Nashville Scene 2-25-21

FEBRUARY 25–MARCH 3, 2021 I VOLUME 40 I NUMBER 4 I NASHVILLESCENE.COM I FREE

CITY LIMITS: EXIT/IN’S OWNERS OUTLINE A PLAN TO PURCHASE THE PROPERTY PAGE 6

FOOD & DRINK: EAST NASHVILLE, A YEAR AFTER THE TORNADO PAGE 18

How the pandemic has further exposed the changing culture of Lower Broadway

BY STEVEN HALE

HONKY-TONK BLUES cover_2-25-21.indd 1

2/22/21 3:04 PM

Fun, tragic, pretty or horrific? Yes. No. And then some.

Fun, tragic, pretty or horrific? Yes. No. And then some.

Argentina-born artist Liliana Porter recontextualizes the ordinary things of Argentina-born artist Liliana Porter recontextualizes the ordinary things of the world to create small cracks in our perception of meaning, memory and the worldUsing to create small cracks in and our perception of meaning, memory and history. odd souvenirs, toys figurines from flea markets and yard history.

Using odd souvenirs, toys and figurines from flea markets and yard sales, she juxtaposes these objects in theatrical vignettes and symbolic sales, shemeanings. juxtaposes these objects in theatrical and symbolic double See works of art that are all atvignettes once humorous, terrifying, double meanings.

See works of art that are all at once humorous, terrifying, banal and exotic. banal and exotic.

Advance timed tickets are required and can be reserved at FristArtMuseum.org/tickets.

Advance timed tickets are required and can be reserved at FristArtMuseum.org/tickets.

THROUGH MAY 2 THROUGH MAY 2

Downtown Nashville, 919 Broadway, Nashville, TN 37203 | FristArtMuseum.org @FristArtMuseum #TheFrist #FristLilianaPorter

Downtown Nashville, 919 Broadway, Nashville, TN 37203 | FristArtMuseum.org @FristArtMuseum #TheFrist #FristLilianaPorter

Supported in part by

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NASHVILLE SCENE | FEBRUARY 25 – MARCH 3, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

Supported in part by

FC003418_Mrr_LilianaPorter_NashvilleScene_10.75x12.5.indd 1

Liliana Porter. Man with Axe and Other Stories (detail), 2017. Figurines, objects, and wooden base, dimensions variable. Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase with Lilianaprovided Porter. Man with Axe and Other Stories (detail), 2017.Photo: Figurines, objects, and wooden funds

by Jorge M. Pérez, 2017.013. © Liliana Porter.

Rhinebeck Studio base, dimensions variable. Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, museum purchase with funds provided by Jorge M. Pérez, 2017.013. © Liliana Porter. Photo: Rhinebeck Studio

2/19/21 10:59 AM

CONTENTS

FEBRUARY 25, 2021

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22

The Exit’s Strategy .....................................6

The Natural

CITY LIMITS

BOOKS

With the Exit/In property for sale, venue owners outline a plan to purchase

Singled Out recounts the athletic feats and personal tragedies of baseball’s Glenn Burke

BY STEPHEN TRAGESER

BY SEAN KINCH AND CHAPTER 16

Pith in the Wind .........................................6 This week on the Scene’s news and politics blog

De-Forrest-ation .........................................7 Bill Dorris is dead. So what happens to his infamous Nathan Bedford Forrest statue?

BY LENA MAZEL

8

COVER STORY

Honky-Tonk Blues

24

MUSIC

The Notes Must Get Through ................. 24 Not even a pandemic can stop jazz sax champion Jeff Coffin and his Ear Up Records

BY RON WYNN

With the Flow .......................................... 24 Challenging times paint Lydia Luce’s Dark River in a new light

How the pandemic has further exposed the changing culture of Lower Broadway

BY LORIE LIEBIG

BY STEVEN HALE

Mando Saenz transcends the tropes of Americana on All My Shame

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CRITICS’ PICKS Watch films by Agnès Varda, listen to the podcast I Spy, dig into Alan Lomax’s archive, check out great Black playwrights and theater artists, observe the 20th birthday of Life Without Buildings’ Any Other City, catch HUMP! Film Festival before it ends and more

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FOOD AND DRINK

Sound and Sense .................................... 25

Lower Broadway Photo by Ray di Pietro

FILM

Primal Stream 44 ................................... 27 Campy Kristen Wiig, wordless Nicolas Cage and more, now available to stream

BY JENNIFER JUSTUS

BY NATHAN SMITH

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All Roads Lead to Roam......................... 28

The Roots of Body Hatred Lie in Capitalism

29

Being There

ON THE COVER:

27 Olivier Assayas’ early-2000s digital collage returns, restored and uncut

ART

Netflix Drops Country Comfort Trailer, Nashville Reacts

BY LORIE LIEBIG

The Devil We Know ................................. 28

21

The Old Spaghetti Factory Loses Lease After 40 Years

The Scene’s live-review column checks out Ruston Kelly at Third Man Records’ Blue Room

BY JASON SHAWHAN

BY SHERONICA HAYES

Local Comedian Flames ‘Scoop: Nashville’ and Its Founder

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

Looking at some of the East Side restaurants and food businesses affected by the March 3 storm

On one woman’s journey to radical self-love

Luke Combs, Color Me Country Radio and a More Inclusive Future for Country Music

BY EDD HURT

East Nashville, a Year After the Tornado

VODKA YONIC

THIS WEEK ON THE WEB:

The breathtaking Nomadland is a fitting tale for a wandering nation

BY CORY WOODROOF

NEW YORK TIMES CROSSWORD

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MARKETPLACE

Exhibits by William Eggleston and Alicia Henry are worth your time

BY LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

SCENERY

Arts and Culture News From the Nashville Scene Looking for the latest on art and culture in Nashville?

Subscribe to Scenery, our weekly newsletter that covers visual art, theater, comedy, books, film and more.

Subscribe at nashvillescene.com/subscribe nashvillescene.com | FEBRUARY 25 – MARCH 3, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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2/22/21 6:02 PM

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ALTERED STATE — SOME THINGS NEED REPEATING

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TUESDAY MAR 2 6:00PM FACEBOOK LIVE with ANDREW MARANISS Singled Out

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Each week I write a letter about local events close to my heart, or things I have seen or read that might be of interest to our community. Today, however, I wanted to share an opinion piece by Holly McCall, editor of nonprofit States Newsroom site Tennessee Lookout. McCall’s thoughts on Gov. Bill Lee’s State of the State address

“ALTERED STATE”

On Feb. 8, I switched on Facebook to watch Gov. Bill Lee’s third State of the State address. There’s much that I disagree with Lee on but having read a preview of the speech, I felt confident I at least knew what to expect going in.

Sure — we are mid-COVID-19 pandemic, and Lee had already signaled his support for a bill that would enable gun purchases without the buyer getting so much as a permit. It’s a dangerous bill, but I was prepared, because there’s rarely a legislative session that doesn’t feature at least one misguided bill that makes it easier to shoot people.

Still, Lee managed to leave me wondering how I live in the same state as him, because his perception of reality is vastly different than mine.

Lee began with an accurate synopsis of 2020, calling it “an unimaginable one for us that included the rise of a global pandemic.

Devastating tornadoes, flooding, violence, unrest, economic collapse. Witnessing our nation undergo painful turmoil at the highest level of government.”

He failed to note his own role in fueling rumors that led to that turmoil: Lee refused to recognize Joe Biden as the lawfully elected president until 11 days before Biden was inaugurated.

My astonishment set in early in Lee’s speech, shortly after the niceties and howdydos ended, when Lee congratulated himself and his administration for the grand job they have done managing the COVID-19 pandemic in Tennessee.

Lee accurately stated that Tennessee doubled down on testing, offering it to everyone regardless of their symptoms. He also said the state has led on distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently disputed.

But then, the governor diverged from reality.

“You may remember the last time I addressed Tennessee was right before Christmas — there was more pressure than ever to implement mandates and lockdown, but we trusted our people and encouraged them to gather differently,” said Lee, referring to a seven-minute Facebook live performance. “It helped us blunt a postholiday surge.’’

In one sense, he was right: Tennessee already led the country in COVID-19 case rates, a trend that carried on after that Dec. 20 speech. When you lead in illness for weeks at a time, there’s nowhere to go but up. But it’s a tough sell to call that success.

Lee then moved on to address the state’s economic climate, saying Tennessee’s response to COVID-19 has been effective

earlier this month were insightful and worth sharing. This piece originally ran Feb. 12. It has been edited.

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.

and many sectors of the state economy are roaring.

In much the same way he noted that COVID-19 rates dropped, Lee noted the unemployment rate has dropped from a high of 15.5 percent to 6.4 percent. While below the national average, the rate increased from November to December. And he failed to discuss what a god-awful mess the state’s unemployment system has been. A Tennessean reporter recently documented his own troubles with filing for unemployment during a companywide furlough.

Moving on to the recent extraordinary session devoted to education, Lee noted the legislature approved $43 million for teacher pay raises — that works out to a 2 percent pay raise — and that he’s asking for another $160 million for education in his budget for the upcoming year.

Democratic state Rep. Gloria Johnson, D-Knoxville — an outspoken critic of Lee and a longtime educator — posted a Twitter thread laying out what little impact that amount of money will have on education.

She told Chalkbeat that a 2 percent raise is an insult akin to tipping a waiter a few cents.

Through the remainder of his speech, Lee hit all the right-wing talking points. He touted a controversial and experimental health care block grant Tennessee pursued from the outgoing Trump administration rather than taking billions of dollars allotted to the state in Medicaid expansion. He implied election fraud took place during the 2020 presidential election in other states, saying, “If every state ran their elections the way Tennessee does, there’d be no delays and no scandal.”

Lee said he’s strongly pro-life, but introduced his support of a bill to allow permitless gun carry by saying, “Now more than ever, Tennesseans want a strong commitment to the Second Amendment and the right to protect themselves.” In fact, statistics show that states that have weakened their permitting system have an 11 percent increase in murder by handguns.

I’ll give Lee credit for the good in his address, like his announced initiative to get high-speed broadband throughout the state.

But too much of his speech included issues of no importance to many Tennesseans and a misguided sense of what is important.

Of the past year, Lee said Tennessee needs to “move forward but work to make sense of it all.” I’m still trying to make sense of his alternate reality.

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

Copyright©2020, Nashville Scene.

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Phone: 615-244-7989.

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Editorial Policy: The Nashville Scene covers news, art and entertainment. In our pages appear divergent views from across the community. Those views do not necessarily represent those of the publishers. Subscriptions: Subscriptions are available at $150 per year for 52 issues.

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In memory of Jim Ridley, editor 2009-2016

Holly McCall Holly McCall is editor of Tennessee Lookout, which covers government and politics in Tennessee. The Lookout is part of the nonprofit States Newsroom based in Washington, D.C., and Chapel Hill, N.C.

NASHVILLE SCENE | FEBRUARY 25 – MARCH 3, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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2/22/21 6:20 PM

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6:20 PM

nashvillescene.com | FEBRUARY 25 – MARCH 3, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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CITY LIMITS

THE EXIT’S STRATEGY With the Exit/In property for sale, venue owners outline a plan to purchase

PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

BY STEPHEN TRAGESER

CHRIS COBB

I

n the 50 years since Exit/In opened on Elliston Place, the beloved music venue has survived a great deal of upheaval. The business has changed hands many times, sometimes with the owner or owners going bankrupt. Responding to extensive real estate development in the neighborhood, current owners Chris and Telisha Cobb spearheaded a grassroots movement called Save the Rock Block and fought off a zoning change. During the COVID-19 pandemic, venues haven’t been able to generate revenue as normal for almost a full calendar year. Chris Cobb helped launch Music Venue Alliance Nashville, a group of 15 local independent venues that made its case to Metro and received a vital allotment from CARES Act funding. Exit/In also joined the National Independent Venue Association, which campaigned for federal aid that was ultimately included in December’s second stimulus bill — though it’s yet to be disbursed.

The longevity of Exit/In is a testament to the immense cultural and economic contributions that venues make to communities lucky enough to have them.

On Feb. 15, however, news came that is too often the death knell for small businesses in general and independent music venues in particular: The two families who each have a 50 percent ownership stake in the property

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that’s home to Exit/In and its sister bar Hurry Back decided to put it up for sale. But there was a note of hope in a report from Tennessee Lookout: The Cobbs have a chance to buy the property themselves, with assistance from Charlotte, N.C., real estate and development firm Grubb Properties and its recently established Live Venue Recovery Fund.

“It is the singular best scenario for Exit/ In and other venues out there who may find themselves in a similar situation,” Chris Cobb tells the Scene. At press time, the asking price for the property hadn’t been made public, but Grubb has used money added to the fund by accredited investors to make an offer. If the offer is accepted, Grubb will own the property and lease it back to Exit/In, with a plan for the Cobbs to eventually purchase the site. Cobb sees a chance to interrupt a cycle that’s been playing out in gentrifying neighborhoods for decades — a cycle that has been slowed but certainly not stopped by the pandemic.

“Post-COVID, the building-ownership issue is a huge one that the independent venue ecosystem has got to figure out how to navigate,” he says. “Things are broken when artists and creatives make somewhere cool, people move there because of that, drive up the property value, and then the people and the places that started all that get pushed out.”

The idea that a developer in possession of a sizable parcel of desirable real estate

wouldn’t take the first opportunity to erect a profitable mixed-use building on the site and leave the historic marker out front is worthy of skepticism in contemporary Nashville.

Cobb reached out to Grubb after hearing about the fund through NIVA, and he voices “a high level of trust” in the intention of the firm and its CEO, Clay Grubb. Investing in cultural landmarks is potentially a savvy move, even if the payoff isn’t immediate.

Spaces like Exit/In are a significant part of why people want to live in Nashville, and keeping them in place is a way to maintain or increase the value of future investments.

Grubb has pledged that gains from the project above the 12 percent internal rate of return promised to investors will be donated to NIVA. “The pandemic both exacerbated preexisting problems and exposed a fundamental flaw in the independent venue ecosystem,” Hillary Schmidt, director of acquisitions at Grubb, says in an email. “We realized it was time to take action to better protect and prepare venues going forward.”

Grubb has some experience working with venues, though in different contexts.

Charlotte’s Visulite Theatre is part of a substantial development spearheaded by Grubb in the Aughts. The company was also involved in funding renovations at Cat’s Cradle, a long-running 750-capacity venue just outside Chapel Hill in Carrboro, N.C., that’s kind of like the Research Triangle’s analog to Exit/In. The Live Venue Recovery Fund was established at the very end of 2020, and its first prospect was Louisville, Ky.’s Headliners Music Hall. Exit/In is the second, and currently the only club the fund is working with in Nashville. Schmidt says she wants to hear from other venues that could be a good fit. There’s no target number of clubs for the fund to work with, and the ultimate quantity is dependent on interest from investors and market conditions where venues are.

The timeline for Grubb selling the venue properties it buys to the business owners is dependent on each venue’s situation, but the firm anticipates the process playing out over three to five years in most cases.

Cobb doesn’t want to put the cart before the horse for Exit/In — the first hurdle is that the current owners have to accept Grubb’s offer. But if and when that happens, it’ll be time to explore options for raising money to make the purchase. Social media has been filled with pledges from venue supporters offering to do whatever needs to be done to make sure the club stays where it’s been since 1971. The Cobbs are currently exploring the legal implications of launching a crowdfunding campaign to make use of that support.

“It’s so humbling to see the outcry of support for Exit/In, and Exit/In deserves it,” says Chris Cobb. “On some level there’s going to be a need, and we’re just trying to figure out what level that is and how to allow people to contribute in a manner that aligns with our values, and is able to be used for long-term preservation efforts for the club and improving the experience. When we are able to reopen, we feel like if the community is going to contribute, there needs to be a direct line [between that and] the club being able to give back to the community.”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

THIS WEEK ON OUR NEWS AND POLITICS BLOG:

Local comedian Josh Black focused his ire — and, of course, a steady stream of jokes — at Scoop: Nashville, the local outlet most notorious for posting mugshots of recent and embarrassing arrests, and its founder Jason Steen, after Steen made disparaging comments about Black women activists. In response, Steen tweeted — and then deleted — that he would restart the Scoop practice of publishing the names and addresses of victims. “For some reason, Scoop: Nashville likes to attack poor and working class people,” Black said in the opening of a new video, citing the mugshot-shaming that grew the website’s brand. He added that the website especially targets Black people, people experiencing homelessness and those struggling with substance abuse.

“He’s consciously assisting in the mass incarceration of Black people,” Black said. “Scoop: Nashville is handing out a hotline number … so you can get more of them locked up.” Black’s video also included a clip from Steen’s talk show, wherein he calls local activist Jeneisha Harris a “bitch,” and calls activists Theeda Murphy and Gicola Lane stupid. An online spat between Steen and the three women began after the recent death of Markquett Martin. Martin died while fleeing police at J.C. Napier Homes — according to police, evidence suggests he suffered a self-inflicted gunshot while running.

Harris and Lane tweeted that there were witnesses claiming officers shot Martin, and Harris also mentioned footage that shows Martin’s death. Steen tweeted at her to share the footage, and Harris refused. Steen later insulted her, Lane and Murphy on his podcast. Steen ended up on the other side of the news earlier this year when Clarksville’s Leaf-Chronicle posted a report that employees at his Clarksville: Scoop outpost had gone weeks without pay, with former employees describing a toxic workplace. … Middle Tennessee is thawing after back-to-back winter storms dumped ice and snow across the region. Nashvillians’ (in)famous inability and unwillingness to drive in such conditions may have a positive effect, though: Mother Nature may have mandated an effective quarantine. Visit Pith to see some of contributor David Piñeros’ photos of last week’s icy madness.

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

NASHVILLE SCENE | FEBRUARY 18 – FEBRUARY 24, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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DE-FORREST-ATION Bill Dorris is dead. So what happens to his infamous Nathan Bedford Forrest statue?

BY LENA MAZEL

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statue of Confederate general and early KKK leader Nathan Bedford Forrest has loomed over I-65 for 23 years, an eyesore and a consistent subject of mockery in Nashville and elsewhere. During the summer, amid renewed calls for its removal, it remained. The statue — which stands on private property and has been vandalized more than once, including being splashed with pink paint a few years back — belonged to a man named Bill Dorris, who reveled in its notoriety. Dorris died in November, but the monument’s future is still uncertain.

Even beyond its glorification of a traitor, enslaver and alleged war criminal, the statue — surrounded by 13 Confederate flags — has a troubling history. It was sculpted by Jack Kershaw, a lawyer who famously defended Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin, James Earl Ray. When the work was unveiled, Kershaw said, “Somebody needs to say a good word for slavery.”

Dorris conceded that the statue was far from high art. “As an artist, mediocre,” he once said of Kershaw. “As a thinker, he was way ahead of a lot of people in his time.”

Kershaw was a notable member of several segregationist organizations and founder of

the League of the South, a neo-Confederate Southern separatist group. “Jack got some materials that I use to make bathtubs with,” Dorris told WPLN in 2011. “And he started with a butcher knife. That’s the end result that you see out there right now.”

Dorris lived next to the statue in a small property on Hogan Road. Not long after his death in the fall, Dorris made headlines for leaving his “$5 million estate” to his border collie Lulu. But while his will does designate a $5 million trust to the dog, that figure is likely exaggerated — a source close to the case, which is currently in probate court, tells the Scene that lawyers have valued his estate at closer to $500,000.

But what will happen to the statue of Forrest? For now, at least, the monument’s future is unclear. While most of Dorris’ assets were left to his dog, his will states that “the ice house, artisanal well, and Confederate flag display located at Hogan Road’’ will be entrusted to one of two groups: Sons of Confederate Veterans in Columbia, Tenn., or the Battle of Nashville Trust. Lawyers are still deciding which organization will inherit the monument.

James Kay, president of the Battle of Nashville Trust, says he was surprised when he learned that Dorris had named the

organization in his will.

“The trust had no connection with Mr. Dorris prior to his death,” Kay says.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans did not respond to requests for an interview.

But they do have a long history with Nathan Bedford Forrest’s legacy. In 1973, the group funded and organized the creation of the Forrest bust that currently sits in the Tennessee State Capitol. Amid protests against racial injustice this summer, removal of the bust gained widespread support, with the State Capitol Commission voting to remove it in July.

The SCV attempted to block the measure with a lawsuit. The Tennessee Historical Commission was set to hold a final hearing on relocation of the bust on Feb. 18, but the vote was postponed until March 9 due to inclement weather.

Angel Stansberry, a member of activist group People’s Plaza, says she’s seen members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans near the Capitol. According to Stansberry, they’re often armed. “We’ve kind of faced off with them a few times,” Stansberry says. “I know a few of their names just because they had me circled [in photos] on a few of their Facebook pages, actually.”

The Sons of Confederate Veterans have made no statement about Dorris’ statue.

Dorris saw the Forrest monument as an homage to the Confederacy, telling WPLN in 2011, “I still consider this the sixth-largest nation in the world, the Confederate States of America.”

The public focus on Dorris, Stansberry

PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

CITY LIMITS

says, feels revisionist. “It’s all over the news that he left $5 million to this border collie,” she says. “And that’s really what gets like, all this attention, you know? Because Americans care more about dogs than Black people.”

It’s still unclear who will inherit Dorris’ ghastly 25-foot-tall legacy. But if Dorris’ statue goes to the Battle of Nashville Trust, that’s good news for the city.

“The statue is ugly,” says the trust’s Kay. “It is a blight on Nashville and its citizens. It hinders our mission and what we are trying to accomplish. If the property is deeded to the trust, the statue will be removed.”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

The Five Love Languages: Making Your Relationships Better, Stronger and More Loving Dr. Gary Chapman

will open this program as our special guest speaker on Tuesday, March 2nd at 6:00 pm Dr. Gary Chapman is an experienced and well-respected family counselor, and a well-known author, having written more than 40 books. He hosts a nationally syndicated radio program, A Love Language Minute, and a Saturday morning program, Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, that air on more than 400 stations.

Rabbi Mark Schiftan

will continue on the following Tuesday Evenings at 6:00 pm

March 9th - Taking the Test: What Does it Say About You? March 16th - Comparing Results with Someone, Anyone You Love March 23rd - Enhancing, Improving, Bettering Your Loving Relationship(s) Please refer to thetemplehub.com for zoom link 5015 Harding Pike ~ The Temple ~ (615)352-7620 nashvillescene.com | FEBRUARY 25 – MARCH 3, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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2/22/21 6:24 PM

PHOTO: ALEX KENT

HONKY-TONK

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2/22/21 3:27 PM

How the pandemic has further exposed the changing culture of Lower Broadway

BY STEVEN HALE

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HONKY TONK CENTRAL, SEPT. 6, 2020

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n July, as Nashville was hitting new highs for COVID-19 positivity rates and hospitalizations were surging across Tennessee, TMZ published a video of Lower Broadway with the title “NoMaskville.” The nearly 90-second clip taken from a car shows what looks like a normal scene for the street on a weekend night — and that’s what was so confounding about it. Large crowds crammed into small indoor bars, with many more people milling around outside waiting to get in, most of them apparently unmasked. A shirtless man strolls by in the foreground.

It was one of several videos and images from Nashville’s main tourist destination that spread around the internet over the past year to the shock and horror of many observers. The images further prompted a question that one might have already felt compelled to ask: What the hell is going on down there?

It’s been impossible to ignore the way Lower Broadway has grown and mutated over the past decade: The arrival of bigger bars where one is is more likely to hear Bon Jovi or, to borrow a lyric from recent SNL-performing songwriter Phoebe Bridgers, “some America First rapcountry song” than the sort of honky-tonk tunes that used to echo down the street; the transpotainment arms race in which pedal taverns led to party tractors and a hot tub on a trailer called the Music City Party Tub; and, of course, the bachelorettes.

Intoxication has always been a feature of downtown Nashville, and Lower Broadway-centric hand-wringing about fading authenticity — a vaguely defined idea that is often a commercial creation itself — is an old pastime for locals. A recent round of it came a few years back when bigtime country stars started lending their names to branded bars that came to tower over the original honky-tonks. The Tennessean reported in 2017 that “to some observers, these celebrity-endorsed spots threaten to make Lower Broad look more like a musical theme park” and quoted the venerable honky-tonk proprietor and performer Layla Vartanian referring to the new arrivals as “Wal-Marts.” Can anyone say now those concerns were misplaced? If anything, they underestimated what was to come. The Tennessean’s article came before the opening of Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk & Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse, an establishment that would seem to have been conjured out of the nightmares of someone with such concerns for the identity of the street.

Bars built in the image of figures like Kid Rock (who responded to President Joe Biden’s inauguration by tweeting “THESE FAR LEFT SOCIALIST LIBERALS AND MEDIA CAN DE-PROGRAM DEEZ NUTZ!!”) and John Rich (who spent the past few months predicting that Donald Trump would serve a second term despite having clearly lost the presidential election) were bound to attract a certain type of customer.

One local who recently left a job at an establishment downtown says nights on Broadway felt increasingly inflected by America’s political culture wars. The era of Donald Trump and COVID-19 only heightened these dynamics and the street’s image among some locals. When a man who was photographed taking part in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol — the so-called zip-tie guy — was arrested and revealed to be a former employee of Kid Rock’s bar, eyes rolled all around the city. Of course he worked there. (It’s worth noting that the man, Eric Munchel, had been fired months earlier.)

Taken all together, these dynamics raise questions about what the city has created or allowed to grow on its most famous street. Much of Lower Broadway’s aura comes from the legends of someone like Hank Williams stumbling drunk in an alleyway behind the honky-tonks. Go down there today, though, and while you’ll run into a whole lot of stumbling drunks, you might not even hear a Hank Williams song. The pandemic interrupted the party, putting businesses in jeopardy and raising questions about what shape the street will be in on the other side. Another question is this: Is Lower Broadway today a reservoir of Music City culture, or a drunken playground dominated by assholes?

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B

arrett Hobbs inherited memories of Nashville’s bar business well before he could make any of his own. The fourth-generation Nashvillian is the grandson of the late John A. Hobbs, who in 1977 opened the Nashville Palace — one of his many establishments in Music Valley, the commercial area near Gaylord Opryland Resort — and provided a proving stage for future country stars like Randy Travis and Alan Jackson. The younger Hobbs’ earliest childhood memories of Lower Broadway, he says, are of retail stores like Service Merchandise, still barely hanging on before the opening of the mammoth Hickory Hollow Mall in Antioch. As a senior at Father Ryan High School in the early ’90s, he and his friends would head down to the corner of Fifth and Broadway, to a parking lot where Bridgestone Arena sits now, and peoplewatch — scanning a Lower Broadway that even an intoxicated observer today would recognize as something from a different era.

“We would drink a beer and sit there and watch the different characters — you know,

homeless or addicts or whatever they were, just drunks — fall in and out of The Turf and The World’s End, and try to peep in the windows on the strip joints that were left,” Hobbs says.

It wasn’t long before he was in the bar business himself. Now, more than 20 years later, Hobbs’ Cumberland Hospitality Group owns Lower Broadway bars Whiskey Bent Saloon and Bootleggers Inn, along with several other establishments elsewhere (including the Palace, which he bought in 2016, bringing it back into the family).

When he speaks to the Scene, Hobbs says he’s on his third day of shuttling staff to and from work to try to keep his businesses running through a week covered in ice and snow.

“I was hoping 2021 would come in with a bang and things would get back to normal a little quicker than they seem to be, surviving with a hangover from 2020,” he says.

Hobbs gives credit to early Lower Broadway proprietors like Vartanian and Robert Wayne Moore, whose Western boot and apparel store would eventually become

the beloved Robert’s Western World. He also credits Steve Smith, who took a risk on Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, buying it for four figures in the early ’90s when the street was anything but a sure business success. Not surprisingly, Hobbs is eager for Broadway to be operating at full strength again.

“Until Broadway has its full heartbeat back, that’s not restricted,” he says, “Nashville is not going to come back.”

But Hobbs also acknowledges some concern about what Lower Broadway has, or at least might, become, saying he worries about losing an “authenticity” that separates Lower Broadway from the famous main drags of other cities. No doubt many would say that ship sailed long ago. A 2001 Scene story titled “The Bar That Time Forgot” bemoaned the “Gaylordization” of Lower Broadway and hailed long-since-departed The Dusty Road as “Nashville’s last honestto-goodness honky-tonk.” Still more might argue that the “It City” era fully completed the street’s transition from a place to have your face melted by a guitar lick or an unknown songwriter to simply a place to get shitfaced.

Hobbs isn’t ready to go that far, but he has seen a shift.

“There is a shift in the atmosphere, and it’s inevitable,” Hobbs says. “It’s not that anyone’s done anything wrong. But if you have a place that can only hold 60 or 70 country music fans, you’re going to have one type of atmosphere — you’re going to have 21-year-olds to 71-year-olds wanting to hear the best music on the planet, and drinking at different levels at that time. If you put in a bar with three different types of music, where you’ve got rock ’n’ roll, and you’ve got mix music, and you’ve got country, and those people don’t necessarily intertwine together. Now, all of a sudden, you’ve got three concerts going on at once.”

He says that perceptions of the district have to come with perspective, and have to be put in context of the incredible growth in tourism that Nashville has experienced over the past decade.

“There’s the perception there’s more drunks down there now,” he says. “There’s not any more drunks by percentage — there’s just more people in general.”

Even so, the prospect of drifting further in that direction is a topic of conversation among people with interests in the future of Lower Broadway.

“There is a conscious discussion that has been going on — and you don’t want to pick on any city, but you hear it a lot — we don’t want to become Bourbon Street,” Hobbs says. “You know, where it is nothing but a 21-and-up party scene. That’s all Bourbon Street is.”

Hobbs says he understands that a family might not want to come inside one of Lower Broadway’s honky-tonks, but “I want them to always be comfortable being able to walk by.”

PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

Hobbs says he understands that a family might not want to come inside one of Lower Broadway’s honkytonks, but “I want them to always be comfortable being able to walk by.”

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“We cross that threshold where they’re not comfortable walking by, I think we gotta look at ourselves,” he says.

O

ther proprietors on Lower Broadway suggest that threshold may have already been crossed.

“It’s always had a seedy reputation, but the seedy reputation was built around creativity,” Acme Feed & Seed owner Tom Morales says of the street. “It wasn’t built around drunk bachelorettes. Now, you might find some musicians down on Lower Broad drunk, but it was part of the creative process.”

Morales laments what he sees as an abandonment of what was — or at least what he feels should be — the identity of Nashville’s most famous thoroughfare.

“There’s no vision, it seems like haphazard, ‘let’s just keep the hotels full and however that happens is good,’ ” he says. “I personally don’t agree with that. I think [it’s about] the history and the preservation and the music, the music, the music. Nashville’s got a diverse economy, I understand that part, but the reason all of this is diverse and everybody came to Nashville, located here, was for the music. They didn’t come because there’s pedal taverns, they didn’t come because there’s drunken debauchery on weekends.”

“While we have enjoyed tremendous success, we have obviously generated growing pains as well,” says Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp president and CEO Butch Spyridon. “We are equally concerned about the evolution.

Our character, our authenticity and our music brand are critical to sustaining our success, and we have to address issues like entertainment transportation, aggressive panhandling, trash and noise. We had initiatives last spring with Metro and the Downtown Partnership to work on these issues, but paused due to the tornado and COVID-19 pandemic. We hope to restart those efforts again.”

Morales, who also owns The Southern Steak & Oyster, has been outspoken recently about his frustrations with the atmosphere on Lower Broadway in more ways than one. After a long shutdown at the beginning of the pandemic, Morales reopened Acme — but in October, he announced that he would be closing down the bar and restaurant again. In those early months, Morales had kept the fourstory establishment on the corner of First and Broadway closed longer than others, a decision he attributed in his October announcement to concerns for “the safety of our staff and customers, followed by the economics of operating in this climate.”

After finally reopening, Morales said he and his team quickly came to believe the situation was untenable. Staff started getting sick, he says, and customers were trying to defy things like mask mandates because they hadn’t been made to follow them in other bars on the street. When he decided to close, Morales says he “caught hell” from unnamed bar owners on the street.

“It’s a perpetual Trump rally down there,” he says. “You’re having to be policemen instead of hospitality people.”

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ACME FEED & SEED

His complaints bring together concerns about the changing culture of Lower Broadway and the way that the Trump era and the pandemic, in his view, amplified the dynamic.

“There’s a core destination customer or tourist that has always come to Nashville and its surrounding country music,” he says.

“Nothing against that. But with it brings a culture, and right now that culture has been hijacked to represent a lot of the things that, for myself, are contrary to what we need as Nashville business.”

Morales says in the brief period Acme was reopened, his staff was met with people in fishnet masks with the words “FAKE NEWS” on them trying to get into the bar.

Hobbs, who is the chairman of Mayor John Cooper’s Advisory Committee on Hospitality, sounds a more optimistic note about where things are headed. He says the committee has been a successful mediator, working with the Metro Public Health Department and the mayor’s office to translate proposed rules into more workable forms for the reality of the industry. He points to more nuanced policies that have resulted from the committee’s work, such as a recent loosening of restrictions that allowed restaurants that don’t serve alcohol to be open 24 hours a day. He also says he’s pleased that the committee has worked to restart negotiations for the booking of meetings and conventions in the city later this year.

Spyridon says the city has “lost around $4.5 billion in direct visitor spending and, more importantly, tens of thousands of jobs.” He also says, however, that he is “reasonably optimistic about our recovery starting this spring and steadily improving through the rest of the year” if the vaccination rollout continues apace and planned events are able to take place.

“Nashville’s got a diverse economy, I understand that part, but the reason all of this is diverse and everybody came to Nashville, located here, was for the music. They didn’t come because there’s pedal taverns, they didn’t come because there’s drunken debauchery on weekends.” ­ -Tom Morales

Metro Councilmember Freddie O’Connell represents District 19, which includes Lower Broadway. He says in the early days of the pandemic, “We had some folks come to the table in good faith and closely examine how to operate safely, and we had some other folks who, I think, were not doing that.”

O’Connell doesn’t name any names, but it’s easy to imagine who he might have in mind. When Metro’s then-director of health Michael Caldwell mandated that all Nashville bars — including Lower Broadway’s honky-tonks — close until further notice, Tootsie’s owner Steve Smith immediately announced his intention to defy the order. He reversed course within 24 hours, but he has made his displeasure with the restrictions plain. In June, he joined a lawsuit against the city seeking to block the restrictions, and in the same month his Honky Tonk Central and Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk & Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse (the latter of which he coowns with the eponymous “Bawitdaba” singer) were cited for failing to comply with public health guidelines.

While opposition on Lower Broadway to pandemic-related restrictions and guidelines appeared to many like greedfueled obstinacy, there was also a more reasonable frustration among the street’s business owners — that the city did not have a long-term plan for how to reopen that was workable for establishments like theirs.

Nearly a year after COVID first arrived in Nashville, O’Connell says the situation on Lower Broadway seems to be relatively under control.

“I think overall, if I’m not hearing from people, it’s a reasonably good sign,” he says.

“Right now, I’m not hearing from the Metro side with regard to frustration with lack of compliance, and I’m also not hearing from the Broadway side a particular set

of concerns. And I think it’s one of those things where it’s a bit of give and take.”

S

teve Smith answers his phone and announces that he’s in Palm Beach, Fla., where he’s just been golfing and eating lunch with Donald Trump, Kid Rock and “Daddy Kid Rock” — “which is Kid Rock’s daddy.”

So, how is the former president doing in exile?

“He’s so happy it’s unbelievable,” Smith says. “He’s gonna sit back and watch Joe Biden fuck the rest of the world up for four years, then he’s gonna walk in and take it over.”

It would be difficult to talk about the culture and identity of Lower Broadway today without talking to or about Smith, who owns or co-owns three of the most visible establishments in the district. He played an undeniable role in revitalizing Lower Broadway in the ’90s and an undeniable role in making it whatever it is today.

But that conversation turns out to be difficult to have. The Scene reached out to Smith through an associate, and he agreed to speak for this story with a tentative plan to talk on Wednesday, Feb. 17. Once he’s on the phone, it seems as if he and his party have been — as his rap-country-luminary business partner might put it — “chillin’ the most.” Over the course of a nearly 30-minute conversation, Smith launches into tirades about the coronavirus pandemic and, more specifically, Nashville’s public health orders. He reserves special invective for Mayor Cooper, and repeatedly urges the Scene to print it all. He also makes repeated reference to the fact that he knows the Scene’s owner, Nashville real estate magnate Bill Freeman, with requests that

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PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

KID ROCK’S BIG ASS HONKY TONK & ROCK N’ ROLL STEAKHOUSE, MAY 2019 the paper “be nice” to him.

Smith interrupts a question about his early opposition to COVID-related guidelines to insist that his establishments have followed the guidelines, but that “COVID’s over.” It’s not, of course. On Feb. 18, Tennessee surpassed 11,000 COVID-19 deaths, and more than half of the state’s deaths from the pandemic have come since December.

Smith says the closures and restrictions have cost him more than $90 million, and he repeatedly places the blame for what he describes as the death of Lower Broadway at the feet of the mayor.

“John Cooper has ran the city in the ground, so my opinion on Broadway — we’re done,” Smith says. “Downtown Broadway is going in the tank like a snowball headed to hell because of John Cooper. You wanna print that? You got enough nuts to print that, son?”

Asked what he thinks of the current situation on Lower Broadway — where bars are allowed to stay open until midnight, with last call coming at 11 p.m. — Smith says this: “What are you allowed to do in Davidson County? Then what are you allowed to do in Wilson County? Or in Hendersonville? What are you allowed to do there? You answer that question. Someone can drive 15 minutes down the road and live a normal life or stay in a concentration camp under John Cooper — Hitler John Cooper’s word. Use the word

‘Hitler,’ I called John Cooper ‘Hitler,’ put that in the fucking paper.”

Someone near Smith apparently asks who he’s talking to, and Smith responds: “a newspaper reporter.” The man chimes in again: “Retract the Hitler.”

“I’m not gonna retract ‘John Cooper’s Hitler,’ ” Smith says. “I’m not retracting that.”

(When asked for a response to Smith’s statements, Cooper’s office offered the following: “Comparing the Nazi atrocities of the Holocaust to public health restrictions that saved lives is deeply offensive. That kind of ugly comment speaks for itself.

The public health actions taken over the past year have saved hundreds of lives, as evidenced by our fatality rate being less than half of the state and national averages.

Compared to other cities, Nashville took a balanced approach that allowed businesses to operate at safe capacities. We are a resilient city that is well-positioned to thrive as we rebound from the pandemic.”)

It’s certainly an escalation from how Smith described the situation in June, when — after joining the lawsuit against Metro’s public health restrictions — he told The Tennessean, “They’ve got us behind a Berlin Wall.”

As it turns out, during the call Smith is with Kid Rock, who chimes in again to ask what publication Smith is talking to. When Smith tells him, Kid Rock draws a connection

between the Scene and the Metro Times, an alt-weekly newspaper from his native Detroit.

“Fuck them,” he says. He declines to get on the phone.

Soon the two seem to be trying to amuse each other. Smith asks, “Do you want deez?” apparently attempting to draw the reporter into a “deez nuts” joke. This comes up again later when Smith asks Kid Rock — whose real name is Robert Ritchie — “what should he print, Bob?” Kid Rock answers, “Deez nuts.”

Soon, Smith is back to declaring that Cooper has “killed the city.”

“Downtown Broadway has gone to the shithole, and I wouldn’t give a quarter for any property down there if I was any kind of smart businessman,” he says. Smith goes on to claim that he is in possession of emails in which Metro public health officials refer to Tootsie’s as “the Purple People Eater” and Kid Rock’s bar as “Kid Rock’s Big Ass Cluster.”

Asked if he understands why it was concerning to people to see large crowds in indoor bars during a pandemic, Smith begins extolling the virtues of Florida’s handling of the crisis. He claims the state has “the best numbers of anybody in the United States besides Utah.” It does not — either in cases per 100,000 people or deaths per 100,000 people, although it has done better than Tennessee in both categories.

Smith makes more false claims, like,

“Healthy people can get out and get immune to any virus and live,” and that COVID-19 is “just a damn ’nother flu.”

“They need to let these young people that’s healthy and older people that’s healthy live their lives,” he says. “Live their fucking lives. If you’re in a nursing home or you have underlying conditions, you need to fucking stay in. But at the end of the day it needs to be the people’s choice, not the government’s choice. This government is trying to turn everything into a communist country so they can tell us when to walk, when to talk, when to breathe, when not to fucking breathe. At the end of the day we better wake up and get to that.”

At this point, Smith declares that he’s “not gonna authorize” the Scene to print everything else he’s said, “’cause it’s all stupid shit.” Before the call ends, he returns to the matter again, asking to approve the quotes the Scene will use.

Informed that’s not how it works when you’ve agreed to an interview with a reporter on the record, he says, “Well that’s great, so do what your conscience will allow you to do, son.”

With that, the Scene asks one more question.

“Have you been drinking?”

After a brief pause, Smith answers: “Always.”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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— Cindy Walker From a farewell note written to her beloved songs

Country Music Hall of Fame member Cindy Walker’s songwriting career spanned half a century, with songs recorded by a broad and diverse range of stellar artists, from Bing Crosby to Bob Wills, to Roy Orbison, Ray Charles, Willie Nelson, and to many, many others. She willed her catalog of some five hundred songs to the Museum. To learn more about Walker’s life and career, visit the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

OUR DOORS ARE OPEN DOWNTOWN NASHVILLE

Visit CountryMusicHallofFame.org to buy tickets.

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CRITICS’ PICKS W E E K L Y

R O U N D U P

O F

T H I N G S

T O

D O

WOMEN TO WATCH: CELEBRATING THE CENTENNIAL OF WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE

as self-indulgent and self-aggrandizing. proper tribute to the late icon of cinema But Varda — by this time nearly 90, with just months after her death. You can watch the ends of her white, bob-length hair dyed all of these and more on the streaming red, giving her the appearance of a friar service The Criterion Channel — which is — is playful as always, humble and still well worth the $11 per month after a free excited about the possibilities of art. There’s two-week trial. But plenty are available on so much more — the delightful feminist other platforms too. The most popular entry landmarks One Sings, the Other Doesn’t and Jane B. point into Varda is her pensive 1962 drama par Agnès V.; the intimate documentary about Cléo from 5 to 7 (HBO Max). The film takes the people who glean food from harvested place in a single evening, following blond, fields and market refuse, The Gleaners and I; the listless pop star Cléo (Corinne Marchand) light, gorgeous short “Uncle Yanco.” Wander around the streets of Paris as she awaits the results of a medical test. Varda had through the archives of this singular artist. a talent for investigating how women You’ll be glad you did. ERICA CICCARONE are presented in cinema and how we are viewed as we move through the world — but [INTO THE UNKNOWN] without being didactic. Instead, she gives TREAT YOUR KIDS TO TPAC’S VIRTUAL us rich characters whom we care about DISNEY WORKSHOPS deeply, despite their flaws. In 1965’s Le Throughout the pandemic, local families Bonheur (Criterion, Turner Classic Movies), have been struggling to find ways to Varda’s scathing critique of marriage is keep their kids occupied and entertained. veiled in candy colors and set in part in a Fortunately, Tennessee Performing Arts gorgeous garden of Eden; the technique Center has stepped up with its Disney belies the tragedy at the heart of the film Musicals in Schools Story Adventure and makes it more potent. But sometimes Workshops. Here, teaching artists lead she could depict social estrangement only fun, interactive 30-minute story programs, with uncompromising darkness, as in which help youngsters develop key theater 1985’s Vagabond (Criterion), which opens skills — such as body movement, with the image of an anonymous character development and woman who has frozen to death listening to cues. The popular EDITOR’S NOTE: in a ditch. Varda then follows program draws on familiar AS A RESPONSE TO THE her through the last weeks of Disney musical titles such ONGOING COVID-19 PANDEMIC, her life, using long tracking as The Lion King, The Jungle WE’VE CHANGED THE FOCUS OF shots to set the drifter Book, The Aristocats and THE CRITICS’ PICKS SECTION TO INCLUDE ACTIVITIES YOU CAN against a desolate landscape.

Frozen, offering adaptations PARTAKE IN WHILE YOU’RE AT It’s the most harrowing of that are specifically designed HOME. her films, and it shows her for either elementary- or uncompromising artistic vision. middle-school-age children. The In 2017’s Faces Places, a documentary workshops are probably best suited directed with French street photographer for kids ages 7 to 12, but really perfect for JR, Varda visits villages and towns in the entire family to enjoy together. TPAC’s France to photograph residents, print their Disney Musicals in Schools Story Adventure portraits and plaster them around the town Workshops are free, but registration is (for rent on Prime, Apple TV, YouTube required. For complete program schedule and from Nashville Public Library). In the and details, visit tpac.org. AMY STUMPFL director’s final film, Varda by Agnès (Criterion), she takes the audience through a tour of [SECRET AGENT MEN … AND WOMEN] her long career, including footage and LISTEN TO THE PODCAST I SPY commentary on her visual-art installations.

Launched in 2019 by global-affairs With any other director, the film would read news mag Foreign Policy, podcast I Spy

ART

VIEW WOMEN TO WATCH: CELEBRATING THE CENTENNIAL OF WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE AT CHEEKWOOD

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States, Cheekwood Estate & Gardens is presenting Women to Watch: Celebrating the Centennial of Women’s Suffrage.

The exhibition, which opened Feb. 6, will remain on view through May 2 and features works on paper by women artists from the Cheekwood collection. Among the artists whose work will be included are luminaries Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner — artists who are much like the suffragists who struggled to have their voices heard. By only including art by women, Women to Watch lets viewers appreciate the work without comparing the artists to their perhaps better-known male contemporaries, and that will likely lead to a better understanding of the artist as an individual. Also in the exhibition is work by Clare Leighton, whose art was marginalized

because critics of her time didn’t consider wood engraving a legitimate art form. Still, she persevered. Leighton’s work mainly depicts rural life, with working class men and women as the focus. View these works and others, and gain new insights into some of art history’s unseen and undervalued figures. For more information on Leighton and the other artists Cheekwood is celebrating, visit cheekwood.org. Through May 2 at Cheekwood, 1200 Forrest Park Drive DIANA LEYVA FILM

[SUFFRAGE CITY]

[A WOMAN’S TRUTH]

WATCH FILMS BY AGNÈS VARDA

Whether documenting the lives of everyday people, dramatizing a marriage falling into disrepair or describing life as an artist, the films of Agnès Varda are uncommonly intimate. A pioneering writer-director of the French New Wave, Varda transcended that movement, pressing cinema to its limits until the last year of her long life. The Criterion Collection released a stunning box set last year, finally paying

PODCAST

CHILDREN

“FIREWOOD IN GEORGIA,” CLARE LEIGHTON

CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7

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CRITICS’ PICKS

MUSIC

D. PATRICK RODGERS [DOWN IN THE BOTTOM]

DIG INTO ALAN LOMAX’S ARCHIVE

As the 20th century rapidly recedes from view, it makes sense to think about how the twin ideas of folk music and popular music intersected in an age of cultural flux. The Texas-born archivist, writer and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax is one of the architects of 20th-century music, and his massive contributions to world culture are worth considering in light of the ongoing discussion about cultural appropriation.

Born in Austin, Texas, in 1915, Lomax got around: He documented the lives of now-canonical blues and folk performers like Fred McDowell, Son House and Jean Ritchie. Lomax founded The Association for Cultural Equity in New York in 1983 — find it at research.culturalequity.org — with an eye to preventing what he once called “cultural grey-out,” and his post-1946 archive of 17,000 sound recordings, video and photographs went online — in pristine digitized form — in 2012. Start with the material he gathered at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival, particularly Howlin’ Wolf

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PATRICE O’NEAL: KILLING IS EASY

[PLAY IT BLACK]

CHECK OUT GREAT BLACK PLAYWRIGHTS AND THEATER ARTISTS

[THE RIGHT STUFF]

OBSERVE THE 20TH BIRTHDAY OF LIFE WITHOUT BUILDINGS’ ANY OTHER CITY

Among artists who released only one record but made it count, Scottish foursome Life Without Buildings’ 2001 LP Any Other City ranks up there with The Modern Lovers, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.

More project than full-fledged band, LWB was fronted by poet Sue Tompkins, backed

[KILLIN’ IT]

WATCH PATRICE O’NEAL: KILLING IS EASY ON COMEDY CENTRAL

On Feb. 19 Comedy Central premiered Patrice O’Neal: Killing Is Easy, a full-length documentary on the caustic but honest comedian who died way too young — at age 41 — in 2011. Produced in collaboration with Bill Burr’s All Things Comedy, the doc features interviews with the comics O’Neal worked with (and often roasted the hell out of) back in the day — including Burr, Kevin Hart, Denis Leary and Colin Quinn. You also get interviews with family and friends who knew the compassionate, complicated side of O’Neal, a man who felt he was on borrowed time due

to diabetes, and still tried to make a lasting dent in the comedy world. Once you’ve watched the doc (which can be viewed on the Comedy Central app, video on demand and download-to-own platforms), you might wanna head over to YouTube and do a deep dive. I recommend watching Patrice O’Neal: Elephant in the Room, the stand-up special he filmed not too long before his death. After that, check out old episodes of Tough Crowd With Colin Quinn, the brilliant but short-lived Comedy Central panel show that showcased O’Neal at his loudmouthed finest. CRAIG D. LINDSEY FILM

by a trio of classmates from Glasgow School of Art, and sounded like a possible progeny of old-school post-punks The Raincoats.

Because the group never toured, it took awhile for AOC to become discovered — but over time, word got around about the lightning-in-a-bottle record and band.

Tompkins’ talkative, ASMR-like vocals and impressionistic lyrics seem off the cuff, but they’re so expertly woven into the music — jangly and mathy, like American Football and other Chicagoans of the era — there can’t be anything accidental about them.

Tracks like “P.S. Exclusive,” “14 Days” and “Sorrow” are like puzzles you want to do over and over again. Then there’s “The Leanover,” which, amazingly, has been rediscovered and repurposed by the next generation. It’s hard to explain, but Google “Life Without Buildings” and “TikTok,” and give AOC a spin on your streaming platform of choice while you’re at it. CHARLIE ZAILLIAN COMEDY

Black History Month provides a welcome opportunity to explore some exceptional work — and hopefully gain a better appreciation for the Black artists who’ve helped shape modern theater.

You might start with six-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald and her remarkable portrayal of jazz legend Billie Holiday in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill. Or perhaps Dominique Morisseau’s scorching contemporary drama Pipeline. (Both are available on BroadwayHD.com.) Amazon Prime has also pulled together some great titles, including Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over (a fascinating twist on Waiting for Godot, directed and filmed by Spike Lee) and Kemp Powers’ One Night in Miami (which marks a strong directorial debut for Regina King). You can also check out the new film adaptation of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, with some powerful performances from Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman, via Netflix. Of course, if you need a break from all the screentime, you can always dig into biographies celebrating Black theater artists — I recommend Cicely Tyson’s new memoir Just as I Am (released just two days before her death in January) or Richard Wesley’s marvelous It’s Always Loud in the Balcony: A Life in Black Theater, From Harlem to Hollywood and Back. Both titles are available via Nashville Public Library. AMY STUMPFL MUSIC

is currently hip-deep in its eight-episode third season. Focusing on what I Spy calls the “operations people” — that is, “the spies who steal secrets, who kill adversaries, who turn agents into double agents” — each episode features one source telling the story of one operation. That means insider tales from former agents and operatives with the Drug Enforcement Administration and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, as well as from the U.K.’s MI5 and Israel’s Mossad — not to mention the big, bad daddy of them all, the Central Intelligence Agency. It can be a conflicting listen when you consider the extremely dark and cruel dealings many of the aforementioned agencies are historically responsible for, but some episodes are deeply compelling and revelatory — like the two-parter featuring former DEA Agent Steve Murphy, who played a central role in the killing of Colombian drug kingpin and vicious killer Pablo Escobar. (If Murphy’s tale sounds familiar, that’s probably because his story was the inspiration for the Netflix hit Narcos, in which Murphy was portrayed by noted hunk Boyd Holbrook.) Bonus: Though the podcast doesn’t feature an onmic interviewer, it’s narrated by prolific character actor Margo Martindale, known in part for her role as a KGB handler on FX series The Americans. Listen to I Spy via foreignpolicy.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

THEATER

singing “Down in the Bottom.” Lomax’s late-’50s photographs of the congregation of a Memphis Pentecostal church are superb, as is his 1949 recording of New Orleans guitarist Johnny St. Cyr’s rendering of “Jelly Roll Blues.” There’s a built-in contradiction between documentation and exploitation that Lomax’s work embodies, since he sometimes used deceptive methods to get his subjects to perform. Still, his achievement remains secure — the 20th century never sounded so alive. EDD HURT

[HUMP UP THE JAM]

CATCH HUMP! FILM FESTIVAL BEFORE IT ENDS

For the second year in a row, the excellent HUMP! Film Festival will be online only. While that might be a reminder that it was around this time last year that the COVID-19 lockdown put in-person events on hold, there’s a bright side: Watching cool porn from home is just the thing to sate your cabin fever. That’s because the series’ curator — longtime Savage Love columnist Dan Savage — aims to normalize unfamiliar turn-ons with the films, which means there’s a lot of variety among the 21 short films. So even if you’d never search keywords “gay” or “BDSM” while browsing PornHub, you get to watch a super-hot selection of films that might just convince you that other people’s turn-ons aren’t so out-there after all. Tickets go for roughly $30 each, and the 21 films aren’t available to watch anywhere else — part of the fun is that none of the performers are pros, so a limited audience helps ensure their relative

HUMP! FILM FESTIVAL

NASHVILLE SCENE | FEBRUARY 25 – MARCH 3, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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CRITICS’ PICKS

MUSIC

anonymity. You’ll see animation, straight and gay sex, kink, comedy and everything in between. If you’re interested in sex, film, art or community-building, I highly recommend buying a ticket. Find out more at humpfilmfest.com. LAURA HUTSON HUNTER [WHOSE HOUSE?]

STREAM COLD LUNCH RECORDINGS’ LIVE AT JOSH’S HOUSE

House shows are a many-splendored thing, and absolutely critical to developing and maintaining a healthy music ecosystem.

Some of my fondest memories are from house shows where the performers took advantage of the intimate environment, regardless of damp basement smells and questionable plumbing, to show you something special about their work. I get that same vibe from watching Live at Josh’s House, the streaming series produced by Nashville indie label and booking enterprise Cold Lunch Recordings, which has long been tuned in to the best of what’s bubbling up from the underground in Music City. The series features a slew of artists who you might have seen around town at Cold Lunch events like Spewfest, playing 20-minute sets filmed at the home of director and editor Josh Whiteman. In the episodes released so far, Heaven Honey’s Jordan Victoria played arresting rock-schooled tunes from her catalog with help from Volunteer Department’s Oliver Hopkins; Harpooner’s Scott Schmadeke crooned sophisticated Nilssonian pop tunes at a piano surrounded by candles; and Diatom Deli layered her vocals, field recordings, synths and acoustic guitar into gentle but rich compositions.

New episodes are set to appear around the second and fourth weeks of each month on the website of Melted Magazine and on Cold Lunch’s YouTube channel. Keep an eye on the label’s Instagram profile for details on the next episode. STEPHEN TRAGESER

TV

CRIME SCENE: VANISHING AT THE CECIL HOTEL [ON THE LAM]

WATCH CRIME SCENE: VANISHING AT THE CECIL HOTEL ON NETFLIX

Eliza Lam disappeared on Jan. 31, 2013. The 21-year-old University of British Columbia student was in the middle of a solo trip down the West Coast, and had checked in at the Cecil Hotel — an infamous hotel in the heart of Los Angeles’ Skid Row — when she went missing. Twenty days later, her body was found floating in one of the hotel’s rooftop water tanks, and how she got inside the tank has been widely debated ever since. In the new Netflix docuseries Crime Scene: Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, director Joe Berlinger (the Paradise Lost series, Conversations With a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes) uses Lam’s own words from her prolific blogging, as well as interviews with the Cecil’s staff, to piece together the woman’s final days. But as much as the docuseries focuses on Lam’s disappearance — and the mental illness that the coroner ultimately claimed contributed to her accidental death — it also examines the armchair-detective culture that fueled the unrelenting fascination with the case. Once the LAPD released footage of Lam’s bizarre behavior in one of the hotel’s elevators, true-crime aficionados spent hundreds of hours dissecting every second of the video in hopes of finding their own answers, and as a result, there are thousands of theories on the internet: “It was murder!”

“It was attempted trafficking!” “Another person is standing just out of frame!” Some even combed through public records, including the autopsy report, and traveled to Los Angeles to stay in Lam’s old room and literally retrace her final steps in an attempt to uncover the truth. Is Lam’s death part of a bigger conspiracy? Or is society’s deep mistrust and misunderstanding of mental illness the reason people won’t accept the truth? MEGAN SELING

nashvillescene.com | FEBRUARY 25 – MARCH 3, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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FOOD AND DRINK

Looking at some of the East Side restaurants and food businesses affected by the March 3 storm

BY JENNIFER JUSTUS

T

PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

he steeple from The Church at Lockeland Springs in East Nashville was sitting on the ground near the church for nearly a year, one of many reminders of the March 3 tornado’s destruction. But a couple weeks ago, a crane lifted the steeple back up to its perch. And several weeks before that, the rehabbed neon sign at Weiss Liquors — ripped from its longtime home by the

and some may never return. For the purposes of this story, we zoom in on a few establishments just along this stretch, a gateway corridor to East Nashville, to see how they’re doing and hear about changes they see on the horizon.

Five Points staple Boston Commons plans to reopen this week. Also this week, Smith & Lentz Brewing is set to reopen for the first time since the storm and after a year’s worth of insurance red tape, major structural rehab and refocus. The owners added a kitchen with a wood-fired oven for pizzas and upgraded their back patio, among other renovations. Still, after all this time, just opening the doors can feel like a miracle.

The morning after the tornado, Kurt Smith arrived to see the back wall of the brewery completely collapsed. “It’s gone,” Smith texted Adler Lentz, who’s been his business partner since the brewery opened in 2015.

“We lost everything,” Lentz adds.

Despite the damage done to these business owners’ buildings, gratitude is a common refrain.

“Luckily no one on our team was hurt,” Smith says. “We took it as an opportunity to

tornado’s deadly winds — lit up Main Street again. The steeple and the sign reach toward the sky over two different but historic establishments — the church was built in the early 1900s, and the liquor store has been in its East Nashville location since the mid-’60s. They’re beacons of “normal” in a neighborhood ravaged by the storm almost a full year ago.

And yet despite these repairs, many wounds remain — boarded-up windows, tangled metal and lumber, shaggy bits of insulation, blue tarps and the empty wire frames from blown-out signs sprouting up from asphalt like steel daisies. And then there are the more lasting scars. The ways a disaster can reshape a neighborhood, as well as the emotional trauma and the lives lost — specifically, the lives of service-industry workers Albree Sexton and Michael Dolfini.

Woodland and Main streets run parallel from Fifth Street South to Five Points, a roughly one-mile stretch that holds more than 50 food-and-drink-related businesses, many of which have been hit hard by the pandemic. Some of the businesses have reopened only recently with new menus and roofs, while others have yet to reopen

18

reset and think about what we are and what we value and what we want to become.”

An image seared into Smith and Lentz’s memories from March is the Edley’s BarB-Que catering van flipped over in front of the brewery. Next door to the barbecue restaurant, the Molly Green boutique was mostly leveled. One of its brightly colored cinder blocks sailed through the window of The Grilled Cheeserie a few blocks down the street. Directly behind Molly Green, the tornado took the roof off of Attaboy, which remained closed until October. Attaboy managing partner Brandon Bramhall offers his gratitude to Basement East sound engineer Josh Williams, who darted across the alley to bang on the bar’s door as the twister barreled toward them. Williams warned bartenders and guests and also helped usher his co-workers at the music venue to safety.

Further down the street, bar stools from BoomBozz Craft Pizza and Taphouse ended up in a neighbor’s living room.

“We had stuff on our property from blocks away,” says Dollye GrahamMathews, who owns the 22-year-old Bolton’s Hot Chicken and Fish with her husband Bolton Mathews, “and our stuff on other

PHOTO: DANIEL MEIGS

EAST NASHVILLE, A YEAR AFTER THE TORNADO

NASHVILLE SCENE | FEBRUARY 25 – MARCH 3, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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people’s property blocks away.”

Beyond the physical chaos, of course, was the emotional toll the storm took. “We united, we fed each other,” says GrahamMathews. “With hugs or to just look at each other and shake heads.”

The folks at Edley’s, who are in the process of redoing their patio, gave away barbecue sandwiches for two weeks after the tornado and raised $235,000 with Cumulus Media for The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee. Weiss Liquors kept the doors open from day one, cash-only at first, until the power was restored. And though Koi Sushi & Thai had to close for three months, the restaurant brought in gas-operated woks to serve noodles and dumplings to first responders, neighbors and staff.

Mike Grimes and Dave Brown of The Basement East plan to open fairly soon too, possibly as a safe and socially distanced bar hang, thanks to the venue’s patio and 5,000-square-foot space. “As therapy,” Grimes says. “Five years ago, we put all our money and resources on the line,” says Brown. The business was thriving, they say. But despite significant damage done to the building by the tornado, they are overwhelmingly grateful — grateful that the staff stayed safe that night.

Despite the blur of those early posttornado days, Attaboy’s Bramhall remembers chef Bryan Weaver of Butcher & Bee and Redheaded Stranger bringing food. At The Basement East, Dave Brown remembers many offers of help including someone bringing sausage biscuits.

Wayne Hanan worked at 3 Crow Bar in Five Points for 13 years. He recalls regulars showing up with plywood and drills to board up windows soon after the storm. Longtime owner Bill Carney made it clear any employees who wanted to work would be paid $15 an hour to help clean up. “The first day, the entire staff showed up,” Hanan says. “People kept coming by the bar and saying, ‘What do you need?’ My phone was blowing up.”

3 Crow donated hamburgers from the bar’s out-of-commission cooler to chef Margot McCormack across the street at Margot Cafe & Bar for a neighborhood gathering. “Everybody was out helping everybody else,” Hanan says. “[3 Crow] was a second home to a lot of people. The tornado really helped us see that.”

Hanan was part of a recent mass turnover of longtime 3 Crow employees after operation and management changes.

That turmoil raises questions about further changes in a neighborhood that has already changed so much in recent years.

McCormack, for example, decided not to reopen her second Five Points restaurant, Marche Artisan Foods. From the kitchen window of Margot Cafe & Bar, she can see progress happening at the former home of Marche as it becomes Shep’s Delicatessen. “I know I made the right decision,’’ McCormack says. “But I’m a sentimental person. That pulls at the heartstrings for sure.”

Meanwhile, McCormack is not going anywhere anytime soon, having shifted breakfast, lunch and dinner to Margot. “It has taken us a full year to fix this patio,” she says. The awning had been ripped off in the tornado. Her sous chef Steve Muller passed away unexpectedly. Longtime employees had to move on when COVID closed the restaurant temporarily. “We’re hoping to step through the portal of this patio,” McCormack says, “to whatever the ‘new’ is.”

In talking about neighborhood change, McCormack and Laura Wilson of business incubator Citizen Kitchens both recognize their roles in gentrification after the 1998 tornado as they contemplate the future.

They came to East Nashville in the early 2000s. Wilson works out of Hunters Station, which became a hub for food, free coffee and supplies after the tornado. She lived in New Orleans for a decade, including during Hurricane Katrina. “Of course it’s gonna change,” she says, referencing the radical change she saw in her former city after the hurricane. “I want to remember where we came from — contribute to the becoming that also speaks to the past.”

“The tornado affected our neighbors,” Wilson says. “COVID affects a larger sphere all with different opinions.”

Graham-Mathews, whose husband is facing stage 4 cancer, says business is down 75 percent at Bolton’s — “a place where everybody came from all parts of town and sat down close to people that maybe didn’t have the same background.” She recalls an overwhelming generosity and warmth at the restaurant post-tornado, and hopes for a return to that — to conjure the positive parts of those tragic days and keep a spirit of community.

Folks like Lentz hope their reopening, among others, can offer signs of good things to come in accessible ways for neighbors.

“I have never felt more attached to a community in my life,” Lentz says. “I’m excited to see the people who are still here and deepen our relationships. … We miss them. After all, I’m proud of everybody for keeping our heads up.”

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On one woman’s journey to radical self-love

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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.

E

very day when I get home from work or school, I toss my keys onto a shelf where, for the past nine months, a trendy black waist trainer has lived. The waist trainer, a hand-me-down from my mother, was purchased during one of her fitness kicks after seeing pop stars like Lizzo sport one on Instagram. It was a little too snug for her figure, but it was the perfect fit for mine. I excitedly went home to try it on and attempted to do a few exercises. After nearly fainting from how constricted my torso was, I ripped it off to allow my belly to expand back to its normal size. I took in several deep breaths and tossed the treacherous piece of fabric onto the nearest surface, and that’s where it has resided ever since.

Though the trainer has remained stranded on that lonely shelf, my life has changed somewhat dramatically over the past nine months — from being arrested multiple times during peaceful protests over police violence and racial inequality to surviving COVID-19. I’ll save the details of those events for another essay, but one thing that came out of my experiences was the way I’ve come to recognize the role that capitalism plays in how the Western world shapes and enforces standards of health, physical appearance and the individual self. I began to wonder what on Earth would drive my mother and countless other women across the country to spend their hardearned money on a product that basically feels like a boa constrictor wrapping itself around its prey, squeezing tight enough to snap bones like twigs. What would you sacrifice for a cinched waist? A meal, perhaps? The ability to move and breathe with ease? A perfectly intact rib cage? Why would you make those sacrifices?

The goal here is not to ridicule women who strive for the “perfect” figure. It is to interrogate what authority any human being has to establish what is perfect — to challenge the very systems of power that not only create a standard but use it to exploit and oppress anyone who does not adhere to it. In contemplating how, exactly, women are guided to these notions of health and beauty, the truth began to unfurl in my mind. I journey back to my childhood.

I grew up a chubby kid who always left the mall empty-handed while my skinnier friends carried bags of clothing from almost every store. I understand now how that kind

of experience shapes the way that young girls’ and women’s bodies are both validated and invalidated. Fat phobia is impossible to ignore in the clothing industry.

I thought back to an essay I read in my gender studies class a few years ago about the origins of manufactured clothing. For centuries, most clothing was specifically tailored to a woman’s individual measurements, and more often than not, those clothes were made by that woman or someone in her household. Fast-forward to a woman walking into a market and, for the first time, instead of buying fabric, finding a completed garment for sale.

The advent of the clothing industry — by far one of the most impactful economic advancements in the Western world — created new standards for bodies. It’s arguable whether it was intentional that the earliest clothing brands only catered to small-framed women. In some cases, clothing was tailored to fit the person who designed it. In other cases, making small sizes was the most cost-effective thing to do. Since resources were more limited, brands would likely choose quantity over all else, with little regard as to who wouldn’t be able to find clothing that fit, or for the long-term impact these standards would have.

The most important thing I’ve learned in the past year is that capitalism depends on the discontent of consumers. The wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by more than 25 percent during the height of the COVID-19 crisis. The less satisfied we are with ourselves, the more willing we are to spend our money on things that we think will bring us closer to complete. This means that the people who profit from the clothing industry are the same people who profit from the food and fitness industries as well. The roots of body-shaming and fat phobia are economic.

Let’s say my mum is shopping in Whole Foods one day and she picks up a copy of The Washington Post. In it, she sees an ad with a super-fit celebrity wearing a waist trainer. She pulls out her iPhone, opens the Amazon app and orders the exact same item. It’s shipped to her doorstep the next day. In this case, a single man — Jeff Bezos, owner of the Post and CEO of Amazon, which owns Whole Foods Market — has a controlling interest in everything she sees, influencing not only what she buys, but where she buys it from. This type of power is especially dangerous because it governs every aspect of our vulnerable lives.

Nearly a year later, that waist trainer my mother ordered is sitting on a shelf in her daughter’s bedroom. My journey to radical self-love has been a process of great learning and unlearning, fueled by a fierce determination to not allow some white man to get rich by exploiting my insecurities.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

NASHVILLE SCENE | FEBRUARY 25 – MARCH 3, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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ART

BEING THERE

Exhibits by William Eggleston and Alicia Henry are worth your time

BY LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

I

f you’ve ever questioned whether seeing a work of art in person will change your perception of it, let two current exhibits on Hagan Street answer that for you.

Start at David Lusk Gallery, where a grid of 23 never-before-seen photographs by the legendary William Eggleston is spotlit like a moody film-noir set. The shots were taken in or around 1990, and the title — For Lucia — references Eggleston’s longtime mistress Lucia Burch. But the rest of the story behind the scenes is a mystery. The photographs are quintessential Eggleston — the snapshot aesthetic he pioneered is so prevalent in the digital era that it’s easy to take it for granted.

There are no ALICIA HENRY: 2020 AND 2021 clear highlights THROUGH MARCH 27 AT ZEITGEIST GALLERY, 516 HAGAN ST. in the series OPEN BY APPOINTMENT ONLY — that makes sense, given WILLIAM EGGLESTON: FOR that Eggleston LUCIA has described THROUGH MARCH 13 AT DAVID LUSK GALLERY, 516 HAGAN ST. his approach to OPEN 10 A.M.-5 P.M. photography as WEDNESDAY-SATURDAY “democratic”

FROM FOR LUCIA, SERIES,

BY WILLIAM EGGLESTON

FROM ALICIA HENRY: 2020 AND 2021, BY ALICIA HENRY — but if you spend any amount of time with it you’ll almost certainly come away with a few favorites. “Phil-a-Bag” might be the most Egglestonian of the lot, with a mixture of hand-painted and commercial signs, a stretch of rural road and a lot of atmosphere.

If it weren’t for the sign advertising a pack of cigarettes for 39 cents — which was likely an antique even when the photograph was taken

— you might mistake it for a local backroad.

Time moves slowly in certain parts of the world, and you can almost hear a Southern drawl in these shots.

The crowded installation of photographs on a single wall mimics the quickness of a camera’s lens, but seeing each of the images printed and framed underscores their preciousness. And they are precious.

Eggleston is among the most important living artists — the 81-year-old Memphian’s work is famously featured on album covers (Big Star’s Radio City and Silver Jews’ Tanglewood Numbers, to name just two), and he broke art-world barriers with his practice of capturing banal subject matter in full color. Being able to see this work locally before the rest of the world feels like a luxury.

If the Eggleston photographs are like soaking in a warm tub, the exhibit of new work by longtime Nashvillian Alicia Henry at Zeitgeist Gallery is an ice bath. The Fisk University professor’s fabric-based work photographs beautifully. But only when you see it in person — with its loose threads and nubby textures — can you fully appreciate Henry’s ability to turn rags into objects of devotion. One especially haunting lifesize body seems stitched together from balled-up and tattered socks.

As if planned to match the Eggleston grid, the south wall of the Zeitgeist space — the one daylight seems to pour onto regardless of the weather — is home to an assemblage of carefully spaced faces. Mask-like faces are common in Henry’s work, but these are more cartoonish than many of her past iterations, and seem to speak directly to the minstrel tradition she references. The faces are made from thick black textiles and leather, but they’re not monochromatic — the textures and pigments in the various fabrics have subtle differences that create a kind of spectrum of shades. Each face is different, but the tidy arrangement simplifies the group, like an old black-andwhite school yearbook or comic strips on newsprint.

This uniformity allows complex ideas to come out of subtle differences — a gaping hole in one head, an Edvard Munch “Scream” mouth on a face with pigtails, a gap-toothed jack-o’-lantern grin. This is a collection of some kind, but what you might take away from it — and whether you perceive it as sinister or lighthearted — depends on how much time you spend with it.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

nashvillescene.com | FEBRUARY 25 – MARCH 3, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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he title of Andrew Maraniss’ new book, Singled Out, captures the predicament that Glenn Burke faced in the 1970s. As a baseball player with extraordinary athletic gifts, Burke stood out even among his major league teammates. An extrovert with a colorful sense of humor, he offered entertainment in the locker room and leadership on the diamond.

What really made him different, though, was a secret he tried to conceal. By the time he reached the big leagues, Burke knew he was gay. Playing a sport that Maraniss describes as “the heart of homophobia,” Burke understood that staying in the closet was his only option. He led a double life for as long as he could — macho outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers by day, disco denizen by night — but soon rumors of his sexual orientation hastened his exit from the sport he loved.

Maraniss, who lives in Nashville, describes Burke as a magnetic individual with boundless charm. On bus rides, he sang along with music blaring from his boombox; he kept the dugout upbeat and engaged with constant streams of chatter. Decades SINGLED OUT: THE TRUE STORY OF GLENN BURKE

BY ANDREW MARANISS PHILOMEL BOOKS 320 PAGES, $18.99 MARANISS WILL DISCUSS HIS BOOK ONLINE 6 P.M. TUESDAY, MARCH 2, VIA PARNASSUS BOOKS later, journalist Lyle Spencer described him as “the most lively personality I ever covered in forty-five years in sports.”

Typically the instigator of team celebrations, Burke is credited with being the first athlete to deliver a high five when he spontaneously rushed to greet Dusty Baker after Baker hit his 30th home run in the last game of the 1977 season — making the Dodgers the first team in major-league history to have four players with 30 or more home runs.

Maraniss begins the story with Burke’s upbringing in Oakland, Calif., where his athletic legend began on the city’s blacktops.

His friends recall his amazing jumping ability, his ruthless competitiveness on the basketball court and his affability off of it.

Burke “was the funniest kid in his circle of friends,” Maraniss writes, “adept at perfectly mimicking the popular Black comedians of the day.” His performance on the court, leading to high school championships, turned him into an East Bay celebrity who seemed destined for success.

To account for Burke’s experiences off the field, Maraniss covers cultural revolutions of the 1970s and ’80s. Burke’s Major League Baseball debut in 1977 coincided with the

explosion of disco, a milieu in which a gay Black man could experience freedom and a measure of equality. In the offseason, and whenever he could sneak away during the season, Burke raced to clubs and indulged in all available pleasures.

Out of consideration for his younger readers, Maraniss soft-pedals the sex-anddrugs angle, but he makes it clear that Burke’s downfall was not the result of a random sexual hookup or occasional narcotic use.

Burke approached partying, especially in the Castro District of San Francisco, the way he played sports: at full speed, with maximum effort and balletic grace. Burke was perfectly suited to the disco era. Former MLB player Tito Fuentes compared Burke to “a glistening mirror ball at a discotheque when the light hits it and all of these different reflections and colors flash all over the room.”

Maraniss offers a nuanced perspective on Burke’s relationships with his teammates.

When spring training started, Burke left the expressive gay subculture and returned to the “repressive existence” of the Dodger locker room. With the team, he found joy on the field but struggled to fit into the players’ skirt-chasing lifestyle.

In the fishbowl of the MLB, Burke’s hidden life became difficult to disguise.

His teammates faced the dilemma of suppressing their suspicions or confronting Burke. In Los Angeles, clubhouse leaders Dusty Baker and Davey Lopes took different tacks. Baker felt compelled to learn the truth, so he talked to Burke and queried his friends, but no one gave a forthright answer. When Lopes heard the rumor, he thought about it briefly and then dismissed it as irrelevant. “You know what?

I don’t give a shit,” Lopes told a teammate.

“He was an integral part of the ball club.”

Maraniss deserves credit for giving proper space to Burke’s challenges. While still in the minors, Burke developed a “reputation as an unpredictable hothead” whose temper was often directed at authority figures. He was a poor judge of character, trusting friends who had proven to be selfish.

His drug abuse, which skyrocketed when he was a well-paid baseball player, continued during the thin years that followed, ultimately landing him on the streets.

Singled Out is marketed as a young-adult title — the author’s third, after Strong Inside and Games of Deception — but its content and language assume mature readers.

Maraniss is unsparing about the vitriol suffered by Burke and other gay people, most egregiously when the AIDS epidemic caused the deaths of thousands. This book pays long-overdue tribute to a cultural pioneer, a man who wanted simply to play ball and dance in a world that was not yet ready for his moves.

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

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NASHVILLE SCENE | FEBRUARY 25 – MARCH 3, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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MUSIC

Not even a pandemic can stop jazz sax champion Jeff Coffin and his Ear Up Records

BY RON WYNN

T

he pandemic may have essentially halted touring and limited most musical performances to livestreaming, but it hasn’t slowed Music City’s prolific Jeff Coffin one bit.

VISIT EARUPRECORDS.COM Though he’s best FOR DETAILS AND TO BUY THE known as a jazz LABEL’S LATEST RELEASES saxophonist, his many roles run the gamut from bandleader, composer and educator to author and longtime member of the Dave Matthews Band. He’s won Grammys for both jazz and pop performances with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. For many years, Coffin has also been a producer and owner of an independent label, Ear Up Records.

Ear Up has issued a host of memorable recordings covering a wide range of territory. Eminent saxophonist Dave Liebman came to Music City in 2015 and joined a band of Nashville jazz all-stars for a tribute to On the Corner, a polarizing classic from Liebman’s legendary onetime boss Miles Davis; Ear Up released the recording in 2019. More highlights from the label’s extensive catalog include Hot Chicken, a spirited 2016 release from Coffin’s fellow Nashville saxophonist Evan Cobb, as well as a wealth of duo and trio dates that match Coffin with musicians from a host of genres, playing music that ranges from way outside to very much in the groove.

2021 promises to be an extremely busy year for Coffin and Ear Up. The first of five planned releases — all of which he will play on — is coming Feb. 26, with the second to

WITH THE FLOW

Challenging times paint Lydia Luce’s Dark River in a new light

BY LORIE LIEBIG

I

f you were to sketch out the path that led Lydia Luce to the release of her second album Dark River, you would see two very distinct segments: the months before March 3, 2020, and everything that has unfolded since.

DARK RIVER WILL BE Over the past SELF-RELEASED FRIDAY, several years, Luce has FEB. 26; VIRTUAL RELEASE cemented herself as SHOW STREAMS FEB. 26 one of the local music VIA CENTENNIAL PARK CONSERVANCY ON YOUTUBE community’s most AND FACEBOOK prominent creative figures, thanks to her incredible talents as a singersongwriter and multi-instrumentalist. Her reputation as a sought-after string player has led to her performing on tracks for Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and Joshua Hedley. But Luce’s talent for writing music

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follow March 19.

“There’s no reason to just sit by idle,” Coffin says with a laugh during a recent lengthy interview with the Scene. “As a matter of fact, before we started I was writing a song. While there’s no question that the pandemic has really hurt the music industry and especially a lot of local musicians, this can also be a productive time, and I feel it really is a time when people need music the most. The inspiration and energy it can provide is vital in times like these.”

Both of the quickly approaching releases feature duo performances, musical situations in which cohesion and musical empathy are critical. There aren’t extra instruments around to bolster settings that might not be working, cushion mistakes, redirect meandering sections or draw attention away from what might be mundane or forgettable performances.

Symbiosis, out Friday, pairs Coffin with another formidable saxophonist, Derek Brown. The second, Let It Shine, matches him with cellist Helen Gillet and features the two playing on an impressive total of 13 different instruments. The challenging and greatly varied idiomatic material on both releases also reflects the mission of Ear Up. “My biggest reason for starting Ear Up was I wanted to create situations

that draws on the richness of postwar vocal pop and the intimacy of contemporary folk-pop shines through her solo work, which many heard for the first time on her 2018 debut record Azalea. That project quickly earned her praise from national publications. After the end of a long-term relationship in the summer of 2019, Luce headed out of Nashville for a trip to the Pacific Northwest.

“That for me was some quiet alone time to really feel deeply,” Luce says. “It was pretty lonely and kind of a sad time. I got really sick, and I didn’t feel the usual excitement and joy that I find when I’m alone and hiking and camping.”

All the same, she was able to sort through and explore her feelings. This was a process of emotional recalibration she needed to complete before diving into the material that would shape her new album.

“I just wasn’t ready to write those songs because I hadn’t really dealt with a lot of that stuff,” she says.

In January 2020, Luce headed into the studio with producer Jordan Lehning, who also worked on Azalea, to complete this new creative chapter. The result is Dark River, which she’ll release on Friday and celebrate with a livestream from the Parthenon as part of Centennial Park Conservancy’s Echo

for musicians where they weren’t being pressured by outside things, and where creativity and variety were at a premium,” says Coffin. “I’ve never really thought about genre in terms of the types of artists that I record. It’s always been much more about music and message, making sure the environment is right so that everyone feels right at home, is playing well and doing something that’s different. I’ve never wanted to just crank out or release something that would necessarily be pigeonholed or restricted. We also always want to have fun with what we’re doing, and I want to work with people whose music I enjoy and respect.”

That ethos is certainly reflected on Symbiosis, a collection powered by Coffin’s energetic, freewheeling improvisations and Brown’s equally imaginative “beatbox” saxophone technique. Brown utilizes slaptonguing and circular breathing, and creates a wealth of amazing melodic, harmonic and rhythmic leads or accompaniment.

The seven-song set consists of all originals, six of which the pair wrote together. The idiomatic contexts change constantly from avant-garde to funk, from soul/jazz to pop or rock-infused material.

Though it sometimes seems impossible given the amount of sounds that you hear — the torrent of melodies and notes and

the intensity that’s created — everything you hear on the LP was recorded live. Both Brown and Coffin excel in alternately fierce and poignant moments during their solo and interactive segments. Standout tracks include “The Belly Crawl” and the finale “Somewhere I Can’t Recall,” which features Coffin on four instruments and Brown on both tenor sax and what he calls “sax percussion.” Suffice to say, you won’t hear many two-sax recordings done like this one.

Coffin is also very enthusiastic about Let It Shine. “She’s exactly the type of artist I love playing with,” Coffin says of New Orleansbased Gillet. He calls their forthcoming LP “one of the best sessions I’ve ever participated in with anyone.” Gillet, a native of Belgium, is well-known among fans of Crescent City music for dazzling technique that includes just about every method you can imagine to get sound from the cello, from rubbing and slapping the body to flashy arco solos, edgy plucked accompaniment and digital looping. She also adds effective vocals sung in French and English.

Later in the year, on dates to be determined, Ear Up is set to release music from The Nu Gurus, Trio Nashville (whose name may change before the record is out) and The Viridian Trio. Aside from his continuing work at Vanderbilt as part of the Blair School of Music faculty, Coffin has a busy calendar that also includes In the Studio, a streaming performance series he began last year to benefit fellow Nashville musicians. Proceeds from donations gathered during streams benefit local out-of-work musicians and their families.

The concerts have been held regularly on Fridays at 7 p.m. A complete schedule and links to past performances can be found at facebook.com/jeffcoffinmusic. In addition, there are tentative plans for the Dave Matthews Band to resume touring this summer, and Coffin also says he’s hoping to work again with Béla Fleck.

“Oh, and I’m still writing songs all the time. For me it’s really about the music, doing whatever I can to help it grow and get it out to the people.”

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PHOTO: ALYSSE GAFKJEN

THE NOTES MUST GET THROUGH

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MUSIC

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SOUND AND SENSE

Mando Saenz transcends the tropes of Americana on All My Shame

BY EDD HURT

PHOTO: KIRSTEN BALANI

performance series. The album is an emotional, thoughtful and brilliantly crafted exploration of personal growth and acceptance. She addresses challenging topics like codependency and relationship struggles, grappling with confidence and trust in yourself, and eventually finding your own identity on the other side. “It’s about coming into who you are, fully trusting your gut — being 100 percent that person and not letting anybody take that away,” says Luce.

With the album mostly complete, she began planning for its release in mid-2020. But in the early hours of March 3, a tornado tore through East Nashville with Luce’s home directly in its path. Luce was in bed when she first heard the sirens go off, and was one of the many locals who looked at their phones to see @NashSevereWX (whose online coverage is credited for saving many lives that night) advising people to immediately head to the lower level of their homes. She made it to safety moments before a wood piling came through the wall in the exact spot where she had been lying just moments earlier.

“If I would’ve stayed in my room, I might not be here,” Luce says. “That was really intense and really, really crazy to think about after. It kind of wrecked me.”

This experience has changed Luce’s perspective on many things, including her songs. On the surface, the Dark River track “Occasionally” focuses on pining for a love that’s long gone. In the aftermath of the tornado, Luce hears it uniquely vocalizing the trauma of anxiety that can trickle into your mind and body without warning. “It’s cool how songs can really be so many things and have different meanings to people and whatever they are going through,” she says.

The pandemic brought its own waves of change to Luce’s life — “2020 feels like three years in one,” she says with a small laugh. Tour plans were put on hold, and the record’s release date was pushed back. Southern Ground Nashville, the historic studio where Luce recorded Dark River, was shuttered and put up for sale.

Although these unexpected events were challenging for Luce, they also allowed her to slow down and focus her energy on different creative outlets. She penned “All The Time,” a driving, empowering letter to herself, which became a late addition to the album.

“If I wouldn’t have pushed [the album back], maybe I wouldn’t have written that,” Luce says. “I spent a lot of time just dreaming up what these sounds look like, thinking about the artwork and getting to create some music videos, in the safest possible way.”

Another creative project close to Luce’s heart is Lockeland Strings, which is the name of both an ensemble and a performance series. It began as a simple DIY house show, but expanded into a monthly showcase with a deeply devoted audience.

While helping keep the creative community thriving, Lockeland Strings also partners with a new nonprofit each month. The format has been adapted to presenting livestreams on a less-frequent schedule during the pandemic, but Luce plans on bringing Lockeland Strings back to its previous state once COVID-19 has finally passed.

“The thing I miss maybe the most is just the community aspect of Lockeland Strings,” Luce says. “I love it, and those shows are so special.”

In many ways, Dark River stands as a soundtrack for perseverance, reflection and growth, whether it be from a past relationship or a chapter in life that simply didn’t go as planned. The road behind her was a bumpy one, but Luce sounds determined to keep moving forward.

ALL MY SHAME OUT FRIDAY, FEB. 26, VIA CARNIVAL MUSIC/EMPIRE

I

f Nashville is all about songwriting, as some observers believe, Americana music is one genre — far from the only one — that can have difficulty connecting good songs with interesting production styles.

In many cases, the song remains at the forefront, which means Americana is, at its core, deeply stylistically conservative. Still, when the formula balancing song to sound works right, you can wind up with music that’s both conservative and idiosyncratic.

Some artists figure out how to solve the problem, and you can hear that clearly on Nashville singer and songwriter Mando Saenz’s latest full-length All My Shame, out Friday. Produced by former Wilco and Uncle Tupelo drummer Ken Coomer in an alt-country-meets-power-pop mode, it’s a testament to the songwriter’s art, and perhaps Saenz’s finest record to date.

All My Shame is Saenz’s first collection since his critically acclaimed 2013 album Studebaker, which was recorded in Music City by producer Mark Nevers. Coomer’s production of All My Shame gives Saenz the aural signature his songs deserve — the

layers of acoustic and electric guitars define a record of intense self-examination. Saenz’s latest music lives in a pop-rock-country zone that exists somewhere between, say, Marshall Crenshaw’s 1999 album #447 and Dwight Yoakam’s 2003 record Population Me. For the Texas-bred Saenz, who first met Coomer in Houston when they were recording there in 2004, the fit between singer and producer seemed natural.

“We worked together before I moved to Nashville,” Saenz says from his Nashville home. He’s lived in town since 2006, when he made the move to Music City after spending seven years learning his craft in Houston.

“We did some sides, or whatever, and we weren’t sure if it was going to be a record or not. So we had real good rapport, and I knew how his mind worked in many ways.”

Saenz was born in 1973 in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, where his father was attending medical school. His family settled in Corpus Christi, Texas, when Saenz was in the fourth grade, and he began pursuing a music career in earnest during his stint in Houston. After signing a publishing and songwriting deal with Nashville producer Frank Liddell’s

Carnival Music Company, he released his second album, 2008’s Bucket, which was produced by R.S. Field in a country-rock style.

Bucket established Saenz as a songwriter whose tunes lent themselves to interpretation by country singers like Lee Ann Womack, who included his “When I Come Around” on her 2014 release The Way I’m Livin’. He’s also garnered cuts by Miranda Lambert and Jim Lauderdale, and his pithy songs seem endlessly adaptable.

For all that, he says he wrote his latest batch of material without thinking about how others might interpret his songs.

“I definitely wanted to make a new record as opposed to just another record,” he says. “I always consciously wanted to write something cool, something I could dig. If other people sang the songs, that’s just happenstance.”

All My Shame is a remarkably consistent record — just when you think it may have peaked, Saenz hits you with another superb song. In classic singer-songwriter fashion, Saenz writes tunes that would be effective delivered simply, with vocals and an acoustic guitar, but Coomer’s production raises the emotional stakes of songs like “Cautionary Tale” and “The Leaving Side.” As is often the case in Americana, it’s the electric guitars — played here

by Joe Garcia and Drivin N Cryin axman Laur Joamets — that make the difference between a very good demo and a fully realized record.

What this means is that All My Shame works as fusion music. If you’re a student of the subtle differences between alt-country and power pop, you might notice the way the record’s opening track “The Deep End” begins as a Celtic-flavored stomp, or how the New Wave-style organ in “Talk Is Cheap” echoes the song’s melody during its instrumental break.

Every song signifies, and Saenz’s lucent tenor voice seems a bit recessive until you listen closely. The aforementioned “Cautionary Tale” rolls through a maze of Beatles-esque chord changes, while “In All My Shame” builds in intensity over five minutes. Meanwhile, “As I Watch You Slowly Drift Away” contains one of the album’s finest couplets: “She laughed like a broken train / The cover of a magazine she used to read.”

All My Shame registers as Texas singersongwriterdom — the sheer level of craft puts Saenz in the league of artists like his contemporary Hayes Carll or ones from a previous generation like Robert Earl Keen. It’s also a very romantic album, since Saenz casts himself as a passionate man who attempts to learn from his mistakes.

The record’s emotional pinnacle is “I Can’t Stay Alone for Long,” which suggests the line between love and obsession might be blurry, as he sings: “Lord, what have I done? / But it ain’t the morning yet / The night has just begun.”

Saenz makes melancholia sound appealing, and nothing could be more attractive than being able to perform that trick. Still, it’s not really a trick, because Saenz means it. All My Shame takes you down a rueful avenue, and you might emerge from the experience feeling uplifted.

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MUSIC

THE SPIN

LEAN IN CLOSE

BY LORIE LIEBIG

O

ne of the last pre-pandemic performances at the Ryman was songsmith Ruston Kelly’s sold-out headlining debut at the venue. The show bookended a busy touring run in support of his second LP Dying Star

and covers EP Dirt Emo, which is also the name Kelly gives his folky, indie-rocking sound. Kelly has found even more success with his acclaimed follow-up Shape & Destroy. The album came out in August, and the pandemic has prevented him from touring behind it. Friday night, nearly a year after that Mother Church milestone, Kelly introduced many of the Shape songs to a live audience for the first time, streaming from the electrified cobalt glow of Third Man Records’ Blue Room.

Shape & Destroy covers a much different chapter of Kelly’s life than the one

documented in Dying Star, which was mostly written as he was struggling with addiction.

This time around, even the most uncertain moments are buoyed by a feeling of hope, along with the love of others helping him move in the right direction. Accompanied by his father Tim “T.K.” Kelly on pedal steel, sister Abby Sevigny on background vocals, producer Jarrad K on keys and Juan Solorzano on electric guitar, Kelly took advantage of a more stripped-down setup to showcase the songs close to their original form.

“I wanted to make this a special thing we

BLUE LIGHT SPECIAL: RUSTON KELLY

can do together, because how do I know if we’ll ever do it like this ever again?” Kelly said. “I partly wanted to reach a place where a lot of these songs came from, [which was] a more intimate place. I wrote a lot of these songs on the back of the bus on the Dying Star tour, and a lot has happened since then.”

The set list leaned heavily on songs from Shape, including “Radio Cloud,” “Mid-Morning Lament” and “Closest Thing,” along with earlier fan favorites like “Mockingbird” and “Mercury.” Throughout

V I R TUAL

the show, there was plenty of lighthearted, friendly banter between Kelly and his bandmates. Discussion topics ranged from reminiscing about his father’s incredible artistry and skill in the studio to recalling a set at a casino that ended with a young, unimpressed onlooker demanding a Toby Keith cover, which Kelly declined.

On a slightly different note, one of the most emotional moments of the evening came when Kelly sent out a message to a fan who has an especially important connection with his music. He dedicated “Hallelujah Anyway,” the poignant last song on Shape & Destroy, along with “Clean” to Drew, a man who is also navigating the path of sobriety.

“That’s a tough road, my friend,” Kelly said. “Your girlfriend or wife — if it’s not your wife, she should be, because she seemed to really care about you — she reached out to me to say this record helped you get there, so this one’s going to you, bud.”

The set did feel short but sweet, coming in at just more than an hour with another 30 minutes or so of material reserved for VIP ticket purchasers only. Even so, it served as a fitting live introduction for a record that in many ways reiterates the importance of human connection, through the best and worst of times.

“I feel like the luckiest person in the world to hopefully make something beautiful out of the mistakes I’ve made and my observations of the world,” said Kelly.

“And I hope you get more out of it than I do.”

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FILM

PRIMAL STREAM 44 Campy Kristen Wiig, wordless Nicolas Cage and more, now available to stream

BY JASON SHAWHAN

of extricating oneself from fundamentalist religions and how to bridge into the secular world. It’s not often that we get horror films focused on Jewish traditions (see also 2015’s exceptional Tikkun), but this film hits like a ton of bricks. Like I said, I had to light the candle of soothing and centering. Buckle up.

BARB AND STAR GO TO VISTA DEL MAR

THE VIGIL

W

hat with last week’s ice storm and the continuing chaos of the pandemic and all that, I found the best way to help the economy was to rent some video-on-demand titles. It’s been a long time since you could go to the video store and rent a bunch of new releases in the physical sense, but if you’ve got an enduring chili recipe and a heart that occasionally seeks comfort in the ephemera of the past because the present is just too disheartening, you can find and approximate that Video Store Feeling in your own timespace.

All of the below are new releases that can be found via video on demand. As always, for more recommendations of what to stream while you’re at home, look back at past issues of the Scene.

THE VIGIL

Usually if I’m lighting the mango-coconut candle, it’s due to a very specific type of anxiety: political shenanigans, biochemical misalignment, a menacing snarl from the woods out back. But it also serves its purpose when something just gets too scary (and yes, the candle was lit on Jan. 6). And that’s what happened while I watched The

BARB AND STAR GO TO VISTA DEL MAR

Vigil, even just on a laptop with headphones.

I delight in horror films, and whatever imaginative disruptions they can throw — but every once in a while, something drags a talon along the part of the hippocampus that controls the fear response, and you just have to resort to soothing sense memory.

Hence, the candle.

Set around the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, The Vigil is about Yakov, who is learning to adapt to life outside of the Haredi. He’s making progress, but awkwardness abounds, and money is a problem. So when Reb Shulem seeks him out to fill in as a shomer for an evening, Yakov manages to get enough for the gig to cover his rent — problem solved.

Now, being a shomer involves sitting with a corpse and saying prayers of protection throughout the night. It’s a meaningful tradition, and one that has existed during the development of Judaism throughout the millennia, protecting the body from desecration and spiritual interloping. But what happens if it’s more than a tradition, and what if there is something tangibly dangerous involved?

This film is theologically provocative, but not in a way you’ve seen before. It is deeply, deeply scary. And it also has perceptive things to say about the process

Ideally, you’ll want to do your frozenmargarita prep before you even read this review. Those who were wondering how Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo would properly follow up the rightful phenomenon of their film Bridesmaids were first keyed in by the abstract, Madonna-scored trailer that surfaced back in late 2019/early 2020.

The colors: bright; the mood: uncertain; the vibe: distinctive. And at its heart, a mystery.

Those who have now seen the film itself and luxuriated beneath its tropical fronds can tell you that Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar is a surreal romp through 40-something decadence, breaking free from routines, potentially apocalyptic Florida adventure (both mosquito- and gator-related), the power of sexual liberation, the necessity of mythmaking and the enduring bonds of friendship. This film isn’t for everybody, but everybody could certainly find some joy within it. A lip-synching child, a Grace Jones deep cut and a Ryan Tedder parody addressed to beachside seagulls were the three steps by which this deeply strange film won me over completely. Wiig and Mumolo embody these characters with an infectious joy that powers through occasional deadends. (Like my beloved Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, this is daffy magic with the occasional momentum-shifting sandtrap.) Jamie Dornan displays a deft comic genius as a lovestruck henchman who just wants to be part of an official couple.

The unintentional laughs he garnered in the Fifty Shades trilogy are nothing compared to how genuinely enjoyable and funny he is here, and he fits into the universe perfectly.

Especially given the recent crazy weather, this is your emotional poolside margarita of a movie to watch with your friends and the lovers in your heart. (I’m at two viewings already.)

WILLY’S WONDERLAND

This is a weird film. I have no background with the Five Nights at Freddy’s media empire, so I’m not qualified to evaluate any similarities between that concept

and this one — except to say that this film incorporates a satanic serial-killer cult of amateur children’s entertainers and features Nicolas Cage in a role wherein he does not speak. Rather, His Cageness shakes, struts, grunts and shrieks, and it’s unexpectedly awesome. The eight animatronic creatures that inhabit the family funspace of Willy’s Wonderland are all perfectly unsettling when the light is right, with senior menace Willy Weasel and the guidance-counseloresque Cammy Chameleon representing the most potential damage to kids who might accidentally see this. National treasure Beth Grant is also along for the ride as the town of Hayesville’s sheriff with a secret. The teenish supporting cast doesn’t get a chance to make too much of an impression, but the design is exactly the right combination of inspired and hackneyed. Plus, Cage is better here than he was in Color Out of Space (a great film in which he didn’t really mesh all the way with the premise).

PG: PSYCHO GOREMAN

Nita-Josée Hanna is the young star of this film, and this may be the first time an actual young performer seems to have studied Mink Stole’s immortal portrayal of Taffy Davenport in John Waters’ Female Trouble. Little Mimi, the heroine of this film, is a difficult role to properly inhabit — petulant and conniving, but also perceptive and complex. And when she finds herself the possessor of an enchanted gem that allows her to command an extradimensional menace that she comes to name Psycho Goreman (“PG for short”), you can imagine how her life (and that of her family) turns upside-down. PG can eviscerate her enemies, transform her crush into a tentacled brain, and even play drums in her band! Of course, anytime you start messing around with cosmic forces, there’s going to be a grand confrontation with all sorts of monstrousness. (Personal fave: a mobile cauldron stuffed with skulls, viscera and ichor of all sorts that can spray myriad noxious fluids at its enemies.) At its best, PG: Psycho Goreman feels like a collision between the more anarchic strains of Canadian children’s television, the TV Guide description of E.T. (but not the actual movie), and one of those splatterific R-rated Italian fantasy epics from the early ’80s. It was made by members of Astron-6, the Canuck collective behind The Void and The Editor.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

WILLY’S WONDERLAND

nashvillescene.com | FEBRUARY 25 – MARCH 3, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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FILM

THE DEVIL WE KNOW Olivier Assayas’ early-2000s digital collage returns, restored and uncut

BY NATHAN SMITH

C

haracters in Olivier Assayas movies are constantly consuming media. The stars of his films are as much spectators themselves as they are spectated by the audience: In Irma DEMONLOVER Vep, Maggie Cheung NR, 122 MINUTES sifts through OPENING FRIDAY, FEB. 26, videotapes of Hong VIA BELCOURT.ORG Kong action movies and silent French serials; 20 years later, in Personal Shopper, Kristen Stewart watches YouTube videos about the occult and clips from old movies. When Assayas’ avatars aren’t watching, listening or reading, they’re often producing media — like Juliette Binoche’s characters in Clouds of Sils Maria and Non-Fiction, acting in hyper-stylized superhero movies and police procedurals.

But no Assayas movie interfaces with multimedia experience and the many screens of 21st century life like 2002’s Demonlover, recently restored and uncut

by Janus Films, with plans for an eventual physical-media release by The Criterion Collection. In one scene, Chloë Sevigny lies on a hotel bed nude like the subject of an Impressionist painting, playing the cyberpunk-influenced video game Oni on her PlayStation 2; Connie Nielsen surfs the web, fiddles with a camcorder, and watches forgotten nu-metal band Soulfly perform their hit “Back to the Primitive” on cable; Gina Gershon makes jokes about Lara Croft of Tomb Raider.

Both in content and style, Demonlover is a film that often feels like the restless, fidgeting uncertainty of browsing the

internet or flipping through pay-per-view channels. It’s like a digital collage — a million lines of code, a thousand JPGs and GIFs, and a virtual ecosystem of vibes all smeared into one. In some ways it feels very dated, depicting an era when Internet Explorer felt like the final frontier — the flip phones, the now-primitive CGI sequences, the opening credits typed out in Impact font and a hilariously placed poster for Roland Emmerich’s misbegotten 1998 American Godzilla remake. But even 20 years later, Demonlover still drips with a kind of icy and innovative cool, a virtual Videodrome starring some of the hippest women who ever walked onto a movie set and a jagged razor blade of a score courtesy of Sonic Youth.

The plot is, in some ways, just window dressing — or maybe more aptly, screen dressing, a desktop background for a network of character relationships and transactions to unfold upon. We open in the most liminal of all spaces: an airplane, midinternational-voyage, with out-of-context explosions from anonymous action movies unfolding silently across the in-flight movie monitors while most of the passengers sleep.

Diane (Nielsen) is a conniving, backstabbing agent in a French media company working at all costs to earn exclusive global distribution of the world’s most successful producer of hentai — Japanese animated pornography, varying from physical comic books to absurd and expensive CGI productions about superpowered girls with impossible proportions fighting zombies and being pleasured by tentacle monsters. Though anime was already a

massive international industry in the early Aughts, it’s only become more prevalent and dominant in the West, a form of media that so many millennials and younger have become completely fluent in.

What begins as a trashy airport thriller — dripping with corporate espionage, sexual intrigue and anime clips that are sure to make the most stone-faced viewer blush — soon disintegrates into a pixelated labyrinth, somewhere in the no-man’s-land between the iconic anime Ghost in the Shell and David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Call it Lost Information Superhighway. Just as quickly as Diane rises to power, the tables are turned, and the formerly lowly secretary Elise ( Sevigny) becomes a powerful corporate dominatrix. Faster than a fiberoptic cable, Diane has fallen from her newly earned position as e-girlboss and corporate assassin to become a victim, an object of surveillance, an image.

More than a portrait of living through digital chemistry or a warning about losing yourself in and on the web, Demonlover is a study in transaction: Assayas constantly surveys and documents the swiping of credit cards, the signing of contracts, the jargonistic discussion of business deals. It’s

ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROAM The breathtaking Nomadland is a fitting tale for a wandering nation

BY CORY WOODROOF

I

t’s easy to miss things in a pandemic — a vacation spot, your favorite dish from a restaurant that has temporarily closed, overpriced hot dogs at a ball game, seeing a movie you know you’ll love forever on the silver NOMADLAND screen. They’re things we R, 108 MINUTES take for granted. Take NOW AVAILABLE TO that feeling, multiply it by STREAM VIA HULU a thousand, and that’s what it feels like not to be near the people you love in a time of crisis. Living through the isolating hell of COVID-19 has been numbing but edifying. We’re all a bit listless, cobbling together new, strange experiences out of the remnants of our old lives.

Filmmaker Chloé Zhao has spent her last two films — movies that have catapulted her to soughtafter status in Hollywood in a short amount of time — mourning the things and people we lose when life changes and we have to find a new path forward.

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She has found a kinship with the struggles of the American West, a land once replete with golden possibility.

In 2018’s stunning The Rider, Zhao depicts a cowboy having to hang up the saddle for the sake of his health, unsure of what life will look like moving forward. With Nomadland (now streaming via Hulu), Zhao studies one woman (Frances McDormand) as the representation of a fractured nation in the wake of economic devastation. She’s also living through a universal experience, trying to cope with loss and what it means to wander anew. Nomadland was made before COVID-19 hit, but it works as an analogy for what we’ve all experienced over the past

year, slogging through an uncertain, dreary time.

McDormand’s Fern has lost her husband and her job in economically distressed Empire, Nev., and it’s sparked an irreversible change in her. She’s sold all of her belongings and has decided to wander across the West in a van. Zhao taps into what filmmakers like the Coen brothers and Martin McDonagh have found in McDormand: Her steely resolve, quick wit and undeniable depth make her a perfect vessel for Fern’s lament. As she goes through the ups and downs of nomadic living, Fern is full of both optimistic curiosity for a new life and the crushing weight of what she carries with her. Certain passersby interweave their stories with hers — a dying woman

a film about women who have advanced to the highest echelon of capital, but they’ve done it by destroying other women — and even then, they’re still living in a system in which they can easily become the action figures and playthings of men. Assayas, a French filmmaker, specifically casts nonFrench women — mostly American — to act in his film about the seedy workings of international capitalism to emphasize that these women are stars, the products of a film industry who have commodified their images. Though men play only a sidelined, almost marginal role in Demonlover, the absolutely jaw-dropping final images — the rare ending I would never dare spoil — reframe the entire movie to make us consider how these powerful women have still been dominated and brutalized by the patriarchy, even if they have previously seemed to be the authors and avatars of their own destiny. Demonlover is less an active condemnation of digital culture and more a sad resignation to the lack of free will we have in an algorithm-driven world.

Even when you think you’re in charge of your life, someone else is almost always holding the controller.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

(the mononymic Swankie as herself, a true original) shares her life’s story, a kindred nomad (David Strathairn) gently tries to court Fern at various stops, and a hallowed nomad (real-life nomad Bob Wells) unearths the grander realities at play for those who choose this style of living.

All along, Zhao finds nothing but beauty and aching in Fern’s story. She’s here because the system that’s supposed to serve everyone in a nation as prosperous as the United States failed her, and because the cycle of life is unforgiving. Likewise, we’ve found ourselves gripped by a pandemic caused

by Mother Nature’s fickle patterns and worsened by humans’ systemic failures.

Fern seems unable to settle as she processes the trauma of her past throughout the film, but it’s never without hope for better times ahead. The grand empathy of Zhao’s vision finds a world where nomads won’t wander forever, and where no goodbye is permanent. Nomadland posits a key tenet of the nomad: What we once loved is never really gone, and we’ll find it down the path eventually. It might not be the same as it once was, but it’ll return to us one day.

Roger Ebert’s line about film being like a machine that generates empathy is referenced frequently, but that’s because it’s one of the truest lines ever written about the medium. Zhao’s film, however accidental, is the empathy machine we need to get us through the pandemic. For that, it will live eternal.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

NASHVILLE SCENE | FEBRUARY 25 – MARCH 3, 2021 | nashvillescene.com

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Co. with a plant Choose randomly, in a way Specialty Like legs in the days after a marathon “Get ’em!”

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S U H P I TC

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