Nashville Scene 9-17-20

CITY LIMITS: OFFICE OF NEW AMERICANS LEADER TO FOCUS ON COVID, CENSUS

SEPTEMBER 17–23, 2020 I VOLUME 39 I NUMBER 33 I NASHVILLESCENE.COM I FREE

PAGE 9

MUSIC: EAST SIDE VENUE DRKMTTR KEEPS EVOLVING TO MEET ITS COMMUNITY’S NEEDS PAGE 22

South Gotta Change Guest editor Adia Victoria and her fellow artists explore the South’s legacy of racism

T BONE BURNETT

ADIA VICTORIA

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The story of country music is open-ended, always evolving, surely inspiring.

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum honors that story every day, come what may.

Here, the past is present, and tomorrow is within reach.

Our doors are open, and we invite everyone to explore the galleries and the music, observing our newly established protocols.

Visit CountryMusicHallofFame.org for more details.

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NASHVILLE SCENE | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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9/11/20 12:45 PM

CONTENTS

SEPTEMBER 17, 2020

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FOOD AND DRINK

CITY LIMITS

Walk a Mile: Nolensville Pike ....................7

In the ninth installment of his column, J.R. Lind explores the multicultural thoroughfare south of downtown

BY J.R. LIND

Pitch Perfect ...............................................8 One big win against Atlanta sets Nashville SC up for an unlikely playoff spot

BY STEVE CAVENDISH

Pith in the Wind .........................................8

This week on the Scene’s news and politics blog

New Mayor’s Office Staffer to Focus on COVID, Census ............................................9 Office of New Americans’ Mohamed-Shukri Hassan has a long history in local advocacy work

BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT

Finding Our Lost Spring

Mixologist Mike Wolf talks to his colleagues about the pandemic in a new compilation book benefiting hospitality workers

BY MARGARET LITTMAN

20 ART

Spellbound

Messages in Threads and Wings offers talismans for dark times

BY ERICA CICCARONE

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BOOKS

A Multitude of Elegies

Ayad Akhtar creates a powerful literary assemblage in Homeland Elegies

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BY HAMILTON CAIN AND CHAPTER 16

COVER STORY South Gotta Change

Life Down Here ........................................ 10 Three artists describe their experiences as Black Southerners COMPILED BY ADIA VICTORIA

We’re Gonna Find a Way ........................ 11 Talking to Adia Victoria and T Bone Burnett about ‘South Gotta Change’ and our region’s legacy of white supremacy

BY ANDREA WILLIAMS

Generations for Change ......................... 13 Two members of one family discuss the decision to join the fight for justice

BY JACKIE PAUL SIMS AND RIENNE J. HILL

Reading Flannery O’Connor in the Age of COVID ....................................................... 14 Talking to writer and critic Kiese Laymon about the racial implications of the iconic Southern author’s work

BY ADIA VICTORIA

‘Untitled’ .................................................. 14 ‘i was a half a mile / down the road / by the time i heard / my own clamor / mispronounced / from the mouth / of the white woman / at channel four.’

BY JOSHUA ASANTE

‘Bedtime in Mississippi’ ......................... 15 ‘Here, the soil speaks through gritted teeth’

THIS WEEK ON THE WEB: Jason Eskridge,The Pink Spiders and Many More to Play Music City Bandwidth Gov. Lee’s Police Reform: Coronavirus Money for Officer Training Succulent Vegan Tacos to Set Up Shop in Farmers Market Remembering the American Negro Playwright Theatre founder Barry Scott

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ON THE COVER:

Adia Victoria and T Bone Burnett Photo by Daniel Meigs

MUSIC

Going Boldly ............................................ 22 Mickey Guyton stands strong on her new EP Bridges

BY ANDREA WILLIAMS

Not Dark Yet ............................................ 22 Drkmttr keeps evolving to meet its community’s needs

BY P.J. KINZER

The Spin ................................................... 24 The Scene’s live-review column checks out Margo Price at Brooklyn Bowl

BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

25 FILM

Primal Stream 25 ................................... 25 Bette Midler, ’70s vampirism and The New Mutants, now (and soon) available to stream

BY JASON SHAWHAN

Sibyl Disobedience.................................. 26

Despite spellbinding performances, Sibyl spins from complicated into messy

BY SADAF AHSAN

Ante Up .................................................... 26 Antebellum is yet another depiction of Black pain

BY CIONA ROUSE

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BY CRAIG D. LINDSEY

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FROM BILL FREEMAN THE CENSUS IS IMPORTANT TO YOUR POCKETBOOK AND YOUR VOICE IN CONGRESS The U.S. Constitution mandates that we count our population every 10 years, which in practice is much more difficult than it sounds. This year in particular, the U.S. Census Bureau is struggling to count our population because of many obstacles, not the least of which is the president of the United States.

President Donald Trump’s administration has instilled deportation fears in many who would otherwise participate, and some folks feel uncomfortable completing the census form online, thinking it is not secure and is perhaps intrusive of their privacy.

Census officials assure us, however, that all information is secure.

The coronavirus has of course created challenges, making it difficult for census workers to conduct in-person checks and to have sufficient time for training.

Have these challenges overwhelmed the responsibility and importance of our decennial count?

The census isn’t a method for Uncle Sam to peek into our private lives, but it is essential in the apportioning and allocating of a wide array of critical services to our communities. United States congressional apportionment is distributed among the 50 states according to the most recent census, as are electoral college votes. If we don’t submit our census, we could lose political power in Congress, which is quite important in the forthcoming presidential election as well as elections to follow. Ten states are already set to lose a congressional district due to a lack of 2020 census returns.

Tennessee is not currently one of them, and participating in the census will help keep it that way.

Census results also influence highway, infrastructure and public transit systems.

With Nashville currently on hold for a larger mass transit system, a true calculation of the number of people in Middle Tennessee could increase grant dollars and government funding. We all know we have little time to wait. The U.S. Census also helps local and regional business owners, who use the data to inform many key decisions — decisions like expansion locations, inventory selection and much more. Without accurate census data, businesses could suffer even beyond the problems COVID-19 has caused.

Federal funding for public education, employment and health care — including Medicaid and Medicare — is also influenced by the census count, and it impacts our social services, including rural community development, child abuse prevention, adult education, free and reduced lunch programs, and housing assistance.

It’s understandable that some folks might feel wary of providing personal information about the people in their household. Thus it’s not surprising that the Census Bureau is struggling to complete an accurate count.

For some, the fear goes far beyond simple discomfort in providing dates of birth, names and ages — they’re concerned for their very security. President Trump tried to insert a new question about citizenship into the census, but the Supreme Court blocked those efforts. The damage was already done, however: That attempt left

many afraid to respond.

For those who are concerned, there is help through the Census Bureau. Paper forms can be requested and mailed back to the bureau in lieu of online submission.

Keep in mind that the end-of-September deadline is closing in fast. For those concerned with the security of their personal information, there is comfort in knowing that the Census Bureau is a government agency, and Title 13 of the U.S. Code demands that such agencies insure citizens’ privacy. As noted on census.gov: “During the 2020 Census, the Census Bureau will never ask for your Social Security number, bank account or credit card numbers, or money or donations. So, if someone contacts you via email or phone and asks for any of those details, it would be a tip-off to a scam.”

The coronavirus has also limited the normal activities of door-to-door census representatives, but for the next few weeks they will be contacting people in communities nationwide to gain the needed information. As with any unsolicited requests for information, the census gives helpful recommendations on how to verify a census worker’s identity before sharing any personal information at 2020census.gov.

It’s especially important that Nashvillians participate, because it will help build our community in the future. Mayor John Cooper has employed a Complete Count Committee to spread the word about the census. Responsible citizens can help in this effort: The committee is asking that Nashvillians post on social media platforms to inspire others to “pledge to complete the 2020 Census.” You can even film a video using the following script: Hello Nashville! 2020 is a census year, and we need YOU to participate.

The more Nashvillians who get counted, the more federal funding we’ll receive for our hospitals, schools, road repairs and other important services.

Your census response is protected by law and will never be shared with law enforcement or immigration agencies.

To learn more and respond, visit 2020census.gov or call 844-330-2020.

And remember, your response matters in shaping Nashville’s future.

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

Editor-in-Chief D. Patrick Rodgers Senior Editor Dana Kopp Franklin Associate Editor Alejandro Ramirez Arts Editor Laura Hutson Hunter Culture Editor Erica Ciccarone Music and Listings Editor Stephen Trageser Contributing Editors Jack Silverman, Abby White Staff Writers Stephen Elliott, Nancy Floyd, Steven Hale, Kara Hartnett, J.R. Lind, William Williams Contributing Writers Sadaf Ahsan, Radley Balko, Ashley Brantley, Maria Browning, Steve Cavendish, Chris Chamberlain, Lance Conzett, Steve Erickson, Randy Fox, Adam Gold, Seth Graves, Kim Green, Steve Haruch, Geoffrey Himes, Edd Hurt, Jennifer Justus, Christine Kreyling, Katy Lindenmuth, Craig D. Lindsey, Brittney McKenna, Marissa R. Moss, Noel Murray, Joe Nolan, Chris Parton, Betsy Phillips, John Pitcher, Margaret Renkl, Megan Seling, Jason Shawhan, Michael Sicinski, Ashley Spurgeon, Amy Stumpfl, Kay West, Andrea Williams, Cy Winstanley, Ron Wynn, Charlie Zaillian Art Director Elizabeth Jones Photographers Eric England, Daniel Meigs Graphic Designers Mary Louise Meadors, Tracey Starck Production Coordinator Christie Passarello Events and Marketing Director Olivia Moye Promotions Coordinator Caroline Poole Publisher Mike Smith Senior Advertising Solutions Managers Maggie Bond, Debbie Deboer, Sue Falls, Michael Jezewski, Carla Mathis, Heather Cantrell Mullins, Stevan Steinhart, Jennifer Trsinar, Keith Wright Advertising Solutions Manager William Shutes Sales Operations Manager Chelon Hill Hasty Advertising Solutions Associates Emma Benjamin, Price Waltman Special Projects Coordinator Susan Torregrossa President Frank Daniels III Chief Financial Officer Todd Patton Corporate Production Director Elizabeth Jones Vice President of Marketing Mike Smith IT Director John Schaeffer Circulation and Distribution Director Gary Minnis For advertising information please contact: Mike Smith, msmith@nashvillescene.com or 615-844-9238 FW PUBLISHING LLC Owner Bill Freeman VOICE MEDIA GROUP National Advertising 1-888-278-9866 vmgadvertising.com

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In memory of Jim Ridley, editor 2009-2016

NASHVILLE SCENE | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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nashvillescene.com | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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NASHVILLE SCENE | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

CITY LIMITS

Walk a

Mile

NOLENSVILLE PIKE

In the ninth installment of his column, J.R. Lind explores the multicultural thoroughfare south of downtown

BY J.R. LIND | PHOTOS BY ERIC ENGLAND THE ROUTE: From

Peachtree Street

Foster Avenue

Nole

e le Pik nsvil

with J.R. Lind

Joyner Avenue

Once a month, reporter and resident historian J.R. Lind will pick an area in the city to examine while accompanied by a photographer. With his column Walk a Mile, he’ll walk a one-mile stretch of that area, exploring the neighborhood’s history and character, its developments, its current homes and businesses, and what makes it a unique part of Nashville. If you have a suggestion for a future Walk a Mile, email editor@nashvillescene.com.

T

his is a place where people from all over come together, and it’s been that kind of place for a long time.

It’s also a noisy place, and given its history, it’s easy to imagine that it’s been relatively noisy for a long time, too.

It is loud on Nolensville Pike.

North and south, commuters and work trucks and various other conveyances of commerce rush in and out of downtown, which peeps into view over the ridge of hills that divide it from South Nashville. Below, east and west, traffic moves along Interstate 440, drivers thrilled they can now push the throttle to the speed limit without risking permanent structural damage to their undercarriage. The ring road’s infamous potholes and ridged surfacing have been recently smoothed, the long-familiar huckachuck sounds gone and replaced by more conventional traffic noise.

The trains run underneath as well, branches of rail line coming together at Radnor Yard farther south, and then in perfect 19th-century efficiency, lining up in parallel on the final stretch to the city proper.

It is bustling and it is loud on Nolensville Pike. And it is busy in a way that downtown, with its Potemkin economy of party-throwing, isn’t. The people on Nolensville Pike and those using it for their coming and going are at work, going to work or coming from work (or maybe all three). Which isn’t to say it’s just charmless capitalism here. Quite the

Nolensville and Melrose Avenue, south to Joyner, crossing Nolensville, then back north. Left on Lutie, left on Foster, left on Peachtree returning to the start.

CRANES: 0

ABANDONED SCOOTERS: 0

contrary. Though there is plenty of evidence of ruthless moneymaking (Nolensville may have more payday lenders per foot than any street in America not adjacent to a military base), the stretch of Nolensville south of 440 is almost a surrealist reinterpretation of a Tocquevillian vision of America: familyowned stores and a veritable smorgasbord of international cuisine; so many small, storefront churches, they must come up with increasingly elaborate names to differentiate themselves from one another; a clutch of lawyers and accountants who’ve hung their shingle to protect the rights and money of the people.

But before the Comte de Tocqueville journeyed across America, before even the Sieur de Montbrun hunkered down in his cave, this was an important place.

What would become Middle Tennessee was rife with game, drawn by salt licks and an abundance of water sources. The land wasn’t the territory of any of the surrounding Native American tribes, but was held in a sort of condominium by the Shawnees, Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws and Cherokees. They’d agreed to share it, an arrangement largely to the credit of the Shawnee, and they’d come together to trade and treat, their meeting place a smooth stone 40 feet by 50 feet near what is now the intersection of Nolensville and Whitsett. The flat rock eventually served as the namesake for the broad area south of town: Flatrock.

The impressive and expansive wroughtiron-fence-bound campus of Iglesia Una Esperanza Viva is sort of the northern gateway to this stretch of Nolensville. It being Wednesday morning when I take my walk, its asphalt parking lot is mostly empty save for a few church buses and a modified golf cart that, almost anywhere else, might be the symbol of some ill-fated transpotainment venture. This particular vehicle, however, is almost certainly used for helping less mobile parishioners get to the sanctuary. Twin lions — labeled “Lord of Lords” and “King of Kings” — roar silently

and eternally at the church’s gate.

Across the street, Woodbine Plaza is a microcosm of the cultural stew that Nolensville is, at least locally, famous for. It includes a Persian restaurant, a Muay Thai studio, an auto parts shop and a pizzeria.

At Elberta, an evanescent real estate office looks as though its staff was raptured mid-sale, a lonely coffee pot still plugged in.

Next door, Creech Ladders & Racks, given the high turnover of its neighboring businesses, seems a cenotaph of stability — in fact, it’s “only” been in business since 1987.

How in the world, one wonders, can a store that sells ladders, which no one ever replaces, stay in business so long? Diversification, that’s how. Creech now promises to be “a one-stop shop experience for everything you need in a multitude of industries.”

Over the road is the Hickerson’s Motel Court, built in 1951, its blue-and-white lighted sign — still one of the city’s best — once a beacon for northbound travelers in the days before interstate highways. Those midcentury tourists probably never imagined their respite would one day neighbor a Honduran restaurant. They also probably never considered it would be across the street from a cat cafe. For that matter, they probably never considered the existence of a cat cafe. The Mewsic Kitty Cat Cafe — it was Nashville’s first cat cafe, if you can believe it — is closing soon, but on this morning, more than a dozen felines are still lounging, rolled up inside used drums as the first warming rays of the sun chase away the shadows. The cats, being cats, simply roll over so as not to be awakened before their usual time, which is probably midafternoon.

He-Man alerts passers-by that Totally Rad Toyhouse will buy used toys. The shop features shelves full of vintage playthings, and its “no solicitation” sign advises wouldbe solicitors: “If it’s not toys, we don’t care.”

A hookah bar — no doubt succumbing to pandemic pressures and the resultant widespread realization that putting mouths on shared objects isn’t the best idea — is out of business next door, but a new club concept is inbound, and it probably won’t use a disease vector as its main draw. This little strip includes a wing joint, a vintage store and, yes, a storefront church with a complicated

multi-claused name.

La Hacienda, a Nashville Mexican food destination so venerable that even Barack Obama grabbed some tacos there (though not a margarita the size of a stock tank), sits at the light at Nolensville and Joyner.

Though it is rightly famous for its food (and, again, those drinks), it is also notable as having one of the three most convoluted parking lots in the city. (Frugal MacDoogal and Star Bagel round out this particular trifecta.) Why are there two spots in the middle of the lot, forming a rectangular roundabout, if such a thing can exist? The mind boggles.

Walking briefly back north on Nolensville, the strip opposite includes a Venezuelan restaurant, a pair of immigration attorneys, a well-hidden Alcoholics Anonymous meeting spot and, given my rather paltry knowledge of the Spanish language, what I assume is a metaphysical store, selling tarot readings and various crystals for a glimpse at the future.

But look no further than Lutie Street for that glimpse. The tall-and-skinnies are arriving, at least on the edge of the street closer to Nolensville.

It was on Lutie where Kathy Jones, the 12-year-old victim of a brutal 1969 rape and murder, lived. She walked from her home on Lutie, past the back entrance of the fire hall (which remains) and on to Nolensville, intending to go to the roller skating rink near the intersection of Nolensville and Thompson Lane, which for many years was home to the recently shuttered Performance Studios. Her body was found three days later in a vacant lot behind the Krispy Kreme. The case remains unsolved.

Kathy’s home, near Lutie’s crossing of Burbank, remains much as it did 51 years ago, as do many of the houses on the eastern end of the street. There are obvious revamps and rehabs and new paint jobs (pastels seem particularly popular), but the pushovers that seem prevalent on the other end of the road haven’t yet made their mark.

As loud as Nolensville is, the old — and in late summer, quite bushy — trees and slight downward slope of Lutie cause an almost sudden silence. Eerie if you know the history, but welcome in any case.

Just past what may be the only pair of

nashvillescene.com | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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CITY LIMITS

THIS WEEK ON OUR NEWS AND POLITICS BLOG:

short-and-skinnies in the city, Lutie runs into Foster, where the Mini Mart (or Mini Market, depending on which sign you believe) pushes the boundaries of the definition of “Mini,” stretching at least one-third of the long side of the block.

Foster Avenue climbs north, the houses larger and more bebricked than those on Lutie and in an amalgam of Nashville preWorld War II styles: cottages, four squares, even a hint of Victorian.

There’s a variety of churches — in more traditional facilities than those on Nolensville — including St. George’s Coptic Orthodox Church, a local congregation of an ancient branch of Christianity distinct from the more familiar foundational denominations of Roman Catholicism and even Eastern Orthodoxy. It is part of the Oriental Orthodox tradition, which holds to a miaphysite Christology, believing that Jesus’ humanity and divinity are united in a single nature. This is contra the vast majority of Christian flavors, which hold to the doctrine established at Chalcedon in 451 that

SPORTS

PITCH PERFECT

One big win against Atlanta sets Nashville SC up for an unlikely playoff spot

BY STEVE CAVENDISH

A

t the end of four minutes of stoppage time, the referee blew the whistle on Nashville SC’s convincing 4-2 win over Atlanta United on Saturday night at Nissan Stadium. Head coach Gary Smith turned to his staff — he high-fived one coach and fist-bumped another, and finally elbow-bumped another awkwardly. Just because they’ve figured out how to play games in the COVID-19 era doesn’t mean anyone’s figured out how to appropriately celebrate yet.

It didn’t matter. A jubilant Smith congratulated his players as they walked off. More than six months ago, Nashville SC faced Atlanta in the opening game of the year — a 2-1 loss to this same United side, a team that was supposed to be a contender for the title. That loss felt a little bit like a win, with the raucous 59,000 fans in the stands for Nashville’s first-ever MLS game.

But a lot has changed since then.

First came the coronavirus and ensuing shutdown.

Then, as the league transitioned into an ingenious restart tournament in a bubble environment in Orlando in June, Nashville and one other club were kicked out for a disqualifying number of positive COVID-19 test results. If you were drawing up the worst possible way to start an inaugural season, this would pretty much be it.

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the divine and human natures of Jesus are separate but united in a single body. Sound esoteric? It sure is! If it’s too much to ponder, simply enjoy St. George’s sign, which features a rather vigorous painting of their patron slaying his dragon.

A certain pattern emerges after the turn west on Peachtree, which is (probably) not an extension of the confounding number of roads with that name in Atlanta. Many of the homes have the same quite unusual layout. The porches are shaped like a flipped L, with one front door on the edge of the short arm of the L and a second front door on the end of the long leg. Indeed, it appears they came from the same kit. Back when it was possible to order a home from the Sears catalog, someone seems to have done that in what was called Overhill City.

The homes, largely built in the mid-1930s, follow the Collingwood model, available with materials (including paint) for $1,497 dollars in 1935 (the equivalent of about $28,000 today).

But the properties aren’t simply ditto-

marked copies of one another. Yard art is popular on Peachtree: birdbaths disguised as mushrooms embraced by gnomes, a planter shaped like an ant made from propane cans and a motorcycle gas tank. Another front yard is consumed by a thriving wildflower garden teeming with butterflies, particularly Gulf fritillaries.

Where Peachtree climbs back to Nolensville — the stretch that was the longtime home of late Scene editor Jim Ridley — and closes the loop is the Peachtree Drive-In, a restaurant that offers burgers, sandwiches and other favorites with the dash of international fusion appropriate for the neighborhood. Rather confusingly, there are signs out front saying it is both opened and closed during the pandemic, so caveat eator. In any case, there’s lots of open space under the wide shade trees surrounding the alarmingly green building.

It looks like a great place for people to come together, just as they have in this part of the world for centuries.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

It would have been pretty easy to write off this season. But to Smith and general manager Mike Jacobs’ credit, the team has stayed together, and in the eight games since the restart, Nashville is 3-3-2 and has moved into contention for one of the final playoff spots. Their biggest problem had been a lack of scoring, notching only five goals going into Saturday’s game.

Smith sensed that they were due.

“Sometimes you feel a spirit and an energy within a group pregame,” Smith told reporters after the team picked up all three points in the standings. There wasn’t a lot of rah-rah from him. There was a little bit of bulletin-board talk about United’s Miles Robinson — an excellent young defender who mouthed off to the Atlanta press about his team having more talent than Nashville — but Smith has felt a turn coming in the club. Why? Because the chances have been there, but not converted. Coming into the game, neither Dominique Badji nor Hany Mukhtar, two key attackers, had scored.

When the team took the field, that raucous crowd from February didn’t greet them. Nissan Stadium was empty, due to the ban on large gatherings in Nashville, but it didn’t seem to matter. Badji tapped home the first goal 59 seconds into the game, and Mukhtar added another 27 minutes later. Captain Dax McCarty added a third — a third! — in the 36th minute, and honestly, Nashville ran Atlanta so ragged that it looked like they could’ve scored five or six goals before the half.

Sitting in the locker room, McCarty thought to himself that this was a must-win game. Get past Atlanta — who Nashville has faced twice already because MLS limited travel in what the league has been calling “phase one” of the schedule — and all of a sudden the team just might have a chance to sneak into the playoffs. That’s a wild thought for any expansion team, even in a year as messed-up as this one has been.

Smith, Jacobs and team owner John Ingram have been thinking about it too. With Smith’s side well-organized and defensively strong but lacking firepower, the club went out and acquired Venezuelan striker Jhonder Cádiz from Portugese giants Benfica last week. He’s an interesting player with a lot of upside, but he might have done his best work already in lighting a fire under Badji, Mukhtar and winger Abu Danladi, who rounded out the scoring on Saturday. There’s nothing like fear of losing your job to motivate you.

“I’m not one for coincidences,” Smith said when asked if the signing lit a fire under his attackers.

“Competition is always a key factor in the way players play. Those guys know there’s someone coming in.

They’re certainly looking over their shoulder.”

The fans of most expansion teams shouldn’t have the right to hope for making the playoffs — even an expanded playoffs where most of the league gets in. This time last season, FC Cincinnati was trying to figure out how to not let three or four goals a game fly past their goalkeeper. What Nashville SC is doing is rare, even if the smaller season puts an asterisk in the record books.

As MLS enters “phase two” and lets teams travel outside their regions, the next three games represent a huge opportunity: Columbus (away, Sept. 19) leads the Eastern Conference; D.C. United (home, Sept.

23) is currently a dumpster fire; and Houston (home, Sept. 26) is fighting for a playoff spot in the West.

Pick up four or more points from those games, and all of a sudden Nashville SC might actually be able to host a playoff game by the time fans are allowed back into Nissan Stadium.

Wouldn’t that be something? A near-disaster of an inaugural season turned into an unforeseen gem.

If it happens, can anybody help Smith figure out how to celebrate? Maybe just give him a hazmat suit and let him finally hug somebody.

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Gov. Bill Lee rolled out his long-promised police reform package, though it didn’t include much that was unknown beforehand, nor did it have much that excited reform activists. As previously announced, the state will make a national registry of disciplined officers more available to Tennessee agencies, and Tennessee’s own Notice of Separation form will be expanded to include the reason for an officer’s departure. According to the governor’s office, law enforcement agencies must use the form by the end of the month. Those changes will help weed out officers fired or disciplined for misconduct as they seek new jobs at other agencies. As also previously announced, minimum training hours for officers will be boosted from 400 to 488 hours, including use-of-force training and “positive community and officer interactions.” Other items on the training docket include de-escalation techniques, duty to intervene, officer wellness and public assemblies. The state will allocate $300,000 in federal coronavirus relief funds for 90 cadet scholarships to the Tennessee Law Enforcement Training Academy. A group of law enforcement leaders also came up with a sample use-of-force policy checklist. Rondriquez White, a local Black Lives Matter organizer, says that the “wildest” part of the announcement is that the governor plans to use coronavirus relief funds on police training as opposed to community needs like housing and education associated with the pandemic. As for the substance of the announced reforms, White is unhappy but not surprised. “This isn’t the type of stuff we asked for, and it just gives the police more power,” he says. “It’s an opportunity for the governor and his cohort to say, ‘Hey, we did something,’ without actual input from the community.” … An updated evictions moratorium from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was even broader than the original moratorium that was part of the CARES Act passed by Congress earlier this year, but the new broad directive from the CDC contains very little information for courts, renters, landlords and attorneys. “It’s a broad eviction moratorium,” says Kerry Dietz, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee and the Cumberlands. “Pretty much any residential lease is going to be covered. There’s a lot that is ambiguous. How it will be implemented is still a little up in the air.” While representing two clients in court, Dietz got the impression that judges were “dragging their feet” because “they want to wait and get some more direction about what to do.” The Tennessee Supreme Court could soon issue guidance to state courts about how to interpret the CDC order. For now, there’s nothing.

A spokesperson for the Davidson County Circuit Court Clerk said “we currently don’t have any updated orders from the courts.”

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NASHVILLE SCENE | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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CITY LIMITS

NEW MAYOR’S OFFICE STAFFER TO FOCUS ON COVID, CENSUS Office of New Americans’ Mohamed-Shukri Hassan has a long history in local advocacy work

BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT

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

Walk a

Mile

MOHAMED-SHUKRI HASSAN

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ELEVATE YOUR VIEW

M

ohamed-Shukri Hassan has come a long way from delivering pizzas from a Pizza Hut on West End Avenue, and he’s come even further from

his native Somalia.

Hassan’s family moved to the United States as refugees when he was a kid, and to Nashville in search of better jobs shortly after he graduated high school. Hassan began attending Nashville State Community College, and later Tennessee State University — from which he would graduate — launching a decade of service to other immigrants and refugees in the city.

That work culminated in his appointment last week by Mayor John Cooper as director of the Office of New Americans. In that role, Hassan will largely be focused on the city’s COVID-19 outreach to immigrant and refugee communities, which have been especially hard hit by the pandemic. One item on his résumé could prove particularly valuable in that work: He served as an outreach worker for Metro Public Health for more than two years while he was in school.

“I speak four different languages, so I was doing a lot of outreach back then to special populations, especially to immigrant mothers who were breastfeeding,” Hassan says, just a few days into his new job in the mayor’s office. “I have already had a call with the health department person in charge of the testing sites. Coming into this position, I’m well aware of the inequities and the needs of the community, especially in South Nashville.”

Hassan is already working on a plan to bolster the city’s coronavirus-related outreach in 11 different languages, including Spanish and Kurdish, and setting up satellite testing sites in different communities. Though COVID-19 and its outsized effect on immigrant populations will be his primary focus in the short term, another pressing matter will also

be part of his purview: the census.

The decennial count is already well underway, but Nashville leaders, like their counterparts around the country, are scrambling to make sure as many residents as possible are included in the tally. An undercount could mean a decade of underfunding for schools, housing, transit and more. And due to language barriers and other issues, immigrant and refugee populations can be the hardest to count, putting their neighborhoods at even greater risk of losing out on resources.

“The next few weeks I’ll be focused initially on planning a big event in Southeast Nashville to have civic and religious and community groups help the city get the word out [about the census],” Hassan says.

“Besides COVID, that will be another big chunk of work moving forward the next few weeks. I’ll be finding different strategies in how to communicate especially to new Americans.”

The new director does not think his work will include much response to federal immigration raids or fallout from Metro collaboration with federal authorities, as he says Metro has mostly done away with agreements with immigration authorities.

He wants his work on that front to be more proactive than reactive to one-off emergency situations.

“Obviously as someone who came here as an immigrant, I understand the impact it can have,” he says.

Hassan is trying to take a more holistic approach to new American outreach. That means countering the perception that immigrants and refugees only live in Southeast Nashville rather than in pockets all across the county and region.

“We are a city made of neighbors, and everybody lives beside each other,” he says.

“I’m honored to be serving the city I love and the community I love.”

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nashvillescene.com | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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South Gotta Change Guest editor Adia Victoria and her fellow artists explore the South’s legacy of racism

Life Down Here Three artists describe their experiences as Black Southerners

COMPILED BY ADIA VICTORIA RESPONDENTS: Danielle Buckingham: Black Mississippi writer and creative Zaire Love: filmmaker, music maker, hood griot Joshua Asante: musician, writer, transient

T

he South is a land forged by the brilliance of Black imaginative thought. I reached out to a few of my friends in the creative world whose vision of what is possible for the South inspires me and pushes me to see the beauty of this region and her people. The artists below — representing Arkansas and Mississippi — have managed to distill the soul-split nature of the South into art that is clear-eyed, radical and unflinching. They represent the heartbeat of forward-thinking Southern culture.

DESCRIBE YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO THE SOUTH IN ONE WORD. Tumultuous. DB Complex. ZL Hemiola. JA

HOW HAS COVID-19 IMPACTED YOUR IDENTITY AS A SOUTHERNER? I think it has exacerbated already-existing problems. Like the fact that there are some towns in Mississippi whose hospitals really don’t have the capacity or resources to deal with a COVID outbreak. I think being in the South sets us apart in that way, particularly

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The South is a land of extremes, and a land of extreme contradictions. It is a land of unparalleled beauty and unanswered questions. It is a land whose past will not pass and whose future remains singularly unclear. I wrote my song “South Gotta Change” very much feeling the weight of my own Southern identity.

This year has been the year of unanswered questions. The burden of “Why?” bears down upon us all. But I also believe this year has given us the ability to examine our lives, the systems we swim through, our relationships with one another. My hope is that this issue of the Scene challenges the way you understand the South — the culture, the people, the history, the possibility. Truly examining our environment is the first step to any meaningful change. I thank the Nashville Scene for providing space for my voice and my art. I thank you for engaging with this issue with an open heart and an open mind. —ADIA VICTORIA Editor’s note: Adia Victoria is a poet, writer and blues musician living in North Nashville. Following the release of her song “South Gotta Change” — which addresses the South’s legacy of white supremacy — we invited her to guest edit, or curate, this Scene cover package. In this issue we’ve also included a piece from contributor Andrea Williams that discusses Victoria’s work with noted producer T Bone Burnett.

those of us living in or from rural areas.

And especially if you’re poor and/or Black and/or queer. It puts us at an even greater disadvantage when we already have regionalspecific issues compromising the health of marginalized folks. And then a pandemic on top of that is disastrous. DB I don’t think it has in the present. I believe that revelation will come after it has passed. ZL I feel that in a lot of ways Southern folk en masse deal with a bit of inferiority in relation to the rest of the country. No one really talks about it, but it’s there. Like a cultural birthmark, or that stain in the floor that ain’t going no place, so you just step over and get on with the day. For me, some of the Southern reluctance to adhere to pandemic-related restrictions added to that bit of shame. But that’s just the funk of life down here; and it’s in the fibers of everything. JA

WHAT ROLE CAN THE ARTS PLAY IN REIMAGINING A BETTER SOUTH? I think art provides an alternative and more accessible way to make sense of the regional-specific issues we face. I think about Jesmyn Ward’s writing, and her also being a Black woman from a small town in Mississippi. She gave me permission and audacity to say, “I want to be a writer, and maybe I can be a writer.” I think the very visibility of Southern artists, musicians and writers opens up a realm of possibilities, particularly for young people who grow up in places like Mississippi, and the narrative around the state really makes us feel worthless unless we somehow remove ourselves. But being in the South and creating art and sharing that art and growing art communities here, it’s so liberating and necessary. DB Making and demanding space for diverse voices and experiences within and outside of the binary. ZL Only the arts can reimagine the South

to the extent of being a better place to be and thrive in. It takes the dreamers and the sound makers to shape new realities. I believe that this world, if it’s worth keeping, will never be more valuable than the art it produces and the diversity therein. The same is true for the country’s underskirts. JA

IF YOU COULD MAKE A PROMISE TO FUTURE GENERATIONS OF SOUTHERNERS, WHAT WOULD IT BE? Everything feels so all-over-the-place and unpredictable that I don’t even know how to answer this. To keep it short: I promise to do my best to get us a little closer to being free. DB I promise to make space for Black experiences, stories and voices to be heard, expressed, documented and archived, to inspire you and to affirm and confirm that you all come from a mighty lineage. ZL Whites gone white. JA

JOHN LEWIS SPOKE OF THE NEED FOR “GOOD TROUBLE” WHEN CONFRONTING INJUSTICE. WHAT DOES GOOD TROUBLE LOOK LIKE TO YOU? This is complicated, especially when so many young folks have been out in the streets and demanding more of politicians and having their “non-respectable” methods demonized. To me, good trouble is anything that actively defies the power structure in this country. Good trouble is demanding and overbearing. It is disruptive to those who hold the most power in this country.

And it is challenging, or should be, for those of us who have too much blind faith in this country. DB Creating, documenting and archiving the movement and Black life in a way that preserves stories from the source, so that our history can not be revised as the

dominant culture has done for centuries. My good trouble is ensuring that the revolution is indeed televised/filmed and documented while also creating music, art and spaces that tell I was here. ZL I strive to be a well-rested Black person with my good mind intact. In this country, there are few things more troublesome than that. JA

WHAT HAS KEPT YOU TIED TO THE SOUTH? My grandmother and siblings, my community, but also I feel at home here. I feel a very complicated type of safety here.

I know this place. And I don’t know, it feels irresponsible to say I love Black folks, to say I love my family and my ancestors whose roots are mostly in Mississippi, and to then get up and turn my back on it. I think love and a sense of responsibility keep me tied to the South. DB My purpose in documenting and archiving through film the stories and lives of my people and ancestors while also creating my art that is deeply influenced by this place. ZL The possibility of bumping into Nikky Finney some place. JA

WHAT SOUTHERN MUSICIAN, WRITER OR POET HAS BEST ARTICULATED YOUR SOUTHERNERNESS BACK TO YOU? Jesmyn Ward. DB Nina Simone. Maya Angelou. Kiese Laymon. Jesmyn Ward. My granny.

Myself. ZL Henry Dumas/Sun Ra toss up. Because being down here, at the geographic bottom of things, just feels Black. Like space. And free will. And the dark, vast spine of the Mississippi snaking through my childhood memories and up, up, up into the cosmos. JA EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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

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ADIA VICTORIA

We’re Gonna Find a Way

Talking to Adia Victoria and T Bone Burnett about ‘South Gotta Change’ and our region’s legacy of white supremacy

BY ANDREA WILLIAMS

I

t’s been six years since Adia Victoria released her debut single, “Stuck in the South,” a searing, moody track that reveals the inherent struggles of a Black woman born and raised in a land that has given her life but continually denies her liberty. “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout Southern belles,” she sings, “but I can tell you something ’bout Southern hell / When your skin give ’em cause / to take and take.”

The American South is a constant source of inspiration for the South Carolina-born Victoria, a modern blueswoman with a spirit that harkens — and pays homage — to the ancestors. And on Aug. 28, with her Black brothers and sisters still marching in the streets, still asking, begging, for acknowledgement of rampant injustice, Victoria released “South Gotta Change.”

It is, perhaps, the younger, more fearless, spawn of 2014’s “Stuck in the South.” This time around, Victoria is not lamenting centuries of pain. This time, she is

PHOTOS: DANIEL MEIGS

South Gotta Change

T BONE BURNETT demanding recourse.

The lyrics to “South Gotta Change” came easy for Victoria. Later, for the song’s musical foundation, she turned to legendary producer and 13-time Grammy winner T Bone Burnett. Burnett was born in St. Louis but raised in Texas, so he knows well the ways of the South. Still, before coming back to Nashville, 50 years in Los Angeles had created a misguided belief that the modern South — what he refers to, unironically, as the Confederacy — had somehow come to terms with its wretched legacy.

“Just going to the grocery store and the dry cleaners in L.A., you deal with 15 different ethnicities, and everybody’s peaceful, everybody’s respectful,” Burnett says. “I thought that’s the way the world was, but moving back to the Confederacy showed me that it’s not.”

Ultimately, Burnett’s decision to produce “South Gotta Change” — to orchestrate the gothic guitar wails that underscore Adia’s vocal yearning — is reflective of the song’s powerful message: “ ’Cause I love you, I won’t leave you / Won’t let you slip away / Come what may / We’re gonna find a way / The South gotta change.”

“My thesis is, essentially, that the Civil War never ended,” Burnett explains. “There was a ceasefire, but it was never resolved.

And I believe we’re in the moment, right now, to finally resolve the Civil War in favor of equal rights for all people.”

“While [African Americans] and their descendants have been overcoming indignity for over four centuries, they have in return given the world literature, art, music, knowledge and wisdom, and shown the world grace, courage, faith, perseverance and forgiveness, and for that, the world owes them the deepest respect and gratitude.” —FROM T BONE BURNETT’S FORTHCOMING ESSAY “THE CONFEDERACY” IT IS WHOLLY APPROPRIATE THAT, in a city where music is the source of both immense pride and blistering prejudice, Victoria (who is Black) and Burnett (who is white) have partnered to leverage it as a healing force.

“I think about what equity and justice would look like, especially in the South and in a town like Nashville,” Victoria says.

“Whose story is being told? Who gets to tell the story? Who is the subject? Who is the seer? And from those stories, what are the truths and myths that are built?”

Burnett calls these myths the “delusion

of white supremacy,” and while the delusion may have changed shape over time, it remains deeply entrenched nonetheless.

If the delusion of 1820 was the belief that Black people could and should be bought and sold like cattle, that they were to be perpetually denied access to the wealth generated by their physical labor, the delusion of 2020 is the belief that Black ideas are now currency. It is the idea that Black people should now be locked out of the industries built by their creative and intellectual labor. And nowhere is this

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

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PHOTO: DANIEL MEIGS

South Gotta Change

ADIA VICTORIA AND CREATIVE PARTNER MASON HICKMAN

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delusion more prevalent than in Nashville.

In an essay written for Amazon’s audiobook platform Audible, slated for a Sept. 24 release, and called, aptly, “The Confederacy,” Burnett speaks to this truth: “While [African Americans] and their descendants have been overcoming indignity for over four centuries, they have in return given the world literature, art, music, knowledge and wisdom, and shown the world grace, courage, faith, perseverance and forgiveness, and for that, the world owes them the deepest respect and gratitude.”

This idea of an unpaid debt strikes directly to the core of “allyship” — a term that has been used frequently in our postGeorge Floyd world but that still remains rather nebulous. How do American whites,

and Southern whites in particular, repay what has been stolen?

Put simply, allyship is action. It isn’t hashtags or black squares on Instagram or even regular Zoom conferences that call attention to inequities without ever doing the work to solve them.

It is, in Burnett’s case, making time to produce Adia’s song, and using his platform to spread it widely. It is telling his friends about the truth of white supremacy and how it always hovers close, suspended in the air, as potent and dangerous as any virus.

“In the South,” Victoria says, “I think one of the reasons we are so hard-pressed to get past the Confederacy is because the myth will not die. You think of what James Baldwin said: The reason why white people hang onto their hate is they don’t know what to do without it. They’d be flailing in the wind.”

While Burnett believes that many of these white people are ultimately “good,” he also knows that it is the “good” people who present the most danger to humanity. In Nashville, few people are the direct ideological offspring of Nathan Bedford Forrest — the Ku Klux Klan leader, Confederate general and general genocidist. Instead, they descend from people who may have never raped or killed or looted, but who stood silently by as Forrest and others enacted their own reign of terror on the Black community.

Getting “good” white people to act on behalf of the oppressed has always been this country’s most strident challenge; indeed, we wouldn’t be here, in a nation still fraught with racial inequity and violence, if more of them were willing to do so. But alas, it seems that the best way for white folk to connect the dots of white supremacy and see how it continues to draw harsh lines through society is to marry a Black person, to have a Black child, or to otherwise be in such an intimate relationship with a Black person that the struggles once rendered black-andwhite in a news report now stand before them in three-dimensional Technicolor.

“Black people have to constantly negotiate with whiteness,” Victoria says.

“I think it’s time that white people have to negotiate with us.”

And this is where the storytelling comes in — where songs like “South Gotta Change” have the potential to do the work that legislation and marches have failed to. Will it work? Burnett, who has dedicated his remaining years to the fight for equality for all people, seems to think so: “If you look at Memphis in the ’50s, you had Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash,” he says. “None of them probably had a high school education, but they changed the whole world, those four guys.”

Victoria is a master storyteller who knows and feels, deep in her marrow, how white supremacy has stripped everyone, Black and white, of their humanity. Thankfully, she is as ready as anyone to help the South be the change the world needs to see. “Black people,” she reminds us, “have never wanted to do back, in kind, what has been done to us.

“I’m looking at this from a spirit of grace,” Victoria continues. “It’s grace that allows people the space and the opportunity to grow. The most important things we learn in life are often the things that we mess up, the lessons that come from having someone else guiding us.”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

NASHVILLE SCENE | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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South Gotta Change

Generations for Change Two members of one family discuss the decision to join the fight for justice

BY JACKIE PAUL SIMS AND RIENNE J. HILL Editor’s note: Longtime activist Jackie Paul Sims is a member of Community Oversight Now, a group of activists who successfully lobbied to establish a board of citizens to oversee the Metro Nashville Police Department in 2018. Sims is the mother of this week’s guest editor Adia Victoria. She introduces an essay by Victoria’s 16-year-old cousin Rienne J. Hill.

Why I Joined Teens for Equality

This summer, case after case of police killings of Black women, men and children began to flood the media. I read countless stories of Black Americans being assaulted and killed by the police. I began to realize that too often police do not see Black people as innocent, or even as people. You could be minding your own business and still be a

PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

H

ow excited I was to hear that my great-niece is involved with Teens for Equality.

Here in Nashville, we are three generations of Black women, on different paths, intersecting, to do the work of social change.

This work has always been a generational enterprise. The generations are not necessarily related, but the power from the transfer of wisdom, knowledge and understanding from generation to generation persists. The work of the civil rights movement in the mid-20th century, again in Nashville, is the perfect example.

I think about my training sitting under Dr. James Lawson, 12 years ago, when I moved to Nashville. I took two of my daughters to hear him and learn about nonviolent social resistance. Two generations earlier, Dr. Lawson also trained a young group of Freedom Riders from American Baptist Seminary, Fisk University, Tennessee A&I College (now Tennessee State University) and Meharry Medical College. A then-young John Lewis would become Congressman John Lewis, who made a lifetime commitment to social change. John Lewis would influence countless organizers and activists over the next generations. Some would be older, like me, but mostly they’d be younger, with the fire and energy to protect the union and its peoples as it continues to bend toward justice. Rienne is now making her debut in the work through the activist group Teens for Equality. She feels the urgency of now, because she has a very young brother whose future she wants to protect. Soon I will retire from the work, but this work of our nation becoming a more perfect union will carry on from generation to generation.

Becoming is a work in progress! JPS

JACKIE PAUL SIMS (LEFT) AND RIENNE J. HILL target. And the police who kill us often still roam the streets. Where is the justice for the people who are killed?

Ever since George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer was caught on video, killings of other Black people by police have been receiving more attention. But why did it take Mr. Floyd being slayed for America to finally pay attention to the corruption in our justice system? I have recognized the privilege these officers hold. They abuse their power and get away with it, and the system protects them.

Seeing the protests this summer gave me hope, because they made me realize that I have a voice. Even though the state government passes unconstitutional laws to lock

protestors up, they can’t silence us all. The inequality and injustice I have witnessed have inspired me and so many kids across the country to stand up for our future and demand change. My mother was concerned for my safety at the protests in downtown Nashville, and I understand. There is always the potential for violence when the people come out and demand change.

But soon enough I heard about a group called Teens for Equality that was organizing protests with thousands of people here in Nashville. I was inspired to see kids my age pushing for change in our community.

Even friends of mine from school were organizers with Teens for Equality. I joined the group in July, and I will continue to

organize and march for change, just like John Lewis and the student protestors did in Nashville in the 1960s. It’s up to kids to push for a better world and a better future.

I don’t want my little brother to grow up in a world where he has to fear for his life just because of the color of his skin. I am organizing to keep kids like us safe. I hope that other kids educate themselves on the injustices of this system, because our future is at stake. It’s up to us to stand and make our voices heard, even when it seems impossible. If we stand together against oppression and corruption, I know that things will change for the better. They can’t silence us all. RJH EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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

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South Gotta Change

Reading Flannery O’Connor in the Age of COVID

‘UNTITLED’

‘i was a half a mile / down the road / by the time i heard / my own clamor / mispronounced / from the mouth / of the white woman / at channel four.’

Talking to writer and critic Kiese Laymon about the racial implications of the iconic Southern author’s work

BY JOSHUA ASANTE

BY ADIA VICTORIA

A

t the onset of quarantine, I found myself seeking comfort in the familiar. I surrounded myself in the safety of childhood snacks and my favorite records, and I spent time with the authors whose work provided me community when I needed it most.

Flannery O’Connor’s work, with its themes on the sacred, the outrageous and the grotesque, would prove to be the art that spoke truth to this moment of heightened absurdity. Last month, I spoke to Mississippi-based writer, essayist, educator and cultural critic Kiese Laymon about O’Connor’s short story “Judgement Day” and the South — both its past and reimagining its future. Laymon is the author of the critically acclaimed Heavy: An American Memoir.

Adia Victoria: Kiese, how are you?

Kiese Laymon: I’m good. I’m in Mississippi.

I’m glad you reached out to me to talk about Flannery and “Judgement Day.” Out of all the white Southern artists my friends and I talk about, we talk about O’Connor the most, because, I mean, she’s complicated.

I think she’s wonderfully complicated and fucked-up. But a lot of my Northern folks — they just don’t mess with her, you know what I’m saying? They’re just like “she’s racist and hopeless.” [Laughs]

AV: You know, to me, I don’t see her as complicated. I see her as thoroughly and completely Southern. I had a conversation with a friend from Ohio recently about people grappling with her legacy, and my response was like, “She grew up in the Jim Crow South in Georgia, like, she was supposed to be racist.” [Laughs] And to expect her to be anything other than that kind of minimizes the potency of white supremacy and its ability to shape hearts and minds. What else could she have been?

KL: I think it’s interesting to bring up Northern folks when discussing “Judgement Day” — the way she has the main character, this white man from Georgia, leaving the South for New York City and bringing with him the ideology of the South and his expectations out of both the races.

AV: Exactly. [Tanner, the lead character] is used to the boundaries and the manners of the Jim Crow South. He understands Blackness solely as serviceable to whiteness, and Flannery was very aware

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some of our names are meant to fill the lungs and mouth, KIESE LAYMON

to dance like dust on the walls and faces

of that. At one point she was supposed to appear alongside James Baldwin in her hometown of Milledgeville, Ga., but she declined. She said it would have been rude to so flagrantly disrespect the system upon which she fed.

KL: Yeah, in “Judgement Day” you see her grappling with these rules and what happens when the social boundaries are removed.

AV: I think you’re seeing that now, as well, during COVID. All of our normal boundaries and expectations of behavior have been taken from us. We don’t know how to act!

[Laughs] I’ve been curious — especially in America, where does this leave the power dynamic between white folks and the rest of us?

KL: That’s a heavy question! [Laughs] Do you mean, do I think white folks will be able to relinquish the emotional hold on [these boundaries]? I think enough of them can.

It’s a weird question, because I hate talking about electoral politics, because I don’t feel like that is where shit really happens. I don’t know if enough white folks can be pushed to do that work. Enough of us can, socially and politically, come together and push and defeat those who won’t. But, like, the hard part of the question makes me think about the failure of beautiful and fucking wonderful artists, writers, songwriters. …

These white folks who gave their last hope that white people would do exactly what you’re saying, release these emotional holds, and they just didn’t. They didn’t.

AV: That’s been something I’ve been meditating on during this pause in my life.

The building of the world that Flannery writes. I think about the emotional ties Flannery and white Southerners feel for white supremacy. She has one quote where she says in a letter to a friend: “I’m an integrationist by principle and a segregationist by taste.” And I think about Faulkner’s infamous quote where he talks about if it came down to fighting for Mississippi against the government he’d go out into the street with arms and shoot Negroes. And I think of the propaganda that created this strong desire for dominance in white people in the South. I look at the role that literature and the creation of the Lost Cause and Dixie, moonlight and magnolias

played in creating these boundaries and manners between the races.

before settling on the furniture and floors.

KL: I look at our Southern writers who were dealing with that complex divorce between the emotional and the biological and how to implicate themselves. How to question whiteness in a way that makes it stick, so it’s not just an intellectual exercise or debate that white folks can engage in and then continue to benefit from this system.

i was a half a mile down the road by the time i heard my own clamor mispronounced from the mouth

AV: I think this is the first time that dealing with whiteness has become urgent for white people. Just like Tanner in “Judgement Day” is forced to reckon with the removal of the boundaries provided by the Jim Crow South, I think that during COVID, white folks are having to deal with the removal of their comforts by an avowed white supremacist in the Oval Office. They are having to contend with the wages of whiteness in a way they’ve never had to before. That’s why reading O’Connor right now hits differently. We’re seeing white folks, like Tanner, connect emotionally with the detrimental loss that white supremacy causes.

of the white woman

KL: I feel that connection with O’Connor.

name now worming

She was able to step outside of the system in Georgia and really examine whiteness.

A lot of her people down there were blind to what whiteness really was. She was able to investigate and dig a little deeper.

AV: What does hope for the South look like to you?

KL: There’s a part of me that believes in radical sharing and radical acceptance.

And I think if radical sharing is done with the expectations that we’re gonna fuck up, but we’re also gonna own our fuck-ups, this will cause as little harm as possible. It will also cause as much joy as possible, and not just for the most vulnerable people in the world at large, but for the most vulnerable parts of ourselves. So I do believe. This is where Morrison and Baldwin and them get me.

Like, I do believe that human beings caused this fucked-up shit. And I think human beings can unmake it.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

at channel four. banging its way around my grandmother’s dining room, into the framed faces of aunts and cousins and uncles. common delta folk regal in their some dead, some dying like me. i was a half mile down the road, my my lungs and mouth, sitting down hard on my breath. long gone before it reached my grandmother, crooked and bent by the white anchor’s evening voice.

Lord knows why they think they gotta talk like that. was chest high in the Mississippi by the time i could hear her ask asked what i’d done.

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

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South Gotta Change

‘BEDTIME IN MISSISSIPPI’ ‘Here, the soil speaks through gritted teeth’

BY CIONA ROUSE

No moments of silence here. Not now

DEBUT ALBUM BY INDEPENDENT ARTIST

RYANYINGST

or at midnight or when something alarms at 3am. Repetitive rumble of AC just outside the window. The clock’s yakety yak each second.

The loud red of a truck or a car yowling blue lights. Forever bringing some kind of blues.

A constant ghost. Whispered truth, bruised knees pleading for someone to hear her testify.

Threadbare synapses stitched into my cortex, a patchwork of questions and fear. Here, the soil speaks through gritted teeth.

Here, we bite back with our toes clenching blood mud. Here, the sun pushes us into the ground and down into dusk.

The katydids shine their song until its return.

Enough of this noise, though: I know a South where I was called OREO from mouths shaped and shaded like mine. What’s a black girl not black enough? And I know a pale-faced, dandelion-haired South whose mama wants to know why Katie didn’t say all of who I was before she invited me to her first boy/girl party.

Whoever will she dance with? she asked.

What’s a girl too black to do?

BAR RINGS NOW STREAMING EVERYWHERE

I know a South where I will never go. Even if they say the road is yellow-bricked with good intentions, I know no good intentions ever clicked their heels three times to save a body like me.

I know a South so stuck always in mythology, it wants to read me who I am even in the should-be quiet of night.

Back to the noise: The radio fuzzing through the wall from another room.

Locusts in conference at the base of the maple.

A pecan strikes the rooftop, and I no longer jump, only hope it means a wind strong enough to loosen the tree’s fist is a wind near enough for relief.

The owl inside my brain asks who, who who all night long.

WWW.RYANYINGST.COM nashvillescene.com | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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CRITICS’ PICKS THEATER

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

[CATCH THE BUG]

CATCH THE PREMIERE OF THE THEATER BUG’S STORIES

STORIES PREMIERES FRIDAY, SEPT. 18 PHOTO: ABBEY RHYNE

thetheaterbug.org

[NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT]

EXPERIENCE TEMPO, AN IMMERSIVE SENSORY EVENT AT THE FAIRGROUNDS NASHVILLE creators, EAMOTION, do their best to explain it, calling it a 30- to 40-minute cruise through a fixed course wherein audience members encounter a series of synchronized theatrical installations that are dynamic and high-tech. I’m imagining a combination of a virtual-reality roller coaster and Laser Floyd. Tickets are $45 per car, and you purchase them according to the time you’d like to arrive — earliest tickets

TEMPO

16

assign a 7 p.m. start time, and tickets are available in 15-minute intervals until 10:45 p.m. each night. There are more details on the EAMOTION website (eamotion.com), including rules about safety requirements.

Sept. 18-22 at Fairgrounds Speedway, 624 Smith Ave. LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

falldance.org/windows to learn more. 4:30 & 5:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 18, at Metro Parks Centennial Art Center, 301 25th Ave. N. AMY STUMPFL

MUSIC

When was the last time you took a leisurely drive through a speedway surrounded by 50-foot-tall pyramids that pulse with digital lightscapes and multisensory effects? Been a while, eh?

You’re in luck. Tempo is an innovative, experimental and totally pandemic-safe event that will likely be the most exciting thing you’ve done in your car since Junior Prom. It’s so innovative, in fact, that it’s fairly difficult to describe — the event

[REMEMBER]

STREAM TPAC’S SALON SERIES: BA DE YAH, DANCING IN SEPTEMBER

Without a doubt, one of the coolest things to happen in Nashville in some time will be the opening of the National Museum of African American Music — whenever At a time when most arts organizations it will be possible for that to happen, of are focused on virtual programming, course. After nearly 20 years in Nashville’s contemporary and the works, the museum’s grand aerial dance company FALL is EDITOR’S NOTE: opening gala was set for Sept. working to make live outdoor AS A RESPONSE TO THE 3, but postponed until it’s safe performances more accessible ONGOING COVID-19 PANDEMIC, to have a celebration worthy to local audiences. FALL will WE’VE CHANGED THE FOCUS OF of the monumental story present two free outdoor THE CRITICS’ PICKS SECTION TO INCLUDE ACTIVITIES YOU CAN the museum will tell. Music and socially distanced PARTAKE IN WHILE YOU’RE AT made by Black people — from performances of its new HOME. spirituals and gospel music to work Windows on Sept. 18. The jazz and R&B, from string-band show — which explores “past music to rock ’n’ roll, hip-hop and and present selves and reconciling beyond — is at the root of a vast array of with change” — is limited to 25 people musical and cultural traditions and deeply per performance, with masks required ingrained in American culture. NMAAM for both dancers and audience members. is designed to let guests explore that Tickets are free, and can be reserved online. wide-ranging story in full, from superstar And for those unable to attend a public performers who will likely come to mind performance, FALL may be able to bring when you think of music to lesser-known the show to you: For a minimum donation figures with far-reaching influence. The of $50 per household, FALL’s dancers will latest installment of TPAC’s Salon Series of present a special socially distanced showing streaming presentations features Kristin of Windows in your backyard, on your street Horsley, TPAC’s senior director of education or at a common location. Visit DANCE

ENTERTAINMENT

Fresh off the success of its first original virtual musical Quaranteened, The Theater Bug is back and ready to launch a new musical Instagram and web series titled Stories. Produced in partnership with Nashville-based creative agency MA2LA, Stories takes on a wide range of social issues facing today’s young people — including everything from women’s rights and racial injustice to LGBTQ issues — all set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The series features a diverse cast of young performers and professional artists, and was written by Megan Murphy Chambers, Cori Anne Laemmel and Tyson Laemmel, with script contributions by Pascia Smith and Tamiko Robinson Steele. Episode 1 premieres through Vimeo On Demand Sept.

18. You can check out episode highlights — along with a new original song — for free on Instagram (@westview_birdhouse), and you can download the full episode for $5.

Original songs and sheet music also will be available for download at thetheaterbug. org. Premieres Friday, Sept. 18, via thetheaterbug.org AMY STUMPFL

[WINDOWS OF OPPORTUNITY]

CATCH A LIVE PERFORMANCE OF FALL’S WINDOWS

NASHVILLE SCENE | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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CRITICS’ PICKS

In a year when hundreds of thousands of lives have been claimed by a respiratory virus, a children’s book that illustrates what happens when we breathe seems particularly poignant. When You Breathe

by Diana Farid aims to do just that, and Clarksville artist Billy Renkl has illustrated the book. I learned of Renkl when his sister,

Margaret Renkl, published Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss, last year. Billy illustrated the collection of essays — rendering songbirds, plants, fruits and more to gorgeous effect — bringing the book’s themes into focus. They remind me of old bookplates, colorful labels affixed to the inside covers of books to indicate ownership. It seems impossible to imagine Late Migrations — a book about belonging and how, if we’re lucky, we will find an “everlasting place” in the lives of our family members — without them. You can tune in to the siblings’ virtual conversation via Parnassus Books to learn more about Billy and When You Breathe. 6 p.m.

Wednesday, Sept. 23, via Parnassus Books

FILM

ERICA CICCARONE [THAT GUM YOU LIKE]

BUILD YOUR OWN STREAMING DAVID LYNCH FILM FESTIVAL

Even with cineplexes reopened and showing a small smattering of new releases, we’re going to keep right on with our build-your-own-streaming-film-fest recommendations for those who don’t wish

Mexican Pizza would soon be history as well.

I honestly only ever went for the chicken soft tacos to rationalize my own garbage-monster tendencies, but retiring the “pizza” — ground beef and/or refried beans sandwiched between tostada shells, topped with onions, peppers and gooey white-and-orange cheese — is to gamble with the emotions of the T-Bell faithful. It’s been a menu staple since 1985, one of the earliest instances of the Irvine, Calif., chain’s boundless ability to conjure new, stoner-friendly mutations of the same few base ingredients. See also: the Enchirito, Quesarito and Volcano Taco, which the Mexican ’za will soon join in the discontinued-item graveyard. The good news: You have until Nov. 5 to make a run for the border and give it a proper send-off.

CHARLIE ZAILLIAN [GET OUT THE VOTE … BY MAIL]

PARTICIPATE IN POSTCARDS TO VOTERS

Way back in December 2016, I pledged wholeheartedly to hit the streets for literally any candidate running against Trump on the Democratic ticket. I fondly recall busing from New York to Philly to register voters in 2008 — a starry-eyed 20-something who would take a Sharpie to subway cars to write “OBAMA WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING.” (Deep sigh.)

But as this awful year drags on, I am finding it harder and harder to get hyped for the most important election of my lifetime, and I know I’m not alone. I recently discovered Postcards to Voters, a platform that connects Americans with others in

the electorate by post. With a few clicks or texts, Postcards to Voters will send you as many addresses as you can manage, and you can send friendly, colorful postcards that encourage strangers to vote. The organization already counts more than 75,000 volunteers who are assigned 5,000 voter addresses daily. Decorate your postcards with messages about who and what you’re voting for. Add information about voting by mail, like the deadline to send in a ballot in the voter’s state. In short, get hyped to vote by hyping up others. If you’re not feeling up to designing your own postcards, Etsy’s got tons of fun designs, and the Postcards to Voters website links to some of these. And the bonus? You’ll be supporting the USPS with your postcard stamps. To participate, go to postcardstovoters.org. ERICA CICCARONE EDUCATION

WATCH ILLUSTRATOR BILLY RENKL IN CONVERSATION WITH MARGARET RENKL

to take the health risks associated with returning to the theater. For this, our 23rd installment, let’s explore the work of David Lynch. How did we profile 22 filmmakers without yet dipping into the 74-year-old iconic auteur’s catalog, you ask? Beats me, but let’s start at the very beginning (a very good place to start, in my opinion).

Lynch’s 1977 feature-length debut Eraserhead is currently available to stream with an HBO Max subscription. (It’s also $4 on platforms including Amazon Prime and iTunes.) Widely panned though it was at the time of its release, it’s a perfect window into Lynch’s unconventional approach to storytelling, and just a great, weird watch.

There are a few places you could take your at-home streaming fest from there — 1980’s The Elephant Man ($4 on Prime) is a straightahead film with killer performances from Anthony Hopkins and John Hurt, and 1984’s ambitious Dune adaptation (also $4 on Prime) is truly an effort to behold. The latter may particularly interest you, given the fact that Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation is on the horizon. But many would argue — myself included — that Lynch truly came into his own with 1986’s cryptic and intoxicating Blue Velvet ($4 on Prime and YouTube), which features career-best performances from Dennis Hopper, Kyle MacLachlan and Isabella Rossellini. Unfortunately 1990’s black comedy Wild at Heart doesn’t appear to be available to stream on any platforms, so at this point we can move into Lynch’s nonlinear-noir phase: 1997’s Lost Highway ($4 on Prime, YouTube and iTunes) and/or 2001’s Mulholland Drive, which is available for $4 on iTunes and Google Play. (Sadly, 2006’s Inland Empire is currently unstreamable.) That’s a whole lot of mind-warping experimentalism, so if you need to step away for a bit of heartwarming, uncharacteristically conventional storytelling, put on 1999’s The Straight Story (available via Disney+). Or just binge the first two seasons of Twin Peaks (now on Netflix), and follow that with its deeply unsettling 1992 prequel Fire Walk With Me ($4 via Prime). Just don’t watch Fire Walk With Me first, as one particularly cruel ex convinced me to do many years ago.

ELECTION

[EX LIBRIS]

LOST HIGHWAY

[TRAVELING WITHOUT MOVING]

TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF OBSCURE CORNERS OF THE WORLD WITH GEOGUESSR

In the early ’90s, the combo of Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? and GeoSafari games instilled in me a lifelong curiosity about the world’s lesser-known countries — the further away and harder to pronounce, the more exotic in my mind.

I want to believe today’s elementary schoolers are using GeoGuessr to develop similar interests. The web-based video game consists of five rounds in which the player is virtually dropped somewhere random in the country, continent or world (you can set it to whichever) on Google Street View. Poke around for clues — the side of the road cars are driving on, the language the signs are in, types of vegetation, flags flown and so on — and once you think you know where you’re at, you drop a pin and are awarded points according to how close you are. You might lose hours of your life to GeoGuessr, but it’ll resharpen your geography game big-time with all the rabbit holes it sends you down.

It’s a perfect activity for these times of homebound wanderlust, and also makes you really consider what a crazy thing Google Street View is, maybe for the first time since it was introduced back in 2007. Visit geoguessr.com to play. CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

D. PATRICK RODGERS

FOOD & DRINK

BOOKS

outreach, in conversation with NMAAM’s curatorial director Dr. Dina Bennett; director of education and public programs Tamar Smithers; and development manager Kara Duke. They’ll also be joined by percussionist Lucius “Spoonman” Talley.

The Sept. 22 event will trace the evolution of Black music in America and offer a preview of how the museum will tell that story; a rescheduled date for the gala has not been announced, but NMAAM still plans to open to the public (date TBA) in the fall. Register for the talk by Sept. 21 via tpac.org, and visit nmaam.org for updates on the museum’s ongoing outreach programs, membership options and more. 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 22, via tpac.org STEPHEN TRAGESER

[SOUTHERN BELL]

PAY YOUR LAST RESPECTS TO THE DISAPPEARING TACO BELL MENU ITEMS

¡Ay caramba! Following July’s first wave of Taco Bell’s menu downsizing — which meant saying farewell to everything with potatoes and the road-trip go-to 7-Layer Burrito — the fast-food giant twisted the knife with a subsequent announcement that all shredded-chicken options and the

POSTCARDS TO VOTERS

nashvillescene.com | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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[GOING ALL CITY]

SEE ART BY K.J. SCHUMACHER AT TINNEY AND CHEEKWOOD

BOOKS

If it’s been a while since you’ve seen a real-life in-person art show, there’s a good opportunity to dig deep into the experience — artist K.J. Schumacher is exhibiting in two Nashville locations, both of which are worth your time. First, stop by the exhibition @home at Cheekwood, which matches Schumacher’s strong collage work with art by Paul Collins, Alex Blau and Nuveen Barwari — all created during the isolated periods between March and when the exhibition opened in July. Schumacher’s vibrant assemblages feel both frantic and subdued — a perfect unison of pandemicera emotions. Over at Tinney Contemporary, a solo exhibition called Rinna showcases the artist’s large-scale primary-colored paintings. Some of this work, like a pair called “Facsimile 020” and “Facsimile 018,” feel like ink-stained remnants of ’80s office life, but at the scale of a Robert Longo series of that era’s businessmen. This exhibit remains on view through September — the Cheekwood show closes on Sept. 20. @home continues through Sept. 20 at Cheekwood, 1200 Forrest Park Drive; Rinna through Sept. 30 at Tinney Contemporary, 237 Fifth Ave. N. LAURA HUTSON HUNTER

CRITICS’ PICKS down falsehoods and course-correct as Dart Adams, a hip-hop journalist and historian from Boston. Adams is prolific on Twitter (@Dart_Adams), but he’s also amassed bylines ranging from underground hiphop blogs to NPR — and now his writing is available together in The Book of Dart, a 2019 entry in the Best Damn Hip Hop Writing series. In this essay collection, Adams discusses the genre and culture from the perspective of both someone who witnessed decades of change and evolution firsthand and a tireless historian whose research is never finished, and who often railed against the corporatization of rap along the way. He brings the same sharp pen to each entry, whether he’s reflecting on GZA’s classic solo debut Liquid Swords, musing on J Dilla’s legacy, breaking down vital transformative periods in hip-hop or ruminating on what Jay-Z’s unprecedented success means for the music industry. While you’re going down the hip-hop rabbit hole, fellow Bostonian Brian Coleman delves into the stories behind rap classics from the ’80s and ’90s with his impressive Check the Technique duology. Across two books, released in 2007 and 2014, Coleman offers in-depth interviews with artists like The Roots, Ice Cube, A Tribe Called Quest and The Coup to detail the stories behind rap’s most influential albums. ALEJANDRO RAMIREZ

[DROPPING SCIENCE]

DIVE INTO HIP-HOP HISTORY WITH THE BOOK OF DART AND CHECK THE TECHNIQUE

Hip-hop history is fascinating and full of legends, plot holes and misunderstandings, and no one is as happy to fill the gaps, strike

18

K.J. SCHUMACHER

“UNTITLED (RED/BLUE),” K.J. SCHUMACHER

ART

CRITICS’ PICKS

NASHVILLE SCENE | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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FOOD AND DRINK

FINDING OUR LOST SPRING Mixologist Mike Wolf talks to his colleagues about the pandemic in a new compilation book benefiting hospitality workers

BY MARGARET LITTMAN

PHOTO: DANIEL MEIGS

I

t was March 2020, and Mike Wolf, like many of us, wasn’t really sure how to proceed.

He’d spent time at the beginning of the month helping friends cope with the damage from the tornado, texting fellow bar owners from Home Depot, figuring out who needed tarps, bottled water and lumber. Right after that, Chopper — the East Side tiki bar Wolf owns with Andy Mumma and Bryce McCloud — was temporarily shuttered, like other nonessential businesses, due to coronavirus concerns.

Wolf, who became known to locals behind the bar at Husk Nashville before he moved to Chopper, is the author of Garden to Glass, which the Scene called “an exhaustive study of how to incorporate natural ingredients into drinks” when it was published last year.

When the pandemic hit, Wolf was writing a follow-up on the “platinum age of American drinking,” a phrase referring to cocktail culture, American-made-wine lists and whiskey. The phrase now makes him wistful, as he recalls those halcyon pre-pandemic days.

“It was strange to be thinking about LOST SPRING: HOW WE this while all the COCKTAILED THROUGH CRISIS bars are closed.”

COMPILED BY MIKE WOLF So Wolf took a TURNER PUBLISHING hiatus from work$6.99 ing on that book, Liquid Gold, which shares its name with his popular podcast and is scheduled to be published in October 2021 with more recipes than originally intended. He sent an email to 70 friends and people he admired from the bartending community, asking them for reflections, inspiration, tips on stocking the at-home bar cart and, of course, quarantine recipes.

Wolf’s list primarily featured Nashville mixologists, but also included folks from across the country, among them some contacts he’d planned to work with on a Garden to Glass book tour this year. That initial email was the first step in Lost Spring: How We Cocktailed Through Crisis, released as an ebook on Aug. 25 and available in print in May 2021. A portion of the sales of Lost Spring benefit Tennessee Action for Hospitality, the statewide organization aiding independent bars and restaurants in the COVID-19 era.

“I got the sense from people that there was a fair amount of drinking going on in the house,” Wolf says in what may be one of the biggest understatements of 2020. That said, there’s no pressure to drink alcohol during a pandemic or any other time — Lost Spring provides plenty of options for mocktails.

In addition to recipes that run the gamut from twists on gimlets to French 75s, the book includes musings on what it means to work in hospitality and what bartenders were thinking about (and drinking and do-

MIKE WOLF ing) while their workplaces were shuttered. Lost Spring explores love for the industry and pining for its customers.

While Wolf considered himself an introvert “well-suited for a pandemic,” the time off made him reflective. “Bartending became my social side. When you realize you can make people happy, you make their day, can turn around their whole trip to Nashville, make the best drink they’ve ever had — that is what’s so great about it.”

For Demi Natoli, bar manager at White Limozeen and former general manager at The Patterson House, part of rethinking drinks has been rethinking her role and career. “Sometimes I just get people drunk, and that does not feel great,” Natoli says.

Her retooled White Limozeen menu has fewer large-format options (no punch-bowl drinking for crowds these days, as groups are limited to six people), and instead she’s been able to add more specialty drinks to the menu. “It is such a big ask of people right now, to spend money to leave their homes. It is special to us.”

Many others featured in Lost Spring agree. Alexis Soler of Old Glory and No. 308 writes, “How do we help humans that are having all these extreme and traumatic experiences restore joy and comfort in spaces outside of their homes?”

“I have even more respect for our role in the lives of people who sit with us,” writes Graham Fuze of Butchertown Hall.

The book is not just recipes and remem-

brances, but also music, including a Spotify playlist compiled by Chopper’s Patrick Goodspeed, who’s also a DJ. Listen to it as you prepare your specialty cocktail, read the innermost thoughts of your favorite bartenders, or sip during a socially distanced porch hang.

“I started pulling things that were comforting,” says Goodspeed. “I did not want to hear the songs I would [normally] hear at work. Those are more social. As a lot of us were at home alone I wanted things that felt lush at home. I thought about how do you

make it feel better, a little more calm, without being overly pandering to the highest emotions?

Normally I would shy away from these things.”

Different parts of Lost Spring will resonate with different folks.

Attaboy’s Riley Perrin Ellis offers a tribute to late Attaboy bartender Mike Dolfini, who died during the March tornado, in the form of his Shelter Cove drink recipe, a section that is particularly poignant. Goodspeed found Matt Campbell’s story about working at Robert’s Western World a connective thread for all those who work in Nashville, whether they have served up bologna sandwiches or not. Kynsey Hunter, then bar manager and sake sommelier at the now-shuttered Green Pheasant, offers a recipe for what she calls Boozy Banana Bread, her attempt at creating a cocktail from the two things people made most during quarantine: banana bread and sourdough.

But the philanthropic aspect of the book is its most powerful, as Wolf notes that few hospitality workers have the long-term financial reserve to get through a post-pandemic recovery. Local spirit brands TC Craft and Cathead Distillery were co-sponsors of the book, making donations to the fund as well.

“After the tornado, it was encouraging to see how we banded together as a community,” Natoli says. “I am from Florida, and when we have a hurricane there it is every man for himself. Here we all stick up for each other.”

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

nashvillescene.com | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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isiting Messages in Threads and Wings: Recent Work by Lesley Patterson-Marx feels like turning the pages of a scrapbook documenting someone’s life — or maybe your own life, including the years you have not yet lived. The exhibition — which is on view at Tennessee Tech’s Appalachian Center for Craft in Smithville through Oct. 2 — shows longtime Nashvillian Lesley Patterson-Marx at her most thoughtful and inventive. The exhibition rewards patience and curiosity. Each work is a vessel containing items and imagery symbolic of protection and healing. Patterson-Marx has applied her delicate touch and obsession with detail to creating talismans for our times.

Though the exhibition statement and work do not refer specifically to COVID-19, I couldn’t help but feel that Messages in Threads and Wings offers metaphorical protection from the respiratory virus — or at least from the emotional lows of living through the pandemic. The mixed-media assemblages are made of delicate materials like organza, lace, used postage stamps and vintage linen, as well as collected ephemera from Patterson-Marx’s daily walks, like the bodies of butterflies that have completed their life cycle, four-leaf clovers and the eggshells of songbirds. Patterson-Marx also collects old photographs that she finds at flea markets and antique shops. Blackand-white or sepia, they look like the kind of photo you’d find taped into a grandmother’s jewelry box.

Patterson-Marx has a meditative MESSAGES IN THREADS AND WINGS: RECENT WORK practice, working

BY LESLEY PATTERSONintuitively and in reMARX IS ON VIEW THROUGH OCT. 2 AT THE APPALACHIAN sponse to the natural world. Fabric is usuCENTER FOR CRAFT, 1560 CRAFT CENTER DRIVE, ally hand-stitched SMITHVILLE, TENN. and hand-dyed, reflecting the slowing down that we were forced to embrace in March — although Patterson-Marx has long been incorporating these processes into her practice. The first time I saw the artist’s work, it was in a small exhibition in the Sarratt Gallery at Vanderbilt University in 2014. Then, I was struck by how easy it was to see my mother’s family in the found photographs and fabric silhouettes that Patterson-Marx displayed in books and bottles. They reminded me of summers in rural New Jersey, sleeping on the pull-out couch in my grandmother’s breezeway with my sister. It was easy to recall that verdant, flat landscape, our walks to visit our ancestors in the cemetery down the road, harvesting strawberries in our grandfather’s garden.

But in the midst of this upside-down year, the work feels more universal, speaking to shared trauma and loss, but also to the notion of care. This element is displayed in the four aprons that anchor the exhibition. Each has its own purpose. In the ethereal “Four Leaf Clover Protector Apron and Mask,” more than

“FABRIC AND DRESS SEWING MEDITATION BOX,” LESLEY PATTERSON-MARX

VOTED BEST FOR 15 YEARS!

Messages in Threads and Wings offers talismans for dark times

40 clovers are sewn on sheer silk organza. The matching mask, similar to those sold as pandemic necessities now, can not only bring luck to the wearer, but also protection. Another pattern is drafted from Patterson-Marx’s grandmother’s apron. Swallowtail and hackberry emperor butterflies are sewn on marbled silk and put into the sheer pockets of the apron, along with small vintage photographs of people posing outdoors. While the bodies of butterflies symbolize impermanence, the photographs read as tributes to ancestors, reminding the apron’s wearer of wisdom passed down through generations.

The exhibition also includes artist books that Patterson-Marx makes using both traditional bookbinding techniques and improvised ones. They are filled with surprises. Unbutton a fabric envelope or unzip a page in “Correspondence Book” and find dozens of used postage stamps, more vintage photos and handwritten postcards the artist found in her travels. In another piece, “Fabric and Dress Sewing Meditation Box,”

Patterson-Marx has crafted a box from an old hardcover book. Inside are tiny treasures: Buttons are transformed into mandalas, tiny vials labeled with words like “joy” and “courage” contain beads and bows, and a spool unfurls into a row of butterflies cut from fabric.

Sewing is a metaphor for self-reflection here, and this is a box for mending the spirit.

Messages in Threads and Wings is a soothing, nourishing exhibition. The Appalachian Center for Craft is located in the scenic Eastern Highland Rim, about an hour’s drive east of Nashville, and the gallery is practicing limited entry, requiring social distancing and masks. You can also view the exhibition on Patterson-Marx’s website (lesleypattersonmarx.com). But if you do make the trip, I recommend you follow your gallery visit with a stop at the food stand off I-40’s exit 273. Then go for a walk in Edgar Evins State Park, which sits on beautiful Center Hill Lake. It’s a recipe for renewal.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

“BUTTERFLY APRON,” LESLEY PATTERSON-MARX

: Winners’ Reader poll

NASHVILLE SCENE | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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BOOKS

A MULTITUDE OF ELEGIES Ayad Akhtar creates a powerful literary assemblage in Homeland Elegies

BY HAMILTON CAIN

A

“FABRIC AND DRESS SEWING MEDITATION BOX,” LESLEY PATTERSON-MARX

utofiction is fictionalized autobiography that maneuvers around the rooms of the author’s life, arranging a vase here, imagining a divan there, relieved of the memoirist’s burden. Did I get it down right?

Two-thirds of the way through his dazzling, genre-busting Homeland Elegies, Ayad Akhtar reveals that this is his game: “I can’t renounce this bizarre tendency simply for the sake of preserving what little reliability I may still possess as narrator of these songs and stories; I have to own it; this brand of crazy is fully baked into me.”

What emerges is similar to a Calder mobile, an original assemblage of bright colors and jagged shards that move and twirl into a coherent, strikingly beautiful whole.

HOMELAND ELEGIES: A NOVEL

BY AYAD AKHTAR LITTLE, BROWN 368 PAGES, $28 AYAD AKHTAR WILL DISCUSS HOMELAND ELEGIES AT THE 2020 SOUTHERN FESTIVAL OF BOOKS, HELD ONLINE OCT. 1-11

“BUTTERFLY APRON,” LESLEY PATTERSON-MARX

Akhtar opens Homeland Elegies during the 2016 Republican primaries as his recently widowed father — a Pakistani immigrant and physician who treated Trump for a heart condition years before — inexplicably falls for the reality-show huckster turned presidential candidate. Something about Trump’s xenophobia awakens the id of the elder Akhtar, who rails against Christians, Jews and Muslims alike, disdains Black people for their perceived “slave’s mentality,” and puts down women who, like Hillary Clinton, have sought careers outside of the home.

Ayad connects his father’s rants to a larger national breakdown: The man seemed to be turning into an imbecile, his hodgepodge views like mental flatulence, one fetid odor after another. To push the metaphor: it had the logic of dysentery, an infection of his political consciousness occasioning wanton discharge. And further: a child shits on the floor and sticks its finger in the feces, delights in the odor, and relishes the disgust in everyone else. Puerile pleasures, that’s what Father was learning again — we all were — and Trump was our tutor.

From this moment of sickening disillusion, Homeland Elegies unfolds across a mash of forms, from family saga to political op-ed to Muslim history. Akhtar’s parents, both doctors, came to the United States to work. Ayad was born in Staten Island, N.Y., and grew up in suburban Milwaukee, yearning to be a writer. After studying literature at Brown and playwriting at Columbia, Ayad

rented a small one-bedroom apartment in gentrifying Harlem and won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Disgraced. His conflicted feelings about America pulse throughout the pages of Homeland Elegies, a 21st-century version of a Twain-like tall tale.

He relies on a series of ornate, digressive set pieces to propel his book forward — no graceful arc for him. As with Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the narrative proper may be a farce, with the real action unfolding in a series of carefully inserted footnotes. Each section conjures its own erudite magic. A bottle of Saint-Émilion with a literary aunt who loathes Rushdie; racist encounters in Scranton, Pa., after his car breaks down; a visit to impoverished relatives in Pakistan — all gleam in a lush, adventurous prose. There’s danger here, including scenes of graphic sex — one involving an STD and a gray Icelandic mitten — as Akhtar skewers Puritan sensibilities, as well as conservative Muslim attitudes, dissecting all aspects of our smug American morality.

And nowhere are we more selfsatisfied than with money. In one beguiling episode, Akhtar drifts into an unexpected friendship with a rich-asCroesus Pakistani American, a hedgefund manager. Riaz’s millions act like an aphrodisiac to Ayad: private jets, trips to villas in Italy, rare Japanese whiskey. But there’s no pot of gold at the end of the billionaire’s rainbow, only a disgust with himself, as Ayad realizes during a conversation with his friend in a lavish Upper East Side apartment.

Night had fully fallen over the East River, and the lights along Astoria’s waterfront twinkled, sparse, serene.

Riaz stood and emptied what was left of that sublime whiskey into our tumblers.

Throughout his telling, I’d watched the flashing anger in his eyes grow stronger, steadier, watched the incandescence of his rage brighten and consume some essential kindling that, now spent, left him looking enfeebled.

Ayad confesses, too, his lack of a fulfilling relationship with his father, and more poignantly, with his reserved mother. Such moments of vulnerability enrich our understanding. Homeland Elegies, then, is a multitude of elegies: for Akhtar’s ancestral Pakistan, for an America that’s lost its way, for Islam, for his youth, for the act of storytelling itself. And yet here he’s forged something vivid, compelling and possibly new.

“Maybe I just needed to be encouraged to step outside of my comfort zone,” he opines.

But he’s also aiming his criticism at us, in dire need of just such a book to shock us from our complacency and toward those better angels we desperately want to believe in.

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

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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nashvillescene.com | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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MUSIC

GOING BOLDLY

Mickey Guyton stands strong on her new EP Bridges

BY ANDREA WILLIAMS

M

ickey Guyton is everywhere.

In February, the country singer-songwriter’s single “What Are You Gonna Tell Her?” called out country music’s long-standing BRIDGES IS OUT NOW VIA CAPITOL NASHVILLE misogyny and subsequently lit up the 2020 Country Radio Seminar. It was both a capital-M Moment for Guyton, who’s been trying to make a name for herself in Nashville for more than a decade, and a hopeful sign of things to come. What came next, however, was COVID-19, which sent the music industry and the rest of the global economy into uncharted waters.

It might have felt safer under these circumstances to back away from the social justice platform she’d recently built for herself. But following the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and the subsequent protests against police brutality and systemic racism, Guyton stepped up even stronger and spoke up even louder, releasing the heartbreakingly soulful “Black Like Me” in early June.

Buoyed by the runaway success of “Black Like Me” and the modern civil rights movement that is upon us, Guyton has been featured in Rolling Stone, Variety and The Washington Post. She’s been interviewed on CBS This Morning and was invited onto the Meditative Story podcast to discuss how and why she decided to finally embrace her uniqueness in an industry that rewards — practically demands — homogeneity.

Through it all, Guyton has talked about sitting back in cutoff shorts and cowboy hats and trying to let the sideways glances and racial slurs roll off her back. She’s talked about her willingness to play the Nashville game even when she’s felt destined to lose.

When I speak to Guyton for this article, I ask about all of this. I ask her if she’s tired of having to work twice as hard to get half as much, tired of being Black in a white world, and tired of having to talk about it all the time.

NPR called her “a poised and galvanizing country-pop conscience,” and I ask her about that, too. Why, I wonder, is a woman who’s yet to release a full album — a woman who is undoubtedly carrying the weight of being both Black and a woman in an industry as oppressive as country music — also being looked to as the genre’s voice of moral reason?

“Being country music’s conscience wasn’t my intention, for sure, but a lot of times things going on within the industry get brushed under a rug,” Guyton says. “If a Black woman is saying that white women are discriminated against in country music, how do you argue that, you know?”

To be clear, Guyton isn’t saying that she doesn’t want to talk about issues like racism and sexism in country music. What she’s saying is she feels she has no choice. Put differ-

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ently, if a Black woman doesn’t scream at the top of her lungs about all that’s wrong in society, do her hurts and pains ever make a sound?

“I’ve seen people try to talk about it and get labeled angry and mad, and I have the ability to do that without sounding angry and mad,” Guyton says. “Did I want to just be like every other country girl and be able to sing a cute song? Yeah. But the standards are different. For some reason, when I am speaking on these issues, I’m listened to. If I speak about cute country songs, I’m not.”

FALL IS FAST APPROACHING. We are six months into the coronavirus pandemic, and the racial reckonings rippling through every corner of society are showing no signs of slowing. Neither, as it turns out, is Guyton.

Despite some fans urging country music artists to stick to a benign, music-only script, Guyton’s new EP Bridges, released Sept. 11, doubles down on her desire to build a better world through her art. The record opens with “Heaven Down Here,” Guyton’s current single, in which she laments that “The world is turning upside down / I swear it feels like all we’ve got is problems,” and urges God to let his love rain down “Like pennies / In this wishing well of tears.” In the second track, “Bridges,” she places the onus for healing on mortals, asking: “What if we took these stones we’ve been throwing / What if we laid them down / What if we forget all that we know / And make some common ground?”

“I feel like ‘Bridges’ is the bridge between the songs,” Guyton says. “You have these songs that are speaking about such hard topics, but ‘Bridges’ is like, ‘What if, instead of being so divided, we build bridges?’ ” This project is classic Guyton — big voice and wide range set to early-Aughts pop production — so the most remarkable thing is, by far, the content of her songs. The fact that a mainstream country artist can spend four tracks of six on an EP talking about anything other than breakups and beer is remarkable.

Even “Rosé,” Guyton’s ode to the pink drink of choice for so many women, is less fluffy than it seems.

“I wrote that song two-and-a-half years ago because I couldn’t believe that nobody had written a song about rosé,” Guyton says.

“If there’s a drink that’s for women, it would be that. So I brought this song to the label forever ago, and you know,” Guyton pauses, her voice trailing off. “Now they hear me, but they didn’t before.”

If you’ve followed Guyton’s career since, say, 2015, when she released her single “Better Than You Left Me,” or 2016, which brought “Heartbreak Song,” the idea that Guyton’s label Capitol Nashville is listening and letting her be creatively free is welcome and refreshing. The toeing of the line and remaking herself for Nashville’s sake wore heavy, and the intense machinations always seemed evident in her work, her demeanor. Finally, though, it seems Guyton has broken free of the rules and regulations that stifled her.

“This project is completely from me,” she says of Bridges. “I didn’t really have anybody guiding me, or choosing songs, or scrutinizing my work the way I did before. They’ve given me the opportunity to actually be an artist, and I’ve never had that. This is 100 percent from me, and I think the songs reflect that.”

The record also reflects the reality that there is still much work to be done if Nashville is going to build the bridges that Guyton sings about. Though she makes explicit pleas for social justice and reconciliation, each track on the EP, including the autobiographical “Black Like Me,” was co-written, produced and performed by white people.

The fact that Black Nashvillians in creative fields struggle to find opportunities even with successful Black artists in town is a familiar problem. It’s also one that Guyton hopes to address in the future. But first, there is Bridges.

As an artist who has yet to break big, Guyton understands the expectations that accompany every project, including this EP composed of songs so close to her heart. The label needs it to do well. Her publisher needs it to do well.

Her management needs it to do well.

It is Guyton’s hope, of course, that people relate to — and buy — her music. But the unyielding, self-imposed pressures that have accompanied her past releases are noticeably absent. Guyton is pregnant and due almost a year to the day following her careerdefining performance at CRS 2020. That, coupled with an industry in upheaval and lots full of parked tour buses, has allowed Guyton

to absolve herself of the worry that typically precedes public reception. For now, all that matters is that she’s created a project that she believes in, and that she feels good about.

“I feel really, really good about it,” Guyton says. “I really do.”

EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

NOT DARK YET Drkmttr keeps evolving to meet its community’s needs

BY P.J. KINZER

“W

e are the cockroaches of music venues in Nashville,” says Drkmttr co-owner Olivia Scibelli with a laugh.

“You can’t kill us, for some reason.”

There are some good reasons for Drkmttr’s survival, and more of them emerge as time goes on.

For the past five years, Drkmttr has served Nashville as an all-ages DIY space, hosting underground music, community organization meetings, drag nights and even a musical based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The volunteer-centered collective has survived two moves and — counting the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic — three extended closures.

With help from a crowdfunding campaign, Kathryn Edwards launched Drkmttr in a creaky old house near the Nashville City Cemetery in 2015.

The next year, the venue moved into a former barbershop in The Nations. Just a few months later, the space was stalled when DIY venues nationwide were shuttered following the December VISIT DRKMTTRCOLLECTIVE.COM AND 2016 fire that killed NASHVILLEFREESTORE.COM FOR 36 at Oakland, MORE INFORMATION Calif.’s Ghost Ship.

After months of work to obtain an occupancy permit from the fire department, the arts space reopened in April 2017.

But the volunteer organizers decided to leave that location (now home toBarbershop Theater) in February 2018. It took most of that year to figure out a sustainable way to reopen. But Drkmttr came back in January 2019, organized as a business with Edwards, Scibelli and Chappy Hull as co-owners

NASHVILLE SCENE | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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MUSIC

PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

sept. 28 -oct. 4

and situated in what is hopefully its permanent home at 1111 Dickerson Pike.

Like venues across the country that depend on people being able to mingle safely in large groups, Drkmttr has been unable to host shows since the pandemic began to spread in March. The co-owners’ immediate challenge was figuring out how to pay the bills — a successful GoFundMe campaign was a great start, and a Patreon profile continues to help. But the Drkmttr crew has been proactive in expanding their role in the community, and along the way they’ve found inspiring new purposes for the space. They’ve opened their doors to political organizers and started a podcast, and the venue is now the proud home of the Nashville Free Store, an initiative offering food, cleaning supplies and more to anyone who needs it, no questions asked.

According to Scibelli, Drkmttr’s organizers just couldn’t sit around after the protests against systemic racism and police brutality began in late May, following the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor.

“That was the big thing,” Scibelli says. “We decided we were going to open our doors to people who are doing activist work. We posted something saying that if anyone needs any space for organizing, we were available.”

They got an immediate response from Teens for Equality. The group needed a space for a debriefing session following its June 4 Black Lives Matter march, which turned out to be one of the largest peaceful protests for racial equality in the city’s history. The pandemic limits how many people can meet in the physical space, but the venue has hosted other activist meetings as well as an in-person event for progressive congressional candidate Keeda Haynes. Drkmttr also uses its social media profiles to spread the word about a variety of public gatherings, online meetings and other actions for progressive causes.

The Nashville Free Store came about when Edwards and Scibelli were approached by Molly McCarthy and Bassam Habib, members of the extended Drkmttr family who wanted to help establish a mutual-aid endeavor in Nashville. They’d heard about an ongoing effort by community members to support other community members in Birmingham, Ala., and thought it could work in Middle Tennessee. Scibelli notes that the group operates inside Drkmttr, but is independent of the venue itself.

In a little more than two months of operation, the store has grown and adapted to fit the needs of those who use it. However it changes, it’s guided by McCarthy and Habib’s mission for the store, printed on their website. It is simple — “It is a place where we can share resources freely and no one will be asked questions or turned away” — and so is the methodology. On Fridays from 3 to 6 p.m., community members leave donations including perishable and nonperishable food, diapers, toiletries and school supplies. On Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., people mask up and line up around the

building, waiting their turn to gather what they need.

The whole process is socially distanced, to keep both shoppers and volunteers safe. The effort is not billed as charity — as McCarthy pointed out in a recent interview for the Scene with Megan Seling, “charity” implies that those in need are at fault, when in fact they’re being overwhelmed and the system is failing them — but rather an opportunity for a community to care for its members who’ve been hit the hardest. There is also a community refrigerator outside the building, where shoppers can stop by to pick up items they need when the store isn’t open.

Edwards, an experienced show promoter who has handled the lion’s share of Drkmttr’s booking, is also a former volunteer DJ who hosted a show called From the Basement on community radio station WXNA-LPFM. She’s a natural fit to host Drkmttr’s podcast, Drkmttr Radio (part of the We Own This Town network). What was at first an extra responsibility has turned into something that gives Edwards & Co. an opportunity to keep sharing information and music with the all-ages community that’s grown up around the venue.

“When we launched the Patreon, one thing you had to have with it is [original] content,” Edwards explains.

“It’s an opportunity for me to be able to interview people who have important things to say and haven’t necessarily been given that platform.”

The podcast features music from performers who’ve played Drkmttr before as well as bands that are tangentially related, plus discussions on other topics of interest. Since late July, new episodes have appeared about every two weeks. So far, Edwards has interviewed Scibelli and Pierce Jordan, who fronts the powerful Philly hardcore band Soul Glo. For the most recent episode, published Aug. 28, Edwards celebrated Drkmttr’s fifth anniversary (the inaugural show was Aug. 29, 2015), sharing memories of the venue’s first home while playing tracks from bands that frequented the house at the time, like Gnarwhal and Yautja.

There is more on the horizon for Drkmttr too. Organizers will soon begin renovating the former kitchen space to serve as a community classroom and meeting space, providing a platform for new outreach programs.

There are plans to pair up with Queen Ave Collective (a multimedia production space opened up at the site of another much-loved, long-defunct all-ages venue, also called Queen Ave) to work on a livestreaming music festival for the fall.

Drkmttr and its extended family have proven again and again to be an important piece of Nashville, growing and changing with the needs of their community.

But these efforts take resources. For those wanting to contribute, the Patreon is always active, and the Free Store accepts any donations dropped off on Fridays.

Until we can all see live music (or Buffy adaptations) in the same room again, we can put our efforts into caring for the community around us.

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nashvillescene.com | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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MUSIC

THE SPIN

BOWL ’EM OVER

BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

“I

thought we would’ve sold more tickets!”

Margo Price quipped Thursday night, moments into her second of two pay-per-view livestreams from the new Nashville outpost of NYC venue Brooklyn Bowl.

With lockdown entering its sixth month, even avid local rock-scene supporters would be forgiven for forgetting that the Nashville BB — adjacent to First Horizon Park in Germantown’s southeastern corner — is ready for shows with big crowds, if only it were safe to host them. The venue’s grand opening was originally set for March 14, the weekend that COVID-related shutdowns began in earnest, though it’s hosted a few streaming performances from an empty house. As the next-best thing for now, Price’s show offered reassuring reminders that the pause on concerts hasn’t meant that music has stopped.

Price’s third album That’s How Rumors Get Started has been out for two months, but for obvious reasons hasn’t had a proper release show. Price and band ended one leg of the touring cycle for 2017’s All American Made with a sold-out three-night Ryman run, memorialized in Perfectly Imperfect at the Ryman, and wrapped the whole thing up by opening for Jack White at Bridgestone

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ing unexpected new dimensions to the set — New Wave liveliness and Thin Lizzy licks on “Heartless Mind,” expressive blues-rock riffs on “Twinkle Twinkle,” and big Stevie Nicks energy on the wistful title track, one of a handful in which guest singers Nicki Bluhm and Ashley Wilcoxson lent low-key harmonies. Keyboard maestro Micah Hulscher (seen on screen just a week before at The 5 Spot with his jazz trio Greasy Neale) shined as The Pricetags’ ace in the hole, shifting on a dime from barroom boogie to orchestral prog flourishes, playful Farfisa licks and whatever else the songs called for.

Neither Price nor her bandmates showed any signs of rust. If anything they sounded readier than ever, unleashing so much pentup emotion that the lack of an audience (outside of a couple club staffers and loved ones) couldn’t compromise it. As the 18-song set continued on through peaks (the crackling prog-rocker “Paper Cowboy,” with Price on auxiliary percussion alongside drummer Dillon Napier) and valleys (a funereal “All American Made” with added emphasis on the line, “I wonder how the president gets any sleep at night”), Price reaffirmed her mastery at balancing heaviness and levity both as a songwriter and performer.

That’s a lot to juggle with how much Price exerts herself onstage — jumping from acoustic guitar to electric, to organ, to drums and sometimes just singing — but she makes it look easy, as the greats do. Kudos also to the tech crew — watching from home, one quickly forgot the gig was taking place at an empty club down the road. It felt closer in spirit to an Austin City Limits taping, or a vintage installment of Germany’s Rockpalast series.

Speaking of greats: Joining Price & Co. for the set’s final act, special guest

IN A LANE OF THEIR OWN: MARGO PRICE AND JEREMY IVEY Arena. Considering the momentum the 37-year-old singer-songwriter built up ahead of Rumors, the lack of a blowout release concert is among the biggest bummers heaped upon Nashville’s music scene this year.

Maybe not on the level of John Prine not being able to have an in-person wake, but a downer nonetheless.

The made-in-L.A., Sturgill Simpsonproduced Rumors marks Price’s first solo album for a label other than Third Man Records. Loma Vista, a subsidiary of substantial Beverly Hills-based indie Concord, released Rumors. A wrecking crew of session players sits in for her longtime Nashville band The Pricetags, and the record’s ’70s pop-rock veneer smooths some of the rougher, outlaw-country edges off All American Made and Price’s 2016 debut Midwest Farmer’s Daughter.

But in the live setting, backed by The Pricetags, the material roared to life, add-

acknowledged the weirdness of the situation. “I’m not good at this social distancing thing — it’s hard not to cuddle up to people,” the 67-year-old songsmith confessed.

But even sans audience, their tag-team take on Williams’ “Joy” — a fiery ode to reclaiming what’s yours after ending a toxic relationship — from 1998’s unimpeachable Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, was an absolute riot. Standing opposite each other and trading off verses, Williams on Telecaster and Price wielding a tambourine, both grinning from ear to ear as they belted it, the pair ratcheted up the already-heavy song’s piss-and-vinegar intensity like true kindred spirits.

After a second tune together, “You Can’t Rule Me” — a scorcher from Williams’ latest, Good Souls Better Angels — Williams gave Price a “we’re-not-worthy” salute before heading offstage. Price reciprocated, calling the jam “the one good thing that’s happened to me in 2020,” and adding, “We’ve got to do that again sometime with a crowd.”

Those at home no doubt agreed.

EMAIL THESPIN@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

NASHVILLE SCENE | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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FILM

PRIMAL STREAM 25

Bette Midler, ’70s vampirism and The New Mutants, now (and soon) available to stream

BY JASON SHAWHAN

THE VELVET VAMPIRE

DIVINE MADNESS

I

hope you’re doing as well as possible — and by that I mean I hope that the ongoing stress of the pandemic and our current political situations aren’t grinding you down.

There are so many struggles going on, and at times it feels impossible to address them all without sounding disingenuous or opportunistic. So please just know that I hope these weekly guides to what’s out there and available to you serve as a safety valve, or one of those runaway truck paths you see on the side of a mountain, or an emotional Dairy Queen. The vibe of this week’s picks is a little less apocalyptic than last week’s; the outside world has more than enough of that to go around. Look back at the past 24 issues of the Scene for scores more recommendations of what to stream.

DIVINE MADNESS ON TCM The first great concert film of the ’80s, Divine Madness finds energetic dynamo Bette Midler holding court in Pasadena, Calif., and serving up everything an audience could want: torch songs (Ragovoy and Weiss’ “Stay With Me” with such intensity Midler nearly burns down the stage), rock numbers emanating from some extradimensional timespace (Springsteen, Nilsson, Dylan), dirty jokes, conceptual theater (including Midler’s lounge-singer/mermaid alter ego Delores DeLago), well-placed ballads that will knock you flat, and a commitment to providing as much entertainment as humanly possible. Director Michael Ritchie (The Bad News Bears, Smile, Fletch) did the work with the camera crew, and even though there are 10 units operating at any given moment, as a viewer you never see anything except the show, the audience and a diva working her ass off onstage. Midler may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you know her work from Beaches, Hocus Pocus, “From a Distance” or holding court on Twitter these days, take 94 minutes and familiarize yourself with Divine Madness.

As a bonus, the complete theatrical version is streamable via TCM, including the two Tom Waits songs (“Shiver Me Timbers” and “Rainbow Sleeves”) that were removed from the VHS and DVD editions. And yes, that is dance-music doyenne Jocelyn Brown as one of Midler’s Staggering Harlettes.

THE VELVET VAMPIRE ON NIGHT FLIGHT, TUBI AND AMAZON PRIME VIDEO A magical anomaly even when it surfaced in theaters in 1971, The Velvet Vampire is a distinctive ride. Director/co-writer Stephanie Rothman (The Student Nurses, Terminal Island) made something that fit producer Roger Corman’s exploitation requirements (nudity, vampire violence) and understood the new wave of sensual European horror even as it tapped into a specifically American sense of unease and menace. Lee (Michael Blodgett from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) and Susan (Sherry DeBoer of all the ’70s TV) are the most blonde and most beautiful couple at the chic gathering where

THE NEW MUTANTS

they encounter Diane LeFanu (Celeste Yarnall of Star Trek, Knots Landing, Melrose Place). Diane is widow rich, brunette mysterious and captivated by the two, and before you know it, Susan and Lee are on their way to spend some time at Diane’s Palm Springs estate. There are complications with the car, as well as with the mysterious folk who live on the periphery of Diane’s home. Native American legends come into play, as do shared stories of corporate terror and miners’ maladies — to say nothing of the hypersymbolic dreams that afflict the subjects.

But Diane is very charming and drives a dune buggy, so you can’t help but get swept up in her sway. The desert locations and unwinding hippie vibes give the film a singular texture, and Rothman knows how to deploy or subvert a cliché with deft timing. And then there’s a rightfully legendary sequence toward the end of the film that starts in a bus station and ends in the middle of the street in broad daylight that is jaw-dropping in its ambition and achievement. You will want to see more Stephanie Rothman films, and you absolutely should.

THE NEW MUTANTS AT DRIVE-INS, COMING SOON TO DISNEY+ OR HULU Bounced around for reshoots that apparently never happened and from release date to release date, The New Mutants for the longest time felt cursed to never come out — or perhaps it was some grand unstructured joke about comic book/superhero cinema. The sale of 20th Century Fox to Disney coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic

seemed like just the latest escalations in a sad story about IP and the modern market — a cautionary tale for people too tapped into the current trends in global exhibition.

But strangely enough, The New Mutants is neither a reshot quilt nor the disaster some might expect. Honestly, it’s the third-best X-Men universe film, and it’s genuinely saddening that this iteration of these characters has nowhere to go. To be fair, there are some big issues here: Co-creator Bob McLeod’s concerns and frustration (including misspelling his name) are well-documented and worth exploring, and like him, I don’t understand why exactly the Vietnamese original team member Karma was replaced by a for-some-reason-initially-racist incarnation of the Russian character Magik (Anya Taylor-Joy, from The Witch and the tonally similar Morgan).

Earlier I mentioned that it felt like this film might be cursed to never come out, and that sticks in the craw, because The New Mutants has one of the kindest, most evocative and sweet queer romances that mainstream cinema has given us in the past decade or so, which was not something I expected. But I’m a longtime fan of the series, and it brought me great joy (as does the presence of a certain puce-colored miniature dragon). It also at several moments brings to life the impressionist wonders and kinesthetic horrors of longtime New Mutants artist Bill Sienkiewicz (to this day the greatest comic book artist the medium has produced — see also Elektra: Assassin and the TV show Legion), who’s never afraid to tap into the preternaturally upsetting and visceral. If budget limitations cast that certain industrial pall/green-screen fatigue over the mysterious facility where our characters are stuck, the way the effects artists lean into the disconnect and let the suppressed horrors in the story seep out is somehow more effective. Ultimately, The New Mutants is a coming-of-age story in which the internal and biochemical struggles that plague us all are externalized into something grand and operatic, pulsing with eldritch fire, psionic blasts and bodies unbound by established tradition. It’s out in theaters currently, but we’re not recommending you go to movie theaters in this space. At the time of this writing, New Mutants is at some of the drive-ins around Middle Tennessee (I drove to the Montana Drive-In in Estill Springs to see it), and it will most likely surface on Disney+ or Hulu at some point soon. It’s worth your time when it does.

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nashvillescene.com | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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FILM

SIBYL DISOBEDIENCE Despite spellbinding performances, Sibyl spins from complicated into messy

BY SADAF AHSAN

T

here are few actors who can cry quite like Adèle Exarchopoulos.

The French actress outranks even the likes of renowned sobber Claire Danes. Exarchopoulos heaves silently, her sobs narrowly escaping a growing lump in her throat, her tears gliding down her cheeks and under her chin, where she wipes them away casually mid-soliloquy with the back of her hand.

Her performance in 2013’s Blue Is the Warmest Colour — along with how she ate, kissed and yelled — still echoes in my brain, her mannerisms so real and unaffected.

She brings that same innocence SIBYL NR, 101 MINUTES; IN FRENCH to Sibyl, in which she plays a patient WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES AVAILABLE FRIDAY, SEPT. 18, of the eponymous VIA BELCOURT.ORG psychiatrist, who is played just as engagingly by Virginie Efira (An Impossible Love).

Efira is spellbinding as Sibyl, a psychiatrist keen on getting back to her writerly roots. But when Exarchopoulos’ Margot, a new patient with a wild story, shows up at her office, she can’t resist. Margot is an actress who has become pregnant after an af-

fair with her famous co-star Igor (Gaspard Ulliel), who is married to the film’s director (Sandra Hüller). If that sounds complicated, it only gets more so. Sibyl throws ethics to the wind and begins recording her sessions with Margot on the sly, even going so far as to travel with her to the set and meet the figures in Margot’s life whom she’s been introduced to only in conversation. A novel begins to pour out of Sibyl as she borrows more and more from Margot’s story.

Were that the film’s entire premise, Sibyl could have been just as good as all its glossy cinematography makes it look. But the love affair at the film’s core, which grows in expected ways, spins from complicated into messy. And with the inclusion of sudden

flashbacks that tell us Sibyl is a recovering alcoholic — whose previous relationship mirrored Margot’s current one in multiple ways — the film becomes mired in its desperate efforts at profundity.

It’s unfortunate, too. Sibyl was directed and co-written by Justine Triet, who last made In Bed With Victoria, a memorable little romance also starring Efira. In fact, it’s Efira and Exarchopoulos holding this movie up with their impassioned performances, like a bent and battered wire hanger struggling to support an oversized wool sweater. You know the one — it’s not going to make it!

Perhaps the intent is for the film to break down, just as its protagonist breaks down

ANTE UP

Antebellum is yet another depiction of Black pain

BY CRAIG D. LINDSEY

“B

lack people in general, cuz, we sell trauma,” said rapper Vince Staples in an interview with Hot 97 a few years back. “Every hot movie. … 12 Years a Slave, the Nat Turner movie [The Birth ANTEBELLUM of a Nation], Django, R, 106 MINUTES AVAILABLE FRIDAY, SEPT. 18, Moonlight — let’s keep VIA VIDEO ON DEMAND it going. We can all name one right now. For Black people, the Black business is trauma. That’s what we got.”

Staples has a point about how Black pain has virtually become its own film genre. Films that dare to show African Americans as versatile, multidimensional or, dare I say, just like white folk don’t seem to get green-lit as often at the studios. (Thank God cable networks and streaming platforms are around to drop eclectic shows that prove that Black people aren’t a monolith.) But most of the time, whenever you see a Black film at the multiplexes, expect the Black people in it to go through a lot of agonizing, upsetting, miserable shit.

Righteous recording star Janelle Monáe definitely goes through a helluva lot in Antebellum, a psycho thriller streaming on demand via various services this Friday. (It was scheduled for a theatrical release in April, but — well, you know.) As you can probably tell by its title, some scars — both physical and psychological — will be inflicted on most of the film’s dark-

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skinned characters.

Monáe plays two characters. We first see her as Eden, a slave who recently tried to escape a Louisiana plantation. She ends up being whipped and branded for her insolence. This plantation is run by some textbook white assholes, including the always shifty-looking Jack Huston as a brutal Confederate captain and Jena Malone — whose Southern accent is extra as hell here — as his significant other. In another time and another place, Monáe is also Veronica, an author and motivational speaker with a loving family, a designated ratchet BFF (Gabourey Sidibe is both cringey and thirsty), and a knack for both inspir-

ing Black people to rise up and calling white racists out on their bullshit.

If you haven’t figured out yet how these two worlds will collide, then you should probably watch more movies (especially M. Night Shyamalan movies). Co-writers and co-directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz — billed here as Bush | Renz — indeed spend most of the movie jacking the work of other filmmakers, dropping everything from obvious, icy nods to Kubrick and Hitchcock (the latter also morphs into a quick nod to Beyoncé’s Lemonade) and even throwing in the sort of obtrusive lens flares J.J. Abrams can’t get enough of.

Bush (a filmmaker who’s Black) and Renz (a film-

in her efforts to craft an engaging story while battling her real-life demons. If so, I’d rather it be even a smidge less scattered under its very pretty surface.

Viewers are warned at the very start of the film, when a verbose acquaintance attempts to mansplain the art of writing to Sibyl.

“Writers take readers hostage,” he says in an almost throwaway comment between mouthfuls of food and nonsense. While the film doesn’t manage to hold its viewers fully captive, Sibyl’s writing certainly seems to steal her own soul, as well as the souls of those around her. And that, I can say as a writer, is where Sibyl finds some of the truth and chills it’s after.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

maker who’s white) are the latest directors ready to jolt audiences with a hit of racially charged, thoughtprovoking horror, now that Jordan Peele has made that a lucrative thing. (This movie is produced by Sean McKittrick, who also produced Peele’s Get Out and Us.) But Antebellum is practically a pileup of all the movies that Staples listed above, merging the disturbing tragedy of Slave and Moonlight with the cathartic vengeance of Django and Birth. The movie also gives us something that’s beginning to get on my nerves whenever I see it in movies: racist white characters who, for some reason, won’t say the N-word!

Seriously, how are you gonna make a movie set on a plantation and not have the N-bombs fly as fast and furious as bumblebees?

As I was watching Antebellum, I began to understand how my people felt when they saw Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit a few summers ago. Bigelow’s so-real-it-hurts depiction of a tragic, police-fueled incident that happened during the 1967 Detroit riots was viewed by many in the African American community as straight-up torture porn — especially since the film was released during a time when the deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Philando Castile were still fresh in our minds.

We’ve had a cruel year, what with the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor launching protests and riots across the country, BLM supporters and Trumpers squaring up in the streets, the police still paralyzing men at close range (while ignoring white boys with semiautomatic rifles) and crazy Karens getting caught on video telling minorities what to do.

Considering all that, seeing more Black pain is really something we don’t need right now. We already see it on our damn phones every waking moment.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

NASHVILLE SCENE | SEPTEMBER 17 – SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

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CROSSWORD EDITED BY WILL SHORTZ ACROSS 1

Block letters?

4

Clue weapon

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They may be cured

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Constellation beneath the tail of Scorpius

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Novelist ___ de Balzac

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Mine, in Marseille

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Sign on a mountain roadway

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Perennial known for attracting butterflies

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SANTIAGO BRONCHALES

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Lead-in to X, Y or Z

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Apple platform

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Disconnect Go, on a Monopoly board, e.g.

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Heater

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Put on low, in a way

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Dinnertime annoyance

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PUZZLE BY JON OLSEN

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Pessimist’s word

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Travels à la Theodore Roosevelt in 1909-10

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John or Paul, but not Ringo

Reason to lower the bar

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What might be in trouble if it’s out of the woods?

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Las Vegas-to-Denver dir.

DOWN 1 2

Sea creature pictured on the flag of Anguilla

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Ran again

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Crew mover

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Spins

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Hideo who threw no-hitters in both the American and National Leagues

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___ Cephas Jones, Emmy winner for “This Is Us”

Ready for trouble

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Illness that tonic water was invented to treat

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“Deadline: White House” channel

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Photographer Goldin

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Greeting in 63-Across

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Actor with a “Rocky” performance, familiarly

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“Do tell!”

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Dental crown alternative

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Group whose motto is a hint to this puzzle’s theme

Winner of the 1966 World Cup: Abbr.

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Sole heir, perhaps

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Here-there link

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“Let me go now”

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Rooster, at sunup

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Benjamins

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Actress Anne

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Visibility reducer

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Blend

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“Tartuffe” playwright

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February 4th, for many?

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Wolf ___, sea urchin predator

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Enters, as data

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Like soy milk

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Like most ice rinks

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Property claim

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Amount in red

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Cook slowly, in a way

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Tax evasion agts.

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City that’s home to the Sugarloaf Cable Car, informally

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What the nests in bird’s-nest soup are made of

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Crispy brisket bits

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They might appear in cameos

Kevin who played Hercules

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Irritating inconvenience

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Chinos color

In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a non-resident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon IRIS BEST OATES. It is ordered that said Defendant enter Her appearance herein with thirty (30) days after September 24, 2020 same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on October 26, 2020. It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

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Bookstore section

Fitting nickname for athletes at Whittier College

IRIS BEST OATES

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3

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vs.

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Rocky’s love in “Rocky”

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Famed French wine region

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vs.

MICHAEL JEROME WHITNEY

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AMBER NICOLLE WILLIAMS

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Non-Resident Notice Third Circuit Docket No. 20D700

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T S R F I E A L P A N T I L S D P I G O T R C E A A O Y N T S S H O P T E L L L E A L I N O L A

Non-Resident Notice Third Circuit Docket No. 20D1183

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Part of the eye

MIGDALIA GARCIA

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“Supposing …”

vs.

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“Kid-tested” cereal

FLAVIO ROBERTO ROCA

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Language suffix

In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a non-resident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon FLAVIO ROBERTO ROCA. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HIS appearance herein with thirty (30) days after October 8, 2020 same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on November 9, 2020. It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE

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

E L I H U

A C C E S S

T H E R M O S

Non-Resident Notice Fourth Circuit Docket No. 19D1284

Bethany Peery Glandorf Attorney for Plaintiff

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Richard R. Rooker, Clerk M. De Jesus, Deputy Clerk Date: September 11, 2020

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LEGALS

Simple bike trick

1974 C.I.A. spoof

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NO. 0813

In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a non-resident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon FLAVIO ROBERTO ROCA. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HIS appearance herein with thirty (30) days after October 8, 2020 same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on November 9, 2020. It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

S A L M A

A R P E A S A R M E T O N I N G A V E C E R T Y S

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

Richard R. Rooker, Clerk W. North, Deputy Clerk Date: August 27, 2020 Jessica R. Simpson Attorney for Plaintiff NSC 9/3, 9/10, 9/17, 9/24/20

Non-Resident Notice Fourth Circuit Docket No. 19D1284 AMBER NICOLLE WILLIAMS vs.

SANTIAGO BRONCHALES In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a non-resident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon SANTIAGO BRONCHALES. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HIS appearance herein with thirty (30) days after October 8, 2020 same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on November 9, 2020. It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

In this cause it appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the defendant is a non-resident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon SANTIAGO BRONCHALES. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HIS appearance herein with thirty (30) days after October 8, 2020 same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on November 9, 2020. It is therefore ordered that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks succession in the Nashville Scene, a newspaper published in Nashville.

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Richard R. Rooker, Clerk M. De Jesus, Deputy Clerk Date: September 11, 2020 H. Julianne Lackey Attorney for Plaintiff NSC 9/17, 9/24, 10/1, 10/8/20 Public Notice – Request for Comment Reappointment of Henry Martin United States Federal Public Defender Middle District of Tennessee Please visit our website at www.ca6.uscourts.gov for detailed notice.

NSC 9/17, 9/24, 10/1/20

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PANDEMIC. PROTESTS. MURDER HORNETS.

Richard R. Rooker, Clerk M. De Jesus, Deputy Clerk Date: September 11, 2020 Bethany Peery Glandorf Attorney for Plaintiff

NSC 9/17, 9/24, 10/1, 10/8/20

Richard R. Rooker, Clerk M. De Jesus, Deputy Clerk Date: September 11, 2020

THIS IS NOT THE YEAR TO LEAVE THINGS TO CHANCE. H. Julianne Lackey Attorney for Plaintiff

NSC 9/17, 9/24, 10/1, 10/8/20

Note: “B/W” and “W/B” = BLACK in one direction and WHITE in the other.

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