Nashville Scene 2-11-21

CITY LIMITS: CHRISTMAS BOMBING DAMAGE COULD PUT HISTORIC PRESERVATION STATUS IN DANGER

FEBRUARY 11–17, 2021 I VOLUME 40 I NUMBER 2 I NASHVILLESCENE.COM I FREE

CITY LIMITS: TENNESSEE PRO-IMMIGRANT GROUPS ARE CAUTIOUSLY OPTIMISTIC ABOUT EARLY BIDEN ACTIONS

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Checking in with a sex therapist, a comedian and more about love in the time of coronavirus

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2/8/21 4:16 PM

— J.T. Gray Owner, The Station Inn

The Station Inn has been a musical beacon to generations of musicians, including Roland White, Sam Bush, Larry Cordle, Jerry Douglas, John Hartford, Alison Krauss, Sierra Hull, and many others. “Father of Bluegrass” Bill Monroe visited frequently, and when he died on September 9, 1996—a Monday, when the club normally would have been closed—pickers and fans went there anyway, holding an extended wake.

Explaining the decision to open his club, owner J. T. Gray said the above.

Learn more about the venerable Nashville club in the exhibition The Station Inn: Bluegrass Beacon.

DOWNTOWN NASHVILLE Visit CountryMusicHallofFame.org to buy tickets. photo:

Les Leverett

from the collection at the country music hall of fame and museum

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NASHVILLE SCENE | FEBRUARY 11 – FEBRUARY 17, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

CONTENTS

FEBRUARY 11, 2021

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22

Along the Avenue .......................................6

Sin Bin

CITY LIMITS

Damage from the Christmas Day bombing could put Second Avenue’s historic preservation status in danger

BY J.R. LIND

Pith in the Wind .........................................6

This week on the Scene’s news and politics blog

Pivot Point ..................................................7 Tennessee pro-immigrant groups are cautiously optimistic about early Biden actions

BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT

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THIS WEEK ON THE WEB:

VODKA YONIC Being a hockey fan has become an exhausting exercise in self-reflection

BY MEGAN SELING

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BOOKS

Home Is a State of Mind

Simon Han’s debut novel considers what it means to live between two worlds

BY JOY RAMIREZ AND CHAPTER 16

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COVER STORY Love Sick

The Love Doctor .........................................8

Talking with sex therapist Renée Burwell about how the pandemic is impacting relationships

BY ERICA CICCARONE

Best-Laid Plans ..........................................9

Our pandemic wedding wasn’t the one we’d hoped for, but ultimately it was just right for us

MUSIC

Now Boarding .......................................... 24 Pink Sweat$ digs deep into his subconscious on Pink Planet

BY DARYL SANDERS

Missing the simple joy of loving friendships during the pandemic

The Scene’s live-review column checks out My Wall at The 5 Spot and Eve Maret via The Fuse Factory

Black Magic ............................................. 12 Talking to local comic Josh Black about maintaining your love life during a pandemic

BY D. PATRICK RODGERS

Kink Takes a Hit ...................................... 14 Nashville’s kink-positive community grapples with safety protocol

BY LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

Finding Love in a Pandemic ................... 14 On the once-in-a-lifetime circumstances that led me to my partner

BY JONATHAN SIMS

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Rotier’s to Close After 75-Year Run David Arnold’s The Electric Kingdom Finds Beauty in the Darkness

ON THE COVER:

Illustration by Alexandria Hall

Styrofoam Winos’ prolific trio of offbeat songsmiths makes its full-band debut

BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

BY AMANDA HAGGARD

Tennessee’s Rapidly Rising COVID-19 Death Toll

J.J.’s Bohemians ...................................... 24

BY BRITTNEY McKENNA

Better Together ....................................... 10

The BlackSon Stays Goal-Driven in ‘Thanking God in Advance’

The Spin ................................................... 25

BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

27 FILM

With Quiet Promise ................................ 27 Minari is the kind of American story we need more of

BY SADAF AHSAN

Panther Power ......................................... 27

Judas and the Black Messiah, featuring a magnetic Daniel Kaluuya, feels like two movies at once

BY CRAIG D. LINDSEY

CRITICS’ PICKS

Watch Carla Ching’s Revenge Porn on PlayPerView, go on a walking tour of Fort Negley, listen to Welcome to Your Fantasy, join Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club, build your own streaming Denzel Washington film festival, get into Gayl Jones, watch some of Broadway’s most romantic musicals and more

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FOOD AND DRINK

Primal Stream 42 ................................... 28

Joan Crawford, Keenan and Kel, and the Empty Man, now available to stream

BY JASON SHAWHAN

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2/8/21 6:18 PM

HI! MY NAME IS GYPSY! I love long walks on uncrowded beaches and some of my favorite things to do include chewing up sticks, cuddling, and napping! I hope you enjoy kisses, because I am quite the lover! I will climb on your lap whenever I feel your attention should be on me or just in case you need a reminder of how cute I am!

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Shop + Donate To Help Our Veterans 615-248-2447 1125 12th Ave. S.

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

Walk a

Mile

J.R. Lind

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FROM BILL FREEMAN MARTHA COOPER — A WOMAN TO BE HONORED On Thursday, Feb. 4, Martha Cooper — who was married to U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper for nearly 36 years — passed away due to Alzheimer’s. The Coopers were blessed with three children, who have just experienced a tremendous loss. From all I’ve seen, Martha was a loyal, loving and caring supporter of her husband through the ups and downs of his career — and politics has plenty of both.

Being married to a congressman could not have been easy for Mrs. Cooper.

Members of Congress work a highly unusual and stressful schedule, with many commuting to Washington, D.C., for three to four days before flying back to their home districts for the remainder of the week. They might have Sunday morning off, but even then, they’re likely preparing for their return trip to D.C. to start the week all over again. The job isn’t easy on one’s spouse, but a rare few — like Martha Cooper — make it look easy.

The Coopers met in Washington, D.C., and courted during Jim’s 1984 reelection campaign. He proposed during a Christmas party at the White House, and they married in the spring of 1985.

According to the Cooper family’s obituary of Martha, she was “wary of politics until she lived in Shelbyville with Jim’s mother for a few months in 1984 to manage Jim’s first re-election campaign.” But considering the couple’s 36-year union, it seems things turned out all right. She honored her husband and the Democratic Party with her support — especially her favorite, President Barack Obama.

Though I didn’t know Martha well, I always admired her spirit — and, of course, her taste in presidents.

Martha was charming, caring and unique. She earned an M.S. in ornithology and had a fascinating career. The Cooper family’s obituary notes that her first job was in a “cubbyhole in the attic of the Natural History Museum, the Bird Division of the Smithsonian, staffing the first two editions of the million-selling National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America.” The family describes her as an “adventuresome soul” and details her colorful life and adventures. Apparently she smoked cigars in the swamps of Louisiana to keep mosquitoes away, taught children and, as an ornithologist, really enjoyed birds and other wildlife. Though her favorite bird was the Upupa epops, she “studied Puffins for the Quebec-Labrador Foundation, protected Least Terns on the Gulf of Mexico beaches, camped in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and worked the Galapagos Islands for the World Wildlife Fund.” “Adventuresome” describes her well.

Let’s not forget that all the while, she was a mother, a job that takes great patience and energy. She was loyal to her family and loved great music, a good party and having and making great friends. Despite her later years when Alzheimer’s set in, Martha indeed had a good and inspiring life full of smiles and adventures — and even when she was ill, she continued to handle it the best she could, and with optimism.

In March of last year, the Alzheimer’s

MARTHA COOPER Association noted that an estimated 5.8 million Americans ages 65 and older have Alzheimer’s dementia. Between 2000 and 2018, the number of Alzheimer’s deaths increased by more than 146 percent.

Family caregivers also suffer emotional distress and negative mental and physical health outcomes. Alzheimer’s is one of those diseases that, much like the pandemic we’re experiencing, shows no bias. It can befall any one of us at any time, regardless of our race, sex, income or environment. And when we see family members who are taking care of their loved ones, we can certainly recognize the toll it takes on them. It is not easy to watch someone we love deteriorate a little more each day — even if, like Martha, they handle it courageously. As the Cooper family’s obituary relates, “Her charm and optimism were heroic,” and, “she always smiled and said thank you.”

Martha Cooper is to be praised, and her life is to be honored. We could use many more people like Martha in the world: People who live with courage, take little for granted, change things for the better, provide loving support and grace to their family and friends, and inspire us all by living an adventurous life.

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.

PHOTO COURTESY OF U.S. REP. JIM COOPER’S OFFICE

PET OF THE WEEK!

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 Editorial Intern Diana Leyva Art Director Elizabeth Jones Photographers Eric England, Matt Masters, Daniel Meigs Graphic Designers Mary Louise Meadors, Tracey Starck Production Coordinator Christie Passarello Events and Marketing Director Olivia Britton 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 Olivia Bellon, 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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NASHVILLE SCENE | FEBRUARY 11 – FEBRUARY 17, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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2/8/21 6:07 PM

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nashvillescene.com | FEBRUARY 11 – FEBRUARY 17, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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CITY LIMITS

ALONG THE AVENUE Damage from the Christmas Day bombing could put Second Avenue’s historic preservation status in danger

BY J.R. LIND

PHOTO: MATT MASTERS

SECOND AVENUE IN JANUARY

I

n the days following the Christmas bombing on Second Avenue, Metro Nashville Codes Administration officials were concerned that many, if not all, of the affected buildings would have to be demolished. Such a move would erase from the cityscape what was Nashville’s first major historic preservation success story.

But as cleanup progressed and codes officials and engineers were able to get a clearer look at the damage, the outlook became rosier. Codes director Bill Herbert said a look inside with his department’s chief engineer made it clear “that every one of these buildings can be rehabilitated.”

That’s not a universal opinion, however.

One property owner who owns five of the affected buildings brought in his own engineer, who said some of them will have to be demolished. Because the buildings have party walls — that is, shared exterior walls — there is concern that the demolition of one will force the demolition of the next, and so on in a domino effect.

For now, the buildings are shored up while cleanup continues and property owners and city officials decide their fate.

The Metro Historical Commission and its sister Historical Zoning Commission are among the government entities that can provide technical assistance for repairs and restoration of damaged historical properties. Owners of income-producing buildings on the National Register of Historic Places are eligible for a 20 percent federal tax credit for substantial rehabilitations.

Stephen McNair — owner of Mobile, Ala.-based consulting firm McNair Historic Preservation and no relation to the late, great Titans QB of the same name — has plenty of experience with restoring NRHP-

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listed properties damaged in disasters, though they’re typically disasters of the more natural variety.

McNair says the owners and their contractors will have a delicate balancing act if they decide to restore.

“The challenge is going to be maintaining the contributing status for the historic properties due to the loss of historic fabric caused by the explosion,” McNair says. He goes on, referencing the National Historic Preservation Act, including Section 106, which requires a review if a federal project might impact a historically or archaeologically significant site. “If the National Park Service reclassifies the properties as noncontributing within the National Register Historic District, then the properties could potentially no longer qualify for federal historic tax credits, Section 106 protections, and other historic incentives.”

The primary contributing factor in what the Department of the Interior officially calls “The Second Avenue Commercial District” is architectural. That is to say, it’s the way the buildings themselves look rather than what they are that is historically significant. The three- to four-story buildings, mostly built in the 1870s and 1880s, may be home to kitschy restaurants and tourist-trap nightclubs, but that doesn’t — and hasn’t — diminished their architectural import. In 1997, 25 years after Second Avenue’s NRHP designation, Metro made the city’s desire to preserve the area official. Thus it was designated a historic district, and the city implemented design standards, requiring that any significant changes to the buildings’ exteriors be approved by the Historic Zoning Commission.

And so for nearly a quarter of a century, a block of unique Victorian Italianate and Commercial Style — also known as Chicago

School — structures have remained frozen in time, maintaining what historians have long regarded as one of the best-preserved stretches of masonry and cast-iron storefronts in the United States.

Second Avenue is also a testament to how historic preservation and modern-day revitalization aren’t always at loggerheads — how business and cultural interests can work together. None of the buildings serve their original use — before Nashville numbered its north-south roads and named them avenues, Second was Market Street, its warehouses providing both a physical and commercial connection between the wharfside riverboats and the city’s shopkeepers and manufacturers — but the residences, restaurants and retailers within the buildings have kept them vital.

But due to the Christmas Day bombing, that symbiosis is in danger.

Second Avenue’s place in Nashville’s commercial fabric isn’t at risk. Even if the buildings ultimately fall victim to the wrecking ball, Second will still bustle after dark with the tourists’ buzz and the postgame crowds from Nissan Stadium and Bridgestone Arena.

What’s inside the buildings is replaceable.

But if those old structures meet their fate — if the challenge of restoring them to their former glory as lovingly maintained time capsules of the late 19th century proves too costly or too Herculean a task — then that brick-and-mortar fabric, that architectural amber, can’t be replicated. An overhaul of the street, even if it’s by necessity, puts the NRHP designation and all that comes with it at risk if too many contributing properties lose that status. In 1985, a fire destroyed three buildings on Second Avenue, forcing their demolition, but the rest of the block remained intact; the destruction on Christmas was far more widespread.

Even if the buildings’ owners are willing and financially able to rebuild to historic standards after insurance makes them whole, McNair says restoration could still be a sticky wicket. For what it’s worth, investigators’ reluctance to designate the bombing a terrorist act is helpful here, as most bogstandard property insurance policies do not cover damage from acts of terrorism.

“Preserving the remaining historic fabric while rehabilitating the properties to meet modern life-safety code and ADA regulations is going to take a thoughtful, measured approach,” says McNair, “and will require working closely with the Tennessee Historical Commission and Metro Historical Commission.”

Without the desire for restoration and that measured approach, Nashville may lose its most significant and visible preservation success story at a time when preservationists are fighting to save the city’s legacy in far less conspicuous places.

Long after the final accounting of the events of Christmas 2020 — after the adjusters put the final dollars and cents in their assessments, after law enforcement puts the final jots and tittles in the investigation report, after Nashvillians come to terms with the fear and surrealism that permeated the city in the bomb’s aftermath — the lasting legacy of that morning may be that our collective legacy couldn’t outlast it after all.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

THIS WEEK ON OUR NEWS AND POLITICS BLOG:

On Feb. 3, the Tennessee Department of Health reported that the state had surpassed 10,000 deaths from COVID-19. It’s a grim milestone made only worse by the math underneath it. Tennesseans have been dying from COVID-19 at a startling rate over the past two months. The state surpassed 10,000 deaths 321 days after the first Tennessean died from the illness, but just 59 days after the state’s death toll surpassed 5,000. As of this writing, the state has reported 10,469 deaths. We’re hurtling toward 11,000 deaths before the fact that 10,000 Tennesseans have died can really even sink in. In Nashville, the city has reported 601 deaths. There is some hope, of course, in the fact that people around the state are now being vaccinated. But the rollout, here and around the country, has been slow. The state reports that only 8.43 percent of Tennesseans have had at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, as the U.S. is now averaging roughly 1.3 million vaccinations per day. … Nashville’s longtime Congressman Jim Cooper announced on Feb. 4 that his wife, Martha Hays Cooper, had died “after years of struggling with Alzheimer’s.”

The two married in 1985 while Jim was in his second term in Congress and Martha was a research assistant at the World Wildlife Fund. She is survived by her husband, three children (Mary, Jamie and Hayes) and one grandchild, Jay. A native of Mississippi, Martha attended Sweet Briar College in Virginia and earned an M.S. in ornithology from Mississippi State University.

Among other jobs, she worked on the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America.

According to an obituary released by the congressman’s office, Martha’s favorite bird was the Eurasian hoopoe.

“Martha was wary of politics until she lived in Shelbyville with Jim’s mother for a few months in 1984 to manage Jim’s first re-election campaign,” the obituary notes. “The experiment worked.”

NASHVILLESCENE.COM/PITHINTHEWIND EMAIL: PITH@NASHVILLESCENE.COM TWEET: @PITHINTHEWIND

NASHVILLE SCENE | FEBRUARY 11 – FEBRUARY 17, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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2/8/21 6:11 PM

PIVOT POINT

Tennessee pro-immigrant groups are cautiously optimistic about early Biden actions

BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT

I

t’s been a long four years for immigrants, refugees and their advocates in Tennessee.

From early in his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump made clear that a crackdown would be a priority: a so-called Muslim ban, an end to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals protections and a drastic reduction in the number of refugees allowed into the country each year. That meant years of protests, caravans to Washington, D.C., and an enhanced focus on local, state and national elections.

So Democrat Joe Biden’s inauguration last month came with at least a brief semblance of relief for some who supported the new president’s campaign calls to renew DACA, do away with non-COVID-related travel bans and ramp up refugee resettlement. On his first day in office — and in the days and weeks following — Biden signed several executive orders fulfilling or beginning to fulfill those promises. (In the short term at least, the advocates’ caution is aimed at news out of Washington that the Biden administration has continued with some deportations during the early weeks of the new president’s tenure.)

“We’re hopeful things are changing, but we know this is the kind of work we have to do every day,” says Sabina Mohyuddin, the

Nashville-based executive director of the American Muslim Advisory Council. “We can’t slow down. We have to keep still pushing hard. We don’t want to fall into complacency and overlook policies that may still be harming our communities.”

Among the things Mohyuddin wants to keep pushing for despite early optimism about the Biden administration is the No Ban Act, which has already passed the House and would keep future presidents from establishing similar travel bans in the future. Tennessee families, Mohyuddin says, have been unable to bring relatives living in unstable or dangerous conditions to join them in the United States due to the ban, while some university students have had to change their educational plans.

“The scars from the Muslim ban will take a while to heal,” she says.

In the new tradition of ping-pong executive orders marking the transfer of power, Tennessee Republicans were dismayed by Biden’s unilateral actions and promise for more legislation to come.

“These proposals inspire lawlessness, enable the flow of illegal drugs and human trafficking, and threaten Tennessee communities already hurting due to the ongoing pandemic,” said new Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty in a statement released the day after Biden’s inauguration. Hagerty lamented the president’s decision to abandon Trump’s partial wall on the southern border. “Our priorities must be to continue to secure our border, strengthen our legal immigration system and protect jobs for hardworking Americans.”

At the state level, feelings are similar.

After four years with a like-minded ad-

A GROUP OF DACA RECIPIENTS ORGANIZED

BY TIRRC TRAVELS TO WASHINGTON, D.C., IN 2019 ministration in the White House, dominant Republicans at the state Capitol returned to Nashville this week for a new session with one fewer ally. Even Trump’s dramatic reduction in refugee resettlement numbers wasn’t enough for Tennessee Republicans, who in 2019 bristled when fellow Republican Gov. Bill Lee said he would still let the state participate in the program.

And though most immigration policy work is conducted above the state legislature’s paygrade, pro-immigrant and pro-refugee groups are keeping a wary eye on the Capitol.

“We are very much ready and preparing for the legislature to continue to behave as they have in the past,” says Judith Clerjeune, policy and legislative affairs manager at the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition. “We will continue to fight for immigrant communities in Tennessee, making sure we’re pushing back against white nationalism and xenophobia.”

One key early focus for Clerjeune and TIRRC, though, is in Washington, where the group and its allies will be pushing for pas-

PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

CITY LIMITS

sage of new Biden administration legislation that, among other priorities, would provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. With a slim Democratic majority in the House and a tie in the Senate (with a Democratic tiebreaker in Vice President Kamala Harris), Clerjeune says it will take a “lot of work” to push the agenda through Congress.

What’s more, even a success like that wouldn’t be the end of the road for those pushing for pro-immigrant and pro-refugee policies, Clerjeune says, pointing to economic and health disparities highlighted by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

“The administrations have changed, but in many ways our work remains the same,” Clerjeune says. “Trump was a big problem, but him and the policies coming from his administration were a symptom of a much deeper issue and a problem that is not solved by just changing administrations. Regardless of who’s in the White House and Congress, we have a lot of work to do to change our immigration system.”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

Temple Social Justice Team Presents

Walk the Talk on the Death Penalty: Where Do We Stand as a Community of Faith? What Is Our Moral Obligation?

Thursday, February 18th ~ 7:00 pm

Zoom Room: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83413545576 Meeting ID: 834 1354 5576 • Dial in- Audio Only: +1 312 626 6799 Rolanda Holman

Kelley Henry

Sabrina Butler-Smith

The Rev. Stacy Rector

The sister of Pervis Payne will speak about the circumstances surrounding her brother’s conviction. Mr. Payne had a scheduled execution date of December 3, 2020, but received a reprieve from Gov. Bill Lee through April 9, 2021.

Convicted when she was a teenager for the murder of her 9-month-old son, Walter, Ms. Butler- Smith served five years in prison and 33 months on death row. In 1995, her case went to retrial and she was exonerated of all wrong-doing as the medical examiner changed his opinion on cause of death as being related to a kidney disorder. She now lives in Memphis with her three children and speaks about her experience with the goals of changing public opinion as well as state policy regarding the death penalty.

As Supervisory Assistant Federal Public Defender, Kelley Henry has represented several death row inmates facing execution dates. She has been a tireless advocate for those who did not receive adequate legal representation and for alternative sentencing.

Executive Director, TADP The Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (TADP) seeks to honor life by abolishing the death penalty. Their mission is to educate citizens about the failures of the death penalty and to organize Tennesseans to advocate for policy change.

The Temple invites the entire community to attend this online event.

5015 Harding Pike ~

The Temple ~ (615) 352-7620

a congregation of the heart, a community of the spirit

nashvillescene.com | FEBRUARY 11 – FEBRUARY 17, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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2/8/21 6:12 PM

Checking in with a sex therapist, a comedian and more about love in the time of coronavirus It’s been a year of tests — tests of our patience, our fortitude and our capacity to care for others. Our annual Love Issue, a paean to matters of the heart, celebrates love in its many forms. This year, we reflect on love in the time of coronavirus. We talk with a sex therapist about how the pandemic is impacting relationships, check in with the local kink club, get dating advice from a Nashville comedian, and share some of our own love stories.

ILLUSTRATION: ALEXANDRIA HALL

THE LOVE DOCTOR Talking with sex therapist Renée Burwell about how the pandemic is impacting relationships

W

BY ERICA CICCARONE

MY PARTNER TO SUPPLY ALL THE THINGS I USUALLY WOULD GET FROM IN-PERSON INTERACTIONS WITH FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS TREND? That’s an

EARLY ON IN THE PANDEMIC, I WAS EXPECTING

interesting question, because I feel like that is a circumstance that isn’t new. I think a lot

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PHOTO: DANIEL MEIGS

e’ve all heard it before — relationships take work, even in normal times. Throw in a global pandemic, an economic crisis and prolonged restrictions on what we can do and where we can go, and the lifting gets even heavier.

And that’s whether you’re newly dating, in a long-term relationship or parenting kids who are suddenly always home. Are our relationships suffering or thriving? Has dating become impossible? Are we even having sex anyore?

Renée Burwell is the founder of Madison practice Pandora’s Awakening, where she specializes in sex, trauma and couples therapy. In addition to talk therapy, Pandora’s Awakening offers workshops about sexual health, support groups, kundalini yoga and more. Burwell spoke to the Scene by phone and by email, answering all of our questions about how the pandemic is impacting dating, relationships and sex.

of people rely on their partners too much to be their everything … when really they still have to be an individual within that relationship and do their own work and find other resources. In previous time periods, people had knitting groups, they had other

communities that they could go to. ... In our society, everyone’s kind of siloed. … [During the pandemic] it’s almost not unhealthy for people to rely on the people who are in their household because that’s what the CDC is recommending.

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HAVE YOU SEEN RELATIONSHIPS SPEEDING UP OR ENDING UNEXPECTEDLY AS PEOPLE ARE THINKING ABOUT THEIR MORTALITY? Are you familiar with the cuffing season? So the cuffing season is in the winter, around December or November, when it starts getting cold. Everybody’s rushing to be in a relationship. Usually around Valentine’s Day, those relationships end. I feel like we’re in more of an intense cuffing season right now, because like you said, we are having death in our face on a regular basis in a way that we haven’t before. We’re having all these restrictions that are just kind of making us go into reflection. [We’re] also just needing comfort. I think that definitely relationships are speeding up and people are reevaluating and being more self-reflective when you really can’t go anywhere.

I think people who were in relationships that weren’t serving them are having more time to reflect and decide to change those because they don’t want to [spend] the rest of the time that’s fragile with someone who’s not for them. Or they want to improve those relationships. Some people are coming to therapy more. I’m getting a whole lot more requests for couples therapy, and then some people are just skipping the couples therapy, and they know that they’re done.

WHAT IS THE PANDEMIC DOING TO OUR SEX LIVES? I’ve seen a lot of different things.

In the very beginning of the pandemic, everyone was really focused on building more [intimacy]. Physical intimacy and emotional intimacy are two different things.

I always like to say that [upfront]. When people are doing online dating, now that they can’t really meet in person, people are taking their time to get to know each other a little bit more online or over the phone. ...

Before, people could use sex almost like a vulnerability shield. People are becoming more open to getting to know each other and kind of depend and rely on each other more right now. What I’m seeing more so is the people who weren’t really taking care of their sexual health, they’re trying to do something about it now. … I’m not really seeing new people who [are] just now having sexual issues. I’m seeing people who’ve had sexual issues for a long time and now they are trying to work on it.

RIGHT. ALL OF MY PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES SEEMED TO COME BACK FULL FORCE AROUND JUNE. [Before the pandemic] you could

always go out and hang out and talk, listen to other people’s problems, and now you have to kind of sit still. And when you’re sitting still, that’s the time of actually going inward. So I think what a lot of people are doing right now is just [asking], “What are my areas of improvement?” ... I don’t know if these new relationships that people are getting into are going to be successful.

I don’t know if there’s going to be other problems that happen once we get out of COVID, but it’s going to be interesting.

WHAT ABOUT CHILD CARE RESPONSIBILITIES? HAVE YOU SEEN THAT HAVING AN IMPACT ON RELATIONSHIPS? I’ve definitely had some couples come in and say that they haven’t had sex as much due to the pandemic, or they’re not able to prioritize date time as they have their kids always around. ... But even if it’s a decrease in some ways, there’s an increase in bonding. This is the only person you have that’s going through this with you. Sex and intimacy are different.

People [are] feeling more connected to each other, but at the same time, people aren’t able to really prioritize the fun that they were able to before a pandemic. Couples just have to be more creative, but that’s hard to do sometimes, even if it’s just [trying] something new.

RESEARCH IS SHOWING THAT PEOPLE OF COLOR ARE BEING DISPROPORTIONATELY IMPACTED BY THE PANDEMIC IN A VARIETY OF WAYS. IS THIS SHOWING UP IN YOUR PRACTICE? Racial tension and added emphasis on Black mental health and racial trauma has given many people of color permission to access services that were once stigmatized within the community. People are seeing the benefit of seeking professional mental health treatment unlike anytime I’ve seen in the past.

ANY LAST THOUGHTS ABOUT LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID? It’s interesting because I just see both sides of it. I don’t see a common thread that everyone is hating each other. I don’t see a common thread that everyone is in this nostalgic, euphoric space with each other.

It’s a combination of everything, but I think probably the common thing is just the selfreflection — this being a deeper, reflective time for people who are reprioritizing what’s important to them.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

ILLUSTRATION: ALEXANDRIA HALL

I think people who were in relationships that weren’t serving them are having more time to reflect and decide to change those because they don’t want to [spend] the rest of the time that’s fragile with someone who’s not for them.

BEST-LAID PLANS Our pandemic wedding wasn’t the one we’d hoped for, but ultimately it was just right for us

BY BRITTNEY McKENNA

O

n Sept. 10, 2019, I asked Mary — then my girlfriend of five years — to marry me.

Earlier that day, I’d picked up our matching engagement rings from Consider the Wldflwrs, with plans to surprise Mary on our anniversary later that month. Never one for patience, I made it all of six hours before popping the question.

We were watching the season finale of Bachelor in Paradise — the episode in which contestants can propose to the person they’ve been drunkenly lounging around on the beach with. I thought, “How funny would it be if I whipped out real engagement rings while we watch all these hot idiots make huge mistakes on national television?”

So I did. It wasn’t the romantic beachside proposal I’d originally planned, but it was all the better because it suited us as we really are: snuggled on the couch with our dog, decked out in our favorite sweat suits, watching reality TV and laughing our asses off. She said yes. The following day, we shared the news with our friends and family, most of whom were excited and supportive (not to mention teasing me for my impatience).

We’d known we wanted to get married for years, having even bought a home together in 2018, but homophobia was one of several hitches on our journey to getting hitched. It slowed our actual engagement process, as a jeweler I approached to make rings for us refused to serve a same-sex couple — an experience I wrote about for the Scene’s 2019 Pride Issue. And it tempered our

LOVE SICK coverstory_2-11-21.indd 9

excitement to plan a ceremony, as a close member of our family did not approve of our engagement.

To ensure a wedding we would actually enjoy, we decided to plan for September 2020, which coincides with the anniversary of when we met. That would give us a year to iron out logistics and details in a leisurely manner, and more importantly, it would allow us time to heal from an important family member’s refusal to attend.

But it wasn’t long before COVID-19 changed our plans yet again. We set wedding planning aside, revisiting the idea in late summer when the thought of a working vaccination began to seem more realistic. We researched possibilities for early summer 2021, hoping that by then we could host a small gathering of close friends and family for a fun, informal and safe ceremony.

A week later, my dad David was diagnosed with metastatic salivary gland cancer. His doctors shied away from giving us survival odds, but my own research told me there was a 60 percent chance he’d still be with us at the end of his treatment.

While I was grateful that his cancer was treatable, I didn’t — and still don’t — like those odds. I wanted my dad, who loves Mary like she’s his own daughter, to see us get married. I wanted him to know that I was committing myself to someone who loves me, respects me and cares for me in ways I never dreamed I’d experience. And most of all, I wanted to do that in a way that kept him safe and healthy.

Mary and I put our heads together to devise a COVID-safe ceremony with only close family, but as my dad’s condition deteriorated we realized it wouldn’t be possible. With few options left — and with the blessing of our loved ones — we decided to tie the knot on our own. We booked an hour at our favorite bar — The Fox Bar & Cocktail Club, just up the road from our house — hired an officiant and a photographer, and scraped together two outfits with the help of express shipping and some very generous friends.

On the afternoon of Friday, Jan. 1, we exchanged vows over cocktails and a homemade playlist with songs by our favorite artists, like Andrew Combs and Jaime Wyatt. Our bartender Ryan was warm and gracious, serving me my first pour of Pappy Van Winkle and offering kind conversation. All throughout

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2/8/21 3:33 PM

BETTER TOGETHER

Missing the simple joy of loving friendships during the pandemic

BY AMANDA HAGGARD

I

t’s when I think back to my birthday party at Bavarian Bierhaus last February that I most feel the absence of my friends.

Packing 18 people around a table for 12 seems unthinkable now. But I even sort of miss the mild, momentary irritation of not being able to make a reservation inside a restaurant in the Opry Mills Mall, of all places. Eating the fries my buddy didn’t finish, putting my arm around a friend while we watched a 75-year-old woman play the “Pennsylvania Polka” on accordion, giving someone the second half of my warming beer — all of these small things, among other moments, brought me comfort. They also made my marriage better.

Over the past year, without the company of friends, my husband and I have had to relearn what it means to be together. Like really, really together. I work from home, and my husband is a stay-at-home dad to our toddler. It’s hard not to get under each other’s feet. My elderly dog barks constantly, we never know what we want for lunch, and it seems like we can never get enough sun on

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What I’d feared would be a lonely day proved to be anything but. Our community may not have been with us physically, but they made their love known to us, whether through offers of loaned jewelry, requests for photos or simple notes of support and excitement. Like our engagement, our wedding looked nothing like we’d thought it would.

Instead, it looked more like us than either of us ever could have dreamed: intimate, playful and

the days when it’s actually out.

I’ve found myself evaluating the saccharine rom-com trope of being someone’s “everything.” Maybe I’m not a romantic, but I think expecting your partner to be your “everything” is a big ask. Your everything? Of course my marriage means a great deal — but in the nearly 12 years I’ve been married, our friendships with others have buoyed us and allowed us to love and be loved by many.

In thinking we can’t find love in friendship — that we must love and cherish one person above all else — we limit ourselves.

Throughout the pandemic, those in our immediate household have had to tolerate more of us, just as we have had to tolerate more of them. The small, taxing moments that would dissipate in pre-pandemic times now add up. Normally, I might quiet my anxiety about a project by spending a couple minutes walking around the block with a friend at work. Now, my husband absorbs and helps me work through those frustrations. And it’s not that he doesn’t want to, or that I don’t support him in the same way. It’s that I can no longer grab a beer after work and arrive home having already forgotten about a frustrating moment. With friends, I don’t have to share cleaning duties or decide who’s going to take on the next pile of dishes. They can listen to my problems and tell me to suck it up, which can be harder to hear from a partner. It’s a great loss to spend this much time away from friendships — what they offer us should be as valued as romance.

Of course, there are sweet moments that come with being home all the time. My toddler noticed the other day that my husband always pours my first cup of coffee for me.

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Brittney and Mary on their wedding day

with the focus on love, not expensive centerpieces.

We chose Jan. 1 because it marked a new beginning after a difficult year, but also because New Year’s Day is traditionally a time to come together with loved ones. We made a pact to spend our future

anniversaries with friends and family, starting each year with a scaled-down version of the communal celebration we couldn’t have. After all, who needs one party when you have a lifetime?

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

ILLUSTRATION: ALEXANDRIA HALL

the day, we were far from alone. Pre-ceremony, our neighbors came outside to send us off. A group of friends pitched in to pay our tab at The Fox. When we got to our room at the Noelle Hotel for a one-night honeymoon, several other friends and my parents sent Champagne and snacks to our room, with sweet notes of congratulations. And my dad, safe at home in Chattanooga, got to see our photos and celebrate with us on our next visit to my parents’ home.

PHOTO: DEB SCALLY PHOTOGRAPHY

Like our engagement, our wedding looked nothing like we’d thought it would. Instead, it looked more like us than either of us ever could have dreamed.

Our daily walks have turned into fun adventures in which we spy on neighborhood cats and spot interesting plants. As I work, I can see my daughter and husband playing out back from my office window.

But while all of those moments are sweet, I want them to be balanced by the joys of friendship — being seated across from someone at a coffee shop who thinks you are as rad as you think they are; doing the

chicken dance in a chain restaurant with someone you have to see at work the next day; leaving a batch of homemade treats on the snack table in the office. I share pieces of my love with them all, and they remind me that everything is going to be OK. Meanwhile, my husband and I are able to love each other more fully when the “everything” expectation falls away.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

LOVE SICK 2/8/21 3:34 PM

PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

BLACK MAGIC Talking to local comic Josh Black about maintaining your love life during a pandemic

I

BY D. PATRICK RODGERS f you live in Nashville and spend much time on the internet, odds are good that you’ve seen Josh Black by now. The stand-up comedian issues short videos that have taken Nashville by storm in recent months. In them, Black takes on all manner of topics — from what Nashville newcomers need to know about the city to local true-crime tales to Nashville’s response to the Christmas Day bombing.

He also had some advice about being single in a pandemic, as well as how to maintain a relationship while in quarantine.

In the spirit of those last two clips, we at the Scene reached out to Black for further thoughts on romance during the COVID-19 era. For more from the comic, follow him on Twitter at @SirJoshuaBlack, where you can also keep your eyes peeled for details on his upcoming socially distanced comedy gigs.

that you can masturbate in peace without a partner barging in because she was supposed to be at Publix but came back because she forgot the damn AirPods. Now you’re crossing ya legs pretending you’re on the phone. “What’s that honey? Nah, I always talk on the phone ass-naked.” Use your time being single to love yourself and grow so that when you find someone, your energy and emotions don’t weigh them down, but instead add a slice of life.

HOW ARE PEOPLE SUPPOSED TO MEET HOT YOUNG SINGLES IN THEIR AREA IF THEY HAVE TO REMAIN SOCIALLY DISTANCED? Be a COVID tester. You’ll see thousands of baddies every day, and flirting with them may keep their minds off the fact that there’s a popsicle stick shoved in their face tickling the brain.

Afterwards say, “I can text you the results personally if you’d like, but I’ll need your number.” This is risky. In fact, half of you will be fired, but the other half will find soul mates. Win some, lose some. The best part is that you’ll be in the know and can forewarn the streets of any reckless behavior. You can post in the East Nashville Facebook page: “Don’t go to Bridgette’s birthday party Sunday. She’s got The ’Vid!”

DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE FOR PEOPLE WHO AREN’T IN RELATIONSHIPS OR LIVE ALONE AS COVID-19 CONTINUES? There’s a difference

ACCORDING TO THE BBC AND OTHERS, BREAKUPS AND DIVORCES HAVE BEEN SPIKING DURING THE PANDEMIC. WHY DO YOU THINK THAT IS? Some people don’t have COVID but still

between loneliness and solitude. This can be a time for self-care. Finish that Angela Davis book you bought and posted on the Gram but never opened. Enjoy the fact

have no taste. Jumped into a relationship with a lame because you were bored instead of waiting for your soul mate. Jim and Pam were soul mates. That’s why he got

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away with that ratchet-ass proposal at the hood corner store in a rainstorm. A lot of people out here with SettleMates. People they settled for. Quarantine’s making you realize how little y’all have in common. You wanna smoke weed with anarchists at the community garden and he wants to wear Sperrys and binge-watch Alex Jones videos.

Quarantine isn’t causing breakups, it’s just exposing how ridiculous some relationships are. That’s a good thing. Stop pretending you’re in love with someone you hate. The love of your life is out there waiting for you.

DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE FOR PEOPLE WHOSE PARTNERS ARE ANNOYING THE HELL OUT OF THEM AS THEY SHELTER IN PLACE TOGETHER? Go to East Nashville and find any white dude with dreads and buy a quarter of ’shrooms from him. Eat them at Radnor Lake by the water.

Hold hands, smile, walk, relax. Do you feel anything yet? Laugh at how awkward y’all’s first date was. Reminisce on the good times had before you both became so ungrateful.

Is it just me or is that tree breathing? Treat your relationship like you treat the show Stranger Things. You fell deeply in love with it, but somewhere along the line shit just got boring. But you know in your heart it’ll get better. Yeah that tree is definitely breathing.

Forgive each other. Start a clean slate and enjoy this first date. Once Mother Nature is done teaching you beautiful lessons about life, go home, play ’90s R&B and make slow passionate love. But don’t forget to feed the dog. It feels like you’ve been gone for 10 minutes, but it’s actually been eight hours.

WHAT’S THE PERFECT DATE DURING THE PANDEMIC? Get a bottle of Guidance Whiskey. It’s local and Black-owned. Then go home and put on y’all’s favorite trap playlist. As you drink, Google a recipe for a baked vegan pasta dish. Take Earth Rides XL to the grocery store (big dick energy). Drunk grocery shopping with your partner is high-class behavior. A 10-second makeout session in an aisle with an old person near you is mandatory. Go home and strip to your underwear and play music while y’all cook. We can now move from trap to Drake and Sza vibes. Take a sexy picture together and send it in a DM to that pretty girl who’s always leaving heart eyes under both of y’all’s posts.

Invite her over for dinner and fade away into the night.

HOW DO YOU THINK NASHVILLIANS HAVE HANDLED COVID-19 ON A PERSONAL LEVEL? Well, Republicans have had a pretty rough time here lately. They are being oppressed by having to wear masks in public. Their children aren’t being allowed to give each other COVID in schools. When Tennessee was the No. 1 state for COVID, poor Kid Rock wasn’t allowed to have people shoulder to shoulder in his bar while he quarantined in another state. Biden stole the election. Obama’s a Muslim. Gays are going to hell. And saying “Black Lives Matter” is still somehow legal. But all we can do is pray that they can make it through this tough and trying time.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

LOVE SICK 2/8/21 3:35 PM

Call Me Cupid?

Introducing people to houses, till they

Love.

fall in Let's find your home together!

EDDIE FERRELL

Broker, CRB CLHMS, Vice President, Circle Of Excellence, MMDC 931.320.4552 | 615.650.7447 eddie@eddieferrell.com 964 Main St. | East Nashville, TN 37206 nashvillescene.com | FEBRUARY 11 – FEBRUARY 17, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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Nashville’s kink-positive community grapples with safety protocol

BY LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

B

efore the pandemic, the fireplace at The Mark was a cozy, sexy gathering place for Nashville’s most dedicated sex-positive community members. It’s a sleek in-wall unit, the kind you might see in high-end hotel lobbies. Members would gather around it as if it were the office water cooler.

Now you can visit The Mark’s YouTube page and view a two-hour stream of the fire crackling, like a Yule log for the BDSM scene. Still, it’s just not the same.

“It’s a struggle for me right now,” says Mercury, The Mark’s executive director.

The usually dapper kink kingpin is dressed down in a color-coordinated tracksuit and matching sneakers as he leads a truncated tour through the space. Its usual equipment — a massive St. Andrew’s cross, monkey bars, chains — is pushed into a corner to make enough space to allow a small gather-

FINDING LOVE IN A PANDEMIC On the once-in-a-lifetime circumstances that led me to my partner

BY JONATHAN SIMS

I

n early March 2020, I was 34 and had been single for a little more than two years. I had moved to Nashville from St. Louis to escape a horrible six-year relationship. For the first time in nearly a decade, I felt like myself again, and I was ready to take another risk. Then the pandemic lockdown was announced. Bad timing.

Scientists said to buckle in for a long and bumpy ride, which meant my chances of meeting someone organically had just dropped to nil. I picked up the dating apps again, hoping to find some good conversation that might lead to something substantial when it was safe to venture out again. Nothing really clicked. On the surface, I was looking for a woman 30 or older, nonsmoker, non-religious, intelligent, kind, caring, ambitious, tidy, goofy, funny, nerdy — and with no cats.

When June rolled around, I quietly celebrated my 35th birthday and stayed focused on my new job at the Scene’s sister publication Nfocus Magazine.

I settled into quarantine life nicely. A couple weeks later, I was mindlessly scrolling through Hinge while watching the Dungeons & Dragons web series Critical Role, and I saw a profile that wrenched me out of my stupor.

Following Hinge’s “I geek out on” prompt, she had written: “Star Trek, Star Wars, Studio Ghibli, Pokémon, Adventure Time, Doctor Who. I’m terrible at FPS video

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Virtual communities existed when we opened, but we were the ones who were taking the next step. This is how you’re safe. You’re not safe online.

—Mercury, The Mark’s executive director ing of people to maintain safe distance. A display of masks is on the wall — not the patent-leather doggy masks more commonly associated with kink, but rather plain cotton ones with The Mark’s branding and the line “Wearing a Mask for Your Safety!”

That might seem an unlikely slogan, but people familiar with The Mark will recognize the club’s long-standing adherence to community safety — that’s one of the core concepts of The Mark, and a big reason why its closure during the pandemic has felt so seismic to its members.

“The whole reason to start The Mark was because we wanted a real community that was real life — not virtual,” says Mercury.

“Virtual communities existed when we

games, but I’ll kick your ass at Mortal Kombat. [live long and prosper emoji].”

For “I get along best with people who,” she answered, “clean as they cook, are kind to service workers, and agree that the thermostat should be set to 68 degrees at all times.” A photo of her in a Vault suit from Fallout 4. A photo with a spotless, uncluttered apartment, with a movie poster behind her — the Japanese release of A New Hope. A photo of her cat. Damn it. But it was pretty cute, for a cat.

I “liked” her Vault suit photo and closed the app until a week later, when I got a Hinge notification from Elizabeth Meade. June 23.

“Hi hey hello! It seems like we have a lot in common!”

Oh, snap! She responded. OK, play it cool. Don’t be a dweeb.

“Hello howdy hi! It does, indeed.”

Well, I just fucked it up.

But apparently I didn’t fuck it up. We kept talking. We talked about the fun stuff and the serious stuff with utter (and sometimes painful) honesty.

She turned out to be genuinely hilarious, goofy and caring. She’s spiritually agnostic, owns her own business, volunteers with Planned Parenthood and participated in protest marches after the death of George Floyd. She cleans her apartment (every inch of it) every week and is sharp and witty and brilliant with a spirit that I’ve never encountered in another person.

She knows and is fully confident in exactly who she is, which I found extremely refreshing.

She asked me to send her a video of me reading a story, so I recorded myself reading “The Princess and the Pea.” And she sent one of herself reciting “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” from memory. For the next few weeks, I sent nightly videos of myself reading stories.

We texted and talked constantly, but we needed to meet to see if we had chemistry in person. That’s a questionable move during a pandemic, but a coworker suggested that single people could consider

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opened, but we were the ones who were taking the next step. This is how you’re safe.

You’re not safe online.”

The pivot to virtual programming might seem like a no-brainer — the internet is, if nothing else, a hedonist’s playground. But as Mercury explains, that’s both good and bad. As noted by a recent article by British magazine i-D about kink videos on TikTok, clips with the hashtag #Freak have more than 1.2 billion views. Clips with the hashtag #ChokeMe have 45.3 million. Kink isn’t going away just because people can’t access the physical communities, but that means the line separating kink and abuse may risk being blurred even further.

“We are doing nothing here but growing a

PHOTO: ASHLEY WRIGHT

KINK TAKES A HIT

culture of consent,” he says. “That’s important not only in the world of sex, but in the real-life world too.”

“Are you familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?” Mercury asks with a laugh.

He explains that kink and even sex depend on things like personal security. “But the thing is — during the Great Recession, our business was booming. The financial recession wasn’t about anything but money. But now, people are scared, people are stressed, and they’re just trying to get by.”

Similar clubs are closing or have closed already — a club in Louisville, Ky., closed, as did one in Columbus, Ohio. Clubs in Memphis, Atlanta and Birmingham, Ala., are all down to skeleton crews. The Mark spent its threemonth emergency fund early in the summer, and Mercury says they’ve been relying on savings that had originally been intended for purchasing the building they lease.

Still, The Mark hopes to reopen when the Metro health guidelines indicate that it’s safe to do so — even if it’s only for a small number of members. And who knows what kind of new kinks will have arisen with the pandemic? Mercury wonders if people will start role-playing as Dr. Fauci, for example.

Because when you’re a dedicated member of the BDSM community, there’s nothing hotter than safety.

“Kink aside, we are Nashville’s largest provider of adult sex education and sex positivity,” Mercury says. “We’re all better people when we have that on our side.”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

Jonathan and Elizabeth

going to get tested, quarantining while they await results, then meeting up. So we did.

At the testing site, I could see her car in the line, but I couldn’t see her face. We waited impatiently for a week for our results. Both tests were negative!

Our first date was on July 18. I went to her apartment, where we sat on the floor and listened to records, drinking wine and watching the lights on the ceiling from her star machine. We played board games, and she kicked my ass at Mortal Kombat.

We spent eight hours talking that night, and we did the same the next night. I recalled a New York Times article about journalist Mandy Len Catron’s personal experiment with psychologist Arthur Aron’s study, in which he claimed that anyone could fall in love if they ask each other 36 specific questions and then stare

into each other’s eyes for four minutes. We tried it on our third night.

A week-and-a-half later, we took a weekend trip together (still respecting the quarantine), and we survived it! We had difficult conversations and even got a few arguments under our belts. We learned how to communicate with each other better. We learned our quirks and foibles. Back home, I fell head over heels for her cat Calcifur, who loves me back. We clicked with each other’s families. In November, we got an apartment together. We loaded our Christmas tree with the nerdiest ornaments we could find.

It’s certainly not the story I was expecting, but I couldn’t have asked for a better opening chapter. And I guess I’m a cat person now.

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Hosted by Tamiko Robinson Steele featuring performances by

Nashville Ballet • Nashville Opera • Nashville Repertory Theatre Tony-Nominee Susan Egan • Singer Diana DeGarmo • Award-Winning Artist Nan Gurley and a special birthday message from

Florida Georgia Line

February 20

Saturday 7:00 p.m.

Our virtual celebration is FREE to enjoy from the comfort of your home.

Add-on gourmet dinner and appetizer packages are available with proceeds supporting TPAC’s nonprofit mission.

We’re turning 40.

Reserve your access at TPAC.ORG/Celebrate

And bringing the party to you.

RUBY PRESENTING PARTNER

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER PARTNERS

Help for December 25th Bombing Survivors #NashvilleStrong #NashvilleStrong2021

Assistance now available 24 hours a day for those impacted by the December 25th bombing.

Apply online or by phone for help with rent and utility payments, food assistance, trauma therapy, and more.

Visit NashvilleStrong2021.org or call 615-340-9719 16

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This project is funded in part by an agreement with the State of Tennessee and with funding from the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee.

CRITICS’ PICKS W E E K L Y

R O U N D U P

T O

D O

[DALE AS OLD AS TIME]

HISTORY

WATCH HBO’S THE LADY AND THE DALE

the city’s first Black neighborhood, complete with apartment buildings that crowded the hillside. Eventually, some of the families would move to the north side of town, helping found and nurture what would become Tennessee State and Fisk universities. But for decades, they’d come back to tend to the fort’s increasingly overgrown grounds, to picnic, to remember, to thumb their noses at the Klansmen desperately trying to repackage the fort as something it never was. The fort never worked as a symbol of white supremacy — it was, in fact, a symbol of Black accomplishment in the face of unspeakable oppression. This month, two 90-minute walking tours will focus on “why enslaved, free, and self-emancipated people came to Saint Cloud Hill and how their contributions to the war effort directly impacted the creation of United States Colored Regiments, the Confederacy’s defeat and the end of the slavery system.” Tours are limited to eight people and social distancing and mask requirements will be strictly enforced. Email fortnegley@nashville.gov or call 615-862-8470 for reservations and more information. 10 a.m. Feb. 13 & 27 at Fort Negley, 1100 Fort Negley Blvd. J.R. LIND

Hill, part of a network of Union forts to defend the city. It saw little action during the Battle of Nashville itself, so its place in military history is mostly due to its sheer size. Because it hosted no battle, and because the broader Battle of Nashville was such a dismal showing for the Confederacy, and because the Union more or less abandoned it in the days after Appomattox, Official Nashville largely neglected Fort Negley. There were some efforts by the Ku Klux Klan and its ilk, however, to reclaim it as some sort of Confederate shrine, a truly pathetic and revisionist effort by a group of people infamous for being pathetic and revisionist. But for decades of Black Nashvillians, Fort Negley wasn’t a forgotten hulk — it was a testament to Black excellence. Negley and the other ring forts were built in large part by former slaves who fled to the Union lines, and freed Blacks conscripted out of Nashville’s churches. It was garrisoned by, among others, members of the United States Colored Troops. So strong was the hold of the fort that after the war, many of the laborers stayed on Saint Cloud Hill, creating what was essentially

MUSIC

pandemic. Next up: A new play from Carla Ching (Nomad Hotel) titled Revenge Porn.

It’s billed as a play about “public shaming, ownership of women’s bodies and images, After scoring a binge-worthy hit with and the earthquakes that come from Netflix’s Wild Wild Country, dissolving a marriage,” and the filmmakers/mumblecore EDITOR’S NOTE: cast includes Tina Haung, Amy trailblazers Jay and Mark AS A RESPONSE TO THE Hill, Kahyun Kim, Christopher Duplass have once again ONGOING COVID-19 PANDEMIC, Larkin, Ken Leung and Roland produced a docuseries that WE’VE CHANGED THE FOCUS OF Ruiz, under the direction of gets wilder and wilder with THE CRITICS’ PICKS SECTION TO INCLUDE ACTIVITIES YOU CAN Bernardo Cubría. As always, each episode. This four-part PARTAKE IN WHILE YOU’RE AT tiered ticket prices start at $5, miniseries, which premiered HOME. with proceeds from this event on HBO on Jan. 31, chronicles benefiting New York’s Ma-Yi the life of Geraldine Elizabeth Theater Company. To learn more, Carmichael, a woman who went after visit play-perview.com. 6 p.m. Saturday, the car companies in the 1970s with her own Feb. 13, via Play-PerView AMY STUMPFL automobile — a three-wheel, fuel-efficient vehicle known as the Dale. It turns out that was just one notable chapter in the jaw[WALK AND TALK] dropping life of Carmichael, an Ayn RandGO ON A WALKING TOUR OF FORT loving trans woman with a past life as a NEGLEY con artist. This series gets interviews from Fort Negley was the largest inland family members as well as the people who fort built during the Civil War, so attempted — and often succeeded — to take it’s incongruous that for so long it was a her down at various points in her life. (This forgotten monument for much of Nashville. includes a transphobic former newsman Its bastions — built of an astounding 62,000 who you won’t be surprised to learn is the cubic feet of limestone — ring Saint Cloud father of a popular Fox News host.) It’s quite the engrossing portrait of a flawed LGBTQ maverick who always wanted to be famous — but ultimately became infamous. CRAIG D. LINDSEY [THE BEST REVENGE]

WATCH CARLA CHING’S REVENGE PORN ON PLAY-PERVIEW

Early in the COVID shutdown, Brooklyn-based producer Jeremy Wein decided it wasn’t enough to simply lament the isolation of his theater community. He wanted to do something about it. Beginning in March, Wein launched Play-PerView — a virtual platform that delivers livestreamed events like play readings, monologues and panel discussions. The content itself is great, and often reunites original bigname casts and players. But there’s also a wonderful humanitarian element, with proceeds from all events going to support arts organizations that were hit hard by the

FORT NEGLEY

PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

TV

T H I N G S

THE NEW YORK CITY GAY MEN’S CHORUS

THE LADY AND THE DALE

THEATER

O F

[SWEET HARMONY]

STREAM THE NEW YORK CITY GAY MEN’S CHORUS VIRTUAL FUNDRAISER

For more than 40 years, the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus has been lifting up the LGBTQ community while celebrating the power of music. This weekend the organization will continue that tradition, taking its annual Harmony fundraiser online in true Valentine’s Day style. The virtual celebration (which benefits New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, Youth Pride Chorus and its a cappella ensemble Tonewall) will be hosted by SiriusXM personality Seth Rudetsky and producer James Wesley of Stars in the House — the popular livestreamed series that has been keeping Broadway’s spirits up throughout the pandemic. The evening will feature a slew of special guest performances

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CRITICS’ PICKS

STREAM A BOOK EVENT WITH RICHARD THOMPSON FORD

PODCAST

The cover image for the book Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History is a portrait of Louis XIV that’s been cropped to only include his lower half — shapely legs in white stockings, red high heels turned out just so, and a lush ermine cloak slit open to expose the garters on both legs. It’s a great example of how fascinating history can be when it’s viewed through the lens of fashion. The book’s author, Richard

BOOKS

Thompson Ford, is a professor at Stanford Law School who specializes in the law and cultural issues. With Dress Codes, he examines the history of dressing — from the Middle Ages through today — and how our dress codes evolved along with our social and political ideals, reflecting struggles for power and status. “Even in today’s more informal world,” he argues, “dress codes still determine what we wear, when we wear it — and what our clothing means.” Hear him speak about the book with Vanderbilt University professor Dan Sharfstein in Tuesday evening’s Zoom book event.

Register for free at parnassusbooks.net.

6 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 16, via Parnassus Books LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

[HOT, HOT, HOT]

LISTEN TO WELCOME TO YOUR FANTASY

Nothing straddles the intersection of sexy and ridiculous like the Chippendales dancers, the over-the-top male strippers who were, ahem, huge in the ’80s. An in-depth examination of the cultural phenomenon is enough of a selling point to hook me on Welcome to Your Fantasy, a new podcast from Pineapple Street Media that premiered on Feb. 10.

But while that sordid subculture might seem fascinating enough, the pod kicks things up a notch — we’re talking murder, drugs, corruption. The Pineapple Street team is responsible for some stellar pods, including Ronan Farrow’s excellent Catch and Kill and the fascinating if flawed Missing Richard Simmons. If you’re a

[HERE TO MAKE FRIENDS]

JOIN ROXANE GAY’S AUDACIOUS BOOK CLUB

Goodreads, the book-tracking and reviewing app, definitely has its pitfalls. For example: Do I care that innumerable men

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TRAINING DAY fan of those kinds of in-depth cultural dissections, you’re going to love Welcome to Your Fantasy — host Natalia Petrzela is a smart and fearless interviewer, and the top-shelf production includes findings from more than 100 hours of archival footage, as well as more than 60 interviews with investigators, co-conspirators and former dancers. Available to stream via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts LAURA HUTSON HUNTER [WHETHER YOU’RE A WOLF OR A SHEEP]

BUILD YOUR OWN STREAMING DENZEL WASHINGTON FILM FESTIVAL

Even with the vaccine rollout slowly proceeding, it’s hard to know just how long it will be before we can return to movie theaters in large numbers, or when numerous worthwhile theatrical releases will return. So let’s keep right on with our build-your-own-streaming-fest Critics’ Pick series. For this, the 32nd installment, let’s talk about the prolific work of a remarkable talent — 66-year-old actor, producer and sometime director Denzel Washington.

With nearly 50 film performances to Washington’s name, it’d be impossible to conquer the bulk of the New York native’s work in a reasonable amount of time, so instead we’ll cherry-pick a handful of my personal faves, split into categories. Kick things off with a selection or two from the Denzel Action/Thriller category, which most notably features 2001’s Antoine Fuquadirected Training Day (free on HBO Max).

That performance earned Washington a Best Actor Oscar, and has one of the most satisfying conclusions of any film in the copthriller idiom. I’m sorry to report that the newly released The Little Things (also on HBO Max) is a bit of a stinker — not Denzel’s fault — but other action/thriller options for your streaming fest include 2004’s Man on Fire ($3 to rent via Amazon Prime), 2014’s The Equalizer ($4 via Prime and YouTube) and 2006’s intoxicating Spike Lee joint Inside Man ($4 via Prime, and one of my favorites ever from both Lee and Washington). Then dip into Washington’s smoldering intensity with something from the Denzel Drama and/or Historical Fiction category. This is fertile territory, with notable selections including 1989’s Glory ($4 on Prime), 1992’s Lee-directed career highlight Malcolm X (HBO Max), 1993’s gut-wrenching Philadelphia ($4

on Prime), 1998’s He Got Game (HBO Max, and another Lee-Washington collab), 1999’s The Hurricane (HBO Max) and 2016’s Fences ($4 on Prime), the latter of which the actor also directed. The man’s filmography is an embarrassment of riches, and we’ve barely touched on 20 percent of it here. (I didn’t even mention The Taking of Pelham 123, Courage Under Fire or the rare entry in the Denzel Comedy category, Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues.) If all else fails, just type “Denzel” into the search bar of your favorite streaming service and hit play on the first thing that comes up. You won’t be disappointed (unless you land on The Little Things). D. PATRICK RODGERS BOOKS

[DRESS ME UP]

dislike a popular book that just happens to be penned by a woman? No. Am I here for basic takes about contemporary fiction? No. Do I proudly clock my latest trashy mystery series for all my fellow MFA alumni to behold? Yes. But the best reason to have a Goodreads profile is to read Roxane Gay’s reviews. They are brief and honest. Her negative reviews aren’t delivered with a scathing sense of superiority, and her positive reviews are absolutely glowing.

Gay, the author of Bad Feminist, Hunger and more, has launched a book club that you — yes you! — can join. She has chosen a book for each month of the year, and those who subscribe to her Substack ($6 a month) have access to juicy discussion threads about the book as well as a monthly author event via Zoom. You won’t be able to mouth off while swigging wine (which I hear is typical book club behavior) because you’ll be muted in the Zoom room with hundreds of other people. But you will be able to slip your pithy insights and smart questions into the chat box. My friend Kim attended the first meeting, and she reports that Gay is an exemplary host — funny, light and playful — and comes fully prepared to direct an elevated conversation about craft, art and the business of publishing a book. I don’t want to spoil the surprise for all my true nerds out there, but Gay follows the meeting with a syllabus for further reading. February’s book is Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby, which Gay calls (on Goodreads, of course) “chaotic, wellwritten, deeply, gorgeously queer, messy, sexy.” Gay is hiring an ASL interpreter for each event. Learn more and join the club at audacity.substack.com. ERICA CICCARONE

FILM

BOOKS

and celebrity interviews, including Nick Adams (Falsettos), Frenchie Davis (Rent), Sidney DuPont (Beautiful), Henry Gottfried (Waitress), Ann Harada (Avenue Q), Jessica Hendy (Cats), Devin Ilaw (Miss Saigon), Lady Bunny (drag artist/ DJ), Marla Louissaint (Beautiful), John Tartaglia (Avenue Q), Vishal Vaidya (Groundhog Day), Tyler Whitman (Bravo’s Million Dollar Listing New York) and more.

For complete details and to register for free streaming, visit nycgmc.org. 7 p.m.

Saturday, Feb. 13, via New York City Gay Men’s Choir AMY STUMPFL

[KEEP UP WITH JONES]

GET INTO GAYL JONES

When all the critics and scholars start riffing on who were the best women novelists to come out of the Black Arts Movement of the ’60s and ’70s, Alice Walker and the late Toni Morrison are always the first names to pop up. But a name you don’t regularly hear mentioned is Kentucky author Gayl Jones, who dropped two of the era’s boldest, most blunt works of African American fiction. Her 1975 debut Corregidora follows a Kentucky blues singer who attempts to get her life back together after

NASHVILLE SCENE | FEBRUARY 11 – FEBRUARY 17, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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[ROMAN’S NEW TIMES]

SUBSCRIBE TO ALISON ROMAN’S NEWSLETTER AND YOUTUBE CHANNEL

In Pixar’s Ratatouille, a book of recipes by the fictitious Chef Gusteau called Anyone Can Cook kick-started rodent protagonist Remy’s journey to becoming an unlikely culinary mastermind. I’m no competition for the tiny chef voiced by Patton Oswalt, but amid the doldrums of quarantine, cooking for loved ones has become my outlet, Alison Roman my Gusteau, and her pair of cookbooks (2018’s Dining In and 2019’s Nothing Fancy) my bibles. Roman’s pithy writing and flavorful-yet-low-maintenance recipes have demystified cooking at home for me, and I’ve even committed certain favorites to memory (citrus chicken rested in herbs, seared short ribs with quick kimchi, “impostor al pastor” tacos, smashed cucumber and turmeric salad) — and if a grown man in his 30s who still ate like an overgrown toddler pre-pandemic can pull that off, truly anyone can cook. To tide us and our battle-scarred copies of Nothing Fancy over while we await a follow-up, Roman recently launched a free weekly digest and corresponding YouTube channel with recipes, stories and recommendations.

Five dollars a month unlocks subscriberonly content — including online group cooking classes with the chef herself.

Read Roman’s newsletter at anewsletter. alisoneroman.com, and check her out on YouTube at youtube.com/c/alisonroman.

CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

ALISON ROMAN

[LOVE, ACTUALLY]

CIDER IS OUR LOVE LANGUAGE.

WATCH SOME OF BROADWAY’S MOST ROMANTIC MUSICALS

Whether you’re planning a cozy romantic evening with your special someone or just looking forward to bonding with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, there’s no better time than Valentine’s Day weekend to check out some of Broadway’s sweetest musicals.

True romantics will appreciate the beauty and unbridled optimism of An American in Paris — not to mention Christopher Wheeldon’s Tony Award-winning choreography and all those gorgeous Gershwin tunes. The charming 2016 revival of She Loves Me (starring Zachary Levi and Laura Benanti) is another good choice, centering on a pair of bickering colleagues who unknowingly find love as anonymous pen pals. The Netflix film adaptation of The Prom provides bighearted fun, not only celebrating a young queer love story, but also serving as a bit of a love letter to Broadway itself. Looking for something on the quirkier side? Ernest Shackleton Loves Me offers a decidedly unusual tale, following a sleep-deprived single mom who logs onto a dating website and encounters none other than the legendary (and long-since-deceased) explorer Ernest Shackleton. It’s certainly not your typical romance, but there’s something to be said for its themes of empowerment and selfacceptance. You can find all these titles via broadwayhd.com. AMY STUMPFL MUSIC

FOOD & DRINK

being tragically attacked by her jealous husband. Her 1976 follow-up Eva’s Man is a more brutal spiritual sequel, floating in and out of the consciousness of a woman who descends into madness after poisoning and castrating her lover. Jones may be better known for the erratic, controversial things she’s done in her later years than for her sporadic bibliography, but if you want to read literature that gets to the pain between African American women and men this Black History Month, you can’t go wrong with Jones. A long-awaited new novel from Jones titled Palmares is slated for a September release — all the more reason to brush up on your knowledge now. CRAIG D. LINDSEY

THEATER

CRITICS’ PICKS

[CUTTING IT]

LISTEN TO THE DELUXE VERSION OF YOUNG DOLPH’S RICH SLAVE

Current king of Memphis rappers Young Dolph just dropped the deluxe version of his album from last year, Rich Slave — his first after a self-declared retirement.

Unlike many recent deluxe editions of rap albums, which are frequently just pumped-up products designed to inflate streaming numbers, the extra tracks on Rich Slave are all worthy of the original and essential listening. Dolph is a true Tennessee talent like few others, something like the Gucci Mane or Jay-Z of the 901, and he’s as much of an unequivocal selfstarter and discerning dealmaker as he is a thoughtful wordsmith. After hustling as a major independent for more than a decade, he’s started to shift into more of a mentor role as he approaches middle age, cultivating a younger generation of underground Memphis talent like rising stars Key Glock and Duke Deuce. Rich Slave sees him quite naturally sliding into the role as an elder statesman of the scene, speaking up about the state of the world, pushing back against police brutality, and documenting the ceilings placed on his success as a Black man in America — all while he celebrates himself. Rich Slave is available via Grimey’s, or wherever you buy your records. NATHAN SMITH

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UPCOMING VIRTUAL EVENTS THURSDAY FEB 11 6:00PM FACEBOOK LIVE with DAVID ARNOLD The Electric Kingdom

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TUESDAY FEB 16 6:00PM FACEBOOK LIVE with RICHARD FORD THOMPSON Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

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FOOD AND DRINK

SIX MORE WEEKS OF WINTER (DRINKS) Hot or cold, hard or soft, here are seven of the best winter-weather drinks in Nashville now

BY ASHLEY BRANTLEY

HANSEL AND GRETEL AT THE CAFÉ AT THISTLE FARMS thecafeatthistlefarms.org

If you ever find yourself missing your extended family — you know, the ones who like to hug your neck and lie to you about how skinny you’re looking — go to The Café at Thistle Farms, a nonprofit that employs

women survivors of trafficking, prostitution and addiction. The place oozes warmth, rejuvenation and a general sense that everyone is welcome to come in out of the cold.

Max out on coziness with the Hansel and Gretel. The riff on a chai latte is made with local Firepot tea, espresso, gingerbread (actually buzzed up in the drink!), steamed

Y

ou know what feels on-brand this year? Letting a rodent decide our fate. Last week, Punxsutawney Phil did his thing at Gobbler’s Knob and declared six more weeks of winter. But here’s the thing: Phil is only right about 39 percent of the time. Here’s the other thing: Who cares? We’ve essentially lived through a year of winter, emotionally if not literally. Six more weeks won’t wreck us.

That’s especially thanks to Nashville’s current drink roster. Our winter-beverage scene is stacked — and laced and infused and steeped and every other PR buzzword you can think of. Below are seven drinks that will give you the fortification you need to see you through the time change. As always, we recommend checking an establishment’s website for hours, ordering information and more before heading their way.

BUTTERBEER LATTE AT RED BICYCLE redbicyclecoffee.com

I missed the train to Hogwarts. I was 26 before I picked up a Harry Potter book, and I just couldn’t get there. Well, with one huge exception: butterbeer. Beer is good, butter is even better, and the idea of mixing the two is the most magical idea J.K. Rowling ever had. (That’s not what it is in the novels, of course; that’s described as “less-sickly butterscotch,” but butterscotch: also good!)

At Red Bicycle, butterbeer is a latte laced with caramel, vanilla and white chocolate.

The latter, of course, is not actual chocolate, but rather a mix of sugar, cocoa butter, milk products, vanilla and some fatty thing called lecithin. Purists love to rag on white chocolate, but I don’t see why — all those creamy fillers make it hella drinkable! Here it’s sweet, not saccharine, and rich but still frothy. The caramel is there, but it’s subtle enough that you can taste the coffee. It’s a drink your kids would hate, which is why you’ll love it.

HANSEL AND GRETEL AT THE CAFÉ AT THISTLE FARMS

CARMELLA AT CITY HOUSE What kind of animal smokes marijuana at his own confirmation?! If you don’t recognize that quote from queen/icon/legend Carmela Soprano, you’ve been quarantining wrong. Yes, City House spells the name of this drink with two L’s, but it’s got a low-key threatening vibe that is very Carmela, however you want to spell it.

The drink gets its big mob-wife energy from dry gin and Forthave Amaro, which is packed with bracing, wintry rhubarb and cinnamon. Orange bitters and crème de cacao make it all go down easy. All in all, it’s a drink that’s strong enough to dull the pain but bitter enough to ensure you’re always alert — and keeping an eye on the door.

CARMELLA AT CITY HOUSE

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PHOTOS: DANIEL MEIGS

cityhousenashville.com

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FOOD AND DRINK milk, whipped cream and a sprinkle of cookie crumble. The description is enough to make you smile, and the drink will do you one better — especially once you know the recipe comes from one of Thistle Farms’ women survivors.

ABSINTHE TASTING AT GREEN HOUR greenhournashville.com

Some days call for the big guns, and there’s no larger artillery than chocolate and absinthe. At Germantown’s Green Hour — the nighttime alter ego of Tempered Cafe — they’ll tailor an absinthe tasting to your palate. I hate licorice, so that was no small task, but they were equal to it. (The chocolate-truffle pairings didn’t hurt.)

I tasted vanilla and caramel in Letherbee Charred Oak Absinthe Brun while cracking into a cherry-cordial white-chocolate truffle. I tried the classic Vieux Pontarlier, made with Provençal fennel, green anise and aromatic herbs. With an elderflower-rosé dark-chocolate truffle, the French absinthe became easily sippable, like a smooth bourbon. I finished with Corsair Red, Nashville’s

GRAPEFRUIT ORANGE FROM MAYPOP SPARKLING WATER maypopwater.com

There’s no way to talk about “locally made, small-batch sparkling water” without sounding basic. It’s kind of like posting a photo of your goldendoodle and a Jimmy John’s sandwich in front of a Lululemon. But

don’t let that keep you from a jug!

Maypop — which we gave a Best of Nashville award to back in October — is simple and refreshing. It’s made with real fruit and no sugar, and it’s filtered six ways from Sunday, so it tastes clean and crisp. Plus, since it’s local and seasonally made, you can find rotating citrusy mixes all winter. Maypop is available at various locations, including multiple farmers markets — visit their website for more info.

ABRACADABRA AT TREEHOUSE treehousenashville.com

Most winter cocktails double down on dark liquor — bourbon, brandy, black rum.

Treehouse spotlights the lighter side of coldweather cocktails with the Abracadabra.

Served straight-up, it’s backed by vodka and sherry and set off by spiced pear, lemon and honey. Think hot toddy, but cold, with all its associated “healing” properties.

And “healing” is the operative word here.

“Abracadabra” dates at least as far back as the second century, when the Roman emperor’s physician directed people with

malaria to wear amulets inscribed with the word. Its power, he claimed, could cure lethal diseases, which sounds ... useful right about now. If we rely on woodchucks for the weather forecast, why not rely on ancient Romans for health care?

SPIKED HOT CHOCOLATE AT MIDNIGHT OIL toasttab.com/midnight-oil-1310-51st-ave-north

Midnight Oil quickly became a leader in last summer’s frozen-drink frenzy with its spicy peach margarita and lethal frosé.

When the weather cooled, the Nations spot concocted an equally addictive winter warmer: spiked hot chocolate on tap.

Midnight Oil’s decidedly non-artisan hot chocolate (cocoa mix, powdered sugar, milk powder) is spiked with a rotating selection of whiskey. Most often, it’s Skrewball Peanut Butter Whiskey, which essentially makes this a boozy, drinkable Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. And if that’s not enough to see you safely from Halloween to St. Patrick’s Day, you need more help than a drink.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

ABRACADABRA AT TREEHOUSE

PHOTOS: DANIEL MEIGS

ABSINTHE TASTING AT GREEN HOUR

only local absinthe, which has mild hibiscus, tarragon and citrus flavors. Matched by a blackberry-basil truffle, it was a combination unlike anything I’ve tasted before.

If you’re worried about hallucinating, don’t; the chemical (thujone) alleged to make you trip comes from wormwood, which is the same stuff they use to make vermouth and bitters. It’s capped at low levels in the U.S., so if you drink enough to end up naked on the lawn, that’s totally on you.

Yes, absinthe is strong at 45 to 90 percent ABV (whiskey is typically around 45), but you dilute it with water and sugar, so you won’t breathe fire unless you shoot it like a college kid in Prague.

nashvillescene.com | FEBRUARY 11 – FEBRUARY 17, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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2/8/21 11:56 AM

VODKA YONIC

SIN BIN

Being a hockey fan has become an exhausting exercise in self-reflection

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BY MEGAN SELING Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of women and nonbinary writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find in this column, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.

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wouldn’t go so far as to say that hockey was my life, but at one point not so long ago, it was definitely a major organ. Not a lung, but maybe the gallbladder.

Or a kidney. Something a person can theoretically live without, but probably wouldn’t want to if given the choice.

Over the summer, though, that feeling started to shift. Everything started to shift. Catastrophically. You know. You were there, too. First there was the global pandemic. Then came the civil unrest as millions of Americans woke up to the fact that our country was indeed built on a racist system that favors the rich and the white over everyone else. Later came the chaotic election, the deadly insurgence, the second impeachment, the historic inauguration. With every truthis-stranger-than-fiction moment, hockey faded further and further from my mind.

When the sport did manage to push its way through the flurry of headlines, it was rarely good news. The National Hockey League — the whitest major professional sports league in America, with the whitest fan base, according to FiveThirtyEight — constantly tripped over itself as it tried to keep up with the heated discussions about racial inequality.

Attempts were made. On Aug. 1, during the NHL’s first playoff game of the 2020 season, Minnesota Wild’s Matt Dumba, who is Black, was the first NHL player to kneel during the national anthem. It was a remarkable moment, especially considering that the Wild’s owner, and Dumba’s boss, is Craig Leipold — a man who has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates who have condemned the Black Lives Matter movement.

The next day several players for the Nashville Predators — including captain Roman Josi — arrived for their first playoff game at Edmonton, Alberta, arena Rogers Place wearing Black Lives Matter shirts. I was proud. This was my home team, and until that moment, the Preds had been notoriously mum when it came to commenting on political topics.

Later that month, though — days after Jacob Blake was shot seven times by a Kenosha, Wisc., police officer — the Predators tweeted that the team would “put action into place using the platform we have to fight racial injustice and

inequality.” It was originally posted with the #blacklivesmatter hashtag, but minutes later the tweet was deleted and reposted without the hashtag or any mention of Black Lives Matter, or Black lives at all. It was embarrassing, and it was one of many missteps over the years.

Being a Preds fan, a hockey fan, a fan in general, has more often than not become an exhausting exercise in self-reflection.

In 2014, when the Nashville Predators signed Mike Ribeiro to a one-year contract, general manager David Poile already knew Ribeiro had been accused of sexual assault. Ribeiro’s former nanny said the hockey player raped her in 2012, when she was 18 years old. The team signed him anyway, and they stood by him even after graphic details of the alleged assault were released in a civil lawsuit filed against both Ribeiro and his wife in June 2015. Less than a month after the court filing, on July 1, 2015, the Preds signed Ribeiro to a two-year, $7 million contract extension.

The team also stood by defenseman Austin Watson after he was arrested and convicted of domestic assault in 2018.

Watson was admitted into the NHL’s substance abuse and behavioral health program. Months later, the Preds resigned him to a three-year, $4.5 million contract. In the fall, the Preds signed a new forward, Nick Cousins, to a two-year, $3 million contract. Cousins was 18 when he and two of his Ontario Hockey League teammates were arrested and charged with sexual assault in 2012. A woman told police she met the three men at a bar, and that after the group left to go to a nearby house, they raped her. The charges were ultimately dropped due to there being “no reasonable prospect of conviction.”

In my years as a Preds fan, I’ve pitted all of this against my desire to get excited for a bunch of millionaires skating on ice. And, well, I’m tired. I’m tired of wondering if the man I’m cheering for assaulted a woman. I’m tired of seeing teams participate in pandering initiatives without first publicly addressing how they’ve benefited from and contributed to the white supremacist system they claim to be against. Most of all, I’m tired of wondering what secrets are being kept in an effort to protect multimillion-dollar franchises from criticism and backlash.

What do you do when something you love, something that was once a fun distraction from all of society’s soulcrushing flaws, has become a contributing factor to those very issues?

There is a small glimmer of hope on the horizon. In September 2019, the NHL’s newest team, the Seattle Kraken, hired Hockey Hall of Fame member Cammi Granato, making her the first female pro scout in the NHL. In August, the team hired Everett Fitzhugh as their radio play-by-play announcer, making Fitzhugh the NHL’s first Black staffer in the role.

History will be made when the Kraken hit the ice this fall. Nashville’s attempting to grow, too — this year the Predators introduced the GUIDER Initiative, which aims to “diminish the prevalence of social injustice in any form” by incorporating “Growth, Understanding, Inclusion, Diversity, Equality and Representation” into the organization.

Even before the pandemic hit, I questioned whether or not I was going to renew my season tickets. Now I’m sure I won’t. I’ll continue to follow the team. I’ll still watch the games, cheer when Filip Forsberg scores the game-winning goal in overtime, and hope for Pekka Rinne to get a Stanley Cup before he retires (though it doesn’t look good). And I’ll continue to complain about the power play as a co-host of It’s All Your Fault, a weekly Nashville Predators podcast produced by the Nashville Post and the Nashville Scene.

I still like hockey. There’s a long way to go before I’ll love it again. And maybe it’s OK if I never do.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

I’M TIRED OF WONDERING IF THE MAN I’M CHEERING FOR ASSAULTED A WOMAN. I’M TIRED OF SEEING TEAMS PARTICIPATE IN PANDERING INITIATIVES WITHOUT FIRST PUBLICLY ADDRESSING HOW THEY’VE BENEFITED FROM AND CONTRIBUTED TO THE WHITE SUPREMACIST SYSTEM THEY CLAIM TO BE AGAINST.

NASHVILLE SCENE | FEBRUARY 11 – FEBRUARY 17, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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BOOKS

HOME IS A STATE OF MIND Simon Han’s debut novel considers what it means to live between two worlds

BY JOY RAMIREZ

S

imon Han’s appropriately titled debut novel, Nights When Nothing Happened, is a beautifully rendered meditation on what it means to belong — to a family, to a culture, to a particular place and time. But it is also an exquisitely written examination of living between two worlds.

At age 6, protagonist Jack Cheng — having spent his earliest years in Tianjin, China, with his grandparents — is sent to join his parents Patty and Liang, immigrants starting their lives in Plano, Texas. As a child, Jack is unable to comprehend the decisions adults make, and when his life in a multicultural city and a multigenerational family is upended, he feels responsible: “Jack had made his grandparents frail, too frail to come with him. Maybe it wasn’t all his fault for being a dâodànguî (a troublemaker), maybe his leaving was, as he’d been taught to believe, inevitable. He was going to live with his parents, who seemed to him not people so much as a destination he did not want to visit.”

Shortly after Jack’s family arrives in Texas in the early 2000s, his mother gives birth to a baby girl named Annabel, and Jack’s life is altered once again. On an early November morning a few years later, Jack wakes up to the sound of a leaf scraping the sidewalk and then NIGHTS WHEN NOTHING HAPPENED wonders whether

BY SIMON HAN his mother had come RIVERHEAD BOOKS home from work the 272 PAGES, $26 night before. As he wanders downstairs, HAN WILL APPEAR AT A VIRTUAL EVENT 5:30 P.M. out the front door MONDAY, FEB. 15, VIA and into the night THE PORCH WRITERS’ of their suburban COLLECTIVE neighborhood, we sense this is routine for him. Eventually, he lights on one of his little sister’s slippers in the neighbors’ front yard. She sleepwalks.

“Jack Cheng knew about protection,” are the opening words of the novel, and as immigrants living in a suburb outside of Dallas, “protection” concerns everyone in the family. In middle school one day, Jack finds himself imagining (or uttering?) the words “I’m scared.” After class, he wonders whether he had been the speaker: “Jack should not have been scared. His parents had decided to live in Plano in order not to be scared.

Plano had the lowest crime rates in Texas, highly ranked schools, churches bigger than schools, lighted tennis courts, malls that closed before 9:00 p.m.”

As we learn more about Jack, we understand his feeling unprotected by his busy and distracted parents. But most importantly, he protects Annabel. She even calls him “Daddy”: “He sidled beside her, a slipper in each hand. He was Annabel’s protector, but sometimes he did not know what to do with his hands.” His sister’s sleepwalking is a metaphor for Jack’s suspension

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between two worlds — China and America, child and adult, individual and member of a cultural community: “But Annabel had started at one place and ended at another and there was a story in-between that he wanted to learn, a story available only to him, not even to Annabel.”

Han, a graduate of Vanderbilt University’s MFA program, writes prose so lyrical and beautiful it’s easy to lose the trail of narration. We forget whether we are in Plano or Tianjin, so masterfully subtle is the shifting between settings and time periods. In the end, it doesn’t matter. This novel begs for rereading to absorb the details of place and time and character that may have been missed while meandering through the gorgeous descriptions: “He pressed here, he pressed there. A strange thought came to him: maybe the heartbeat he was feeling did not belong to him but to the grass, and to the earthworms slithering beneath. If he followed the trail of heartbeats (between the neighbors’ lawns) he would find the other slipper.”

The first reading of Nights When Nothing Happened is meant to be a marvelous journey between the worlds of Jack’s childhood, made up of fear and safety, loneliness and isolation, imagination and identity. A second reading allows interrogation of some larger questions: How might a person be a stranger even among kin, and how does one assimilate into one’s own family? We might also question the notion of assimilation itself. After all, home is a state of mind and belonging is a universal motive.

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

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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PHOTO: JIMMY FONTAINE

MUSIC

NOW BOARDING

Pink Sweat$ digs deep into his subconscious on Pink Planet

BY DARYL SANDERS

S

peaking by phone in late January from his home in the Gulch, new Nashvillian and rising R&B star Pink Sweat$ is understandably excited. On Friday, Atlantic Records is releasing his longPINK PLANET OUT FRIDAY, awaited debut alFEB. 12, VIA ATLANTIC bum, Pink Planet.

RECORDS; STREAMING He independently CONCERT FEB. 12 ON YOOP released a pair of EPs — 2018’s Volume 1 and 2019’s Volume 2 — that earned him accolades from Rolling Stone, Billboard, BET, Apple Music and YouTube, as well as a nomination for Best New Artist at the 2019 Soul Train Awards. In July, Atlantic released The Prelude, an EP that includes six of the 17 tracks from his forthcoming full-length.

“It’s like, ‘Give a little bit to ease people into it,’ ” explains the singer-songwriter, who most often goes by “Pink” but was born David Bowden. “You hop on a plane, right? The

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Prelude was the plane, Pink Planet was the destination.”

With three songs that have “pink” in their title (“Pink City,” “Pink Money,” “Pink Family”), Pink Planet feels like a concept album. It is, sort of, but according to Pink there’s more going on than just following a story line.

“When I wrote my first project, ‘Honesty’ was the big song,” he says, referring to the platinum-certified track that has garnered nearly half a billion streams worldwide. “That song literally was in my subconscious. I had already had an actual conversation with a person talking it out.

I forgot that conversation, it slipped into my subconscious, and I literally wrote that song in five minutes. I just sang it right into the microphone, every word was like boom, boom, boom!

“When I was growing up, I always felt I had to be somebody else — that I couldn’t be my happy, bubbly self because my environment just didn’t cater to that. So I’m just living out my subconscious on this album, trying to re-create the world I had in my mind from when I was just not myself. All the places I wanted to go, all the things I wanted to do.”

Pink faced a huge array of challenges in his childhood, growing up in West Philadelphia. In the gospel-flavored album opener “Pink City,” he sings about the situation:

“We were born in the rubble / We were raised in the mud / Yeah, it’s hard in the city where I’m from / Trying to live, got to make it / Make it out of the slum.”

“I remember at one point, me and my brother shared a mattress in the corner on the floor of somebody else’s home,” Pink recalls. “So that is where I’m from. But I chose to make that existence into a better one.”

Love is the album’s central theme — love for one’s fellow man plays a key role, though there’s a lot of romantic love. Pink was born on Valentine’s Day, and he takes the importance of those relationships to heart.

“I think the universe or God had a purpose for my birthday being on that day,” he says. “And love is what the Pink Planet is about. It’s not about anything else. When you’re open and you love, there’s a gravitational pull, and on the Pink Planet, love is the gravity.”

Pink’s father was a minister, and his upbringing was strict. He was not allowed to listen to R&B or rap radio stations. It was all right for him to listen to other radio formats, such as rock and pop, and those influences are apparent on the record. But Pink Planet’s primary influence is sophisticated ’70s- and ’80s-vintage R&B — think Stevie Wonder, Prince, Michael Jackson — as refracted through a Pink lens.

Pink didn’t discover those icons and others until after high school. He started hanging out at Philadelphia’s legendary — and sadly now shuttered — Sigma Sound Studio, where legendary R&B albums like Lou Rawls’ All Things in Time and monster hits like Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. Jones” were made. The studio was also where he was christened with his colorful name, a description of his preferred attire at the time. As the story goes, when he didn’t show up one day, someone asked, “Where’s Pink Sweats?” and the handle stuck. A pair who recorded at Sigma and had a profound influence on Pink were Andrew “Pop” Wansel and Warren “Oak” Felder.

“When I was coming up in the Philly scene, Pop and Oak were a production duo, and they were the guys in Philly,” Pink says.

“They did Miley Cyrus, Nicki Minaj, big stuff. I just came up watching them, and I would hear the stuff they were doing, the quality they were producing.”

Pop and Oak used a lot of samples in their

J.J.’S BOHEMIANS

Styrofoam Winos’ prolific trio of offbeat songsmiths makes its full-band debut

BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

S

tyrofoam Winos technically began at Belmont University, where its three members met in 2011. But the project’s true birthplace was J.J.’s Market & Cafe, which was a magnet for eccentrics STYROFOAM WINOS in the heart of Midtown OUT FRIDAY, FEB. 12, VIA Nashville for more than SOPHOMORE LOUNGE 40 years before the merciless forces of development caught up with it in 2018.

The Winos’ Lou Turner, Trevor Nikrant and Joe

work. The recordings that the duo was mining gave Pink an education in classic ’70s R&B. “I would be in the studio and hear a sample of something I never heard, and it would be like The O’Jays, Donnie Hathaway, people like that,” he recalls. “They would be going crazy over these songs, and I’m like, ‘I never heard these songs before.’ Then when I would go home, I would go on YouTube, and it was like, ‘Oh, wow, this actually is really good.’ That music is timeless.

“As I worked on this project, that was a thing I was trying to be super aware of. My goal is not to get all these first-week numbers and people never listen to it again. My goal is 50 years — I want people to be listening to this for the next 50 years. And if you hear this 50 years from now, you feel the exact same way.”

In 2019, Pink was living in Brooklyn, but moved to Los Angeles to work on Pink Planet. His goal was to continue seeking out the best talent to work with and to learn as much as possible: “For me, working with people who are at a high level is like school.” While in L.A., he collaborated with a number of hit-making co-producers including John Hill, D’Mile, Michael Keenan and Doc Daniel.

Then in the fall, he made the move to Nashville. His first visit to the city had come in 2018 after a chance encounter with Seth England in New York. When England, one of the principals in Nashville’s Big Loud Management, learned Pink was a songwriter, he encouraged him to take a trip to Music City.

“When I first came to Nashville, I was driving up Music Row, and I’m seeing billboards with songwriters, and I was like, ‘This is insane — this is a whole ’nother world I’m in right now.’ ” The good first impression stayed with him. When he decided in 2020 that he was ready to make another move, he knew where he wanted to go.

“For me, L.A. is nice, but it wasn’t about what I’m trying to do. I was trying to be about the music, but there is so much nightlife and everything going on there. And that’s not saying there’s not in Nashville, but it’s just different. I love it, and I can see myself being here for a while. When I came to Nashville, it just made me feel like I’m home.”

EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

Kenkel all worked at J.J.’s on and off, and played their first show as a band there in 2015. A ceramic mug from the much-missed cafe features prominently in the collage on the cover of Styrofoam Winos, their debut full-length, out Friday on Louisville’s Sophomore Lounge Records. All three members are solo artists too, and on “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” a songpoem from Turner’s 2020 LP Songs for John Venn, she references a tattoo of the J.J.’s sign on her thigh.

They’ve all got the tat, the Scene learns in talking with the band over Zoom.

“We got them together, us and a couple others, when J.J.’s got torn down,” Nikrant says. “Chaotic in the best way” is how he’ll remember the place. “Lots of characters, weird shit happening, everything breaking, all the time. It was like a portal to a previous Nashville — the oldest building on the block.”

The Winos are a go-to opener for touring acts on shows thrown by local promoter Chris Davis’ adventurous FMRL enterprise. They’re descendants

NASHVILLE SCENE | FEBRUARY 11 – FEBRUARY 17, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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MUSIC

THE SPIN IN DEPTH

BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

I

n the Scene’s Q&A with Nashville trio My Wall last week, the group broke down some of the influences behind its ultra-intense new 12-inch “The Event” backed with “Abuse.”

Recorded by drummer Carlos Ortiz, mixed by Yautja’s Shibby Poole and mastered by Mikey Allred at the venerable Dark Arts, the two-song release is a heady hybrid of drone, grunge, hardcore punk and doom metal styles. The group brought the new material to life in a set streamed from The 5 Spot

DARK SARCASM: MY WALL

spoken word are Turner’s other loves; Vegetarian Alcoholic Press out of Milwaukee recently published Shape Note Singing, her latest collection of poems.

Nikrant, a Brazilian music aficionado, has been inspired during quarantine to buy “a Brazilian guitar made with rosewood, which they aren’t allowed to make anymore.” “It’s kind of environmentally dubious, but it sounds really good,” he says with a laugh.

The trio’s first batch of tunes written collaboratively as a band, Styrofoam Winos abounds with wry lyrical observations and hooks as unusual as they are undeniable. The punchy and playful “Stuck in a Museum,” sublimely wistful “Once” and soaring, ecstatic “Roygbiv” are fully formed songs, thoughtfully arranged and texturally rich. Other moments feel more off-the-cuff, like the plunky, dissonant instrumental “Open Mic” and scathing gentrification treatise “Skyline Top Removal,” in which Turner sings: “I want to tell you all about my space / It was built on the backs of the underpaid / Isn’t it minimal? / Isn’t it great?”

It’s never entirely clear who wrote what or who’s playing which instrument, which seems by design for the band crowned Best Rock Democracy in the Scene’s 2019 Best of Nashville issue. Wide-ranging yet bizarrely cohesive, Styrofoam Winos is musical osmosis at its purest.

The winds of change in Nashville might’ve felled their old home base of J.J.’s, but the Winos are optimistic that what they’re building here is meant to last. “I would say Nashville is home forever,” Kenkel says, the others nodding in agreement. “We’re always talking about how it would be great to own a venue here one day … to, at an old age, still be a part of this city and fostering some sort of sense of community. I dream of playing at Betty’s in my 70s.”

EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

Friday that also included the introduction of a new member, trippy abstract projections and an unexpected cover.

Dark, heavy and weird, My Wall’s compositions rarely end in the same place they start. “The Event,” played third, thrashed out of the gate with Ortiz reeling off volcanic fills like a young Lars Ulrich and vocalist-guitarist Frank Hand’s caged-animal howl reverberating from wall to wall. Then it ground to a sudden halt, leaving just sustained single notes ringing out for a solid minute, before returning and building back up to a confidently menacing stoner-rock gait. On “Crash Site,” a highlight of My Wall’s full-length 2020 release Mine, the trio punctuated its muddy, narcotic crawl with thick sheets of screaming feedback.

Kiley Wells of scuzz-punk troublemakers

PHOTO: LINDA PARROTT

of a long lineage of eccentric Music City groups operating autonomously from the music biz who eschew rigid ideas about genre and what a band even is. Lambchop and The Cherry Blossoms come to mind as antecedents, along with honorary Nashvillians Yo La Tengo. Like YLT, the Winos are a creative union of a couple and their best friend.

Nikrant and Turner are engaged.

Each member of the trio has released records under their own name in recent years. The act of sifting through this trove of material to discern where the solo work ends and the Winos begin gets a bit complicated. In addition to Turner’s John Venn, there’s Kenkel’s 2019 release Dream Creator, and Nikrant’s Living in the Kingdom LP, issued in early ’18. Turner’s tunes are the most distinct and immediate — wordy, sprightly and sneakily catchy. Nikrant serves up a pleasing mix of old-school soul and ’90s indie-troubadour stylings. Kenkel’s hazy streams-ofconsciousness owe a debt to Bob Dylan vocally and Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks vibe-wise.

Sonically, the members’ solo output has more commonalities than differences. Turner shares one reason why: “We started releasing solo stuff at the same time we formed the Winos, with the idea that we would be each other’s backing bands.” She points out that while Nikrant did study bass in college, none of the Winos knew how to play drums until they joined forces. Now, all three are proficient behind the kit.

In the Venn diagram of the Winos’ influences, Dylan, Neil Young, Leonard Cohen and Smog’s Bill Callahan occupy the middle. As for the outer circles, Kenkel recently started making sample-based music under the alter ego Glam Campbell, which he calls “an outlet for random electronic excursions.” Vintage post-punk like The Raincoats, free jazz, poetry and

STYROFOAM WINOS Schizos filled in for bassist Vaughn Walters, who was on leave for work reasons. Wells, with his trademark Western hat, cut an unmistakable silhouette against the colorful kaleidoscopic lighting enveloping the band onstage. He will move over to second guitar when Walters returns, Ortiz tells the Scene.

Throughout the 45-minute performance, the band shifted with ease and at unpredictable intervals from plodding to galloping, from ominous smoldering to hardcore punk pummeling. The slow parts felt like being held underwater, while faster passages offered brief bursts like coming up for air, only to be dragged down again. As noted in our recent writeup, Sunn O)))’s droniness and Electric Wizard’s riffiness are touchstones for My Wall. But the band’s set-closing rendition of Silver Jews’ “Random Rules,” sung

by Hand in the style of Kurt Cobain — who almost surely would’ve been a David Berman fan — was a reminder that metal lovers will often surprise you with their nonmetal musical interests. It also offered proof of the late Berman’s reach as an artist.

If My Wall’s set was a scalding-hot tone bath, Eve Maret’s — which aired simultaneously on the Twitch channel of Columbus, Ohio, arts collective The Fuse Factory — was a soothing synthesizer massage. The St. Louis-raised, Nashville-residing electronicmusic ace’s 20-minute performance was part of The Fuse Factory’s Frequency

Fridays, a weekly showcase of bedroom experimentalists from different corners of the world. A noise artist from Japan, Ami Bique, played before Maret. Names you might have recognized in the chat box included Nashville artist Kim Rueger of Belly Full of Stars and Atlanta’s Klimchak, who impressed with his DIY rig of found percussion at last June’s online Far Out Free Festival.

During the Spirit of Drkmttr streaming fest last fall, Maret delivered a partystarting set that highlighted the pop aspects of her exhilarating Stars Aligned LP, which placed fourth on the Scene’s 2020 year-end Top Local Albums Critics’ Poll. On Friday, she blissed out with a mesmerizing, beautifully layered extended piece that, remarkably, she wrote on the spot. You can check out the intentionally glitched-out video in the archives of The Fuse Factory’s Twitch channel.

A few weeks back, Maret announced the Feb. 12 release of “Space Freeway,” the first track from The Feature. Not to be confused with much-loved rock outfit The Features, The Feature is a project of Maret and Adrienne Franke, her longtime friend and fellow electronic musician. As we slowly inch toward the eventual end of the COVID-19 pandemic, further collaboration between highly creative musicians is one more thing to look forward to.

EMAIL THESPIN@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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FILM

WITH QUIET PROMISE

Minari is the kind of American story we need more of

BY SADAF AHSAN

M

inari is a gentle burn of a film. The loudest thing about it, in fact, is just how much of an American story it is. The most recent in a string of much-needed tales of the West that take MINARI PG-13, 115 MINUTES; IN a new approach, it ENGLISH AND KOREAN shows a different WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES OPENING FRIDAY, FEB. 12, face than the ones we’ve become acVIA BELCOURT.ORG customed to seeing on screen, despite what our neighbors — and what we — look like.

A personal tale from Korean-American writer-director Lee Isaac Chung, Minari transports us to his childhood in Arkansas and his memories as a 6-year-old. Giving the well-tread territory of the American Dream a fresh perspective, Minari follows Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun at his most moving), who brings his family to Arkansas from California in the 1980s with the staunch belief that it’s here he and his wife Monica (Yeri Han) can make a better life for their young children, David and Anne. Land is cheap, so Jacob buys a large desolate plot where he also finds a rickety mobile home where the family can stay. Monica isn’t quite as enthused, but Jacob remains hopeful that he can build a farm where he’ll grow Korean produce, and bring an authentic taste of home to Ozarks grocers.

When Monica’s mother — a hilarious Youn Yuh-jung — arrives with chilli powder

and anchovies mercifully in tow, she lightens everyone’s world. Well, except for David (a delightfully buoyant Alan S. Kim), a true child of immigrants who thinks she “smells like Korea” and is “not a real grandma” with her lack of baking skills.

Emile Mosseri’s score feels as if it’s weeping along with the willows that flank many of the film’s gorgeous green frames. There’s a calm, confident hum that reverberates between scenes like summer cicadas. It’s a relief that Chung waited years to finally put his past on paper, as maturity sharpens the way we remember.

Minari brought me back to my own father’s journey from Pakistan, where he built

a chicken farm in his early 20s to provide for his parents and siblings, to Canada, where he worked a series of menial jobs.

He had married my mother and brought her along with him in hopes of having his children see him succeed, much as Jacob does.

My mother stayed by his side, wary at times like Monica. I watched David and Anne peer from behind door frames as their parents argue, blaming each other for various minutiae while harboring fear that their struggles might never be fruitful, that perhaps the West wasn’t their great savior — and I remembered years of my parents doing the same and struggling to understand what they were building for me and my siblings.

PANTHER POWER

Judas and the Black Messiah, featuring a magnetic Daniel Kaluuya, feels like two movies at once

BY CRAIG D. LINDSEY

H

ere we go again with another fact-based movie about the Black Panthers that thinks people won’t be that interested unless it’s told in a pulpy, melodramatic manner.

Some of you may JUDAS AND THE BLACK remember that Mario Van MESSIAH Peebles brought the story R, 126 MINUTES of Huey Newton, Bobby COMING TO SELECT Seale and the OaklandTHEATERS AND STREAMING VIA HBO MAX based Panthers to the FRIDAY, FEB. 12 big screen with 1995’s Panther, scripted by Mario’s legendary old man, Melvin.

But that movie was told from the perspective of Judge (played by Dwayne Wayne himself, Kadeem Hardison), a Vietnam vet who joined the Panthers and was pressured by the authorities to become an informant. By the way, that character wasn’t really based on anyone.

Judas and the Black Messiah (which will simultaneously show in select theaters and stream on HBO

Max beginning Friday) goes practically the same way, with an outsider infiltrating the Panthers and giving intel to people who want to take these righteous brothas and sistas down. This time around, the rat is someone who actually existed: Bill O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield), a car thief who is approached by an FBI agent (Jesse Plemons, because of course) with an offer — he can either go to jail or infiltrate the Black Panther Party’s Chicago chapter, which is led by Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya).

As someone who has followed Hampton’s life closely (check out Howard Alk’s outstanding 1971 documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton if you can), I would’ve just preferred a nice little biopic on the man.

Kaluuya definitely comes to this thing with the sort

of charismatic rock-star swagger Hampton had in his glory days. (Why the hell he got nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor and not as a lead is beyond me.) Rocking a beefy figure and an approachable cadence, Kaluuya is out to show how Hampton had the magnetism to get gangbangers, Puerto Ricans and even rednecks involved in his cause. But the movie also gives him a chance to present Hampton’s softer side, mostly through the scenes between him and his girlfriend (the terrific Dominique Fishback), also on the side of the Panthers.

The stuff with Hampton is so engrossing that it’s kinda unfortunate the movie also has to devote time to Stanfield’s two-bit, two-faced turncoat. Director Shaka King has no qualms showing how O’Neal (who

Today, in a beautiful bit of poetry, my dad owns a string of popular restaurants where he once washed dishes and swept floors, and where the No. 1 item on the menu is chicken.

In a way, that’s our minari — the Korean water plant that grows stronger in its second season after it has died and been revived, and which surrounds the Yi farm with quiet promise.

Thanks to a generational resilience embedded in our DNA, my siblings and I see the fruits of my parents’ labor every single day, just as they dreamed we would. That kind of pain and passion is challenging to depict, but Minari does so with a special kind of sweetness.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

provided the info that led to Chicago police killing Hampton in 1969) was a hustler — getting money from the feds for information and endangering his fellow Panthers — who realized too late that a Black man shouldn’t do that to his people. Until that happens, the usually mesmerizing Stanfield is forced to act weaselly and bad-tempered, doing everything short of letting his eyes dart around the room when people start talking about a rat being in their midst.

Judas often feels like two movies going on at the same time: an amazing one starring Kaluuya, and a bad one starring Stanfield. It probably won’t come as a surprise that this movie is actually a mash-up of two scripts: one written by brothers/stand-up comics Keith and Kenny Lucas and the other written by Will Berson. (They all share credit, along with King.) So it’s understandable why this movie is packed with so many ideas, including Martin Sheen popping up every now and then as a Negro-eradicating J. Edgar Hoover and comedian Lil Rel Howery coming out of nowhere as a shadowy pimp. (Kaluuya, Stanfield, Howery — man, Judas is a mini-Get Out reunion.)

At least this movie gives us a lot of powerful moments provided by Kaluuya. One scene has him walking up the steps to a cathedral’s stage, ready to spit Hampton’s own brand of gospel, like a veteran boxer preparing for a title bout. As much as Judas and the Black Messiah wants to present itself as a biopic dressed up in crime-thriller clothes, moments like this prove that this is still Kaluuya’s — and Hampton’s — show.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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FILM

PRIMAL STREAM 42 Joan Crawford, Keenan and Kel, and the Empty Man, now available to stream

BY JASON SHAWHAN GOOD BURGER

THE EMPTY MAN

V

ery few emotional responses are fixed forever. As we’re now a full year removed from the beginning of the creeping domestic spread of COVID-19, we’re reaching the point where retrospective thinkpieces are already surfacing. I’m sure few people would think of themselves as being exactly the same person they were a year ago, and that’s something to keep in mind as we slip into the occasional retrospectacle. Things change, a lot, even if you haven’t been going out and doing anything. Let the films and music of your life be more than just one-night stands. Build something enduring out of what art does for you. As always, here are some suggestions.

See more in past issues of the Scene.

GOOD BURGER ON NETFLIX There’s a special kind of surreality that proliferates in kids’ programming, and if it hooks you at the right time, it can help map the structure of your comic DNA forever.

Encountering the Muppets or SpongeBob SquarePants or Bé-Bé’s Kids (the animated film) at precisely the right moment ensures a response to the world built on a genial elasticity, and it can serve you well when the universe gets up to its bullshit. Good Burger, spun off from a recurring segment on Nickelodeon’s ’90s kids’ sketch show All That, came along long after I thought my comic aesthetics were set. But working in the weirder outposts of the fast-food industry has several lessons to teach anyone who ends up in that position, and thanks to gracious co-workers and not a few wine coolers, Good Burger — like its ideological sibling Showgirls (both VHS tapes kept in the trunk until the higher-ups went home and third shift could handle business) — became a sort of background ritual. For my colleagues and me, it was a litany for cleaning conveyor belts, preparing frying mechanisms, figuring out just what the deal was with those beetles that kept divebombing the dumpsters, or just trying to metabolize the evil that customers would vent on us through the day. Some days you’re the Dexter. Some days you’re the

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Otis. And most days, it’s Ed city. I’ve never met Kenan Thompson or Kel Mitchell, but they’re in that part of the brain where all past co-workers live, where memory is a thicket of colors and smells and jokes you’ve heard countless times, and so many special sauces.

RAIN VIA TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES For far too long the enduring legacy of Joan Crawford has been tied to Mommie Dearest, both the Christina Crawford book and the Frank Perry film. But long before wire hangers and Pepsi-Cola reshaped how contemporary culture talks about Crawford, she was doing the work and giving daring performances that were shocking even for audiences of the early ’30s. 1932’s Rain is a great example of the pre-code film, wherein Hollywood was unbound by the restrictive and hollow Hays Code, telling adult stories of ribaldry and transgression that have the potential to shock even today — especially for folks who think of black-and-white cinema as visual shorthand for something unchallenging and demure. Miss Sadie Thompson (Crawford) is a sex worker

RAIN

whose vacation gets derailed by a possible cholera outbreak, leaving her, a boatful of on-leave sailors and a repressed missionary couple stuck in the sensual overload of Pago Pago while they wait to resume their travels.

Sadie likes to party, and the Rev. Davidson is horrified by her actions. So the game is afoot in this intense and provocative adaptation of a W. Somerset Maugham short story, and the issues that Rain engages with are still very much with us today. Beyond all that, though, is Crawford, who simply commands the screen. If you only know her work from the Golden Age of Hollywood, or from her later career adventures in exploitation films and the infamy brought by Mommie Dearest, you are in for quite a surprise.

THE EMPTY MAN VIA VIDEO ON DEMAND OR AMAZON PRIME I missed this one the first time around, and that’s on me (and the misleading trailer with which it was dumped into the public sphere in October). The Empty Man played at the Montana Drive-In outside Tullahoma, and it’s hard to think of a better way to experience a nasty marvel like this than on a giant screen with the chill of night seeping in all around you as you realize how alone you are, cosmologically, regardless of how many cars surround you at the time. The abysmal trailer promises what you might call teenage creepypasta drama giving way

to a police procedural; and while that is correct insofar as both of those elements are part of the total package here, there is so much more.

A prologue set in the ’90s in the mountains of Bhutan is the first indication that there’s more going on with The Empty Man than initially promised. It’s not just a perfectly executed tale of the unspeakable, which in itself could have been extracted from the film as a whole and laid waste to film-fest shorts programs throughout the world — it is also a trap. The best scary stories always are. As we move into “the present day” of 2018 Missouri (the film was finished in 2018, then left to languish by a bewildered 20th Century Fox, eventually to be thrown

by Disney into the pre-Halloween noman’s-land of movie theaters in October 2020), we get to know James Lasombra.

He’s played by James Badge Dale, from 24, radiating soap-opera authority and musclehewn gravitas. Nowadays he runs a shop that helps people find self-defense items.

Sometimes he’s a private detective when things need finding. And when the daughter of a past lover of his gets tangled up in a mystery involving a local urban legend, Lasombra decides to investigate. As in any film noir, when you start pulling at threads, things unravel. And Dale is simply great in this role, perfectly inhabiting this brick wall of a man barreling his way through something vast and labyrinthine to get at secrets hidden away in the oddest of places.

There are several films that would make very useful comparisons, or pairings for hypothetical double features, to prepare you for where this beast of a film goes. But the fact that you’ve read this far already indicates a curiosity of some sort on your part. And in that case, you’d be well-served by checking this film out — ideally without reading anything more about it, especially the kind of film it becomes. But if the hook must be baited further: Stephen Root is in this. So is Marin Ireland (transcendent in Light From Light and The Dark and the Wicked, visceral and real here). And when The Empty Man ended after 137 minutes, I wanted nothing more than to immediately watch it again.

Because sometimes a film is more than just a film. Sometimes a film requires more of the audience than to just be a viewer. Sometimes it requires a witness.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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NASHVILLE SCENE | FEBRUARY 11 - FEBRUARY 17, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

IN RE: HAILEY KAY HAGEWOOD, DOB: 02/20/2007 BRAYDEN RICHARD KEY, DOB: 01/19/2008 Children Under Eighteen Years of Age

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It is further ORDERED that if Respondents do not enter an appearance or otherwise answer the petition, further personal service or service by further publication shall be dispensed with and service of any future notices, motions, orders or other legal documents in this matter may be made upon Respondent by filing the same with the Clerk of the Juvenile Court of Dickson County, Tennessee.

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TIFFANY KEY BYRON HAGEWOOD

IN RE: HAILEY KAY HAGEWOOD, DOB: 02/20/2007 BRAYDEN RICHARD KEY, DOB: 01/19/2008

Tina Romez, has filed a petition seeking custody of Hailey Kay Hagewood and Brayden Richard Key. You are hereby ORDERED to appear for trial on that petition on February 16, 2021, at 1:00 PM, at Dickson County Juvenile Court, 4000 Highway 48 North, Charlotte, 37036, phone number 614-7890250, or to otherwise enter an appearance in this matter. If you fail to do so, an order may be entered against you for the relief requested in the petition. You may view and obtain a copy of the petition and any other subsequently filed legal documents in the Juvenile Court Clerk’s Office at the address shown above.

Children Under Eighteen Years of Age

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It is further ORDERED that if Respondents do not enter an appearance or otherwise answer the petition, further personal service or service by further publication shall be dispensed with and service of any future notices, motions, orders or other legal documents in this matter may be made upon Respondent by filing the same with the Clerk of the Juvenile Court of Dickson County, Tennessee.

NOTICE TIFFANY KEY BYRON HAGEWOOD

IN RE: HAILEY KAY HAGEWOOD, DOB: 02/20/2007 BRAYDEN RICHARD KEY, DOB: 01/19/2008

Tina Romez, has filed a petition seeking custody of Hailey Kay Hagewood and Brayden Richard Key. You are hereby ORDERED to appear for trial on that petition on February 16, 2021, at 1:00 PM, at Dickson County Juvenile Court, 4000 Highway 48 North, Charlotte, 37036, phone number 614-7890250, or to otherwise enter an appearance in this matter. If you fail to do so, an order may be entered against you for the relief requested in the petition. You may view and obtain a copy of the petition and any other subsequently filed legal documents in the Juvenile Court Clerk’s Office at the address shown above.

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ORDER for PUBLICATION It appearing to the Court from the sworn allegations of the Pro Se Petition for Dependency and Neglect and Custody that the whereabouts of the Respondents, Tiffany Key and Byron Hagewood, is unknown and cannot be ascertained with reasonable diligence, it is, therefore, ORDERED that Respondent be

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ORDER for PUBLICATION It appearing to the Court from the sworn allegations of the Pro Se Petition for Dependency and Neglect and Custody that the whereabouts of the Respondents, Tiffany Key and Byron Hagewood, is unknown and cannot be ascertained with reasonable diligence, it is, therefore, ORDERED that Respondent be served by publication of the following notice for four (4) consecutive weeks in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper of general circulation published in Davidson County, Tennessee.

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ORDER for PUBLICATION It appearing to the Court from the sworn allegations of the Pro Se Petition for Dependency and Neglect and Custody that the whereabouts of the Respondents, Tiffany Key and Byron Hagewood, is unknown and cannot be ascertained with reasonable diligence, it is, therefore, ORDERED that Respondent be served by publication of the following notice for four (4) consecutive weeks in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper of general circulation published in Davidson County, Tennessee.

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Nashville Scene’s Marketplace on pages 30 - 31.

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AUTHENTIC ASIAN CUISINE SICHUAN & CANTONESE

OPEN DAILY FOR LUNCH & DINNER: SUN. THRU THURS. 11-9 | FRI./SAT. 11-10 32

NASHVILLE SCENE | FEBRUARY 11 – FEBRUARY 17, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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facebook/Luckybamboonash | B.Y.O.B. No Corking Fee! | ORDER ONLINE: luckybamboochinabistro.com 5855 Charlotte Pike | 760-5930 | 1/2 Mile West of White Bridge Rd. (“Up The Ramp on Left”)

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