Nashville Scene 8-20-20

CITY LIMITS: LEGISLATURE MAKES CAMPING ON STATE PROPERTY A FELONY, DOESN’T ADDRESS UNEMPLOYMENT

AUGUST 20–26, 2020 I VOLUME 39 I NUMBER 29 I NASHVILLESCENE.COM I FREE

MUSIC: BULLY’S ALICIA BOGNANNO FINDS A NEW KIND OF CONFIDENCE ON SUGAREGG

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NASHVILLE IN THE

PANDEMIC

Dealing with COVID-19 was always going to be challenging — but it didn’t have to be like this

BY STEVEN HALE

class of

2020

COUNTRY MUSIC HALL OF FAME MEMBERS-ELECT

DEAN DILLON

MARTY STUART

HANK WILLIAMS JR.

Election to the Country Music Hall of Fame is country music’s highest honor. New members are elected annually by an anonymous panel of industry leaders chosen by the Country Music Association. The CMA created the accolade in 1961 to recognize significant contributions to the advancement of country music by individuals in both the creative and business communities.

The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum is proud to exhibit the bronze plaques in our Rotunda, commemorating membership.

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NASHVILLE SCENE | AUGUST 20 – AUGUST 26, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

CONTENTS

AUGUST 20, 2020

7

22

Walk a Mile: Old Hickory Village ...............7

Let It Go ................................................... 22

CITY LIMITS

MUSIC

In the eighth installment of his column, J.R. Lind ventures deep into the former DuPont territory of Old Hickory

Bully’s Alicia Bognanno finds a new kind of confidence on Sugaregg

BY J.R. LIND

On Your Side ............................................ 22

Special Treatment......................................8 In a special session, lawmakers make it a felony to camp on state property — but don’t address unemployment or schools

Cidny Bullens paints a rich picture of transgender life in Walkin’ Through This World

BY BRITTNEY McKENNA

In Tongues ............................................... 23 The Mavericks make their Spanish-language debut with En Español

This week on the Scene’s news and politics blog

BY ABBY LEE HOOD

The Spin ................................................... 24

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The Scene’s live-review column checks out livestreams by Aaron Lee Tasjan and Nicole Atkins

COVER STORY

Nashville in the Pandemic ..................... 10

BY STEPHEN TRAGESER AND CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

Dealing with COVID-19 was always going to be challenging — but it didn’t have to be like this

25

BY STEVEN HALE

Close to Home ......................................... 12 Nashville nurse reflects on treating COVID-19 patients after having the virus herself

BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT

Margo Price Covers ‘WAP’ on The Daily Show

BY MEGAN SELING

Pith in the Wind .........................................9

BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT

THIS WEEK ON THE WEB: Postal Service Warns It Can’t Guarantee Mail-In Ballot Delivery by Election Day Goo Goo Teams Up With a Duo of Nashville Institutions Jazz on a Summer’s Day Is an Extraordinary Experience

FILM

Primal Stream XXII ................................. 25 Fresh horror, a David Lynch stone classic and more, now available to stream

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BY JASON SHAWHAN

Go to Movies in the Park-ing Lot: Star Wars — Episode IV: A New Hope, livestream Summer Online Shakespeare, watch Instrumenthead live, do jigsaw puzzles, eat the Halloween candy, experience Jason Marsden’s Mars Variety Show and more

BY CORY WOODROOF

Static Shock ............................................ 26 Tesla relies on refreshing innovation to tell a well-known story

CRITICS’ PICKS

19

27

NEW YORK TIMES CROSSWORD

27

MARKETPLACE

FOOD AND DRINK Popping Off

Restaurant pop-ups are transitioning to permanent status to survive the pandemic

BY CHRIS CHAMBERLAIN

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BOOKS

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NASHVILLE HAS LOST $2.45 BILLION IN VISITOR SPENDING SINCE THE ONSET OF COVID-19. HOW QUICKLY CAN WE RECOVER? Between March and August, Nashville lost $2.45 billion in visitor spending — about $100 million per week — according to information provided by the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp.

Hotel occupancy is down 59 percent.

Though things had been slightly improving in May and June, occupancy rates in July and August returned to falling numbers.

The Tennessean, reporting on the NCVC’s statistics, noted that meeting and convention cancellations have led to losses of $500 million in direct spending, $40.38 million in state taxes and $43.11 million in local taxes.

Travel trade groups have canceled trips through 2020, costing the city an additional $28.36 million. The losses continue to pile up. NCVC president and CEO Butch Spyridon says convention business losses could reach $1 billion before all is said and done.

Cancellations are even seeping into 2021.

More disturbing is the fact that Nashville has gone viral with negative press and social media posts. Photos and videos of maskless revelers and bachelorette parties have Nashville tourism leaders and business leaders worried. Spyridon tells NewsChannel 5: “Trending nationally on social media for those kinds of issues is not the PR we’re looking for. … And there’s no light at the end of the tunnel yet.” He concludes that Nashville will have a “coronavirus hangover” that could last well into our future.

Just last year, Nashville had a record 16.1 million visitors. In 2018, $7 billion came to our city in visitor spending — a third of what was generated statewide. Nashville experienced nine years in a row of record performance for hotel rooms sold, and eight years in a row of being a top global destination.

Had COVID-19 not struck, there’s no question that Nashville would have experienced another banner year. Once we’re to a point at which the virus no longer affects our daily lives, there is little doubt that Nashville will recover.

Nashville could actually recover more quickly than other cities due to its location and its tourism industry. Nashville is within 600 miles of 40 percent of the U.S. population, making it a very drivable destination.

With fewer people wanting to fly right now, travelers are seeking locales they can drive to — destinations where they can find activi-

NASHVILLE SCENE | AUGUST 20 – AUGUST 26, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

ties for every age group, like those Nashville has to offer. TravelPulse reports that 57 percent of Americans plan to resume travel within the next six months; 49 percent of Americans, according to the site, say they’re more likely to do so by car. This is a plus for our city. Likewise, though many meetings and conventions have been canceled through the summer, meeting planners are certainly looking ahead to post-COVID days.

STR (a company that provides market data on the hotel industry worldwide) and CBRE (the largest commercial real estate services company in the world) both agree that it will take at least three to four years for Nashville hotel rooms sold to reach 2019 levels.

Whether or not it will actually take that long remains to be seen.

In the meantime, we are all still living with COVID-19, and our city officials are doing their best to keep our residents and visitors safe.

Since the onset of this pandemic, Nashville leaders have been working with businesses to reopen safely. Spyridon comments: “While the pandemic continues to disproportionately impact the hospitality industry, we are encouraged by industry partners who are opening restaurants and hotels and planning events that can be safely held. This type of economic activity is important for the hospitality workforce and our city’s financial recovery. We will always keep our focus on the health and safety of residents and visitors and ask them to be vigilant about wearing masks and physical distancing.”

No one could have expected the coronavirus or the impact it would have on our city and our nation. But as we have done after previous crises — like the 2010 flood locally, and 9/11 on a national scale — we will bounce back, even if it does take those three or four years. Because we are unequivocally #NashvilleStrong, and as Americans, by our very nature, we are quick to recover.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam got it right when he said, “I have a great faith in the strength and the resilience in the American People.”

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

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The Temple presents

Nancy MacLean author of “Democracy in Chains” Tuesday, August 25th, 7:00 pm Duke Professor Nancy MacLean has received more than a dozen prizes and awards and been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowships Foundation. In 2010, she was elected a fellow of the Society of American Historians, which recognizes literary distinction in the writing of history and biography. Also an award-winning teacher, she offers courses on 20 thcentury America, social movements, and public policy history.

Duke History Professor and author of “Democracy in Chains” Nancy MacLean will speak at The Temple via Zoom.

A spiritual/religious discussion of “Democracy in Chains” is topical in the midst of the new COVID-19 reality and the protests for racial justice.

This book reveals how certain libertarian ideas are being advanced to shackle our democracy so that it cannot respond to the will of the majority but instead is concentrating power among those who seek to rig the system to serve their interests.

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CITY LIMITS

Walk a

Mile

OLD HICKORY VILLAGE

In the eighth installment of his column, J.R. Lind ventures deep into the former DuPont territory of Old Hickory

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

Riverside Drive

Robinson Funeral Home north on Hadley. Right on 11th Street, then right on Riverside Road and right on 14th. Left on Cleves and then right on 17th/Golf Club Lane to the park.

ABANDONED SCOOTERS: 0 CRANES: 0

11th Street

14th Street

with J.R. Lind

Cleves Street 17th Street

Rachel’s Walk

Hadley 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.

I

n a city where so many neighborhoods are changing by the moment — with old homes torn down for two new ones, businesses shuffling hither and yon like peripatetic bumblebees, and churches rebranding to web addresses — there is something very centering about stasis.

Old Hickory Village is a largely residential early-20th-century section of the broader Old Hickory area, and it looks as if it was dropped from the sky by time travelers and surrounded by a force field to fight off inexorable metamorphosis. It’s not just a neighborhood out of time. It’s almost a neighborhood out of place, looking more like a well-thought-out company town more suited to the Big 10 Midwest or industrial Northeast than to the sleepy agrarian South.

Of course, that’s essentially what it is.

In January 1918, Delaware’s E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company and the federal government decided to build a massive munitions factory on Hadley’s Bend east of Nashville. DuPont agreed to build a town for the massive number of workers needed to staff the plant, and by November 1918 there were more than 300 homes. They called it Jacksonville to honor Andrew Jackson but changed the name to Old Hickory two years later, in part because mail bound for Jacksonville, Fla., was misdirected to Tennessee and vice versa. They built a self-sufficient and largely self-contained community — note the extant guard houses on the bridge carrying Old Hickory Boulevard over the river — with hospitals, churches, a hotel and

segregated neighborhoods for Black and Mexican workers.

By the time of the Armistice in November 1918, there were 56,000 people here on the DuPont payroll. At the time, Davidson County’s population was less than 160,000.

The population (and the payroll) dwindled after the war ended and DuPont sold the factory, but the company eventually bought back the plant to manufacture rayon (hence Rayon City, an Old Hickory neighborhood north of the Village), bought back the Village, and ran it as a company town until the end of World War II. DuPont is gone now, but its legacy is still intact. And if DuPont ran Old Hickory for decades, the business at Hadley Avenue and 11th Street ran something much larger for just as long: Davidson County. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about the Phillips-Robinson Funeral Home in the flatiron of OHB, Hadley and 11th. It’s a wellappointed, well-taken-care-of funeral home with capacious parking. It looks like a comfortable, welcoming church, which makes sense: It was an Episcopal church until the late 1980s, when Phillips-Robinson moved from its Rayon City location a couple miles north.

Now ubiquitous, particularly in Nashville’s eastern suburbs, the chain of funeral homes started in 1929 to serve the bluecollar families in the Old Hickory area. But here’s a couple things to remember about funeral homes: Everyone needs one at one point or another, and the best funeral directors are deeply empathic — thus it’s a great way to build connections with a broad crosssection of the community.

And as the Phillipses and Robinsons proved, it’s a great way to build a political machine.

In the years before Nashville’s Metroization in 1963, it was virtually impossible to be elected to Davidson County office without the backing of the mortician machine in Rayon City, as detailed in James Squires’ indispensable chronicle The Secrets of the Hopewell Box. The title of that 1996 book refers to Hopewell, the largely Black com-

munity south of Old Hickory, the ballots from which disappeared in a particularly contentious election.

The shift to consolidated government largely destroyed the machine’s power.

(Note, however, the number of Robinsons who are or were judges in recent times.)

Now the funeral home is more of a literal cornerstone to the neighborhood than a metaphorical one.

Hadley is lined with prim homes. Unusually for such an older neighborhood, there is a significant sidewalk network, though visitors quickly notice how much narrower they are than the more social distancingfriendly strips in other parts of town built up after someone in the Codes Administration dreamt up sidewalk standards. Another quirk on Hadley: The power lines run behind the homes rather than along the street. This decision, presumably DuPont’s, allows front yard trees to grow expansive canopies that

stretch over the road and provide nearly complete shade on the sidewalk.

Hadley is essentially the backbone of the Village, and due to the way DuPont laid out its town, this means the homes are the median of what was available, likely intended for longtime employees with families or those on the verge of what we’d now call middle management. Farther away from the Cumberland River and closer to the factory itself, the homes are smaller and more modest. These were for the workaday Joes at the bottom of the ladder. Turning toward the river, the houses get bigger for the aforementioned middle management and truly commodious and luxurious along the river’s bluff where the plant’s top brass lived.

Though the houses on Hadley do tend to be a bit repetitious in design (DuPont, after all, was cranking out these homes at breakneck pace), modern residents add their own touches of personality — particularly by

nashvillescene.com | AUGUST 20 – AUGUST 26, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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CITY LIMITS

using bold color palettes for their shutters, including aqua, yellow and purple. One home, near the intersection with 13th, has a very verisimilitudinous dog sculpture on its porch (and in the middle of the uncanny valley).

Hadley is (or was) also the address of many of the neighborhood’s churches and other centers of civic life. Spanning the blocks between 11th and 13th and out a few more east and west, there’s Methodist, Baptist and Church of Christ churches, a Masonic lodge (with the usual windowless facade and imposing brick structure), a park and a public library. Across from the Methodist church is a large vacant field, unusual enough in Nashville. It’s obviously been graded at some point in the past, hinting at the former presence of a road or building.

For 50 years or so, Old Hickory Elementary School was here. DuPont gave the land to Davidson County with the caveat that if it ceased being a school, the industrial conglomerate could buy it back for $1 — which, it so happens, it did in the early 1970s. It then sold the land to the Old Hickory Utility District, which itself sold it to the church in 1976. Neither school, DuPont nor even the OHUD still exists.

There’s a community garden nearby, and though the distinctive tendrils of squash and okra plants are present (as well as a failed effort at corn), this one, unlike many others, is almost exclusively a province of flowers.

There are both domesticated and wild ones, popping color into the predictably hazy August morning.

The library, built in 1937, looks like it could survive anything (though, of course, it is closed because of COVID-19), built with tough brick and metal and including a narrow chimney on the facade facing 11th. The houses grow in size as 11th rolls toward the river. The lots start to seem smaller, though perhaps it’s a trick of the eye. Styles still repeat: Barn-mimicking three-story homes are next to others with idiosyncrasies including extra-wide and extra-long diagonal eaves and windows that are seemingly between floors. The streets are wider here too — but not the sidewalk — and the trees seem to enjoy the extra space. Porch-sitting must be a prime pastime in the Village. Nearly every home has an abundance of patio furniture and other accoutrements indicating that these folks love spending time on their porches: little gardens, yard art, drinks carts and so forth.

When 11th abuts Riverside Road, the change is obvious. The first home in sight has at least 17 windows facing the street.

Who knows how many are in the back, offering what are no doubt stunning views of Old

Hickory Lake below? Even the houses on the side of the street opposite the lake have covetous vistas, often with upper floors reaching above the trees to offer look-sees at the water. Across from one such home — painted yellow and with poofy hydrangeas so close in hue it appears they were colormatched at a paint store — either serendipitously the trees did not grow so as to block the view or the homeowners took the time to hack out the brush themselves. Thus these homes have a view of the lake and Hendersonville, a mere half-mile away as the Canada goose flies. Or the blue heron, which flapped its big wings in flight as we walked.

At 14th Street, one house — more the middle-manager size — sits catty-corner and markedly close to the street and to its neighbors. Even in pre-World War II Nashville, someone was always trying to get just one more house on a lot. Again, the porches draw the eye: wrapping around three sides of the home, many with slowly whirring ceiling fans fighting the eternal battle against late summer. Windows of sunlight through the trees (almost exclusively deciduous but for the occasional red juniper, which, as any Wilson Countian knows, will grow damn near anywhere) allow for backyard gardens.

SPECIAL TREATMENT

In a special session, lawmakers make it a felony to camp on state property — but don’t address unemployment or schools

BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT

A

special session of the Tennessee General Assembly concluded last week after three days. The session kicked off a century after the same body made Tennessee the final state needed to ratify the 19th Amendment.

Absent from the latest agenda were attempts to bolster the state’s COVID-19 contact-tracing efforts, under-siege unemployment insurance infrastructure or school readiness.

Instead, lawmakers passed bills granting coronavirus-related liability protections to businesses, increasing penalties for vandalism and camping on state property

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NASHVILLE SCENE | AUGUST 20 – AUGUST 26, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

A creeping vine from one has left a ripening spaghetti squash nearly in the road.

Along 14th is a peaceful park called Rachel’s Walk — named for Mrs. Jackson, naturally. Where its parking lot is now was once a pool, built by community volunteers after World War I and improved by DuPont when the company came back in the 1920s.

It was an inexpensive day’s entertainment for the neighborhood kids — the charge was between a dime and 15 cents — and photos show how crowded it would get in the summer. Now, the shade trees offer a similar respite from the heat, though far less thronged with excitable children.

The houses are smaller once again on Cleves heading south, but for whatever reason, the street has attracted a funkier breed. One home’s front yard features a giant metal chicken statue. Another’s porch is decorated with multicolored ceramic owl lights and a stained-glass cow. Another is bright-purple (a purple Jeep and purple car are parked behind). Cleves tees with a curving road known variously as 17th Street or Golf Club Lane, even though the road is less than 500 yards long. And despite the name of its adjoining street, the rather unkempt ball field warns that due to “Safety Concerns,” golfing is not permitted. The field, which was owned by the utility district from the 1950s until its dissolution when Metro Parks took it over, does not have a rear fence marking a home run — making it rather more like a cricket pitch. (With a little love, it would make a fine oval indeed.) It also tricks the eye into thinking the field has the dimensions of the famously canyonesque jewel boxes like the Polo Grounds or Chattanooga’s Engel Stadium. In fact, it’s just 313 to right, 335 to center and 303 down left.

A squint and it’s easy to see the park bustling with ball games again. The foul poles are still there, the cinder-block dugouts sturdy. “The people will come,” as they say in the old movie. And if anywhere still feels like a place where neighbors stream to the park to watch Little League, it’s Old Hickory Village.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

related to recent Capitol protests, and establishing a framework for the delivery of telehealth services.

Republican supporters of the protest bill took pains to argue that the measure did nothing to restrict the rights of peaceful protesters. But opponents — mostly Democrats — contended that the bill would have a chilling effect, particularly on the group who at the time had been camped outside the legislature for more than 60 days.

“It sends a stifling message that we don’t value what you have to say,” Sen. Raumesh Akbari (D-Memphis) said on the Senate floor. “I think it’s unnecessary. I don’t like the spirit of it.”

Shortly after the bill passed, the protesters packed up their gear and left the plaza, announcing their plans to seek a more “sustainable format” for their movement. The bill also makes it a crime to draw with chalk on government property other than sidewalks.

The version of the bill passed by the House and Senate on Wednesday was softened from some earlier iterations that included a provision giving the Tennessee attorney general the authority to prosecute cases when local district attorneys decide not to. Though the Senate initially passed a version that would have kept the camping provision a mis-

CITY LIMITS demeanor (the version preferred by Gov. Bill Lee), the governor and Senate acquiesced to the House version, which makes it a felony with a more serious punishment than some violent crimes in the state.

“Those are really offenses against all of us,” Republican Sen. John Stevens said of the camping provision.

Stevens said the hypothetical loss of voting rights for someone convicted of the newly created felony of camping on state property was “an extreme and appropriate punishment.”

Lee said that “there are aspects of the law that I might have done differently,” but that he planned to sign it anyway.

“Criminal justice reform includes the understanding that you can be tough on crime and smart on crime at the same time,” the governor said when asked how the penalties jived with his long-standing claim that he is focused on and passionate about criminal justice reform.

There was some confusion during the hurried session as the bill underwent several changes, and sponsors were at times unable to answer questions about the provisions included in it. At one point, Senate Judiciary Chair Mike Bell said the bill “would appear to criminalize a family throwing a blanket down to have a picnic.”

Republican supporters highlighted the need to increase penalties for assaulting law enforcement officers and other first responders, another aspect of the bill.

“You can support our law enforcement officers, or you can spit in their face by voting against this,” House Majority Leader William Lamberth said Tuesday, drawing rebuke from Democrats including Memphis Rep. Larry Miller, a retired firefighter.

The two chambers also reached an agreement on liability protections for businesses and other organizations. The bill would make it harder for plaintiffs to sue a business, school, church or other entity if they claim to have contracted COVID-19 on the premises.

When House and Senate leaders joined with the business community in an attempt to establish such protections in June, they failed to reach an agreement because House members said it was unconstitutional to extend the protections back to the start of the pandemic, as the Senate version did.

But by August, House leaders — including Majority Leader Lamberth — had reversed their stance on retroactivity. The compromise agreement establishes the protections dating back to Aug. 3, when Gov. Bill Lee called the special session.

When asked whether the nearly 10 days of retroactivity included in the new bill was constitutionally the same as the months of retroactivity that he forcefully opposed in June, Lamberth disagreed.

“I do not interpret it that way, and I don’t think the courts will either,” he said.

Pro-business groups have been pushing for the protections for months, arguing they are necessary to spur economic recovery. They lost two months of protections due to the failed compromise in June.

“Liability protections are one of the most crucial things that can be done for businesses right now,” Tennessee Chamber of Commerce and Industry president and CEO Bradley Jackson said. “Swift economic recovery cannot occur unless unfair legal exposure is mitigated and businesses have certainty that their efforts to safeguard their employees and customers is acknowledged by the General Assembly and the courts.”

Democrats made several unsuccessful efforts to amend or counter the liability bill, contending that it shouldn’t be retroactive and that the bill made suing “bad actors” in the business community too difficult. Democratic efforts to weaken the protest bill also floundered.

A third priority mentioned in Lee’s call to special session came to a simpler conclusion. Nearly every lawmaker supported a bill establishing a framework for telehealth services, in part necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

PANDEMIC. PROTESTS. MURDER HORNETS. THIS WEEK ON OUR NEWS AND POLITICS BLOG: After 62 days, the activists at Legislative Plaza announced their 24/7 presence would come to an end. “We will no longer occupy the Plaza 24/7, but we will continue to keep fighting and organizing for our goals,” read a statement posted by People’s Plaza on Aug. 14. The group said it began the demonstration with goals of removing Confederate symbols from across the state, defunding and demilitarizing police and removing Metro Police Chief Steve Anderson.

Anderson retired Aug. 7 after earlier announcing he’d leave the force later in the fall. The State Capitol Commission voted to remove the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue from the Capitol in July. The activists had long sought a meeting with Gov. Bill Lee to discuss their grievances, but that meeting never occurred. The group emphasized that their shift in strategy had nothing to do with the General Assembly’s recent passage of draconian anti-protest measures. … The Tennessee Highway Patrol announced that a trooper filmed in a confrontation with a protester has been terminated. A video taken by the demonstrator, Andrew Golden, went viral after being posted on numerous national news sites. In the video, the now-former trooper, Harvey Briggs, approached Golden, who was filming a traffic stop with his cell phone. Briggs, who was not involved in the traffic stop, marched up to Golden, yelling at him for filming the troopers. Golden alleges that Briggs, who was not wearing a mask, pulled the mask off Golden’s face. … The Metro Nashville Police Department announced Aug. 11 that Christopher “Shi” Eubank and Jeffrey Mathews, the two owners of the infamous Fashion House — the site of a recent COVID-guideline-flouting party — are being charged with three separate Class-A misdemeanors: “hosting a gathering in excess of 25 persons (hundreds of people attended the party), not requiring social distancing, and not requiring face coverings.” … Two more men incarcerated in Tennessee prisons have died after testing positive for COVID-19, bringing the total number of prisoners to die with the illness to eight.

A 55-year-old man at Nashville’s Lois M. DeBerry Special Needs Facility died on Aug. 9. The next day, a man who was just 26 years old died at the Whiteville Correctional Facility run by the private prison company CoreCivic. There are currently 45 Tennessee prisoners testing positive for COVID-19 across the state, according to the department.

To date, 3,214 Tennessee prisoners have contracted the illness and recovered. … Rep. Jim Cooper is calling for Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to appear before Congress amid the ongoing dismantling of the United States Postal Service. President Donald Trump, who claims repeatedly and without evidence that mail-in voting (which he differentiates from absentee voting, despite those being the same thing) causes an increase in voter fraud, said in a television interview he didn’t want emergency funding for the USPS because it would facilitate widespread mail-in voting during the pandemic. Cooper says the House should send the sergeant-at-arms to arrest DeJoy if he fails to appear before Congress and notes that tampering with the mail is a federal crime.

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PANDEMIC Dealing with COVID-19 was always going to be challenging — but it didn’t have to be like this

BY STEVEN HALE

O

n Mother’s Day, Kristen Chapman watched her elderly mother through a pane of glass. Months into the global coronavirus pandemic, the nursing care facility where her mother lived could not allow visitors. This was the closest Chapman could get.

Most of our human interactions are attenuated now, taking place from behind a mask or a computer screen. For Chapman, there was an added barrier. Her mother had been living for some time with advanced dementia — a painful state of social, mental and emotional distancing that compounded the grief of what came next.

On a Saturday in late July, Chapman and her brother got a call from the facility tell-

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ing them that their mother had a fever, but that she had tested negative for COVID-19.

Things seemed relatively OK and remained stable into Sunday. But that evening, her mother’s condition declined rapidly. Chapman and her brother got another call informing them that their mother was being taken to the emergency room in Clarksville.

Her fever had spiked, she was breathing poorly, and she hadn’t been taking fluids.

The people on the other end of the phone said they needed to verify the details of her do-not-resuscitate order. If Chapman and her brother wanted to see their mother, they needed to come now.

To Chapman’s surprise, the staff at the ER in Clarksville let the siblings enter the room wearing personal protective equipment.

Chapman sat by her mother’s side, held her hand, played with her hair and played her John Denver songs.

“I knew it was a risk,” she says. “But I’m from Appalachia, and you just don’t let your people go out without being touched.”

Her mom died that night. Chapman and her brother went into isolation, as they were told to assume they’d been exposed to the virus. Two days later, they found out that their mom had tested positive for COVID-19. Chapman, who had already been tested immediately after seeing her mother, quarantined for nearly two weeks before

NASHVILLE SCENE | AUGUST 20 – AUGUST 26, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

getting tested again. (Public health officials have found that tests taken directly after exposure and too early in the course of infection can produce false negatives.) She was negative. But the ordeal meant she had spent the days following her mother’s death in isolation, holed up on a separate floor of her home from her partner and three teenage children.

“That was significantly harder,” Chapman says. “Just not being able to comfort your kids when you tell them their grandmother’s dead.”

In the early hours of March 3, tornadoes tore through Middle Tennessee, killing 25 people — including two in Nashville — and leaving a trail of devastation that is still visible in some places today. Less than a week later, the city reported its first confirmed case of COVID-19. Since then, Nashville and Tennessee — like the country as a whole — have been battered by the wind of a different storm. As the virus spread, public health and the economy spiraled together into crisis.

Across the state, more than 1,300 people have died due to the virus, and more than 1,000 are currently hospitalized with COVID-19. In Nashville, 215 people have died as of this writing, and the death toll has risen at a quicker rate in recent weeks.

Nashville’s first COVID-19 death came on

March 20. It took 100 days for the city to surpass 100 deaths, but just 40 days after that to surpass 200. At the same time, the economic fallout has further strained the city’s finances, which were already in troubling shape. Our unprecedented spring gave way to a miserable summer — but it has felt more like one long, painful season that has fallen hardest on the elderly and the marginalized.

Chapman has seen the coverage of the COVID-protocol-free party at The Fashion House in East Nashville; she has seen the outrage directed at videos of maskless barhoppers walking the streets of Broadway; she has seen Nashville residents arguing and shaming one another over which risks they’re willing to take. It only seems to add to her grief.

“It does not do me one smack bit of good to go down to fucking Broadway and be mad and boo at people or say, ‘Y’all killed my mama,’ ” Chapman says. “All of that does not give anybody a better choice. I guess I just want to say to people, a lot of people know me, so they know somebody now who’s died. They know my mom has died from it. It’s real. I want everybody to take their judgment for everybody else and aim it at the people who put us in this damn situation in the first place.”

PHOTOS: ERIC ENGLAND

NASHVILLE IN THE

WE ALL KNOW MORE NOW than we knew five months ago, and we can safely say that thanks to the pandemic, this year was always going to be challenging. But it didn’t have to be like this. State and local officials have often been slow to act on the advice of public health officials, if they act on it at all. What’s more, the virus has been all but aided and abetted by the impotent response of President Donald Trump, a man who is utterly lacking in the competence, empathy and attention span to effectively confront a crisis of this magnitude. He has indulged delusions about the virus — saying that one day it will “just disappear” — and he regularly contradicts public health officials who are standing right beside him. Under his careless stewardship, the United States has become the world’s glowing red hotspot.

We have seen how the spread of the virus can be slowed, though. In April and May, Nashville appeared to have mostly flattened the proverbial curve. But as the city began to progress through its phased reopening, Metro’s daily updates started to contain some alarming trends. Nevertheless, with case numbers beginning to rise at an increasing rate and two of the city’s six key metrics at less than satisfactory levels, Nashville moved to phase three of the reopening plan on June 22, allowing bars and restaurants to open with some limits on capacity. Although masks were being encouraged, there was no mandate in place. What happened next was predictable, and indeed predicted by many concerned observers.

Daily case numbers spiked, as did hospitalizations. Mayor John Cooper ordered a mask mandate in late June and announced that the city was returning to a modified phase two

in early July.

But it takes time for the effects of such policies to show up in the data, and throughout the month it was evident that large numbers of people were ignoring the mask mandate and defying guidance against crowding into poorly ventilated bars. For the entire month of July, the city’s moving average of new cases per day was higher than at any other point in the pandemic. At the state level, the picture was largely the same, with cases rising and contemporaneous hospitalizations surpassing 1,000 people for the first time.

“The hospitalizations never reached the point where, as a state, we were concerned about a kind of New York-level overrun of hospitals,” says Dr. John Graves, an associate professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine’s Department of Health Policy. “But it certainly was on a trajectory that couldn’t be sustained for very much longer. We had to get it back under control.”

City officials have come under scrutiny for appearing to be beholden to the interests of some high-profile bar owners and tourism industry players, even at the expense of public health. The economic concerns among bar and restaurant owners are real, of course. But at the same time, the decision to allow so-called transpotainment vehicles to continue parading up and down downtown streets until mid-July was befuddling.

“To state the obvious, hindsight is 20/20,” Convention & Visitors Corp CEO Butch Spyridon said in a written statement. “As a city and a nation, I believe we all moved too quickly to reopen in June. Over the last six weeks, most of the Broadway bars have been closed, even though it didn’t look like

it based on viral videos everyone saw. As we have all learned, mask enforcement and alcohol to-go sales were bigger challenges than we anticipated. We are encouraged that Lower Broadway businesses have seen the importance of compliance. While Lower Broad gets most of the attention, the majority of bars throughout Nashville have been eager to comply. It’s been a tightrope between controlling the spread and finding ways for small businesses to survive. We are all in this together, and we all need to act like we are in this together.”

The off-Broadway bars Spyridon refers to have indeed been complying, but they have also spoken out about the ways they say their businesses were unfairly harmed by restrictions that the city was hardly enforcing on Lower Broad. In recent weeks, that has visibly changed, with downtown bars starting a concerted campaign to encourage compliance and police stepping up enforcement of the city’s mask mandate.

We appear to have arrested the rise in cases and hospitalizations again, but the numbers have leveled off at a much higher plateau than before. The school year is here (albeit a virtual one in Nashville until at least Labor Day), bars are opening with limited capacity, and flu season is coming.

Meharry Medical College President and infectious disease expert Dr. James Hildreth sees a mix of good and bad news in the data. The city’s transmission rate — which indicates how many people are likely to be infected by each infected person — has fallen below 1. At the same time, the number of Nashvillians infected per 100,000 is worrisome at around 28. Hospital and ICU bed capacity is not where officials

would like it to be, either.

“This could all go south very quickly if we don’t keep our foot on the gas pedal,” Hildreth says. “The mask thing is just singularly important. If we can just get people to wear the face coverings consistently, that would make all the difference. But the challenge of course is that Nashville is kind of a regional hub, so if the surrounding counties don’t do the same, and people keep moving freely between Nashville and other places, we’re just gonna have these cycles of good news and bad news.”

In a letter to Gov. Bill Lee earlier this month, Hildreth urged the governor to issue a statewide mask mandate, a policy backed by data and even Trump administration officials — but one that Lee has resisted.

Hildreth, who spoke to the Scene via Zoom, is visibly frustrated by the patchwork approach to confronting the pandemic.

“That’s been a problem nationally — that we haven’t had a coordinated response,” he says. “I mean, ideally, the whole country should have shut down for a couple of weeks back in February or March. That would have made all the difference. But having 50 states all doing something different at different times results in what we have right now. So the same thing applies to us as a state. It would be really great if all of us were at the same time doing the mitigation steps because, again, the virus is not respecting borders of any kind.”

Hildreth is also critical of elected politicians who have been, for instance, pushing the idea that students should return to school in person while simultaneously dismissing the warnings of public health officials.

“The people who should be protecting us

nashvillescene.com | AUGUST 20 – AUGUST 26, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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AKHINK OMER

seem to have a different agenda,” he says.

“I’m trying to be diplomatic about it, but that’s really what it comes down to.”

While acknowledging that the goalposts have shifted, Vanderbilt professor Graves says “good news” to him would be maintaining the status quo in terms of cases and hospitalizations even as schools and cities begin to reopen. He emphasizes that hospitals are not overrun now, but he also sees winter coming.

“From a purely capacity standpoint, we seem to be well within capacity,” Graves says.

“But with that said, capacity is as much an issue about staffing. Can we sustain 1,000 or 1,100 people hospitalized with COVID as we move into flu season, and the winter months where you’re going to have other viruses and things circulating in the population?”

Hildreth is similarly concerned about what the rest of this already long year could bring.

“We need to keep as many beds open for COVID patients that otherwise would be needed for serious influenza infections,” Hildreth says. “That’s one thing. As the CDC director recently [said], this fall and winter could be one of the worst in a really long time for us in terms of public health if we don’t get better control of COVID-19. If we have a really bad flu season … it’s gonna be really bad as a matter of fact.”

LIKE SO MANY OTHER societal ills that thrive on inequality — poverty, crime, mass incarceration — the coronavirus has had a disproportionate impact on communities of color. In Nashville, the Hispanic residents in the southeast part of the city have been hit particularly hard. In late June, Hispanic people accounted for nearly a third of all Nashvillians who had tested positive for COVID-19. That number has fallen but is still well above the group’s share of the city population, which is just more than 10 percent.

Metro Councilmember Sandra Sepulveda, who represents southeast Nashville’s District 30, has been a vocal advocate for the community, warning that the city was reopening too soon in June. She says she has noticed some progress in her district. Mask compliance has increased, Sepulveda says, although a lack of Spanish-speaking officials to talk to residents after they test positive

12

remains an issue.

Still, Sepulveda says she has been getting fewer calls about COVID-19 clusters in her district. Recently, she’s been getting questions from constituents about another looming epidemic — they’ve been calling, she says, to ask about mortgage and rent relief.

In March, Davidson County Sheriff Daron Hall announced that his office was halting the enforcement of evictions. The federal CARES Act legislation passed by Congress also included a moratorium on evictions for renters who were part of federal housing assistance programs or lived in properties with federally backed mortgages. But that moratorium ended on July 24, and a Nashville court order suspending local hearings or trials in eviction cases expires Aug. 31.

When the courts have been open, Kerry Dietz — a Nashville housing attorney for nonprofit Legal Aid — has been masking up and going in to keep up with her clients’ cases. She has successfully prevented some of her clients from being evicted, for now.

But Dietz says she has also seen judges grant default judgments in eviction cases in recent months, deciding a case for a landlord because a tenant didn’t show up for court. As Nashvillians face underemployment and unemployment, the pressure has been building. The CARES Act, Dietz explains, required landlords to give tenants 30 days’ notice before filing for eviction. That means a wave of eviction proceedings could be coming at the end of this month.

Earlier this summer — as Dietz was working to keep up with the potential housing crisis brought on by the enduring public health and economic crises — she learned that her 94-year-old grandmother had contracted the virus.

Dietz knew her grandmother as “Bubba,” and she took pride in the line of strong matriarchal figures in her family. Dietz’s greatgrandmother graduated college in the early 1900s, and her grandmother, Bubba, had attended Stanford University, where she played for one of the first college women’s basketball teams. Bubba met Dietz’s grandfather at a mixer she and some friends organized for enlisted men during World War

NASHVILLE SCENE | AUGUST 20 – AUGUST 26, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

CLOSE TO HOME

Nashville nurse reflects on treating COVID-19 patients after having the virus herself

BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT

I

n March, Nashville nurse Akhink Omer spent a week in the hospital recovering from COVID-19.

She described the experience as scary and intimidating, especially because at the time there were only a few known cases in Tennessee.

But Omer nevertheless prepared to return to her work as a nurse, expecting to treat people who were fighting the same illness she had just beaten.

With the virus raging in other parts of the country this spring, Omer took an eight-week gig at a hospital in Boston, and headed there a few weeks after getting out of the hospital in Nashville. There, many of her patients were elderly and “quite a few” died, she says.

“I remember taking an iPad into a room and a family had to say goodbye to their grandmom on the iPad,” Omer says. “They were crying; we were crying. It’s something we never thought we’d have to do in our nursing career.

“People died by themselves,” she continues.

“We’d be with them as much as we could while still trying to limit exposure for ourselves. We had quite a few families that had to say goodbye on FaceTime.”

Omer just finished a stint at a hospital in Maryland and was back in Nashville for a week earlier this month before returning to the hospital in Maryland for another eight weeks. She has repeatedly tested positive for coronavirus antibodies, which gives her some comfort as she continues to see COVID-19 patients every day. The science surrounding COVID-19 and antibody immunity remains sparse, but Omer thinks she has been protected from reinfection since she had the disease in March.

“I didn’t feel invincible,” she says. “We didn’t know if you have immunity from these antibodies. I feel a little bit more confident saying now, many months later, that I do believe the antibodies work. I’m still really careful, because you just don’t know how long you’re going to have these antibodies for and how your body will react if you get exposed again.”

Having the virus previously helped Omer in another way: empathizing with patients. She didn’t

tell all of her patients that she too had suffered through COVID-19, but when she did — especially when their symptoms matched hers — she noticed reduced anxiety in patients who saw that she was on her feet and doing fine.

The travel nursing work pays well, and it’s something Omer is drawn to in part because she’s still unsure how much the bill will be for her March hospital stay. And she plans to keep signing up for eight-week contracts for the foreseeable future.

“I can always tell what state cases are increasing in without watching the news because the prices on these travel-nurse websites start going up in those cities,” Omer says.

But a couple of things could get her to return to Nashville, where she grew up and has for years worked at Southern Hills Medical Center. She says that an extreme spike in cases in her hometown would make her consider coming home to work. Of her longtime co-workers at the hospital, she says, “I wouldn’t want to leave them high and dry and not help.”

She also might stop the travel nursing, she says, if her monthly antibody check came up negative.

“To be honest, I will maybe rethink doing it if my antibodies were to come back negative one day,” she says. “That would mean I’m back at square one as far as risking exposure and getting sick again. I just remember how sick I was. I got lucky the first time.”

When returning home to Nashville between contracts in Boston and Maryland, Omer has noticed what she considers a disturbing trend in her hometown compared to her experience in the North.

“Everybody just wears a mask,” she says. “It’s not this big deal that it is in Nashville. … It was kind of shocking to see that, and to this day I’m extremely disappointed with how people in Tennessee and Nashville and the South in general are so opposed to these masks. I just don’t understand it.”

And that’s part of the reason why she’s not optimistic about a speedy resolution to the pandemic.

“Unfortunately, I really feel like we’re at the beginning of things getting worse, not better, because we had a really good opportunity a couple of months ago to get rid of this,” she says. “If we had really socially distanced, everybody stayed home and we’d taken it more seriously, I feel like we’d be in a lot different situation right now. We’re going to see this slow progression where it might not get worse, but it’s definitely going to be here, and it’s just going to move locations.”

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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IT’S BACK!

The Nashville Scene is excited to announce our new drive-in movie series, Movies in the Park-ing Lot!

This August, join us at oneC1ty, where — instead of bringing a blanket or a chair — you can pull up your car and enjoy four movies under the stars!

Each week we’ll be screening a fan-favorite film FOR FREE, and guests can order a delicious picnic dinner and sweet treats.

AUGUST 20 STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE II. He’d grown up in Nashville, and that’s where they settled after they were married.

Growing up, Dietz bonded with her grandmother over fashion, and in recent years she would join her mother and Bubba for breakfast at Cracker Barrel.

Bubba was experiencing dementia when the virus came; it stayed with her for three weeks before it took her. When the end was in sight, Bubba’s family got her hospice care so she could be treated at home.

Dietz says she is not typically prone to anger, but she has felt it recently. Anger at federal, state and local leaders — and, yes, the people who were hitting the Broadway bars without masks while her grandmother was in hospice down the road. She is mourning the loss of time and the loss of the fourgeneration picture she won’t be able to take if she has children of her own.

“The other thing that sucks is that I hadn’t seen her since February because I was trying to protect her,” Dietz says. “And she died anyway, and I didn’t get to see her for the

last five months of her life.”

The pandemic swirls around all of us and, at times, reaches down to touch us directly. If you’ve been relatively unscathed by the pandemic, it has still likely altered nearly every part of your life. It has been a seemingly endless season of loss. Not all of the losses are equal, but they all compound one another and form one great cloud of collective grief — the loss of friends and family members, and legends like John Prine; the loss of jobs; the loss of beloved local businesses; the loss of spontaneous human interaction, of spontaneous anything that is not fenced in by protocols and anxieties; the loss of mornings in a coffee shop and nights at the corner bar; the loss of graduation ceremonies and wedding receptions; the loss of funerals where hugs and memories are shared as a comfort and a blessing.

This will pass. But it’s taking so much with it.

EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

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AUGUST 27 9 TO 5

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CAST YOUR BALLOT NOW THROUGH AUG. 30

CRITICS’ PICKS W E E K L Y

R O U N D U P

O F

T H I N G S

T O

D O

cord — from sounds of rain, Navajo chants and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” to images of how humans ingest food and our traffic jams? How did they develop the pictorial instructions to show beings from billions of miles away how to get information off the disc? Who thought to include a stylus? To find out, visit the Frist’s website and register for the Zoom session. 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 20, at fristartmuseum.org

COMEDY

STEPHEN TRAGESER

This week, we at the Scene host the third film in our monthlong Movies in the Parking Lot series — the pandemic-friendly successor to our popular long-running Movies in the Park. This week’s selection needs no introduction whatsoever, but here I go introducing it nonetheless: Not only did it launch the second-highest-grossing film franchise of all time as well as the careers of such undeniable greats as Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill — it also changed filmmaking forever while simultaneously paying homage to many classics that came before it. While 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope mystified some old-timers during its production and release (Obi Wan Kenobi himself, Sir Alec Guinness, famously wrote to a friend during filming that his dialogue was “rubbish”), it married the greatest aspects of classic Westerns, samurai films and sci-fi. What’s more, it’s just a really fun, really imaginative film that holds up, and continues to win over young first-time viewers.

In order to attend, enter our lottery for parking passes. We’ll select 50 winners for each screening, with up to six guests allowed per car. Visit nashvillemoviesinthepark.com for more information and to enter the parkingpass lottery. Up Aug. 27: 1980’s legendary 9 to 5. Stay tuned for our rescheduled date for Little Women, which was postponed earlier this month due to inclement weather. 8

p.m. Thursday, Aug. 20, at OneC1TY, 8 City Blvd. D. PATRICK RODGERS [A VIRTUAL CELEBRATION]

LIVESTREAM SUMMER ONLINE SHAKESPEARE

nouncement. 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 20, at nashvilleshakes.org AMY STUMPFL [TO BOLDLY GO]

LEARN ABOUT THE VOYAGER GOLDEN RECORD IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE FRIST AND DYER OBSERVATORY

There’s nothing quite like a little Shakespeare under the stars. While audiences In the upper gallery of the Frist Art Mucertainly will miss Nashville Shakespeare seum, you’ll find Mumbai artist Jitish KalFestival’s annual summer production, it’s lat’s epistolary exhibition Return to Sender, good to know that the stalwart company which combines two intriguing experiential has planned a big virtual celebration that installations. “Covering Letter” features a will take place Thursday evening. Much plea for peace written by Mahatma Gandhi like its traditional program, Summer Online to Adolf Hitler in 1939, projected onto a curShakespeare features a couple of tain of dry fog. Its companion piece pre-show elements — including a “Covering Letter (terranum nundiscussion with NSF-affiliated cius)” focuses on the Golden scholars and ShakespeareRecord, aka The Sounds of EDITOR’S NOTE: inspired musical selections Earth, copies of which are AS A RESPONSE TO THE from Taylor Kelly, Katie carried by the Voyager I ONGOING COVID-19 PANDEMIC, Bruno and Tom Mason. and II space probes that WE’VE CHANGED THE FOCUS OF THE CRITICS’ PICKS SECTION TO INCLUDE Viewers will get to meet NASA launched in 1977.

ACTIVITIES YOU CAN PARTAKE IN the 2020 Zoom Apprentice Kallat’s piece presents WHILE YOU’RE AT HOME. Company, with live comsounds and images decoded mentary from core teachfrom copies of the records ers Bruno, Sam Ashdown that remained on Earth, givand Jordan Gleaves, plus some ing viewers a look at what an highlights from its online showcase, extraterrestrial race that intercepts which livestreamed on Aug. 15. Familiar NSF the probe will be told about our planet. On actors and directors — including Jill Jackson, Thursday, Aug. 20, the Frist hosts a preHelen Shute-Pettaway, Phil Perry, Santiago sentation by Billy Teets, acting director of Sosa and Tamiko Robinson Steele — will be Vanderbilt University’s Dyer Observatory, on hand to share some of their favorite Sumthat offers a closer look at the Golden Remer Shakespeare memories. The evening cord project. How did the committee led by will wrap up with a very special surprise anCarl Sagan decide what should go on the re-

WATCH NEW STAND-UP SPECIALS ON HBO

It looks like HBO Max is ready to give Netflix a run for its money in the standup comedy department, as the app unloads a bunch of specials on the same day — Thursday, to be exact. Two specials are brought to you by Conan O’Brien and his Team Coco crew: American comic Beth Stelling goes off on family, society and all her exes in Beth Stelling: Girl Daddy, while British funny bloke James Veitch uses slideshows and video effects to get his jokes across in James Veitch: Straight to VHS. All the way from New Zealand, Edinburgh Comedy Award winner Rose Matafeo does an hour of what’s been called “stand-up, sketch and mid-20s angst” in Rose Matafeo: Horndog.

Finally, Anjelah “Bon Qui Qui” Johnson is the host of HA Comedy Festival: The Art of Comedy, which features stand-up from a bevy of Latinx comedians. Stream them all on HBO Max starting Thursday, Aug. 20. CRAIG D. LINDSEY MUSIC

GO TO MOVIES IN THE PARK-ING LOT: STAR WARS — EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE

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[THE BEST MEDICINE]

[CHECK YOUR HEAD]

WATCH INSTRUMENTHEAD LIVE

Among the vast array of streaming concert options on your virtual plate, Instrumenthead Live is one you’ll want to keep an eye on. The new series is produced at the East Nashville studio of photographer Michael Weintrob, who’s well-known for his Instrumenthead portrait series that features musicians’ instruments in place of their faces. Weintrob and his team have come up with an interesting model. It doesn’t aim to go further toward replicating the live experience, but leans a bit into streaming being its own medium. It is a pay-per-view platform with variable prices. And via special upgrades like pre-stream Zoom chats with the band and portrait photo prints, Instrumenthead Live bakes in additional ways for artists to connect with their audience and to sell some merch — all good things in a time when musicians’ income streams have all but dried up. Some of the gigs are live, while many are filmed and edited into an audience-less concert film. The next stream on the books is Friday, Aug. 21, featuring Mimi Naja (of Portland, Ore., folk-rock outfit Fruition) and a bunch of friends, including singer Lindsay Lou, banjo picker Kyle Tuttle and Billy Strings bassist Royal Masat. You’ll be able to purchase access to that stream for as long as three months after the initial air

nashvillescene.com | AUGUST 20 – AUGUST 26, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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CRITICS’ PICKS vert some friends into puzzle fiends. Then trade puzzles! ERICA CICCARONE

THEATER

[TAKING THE PARTY ONLINE]

CHECK OUT NASHVILLE REP’S BROADWAY BRUNCH AT NIGHT

HOBBIES

Nashville Repertory Theatre sure knows how to throw a party. But this Sunday, you can enjoy all the fun of its annual fundraising gala without ever leaving your own couch. Broadway Brunch at Night promises to serve up a great evening of music and entertainment, along with an online silent auction, plus a few surprises. Nashville favorite Megan Murphy Chambers hosts the free event, which features a terrific lineup of talent — including Jennifer WhitcombOliva, Piper Jones, Mariah Parris, Scott Rice and more. The cast of Nashville Rep’s Mary Poppins will be on hand to help celebrate the evening, and there will even be a little trip down memory lane to honor the past 35 years of live musical theater at the Rep. VIP packages are available, along with special meal offers from the Rep’s restaurant partners, including Ellington’s Midway Bar and Grill, Chauhan Ale & Masala House and The Mockingbird. The livestream event takes place Aug. 23 at 7 p.m., and the online auction and fundraiser continues through Aug. 29. 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 23, at broadwaybrunch.org AMY STUMPFL [FINDERS KEEPERS]

DO JIGSAW PUZZLES

Even five months into the awfulness of this awful pandemic, some simple pleasures endure. Take the humble jigsaw puzzle, for example. It requires no screens or monitors. No internet connection. All you need is a flat surface, a bright light and several hundred pieces of cardboard that fit together just perfectly. Getting obsessed with a jigsaw puzzle will help you to pass the time and jumpstart your cognitive abilities — and it may even boost your mood. In fact, I guarantee that if you convert your dinner table to a puzzle zone and commit one hour a night to putting something back together, the world will seem like less of a mess. These days, the jigsaw options go far beyond picturesque hillsides and sailboats. Companies like Mudpuppy, Galison, Seltzer and eeBoo are putting out gorgeously illustrated puzzles that soothe the soul. The best part? You can support some local artists and shops while doing it. Holly Carden — whose illustrations have graced these very pages — is taking preorders for a pair of puzzles perfect for murderinos and goths alike, or anyone else looking for a good challenge. Her Edgar Allan Poe Macabre Mansion illustrates 20 of the Poester’s stories in exquisite detail — like rats gnawing on the guy from “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Her other puzzle shows the “murder castle” of H.H. Holmes, the serial killer who tortured and killed dozens of young women right in the backyard of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Find both of these at hollycarden.com. Several local spots sell puzzles, which you can buy online and pick up curbside. The Woodland Street gift shop Harlan Ruby has been ordering puzzles by

16

TV

date, as well as previous shows like the inaugural Music With Five Questions program featuring trumpeter Jennifer Hartswick, saxophonist Jeff Coffin and drummer Kris Myers, or the Grateful Dead tribute with The Stolen Faces. Keep an eye on the Instrumenthead Live website for more shows to be announced. STEPHEN TRAGESER

HOLLY CARDEN PUZZLE the crate, and they’ve got a fantastic selection. Dogs with jobs? Check. Bookish cats?

Check. A medley of Frida Kahlo self-portraits? Check. Over at The Bookshop, you can find puzzles that feature outer space, David Bowie, The Golden Girls and more. JewelryHOME GAME

NASHVILLE SCENE | AUGUST 20 – AUGUST 26, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

and-gifts outpost Freshie and Zero carries an extra-soothing Slow Pokes puzzle that stars a sloth, a pretty glow-in-the-dark zodiac puzzle and others. If you’re thinking, “Great, but what will I do with dozens of puzzles once I’m allowed to go clubbing again?” Simple. Con-

[IF THEY DON’T WIN IT’S A SHAME]

WATCH HOME GAME ON NETFLIX

Netflix’s Home Game is a new documentary series that shines a spotlight on some of the world’s most unique forms of competition, and it is absolutely fascinating. Some of the sports are familiar — one episode is dedicated to women’s roller derby in Austin, and another showcases Scotland’s Highland games. The episode on freediving is also captivating — it uses stunning underwater footage to follow divers in the Philippines as they train to set national records.

But the series also features much more niche displays of strength. Calcio fiorentino, for example, is like rugby meets soccer with a little MMA thrown in for good measure.

There are no pads and few rules, and the only way men can join one of the four teams — the Blues, the Reds, the Whites or the Greens — is if they were born in a particular area of Florence, Italy. Matches are so grueling and violent that there are only three every year — two semi-finals matches and one finals game. And the prize for the winning team? A cow! There’s also an episode on Makepung Lampit, aka water buffalo drag racing in West Bali; Kok-boru, a game in Kyrgyzstan in which a dead goat is used as the “ball”; and Catch Fétiche, aka Voodoo Wrestling in the Congo. One woman’s wrestling character is Queen Shakira — “I am the one that rips out men’s testicles,” she says. I love her. MEGAN SELING

nashvillesceneshop.com

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AUGUST – AUGUST 26, 2020 | nashvillescene.com 1 –20MONTH 2, 2015 | nashvillescene.com NASHVILLE NASHVILLESCENE SCENE || MONTH

[JUST EAT IT]

EAT THE HALLOWEEN CANDY

Just eat it. That Halloween candy you balked at in Kroger the other day while murmuring something about it only being August? Who cares. Buy it, eat it. Time means nothing and everyone knows Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkins are far superior to Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

“But Megan, it’s Auuuuguuuuust!” Trust me, I fully understand your hesitation. I was a lifelong member of the “No Halloween candy before Oct. 1” club too, and for years I denied myself XScream Snickers, Zombie Sour Patch Kids and Junior Mints filled with orange goo until the calendar hit the 274th day of the year. And for what? Comfort trumps societal expectations, especially in a pandemic, and if what you need right now is to go to town on a four-pound bag of Mars’ Spooky Mix, then who the hell are we to judge? And this year’s candy crop is looking good. There are strawberry “blood-filled” Vampire Hershey Kisses, marshmallowflavored green Witch’s Brew Kit Kats and … Brach’s Turkey Dinner candy corn, which actually tastes like roast turkey, gingerglazed carrots and green beans? OK, maybe skip those. Or don’t! Who cares? Eat the Halloween candy! In August! And if anyone dares judge you, laugh in their face with a mouthful of mellowcreme pumpkins.

Mwahaha, you feeble sheep! You candyless cowards! All the more Creepy Cocoa Crisp M&Ms for us! MEGAN SELING

ENTERTAINMENT

Order Now!

FOOD & DRINK

Want the Scene Delivered?

CRITICS’ PICKS

[MISSION TO MARS]

EXPERIENCE JASON MARSDEN’S MARS VARIETY SHOW

While timeless activities like drive-in movie theaters have seen a resurgence during the COVID-19 pandemic, there probably aren’t too many among us who’ve thought, “Hmm, maybe an at-home variety show would do the trick!” Well, for Nashvillian Jason Marsden — the voice actor behind characters like Max Goof, Hocus Pocus’ Thackery Binx and Haku in the English dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away — that’s the way he’s chosen to spread a little joy through the quarantining process. Marsden almost functions as Music City’s pandemic Kermit the Frog with his homegrown Mars Variety Show, which cites Jim Henson’s variety program The Muppet Show as part of its inspiration. Marsden hosts each edition from his home and brings together a cavalcade of remote entertainers, ranging from musicians (Belcourt staffer Jessie Breanne among them) and puppeteers to comedians and fire dancers — a good bunch of whom are locals. Through its affable shagginess, Marsden’s show is ultimately a zany love letter to the city’s stuck-at-home arts scene. All episodes are available for free to watch on the Mars Presents YouTube channel, too. CORY WOODROOF

FOOD AND DRINK

POPPING OFF Restaurant pop-ups are transitioning to permanent status to survive the pandemic

BY CHRIS CHAMBERLAIN

C

onventional wisdom says food trucks and pop-ups all aspire to move up to bricksand-mortar restaurants someday, and when they finally receive the keys to their permanent locations, they’ll have reached the pinnacle of success. But in these Coronatimes, that old trope is no longer necessarily the case.

Pop-ups can exist in many forms: true guerrilla culinary events that only insiders even know are happening; long-term guest stints inside existing restaurants; one-time events where chefs offer a different cuisine than what’s on their standard menus. As restaurants scramble to discover alternate revenue sources during the pandemic, pop-ups have emerged as opportunities that can represent the difference between survival and shuttering.

Pre-pandemic, Nick and Audra Guidry were on a trajectory toward world — or at least the 1000 block of Gallatin Avenue — domination with their successful Slow Hand Coffee + Bakeshop and latest venture, Pelican & Pig. Unfortunately, P&P’s model of open-fire cooking didn’t translate well with the current capacityrestrained regulations of hospitality or for to-go dining. Having been missed by the March tornado that devastated several of their neighbors, the couple scrambled to come up with a viable solution as restaurant doors began to reopen.

The answer came from an old friend, Hunter Briley. “Hunter is from Baton Rouge,” says Nick. “He helped out with the opening of Patrick’s Bistreaux, and it was always his dream to have his own po’boy shop, and he pitched it to us a few years ago. I’m originally from New Orleans, so we decided to give it a try.” The result was the Lagniappe Po’Boys pop-up, which Nick and Audra operated out of the Pelican & Pig space from late May until early August.

Their classic Big Easy sandwiches — like soft-shell crab, roast beef with debris and muffalettas served with a house-made olive salad — were extremely well-received, and Audra pitched in her considerable baking talents by creating pralines from a recipe that has been in Nick’s family for three generations. They also offered a realdeal gumbo that became a favorite among guests. “The gumbo has been crazy,” Nick notes. “We were making 20 gallons a week. I tried to substitute red beans and rice just to mix things up, but people wouldn’t have it!”

While Lagniappe was quite successful, it was never intended to be an ongoing venture, and the Guidrys shut it down at the beginning of August. “Pop-ups are a great temporary cash injection,” says Nick, “and Lagniappe was how we paid the bills during the interim. We’re still evaluating it and may look at doing it again in the future. But we asked our staff,

BLACK DYNASTY SECRET RAMEN CLUB and 100 percent of them were in favor of reopening Pelican & Pig, so that’s what we’re working toward.”

Downtown, a mysterious pop-up is moving forward in fits and starts. The Black Dynasty Secret Ramen Club has been a favorite among in-the-know diners for a couple of years. The venture is operated by a young man named Rooney who is so self-effacing that he doesn’t want his full name used in this story — he says he wants to maintain a sense of mystery around the restaurant and cast the spotlight on the entire team that creates the menu at Black Dynasty.

The chef fell in love with ramen the same way as many others. “I ate a lot of Maruchan and Top Ramen, those $0.25 packs from Kroger,” Rooney says. “I knew it as working-class food until I started studying it after I saw the Momofuku cookbook. I discovered, ‘Oh, that’s something that takes a lot more time than I thought,’ and learned about Japanese ramen chefs. I was fascinated that there’s a whole culture of people so dedicated to one thing.”

After a job change to working as a line cook at Josephine, he moved forward.

“Since I was only working 40 hours a week instead of 80, I found myself with a lot of extra time on my hands,” he says. “I started

planning 10-seat, five-course dinners at my house with a few friends once a month. I really wanted to cook Japanese food with Southern sensibilities.”

Rooney intensified his study of ramen and discovered more things to love about it. “American diners have so many choices.

People expect a chef to be able to cook anything. I prefer chefs who are artisans in one thing. I liked that there wasn’t the need to fluff the menu with bullshit, but it could still be chef-driven and chef-focused food.

Ramen is honest, down-to-earth food.”

Black Dynasty struck a deal for a new permanent home operating out of the back of the quirky Bar Sovereign downtown at 514 Fifth Ave. South. To maintain the sense of mystery, Rooney used a lit red lantern in the bathroom hallway — the only way bar patrons knew that ramen was being served. Initial plans were to serve a simple menu of two bowls of ramen, one salad, gyoza and a dessert. After a few nights of trial runs, Bar Sovereign was temporarily closed, so Black Dynasty switched to a carryout-only model operating out of the alley behind the building.

As of Sunday, the chef and his team have moved back inside. “This offers the chance for stability and consistency, an

opportunity to really see what we can do,” he explains. “It really is a group effort.

The sous chef and line cooks help to write the recipes, and we meet to decide on the menu. They’re really invested and care a lot. We make everything in house, and we’re the only ramen shop in the state that makes our own noodles.”

Black Dynasty has officially moved past pop-up status, as Rooney avers, “I don’t have another job now — this is it!”

Some would consider chef Jason Zygmont’s move from running the kitchen at The Treehouse to his own pop-up to be something of a step down, but he doesn’t see it that way. “When I found out that the owners of the restaurant were looking to sell, I knew I needed to make a change,” Zygmont recalls. “I had to figure out how to do what I wanted, which was to own and operate my own restaurant. I’m an expert at failing to open new restaurants, but I never thought I’d do the pop-up thing. Once I realized that I could do it fewer days a week with a smaller staff, it made sense.”

Zygmont began to move forward with Setsun, but first he needed a semipermanent place to hang his toque: “I looked for a space that didn’t offer dinner service, and I found Sky Blue Cafe two

nashvillescene.com | AUGUST 20 – AUGUST 26, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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A women’s column featuring a rotating cast of contributors

PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND

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NOW OPEN! B&N Cafe´

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New Store Hours beginning August 24, 2020: Monday to Saturday 10 am to 8 pm Sundays 12 to 6 2501 WEST END AVENUE (Across from Centennial Park)

20

NASHVILLE SCENE | AUGUST 20 – AUGUST 26, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

blocks from where I live. It all happened pretty quickly. I sent an email to [Sky Blue’s info] address, and the owner Chad [Stuible] responded the next day. We took a quick tour together and agreed that I would rent it Friday through Monday. Chad is really the unsung hero of the whole story.

Without him, this wouldn’t exist in the current space.”

That current space is at Vandyke Bed & Beverage, the boutique East Nashville hotel where Zygmont has taken over the food program on a permanent basis. After a year of working out of the Sky Blue kitchen creating an innovative menu of exotic vegetable-centric dishes ingeniously paired with natural wines, the chef was looking for a change. “The first three months of doing the pop-up was the hardest job I ever had,” he says. “I was cooking, doing the accounting, PR, HR and social media. We had to do all our prep work off site, so we essentially operated like a caterer. We were really flying by the seat of our pants.”

When the opportunity arose to plant roots at Vandyke, Zygmont jumped at the chance.

“It’s a nicer space in the middle of Five Points with better foot traffic,” he says.

Setsun opened up for business the evening of March 2, a date with great significance. “We had one night of service

and then went home to find out that a tornado had hit,” explains Zygmont. “And then, the global pandemic. To call it a setback would be an understatement.”

Since reopening in June, Setsun has provided an extra benefit to the landlords at Vandyke. Without a food program, they could not operate as just a bar under current regulations, denying hotel guests that amenity and the owners that revenue.

Now the bar, which is operated by Vandyke while Setsun concentrates on the kitchen, can be open whenever Zygmont is serving dinner — from 5-10 p.m., plus during Sunday brunch service.

Carryout has become an important part of Setsun’s business. “I’m wary of sending some things to go,” Zygmont admits. “I’m not doing oysters for carryout, and you have to be aware that the chocolate souffle will basically be a chocolate brownie when it arrives. I didn’t get into this business to dump noodles into a brown paper box, but if you want it, I’ll cook you the best damned to-go food you’ve ever had!”

Zygmont is realistic about his current situation. “We’re essentially trying to survive this moment, treading water, but I count myself as very lucky,” he says.

“We’re just trying to be safe and do what we love.”

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

BOOKS

BATTERED BY THE BOMB Within Atomic Love’s love triangle, broken characters seek healing from the wounds of war

BY TINA CHAMBERS

T

21

‘EAT’

A poem by Ciona Rouse, illustrated by Rachel Briggs PHOTO: ANTHONY SCARLATI

he war is over, but deep and debilitating scars remain in Jennie Fields’ novel Atomic Love, set in 1950s Chicago.

Former Manhattan Project physicist Rosalind Porter has left the scientific community and taken a low-paying, mundane job at Marshall Field’s department store. Rosalind is still griefstricken and wracked with guilt over the part she played in the development of the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“The Manhattan Project’s darling vaporized nursing mothers, little girls cradling dolls, old women pouring tea, men too ancient to fight,” Rosalind laments. “It sucked their houses into winds of flame, shattered their hospitals and schools. It dropped an entire town into the sun and the Americans laughed while it burned. And then they chose another town and did the same.” Her own personal losses, especially betrayal at the hands of the man she loved — physicist Thomas Weaver — proved to be the final straw, and she has worked hard to put ATOMIC LOVE distance between

BY JENNIE FIELDS the groundbreaking G.P. PUTNAM’S SONS 368 PAGES, $26 scientist she was and the cheerless, unapproachable woman she has become.

Once a prodigy, Rosalind graduated from high school at 16, becoming the youngest female ever admitted to the University of Chicago. Mentored by Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi, she excelled in her career as a nuclear physicist — until everything fell apart. Having suffered a series of losses, Rosalind narrowly escaped the war years with her sanity: “First she lost her father; then she lost Weaver; for a while she lost her mind; and then her job. It all crashed down.

And her love for science, already battered by the bomb, collapsed in on itself.”

It comes as a shock to Rosalind’s carefully constructed postwar life when FBI agent Charlie Szydlo suddenly appears and asks her to spy on Weaver, who is suspected of treason. The war years were particularly grueling for Charlie, an idealistic, kindhearted man who barely survived a prisoner-of-war camp in Japan. With a mutilated hand and a broken spirit, Charlie is embarrassed to be alive when so many others are not: “Sitting in the taxi … the lights of the city streaking by, he sees a world rebuilding itself higher and mightier every day — to prove what? That America’s survived. Every skyscraper a desire to forget and look to the future. All built on scars.”

Charlie finally persuades Rosalind that the truth about her former lover must be uncovered, for the sake of both national security and her own peace of mind. As she spends time with Weaver, she realizes that her feelings for him are as strong as ever, although complicated by her burgeoning attraction to Charlie, and his to her. The

new Weaver is apologetic and solicitous and obviously keeping secrets, yet Rosalind can’t believe he’s capable of working with the Russians. As the stakes grow ever higher, however, Rosalind finds herself in real danger and no longer able to hold life at arm’s length.

Jennie Fields, who lives in Nashville, has crafted a page-turning romantic mystery set in a time and place both familiar and foreign, a story of scientific marvels, wartime atrocities and secret agents fighting the Cold War. The inspirations for her story include Leona Woods, the only female and youngest member of the Chicago team of physicists involved in the Manhattan Project; Fields’ mother, a biochemist; and her aunt, who was a clerical worker for the Manhattan Project. With such real-life models to draw upon, Fields brings to vivid life a fascinating period in American history by depicting flawed human characters seeking healing, redemption, love and hope in a world made bleak by the horrors of man’s inhumanity to man — and woman.

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

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NASHVILLE SCENE | AUGUST 20 – AUGUST 26, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

BY CIONA ROUSE

I eat an apple and each crunch treats my ear

fingers buttered with popcorn and defeat.

But now the drum permeates my skin

to a beat, like the bellydance drum solos I become, feathers and coins on my hips

becomes my blood and breath, my body defies lineation

to create a space in my body for honoring my folds and pleats.

swirling, turning like electric weather bumping my heat against the air

In high school I could never feather as a cheerleader, always the base beneath

my arms, snake-like creatures beckon rhythm, hips wreathing.

flying some great tiny gal to heaven.

Your job is threatening your uniform

The downbeat teaches me to drop into this body, my cellular caveat: stop

my coach bleated at me because I worked at a bakery, and, yes, I’d cheat myself

the dieting. With each breath already one sigh closer to death,

some chocolate pleasures. I hid in sweatshirts consumed salads for lunch, hold the meat

why cling to a word so sheathed in die? Emancipate from skinny ideations

and I woke at 5 am to sweat.

Repeat.

and eat.

I hid in the back of the theater alone like a heathen on Sunday repenting in the last pew

Rouse’s chapbook, VANTABLACK, is available from Third Man Books.

MUSIC

LET IT GO

fields have admitted to avoiding medication or therapy for fear that treatment would annihilate their creative output. Damned if you do, dangerous if you don’t.

“I thought about that, 100 percent,” says Bognanno. “I want to write when something is bothering me or there’s something I need to get out. I was worried if I got to a better place that that would kind of be flattened.

But that’s fucking bullshit. I have also talked with people who I admire, and they have said things along the lines of, ‘I don’t want to get treated because I like how much I get done when I’m like this.’ So it was always in the back of my head. But it’s so funny, ’cause now I look back and I’m like, ‘I got a way better record out of feeling better!’ ” Bognanno’s newfound confidence shines throughout Sugaregg, often in surprising ways. Her no-bullshit attitude is still there — she blatantly rejects traditional gender roles in the single “Every Tradition.” But Bognanno has also finally started to trust her ideas, allowing room for experimentation and nuance within the songs.

“ ‘Let You,’ ‘You,’ ‘Where to Start,’ ‘Hours and Hours’ — those are songs you wouldn’t find on any other Bully records,” she says.

Though Bognanno stepped out of the producer’s chair for this album, she still leaned on her production skills. She crafts a whole universe within “Hours and Hours.” It’s the perfect representation of both her resilience and her determination to chart new territory. It’s stunning.

“I have an electric bow, and if you put it on the [guitar] strings it creates somewhat of a controlled feedback — I used that for a lot of it,” she explains. “I did something with the vocals, like when there’s those ‘ahhhs,’ I ran my vocals through a pedal through a guitar amp and mic’d the guitar amp.”

More experimentation comes by way of an acoustic guitar (and a few dog barks) on the woozy “Come Down.” The layers of vocals in the chorus of the peppy, harmony-heavy “Like Fire” were inspired by some fiddling with a harmonizer pedal and — “This is embarrassing,” Bognanno says with a laugh — that drenched-in-synthand-vocoder Imogene Heap song “Hide and Seek.” She laughs again when mentioning the “weird sleigh bells” that also make an appearance in “Like Fire.” “[In the past] it’d just take one dude to be like, ‘Ugh, sleigh bells?’ and [I’d] be like, ‘Scratch the whole song!’ ” Giving up her role as engineer and producer also proved to be empowering. While Bognanno was at the helm for both Losing and 2015’s Feels Like, Sugaregg was produced by John Congleton, a Grammy-winning producer who’s worked on hundreds of records with artists running the gamut from Sigur Rós to Better Oblivion Community Center to St. Vincent and beyond.

“I had no confidence,” Bognanno says of making her previous album. “I was addressing stuff that I felt like I had to address, even just in my personal life, and I was just so worried about it being picked apart or needing to have cool cred. I had to engineer it because I had to feel like I still could, and I had to stick with doing it on tape because I made such a point about it.

“I felt like, being a woman in a male-dominated field, I would let other women down [if I didn’t produce it],” she continues. “Then I was like, ‘I don’t have to prove I can record this record! I know I can record this record!

I can record everyone else’s record, and you know what? I would love to do that. I don’t need to sacrifice my own project.’ No one’s gonna give me shit about that, and if they do, fuck ’em. Whatever.”

EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

career that has earned him fans among legends like Elton John, Emmylou Harris and Rod Stewart. But for Bullens, the release of his new album Walkin’ Through This World feels a lot like starting over: It’s the first album he’s released as an out transgender man.

“It’s been eight years since I’ve been public about my transition, and I retreated for a while,” Bullens tells the Scene. “About four years ago, I came down to Nashville to perform my one-person show … and that show was the bridge from Cindy to Cidny.”

Prior to transitioning in 2012, Bullens performed as Cindy Bullens, releasing eight studio albums between 1979 and 2010. In the decade between 2010’s Howling Trains and Barking Dogs and the folk-rock- and power-pop-fueled Walkin’ Through This

World, Bullens spent several years away from music before returning to the stage for the aforementioned performance piece Somewhere Between — Not an Ordinary Life.

Bullens introduced Walkin’ Through This World with “The Gender Line,” which explores the early stages of his gender transition with vulnerability and compassion. He opens the piece by recalling in stirring detail the inner turmoil he experienced before making the decision to transition, singing: “If you were me, what would you do? You look in the mirror and it’s not really you.” The cover artwork for the single features a photo of Cidny juxtaposed with a photo of Cindy, adding a striking visual to an already striking track.

“There’s a line in [Somewhere Between] where

SUGAREGG OUT FRIDAY, AUG. 21, VIA SUB POP

Bully’s Alicia Bognanno finds a new kind of confidence on Sugaregg

BY MEGAN SELING

22

PHOTO: ANGELINA CASTILLO

T

here is an exact moment on Bully’s new record Sugaregg, out Friday via Sub Pop, when everything clicks into place.

Partway through “Hours and Hours,” the penultimate track, Alicia Bognanno sings with a gentle insistence, “I’m not angry anymore / I’m not holding on to that.”

Her voice cuts through the ethereal cloud of guitar feedback that’s been gathering over a rubbery bass line. She repeats the line again, a little louder, as all the sonic stars collide for the climax. At the end of the song, the words hang in the air before slowly fading away, like Bognanno is trying to remind us that we too can all let go of our anger — if we want to, if we’re willing.

The song, and the idea of letting shit go, is a notable pivot from past Bognanno joints.

On 2017’s Losing, when Bully was a trio rounded out by bassist Reece Lazarus and guitarist Clayton Parker, Boganno was tired, pissed and restless. The keys to America had just been handed over to the world’s most dangerous clown. Bognanno — an unapologetic feminist who has carved out a career as a musician, engineer and producer in a male-dominated industry — funneled that collective frustration into the music.

Losing’s songs shine bright with an alt-pop charisma reminiscent of Dinosaur Jr. and The Breeders, but the lyrics cut deep. In “Focused,” Bognanno vows to kill a man should he dare hurt her friend again. In “Hate and Control,” a response to Trump’s presidency, she gives a warning: “You don’t like it when I’m angry? / Tough shit, learn to deal!”

But even more was going on below the surface. Bognanno didn’t talk publicly about it at the time, but she was in the throes of untreated bipolar disorder, and its symptoms were devastating to both her personal and professional life.

“That was in the thick of it, when I was trying to figure it out, going through the different medications, and had no idea what was going on in my body and head,” says Bognanno, speaking about those months when she was writing, recording and promoting Losing. “My paranoia was debilitating. I literally turned down a show because I was paranoid that I was gonna get tomatoes thrown at me. For no reason! … I can’t imagine what my manager had to go through.

Any interview that was posted I would pick apart and feel sick to my stomach about for months. I remember feeling like I was burning inside and everything was a battle for me. There was just a shell of me in that record, I think. Not to shit on that record, but that’s what it was.”

Sitting in her backyard, in the shade with her two dogs Mezzi and Papa, Bognanno laughs at how absurd those unfounded fears sound now. No one has ever thrown food at her; she’s never been chased offstage.

And she talks openly about how everything changed when she was able to treat her

bipolar disorder with a combination of medication, meditation and therapy. But to say it wasn’t easy to get here is an understatement. The music industry — hell, the country — is notoriously unfair to people experiencing mental illness.

Rapper Kanye West was diagnosed with bipolar disorder prior to the release of his 2018 LP Ye. Recently, he unleashed a string of tweets that mentioned everything from his questionable presidential campaign to vaccines being “the mark of the beast,” and his diagnosis became gossip fodder again.

Some saw his behavior as a joke. They mocked him and passed around memes.

Others tried to diagnose him through their laptops, judging both him and his famous family for his behavior while not so delicately suggesting treatment options.

But receiving treatment can feel like a double-edged sword, especially for emotional artists who rely on life’s highs and lows for inspiration. Our society romanticizes mental illness, from “manic pixie dream girls” to “crazy geniuses.” Many people in creative

ON YOUR SIDE

Cidny Bullens paints a rich picture of transgender life in Walkin’ Through This World

BY BRITTNEY McKENNA

F

or Cidny Bullens, releasing new music is old hat. The Nashville-residing singersongwriter has been a professional musician since the 1970s, charting a

NASHVILLE SCENE | AUGUST 20 – AUGUST 26, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

PHOTO: ALEJANDRO MENÉNDEZ VEGA

MUSIC

EN ESPAÑOL OUT FRIDAY, AUG. 21, VIA MONO MUNDO RECORDINGS

The Mavericks make their Spanish-language debut with En Español

BY ABBY LEE HOOD

S

ince they formed in Miami in 1989, The Mavericks have done a great deal. The rocking country outfit toured clubs until they scored a deal with MCA following their first gig at Exit/In. Soon, they moved to Music City, won Grammys and CMA Awards and earned gold and platinum records. They went on a nearly decade-long hiatus that ended with 2013’s In

Time, and they’ve carried on making music on their terms since.

One thing The Mavericks haven’t done just yet is release an album in Spanish, a language integral to frontman Raul Malo’s identity. It’s the language of his family, who came to Miami from Cuba in the 1960s, fleeing Fidel Castro’s regime. It’s the language sung in much of the music he loved as a youngster that wasn’t country music. Malo

my daughter explains ‘the gender line,’ “ he says.

“My daughter says, ‘Mom, you’ve always been on the female side of the gender line. Now you’re moving to the other side of the gender line.’ That was a really important line in the show.”

Much of the rest of Walkin’ Through This World further details his journey from Cindy to Cidny. Bullens says these songs were a departure from his earlier songwriting, which tended away from social commentary and drew more heavily from personal experience.

But the personal became the political when Bullens transitioned, and the album finds him turning his powers of observation on himself.

“I don’t, as a songwriter, write songs about society,” he explains. “I don’t write songs about cultural change. I don’t write political songs. If you know any of my songs, they’re basically just a moment from my life or how I’m feeling about something, or something I’m observing.”

Bullens recorded Walkin’ Through This World with co-producer Ray Kennedy, whom he counts as a close friend and trusted collaborator. Guests on the album include a who’s-who of the music community he fostered while living in Nashville in the 1990s: Rodney Crowell, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Mary Gauthier, Jess Leary and Siobhan Kennedy. Bullens’ daughter, Reid Bullens Crewe, also performs on the album.

Bullens and his wife recently bought a home

in East Nashville, moving to town following a brief stint in Santa Fe, N.M. Fortuitously, Bullens actually performed at The Bluebird Cafe the final night the venue was open before closing to the public in March.

He cites being in Nashville as a major boon to his creativity, and looks forward to immersing himself more deeply in the local music community when the COVID-19 pandemic passes.

“Nashville is my muse,” he says. “I’m respected here — not that I’m not respected anywhere else.

People ask me how Nashville is, and I have never had a bad experience here in Nashville, in terms of my career and my music.”

While Bullens is uncertain when he’ll be able to perform live shows in support of Walkin’ Through This World, he says he’ll be more than content if even one person finds healing and support in his new songs.

He’s a musician, of course, but ultimately sees his work as a greater act of service to his community.

“I hope this album is part of my legacy,” he says. “I want it to serve. I want as many people to hear it as need to hear it, and that includes trans people who are having a difficult time. [I want them] to know that there’s an ally, and that there are other people who go through what we go through. If they can identify with the songs, that’s my wish.”

has recorded songs in Spanish for his solo records, but Friday marks The Mavericks’ first Spanish-language release, aptly titled En Español.

“In many ways, when you sing in Spanish or in a different language, you can maybe get somebody to think of the world a little differently,” Malo tells the Scene. “We’re seeing a lot of divide and division.”

Of En Español’s 12 tracks, seven are standout songs from a wide variety of Latin American cultural traditions from bolero to mariachi, Afro-Cuban and beyond. Malo and the band — co-founder Paul Deakin on drums, longtime keyboardist Jerry Dale McFadden and guitarist Eddie Perez, a rela-

WALKIN’ THROUGH THIS WORLD WILL BE SELF-RELEASED FRIDAY, AUG. 21

PHOTO: TRAVIS COMMEAU

IN TONGUES

tive newcomer who joined in 2003 — infuse the tunes with sounds from their expansive country and rock palette. The album opens with “La Sitiera,” a much-loved Cuban country ballad about heartbreak, presented in an arrangement rich beyond late countrypolitan architect Billy Sherrill’s wildest dreams.

It’s followed on the album by “Recuerdos,” or “Memories” in English, co-written by Malo between a late-night performance at the Ryman and a midday recording session.

It’s a slow-rocker with brassy trumpets and nimble accordion licks among kinetic, jazzy piano and guitar. Not all of the songs are about pain, but this one continues the theme in devastating fashion, looking back at the memory of a relationship that can’t be saved.

Malo sings: “Hoy es el día que he de partir / Nuestros caminos se separarán / Ya nuestra historia llegó a su fin / Bellos recuerdos en mí quedarán.” Or, roughly translated: “Today is the day that I must leave / Our paths will part / Our story has come to an end / Beautiful memories will remain in me.”

COVID-19 interrupted The Mavericks’ planned 30th anniversary celebration tour, and it’s forcing them to learn something else new: how to promote a record without touring. That opened up an interesting creative avenue. The band’s Quarantunes series on YouTube began casually, with Malo recording himself on his iPhone playing songs at home, but it evolved into a full-scale occasional music video production. A limited film crew, practicing rigorous health and safety measures, captures the band playing songs like the fan favorite “Back in Your Arms Again” in their practice space. The sessions don’t generate the thrills of a live show, but they do strengthen the group’s feeling that making and sharing music is incredibly important right now.

“Music sometimes works as a catalyst for hope and harmony,” says Malo. “With everything that’s going on, it didn’t seem too crazy an idea to release this kind of record.”

EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM CIDNY BULLENS

nashvillescene.com | AUGUST 20 – AUGUST 26, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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MUSIC

THE SPIN

KICKING AND STREAMING

BY STEPHEN TRAGESER AND CHARLIE ZAILLIAN

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hen a corporation runs a “we’re in this with you” commercial, addressing either the pandemic or the current protests against systemic racism and police violence, it can often ring a bit hollow. But when someone like Aaron Lee Tasjan says it, that feels about as sincere as it can get. He began his Aug. 11 livestream, part of NPR Music’s Live Sessions series, affably reeling off songs from behind a keyboard in his East Nashville home studio. Each was relatable in its portrayal of anxiety, confusion, heartbreak or frustration, with an acidic tang that made the sentiments of grace, humor and hope each contained all the sweeter.

The seven-song set featured tunes from Tasjan’s three most recent releases: 2016’s Silver Tears, 2018’s Karma for Cheap and the 2019 acoustic-focused alternate version Karma for Cheap: Reincarnated. That last record included a previously unreleased song called “My Whole Life Is Over (All Over Again),” which Tasjan played during the livestream, and it was the emotional peak of the performance. You can find something worth holding onto in plenty of songs in this time of chaos. But the story in “My Whole Life,” about still feeling whole and maybe even being able to laugh at yourself in spite of constant discouraging news, feels particularly comforting.

A little later, after Tasjan had switched over to his acoustic guitar, he played “I Love America Better Than You.” It’s a kind of contemporary analog to the late, great John Prine’s “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore,” calling out hypocrisy and exceptionalism. But its particular brand of biting and self-effacing humor is very much Tasjan’s own. As he introduced the tune, he offered up a little benediction.

“I appreciate you voting in the face of voter suppression,” Tasjan said. “I appreciate anybody with the humility to ask themselves what they can do in their life every day to change systemic racism — what we can do about the project of whiteness. Hey, man, we’re reckoning with a lot of stuff right now, and it’s a good thing. We need our world to change. It is changing, for the better I think, and that makes me very happy.”

Neptune City, N.J.-raised singer-songwriter-guitarist Nicole Atkins has called Nashville home since 2015, but you can’t take the New Jersey out of the girl. During our pandemic summer, Atkins returned to the land of Springsteen, Sinatra and Snooki for her second livestream show series of the year.

Live From the Steel Porch, streamed from Langosta Lounge on the Asbury Park boardwalk, concluded with a ticketed show on Aug. 12.

“How’s everybody doing out there in TV land?” Atkins greeted viewers, who checked in from as far away as Australia and San Francisco and as close by as Jersey City. She then launched into an hourlong set showcasing material from the recently released Ital-

NASHVILLE SCENE | AUGUST 20 – AUGUST 26, 2020 | nashvillescene.com

KARMA CHAMELEON: AARON LEE TASJAN

BOARDWALK EMPIRE: NICOLE ATKINS ian Ice. The album, Atkins’ fifth, is billed as a love letter to her home state — specifically the Jersey Shore, the Garden State’s endearingly tacky Gatlinburg-by-the-Sea. Clad in an orange flannel coat and cottoncandy jumpsuit that popped against her bandmates’ white dress shirts and the venue’s wood-paneled walls (festooned with quirky artwork and, naturally, a pizza box), Atkins routinely broke the fourth wall. She and her crackerjack four-piece ensemble — which featured an all-Southern rhythm section in Boston-born Memphian Danny Banks on drums and Muscle Shoals-residing former Nashvillian Spencer Duncan on bass — fired off Italian Ice highlights including the psych-y “Mind Eraser,” disco-inflected “Domino” and country road song “Never Going Home Again.” On the tender slow jam “Captain,” Atkins duetted with guitarist Lee Maroney (standing in admirably for Spoon’s Britt Daniel, who appears on

the album version). For the emotionally charged “Forever,” she successfully rallied the crew and waitstaff to belt out call-andresponse vocals.

Livestreams can sometimes make the void where live music was feel even more vast. But this felt more like a TV taping with an interactive side, with fluid multicamera work and Atkins doing double duty as frontwoman and master of ceremonies.

She took questions in real time from fans in the chatbox between songs and even exited the stage momentarily mid-set to let a fellow Jersey native living in Tennessee (22-year-old Memphis singer-songwriter Max Kaplan) play a tune. Atkins defused the unnatural aspects of performing sans crowd with her easy charm, remarkable pipes and comfort with the surroundings, making sure those watching from home felt as at-home as she did.

EMAIL THESPIN@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

FILM

LOST HIGHWAY

PRIMAL STREAM XXII Fresh horror, a David Lynch stone classic and more, now available to stream

BY JASON SHAWHAN

A

s it stands, it’s another week to have a mental margarita of great strength and volume, because the melancholy and aggressive helplessness is real, and there’s only so much that medication and meditation can do at this point. But there’s a lot of interesting art to view this week, and bunches of previous offerings in this series. If the COVID-19 era is the folk mayhem of The Fog, then let me be your Stevie Wayne and offer something more than the existential dread of being alive right now. As always, you can look back at past issues of the Scene for dozens more streaming recommendations.

SPUTNIK VIA VIDEO ON DEMAND A lot of films in the intervening 34 years have sought to follow the lead of David Cronenberg’s version of The Fly in reinventing a classic story with contemporary splatter and effects know-how. But Sputnik is one of the first films ever to try to tap into that 1986 classic’s emotional majesty and keep the audience completely rooted in the personal drama of uncontrollable monstrous transformation — and it keeps the viewer in unexpected places. The trailer promises creature action, and it has an abundance of that. (Note: Do you like lots of bloody mantid-derived action? If so, you’re going to be very happy.) Likewise, there’s a good deal of Soviet-era political intrigue. But Sputnik’s

secret weapon is Oksana Akinshina, whose titular performance in Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-Ever is one of the most wrenching and affecting debuts in global art cinema.

And as Dr. Tatyana Klimova, she is a resolute figure at the heart of this interstellar tragedy. When cosmonaut Konstantin Veshnyakov’s mission crashes to Earth in 1983, he is hidden away at a remote research facility. Dr. Klimova, facing some issues with regulatory commissions and angry relatives, is brought in to consult, because why not — there are unforeseen circumstances all up in this situation, with lots of memory gaps, drippy transformations, and heaps of headless corpses. It’s a little long (just under two hours), but it feels so unlike anything of recent vintage that one can’t help but relax into its deliberate rhythm.

ensues. Random Acts of Violence explores this scenario twice — like the most bloodthirsty of research scientists, looking to shift some variables for maximum splatter.

And damned if it doesn’t resonate in the recesses of the reptilian brain long after the film ends, the first variation for sudden and shocking savagery, the second for physically distant cruelty. On the whole, the film trips up on its determination to make a

OVER THE GARDEN WALL ON HULU Despite the reputation I’ve built over the decades as one of those film critics who most likes movies where enigmatic strangers fix an entire family’s problems by having sex with each of them, or films from the tulpa’s point of view, I have a

RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE ON SHUDDER I like Jay Baruchel. He’s been a hallmark of great comedy for quite some time now (see: Goon, the How to Train Your Dragon series, This Is the End, Letterkenny), so it’s unexpected to see the actor direct a horror film as relentless as this one. Ultimately, the reach of Random Acts of Violence exceeds its grasp, but not before it delivers one of the most impressive and visceral murderscapes I’ve seen in quite some time. If you enjoy horror, you’ve encountered this sort of situation before, wherein a vehicle full of folk meets a mad killer, and mayhem

RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE profound statement about creativity fueled by suffering and tragedy, and I’ve no idea how it’ll sit as a cohesive whole with viewers (though it will find a devoted audience in some subsets of horror fandom). But Baruchel the director knows how to execute (in both senses of the word) an unflinching set piece or two.

LOST HIGHWAY ON PEACOCK AND AMAZON PRIME

SPUTNIK

and Kieślowski, giving Bill Pullman one of the best roles of his career (see also: Zero Effect) and finding in Patricia Arquette a femme fatale for the ’90s and the future.

Her dual role as Renee and Alice prefigures the dualist majesty of Mulholland Drive four years later, but without the operatic sadness that leavens that film’s movie-nursed fugue.

Lost Highway is a space of high-contrast shadows and no pity, where personifications of doubt and jealousy taunt you like a Greek tragedy unfolding on the creepiest roads of interdimensional California. This is a dark, vicious film that pulls no punches and messes with your mind in the best possible way. One time, at a midnight screening of this film, an audience member asked if this was a “devil film.” Honestly, I still don’t know how to conclusively answer that.

With Richard Pryor, Jack Nance and Robert Blake. Watch it as loud as you can in as dark a room as possible. Also, for more David Lynch discussion, look back at our exploration of Lynch’s work in the May 4, 2017, issue of the Scene.

For his first film after the commercial catastrophe of 1992’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, David Lynch dove deep into the darkest recesses of the human mind and served up a hallucinatory meditation on guilt, sexual insecurity and the O.J. Simpson trial. Working with mystery-noir novelist Barry Gifford and cinematographer Peter Deming (Evil Dead 2, House Party, Screams 2-4), Lynch dissects the predatory aspects of male fantasy using the milieux of Buñuel

distinct and sincere fondness for things that are heartfelt and magical. This 2014 animated series (altogether running right around an hour and 50 minutes) is something beautiful and kind. It has magic and mysteries and frog bands and powerful mixtapes, yet it feels timeless in the way that few modern works do — think The Rainbow Goblins or the more abstract moments in Laika’s oeuvre. Two half-brothers journeying into the Unknown with a frog and a sense of purpose wouldn’t seem inherently compelling, but this series hits the ground running and brings the viewer along for the ride, and that’s a rock fact.

It’s a wonderful achievement, and it’s perfect for anyone who binged The Midnight Gospel on Netflix and wants something with the same kind of trippy coziness.

Ain’t that just the way?

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nashvillescene.com | AUGUST 20 – AUGUST 26, 2020 | NASHVILLE SCENE

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FILM

Couples that play together STATIC stay SHOCK relies on refreshing together Tesla innovation to tell a

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08/31/20.

ikola Tesla’s aura is that of the mythic creative — a scientist who was at the bleeding edge of innovation and pushed harder for more. Maybe you’ve put your hands on TESLA Tesla’s plasma PG-13, 102 MINUTES globe at a science AVAILABLE FRIDAY, AUG. 21, center. He’s been VIA VIDEO ON DEMAND played on screen by David Bowie, Nicholas Hoult and now Ethan Hawke. There are holidays to celebrate his achievements, and he has served as inspiration for countless great minds. And thanks to the dorky hubris of Elon Musk, Tesla is now a literal brand.

Tesla’s story itself is a classic journey — that of the troubled genius ahead of his time. He was trapped in an era when an unwillingness to bend to the whims of the market and a lack of blustering business acumen were considered shortcomings, not virtues.

Michael Almereyda’s career has been just a bit like Tesla’s. The director has largely operated within the world of independent cinema, where he’s basically been allowed to do whatever he wants. From a modern-day New York spin on Hamlet to a dramatized version of the Milgram experiment, Almereyda’s three-and-a-half-decade-deep filmography has never quite seen the bump up to widespread acclaim it deserves.

Almereyda may feel some kinship with Tesla. Rather than trotting out the usual stodgy biopic tropes, the director honors the scientist by pushing the limits of what a biopic can be and doing exactly what he wants with it. He also finds his old collaborator Hawke — known for lending his star power to indies on many occasions — in typically reliable form.

As Tesla, Hawke makes the scientist appear all at once in control of his world and completely overwhelmed by it — a fierce, grizzled sea captain bracing for the oncoming tsunami poised to overtake his

small vessel. It’s a recurring theme in this film, how a genial genius like Tesla was able to make a lasting difference but unable to properly monetize his life’s work, or deal with those who held the keys to financial possibility.

Moments from Tesla’s life are intercut with moments from Thomas Edison’s (played by a spry Kyle MacLachlan), the king of the lightbulb who perhaps lacked Tesla’s brilliance but made up for it with determination and entrepreneurship. An early disagreement between the two builds with Downton Abbey flair — you might begin to think it’s that kind of biopic. But then something strange happens: The scene cuts to both inventors munching down on ice cream cones, eventually smashing said cones onto each other’s bodies in anger.

Eve Hewson (daughter of Bono and Ali Hewson) then interrupts the film, playing the role of another famous child — Anne Morgan, famed philanthropist and daughter of tycoon J.P. Morgan. Not only Tesla’s in-film friend and confidant, she’s also here to serve as the narrator.

She hops onto what appears to be a MacBook and compares Tesla and Edison by their modern reputations and Google image-search results. But the fourth-wallbreaking weirdness doesn’t end there: Tesla has a dream sequence in the third act in which he belts the Tears for Fears bop “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” in front of a backdrop like he’s performing open-mic karaoke.

Just like Tesla, Almereyda’s film does not stick to conventions. It works in a space where anything can happen — a character can randomly be holding an iPhone, or comedic actors like Jim Gaffigan (sporting a beast of a mustache) and James Urbaniak can pop in for supporting turns. While Tesla was stuck in a system that didn’t always respect him, independent film gives people like Almereyda the bandwidth to be themselves and go after their vision, even if it doesn’t work out. Here, it does.

Not every jolt of Tesla’s lightning is powerful, and at times the film could use more of the inventor’s renegade spirit. But when Almereyda fires up his Tesla coil of narrative innovation, you might swear you’ve seen something miraculous. But it’s not a miracle — it’s just a filmmaker, like his subject, working with no restraint and thinking ahead of the curve.

EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM

IN THE CHANCERY COURT FOR WILLIAMSON COUNTY, TENNESSEE AT FRANKLIN Adoption Case No. 2353A

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IN THE CHANCERY COURT FOR MAURY COUNTY, TENNESSEE AT COLUMBIA

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Read about and comment on each puzzle: nytimes.com/wordplay.

Crosswords for young solvers: nytimes.com/ studentcrosswords.

It appearing from the Petition, which is sworn, that Respondent Teresa Kathryn Moran cannot be located upon diligent search and inquiry so that ordinary process of law cannot be served upon her; service of process by publication is ordered and she is hereby ordered to appear and answer or otherwise defend against the Petition for Adoption and Termination of Parental Rights within 30 days after the date of the last publication of this notice; otherwise, a default judgement will be entered against Respondent for the relief demanded in the complaint.

It is ORDERED that Petitioners be allowed to proceed with substituted service and that this notice shall be published in a newspaper of general circulation in Nashville, Tennessee, which is the last known whereabouts of Respondent, once a week for four (4) consecutive weeks.

IN RE: THE ADOPTION OF A FEMALE CHILD Gladis Rosibel Sanchez Lorenzo 02/27/2005 By: Daniela Lorenzo Arciniega (Biological Mother) And Raymundo Ruiz Martinez (Stepfather) PETITIONERS, v.

By: Lisa L. Collins Sup. Ct. No. 16035 (615) 269-5540 Attorney for Petitioners NSC 7/30, 8/6, 8/13,& 8/20/20

IN THE CHANCERY COURT FOR WILLIAMSON COUNTY, TENNESSEE AT FRANKLIN Adoption Case No. 2353A IN RE: THE ADOPTION OF A FEMALE CHILD Gladis Rosibel Sanchez Lorenzo 02/27/2005 By:

v.

Edwin Geovani Sanchez (Biological Father) ORDER FOR SERVICE BY PUBLICATION This cause came in front of the court on August 7, 2020, on a motion for publication filed by the Petitioners. In this cause it is appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon Respondent. It is ordered that said Respondent be served by publication and that said Respondent enter his appearance herein within thirty (30) days from the last day of publication of this notice and defend or default will be taken against him. The hearing to be held at the Williamson County Chancery Court in Franklin, TN. It is therefore ORDERED that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks in the local newspaper.

It is further ORDERED that said four (4) week succession publication will constitute service upon Edwin Geovani Sanchez in the above-captioned case.

Entered this the 7th day of August, 2020.

Judge: James G. Martin III By: Vanessa Saenz (#18875) Saenz & Maniatis, PLLC (615) 366-1211 Attorney for Petitioners NSC 8/20, 8/27, 9/3,& 9/10/20

Jane Ellen Cassell Attorney for Plaintiff NSC 7/30, 8/6, 8/13, 8/20/20

ORDER FOR SERVICE BY PUBLICATION This cause came in front of the court on August 7, 2020, on a motion for publication filed by the Petitioners. In this cause it is appearing to the satisfaction of the Court that the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon Respondent. It is ordered that said Respondent be served by publication and that said Respondent enter his appearance herein within thirty (30) days from the last day of publication of this notice and defend or default will be taken against him. The hearing to be held at the Williamson County Chancery Court in Franklin, TN. It is therefore ORDERED that a copy of this Order be published for four (4) weeks in the local newspaper.

It is further ORDERED that said four (4) week succession publication will constitute service upon Edwin Geovani Sanchez in the above-captioned case.

Entered this the 7th day of August, 2020.

Judge: James G. Martin III By: Vanessa Saenz (#18875) Saenz & Maniatis, PLLC (615) 366-1211 Attorney for Petitioners NSC 8/20, 8/27, 9/3,& 9/10/20

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Rocky McElhaney Law Firm InjuRy Auto ACCIdEnts WRongFul dEAth Non-Resident Notice Third Circuit Docket No. 20D644

MAXINE ROSALES BONDS

Jane Ellen Cassell Attorney for Plaintiff NSC 7/30, 8/6, 8/13, 8/20/20

KAREN

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 THOMAS DONNELL HORTON. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HIS appearance herein with thirty (30) days after September 10, 2020 same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on October 12, 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.

NSC 8/20, 8/27, 9/3, 9/10/20

vs.

Richard R. Rooker, Clerk M. De Jesus, Deputy Clerk Date: July 23, 2020

THOMAS DONNELL HORTON

Laura Tek Attorney for Plaintiff

DAVID N BONDS

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 MAXINE ROSALES BONDS. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HER appearance herein with thirty (30) days after August 20, 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 September 21, 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.

Vs.

Richard R. Rooker, Clerk M. De Jesus, Deputy Clerk Date: August 13, 2020

Non-Resident Notice Fourth Circuit Docket No. 20D530

A DON’T BE

Daniela Lorenzo Arciniega (Biological Mother) And Raymundo Ruiz Martinez (Stepfather) PETITIONERS,

Richard R. Rooker, Clerk M. De Jesus, Deputy Clerk Date: July 23, 2020

Edwin Geovani Sanchez (Biological Father)

This the 17th day of July, 2020.

Judge: James G. Martin III

fendant is a non-resident of the State of Tennessee, therefore the ordinary process of law cannot be served upon MAXINE ROSALES BONDS. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HER appearance herein with thirty (30) days after August 20, 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 September 21, 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.

KIMBERLY YVETTE HORTON Vs. THOMAS DONNELL HORTON 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 THOMAS DONNELL HORTON. It is ordered that said Defendant enter HIS appearance herein with thirty (30) days after September 10, 2020 same being the date of the last publication of this notice to be held at the Metropolitan Circuit Court located at 1 Public Square, Room 302, Nashville, Tennessee, and defend or default will be taken on October 12, 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: August 13, 2020 Laura Tek Attorney for Plaintiff

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