesday before AND NOBODY NOTICED IT. Sure, it’s an issue that the content of the ad is hateful and cuckoo-for-Cocoa Puffs crazy, but the deeper issue for the company — one that is hemorrhaging cash and giving buyouts to employees — is that nobody reads their ads. That might do more damage to the paper than any nuke ever will.

YOU’RE DOING A HECKUVA BONER, MIKEY

Like George W. Bush with his FEMA chief, premature congratulation can be a problem in men. Just ask Michael Anastasi, The Tennessean’s vice president and editor who’s also responsible for the USA Today Network in Tennessee. He ordered up a front-page editorial not just in Nashville, but in every Gannett paper in the state on March 18. The headline on that unsigned piece? “Tennessee leaders’ steps are decisive, responsible.” Yes, there’s nothing like bending over backwards to suck up to government leaders and praise them in the first weeks of what, even then, we knew would be a massive pandemic. How much hubris did it take to not only order up that editorial, but also make it the centerpiece of a state’s worth of papers? This came a week after Gov. Bill Lee’s administration had to be publicly shamed into releasing county-level data on the effects of the virus.

If you want to look like a player to the elite, try not to make it look so obvious. There are a number of treatments for that now.

SCHOOLHOUSE CROCK

Ah, Sen. Marsha Blackburn — the perpetual Boner machine. Frankly, if you wanna see a smattering of groan-worthy gaffes, just take a gander at the Trump-adoring uber-conservative legislator’s Twitter profile on any given day. One particular tweet, however, stood out back in September: “We will never rewrite the Constitution of the United States,” she proudly proclaimed. The thing is, we’ve done that already. Twenty-seven times, to be exact. Not only did the longtime Williamson County resident and, you know, sitting United States senator not seem to realize that constitutional amendments are,

by definition, a means of rewriting that socalled living document — she also apparently forgot that she herself has been a co-sponsor on more than one attempted amendment.

Whoops!

SPINES? WHO NEEDS SPINES!

Sadly, Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the election to President-elect Joe Biden comes as little surprise. Just as depressing and only slightly more surprising, though, is Tennessee lawmakers’ willingness to go along with the sitting president as he continued (and continues) to make completely unfounded claims about widespread voter fraud. The most powerful people in the state (including Gov. Bill Lee, U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn and Sen.-elect Bill Hagerty) refused to call out Trump’s clear attempts to undermine democracy. Blackburn, Hagerty and the state party begged their supporters to donate to Trump’s “legal defense fund.”

State Rep. Bruce Griffey went so far as to show up at a “Stop the Steal” rally in downtown Nashville and address the crowd while wearing a MAGA hat. Blackburn did call Biden “the president-elect” in late November, but a spokesperson quickly told press that the senator “misspoke” in doing so. Cool.

Great work.

WHAT GOES AROUND

In this issue and previous ones, we’ve been happy to give shit to Tennessee Republicans who refused (and still refuse) to accept reality: Joe Biden won the presidential election.

So it’s only fair that we highlight a Trumpian turn by one of the year’s most unexpected candidates. Marquita Bradshaw thrilled some on the left by winning the Democratic nomination for Tennessee’s open U.S. Senate seat. But on election night, the race was called for her Republican opponent almost immediately after polls closed. She ultimately lost by nearly 800,000 votes, but would not concede defeat, either on election night or in the days after, holding out hope for “votes in the basement,” a reference to a 1970s Memphis congressional race. Sometimes it’s good to fight, but not when you’re looking for 800,000 “votes in the basement.”

FULL OF BEANS

State Rep. Jerry Sexton quite possibly would have made our illustrious Boner list just for trying and failing — for a second time — to have the Bible named Tennessee’s official state book earlier this year. But the honorable representative from East Tennessee’s Bean Station earns double Boner status thanks to a bizarre and rambling aside he issued back in June. While ostensibly arguing in defense of keeping the bust of Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest in the state Capitol, Sexton meandered off on a diatribe about how “we’re killing millions of babies every year in this country by abortion” before ultimately delivering this weird-as-hell line: “Who knows, maybe some of us will be slaves one of these days. Laws change.” If you’re having a hard time parsing Sexton’s logic there, uh, you’re not alone. Only time will tell what kind of nonsensical jibber-jabber Mr. Bean will offer during next year’s legislative session, but we can’t wait to hear it.

A TOAST FOR THE DOUCHEBAGS

This Boner goes out to a very specific set of Nashvillians — 2,601 of them, to be precise.

According to the Tennessee Secretary of State’s office, that’s how many residents of Davidson County voted for independent presidential candidate Kanye West in November’s election. That’s how many Nashvillians — in a global pandemic, with a disastrous incumbent POTUS actively attempting to undermine the election — went to the trouble of casting their votes for the guy who once tweeted, “Mark Zuckerberg invest 1 billion dollars into Kanye West ideas.” Even worse, Tennessee led the country in total votes for the (admittedly very talented) producer and rapper with 10,279. To loosely paraphrase the would-be POTUS himself, this particular man should definitely not have all that power.

Dark twisted fantasy indeed!

ROCKS HARD

In February, the General Assembly took a break from their usual undertaking of passing laws that ultimately get the state sued and instead debated the relative merits of the Cumberland Plateau. Nobody knows why.

It started with John Ray Clemmons, whose

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district is nowhere near the Cumberland Plateau, filing a resolution honoring the plateau.

Obviously, the plateau wouldn’t be able to show up to the Capitol to receive a finely calligraphed copy of this resolution, so we’re not sure what the point of this was. But the legislature does all kinds of pointless things, like pass laws that aren’t even in the same time zone as the United States Constitution, so let’s not get hung up on the details. Even though most of these resolutions get scooted along via the consent calendar, this one was pulled and Clemmons was forced to defend the resolution in front of the Aristotelian wonder that is the House Ag Committee. During this colloquy, he was challenged by state Rep. Chris Todd. Todd, who holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from Union University, took particular umbrage to the description of the plateau as “a vast tableland of sandstone and shale dating as far back as 500 million years,” saying we “don’t have any solid evidence that the Earth is that old.” There is, of course, mountains of evidence the earth is at least 500 million years old. Indeed, there’s plenty showing it’s about 4 billion years older than that. It’s in books. Books Todd probably had to read — or at least should have read — to get that bachelor’s degree in biology. Bonus geology Boner for Clemmons: The sandstone and shale on the Cumberland Plateau are “only” 300 million years old. Dummy!

HALE. NO.

ILLUSTRATION: HOLLY CARDEN

It’s tough sledding for Tennessee Democrats, destined for second place in most

elections — even when facing off against Republican and multiple Boner Award winner Scott DesJarlais (who is pro-life but also advised a secret abortion for his mistress).

DesJarlais’ main legislative accomplishment seems to be “is a member of the United States Congress and votes on stuff (sometimes),” so we almost have to applaud sentient Coexist bumper sticker Christopher Hale, the world’s youngest perennial candidate. He developed a multipronged strategy that went beyond the retail politics of doorknocking and phone calls. He also came up with the slogan “Hale Yes!” that must have come to him in a stroke of inspiration like Proust eating his madeleine. But PG puns weren’t all Hale had to offer. Seeing that Democrats have a tough time winning on their own merits in Tennessee, he thought it wise to encourage voters to vote for him so they could vote for someone else later, tweeting that conservatives — and in Tennessee’s 4th Congressional District, that’s roughly everybody — should vote for him to rid themselves of DesJarlais, and then vote for some really conservative candidate the next time around. He offered a parade of horribles that included loony Islamophobe Lou Ann Zelenik and monorail enthusiast Joe Carr. He seemingly did this with no trace of irony, because he wouldn’t know what irony was if it marched up to him wearing a pink pussy hat and introduced itself. Hale, perhaps it doesn’t need to be noted, finished with a third of the vote in the general election. He bragged he got more votes than any challenger Demo-

PETTY CRIME ROUNDUP Our look at some of the boneheads, boobs and bumblers arrested this year for Boner-worthy behavior

BY J.R. LIND

E

ven in These Uncertain Times, there’s one thing we can still count on: There are some mind-bogglingly bonerific criminals operating in our fair city.

And what’s more, there are some equally sloppy malefactors who still love to visit and fill our coffers with booze tax and then spend a night (or two, or more) on our dime watched by the men and women of our sheriff’s department.

Call them boneheaded, bold or brazen — just don’t

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call them criminal masterminds.

We all know Al Capone was brought low by tax evasion when the feds had a tough time pinning anything else on him. Maybe it was because the Chicago Outfit was a well-organized syndicate, or maybe it was because Scarface had cops and judges on the take.

But for sure it was due, at least in part, to Al having the good sense not to fence stolen goods at a pawn shop under his own name. At least two men were arrested this year for pawning things they’d shoplifted — a 22-year-old sold a reciprocating saw and some DeWalt tools he’d palmed at a Home Depot; a 36-year-old traded a leaf blower he’d stolen from a landscaping company. The former was followed by a loss-prevention officer to the pawn shop. The latter was tracked via a serial number on the high-grade blower. Both used their own IDs to make the swap.

Both were arrested.

They should have known to use fake names, like the 31-year-old shoplifter who gave police her roommate’s name. Which would have worked, except when

crat in a Congressional race in Tennessee history. He left out the part about how there weren’t many challenger Democrats for the first, oh, 160 years of the state’s existence, and also the part about how he had the lowest percentage of the vote of any Democrat who faced DesJarlais, a man once described by a Republican operative as a “terd.”

BONERS ON THE TRAIL

Campaign season is the time to let a hundred Boners bloom, and this year did not disappoint. Twice (at least) this cycle, Republicans reached for attacks on their opponents that only served to expose their low opinion of the voting public. During his primary fight with Dr. Manny Sethi, Bill Hagerty launched a website implying shady things in Sethi’s past — shady things that amounted to nonprofit work and personal relationships with other doctors who wouldn’t win a GOP primary. (Hagerty went on to win.) Later, in the final weeks of the state Senate race between Republican Sen. Steve Dickerson and his Democratic opponent Heidi Campbell, the Senate Republican Caucus spent loads of cash attacking Campbell. One ad sought to sully her reputation in the closely divided district by highlighting her support for Gideon’s Army and demonizing the group as a dangerous sect of far-left extremists. The group has indeed supported calls to defund the police and empower alternative public safety initiatives. But it was literally founded in response to devastating gun violence in North Nashville, and the group’s most extreme action

she was booked, they ran her prints and learned her true identity. And the nine warrants out for her arrest.

But as Shakespeare didn’t write, she who steals my leaf blower steals trash, but she who filches my bestest boy makes me poor indeed. A 25-year-old woman was charged with theft for stealing her neighbor’s pooch — and she would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids. And by meddling kids, we mean her own security camera, which captured footage of the woman snipping the dog’s leash and taking the purloined pooch back to her house. The dog, by the way, ran back to its actual home. Good boy.

Similarly, a 30-year-old woman denied that she burned her boyfriend’s clothes. She apparently either forgot or didn’t care that she’d sent a video of her burning her boyfriend’s clothes to said boyfriend.

In other canine-adjacent crime news, a 43-yearold was brought low by a poodle after the man tried to break into the poodle’s (and its owner’s) home.

Enraged by this rude and unnecessary violation of basic property rights, the poodle took a nice nip out of the man’s leg.

But at least he tried to escape. An alarming number of criminals are caught not so much in the act, but rather right after the act just, y’know, hanging out. Like the 25-year-old woman who broke into a stranger’s car, drank some bottled water and told officers she was “chilling” in the definitely-not-hers vehicle. Or the 28-year-old man who, after a night on the town, entered what he thought was his apartment.

In fact, it used to be his apartment, but his renewed claim to it shocked its current occupant, who hid in a closet and called the police while the intruder made himself at home, again.

There was the 23-year-old man arrested while showering fully clothed at a downtown hotel. And then there was the 29-year-old who sauntered into a South Nashville Planet Fitness in his altogether, walked right past the attendant and into a tanning room, where he locked the door and sat patiently until the police arrived. And let us not forget the 36-year-old woman arrested for a DUI after she was found passed out in

this year was organizing an amazing rapid response to the March 3 tornado. Swing and a miss. Campbell went on to unseat Dickerson.

LEE’S PERSISTENT PLAZA PROBLEM

Gov. Bill Lee could have just ignored demonstrators’ plans to occupy the steps leading to the state Capitol and set up an “autonomous zone” in protest of racism and police brutality. Maybe then it wouldn’t have lasted as long. But instead, the governor put out a statement hours before the protest began that state troopers would arrest anyone violating anti-camping laws established years ago after the Occupy movement, and this declaration of animosity only served to embolden protesters. No arrests were made the first night of the campout, and while demonstrators relocated across the street onto Legislative Plaza, the movement — which would soon be known as the People’s Plaza — continued for 62 days. Rather than de-escalate the situation, the state wasted taxpayer money and lawmakers assaulted free speech (including an early attempt by House Speaker Cameron Sexton to make chalk writing on state property a felony).

More than $1 million was spent on overtime and travel costs for state troopers to monitor the protests in June alone. In a special session in August — which was supposed to be devoted to COVID-19 response efforts — state legislators passed laws to enhance penalties for violating anti-camping laws, which Lee signed. In a summer defined as much by protests against racial justice as this

her car in a Bar-B-Cutie drive-thru, no doubt angering those behind her in desperate need of some pulled pork. Did they get as angry as the 38-year-old woman who, in the course of some vague dispute about onion rings, punched out the drive-thru window at a Burger King, leading to a vandalism arrest?

Philosophically, though, it’s not always about where you are, but rather where you’re going. Like the 54-year-old arrested walking on I-65 North who told officers he “needed” to get to White House, Tenn. Sir, I assure you that you don’t. And sometimes it’s about where you’ve been and where you’re going again, as in the case of a 26-year-old man caught pilfering wine at a downtown liquor store. Police were able to identify him because he dropped his jail-release paperwork during the heist.

But it’s important we don’t live in the past. Looking at you, 37-year-old woman who, during her DUI arrest, told officers “You are the weakest link, goodbye.”

That is an extremely hip reference to a 20-year-old TV show, ma’am. But “weakest link” is a far nicer thing to say to officers than the barrage of unmentionables spewed by a 25-year-old woman from (where else?) the Chicago area, who let loose every slur in the book when the MNPD tried to make her wear a mask on Broadway. For good measure, she let her bladder loose in the back of the patrol car.

Our last Boner, however, goes to the Metro Nashville Police Department, who arrested a 62-year-old woman simply for living her best life. She was standing on Second Avenue, swigging from a champagne bottle, minding her own business. OK, she was trying to spit on passers-by too, but bear with us here. The officers asked her to stop with the swigging and the spitting and what not, to which she replied, “Fuck you, I’ll do what I want!” Well, apparently, that was enough for an arrest. During a search, the officers found about three-quarters of an ounce of weed and a fancy gold pipe, which the woman “excitedly” explained was the “peace pipe” she used for smoking her marijuana.

And this is a crime?!

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damn pandemic, Tennessee’s attack on free speech garnered national attention. On top of that, this was an election year — it wasn’t lost on local and out-of-state observers that in Tennessee having a felony conviction means you lose the right to vote.

STOP THE PRESS

While organizations across the country reckoned with institutional racism, folks at the state Capitol tripped over their feet. In June, WPLN reporter Sergio Martínez-Beltrán said in a tweet that he had twice faced obstacles from security personnel while trying to move around the Cordell Hull State Office Building to do his job. Martínez-Beltrán has been the station’s political reporter since 2018; he is also the only person of color in the Tennessee Capitol Hill Press Corps. “I wear two press badges around my neck every day,” wrote Martínez-Beltrán in a tweet.

“I wear a suit too. Why? So that security and lawmakers know right away I’m press. Not an intern, not a random person, not a criminal. Press. This week showed that hasn’t been enough.”

TROOPER STUPOR

When Tennessee Highway Patrol Trooper Harvey Briggs saw Andrew Golden filming a traffic stop in the parking lot of the Capitol, he left his post and started shouting at the man to not interfere. Golden, who had occasionally joined in at the nearby People’s Plaza protest occupation, shouted back and used some blue language, which seemed to spark the trooper’s temper. Briggs got up in Golden’s face, and the protester turned the camera on their interaction — the maskless trooper was inches away from the masked protester, in the middle of a pandemic. After more back-and-forth, Briggs ripped off Golden’s mask and shrugged off his complaints about the act. While the cell phone footage didn’t capture the mask-ripping, surveillance footage did — and Briggs was terminated following review. A disciplinary file obtained by the Associated Press showed it wasn’t Briggs’ first mistake as a trooper, but it sure as hell was his last.

ACAB: A COP, A BONER

Early in the spring, the pandemic and associated lockdowns were new, and we all handled them differently. Some folks used the time to go on walks and enjoy the only places where things still felt somewhat normal. Others, like Metro Nashville Police Captain Jason Reinbold, took the opportunity to launch profane tirades at such people. That’s what happened in early April when Erin McDermott was walking along a path in Brentwood with the children she watches as a nanny.

They stopped to eat some snacks and get some water, and the place where they did so just happened to be behind Reinbold’s house.

That’s when the longtime MNPD veteran and one-man Boner Squad started berating McDermott, telling her to leave and eventually yelling to the children, “You wanna stay and listen to me fucking cuss all day?” Reinbold was later accused of sexual harassment and assault, just one example of a variety of allegations that have surfaced about the culture inside the MNPD. He recently retired while under investigation for another misdeed involving copying department files.

APB: ALL-POINTS BULLSHIT

A few days after riots in downtown Nash-

ville led to widespread confrontations with the police, the Metro Nashville Police Department announced its intention to arrest two well-known local Black activists, Justin Jones and Jeneisha Harris, on charges of felony aggravated rioting. Police said the two could be seen in photos and video standing on the roof of a squad car that was later found to be damaged. Metro Councilmember Dave Rosenberg called the charges “absurd” and said the story “reeks of vengeance.”

Jones called the charges “politically motivated.” Less than three hours after MNPD’s announcement, as Jones and Harris were preparing to turn themselves in, the police department released another statement. This one announced that the warrants had been recalled after Davidson County District Attorney Glenn Funk and the MNPD “reviewed additional information.” We’re glad the charges were cleared up, but it sounds an awful lot like they never should’ve been issued in the first place.

REVILED CHILD

In late May, fully righteous and justified protests over the police killing of George Floyd popped up around the country, including here in Nashville. Though a May 30 “I Will Breathe” demonstration in downtown Nashville was peaceful, it was followed by calamitous events later that night, including one bad actor, a white man, setting fire to the Metro Courthouse as a crowd looked on. Photos and videos posted to social media showed the man — shirtless and bearing a tattoo reading “Wild Child” — clearly igniting a fire through one of the building’s smashedout windows. A 25-year-old named Wesley Somers was ultimately arrested for the crime and charged with felony arson, vandalism and disorderly conduct. Here’s the thing: If you’re going to set fire to a historic public building while surrounded by dozens of camera- and smartphone-wielding onlookers, maybe pull that face mask up over your nose, or at least, you know, cover up any extremely identifying tattoos you might happen to have on your torso.

DECEMBER 10

ROBERT EARL KEEN’S

MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM THE FAM-O-LEE SECRET SANTA CHRISTMAS

DECEMBER 17

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DECEMBER 18

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WARMEST WINTER

FRENEMIES

Metro Police officers may have helped expedite the departure of Chief Steve Anderson when they cheesed it up with unmasked revelers crowded on Lower Broadway this summer. Police largely declined to enforce the mask mandate as COVID-19 case numbers continued to rise. That is, until they cited a man experiencing homelessness near the bustling Lower Broad bar district, leading to outrage over the selective enforcement of the rules. Anderson was out hours later.

UNDER PRESSURE

There have been a lot of bad meetings in Metro history, but perhaps the worst was a June public hearing regarding the city’s budget. City leaders were proposing a significant property tax increase in order to stave off potentially drastic cuts to city services in the middle of a raging pandemic, amid a debate about racism and criminal justice, and a lot of people wanted to register their thoughts.

It was a pain in the ass navigating technical difficulties and keeping the dozens of people who arrived to speak in person adequately distanced. And because of that, the meeting lasted well into the next morning. Vice Mayor Jim Shulman, tasked with managing the show, lost his temper in the wee hours,

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nashvillescene.com | DECEMBER 10 – DECEMBER 16, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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ENTRE-MANURE

If you’re at all familiar with Dave Ramsey’s brand of financial tough love and conservative Christian talk radio, you could hardly be surprised by how he responded to the coronavirus pandemic. In March, after a staffer at the Williamson County offices of his company Ramsey Solutions tested positive for COVID-19, Ramsey kept the offices open while acknowledging public health guidelines discouraging large gatherings.

A few months later, when a Florida hotel decided against hosting his EntreLeadership Summit, Ramsey simply brought the whole event to Franklin. In an email to staff, Ramsey Solutions executive vice president Daniel Tardy said the hotel was “being immature, transactional and irrational.” Well, that certainly describes someone in this situation.

After the Scene reported on the conference, Ramsey sent an email to staff encouraging them not to click on the story and framing it as an attack on Christians. Many of his staffers did click on the story and leaked us his email. Hi Dave!

KEEP IT TITE

The Tennessee Titans weren’t going to let something as small as a worldwide pandemic keep them from their pursuit of AFC South glory. After a mini-outbreak shut down team facilities (and led to the first of what has been a series of confusing NFL schedule moves) and the NFL subsequently barred the team from in-person contact, some Montgomery Bell Academy students noticed a “large group of adult football players” on the school’s field in the middle of the day. Because they are teens, they snapped pictures on phones that are nicer than the one you have, and those pictures made their way to bald curmudgeon and longtime Titans reporter Paul Kuharsky. The clandestine practice was confirmed by MBA headmaster Brad Gioia, who apparently has no civic pride and dimed out the Two-Toners. Despite some worries that the hush-hush practice, which took place under the cover of midafternoon, would cost the team draft picks or even lead to a forfeit, the “only” punishment from the league was a $350,000 fine.

DON’T BET ON IT

Now that Tennessee has legal sports betting, would-be touts are seeking advice and an edge from everywhere. But one place not to look: the mayor’s office, as it is clear John Cooper doesn’t know how betting works.

During the Titans’ playoff run, he tried to set up the traditional mayor’s bet with his Boston opposite number Marty Walsh, offering up a six-pack from East Nashville Beer Works if the Patriots prevailed (which they didn’t, by the way, just a reminder). Walsh famously believes mayors’ bets are a jinx and doesn’t engage in them. Even more famously, Walsh is a recovering alcoholic. During the mayor’s star turn at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, literally the first words out of his mouth were, “My name is Marty Walsh, and I’m an alcoholic.” As bad as this double-ended boner was, at least it was a bet made in a recognizable way. When the Predators faced the Stars in the NHL’s Winter Classic on New

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Year’s Day, Cooper — having apparently never made a bet before or seen anyone make a bet or heard of betting — told Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson, “If the Preds win, join me at the world-famous Grand Ole Opry this spring!”

(Bonus Boner for trying to make plans for the spring, lol.) Essentially, Cooper said, “If I win, you get a vacation.” Hard to believe the city is facing a budget crisis with that sort of outside-the-box thinking at the top.

BILLY RAY VIRUS

Taking shots, playing songs and kissing strangers at a house party may be all well and good under normal circumstances. But definitely not during a global pandemic, and especially not the weekend before your Saturday Night Live debut. Morgan Wallen learned this the hard way. A passel of social media posts showed the rising country star celebrating a University of Alabama win in close quarters with maskless fans. When he arrived in New York for SNL rehearsals, Wallen discovered he’d been disinvited from the show for breaking its COVID-19 safety protocols. Jack White assembled a trio at the last minute and filled in ably; Wallen issued a seemingly genuine public apology and got another chance to play the show in December.

All the same, that’s a huge opportunity that few other artists would blow so hard.

UP IN THE AIR

It’s hard to know who should really be accepting this Boner Award. Bobby Joslin, the Nashville businessman who reported his Cessna 172 missing last December only to discover it parked in the wrong hangar?

Or the goofball who parked Bobby Joslin’s Cessna 172 in the wrong hangar at John C. Tune Airport? Look, this mixup lasted long enough to get the FBI involved, so they should probably both come on up here and take a bow. Congrats on the rare Scene double, appearing in both the Best of Nashville Issue and the Boner Awards.

HERE WE GO AGAIN

This year, our city’s excellent professional theater companies have canceled their seasons and watched their funding dry up, TPAC has paused all performances, and Chaffin’s Barn Dinner Theatre shuttered for good.

But the thespians in the ’burbs continued to have a hootin’ good time, mounting inperson productions of the plays that no one needs to see ever again. Who could argue with the essential nature of Steel Magnolias, performed in person by Hendersonville Performing Arts Company? An August production of Mamma Mia! in North Platte, Neb., closed down because 23 members of the cast tested positive for COVID-19. But what would the people of Coffee County do without another viewing of the “smash hit musical,” which The Ultimate Oldies Rock and Roll Show group performed in September at the Manchester Arts Center? The theater has a packed calendar of performances this winter, despite the fact that the town’s mayor, Lonnie Norman, tragically died of COVID-19 in October. The Facebook page of Lebanon’s Audience of One Productions is full of scripture — perhaps that’s what has kept the cast, crew and audience of The Addams Family musical safe. There are circuses in Brentwood, a murder mystery in Smyrna and even Shakespeare in Murfreesboro (possibly the only of these shows worth seeing in normal times), all while cases of

COVID-19-related illnesses and deaths rise throughout the state. It seems the enemies of art are also the enemies of science.

THE COVID COVER-UP THAT WASN’T

Fox 17 really thought it had some kind of smoking gun when it came across an email correspondence concerning Tennessee Lookout reporter Nate Rau’s request for COVID-19 numbers at restaurants and bars. The emails showed city officials trying to figure out how to properly share the low numbers of COVID cases traced back to those spots; out of context, it kinda-sorta sounded like a conspiracy to avoid releasing the data — and reporter Dennis Ferrier quickly called it a cover-up. With the context, though, it sounded more like complying with health care standards to help protect people’s identities, since it’s easier to identify people from smaller outbreaks. Not only that, the report completely missed that Metro did in fact share those numbers with Rau (who they mistakenly identified as a reporter with The Tennessean, his former employer). Amid the mistaken cries of a cover-up was an appearance by Metro Councilmember Steve Glover, the only named source in the story, who mostly complained about the tax rate increase and regulations concerning downtown businesses. While journalists from other outlets quickly corrected the article’s misinformation — and Fox 17 strangely deleted and then undeleted the story from its website — Glover himself appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to spread the false story. One day later, Fox 17 retracted the story and apologized for it, but the right had already had a field day with the false news.

DOLLARS AND NONSENSE

There’s a lot to scrutinize about the homeless shelters set up at the Fairgrounds Nashville — and whether the city should investigate more socially distanced alternatives. But WSMV’s recent look at what it costs to run the operation came across less like accountability reporting and more like a thinly veiled complaint by folks who want the economy to reopen, as well as flea market vendors feeling the financial crunch of the pandemic. Really, once Metro Councilmember Steve Glover enters as a key source for

the story, it’s clear what the angle is. WSMV found it cost $2.5 million, which includes expenses like fencing and medical staffing. In a particularly cynical move, the report tries to call out homelessness service providers’ calls for motel rooms to be provided instead of shelters — a request that stemmed from safety concerns rather than budget crunching. Some back-of-the-napkin math shows that strategy would have cost $410,000 — but as Metro’s statement points out, that leaves out other operating costs, like $1.1 million for contracted medical staff. Given that people experiencing chronic homelessness also often face medical conditions, it’s crucial to realize that it does take more than just a spare room to care for a vulnerable population — something service providers doubtlessly would have told reporter Nancy Amons had she bothered to reach out to them. Whatever Amons set out to do with this story, she missed the mark.

BE THE CHANGE YOU WISH TO SEE

Steve Smith and other owners of Lower Broadway honky-tonks have spent much of this pandemic shouting loudly that the real problem isn’t hordes of boneheads stumbling around the neon canyon, but rather Mayor John Cooper’s administration being overly cautious. The claim that their bars weren’t contributing to the spread of COVID-19 rested on a tiny amount of information Metro released in June. Vast amounts of additional contact tracing data the city collected included information that could identify individuals, and releasing it would violate federal medical privacy laws, so it remained unreleased. Then, Smith and other bar owners filed suit against the city, forcing Metro to de-identify contact tracing data and make it public — which, as Tennessean journalist Brett Kelman’s report notes, pointed a finger right at Lower Broadway.

LADY A-HOLES

Naming their band Lady Antebellum was the foundation on which the milquetoast popcountry trio built a towering Boner palace.

Since 2006, Hillary Scott, Charles Kelley, Dave Haywood and everyone in their orbit have ignored the racist implications of adopting a euphemism that glorifies a time before

ILLUSTRATION: HOLLY CARDEN

scolding those who repeated similar messages about defunding the police for taking up too much time. After the fog cleared, the vice mayor apologized for his undemocratic showing.

NASHVILLE SCENE | DECEMBER 10 – DECEMBER 16, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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the Civil War brought an end to slavery. As protests over police violence against Black people spread this summer following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the band announced it would change its name to Lady A. But someone on the group’s team tripped over their Boner by failing to do a Google search. Or else they assumed that Anita White, a Black blues singer from Seattle who has performed as Lady A since 1987, either wouldn’t care or wouldn’t be able to do anything about the group appropriating the name. When White refused to share “Lady A” under terms of an iffy contract, the band filed suit, starting a legal battle that is still ongoing — transcending Bonerdom into the territory of upholding the systemic racism that led to the protests in the first place.

BONERS BY ASSOCIATION

Boners spring eternal from the Country Music Association’s annual awards ceremony. This year, their media team started a week early with a tweet about how the performance was intended to be a “no-drama zone,” echoing the organization’s 2017 attempt to ban discussions of gun reform. The Associated Press pulled out of coverage, citing photo restrictions that would prevent true journalistic documentation of the event (read: creating a record of which celebrity guests came to this large, invite-only indoor gathering during the pandemic). During the show, 86-year-old Charley Pride — a legend whose age puts him at high risk for suffering badly with the coronavirus — was honored onstage in said room full of unmasked celebrities. If more proof was needed that the CMA reads a room like the writing’s in cuneiform, the program recognized late songwriter Mac Wiseman with hosts Reba McEntire and Darius Rucker duetting on “In the Ghetto.” And a bonus Boner of omission: John Prine, Jerry Jeff Walker and Billy Joe Shaver, three recently deceased singersongwriters who had enormous impacts on country music, weren’t acknowledged in the show at all.

WHITE KNIGHTS OF THE BONER TABLE

Following the CMA Awards, Jason Isbell tweeted that he and Amanda Shires were returning their lifetime CMA membership cards, protesting its failure to recognize the aforementioned late legends Prine, Walker and Shaver. Journalist and author Andrea Williams, a Scene contributor, pointed out that the couple did this in honor of white heroes, but hadn’t ever taken the CMA to task for its refusal to support Black musicians in meaningful ways. Angry fans came out of the woodwork to defend Isbell’s honor, incensed that someone who has shown respect for Black lives was being asked to do more.

They could learn a lot from Isbell’s gracious response, which put his privilege in perspective. Many of us have made the mistake of getting unnecessarily Mad Online, but in this case, Isbell and Williams were just having a conversation. Maybe take it down a notch, Twittersphere.

HIGH ALERT

File this under Petit Boners, since it’s only the fault of whoever scheduled the federally regulated Emergency Alert System for its monthly test. They couldn’t know that the signal would interrupt country supergroup The Highwomen singing a socially distanced

rendition of “Crowded Table” on The Tonight Show. But interrupt it did, coming in right on the first syllable of the opening line. At least the performance is on YouTube.

SUPERSPREADERS INDEED!

In November, an odd flyer started making the rounds online. “Island of Misfit Toys Christmas Party,” it read. “Dress up as one of Santa’s sexy mistresses, a naughty little elf, a spicy candy cane, or even the hot big guy himself!” The flyer promised a weekend-long private party presented by the Vibe Social Club to take place in early December at an unnamed hotel in Antioch. Tennessee Lookout reported that Vibe had previously hosted two other Nashville parties (a “Back to School” party in September and a “Back the Blue” party in October). The owners claim the group is not a swingers’ club (sure seems like it is!), but regardless, big sexy parties aren’t exactly kosher in the midst of a global pandemic. Ultimately the party’s organizer told WSMV that the sensual soiree had been moved to a hotel in Mississippi. Hey Magnolia State — good luck with all that!

EYE OF THE NEEDLE

Before making a bunch of noise about bar and restaurant pandemic regulations, John Rich caused a different kind of ruckus in the pre-COVID days of yore. Last December, the country singer and Celebrity Apprentice champ was upset to learn that students at Lipscomb Academy, where his kids go to school, have been learning about white privilege and racism. The Redneck Riviera owner and his wife even canceled a fundraiser over the curriculum, and rallied like-minded white parents who complained in a series of town halls at the private Christian school. There were calls for people to be fired, including Lipscomb’s first dean of intercultural development, Brittany Paschal, a Black woman. Rich spouting off fragilewhite-guy talking points wasn’t particularly out of character — what’s more embarrassing is that the school seemed to accommodate Rich and others’ calls for heads to roll, transitioning some academy staff, including Paschall, to the University. (Rich later said he didn’t want Paschall fired, but did highlight her past writings in one of his massemail complaints to parents.) Paschall has seemed to handle the ordeal with as much grace as possible, and recently announced she had transitioned to a job in Metro Nashville Public Schools this fall.

THROWING CAUTION TO THE BONER

When a freak derecho slammed into the area with 70-mile-per-hour winds in May, Chad Withrow did what any self-respecting sports talk radio host would do — he picked a fight on air about something he didn’t really understand. On the one hand, we should probably forgive Chad, because he was about two months into a pandemic sports desert and didn’t have much else to opine about on a daily basis. On the other hand, calling out Nashville’s favorite Tweeteorologists, @NashSevereWx, for failing to predict an unpredictable storm is next-level oblivious.

After all, the NashSevereWx account actually saved lives with its warnings on the night of Nashville’s March 3 tornado. Given sports talk radio’s sketchy relationship with science these days, maybe Chad ought to just stick to the games.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

nashvillescene.com | DECEMBER 10 – DECEMBER 16, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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NASHVILLE SCENE | DECEMBER 10 – DECEMBER 16, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

CRITICS’ PICKS R O U N D U P

T H I N G S

T O

D O

[DASHING THROUGH THE GLOW]

EXPERIENCE JINGLE BEAT, AN IMMERSIVE SENSORY EVENT

Back in September, the folks at entertainment production company EAMOTION took over the Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway for Tempo, a pandemic-safe drive-thru event. It was a genuinely fun spectacle — cruising between light towers and various outsized displays with EDM thumping from speakers all around us. This month, the EAMOTION crew is returning with Jingle Beat, another multimedia drive-thru event at the speedway, this time set to feature holidayrelated sights and sounds — lasers, a 50foot pyramid constructed with 2,000 video panels, projection mapping, Christmas tunes and more. Organizers promise “a fresh remix of holiday classics” to accompany the festive choreographed light displays, and as with Tempo, one ticket will cover a carload. Prices range from $45 to $60, so pile your family or small group of pandemic bubble inhabitants into the whip and prepare for a joy ride around the speedway’s twomile fixed outdoor course. Worth noting: EAMOTION & Co. have employed more than 150 tour-production workers to make Jingle Beat happen — that’s a lot of people whose primary source of income disappeared when live music events ground to a halt back EDITOR’S NOTE: in the spring. It’s good to see AS A RESPONSE TO THE those folks gigging again. Visit ONGOING COVID-19 PANDEMIC, WE’VE CHANGED THE FOCUS OF eamotion.com/jinglebeat for THE CRITICS’ PICKS SECTION TO more details. Through Dec. 31 INCLUDE ACTIVITIES YOU CAN at the Nashville Fairgrounds PARTAKE IN WHILE YOU’RE AT Speedway, 625 Smith Ave. HOME.

TUNE IN TO LIVING ROOM FILM CLUB FEAT. HITCHCOCK SCHOLAR CHRISTINA LANE

It’s a lot easier to find men criticizing renowned film critic Pauline Kael online than it is to find an unbiased summary, or even a few good quotes, of Kael’s opposition to auteur theory. Kael famously opposed the supposition that a film’s director is the preeminent creative force in the making of a film. This, surmised Kael, led to critics dismissing the collaborative nature of filmmaking, the labor of the team supporting that director, and their own unique visions that influence the work. I tend to agree. For a prime example of the folly of auteur theory, see the new release Mank, which chronicles the life and work of Herman Mankiewicz, the screenwriter responsible for Citizen Kane. But other examples abound. In the book Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock, scholar Christina Lane writes about the woman who was one of Hitchcock’s closest collaborators and was nominated for Academy Awards in screenwriting for Foreign Correspondent and Rebecca.

J I N G L E B E AT THROUGH DEC. 31 The Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway

Prize Finalist citation, the Kennedy Prize, a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a Guggenheim, the Herb Alpert in Theater, The Booth Award, the Peter Zeisler Memorial Award, the Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, two Bessies, two Obies and two Helpmanns.

The event streams live from New York, and is recommended for audiences older than 16.

9 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 12, via ozartsnashville.org LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

[THE NEXT GENERATION]

STREAM STATE OF THE WORD

I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that Southern Word is still hosting its annual State of the Word event to showcase young regional poets and select a new Nashville Youth Poet Laureate. The bad news is what you’d expect: COVID-19 is likely going to prevent participants from performing at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center

[RISKY CHRISTMAS]

STREAM TAYLOR MAC’S HOLIDAY SAUCE ... PANDEMIC!

If you’re like me and you like your Christmas cheer with a healthy dose of profanity and sexual content, you’re going to love Taylor Mac’s holiday special. The brilliant mind who brought us A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (and who uses the gender pronoun “judy”) returns to Nashville screens via OZ Arts. Prepare to be overwhelmed with Mac’s singular wit — judy really is a modern-day Oscar Wilde, with a long list of awards to prove it, including a 2020 Ibsen Award, a MacArthur Fellow, a Tony Award nomination, a Pulitzer

TAYLOR MAC’S HOLIDAY SAUCE ...

PANDEMIC!

nashvillescene.com | DECEMBER 10 – DECEMBER 16, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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PHOTO: LITTLE FANG PHOTOGRAPHY

[AUTEUR, SCHMAUTER]

The first woman producer at a major studio, Harrison became an influential producer and writer in her own right, working with some of the most lauded actors, directors and producers of 20th-century cinema. But few know her name. Lane’s book aims to correct this omission and bring the phantom to light. She’ll be our guest at the latest installment of the virtual Living Room Film Club, which is co-presented by the Belcourt and the Scene. Our own critic Sadaf Ahsan will talk with Lane about her book, and they’ll leave time for your questions after.

Register at belcourt.org, and find the book at Parnassus. 7 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 10, via belcourt.org ERICA CICCARONE THEATER

D. PATRICK RODGERS

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POETRY

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CRITICS’ PICKS

[HE’S EDDIE MURPHY, DAMMIT]

TV

REWATCH LAST YEAR’S HOLIDAY EPISODE OF SNL HOSTED BY EDDIE MURPHY

[MAYORAL]

STREAM MAYOR VIA THE BELCOURT

The new documentary Mayor — which the Belcourt screens virtually from Dec. 11 to 24 — will have you sympathizing a great deal with its central star: Musa Hadid, mayor of Palestine’s de facto capital Ramallah. As the doc begins, the vaping city manager already has a lot on his plate, from promising that a local school will have doors that’ll stay shut to planning the Christmas-tree lighting ceremony. But he eventually adds calling for an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestine to his to-do list — especially once a certain recently ousted U.S. president recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and Israeli soldiers and Palestinian protesters start going at it. This movie is practically a salute to anyone who has ever attempted to hold things down in municipal government. Director-producercinematographer David Osit always keeps his eye on Hadid, as he tries to stay authoritative (and sane) when chaos begins to take over. Dec. 11-24 via belcourt.org CRAIG D. LINDSEY

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WATCH NASHVILLE IN HARMONY’S AT HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS

LISTEN TO JACKED: RISE OF THE NEW JACK SOUND

It’s almost hard to believe that just a few decades ago, hip-hop and R&B didn’t always get along — the industry behind the latter genre wanted little to do with upstart rappers. But that changed when superproducer Teddy Riley hit the scene, providing hard-hitting beats for smooth and soulful crooners to sing over. Jacked:

[BREAKABLE]

SEE CHROMA: A CONTEMPORARY SURVEY OF AMERICAN GLASS

For many, the art of glassmaking calls to mind the master craftsmen of Venice, the gaudy configurations of Chihuly or simple run-of-the-mill glass flowers. There’s certainly a place for the decorative, but glass can also be a provocative medium that explodes our boxed-in associations.

With CHROMA: A Contemporary Survey of American Glass, the gallery at Fort Houston explores this innovative medium. Curated

by Meredith Edmondson and Jennifer Crescuillo and juried by Pamela Marlene Taylor, CHROMA includes work by 32 artists at the top of their game. Crescuillo incorporates found objects into her glass assemblages, imbuing them with nostalgia; in her other work, she uses sand to carve glass into fossil-like monuments to obsolete technology. From JiEun Yoon’s poetic meditations on the natural world to Dorie Guthrie’s Lynchian portraits and James Akers’ neon celebrations of color, Chroma

CHROMA: A CONTEMPORARY SURVEY OF AMERICAN GLASS

RACHEL BARTEK

FILM

KELSEY BEYELER

[VERY MERRY]

[NEW JACK CITY]

The holidays may look a little different this year, but Nashville in Harmony has cooked up a special musical treat with the premiere of its free virtual concert, At Home for the Holidays. Boasting 120 voices, the citywide chorus is Tennessee’s only musical arts organization created especially for people of all sexual orientations, gender identities, gender expressions and their allies. And this year’s program includes a mix of new music (produced remotely), along with excerpts from past concerts — including footage from shows at the historic Ryman Auditorium. There also will be a performance from the Major Minors — the organization’s youth chorus for ages 12 to 18 — plus special guest appearances, and even a drag-queen storytime. This concert also marks Wesley King’s first show as Nashville in Harmony’s artistic director. The concert is free, but donations are welcome. To learn more, visit nashvilleinharmony.org. 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 12, via Nashville in Harmony’s Facebook page AMY STUMPFL ART

as originally planned. But it’s absolutely still worth tuning into. Southern Word has consistently fostered an impressive lineup of astonishing young voices who have profound messages to share, and watching them perform online has never stopped me from getting goosebumps. And the fact that they’ll be competing for a panel of judges to win the title of Nashville’s next Youth Poet Laureate will certainly raise the bar.

This event is hosted in partnership with the Nashville Symphony and the Schermerhorn, who will be showcasing some of their own young talent from the Accelerando initiative, a program that provides mentorship to young musicians from diverse backgrounds. State of the Word is a rare and special opportunity to catch a glimpse of Nashville’s next generation as they begin to make their presence known, and it’s free to anyone who wants to listen.

7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 11, via southernword.org

MUSIC

NASHVILLE IN HARMONY’S AT HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS

There’s only so much you can expect from holiday traditions. Putting up a Christmas tree might always be a thrill, but try to watch the same movie at least once a year for your entire adult life and tell me you’re not a little bored. That’s why I suggest a new addition to the Christmastime media canon — 2019’s holiday episode of Saturday Night Live, which was hosted by Eddie Murphy.

Aside from a very brief appearance on the 40th-anniversary episode, it was Murphy’s first time on the show since he left the cast in 1984, and it’s also an exceedingly rare allkiller-no-filler episode of the long-running series. The monologue is wonderful and has zero references to 2020, which is a blessing

in itself. There’s plenty of nostalgia — from Gumby and Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood to Buckwheat and Velvet Jones — mixed with some solid new sketches that Murphy carries handily. My favorite is the baking challenge, wherein Murphy appears as a home baker whose creation becomes unexpectedly possessed. Plus, the musical guest is Lizzo. Do yourself a favor and revisit some of the best television of 2019 and cue it up on Hulu, Peacock or VOD immediately. Besides, if you do something two holidays in a row, it becomes tradition — and you’ll never have to suffer through White Christmas again. LAURA HUTSON HUNTER PODCAST

offers a survey of the form and its myriad possibilities. The Fort is limiting capacity to 15 guests at a time, and guided viewing is available by appointment. 11 a.m.-5 p.m.

Tuesday-Saturday, through Dec. 17 at Fort Houston, 2020 Lindell Ave. ERICA CICCARONE

NASHVILLE SCENE | DECEMBER 10 – DECEMBER 16, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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CRITICS’ PICKS

[QUICK AS]

JOIN LIGHTNING 100’S SAVE OUR AIRWAVES CAMPAIGN

FILM

As we reach nine months of COVIDrelated shutdowns, it’s clear that no area of the entertainment economy is immune.

Lightning 100 is a rare commercial music station that’s done exceedingly well in spite of remaining independent — one of few not bought up by a megacorporation like iHeart or Cumulus. Thanks to COVID-19, ad sales are down and the station hasn’t been able to host events like the much-loved free music festival Live on the Green, which generates revenue through vendor fees, sponsorships and so on. This has left the station with a $250,000 hole in its budget, and it’s launched a campaign to enlist your help to stay on the air until things return to something like normal. Following the lead of #SaveOurStages and #SaveYourCinema, Lightning 100 announced Save Our Airwaves, a multifaceted fundraiser.

At the website (lightning100.com/ saveourairwaves), you’ll find options for becoming a member of the station, buying some newly designed merch or other goods, or simply making a donation. An auction of instruments and posters, signed by previous Live on the Green performers like Ben Folds and Kurt Vile, ends at 5 p.m. on Dec. 10. Simply put, the station is free to engage with its community and highlight local music in ways that corporate stations are not — among other things, see To Nashville With Love, a massive benefit for tornado relief that Lightning 100 helped organize. Even if you prefer the approach of community stations like WXNA and WRFN or Nashville Public Radio’s new music discovery station WNXP, Lightning 100 represents a strong swipe at the behemoths’ dominance, a thing not to be taken lightly in our crowded market. STEPHEN TRAGESER

HOLIDAY

reduced capacity and COVID-19 protocols in place (including U.V. air scrubbers and an electrostatic mister), and this week they’ll be showing 1983’s truly wild sci-fi horror extravaganza Videodrome (Dec. 1112 at 8:20 p.m.), written and directed by 77-year-old master of body horror David Cronenberg. The Belcourt will also show this year’s psychological-horror flick Possessor (Dec. 10 at 8:20 p.m.), which was written and directed by the auteur’s son Brandon Cronenberg. Once you’ve taken in one or both of those wild rides, take to your couch and queue up an early selection from the elder Cronenberg’s catalog: For more horror, go with 1979’s The Brood or 1981’s Scanners (both are available on HBO Max, but only the latter features one of the greatest exploding-head sequences of all time), or for something a bit different, go with 1979’s racing film Fast Company (free with ads on Tubi). Next, drop into 1986’s absolutely essential Jeff Goldblum-Geena Davis joint The Fly ($4 to rent on Amazon Prime or iTunes). Very disappointingly, 1996’s car-crash fetishism, uh, vehicle Crash (which, for the record, is much more compelling than the 2004 film of the same name) isn’t available to stream anywhere, so jump ahead to 1999’s sci-fi thriller Existenz ($4 via iTunes and YouTube), which features Jude Law wielding a deeply gross pistol built out of bone, muscle and teeth. Next up, watch one of Cronenberg’s two great and intense crime-centric Viggo Mortensen collaborations: 2005’s A History of Violence

[HOW DOES BRUNDLEFLY EAT?]

BUILD YOUR OWN CRONENBERG FILM FESTIVAL

For this, the 29th installment in our ongoing build-your-own-streaming-film-fest series of Critics’ Picks, we thought we’d try something a little different — recommend the work of a director with a film you can actually see (safely!) in the theater. As we reported in these pages back in November, beloved local arthouse the Belcourt Theatre has reopened with a significantly

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VIDEODROME ($4 on iTunes or YouTube) or 2007’s Eastern Promises ($4 on Prime, YouTube and iTunes).

If you’re still fiending for more ’Berg, bring your fest home with 2014’s celeb-centric satire Maps to the Stars, which is available on Netflix. D. PATRICK RODGERS [THE SAP-SAPPIEST CHRISTMAS]

WATCH SAPPY CHRISTMAS MOVIES

Look, I get it. You like your films like you like your dates: moody, dramatically lit and with minimal dialogue. But if ever there was a year to sacrifice your artistic integrity in the name of happiness and cheer, it’s 2020. Thanks to Lifetime, Hallmark and every streaming service known to man, there are more than 80 new holiday films coming to your screens this season. These beautiful little cinematic abominations were created in a lab using an advanced scientific formula to deliver maximum comfort to your cold, cold heart.

In a year full of unexpected horrors, these films give you something to count on.

Every single one takes place in a charming fictional town named Christmasville or Rudolphland. Your favorite childhood TV hero — Winnie Cooper, A.C. Slater, Sabrina the Teenage Witch — will play a widower, orphan, single parent or some combination of the three. And someone will find love and discover the true meaning of Christmas in exactly 80 minutes. So fix yourself a strong drink, grab a handful of cookies and settle in for a long Christmas movie marathon.

Might I suggest starting with Happiest

[LIGHTS, ACTION]

DRIVE THROUGH THE DANCING LIGHTS OF CHRISTMAS DISPLAY

For 11 years running, the Dancing Lights of Christmas has held court at the James E. Ward Agricultural Center (aka the Wilson County Fairgrounds) in Lebanon. But this year we can appreciate their delightful dose of good cheer more than ever before. Drivethru displays are really the perfect way to take in millions of twinkling lights. There are no crowds! No standing out in the cold or in rainy weather! It’s just you and two-anda-half miles of dizzying delight, all synced up to classic and modern holiday music you hear through your car’s radio. (Last year’s playlist included a mash-up of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” rewritten for Christmas — and I am still laughing about the line “Jingle bells / Straight to hell” sung to the tune of “Exit light / Enter night.”) Weekends can be especially busy, so my advice is to go on a weeknight — during a Tuesday night visit last year, we were able to cruise through the course at our own pace, even stopping the car now and then to take everything in.

Tickets are $25 for each vehicle (and $50 for limos? People take limos to see Christmas lights?) and can be purchased in advance at dancinglightsofchristmas.com. Beginning 5 p.m. nightly through Jan. 3 at the James E. Ward Agricultural Center, 945 E. Baddour Parkway, Lebanon MEGAN SELING GAMES

MUSIC

ALEJANDRO RAMIREZ

Season (Hulu) and Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square (Netflix) before moving onto truly heinous fare like Feliz NaviDAD (Lifetime), The Princess Switch: Switched Again (Netflix) and Snowed Inn Christmas (Lifetime). NANCY FLOYD

FILM

Rise of the New Jack Sound (streaming on Spotify, Apple and elsewhere) follows the rise of new jack swing, particularly by focusing on the formation and early years of Guy, the Harlem-based trio composed of Riley, Aaron Hall and Timmy Gatling. The pioneering sound changed not just rap and R&B, but also the landscape of pop music going forward. Hosted by Taraji P. Henson — who’s just as eager and excited to explore the story as her listeners are — the podcast dives into the history of both Guy and the short-lived genre, and weaves in stories of friendship, gangs, betrayal and dreamers along the way. There are interviews with original Guy members, plus the sounds of Bell Biv DeVoe, Boyz II Men and more.

Listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

CRITICS’ PICKS

[KNIGHT MOVES]

GET INTO CHESS

No, you’re certainly not the only person who binged Queen’s Gambit and thought, “Hey, I should get into chess.”

The timeless board game saw a boom after the series hit Netflix, with orders spiking as everyone tries to get their Beth Harmon on (personal demons not included). But even before the show’s release, chess was already seeing its popularity grow in an unlikely place: Twitch, the livestream platform usually dedicated to video games. Approachable chess experts like Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura, Woman Grandmaster Qiyu Zhou and Woman FIDE Master Alexandra Botez regularly stream their online games while providing real-time commentary and explaining their strategies, a big boost to making the game more accessible. Nakamura, the first chess player to ever join an esports team, arguably led the boom, growing his channel through dizzying displays of skill (dominating full games, solving a series of puzzles and playing blindfold matches) and his engaging personality. Physical chess sets are selling out quickly, but you can still snatch how-to-play guides and strategy books at local stores like Parnassus. You can also just log into sites like chess. com and lichess.org, which offer online matchmaking, puzzles and newbie-friendly lessons. ALEJANDRO RAMIREZ

HAPPIEST SEASON

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FOOD AND DRINK

WHISKEY BUSINESS

Three local spirits entrepreneurs boldly sail into the headwinds

PHOTOS: DANIEL MEIGS

BY CHRIS CHAMBERLAIN

L

aunching any new venture during a pandemic is risky.

But releasing new artisan spirits can be particularly difficult, owing to the need to encourage sampling to create new fans. Yet even with consumers looking to get in and out of their favorite liquor store as quickly as possible, three local entrepreneurs are depending on their own ingenuity to establish new brands that are quickly taking off.

GUIDANCE WHISKEY

Tennessee State University grad Jason Ridgel got into the spirits business through the side door. “I was living in Los Angeles

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GUIDANCE WHISKEY’S JASON RIDGEL working in medical equipment sales,” he says. “I would put on these events for doctors, and I saw that half the budget was being spent on alcohol. I realized I couldn’t let that pass me by.”

Ridgel decided to jump into the business of booze, but not as a distiller. “There’s not a lot of profit in the alcohol business, and nobody would talk to me unless I had a crazy big budget,” he says. “I realized it was easier to contract distill, and cleaned out my savings to get started.”

With the huge Kentucky distillers unwilling to pay attention to him, Ridgel looked elsewhere — specifically to Iowa. “Whiskey is mostly corn, and Iowa is where all the corn is, plus they’ve got great water,” he

says. He found a distiller willing to take a chance on his new venture, and went back and forth for about a year to come up with the 88 percent corn recipe that has become Guidance Whiskey. “I’m not a master taster or anything,” explains Ridgel, “but for me it’s all about drinkability. I got tired of lying and saying I liked something I didn’t like!”

Although Ridgel doesn’t distill his product, he made sure to be on premises when the first batch of 5,000 bottles was being produced. “I had to go to Iowa in December, and it changed me as a man!” Ridgel says.

“I grew up in Alabama, so I couldn’t believe people were so happy and normal in 10 inches of snow.”

Ridgel is proud that Guidance is one of just two Black-owned spirits suppliers in the state, along with Uncle Nearest. His 80-proof whiskey is now distributed at retail in Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, New York and Florida, and it’s also available online in 44 states.

Ridgel named the product to honor those who have offered him guidance throughout his life, and he aims to pay it forward by mentoring other Black-owned alcohol brands looking to enter the marketplace.

“I’ve already helped launch five other minority brands, and I’m really proud that Guidance will be going into the new National Museum of African American Music when it opens,” he says. “Most of all, I’m looking forward to getting in front of more people as things open up. That’s my real joy!”

NASHVILLE BARREL COMPANY

Like Ridgel, Michael Hinds specializes in selling sourced whiskey, specifically rye whiskey. Through his Nashville Barrel Company, Hinds has quickly attained cult status for his exceptional barrel picks from MGP, an Indiana distillery that provides rye whiskey for many other familiar brands.

Hinds’ business started out as a charitable venture and a way to share his remarkable palate with others for a good cause. “It was a passion project,” he recalls. “I was on the board of a bourbon charity, and we began seeking out special single barrels to bottle for fundraisers. Just this year, we’ve raised more than $25,000 for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.” Particularly popular at auction are bottles that Hinds releases under

his private “Fuck Cancer” label.

Most consumers don’t know they can work with distilleries through local retailers to purchase entire single barrels, and even design their own labels for bottling. Hinds has been part of those private pick groups for years, tasting through a selection of barrels to pick just the right one.

Hinds has recently taken his charitable hobby and transitioned it into a real business with Nashville Barrel Company. His first three NBC barrel picks were cask-strength rye whiskeys offered in extremely limited releases. “All of them sold out in about an hour,” he boasts. These single barrels were released at their barrel proofs to showcase the bold elements of the wood and spice in a fine rye whiskey, but now Hinds is aiming at some new products with lower proof and price levels.

Hinds wants to offer products that will be easier to find at your favorite spirits store — a “shelfer,” as he calls it. Instead of single barrels, the new whiskey is a smallbatch blend of 4-year-old and 7-year-old ryes, bottled at 100 proof. “I think 100 proof is better for cocktails but still strong enough to show the backbone,” he says. “I think that the 7-year-old balances out the tannins with the 4-year old.”

Nashville Barrel Company Small Batch Rye Whiskey Batch 1 retails around $60 a bottle — quite a lot less than the singlebarrel editions. Hinds still expects each new batch to have its own unique character, and each label will feature some aspect of Nashville life, which is why the first batch is subtitled “Music.”

Future plans include a new building to house a tasting room, company offices, bottling operations and barrel storage in the emerging Railyard District southeast of downtown. Hinds also expects his product line to grow over time. “We’re a transparent group that relies on access and our ability to pick great barrels. We already own barrels from outside of Indiana, including ryes, bourbons and rums, so you’ll be seeing a lot of new things from us in the future.”

O.H. INGRAM RIVER AGED WHISKEY

The staid whiskey business doesn’t always reward out-of-the-box thinking, preferring instead to trade on history and

NASHVILLE SCENE | DECEMBER 10 – DECEMBER 16, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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FOOD AND DRINK

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tradition — but that doesn’t mean people aren’t trying new things. The risk of veering from the middle of the road is that the spirits biz is an incredibly capital-intensive industry, and the results of experimentation won’t be known or appreciated until years after production.

So it helps to have a firm financial base on the front end of such a leap of faith.

That’s the enviable situation that Hank Ingram finds himself in with his new venture, O.H. Ingram River Aged Whiskey. Don’t begrudge the scion of the family behind Ingram Industries — the barge construction, book production and distribution company — for starting out with a support structure behind him. The intrinsic uncertainty of creating new products is still very real and present with his fledgling whiskey company, but his passion for it is also genuine, as is the hard work he is pouring into O.H. Ingram.

The idea started out as a competition in business school in 2014. “We won despite the fact we were the only concept in the class that couldn’t show a profit in the first three years,” Ingram says. While contemplating a business plan as part of the competition, Ingram knew he was interested in something to do with whiskey, and most of the businesses associated with his family had something to do with the river.

A legend behind bourbon’s creation is that barrels of unaged whiskey traveled by riverboat from Kentucky distilleries to New Orleans, and by the time they had transited the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the time and rocking of the boats had introduced the nuances of the charred oak staves into the whiskey, markedly improving it when it arrived. This story sparked Ingram’s new business concept — aging whiskey on company barges rolling on the river.

One problem quickly arose. “It’s illegal to age spirits on the water,” says Ingram.

“You’d have to figure out ways to apportion the alcohol taxes in each state along the way, and you must maintain a bonded warehouse open for inspection.”

Undeterred, Ingram set to work design-

ing a special floating rickhouse and refurbishing a former grain barge to hold a new sort of grain product — grain whiskey.

His patent-pending river-aging process depends on the vertical movements of the barge docked on the Mississippi River in Wickliffe, Ky., to agitate the barrels and increase the surface contact between oak and whiskey.

Ingram purchased barrels of unaged whiskey and got involved at the cooperage level to choose the toast and char levels of the barrels that would store his juice.

Working with one other employee, Ingram has loaded more than 1,200 barrels onto the barge. For more than three years, his whiskeys have been riding the waves, but that’s not the only factor that encourages wood-whiskey interaction. One reason why Kentucky and Tennessee make such great whiskeys is the vast difference in temperatures between our summers and winters, alternately expanding and contracting the grains in the barrel staves to cycle the aging whiskey.

On the barge, Ingram sees that happening much more rapidly. “We try to take a scientific approach to all this, and we’re seeing a big diurnal shift in temperature over days and weeks, as much as a 60-degree swing in a month. I like to think that we can maintain the sweetness of the grain while introducing the complexity of the barrel.”

O.H. Ingram’s first release is a novel blend of high-rye-content bourbon with a 95 percent rye whiskey, and it retails for $79.99. It definitely tastes older than it is, and the product has been flying off of shelves, selling halfway through the initial 10,000-bottle allocation at 150 retail accounts in two weeks. Ingram plans to have three products in the market over the next year and is already thinking about the future. “We’ll concentrate on rye and bourbon,” he says. “I’m already guessing our 2030 sales and forecasting backwards, but that’s OK. I’m used to thinking in barges and tons anyway.”

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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CULTURE

TURNIP THE VOLUME

Turnip Green Creative Reuse responds to crisis with creativity

BY KELSEY BEYELER

W

alking into the warehouse of Turnip Green Creative Reuse provides an instant sense of the beautiful chaos that this local nonprofit so artfully embraces. Its WedgewoodHouston headquarters stores thousands of pounds of materials that would have otherwise been discarded in the nearby landfills that are nearing capacity.

In recent years, Turnip Green has diverted tens of thousands of pounds of waste annually from Nashville’s landfills. (In 2018, for instance, the organization diverted nearly 90,000 pounds.) Upon reopening after the initial COVID-19 shutdown, they were deluged with donations like never before. “We were literally getting over 500 pounds per hour,” says executive director Leah Sherry. Warehouse visitors can find anything from used art supplies to yards of fabric, discarded wood, hardware and technology, plus myriad trinkets and oddities, all waiting for a new purpose, all available to shoppers in exchange for donations.

But Turnip Green is much more than a warehouse full of materials. It is, at its core, a community organization that sorts through chaos and finds opportunity in it.

The many challenges of 2020 have highlighted just how dedicated Turnip Green is to its mission to foster creativity and sustainability within its community.

Beyond combating Nashville’s everpresent trash crisis, Turnip Green has been quick to respond to the more urgent disasters of 2020, like the March 3 tornado. While residents were busy processing the disaster and rebuilding their lives, Turnip Green was there, working carefully in the background to help clean up — and in the foreground too, by paying staff to join cleanup efforts.

“There’s a lot of just damaged stuff and debris that really doesn’t need to go into

TURNIP GREEN CREATIVE REUSE the landfill,” says executive director Leah Sherry. “But it’s such an emotional and traumatic experience. No one’s thinking about hauling their cellos, you know? So we actually just started advertising that and started getting a lot of tornado items.”

Education is another part of the organization’s mission. When kids weren’t able to go to school in the tornado’s aftermath, Turnip Green started distributing art kits to their families so the students could enjoy at-home activities. “Little did we know that would be what we would be doing on a larger scale,” says Sherry, “because … the next week or so it was pandemic time.”

In a normal year, Turnip Green works with a handful of Metro schools by providing affordable after-school art programs.

Art supplies come from the warehouse and its longtime partner PENCIL, an organization whose mission is “linking community resources to Nashville public schools to help young people achieve academic success and prepare for life.” Once the pandemic paused in-person learning, Turnip

Green mobilized to serve students safely, collaborating with Metro Nashville Public Schools, Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee and PENCIL to distribute thousands of educational art kits, meals and school supplies to underserved children across Nashville.

Before long, working parents were in need of child care. In response, Turnip Green connected with its neighbors at the Adventure Science Center to provide space for an all-day child care program.

This program, christened Turnip Sprouts, also partners with The Nashville Food Project and PENCIL to provide meals and supplies, while funds from internal campaigns, the CARES Act and the Phoenix Club of Nashville allow affordable access for low-income families. This collaboration enables children who would have otherwise been stuck at home with limited resources and supervision to leave their houses and socialize with other kids in a structured environment. They complete online learning, receive homework help, take art lessons

and eat a fresh meal — all in a museum that’s full of wonders. Turnip Sprouts also provides supplies and online programming for select MNPS schools and Latinx Outreach nonprofit Conexión Américas.

Just as old jars can be turned into terrariums and egg cartons into miniature helicopters — two of the art lessons you’ll find on Turnip Green’s YouTube channel — the organization shows us how a nonprofit can reimagine itself to fit the needs of its community. Its employees are experts in making sense of messes and using them to create something productive, and an emphasis on collaboration allows its network of local organizations to grow alongside one another.

“It’s been just a cool challenge to be able to see [that] we can be many different things and we can shift and grow,” says Erin Boddy, who oversees programming for Turnip Green. “And we have a lot of creative, passionate people on our team that really care about the community and want to be able to do what they can and do their share.”

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

PHOTOS: DANIEL MEIGS

TURNIP SPROUTS

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NASHVILLE SCENE | DECEMBER 10 – DECEMBER 16, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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BOOKS

BOOKWORMS

NASHVILLE JEWISH BOOK SERIES EVENTS

The ongoing Nashville Jewish Book Series illuminates the Jewish American experience

All events will begin at 7 p.m. Register via nashvillejcc.org/book.

BY ERICA CICCARONE

W

ithout a doubt, the contributions of Jewish writers to the American literary canon are immense. Across genres, authors from Isaac Asimov and Cynthia Ozick to Fran Lebowitz and Tony Kushner have shaped the literary record of our nation and thus our cultural identity. And the Gordon Jewish Community Center is committed to bringing contemporary Jewish authors to Nashville to engage in conversations about their work.

Now in its fifth year, the Nashville Jewish Book Series has gone online — like almost everything in 2020 — and kicked off on Dec. 3, with its second event scheduled for Tuesday, Dec. 15, and set to feature legendy comedy writer Alan Zweibel. His memoir, Laugh Lines: My Life Helping Funny People Be Funnier, recounts his life in comedy, from being one of the original SNL writers — and collaborating with the great Gilda Radner — to co-writing the upcoming film Here Today with Billy Crystal.

To choose the eight authors participating in the series, the Nashville Jewish Book Series committee members sat in on the National Jewish Book Council’s annual conference online, where hopeful authors made their pitches to organizations and community centers around the country.

WHITE PEOPLE’S WORK

Dispatches From the Race War exhorts white Americans to join the struggle for a fairer society

BY KIM GREEN

I

n the introduction to Tim Wise’s Dispatches From the Race War, the author recalls a question his great-aunt Jean put to him at a family reunion in 1994: “Do you think we’re ever going to have a race war?” The question DISPATCHES FROM THE wasn’t totally out of the RACE WAR blue. Wise was then a

BY TIM WISE 25-year-old anti-racism CITY LIGHTS BOOKS activist who’d launched 352 PAGES, $17.95 an anti-apartheid camTIM WISE WILL APPEAR AT paign as a Tulane unA VIRTUAL EVENT 6 P.M. THURSDAY, DEC. 10, HOSTED dergraduate. His answer

BY PARNASSUS BOOKS — that such a war had been raging since 1619 — prompted his aunt’s silent retreat.

That anecdote epitomizes the fraught debates likely to flare up at holiday tables and Zoom gatherings throughout our divided country in the wake of a bitterly contested election. It sets the stage for Wise’s

TUESDAY, DEC. 15

Laugh Lines: My Life Helping Funny People Be Funnier by Alan Zweibel

THURSDAY, JAN. 14

The Party Upstairs by Lee Conell “Obviously, we would all rather be in person doing this,” says committee member (and Scene contributor) Margaret Littman, “but there is some opportunity in being able to do it by Zoom. The budget’s different, so we can invite more speakers, but also we hope to have more people participate.

And so we really thought about books and authors and projects that might interest a wider cross section of the community than we might normally be able to.

“This is a cross section of books we thought reflected what might be on people’s minds,” she continues. “Michael Ian Black’s A Better Man is about raising boys. We thought that parents who’ve been homeschooling or assisting their kids and spending more time with their kids on a dayto-day basis might be particularly interested in that. We thought of [Nashvillian] Marcus Whitney’s book, Create and Orchestrate, because it will be interesting to people who are thinking about their jobs differently and their careers differently.”

At the Feb. 4 event, authors Cameron Douglas (son of actor Michael Douglas) and

Dan Peres (the former editor of Esquire) will discuss their memoirs, both of which detail their struggles with addiction. This presentation is in partnership with addiction treatment center Cumberland Heights. This too is especially relevant — the pandemic has exacerbated the already harrowing opioid epidemic, spiking overdoses across the nation.

On Feb. 18, Littman will interview author Sue Eisenfeld about Wandering Dixie: Dispatches From the Lost Jewish South. In her book, Eisenfeld explores the complicated history of Jewish life in the South, from those who aligned with the Confederacy to those who fought alongside Black activists in the civil rights movement.

Other titles include book-club favorite Nobody Will Tell You This But Me: A True (as Told to Me) Story by Bess Kalb and The Party Upstairs by Vanderbilt MFA program alum Lee Conell. Because most of the events are scheduled far in advance, it’s easy to read the book ahead of time, come with your thoughts and questions, and leave with a deeper understanding of Jewish American life.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

collection of essays about those divisions — and the American affliction of white supremacy at their core — and asks readers to play an active role in a cure. “The only thing standing in our way is a willingness to look in the mirror,” he writes, “our own and the mirror of the nation — and the courage to be honest about the reflection staring back at us.”

These essays, written over the past 12 years, are organized into sections about the Obama and Trump presidencies, the pandemic and protest movement of the summer, competing ideological narratives about American history and institutional racism, and practical strategies for aspiring anti-racist advocates. Wise, a fiercely dedicated advocate for social justice, is not likely to persuade anyone who owns MAGA paraphernalia. His mission is to share what he’s learned about the art of persuasion with progressive readers who “already have a commitment to racial justice and equity but perhaps find themselves less confident than they should be about the positions they hold.”

He outlines and dismantles common conservative tropes, such as the “he was no angel” rhetoric that inevitably emerges after police shootings of unarmed Black people, and the where-do-we-stop argument about monuments commemorating complicated men.

On the legacies of two such men, Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee, Wise makes this distinction: “Whether Jefferson intended it or not, he gave us a blueprint, however blood-spattered, for building a functioning democracy. Lee and his cohorts had no interest in such things, nor the vision to even imagine them.”

Wise, a Nashville native, is at his best when he’s inviting readers to exit the realm of abstract intellectualizing and envision lived Black experience at an emotional, human level. One might wonder why a white activist is needed for this task — one that Wise has taken upon himself to perform for nearly 30 years now — when so many excellent firsthand accounts already exist, including recent works by Ibram X. Kendi and Ijeoma Oluo, and reaching back to Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and W.E.B. DuBois. Wise’s answer, in an essay about building solidarity, is essentially this: If we white Americans let our fellow Black citizens do all the education work, we sidestep our responsibility to actively take part. He also points out that some white people simply do not believe Black people’s testimony about the racism they experience. For these unbelievers, he says, white allies can act as a bridge: “Using our voice with other white folks smooths the path for them to begin listening to people of color with new ears.”

THURSDAY, JAN. 21

Create and Orchestrate: The Path to Claiming Your Creative Power From an Unlikely Entrepreneur by Marcus Whitney

THURSDAY, FEB. 4

Long Way Home by Cameron Douglas and As Needed for Pain: A Memoir of Addiction by Dan Peres

THURSDAY, FEB. 18

Wandering Dixie: Dispatches From the Lost Jewish South by Sue Eisenfeld

TUESDAY, APRIL 13

Nobody Will Tell You This But Me: A True (as Told to Me) Story by Bess Kalb

THURSDAY, APRIL 22

A Better Man: A (Mostly Serious) Letter to My Son by Michael Ian Black

Maybe that’s where Wise fits into the wider world of anti-racist education — as a sort of personal trainer for people just beginning to walk the anti-racist path: Here are the tropes and whatabouts your own Aunt Jean is likely to float at Thanksgiving, and here are some strategies for addressing them. He arms you with facts and historical context plus vocabulary and common fallacies, along with a logical process that any reasonable person could concede has merit.

Most of all, he advises you to listen to Aunt Jean’s testimony too. “If I am willing to take your pain seriously,” he writes, “you will be far more likely to return the favor when I ask you to acknowledge the suffering of others.”

In other words, his aim isn’t to replace Oluo or DuBois, but to provide an entry-level compendium of what you’ll need to know, from Confederate ideology and the Founding Fathers’ Faustian compromises to scholarship on structural racism in the justice system.

For me, the fact that Wise frequently cites Black authors (and is endorsed by some of them) bolsters his credibility, as do his decades in the anti-racist education trenches.

Wise invokes James Baldwin in the final pages, urging anti-racist recruits and veterans alike not to expect victory but to “earn our deaths” (as Baldwin wrote) by finding meaning in the struggle itself. “And if we are to lose,” Wise writes, “let it at least be said that we did not go quietly.”

For more local book coverage, please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee.

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BELLE MEADE PREMIUM CIGARS AND GIFTS | Beale Meade Plaza | 4518 Harding Rd, Nashville TN 37205 | bellemeadecigars.com

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Belle Meade Premium Cigars and Gifts is a locally owned store that sells the finest cigars, gifts, pipes and tobacco-related products. Stop by today to purchase the finest tobacco in town ... you don’t even have to leave the store to sample your purchase! Complete with a smoking lounge where cigar connoisseurs relax, smoke and enjoy themselves. Come to Belle Meade Premium Cigar and Gifts this holiday season.

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OLAVIE BODY SCRUB AND BODY WASH

ESCAPE DAY SPA + SALON | 6000 Highway 100, Ste 102, Nashville, TN 37205 | escapenashville.com Who doesn’t love a party for one every once in a while? The Olavie antioxidant sugar body scrub provides a luxurious exfoliation experience, while soothing the skin to a glowing finish. The scrub plus Olavie’s antioxidant grape seed body wash provide just that. Give that party for one to a loved one this year, you will be glad that you did! Scrub $39, Body Wash $22

BARNES AND NOBLE AT VANDERBILT

BARNES AND NOBLE AT VANDERBILT | 2501 West End Ave, Nashville, TN 37203 | vanderbilt.bncollege.com/ shop/vanderbilt/home

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Featuring a vintage-inspired graphic celebrating Vandy football, this is a versatile hoodie with a brushed fleece lining (100% cotton). We are open for safe holiday shopping. Parking is free in the 2525 garage. A great selection of general reading and children’s books, toys, games, and Vanderbilt-identified merchandise.

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FROTHY MONKEY TRAVEL TUMBLER

FROTHY MONKEY | frothymonkey.com/ product/traveltumbler Frothy Monkey Travel Tumbler with a sleek coffeeinspired illustration by @chrismonachino.

This white MiiR brand tumbler with gold graphic is insulated, leak-proof and will fit in most cupholders. It is sure to keep 12 ounces of your favorite hot or cold beverage at a tasty temp for hours. $30 at frothymonkey.com or at any Frothy Monkey location.

MAISON BONANGE CHOCOLATE BARS

LITTLE GOURMAND | Market & Cafe: 2209 Bandywood, Ste. D, Nashville, TN 37215 | Patisserie Française: 717 Craighead St., Nashville TN 37204 | littlegourmand.us

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14 different bars, all organic and made and packed with care in the heart of the Cité Royale of Versailles. Classic and adventurous flavors such as ginger, fennel, cardamom, geranium flower, bergamot or thyme. They are molded in the image of the Marble Court of the Château de Versailles and the emblem is a representation of a little angel affiliated with Marie-Antoinette.

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COCO BOW TIE AND MASK CLIFTON + LEOPOLD | cliftonandleopold.com

Clifton + Leopold was born from a love of classic men’s accessories and the desire to make them more reflective of the world today. A world that is more diverse, bold and inclusive. Our ties, bow ties, pocket squares and scarves are handcrafted in the U.S. for dapper humans everywhere.

OLIVE OIL W/BOURBON VANILLA FROM OLIVERAIE JEANJEAN

LITTLE GOURMAND | Market & Cafe: 2209 Bandywood, Ste. D, Nashville, TN 37215 | Patisserie Française: 717 Craighead St., Nashville TN 37204 | littlegourmand.us

It makes perfect sense on pan-fried scallops or a baked white fish. It will delight a fruit salad, a cake, a red fruit sorbet or a chocolate ice cream.

Oliveraie Jeanjean was established in 1994 south of Nimes. The Jeanjean family have passed their passion for their work from father to son. All olives are carefully selected and pressed directly in their own mill.

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GHD CURVE AND GHD AIR HAIR DRYER

ESCAPE DAY SPA + SALON | 6000 Highway 100, Ste 102, Nashville, TN 37205 | escapenashville.com The ghd curve and ghd air hair dryer are the perfect combo to start the day off for that in-salon, glossy finish. Our 1 ¼ inch soft-curve curling iron maintains heat constantly and evenly across the barrel, achieving gorgeous, shiny curls in five to eight seconds, saving both your hair and you time.

Automatic shut off after 30 seconds for peace of mind. Hair dryer $199 curling iron $199

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CANDLE - DEUX

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CLIFTON + LEOPOLD | cliftonandleopold.com The first snowfall always felt like magic. But it was the second one that made it real.The Deux canidé is hand-poured American-raised soy wax with holiday notes of vanilla, citrus peel, eucalyptus + balsam, pine and juniper needles.

They’re housed in a white glass container and enjoy a lifespan of 45 hours. The perfect gift for the ones you love.

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CHOCOLATE & CHAMPAGNE PAIRING GIFT BOX (24 PCS)

LITTLE GOURMAND | Market & Cafe: 2209 Bandywood, Ste. D, Nashville, TN 37215 | Patisserie Française: 717 Craighead St., Nashville TN 37204 | littlegourmand.us Champagne, like chocolate, is a celebration of true craftsmanship. It inspired Neuhaus to create exquisite multilayered pralines, each crafted to be savored with sparkling wine. Belgian Top Sommelier Yanick Dehandschutter collaborated with Maîtres Chocolatiers to provide a series of pairing recommendations to create the best possible flavor combinations.

OI HOLIDAY SET

GREEN PEA SALON | 1113 12th Ave South, Nashville, TN 37203 | 4105 Charlotte Ave, Nashville TN 37209 | greenpeasalon.com

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BUCHES DE NOEL (CHRISTMAS YULE LOGS)

LITTLE GOURMAND | Market & Cafe: 2209 Bandywood, Ste. D, Nashville, TN 37215 | Patisserie Française: 717 Craighead St., Nashville TN 37204 | littlegourmand.us SAINT GERMAIN: Three chocolate Bavaroise (dark, milk and white), chocolate genoise and chocolate frosting. PIGALLE: Mango Bavaroise, Passion fruit, Joconde biscuit, Yuzu cream. Each cake is $69.99 plus tax and has to be preordered before Dec. 12. Serve 8/10 Complimentary tastings in both stores on Saturday, Nov. 28.

PARNASSUS BOOKS | 3900 Hillsboro Pike, Ste. 14, Nashville TN 37215 | parnassusbooks.net/holiday2020

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The perfect gift for the book lover on your list! (Maybe that’s you.) Get a handselected book delivered to your door — or available for in-store pickup — every month.

Choose from First Editions Club (literary fiction), ParnassusNext (YA) or Spark Book Club (middle-grade). Available in 3-, 6-, or 12-month increments.

The perfect product combination for all hair types, this OI holiday set is designed to indulge those who desire beautiful, shiny and fragrant hair. These bestsellers are the perfect choice for nourishing and softening your hair. Includes OI Shampoo, OI Conditioner and OI Oil. Add a Green Pea Salon gift card and you’re gift-ready!

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FIRST EDITIONS CLUBS

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ULTRALUXE BB OIL

ESCAPE DAY SPA + SALON | 6000 Highway 100, Ste 102, Nashville, TN 37205 | escapenashville.com Give the gift of more youthful and radiant skin from the inside out. BB Oil by Ultraluxe is the perfect oil to repair any and all skin types.

A blend of six natural oils provides instant hydration to plump your skin, soften lines and wrinkles. With Vitamin E, soothing lavender and rosemary, this will be the gift that they keep asking for. BB Oil $50.50

BREAD CSA SUBSCRIPTION

BAKERY BY FROTHY MONKEY | 12South, Nations, East, Downtown, Franklin, Chattanooga | frothymonkey.com/bakery Give the gift of freshly baked artisan bread with a Frothy Monkey Bread CSA Subscription. The CSA program also offers loaves not typically available for retail such as challah, gluten-free and specialty seasonal sourdough. 12- and 26-week subscriptions are available with weekly pickup at the new Frothy Monkey in East Nashville. Visit frothymonkey.com/ csasubscriptions for more details.

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KERASTASE HOLIDAY KITS ESCAPE DAY SPA + SALON | 6000 Highway 100, Ste 102, Nashville, TN 37205 | escapenashville.com

Nothing says “happy holidays” more than a personalized at-home hair-care system. The variety of Kerastase gift sets contain our bestselling shampoos, conditioner, heat protectants and hair primers. Satisfying their hair with any of their hair needs or desires, leaving them with exceptional hair.

-Blonde Absolute $90 -Resistance $80 -Nutritive $80 -Extentioniste $90 -Discipline $90 -Reflection $80

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SIGNED JON MEACHAM BUNDLE

PARNASSUS BOOKS | 3900 Hillsboro Pike, Ste. 14, Nashville TN 37215 | parnassusbooks.net/holiday2020

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Need a gift idea? Book bundles to the rescue!

A trio of books signed by historian and bestselling author Jon Meacham is one of our most popular bundles. But there are lots to choose from — cookbooks, cocktails, Nashville, kids and more!

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PARNASSUS MERCH

PARNASSUS BOOKS | 3900 Hillsboro Pike, Ste. 14, Nashville TN 37215 | parnassusbooks.net/holiday2020 Show your book love with some great Parnassus merchandise! Consistently named one of the best independent bookstores in the country, Parnassus is a local treasure — and from T-shirts to adjustable masks, there are plenty of ways to sport your book love in style.

MARIANELLA’S HAND SANITIZER

ESCAPE DAY SPA + SALON | 6000 Highway 100, Ste 102, Nashville, TN 37205 | escapenashville.com

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This year give that loved one the hand sanitizer that feels as fancy as it looks and smells. Marianella’s amazing hand sanitizer is something everyone needs on hand. With 70 percent alcohol and aloe gel that not only hydrates hands as you sanitize but also smells of spruce and lavender once it dries.

Marianella’s 2 oz. $14, 8 oz. $24

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NOURISH NASHVILLE COOKBOOK

NASHVILLE SCENE | nourishnashville.com It’s no secret, Nashville is delicious. Now you can make some of Music City’s best dishes from the comfort of your own home! The Scene’s new cookbook, Nourish Nashville, is available now. Inspired in part by the time we’ve all had to spend at home during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — experimenting and honing our home-cooking skills while social distancing — this cookbook features 40-plus of the city’s most celebrated chefs sharing their most beloved recipes.

ESCAPE DAY SPA + SALON ROBE ESCAPE DAY SPA + SALON | 6000 Highway 100, Ste 102, Nashville, TN 37205 | escapenashville.com

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Transform your home into your very own spa by wrapping up in one of our cozy luxurious robes that gets softer with each wash. From Small to 3xl, everyone deserves some relaxation. $175

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NEST HOLIDAY CANDLE

GREEN PEA SALON |1113 12th Ave South, Nashville, TN 37203 | 4105 Charlotte Ave, Nashville TN 37209 | greenpeasalon.com The legendary Nest Holiday Candle is a host/ teacher/sister/mom/bff gift pleaser, this year in beautiful new recyclable packaging.

This candle is joined by a series of new fragrances and scents that will please anyone on your list. Call ahead for multiple orders!

NATUROPATHICA CBD ELIXIR AND CBD KAVA BALM ESCAPE DAY SPA + SALON | 6000 Highway 100, Ste 102, Nashville, TN 37205 | escapenashville.com

Take a deep breath and chill — you now know what to get everyone on your list. Our CBD Kava Balm and Microdose Elixir instantly relieve muscle tension and melt the worries away. Chill CBD is also the perfect addition to add to a massage, facial and soak. Exfoliating brush $29, CBD elixir $88, CBD Kava Balm $76

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MISS KITTY’S BOUTIQUE

MISS KITTY’S DOG RESORT | 4308 Kenilwood Dr, Nashville, TN 37204 | misskittysnashville.com Our dog clothing changes with the season and ranges from practical items like sweaters and rain gear to wedding dresses, tuxedos and accessories.

We also stock jerseys and tees for our college and professional sports teams in Nashville!

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UPCOMING VIRTUAL EVENTS THURSDAY DEC 10 6:00PM ZOOM with TIM WISE Dispatches from the Race War

TUESDAY DEC 29 6:00PM FACEBOOK LIVE with MARIE BENEDICT The Mystery of Mrs. Christie

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GET TICKETS & LEARN MORE AT PARNASSUSBOOKS.NET/EVENT

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ULTRALUXE TRIPLE ACID EXFOLIATING PADS AND ACID CLEANSER

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ESCAPE DAY SPA + SALON | 6000 Highway 100, Ste 102, Nashville, TN 37205 | escapenashville.com

SCENE MEMBERSHIP

NASHVILLE SCENE | nashvillescene.com/support

The Nashville Scene has been serving our city for three decades and counting. A strong, independent voice, the Scene covers news, music, film, food, art, culture, and state and local politics. Now more than ever, we need your support so that we can continue to provide Nashvillians with free, independent press from a source you can trust. Please consider becoming a member today and enjoy year-round perks, so that we can keep supplying our city with journalism and keep putting news in your hands.

MISS KITTY’S DOG RESORT | 4308 Kenilwood Dr, Nashville, TN 37204 | misskittysnashville.com Pitter Pats are our signature cookie and continue to be a top seller. Little dogs love the heart-shaped treats because they’re thin like wafers, perfect for itty-bitty pups who don’t have the jaw strength for big bones.

One bite, and you’ll see why our clients call them puppy crack!

The top duo gift this holiday season. Acid Cleanser gently washes away impurities and rejuvenates dull skin to a soft, smooth, glowing complexion.

The Triple Acid Exfoliating Pads have a unique combo of salicylic, lactic and mandelic acids that evens skin tone, removes impurities and refines pores ... pads can be used 1-2 times per week.

Exfoliating Pads $48, Acid Cleanser $ 37

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MISS KITTY’S BAKERY

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OPEN FOR BROWSING! Tuesday - Saturday : 10:00am - 6:00pm Sunday : Noon - 6:00pm

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MERCHANDISE FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY SHOP IN STORE AND ONLINE!

ESCAPE DAY SPA + SALON GIFT CARD ESCAPE DAY SPA + SALON | 6000 Highway 100, Ste 102, Nashville, TN 37205 | escapenashville.com

An Escape gift card is one of the easiest gifts to give and one of the best gifts to receive.

From our full-service hair salon, to our healing therapeutic massages, to our advanced skincare and luxurious body treatments, who doesn’t need the gift of wellness? Gift cards available in store or online at escapenashville.com

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This season, give your favorite history lover the gift of membership to Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage. The home of the seventh president offers regular and seasonal tours and exhibits, special events and educational opportunities, plus tastings at the all-new Natchez Hills Winery located onsite. Members receive unlimited admission and great perks year-round. All funds directly support the mission to preserve, educate and inspire.

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Adventure Science Center has several different membership levels, making it easy to give the science lover in your life a gift they’ll be sure to enjoy!

Purchasing membership is also a great way to help support the museum as we recover from significant financial loss due to COVID-19. It’s the win-win we all need this holiday season!

Save 15% on Zoo memberships this holiday season.

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Nashville Zoo Membership benefits include: • Free admission and parking during regular hours for one year • Free or discounted admission to most special events.

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Symphony Ball 2020 goes Virtual An Evening in Harmony A televised benefit for theNashville Symphony Saturday, December 12th at 7pm WSMV-News 4

Hosted by Tracy Kornet & Enrico Lopez-Yañez

Symphony Ball Co-Chairs: Melinda S. Balser & Susan P. Holmes

Performances by Harmony Award Recipients Maren Morris & Keb’ Mo’

to support, text @NSO to 52014 nashvillescene.com | DECEMBER 10 – DECEMBER 16, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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MUSIC

SILVER LININGS

D’Llisha Davis of 2 L’s On a Cloud speaks on the evolution of Nashville hip-hop

BY SEAN L. MALONEY

much there. … They’re determined now more than ever to grow their music and to tap into their creative sense. But honestly, that’s what the community has been doing for years, because there’s always been limited access to certain things. When everything happened, it just kind of took that to another level.

There’s a lot of artists that are talented here. There are a lot of artists who are working together. There are a lot of grassroots support systems that are beginning to help elevate artists. We can’t do live music, so we have to get super creative. We have to do these livestream events. We have to really tap into the music and grow the awareness of hip-hop artists here in many different ways. So it’s definitely got its pros and cons, but I do think that it’s really put a battery pack in a lot of the hip-hop ecosystem.

Who do you think is making the most moves in 2020? I mean, I would definitely give a lot of credit to artists like Brian Brown. I think Daisha McBride really continues to grow in

YULE VARIATIONS

Annual Tom Waits tribute and Second Harvest benefit Get Behind the Mule celebrates its 15th anniversary online

BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

T

he mission of Get Behind the Mule, Nashville’s annual Christmastime Tom Waits covers bash, is twofold. First, it’s a chance to pay tribute to the legendary gravelly-voiced troubadour alongside fellow fans and admirers from the local music community. Just as important: Raising money STREAMING SATURDAY, DEC. 12, VIA STAGEIT to fight hunger ahead of the holidays.

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What do you think is going to be the biggest challenge for Nashville hip-hop in 2021? You know, we’re under the scope right now. And my only fear is that in three, four, five or six months, it still doesn’t happen for some of these artists who are really starting to pick up some speed. That’s the thing that Nashville goes through, especially the hip-hop scene as we go through this roller-coaster of publicity, and growth and all of that within artists — and it just dies back down. So I don’t want it to die down.

How have you been able to maintain your pace and your energy this year? Man, unplugging.

My thing has really been to be as involved as I can and be as much of a resource as I can, but also try not to get too sucked into doing things so consistent to where it feels as if nothing is really moving forward. So I try to do intentional things when it comes to myself as a person, to continue to elevate myself — that way I can continue to elevate those around me. I can continue to elevate the community, the artists, the music scene.

A lot of times I think you get into it so much and you get worn out or you get … to a place of complacency. You lose sight of certain goals. So I think I really take time to unplug, and then when I tap in, I tap in hard.

What keeps you paying attention to the Nashville hip-hop scene? I think the investment, like just this time I spent, the people depending on me to continue things. I just feel a sense of responsibility [to continue], because there are so many publications in hip-hop that come and go.

So I think I’ve felt a sense of responsibility. … I have to know the who’swho, and I have to be able to be ready,

Named for a choice cut from Waits’ 1999 left-field hit Mule Variations, the inaugural GBM took place in 2006 at The Basement and has been reprised each winter since, scheduled as close as possible to Dec. 7, Waits’ birthday. When founder David Noel — a painter, Basement staffer and Waits superfan — was planning the fourth installment in 2009, he reached out to an acquaintance, artist manager and music-biz vet Mary Sack, about potentially getting her then-client Tommy Womack on board. The two caught up one night on the bench outside the Eighth Avenue club, as they did often when Noel worked the door there.

“The more I learned about it, the more I realized I had another artist who’d fit very well,” Sack tells the Scene. That was the late David Olney — expert singer and storyteller, Nashville lifer, and friend and collaborator to Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt and Townes Van Zandt. In January, Olney suffered a fatal heart attack onstage in Florida. He was 71.

“I asked Dave Noel if David Olney could play,” Sack remembers, thinking back to 2009, Olney’s

PHOTO: SECK

How do you see the challenges of 2020 affecting Nashville hip-hop? There’s been a lot to process. The resilience of artists is still very

her own sense. I think DJ the Rapper — he’s really elevated his career this year after everything started to happen. Then you’ve got Black City, Funky Tenn, a collective of artists. You’ve got Namir Blade, who got picked up by Mello Music Group. So there’s a lot of talent I think that’s growing. There are so many artists that have really pushed themselves.

because I get those emails where people are asking for interviews and people are asking about the support. “What’s Nashville hip-hop looking like?” And so I just feel like I have to continue to maintain a sense of stability and even appreciation for new

artists who are coming in, new people who are coming in after me. That keeps me interested. It’s just me being well-invested and really wanting to see change come within this hip-hop ecosystem.

EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

SETH WALKER AND MARY SACK

PHOTO: JOHN PARTIPILO

D

’Llisha Davis has been a committed chronicler of Nashville’s underground hip-hop community since the days of blog rap and shutter shades. A teacher by day and writer/ VISIT 2LSONACLOUD.COM promoter/artist AND FOLLOW DAVIS manager by night, (@ITSTWOELLES) ON TWITTER this hip-hop polymath and her blog 2 L’s On a Cloud have been front-and-center for our rap scene’s internetera evolution. In spite of the holy mess that is 2020, Nashville rappers have kept right on building, earning song placements, collaborating on projects heard well beyond the 615 area code and getting great national press from outlets like Forbes, NPR and Complex.

The Scene caught up with Davis by phone to get her perspective.

NASHVILLE SCENE | DECEMBER 10 – DECEMBER 16, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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MUSIC

KEY PLAYERS

Tiffany Minton’s new oral history project spotlights outstanding women who’ve been vital side performers in Music City

BY BRITTNEY McKENNA

first of many appearances at the annual benefit. “He shrugged and said, ‘Hey, why not?’ It was all very chill.”

Sack has had a hands-on role in every GBM since, working to secure sponsors and curate the bill. The only prerequisite is a familiarity with and appreciation for the strange beauty of Waits’ vast repertoire and idiosyncratic sound — a collision of blues, jazz and vaudeville that challenges conventional notions of “nice” music.

“It’s as much about theatrics as it is about songs,” she explains. “These artists go out of their way to embody Tom Waits in the presentation as much as possible.”

GBM moved from The Basement across the river to The 5 Spot in 2011, and Noel is no longer involved on the booking end, but the format has stayed consistent. About a dozen acts cover two or three tunes apiece, with no duplicates. There’s also live painting during the show and a silent auction, with all proceeds benefiting Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee. The revelry typically gets underway

PHOTO: MILES PRICE

I

t’s no secret that the backbone of the Nashville music industry is its murderers’ row of session musicians. Often called “sidemen,” some of these players and vocalists are as well-known as the artists they support. The famed Nashville Cats, heard on recordings by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash among many, many others, were at the center of the massive Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum from 2015 to 2017.

The biggest and most reverent celebrations of country musicians tend to focus on white men, and the same applies to session players. This should come as no surprise — the term “sideman” in itself is a gendered one, and debates about gender and racial diversity in country music have reached a fever pitch in recent years.

Local musician and historian Tiffany Minton is working VISIT MTSU.EDU/POPMUSIC to change the TO LEARN MORE ABOUT narrative of session THE PROJECT AND SEE THE musicians in SEMINAR ON YOUTUBE Nashville. Minton is pursuing a graduate degree at Middle Tennessee State University, and through the school’s Center for Popular Music, she has spearheaded The Women Musicians in Nashville Oral History Project. The archival endeavor seeks to discover, preserve and advance the stories of women session players and vocalists in Music City.

“I was thinking about the side player and thinking about the fact that that story is generally and popularly known through people like the Nashville Cats or the A Team, when it comes to Nashville,” Minton tells the Scene. “And that most of the people who are being discussed are all white men. But there were other people

TIFFANY MINTON doing it, and there still are.”

The project currently consists of twohour interviews with 15 Nashville women who are musicians, with more to come.

There are instrumentalists like drummer Megan Coleman, bassist Ryan Madora and guitarist Ellen Angelico, as well as songwriters like Angela Kaset. There are also folks who’ve worn a dazzling array of hats, like Judy Rodman, a singer, songwriter, vocal coach and producer, among many other things.

Minton herself has completed the bulk of the work, which includes researching candidates, conducting interviews, typing transcripts and editing the final histories that will live in CPM’s substantial archives.

You’ll be able to check out the project for

“THESE ARTISTS GO OUT OF THEIR WAY TO EMBODY TOM WAITS IN THE PRESENTATION AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.” —MARY SACK around dinnertime and tends to wind down as late as 2 or 3 a.m.

This year’s edition, naturally, will feel a bit different.

It’ll be happening online Saturday via StageIt on a pay-what-you-can basis. Normally Sack seeks out new blood to complement returning performers, but this time she went with an all-alumni lineup. Players

yourself online beginning some time in the spring 2021 semester. It’s a labor of love that brings together Minton’s passions for music and for archival history.

You’ve quite possibly encountered Minton or her work around town. She has played drums for artists like Adia Victoria, Thelma and the Sleaze, Pujol and Heavy Cream, and she co-founded the She’s a Rebel girl-group tribute show series. She says she’s excited for people to encounter this new chapter of her musical work.

“I always thought I would attend grad school eventually, even while I was working as a musician,” she says. “I didn’t want to get too comfortable and too reliant on just being a professional musician, when I had this other lingering goal in my

include country- and blues-schooled rock tunesmith Kevin Gordon, bluesman and 5 Spot regular Afton Wolfe, folk-pop songwriter and Alison Krauss protégé Angel Snow, and Womack, billed under the pseudonym “Ewell Variations.” Most sets are pretaped, but a few will be beamed in live via 5 Spot co-owner Todd Sherwood’s multicamera rig.

It wouldn’t be GBM without live painting; Jeff Bertrand and Billy Martinez have that covered. Their pieces will be auctioned off along with work from other area artists and craftspeople, including metal sculptures courtesy of Keith Herendon and cigar-box guitars from Jonathan James Greiner. The suggested donation is $10, but as with the real-life event, no one will be turned away for lack of funds; the online ticket price is pay-what-you-can. Keeping with another GBM tradition, Cookie Monster — a frequent reference point for Waits’ trademark marble-mouthed vocals — is pictured on the gig poster.

“This is a big anniversary, and we had a shorter window to plan — we’re flying by the seat of our pants

mind. … Public history just seemed like the natural next step if I was going to go to grad school.”

In late November, Minton hosted a virtual seminar outlining her goals for the project. Co-presented with MTSU professor, documentarian and author Kristine McCusker, the seminar featured Angelico, Rodman and Coleman as guests. Minton says that while many of the seminar’s attendees were already connected to the music community, she heard from several viewers that they gained a deeper understanding of why initiatives like the Women Musicians in Nashville Oral History Project are so important.

“When you’re looking at all the people who have been canonized into any kind of history, it’s always a lot of white male figures,” Minton says. “What oral history does is allow us to see that history actually happens from the bottom up and not the top down. It doesn’t start when you’ve become canonized by your greatness. It begins as normal people in time and space. Especially when it comes to understanding the diverse array of histories and how that tells a story about humanity.”

The project is ongoing, and Minton says she is still open to hearing from women musicians in Nashville with stories to share. She hopes that making these women artists’ stories available will not only help to add depth and context to our current understanding of Nashville’s musical history, but that it will encourage future scholars, journalists and even musicians to reconfigure their idea of what a session player can look like.

“Any time you see a man doing something, you have to assume there’s a woman doing the same thing, in order to see them hiding in plain sight,” she says. “In order to deal with this issue, we need to be thinking about women’s work differently. We need to be thinking about how to talk about women in such a way that they are historically present. We need to move beyond the inclusion narrative. … We also need to think about what women are doing and have been doing all along, and tell those stories as though they have always existed.

It shouldn’t be a surprise.”

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at the moment,” Sack says. Still, she never considered canceling. That would’ve been one loss too many in a year that began with Olney’s sudden, shocking death in January and went on to claim the lives of Sack’s mother Edith and 15-year-old dog Miller.

While there aren’t any direct musical tributes planned for Olney or Justin Townes Earle — another GBM alum lost in 2020 — both musicians’ memories will be honored during the stream. Olney’s go-to cover for the benefit, often incorporated into his own solo sets, was “Clap Hands” from Waits’ 1985 catalog standout Rain Dogs. It’ll be played Saturday by Nashville-residing Australian songwriter-guitarist and WXNA DJ Anne McCue. “David could take a Tom Waits song and deliver it with very much the same intensity, but would own it in such a way you’d think it was his own,” Sack says of Olney, her client of 15 years. “Not unlike Tom Waits, his songs could be in-your-face — but just as easily melt your heart.”

EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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Who said it’s better to give than receive?

heers to you, and cheers to 2020 almost being over,”

Maren Morris

proclaimed, holding up her margarita-filled cup from the stage of Brooklyn Bowl Nashville during Friday’s livestream. The country star has kept plenty busy during this unpredictable year, winning three CMA Awards, releasing the moving anthem for social change “Better Than We Found It” and giving birth to a son.

Last year, Morris spent most of her time out on the road in support of her second album Girl, performing at festivals like Bonnaroo and CMA Fest and selling out venues across the country. Although her visit to the more intimate Brooklyn Bowl was still without a physical crowd, fans from across the globe were shown on TVs throughout the venue, cheering Morris on and interacting with her throughout the night. She happily pointed out a few young fans watching along from home with guitars in hand, playing along with her through the hour-and-a-half set.

The unrelenting energy Morris radiated made it obvious that she was thrilled to be back onstage. From the tongue-in-cheek “Rich” to the achingly nostalgic “A Song for Everything,” she showed off all the reasons why she’s quickly become one of country’s biggest names.

Morris moved through some of her more emotionally charged tracks, from her first career No. 1 hit “I Could Use a Love Song” to “I Wish I Was,” which began with her whole band joining in for a stunning a cappella moment.

Later she welcomed Ryan Hurd, her husband and “baby daddy,” as she jokingly called him, to the stage. Hurd sang the baritone duet part sung

by Brothers Osborne’s T.J. Osborne on the recorded version of “All My Favorite People,” an upbeat Girl standout.

“I wish my girls were here,” she told the online crowd, referring to her bandmates Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby and Amanda Shires of The Highwomen, whose “Crowded Table” just earned a Grammy nomination for Song of the Year. Morris saluted the group and their stellar 2019 album with “Loose Change,” an infectious song she wrote just after moving to Nashville from Texas eight years ago and finally recorded for the country supergroup’s debut self-titled album.

In a genre in which many artists opt to gloss over tough subjects like politics or gender and racial equality, Morris chooses time and again to raise her voice about issues that are close to her heart. During the stream, Morris played a song she had written just a day before with Shane McAnally and Jimmy Robbins about her experience with postpartum depression.

Depression, Morris said, is “a very real thing that we all have dealt with in some point of our lives, whether it’s intense or light. I feel great now, but it is a real thing.

It’s not a choice.”

Tentatively titled “If I Just Get Out of My Way,” the song finds Morris examining her choices and the ways she’s coped with tough times in the past. “This stubborn soul is mine for saving,” she sang, sounding as if she was making a promise to herself.

“I know I’m gonna make it to the stars someday, if I just get out of my way.”

She wrapped the set with a one-two punch of her CMA Award-winning hit single “The Bones” and “My Church,” the song that catapulted her into the spotlight back in 2016. Those who tuned in were treated to a trademark performance from Morris, who has mastered a delicate balance that all top-tier performers strive for. She knows how to put on an energetic, large-scale live show that still feels intimate, even viewed through a screen.

EMAIL THESPIN@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

SOMEBODY SAID IT FIRST: MAREN MORRIS

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FILM

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

IN THE MOOD ...

The Belcourt’s World of Wong Kar-wai takes a deep dive into the Hong Kong filmmaker’s romantic body of work

BY NATHAN SMITH

H

ong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai is often spoken of as a supremely sensuous and romantic filmmaker.

And it’s true. But more than sensuosity itself, his films study the WORLD OF WONG KAR-WAI transient and ALL FILMS WILL BE AVAILABLE fleeting nature VIA THE BELCOURT’S VIRTUAL of romantic CINEMA DEC. 11-JAN. 7; CHUNGKING EXPRESS AND IN experience. A THE MOOD FOR LOVE WILL PLAY Wong Kar-wai IN THE THEATER DEC. 12-15 film is even more about the memory of love — unstable and impermanent like a lingering touch or a taste in your mouth that inevitably fades — than the active sensation of love.

Though Wong’s films have not necessarily been impossible to see, previous physical releases of his work are, for the most part, either prohibitively expensive or lacking in quality. The Belcourt’s partial-career retrospective, World of Wong Kar-wai, includes 4K updates of all of his features, from 1988’s As Tears Go By to 2000’s In the Mood for Love (with the exception of Ashes of Time, his adventurous revisionist take on China’s wuxia genre). Also included is an extended director’s cut of “The Hand,” Wong’s segment from the international anthology film Eros, with Steven Soderbergh and the late Michelangelo Antonioni.

These new restorations stand apart in particular because of the extensive, hands-on involvement of Wong Kar-wai himself, who has taken the preservation of his work as an opportunity to execute a few new changes that weren’t feasible at the time of release. Most notable — and

perhaps a little controversial to certain hardcore cinephiles — are the tweaks he has made to Fallen Angels, now presented in an entirely new aspect ratio with additional frame-by-frame alteration to the coloring of the film. At the core, of course, it is still fundamentally the same film, and if you’re encountering it for the first time, its vivid passions and kinetic style will be just as striking as they were years ago.

I was surprised — and honestly a little thrown off guard — the first time I saw In the Mood for Love and discovered not a story of a heated and illicit affair, but rather something much more elusive and guarded.

But maybe that’s what the title really refers to — being “in the mood for love” is not synonymous with being in love. It is, instead, a knotted swarm of feelings, an atmosphere of anxiety as much as eroticism, as possible lovers dance around an emotion, daring each other to collide. Wong’s true subject matter is not romance but hesitation: secretive whispers, unrequited loves, chance encounters, cosmic coincidences and repressed yearnings. Lovers recollect and recall memories that once felt potent and overpowering, but now seem so much more distant.

Wong is undeniably given the most praise as a visual stylist — his palette has been widely imitated and absorbed by filmmakers over the past 30 years, but there’s no mistaking the genuine article. His camera often feels possessed of a mind of its own, sometimes careful and precise, but just as often jagged and canted. There are the occasional stuttering slow-motion frames,

which pull moments out of linear time and briefly take us into a dimension purely defined by emotional experience. Wong’s films are unapologetically beautiful in their cinematography, and they unsurprisingly star some of the most beautiful faces ever put on screen, the finest of a generation of Hong Kong acting talent — Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Maggie Cheung, Leslie Cheung, Faye Wong.

But what remains with me about the cinema of Wong Kar-wai, long after the memories have dimmed and the images dissolved, is the rapturous sound of it all. Through his soundtracks, Wong truly embodies Hong Kong’s unique historical position at a geographical and political crossroads, a city that absorbs and transforms the many cultures that have passed through it. Almost every Wong film is a living jukebox, each track hand-picked and personally felt by the audiophile auteur.

You get the sense that the songs Wong highlights in his films aren’t just needledrops, or tracks a music supervisor turned him onto; these are songs he has lived with, like the shopgirl who obsessively plays “California Dreamin’ ” in Chungking Express.

The often iconic musical cues in Wong’s films form a wide-ranging songbook — everything from Laurie Anderson (Fallen Angels) to Nat King Cole (In the Mood for Love) to Spanish boleros and tangos (in the Argentina-set Happy Together). But maybe the music that speaks most to Wong’s artistic tendencies are the Cantoneselanguage covers of Western pop songs that appear in several of his films, like “Take My Breath Away” in As Tears Go By and The Cranberries’ “Dreams” in Chungking Express. His movies are suffused with the melodramatic gloss of a pop song, but reinterpreted and reimagined, familiar and aching yet also uncanny and new.

Because of its highly industrial and technical nature, cinema rarely ever reaches the direct expressive capabilities of music, but Wong Kar-wai plays the camera like a pianist putting his heart on the keys, with only the slightest of barriers between the soul of the artist and the emotions of the audience.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

SEALED WITH A FIST

Archenemy is a sci-fi adventure for those willing to venture

BY JASON SHAWHAN

I CHUNGKING EXPRESS

t’s a very encouraging sign when a film opens in the pulsating otherspace of a multicolored vortex bordering reality. That’s not to say this is a metonymy for an extended Adam Egypt Mortimer Cinematic Universe. But for anyone ARCHENEMY still bowled over by the R, 89 MINUTES AVAILABLE VIA VIDEO ON writer-director’s 2019 DEMAND FRIDAY, DEC. 11 triumph Daniel Isn’t Real (a masterpiece so poorly handled by its U.S. distributor that it never even got a Blu-ray release), that polytonic miasma lets you know that, in both that film and this one, things are about to get cosmic and fraught, and the multiverse

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FILM

EVERY STEP YOU TAKE

ARCHENEMY

Deepa Mehta’s Funny Boy is a mostly engaging story of gay love

BY STEVE ERICKSON

D itself may quake with the following journey. Archenemy is a deeply weird and profoundly enjoyable film, one adept at shifting realities even as it sometimes posits superheroism as just another example of drunken white people foolishness. (Much respect is due a film that uses chopped-and-screwed music as a signifier for permeable cosmic boundaries.)

This is a great film for reconnecting with your comic-book roots (see also: the intensive yet convivial Cerebro podcast) and for confronting the slippery slope of nostalgia in a crypt of a mall. It’s great for luxuriating in the deceptively subtle and sometimes expansively muscular score by Umberto, aka Matt Hill (when the major chords hit, it will carbonate your subconscious and pump up the adrenaline), and for taking stock of where and how stories resonate with you.

Max Fist (Joe Manganiello) is a person experiencing homelessness on the streets of Los Angeles. He’s also a hero from the city of Chromium, wielder of the crystal fist, and at one point in time powerful enough to punch through the barriers of spacetime itself. He’ll tell you all about it, if you’re buying. It keeps the consumptive loneliness at bay. And though he’s built like a brick shithouse, you just see the ache. As with anyone who’s spent much time playing D&D, Manganiello understands the way that characteristics define how a persona evolves, sanding some edges down while sharpening others, requiring the utmost care when approaching.

Someday, we as a society will talk about how revelatory Manganiello was in 2016’s Pee-wee’s Big Holiday. He made a decent impression as the himbo werewolf Alcide on True Blood, but the Magic Mike films let him do even more as a physical comedian and an implement of affectionate satire. In Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, he finds the sweet spot of wholesome pansexual horniness that finally let one of America’s icons be happily gay. Here Manganiello unlocks the lives of those around him with wrought-hewn charm and persuasive mania. Also, bone-shattering violence.

Angular Schiele/Sienkiewicz-like animation serves a dual purpose in representing Max’s tales of Chromium, which may also be the delusions resulting from, or leading to, his heroic alcohol and methamphetamine habits. “It’s not a planet, it’s a city,” Max maintains, steadfast in his identity as an earthling of some sort; from somewhen. But his time on the Earth of here and now (“your grim rock,” he calls it) is a sad exile. That intersection between animation and live action and addiction and inspiration pays homage to Mortimer’s love of 1982’s Pink Floyd: The Wall, and that heightened narrative plane is a great space for this story to unfold.

Mortimer is really good at tucking these kinetic little city symphonies in and around the narrative,

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getting into the byways of downtown Los Angeles the way Daniel Isn’t Real did with New York City.

There’s a remarkable tracking shot through a spiraling parking garage that follows Max as he reclaims the only item he has from the time before — it’s an iconic moment befitting a hero of some sort.

Orphaned siblings Hamster (Skylan Brooks) and Indigo (Zolee Griggs) — he a curious photographer/journalist, she a “sugarplum fairy interstellar princess” working her way to independence on the lower rungs of the local drug operation — are our anchors in the human experience. This is Hamster’s world we’re living in, and the film does an excellent job of letting the viewer observe and determine the differences between the worlds depicted (including our own). He’s battling to get by just like his sister, and to do so involves packaging his experiences for unseen internet dilettantes and voyeurs. Because if there’s something to healthily aspire to, it’s being loved and seen as relevant by the internet. And as he befriends Max, they have to negotiate the boundaries of their discourse. (Mortimer as a filmmaker is always focused on negotiation and boundaries between characters, and it’s a great trait for one’s body of work to have.)

The supporting cast includes Glenn “Dennis Reynolds” Howerton as The Manager — blond evil incarnate — complemented as the face of nefarious middle management by podcaster Paul Scheer decked out like Gaspar Noé. There’s a lot to unpack about the vertical arrangement of modern crime as it goes from street hustling all the way up to pandimensional skyscrapers.

And then of course, there’s the titular archenemy, spanning a couple of realities. 2020 was already the year when Amy Seimetz wrote and directed the masterful She Dies Tomorrow, and now it’s also the year when she gets to preside over a technorganic empire in robin’s-egg-blue pleather with exquisitely manicured brown nails and a perfectly delivered pair of diva monologues. If there is any justice in the world of comic-bookderived cinema, Seimetz will play Emma Frost.

Daniel Isn’t Real was my favorite film of 2019, so the bar is set very high. And though Archenemy doesn’t quite hit the same home run into the hippocampus that Daniel did, it’s a spry and inventive take on storytelling as something genetic and mutable, the way that cultures adapt, and how perspective can be a bridge and/or a weapon. It deserves a place on the shelf alongside Unbreakable, Candyman and Heavy Metal.

eepa Mehta has built a career as a bridge-builder between North America and South Asia, and it’s work she continues in the Sri Lankaset Funny Boy. Born in India, Mehta emigrated to Canada at age 23 and FUNNY BOY PG, 109 MINUTES founded a production AVAILABLE TO STREAM company working on THURSDAY, DEC. 10, VIA documentaries and NETFLIX TV series. The fact that she no longer lives in India gave her a greater freedom to make 1996’s Fire, whose depiction of a lesbian couple proved highly controversial within that country.

The writer-director returns to the subject of same-sex desire with Funny Boy, which she adapted with Sri Lankan-Canadian screenwriter Shyam Selvadurai from the latter’s own novel. The film and its young hero Arjie (played as a boy by Arush Nand and as a teen by Brandon Ingram) feel autobiographical. No one could accuse Funny Boy’s first half of being subtle — given the likelihood that much of its audience won’t be Sri Lankan (or particularly informed about the country’s civil war between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority, which took place from 1983 to 2009), the film lays out all of the conflict’s details. When Arjie is 8, everyone can already tell he’s gay. Much of his family responds with disgust to his femme behavior, driving him toward his supportive Aunt Radha (Agam Darshi), who shares Leonard Cohen tapes and tales of hanging out at gay bars, while he grows distant from his father Appa (Ali Kazmi), who says he’s in danger of becoming a “bad man” unless he forces himself to participate in the cricket games and cowboy roleplay he hates.

Funny Boy brings to mind Vittorio De Sica’s 1970 film The Garden of the Finzi-

Continis — a tale of wealthy assimilated Italian Jews who nevertheless fall victim to the Holocaust. It’s full of long, loving shots of expensive houses and their bright-green lawns. The lighting is sunny, and almost the entire film takes place during daytime.

For better or worse, its horror is tied to its characters’ privilege, as neighborly namecalling quickly turns to outright violence.

Where Call Me By Your Name, set around the same time, uses its characters’ wealth and isolation to create a utopia where homophobia and the onset of the AIDS epidemic play no role and heartbreak is its characters’ biggest worry, Arjie’s love for his teenage boyfriend Shehan (Rehan Mudannayake) is no real refuge. Their romance, however exciting, can’t keep the demons of Sri Lankan politics at bay. They bury themselves in British pop music — especially David Bowie and The Police (misunderstanding “Every Breath You Take” as a romantic ode rather than a stalker’s anthem) — and its acceptance of blurred gender roles, which was at the time aspirational.

In theory, the couple’s ability to love across ethnic lines might be a model for Sri Lankan life, but two people’s ability to see past that hatred does nothing to prevent the country from falling to pieces.

After watching Funny Boy, I’m stuck with a nagging feeling that it presents its story as particularly tragic because it happens to people whose money should have shielded them from such a hard life. But in her press statement, Mehta points to the story as a cautionary tale about the rise of right-wing populism in India and America. Paradoxically, the film is most engaging when it’s a relatively laid-back love story. But it also richly conveys the swift demolition of one’s ability to feel safe at home.

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

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CH

OR NE H T AU A L A IN T S I R

. 10 C E Y, D OM A D RS ZO U N H T M. O .

P 7 Discuss Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock Presented by the Nashville Scene and The Belcourt Theatre

Learn more and register at

belcourt.org

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nashvillescene.com | DECEMBER 10 – DECEMBER 16, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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12/7/20 4:57 PM

Rental Scene

Welcome to The Residence at Old Hickory Lake

Your Neighborhood

Local attractions: · President Andrew Jackson (Hermitage) Home & Winery · Gaylord National Resort & Grand Ol’ Opry · Cooter’s Garage (Dukes of Hazzard) Neighborhood Dining and Drinks: · Sam’s Marina · Burger and Company · Marco’s Pizza

Enjoy the outdoors: · Nashville Shores · President Andrew Jackson Home & Winery · Kayak on Old Hickory Lake · Boat Rentals at Sam’s Marina.

FEATURED APARTMENT LIVING

Fave Neighborhood Bar: · Sam’s Marina Your new home amenities: · Saltwater Pool · Stainless-Steel Grills · Luxury-Lakeview Gym

Local Family Fun: · Kayak on Old Hickory Lake Local Entertainment: · Downtown Broadway or Grand Ol’ Opry!

Both just 20 mins away!

2401 Lakeshore Drive, Old Hickory, TN 37138 | www.residenceatoldhickorylake.com | 615.258.6088

To advertise your property available for lease, contact Keith Wright at 615-557-4788 or kwright@fwpublishing.com

British Woods 264 British Woods Drive Nashville, TN 37217 1 bed / 1 bath 725 sq ft $1084+ per month

2 bed 1.5 / 2 bath

3 bed / 2.5 bath

1025 to 1150 sq ft $1227+ per month

1650 sq ft $1670+

5 floor plans

www.britishwoodsapartments.com | 615.205.1862 Dupont Avenue Apartments 601 N. Dupont Avenue Madison, TN 37115

1 bed / 1 bath 650 sq ft $872 to $1184 3 floor plans

www.dupontavenue.com | 615.285.5687

Gazebo Apartments 141 Neese Drive Nashville TN 37211 1 Bed / 1 Bath 756 sq ft $1,119 +

2 Bed / 1.5 Bath - 2 Bath 1,047 – 1,098 sq ft $1,299 +

3 Bed / 2 Bath 1201 sq ft $1,399 +

5 floor plans

www.Gazeboapts.com | 615.551.3832 42

NASHVILLE SCENE | DECEMBER 10 - DECEMBER 16, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

Madison Flats Brinkhaven Ave Madison, TN 37115 1 bed / 1 bath 630 sq ft $960

2 bed / 1 bath 810 sq ft $1130

5 floor plans

www.madisonflatsapartments.com | 615.285.5981 The Residence at Old Hickory Lake 2401 Lakeshore Drive, Old Hickory, TN 37138

Non-Resident Notice Fourth Circuit Docket No. 20D1391 ANITA FOX

1 bed / 1 bath

2 bed / 2 bath

3 bed / 2 bath

$1,325 to $1,555

$1,695 to $1,805

749 sq ft

1092 - 1211 sq ft

$2,319 to $2,324 1382 sq ft

Rental Scene

Studio 325 sq ft $850

5 floor plans

www.residenceatoldhickorylake.com | 615.258.6088

vs.

TROY ELLIOTT BICE

Non-Resident Notice Fourth Circuit Docket No.19D2032 Nancy Eileen Duke vs.

Larry Wayne Duke

InjuRy Auto ACCIdEnts WRongFul dEAth dAngERous And dEFECtIvE dRugs

Voted Best Attorney in Nashville Call 615-425-2500 for FREE Consultation

www.rockylawfirm.com LEGALS Non-Resident Notice Fourth Circuit Docket No.19D2032

Nancy Eileen Duke vs.

Larry Wayne Duke In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a non-resident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon Larry Wayne Duke. It is ordered that said Defendant enter His appearance herein with thirty (30) days after December 10, 2020 same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan

Richard R. Rooker, Clerk W. North Deputy Clerk Date: October 30, 2020 Cynthia Bohn Attorney for Plaintiff NSC 11/12, 11/19, 12/3, 12/10/20

Non-Resident Notice Fourth Circuit Docket No. 20D1391 ANITA FOX vs.

Richard R. Rooker, Clerk M. De Jesus, Deputy Clerk Date: November 20, 2020 Patricia G. Campbell Attorney for Plaintiff NSC 12/3, 12/10, 12/17, 12/24/20

EMPLOYMENT COMPUTER/IT: Vanderbilt University Medical Center seeks a Sr. Application Developer in Nashville, TN, responsible for developing & modifying software independently; design, code, perform benchmark testing, debugging and documentation of programs; implement large/multiple development projects, among other duties. Bachelor’s in Comp.

Eng., Comp. Sci., or in a related field + 5 years exp. in job offered or related occupation required. Must have exp in App Development, App Development Standards & Procedures, App Systems Design & App Systems Analysis. Mail resume to Jessica Lucas-Stroud, VUMC, 2525 W. End Ave, Ste 500, Nashville, TN 37203.

TROY ELLIOTT BICE In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a non-resident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon TROY ELLIOTT BICE. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HIS appearance herein with thirty (30) days after December 24, 2020 same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on January 25, 2021. It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

Richard R. Rooker, Clerk M. De Jesus, Deputy Clerk Date: November 20, 2020 Patricia G. Campbell

BIOSTATISTICIAN: Vanderbilt University Medical Center seeks a Biostatistician III in Nashville, TN, responsible for collaborating with research team on design of research project; provide statistical expertise in the design of research projects; collaborate with research team in the design of methods to collect info; among other duties.

PhD in Biology related field + 3 years exp. in biomedical research & biomedical research data analysis required. Mail resume to Jessica Lucas-Stroud, VUMC, 2525 W. End Ave, Ste 500, Nashville, TN 37203..

Nob Hill Apartments 180 Wallace Rd. Nashville, TN 37211 1 bed / 1 bath 690 sq ft $1003 to $1303

2 bed / 2 bath 950 sq ft $969 to $1366 2 floor plans

www.nobhillnashville.com | 615.768.8862 Advertise on the Backpage!

It’s like little billboards right in front of you!

Contact: classifieds@ fwpublishing.com

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Rocky McElhaney Law Firm

In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a non-resident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon Larry Wayne Duke. It is ordered that said Defendant enter His appearance herein with thirty (30) days after December 10, 2020 same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on January 11, 2020.

It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a non-resident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon TROY ELLIOTT BICE. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HIS appearance herein with thirty (30) days after December 24, 2020 same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on January 25, 2021. It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

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S U H P I TC

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