METROPOLITIK: HOUSE REPUBLICANS’ ATTEMPT TO REMOVE NASHVILLE JUDGE MAY SET OFF WAR
MARCH 4–10, 2021 I VOLUME 40 I NUMBER 5 I NASHVILLESCENE.COM I FREE
FOOD & DRINK: VOLUNTEERS ARE MAKING PROGRESS ON OPENING NASHVILLE FOOD CO-OP
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A YEAR OF
COVID Jan. 11, 2021 8,500 active COVID-19 cases in Davidson County
Sept. 5, 2020 926 active COVID-19 cases in Davidson County
March 30, 2020 360 active COVID-19 cases in Davidson County
HOW 12 MONTHS OF THE CORONAVIRUS HAVE AFFECTED NASHVILLE, FROM PUBLIC EDUCATION TO TRANSIT AND BEYOND
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Picasso. Figures features approximately 75 paintings, works on paper, and sculptures by one of the most celebrated figures in modern art. The exhibition offers an in-depth look at Pablo Picasso’s careerlong fascination with the human figure as a means of expressing a range of subjects and emotions. The Frist Art Museum is the only U.S. venue to host this incredible collection of his work. Advance timed tickets are required and can be reserved at FristArtMuseum.org/tickets.
FEBRUARY 5–MAY 2
Downtown Nashville, 919 Broadway, Nashville, TN 37203 · FristArtMuseum.org · @FristArtMuseum · #TheFrist · #FristPicasso
Exhibition organized in partnership with Musée national Picasso-Paris.
Platinum sponsor
Supported in part by our Frist Patrons and
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NASHVILLE SCENE | MARCH 4 – MARCH 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com
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Gold sponsors
Bronze sponsor
Hospitality sponsor
Education and community engagement supporter
Lynn, Ken, and Lauren Melkus
Portrait of Dora Maar, 1937. Oil on canvas. Musée National Picasso-Paris, Gift of Pablo Picasso, 1979. MP166. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée National Picasso-Paris) / Mathieu Rabeau. © 2021 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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CONTENTS
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37208 Rising ............................................6
Crawl Space: March 2021
CITY LIMITS
A tale of two North Nashville family businesses BY M. SIMONE BOYD
What a Wicked Game to Play ...................6 Metropolitik: House Republicans’ attempt to remove a Nashville judge may set off war BY STEVE CAVENDISH
Pith in the Wind .........................................7
This week on the Scene’s news and politics blog
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ART
First Saturday openings offer avian watercolors, oil-pastel transfers, painted textile wall sculptures and much more BY JOE NOLAN
22
BOOKS
BY G. ROBERT FRAZIER AND CHAPTER 16
The Human Cost.........................................9 More than 11,000 Tennesseans have died from this virus. Is it possible to adequately acknowledge our grief?
23
MUSIC
Sweet Oblivion ........................................ 23
BY STEVEN HALE
Indie-folk fave Julien Baker reflects on tour life, quarantine life and her third LP Little Oblivions
A year into the pandemic, challenges continue for MNPS students and staff
BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN
BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT
Pop eccentric Ron Gallo closes the book on his Nashville chapter with the intimate Peacemeal
Independent venues hold on until the Small Business Administration delivers promised federal relief
BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN
COVID-19 Timeline.....................................9 Back to School ...........................................9
The Waiting Is the Hardest Part............. 10
BY STEPHEN TRAGESER
Routing Interest ...................................... 12
Peace Offering......................................... 24
Donate to the Memorial Fundraiser for Joseph ‘Jocephus’ Hudson Tennessee Republicans’ Crooked Priorities Assembly Food Hall Downtown Opening on March 4 Shop Hop: Ready, Set, Grow ON THE COVER:
Data from Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County on Feb. 26, 2021
Face Value ............................................... 25 Thirdface shreds heavy-music norms on Do It With a Smile BY P.J. KINZER
Federal aid has kept WeGo afloat during the pandemic, but the agency hopes for increased local funding
The Spin ................................................... 25
BY ALEJANDRO RAMIREZ
BY MEGAN SELING
Local free stores have stepped up to fill important holes in the food supply
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Feeding the Community ......................... 13
THIS WEEK ON THE WEB:
Secrets and Lies
J.T. Ellison channels Agatha Christie in the suspense-filled Her Dark Lies
COVER STORY A Year of COVID
MARCH 4, 2021
The Scene’s live-review column checks out Vera Bloom at The 5 Spot
FILM
BY CHRIS CHAMBERLAIN
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What Is It Good For? ............................... 26
Stream a Hold Steady concert live from the Brooklyn Bowl, catch Attitude Part I at Nashville Ballet, listen to the new Mogwai record As the Love Continues, check out Tea & Justice: A Virtual Tea Ceremony, attend an online reading with poet Major Jackson, see Kevin Guthrie’s portraits at Nicky’s Coal Fired and more
Kings’ Gambit .......................................... 26
A new restoration of 1972’s F.T.A. connects past to present
CRITICS’ PICKS
BY NATHAN SMITH
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FOOD AND DRINK
Cooperation Makes It Happen
Night of the Kings is grim, dim, impressive and fantastical BY CRAIG D. LINDSEY
Peep Show ............................................... 27
Quentin Dupieux’s Keep an Eye Out plays like middlebrow TV BY STEVE ERICKSON
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NEW YORK TIMES CROSSWORD
A group of volunteers is making progress on opening the community-run Nashville Food Co-op
MARKETPLACE
BY MARGARET LITTMAN
Walk a
Mile
with J.R. Lind
With feet on the street, we discover Nashville’s own unique beat – one mile at a time
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PLEASE MEET NINA BUTTERNUT! Currently living with NHA Fosters, here’s what they have to say about her: “Nina Butternut is the sweetest thing! All she wants are pets and love from her human and she’ll let you know it with the sweetest head nudges! She loves to be comfy and cuddly and hides all her favorite squishy toys in her crate! She’ll stare you down with her big ole eyes and steal your heart! Nina also LOVES to be curious outside and is mostly low key but certainly knows how to play! PS: Cats are not her favorite! Want to meet? Please email foster@ nashvillehumane.org with the subject line “Interested In Nina Butternut” and we’ll get you connected! Call 615.352.1010 or visit nashvillehumane.org Located at 213 Oceola Ave., Nashville, TN 37209
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FROM BILL FREEMAN
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY’S ROBIN STEABAN ADMINISTERS THE HOSPITAL’S FIRST COVID-19 VACCINE TO TESHA AKINS ON DEC. 17
THE IMPORTANCE OF GETTING THE COVID-19 VACCINE TO OUR UNDERSERVED COMMUNITIES OF COLOR “People of color, particularly African Americans, are experiencing more serious illness and death due to COVID-19 than white people,” Johns Hopkins Medicine recently reported. An article from Mayoclinic.org notes that underlying health conditions like diabetes and heart disease can lead to more serious illness from the virus not because of genetic or biological factors, but possibly due to stressful living conditions or inconsistent access to health care. Despite this health disparity, it seems COVID-19 vaccines are not being aggressively allotted or dispensed to those in communities of color. Data from the Metro Public Health Department shows that 60 percent of vaccines administered in Davidson County have gone to white residents; Black residents have received 14 percent of vaccinations; and Hispanic residents have received just 2 percent. The U.S. Census reports that Nashville is 64 percent white, 28 percent Black and 11 percent Hispanic. The race/ethnicity of everyone getting the vaccine is not recorded. News reports indicate that people of color are often more tentative about getting one of the vaccines and consider refraining, perhaps due to the many myths surrounding the vaccines. Aaron E. Carroll, a contributing writer for The New York Times, recently wrote about seven myths of the vaccine, which included everything from people believing it causes infertility to fear of potential negative side effects. Carroll dispels each of these myths. One myth is that “side effects of this vaccine are much more severe than those of typical vaccines.” Patients have sometimes experienced symptoms like aches, chills and fever. These symptoms are usually not a major concern — instead, they are signs the body’s immune system is working. Another myth: “Studies were rushed.” Again, Carroll reminds us of the extensive exploratory and preclinical work done on coronavirus vaccines because of severe acute respiratory syndrome (best known as SARS). Though the process was “highly accelerated,” the vaccines that “made it through the [FDA] gantlet were thoroughly studied and found to be safe and effective.” “In trials,” writes Carroll, “the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have been about 95 percent effective against symptomatic disease, but that level of effectiveness is not necessary. In trials Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was 80 percent to 90 percent
effective, and it changed the world.” In addition to these myths, other issues are at work. Healthline.com reports, “In the past … dangerous health policies and clinical experiments have targeted particularly vulnerable black and brown communities.” Further, according to epidemiologist Leslie Waller of the Metro Health Department, “not everybody has the same ability to engage with the existing health care system or public health system.” Some are simply underinsured. To that end, our business leaders, city officials and faith leaders are doing all they can to set an example by getting vaccinated. They hope it will encourage others to follow their lead. Meharry Medical College President and CEO Dr. James Hildreth and Deputy Mayor of Community Engagement Brenda Haywood are two leaders who hope their example will convince others to follow. They are also working to increase accessibility and arrange transportation to vaccine sites. In addition to business and faith leaders, nonprofit groups like Siloam Health and others are reaching into our communities to find the underserved and ensure they have knowledge and access. More vaccines, like the latest from Johnson & Johnson, are being approved, and that allows further vaccine distribution. These vaccines, according to Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock, are “the best medical prevention method for COVID-19.” Echoing the progress, The New York Times reports that of 75,000 vaccinated people in a research trial, none died from COVID, and only a few were hospitalized. Without the vaccine, given the experience of the past year, 150 would have died and hundreds more would have been hospitalized. According to Dr. Aaron Richterman of the University of Pennsylvania, “The news is fantastic.” For both health and economic reasons, we want to see everyone get vaccinated. Let’s encourage all those we know to seek accurate information and to get the shot. I heartily agree with Aaron Carroll’s final assessment: “The more people who get vaccinated, the more morbidity and mortality we avoid. The best coronavirus vaccine is the one you can get as soon as possible.”
PHOTO: DONN JONES/VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER
PET OF THE WEEK!
Editor-in-Chief D. Patrick Rodgers Senior Editor Dana Kopp Franklin Associate Editor Alejandro Ramirez Arts Editor Laura Hutson Hunter Culture Editor Erica Ciccarone Music and Listings Editor Stephen Trageser Contributing Editors Jack Silverman, Abby White Staff Writers Stephen Elliott, Nancy Floyd, Steven Hale, Kara Hartnett, J.R. Lind, William Williams Contributing Writers Sadaf Ahsan, Radley Balko, Ashley Brantley, Maria Browning, Steve Cavendish, Chris Chamberlain, Lance Conzett, Marcus K. Dowling, Steve Erickson, Randy Fox, Adam Gold, Seth Graves, Kim Green, Steve Haruch, Geoffrey Himes, Edd Hurt, Jennifer Justus, Christine Kreyling, Katy Lindenmuth, Craig D. Lindsey, Brittney McKenna, Marissa R. Moss, Noel Murray, Joe Nolan, Chris Parton, Betsy Phillips, John Pitcher, Margaret Renkl, Megan Seling, Jason Shawhan, Michael Sicinski, Ashley Spurgeon, Amy Stumpfl, Kay West, Andrea Williams, Cy Winstanley, Ron Wynn, Charlie Zaillian Editorial Intern Diana Leyva Art Director Elizabeth Jones Photographers Eric England, Matt Masters, Daniel Meigs Graphic Designers Mary Louise Meadors, Tracey Starck Production Coordinator Christie Passarello Events and Marketing Director Olivia Britton Promotions Coordinator Caroline Poole Publisher Mike Smith Senior Advertising Solutions Managers Maggie Bond, Sue Falls, Michael Jezewski, Carla Mathis, Heather Cantrell Mullins, Stevan Steinhart, Jennifer Trsinar, Keith Wright Advertising Solutions Manager Olivia Bellon, William Shutes Sales Operations Manager Chelon Hill Hasty Advertising Solutions Associates Aya Robinson, Price Waltman Special Projects Coordinator Susan Torregrossa President Frank Daniels III Chief Financial Officer Todd Patton Corporate Production Director Elizabeth Jones Vice President of Marketing Mike Smith IT Director John Schaeffer Circulation and Distribution Director Gary Minnis For advertising information please contact: Mike Smith, msmith@nashvillescene.com or 615-844-9238 FW PUBLISHING LLC Owner Bill Freeman VOICE MEDIA GROUP National Advertising 1-888-278-9866 vmgadvertising.com
Copyright©2020, Nashville Scene. 210 12th Ave. S., Ste. 100, Nashville, TN 37203. Phone: 615-244-7989. The Nashville Scene is published weekly by FW Publishing LLC. The publication is free, one per reader. Removal of more than one paper from any distribution point constitutes theft, and violators are subject to prosecution. Back issues are available at our office. Email: All email addresses consist of the employee’s first initial and last name (no space between) followed by @nashvillescene.com; to reach contributing writers, email editor@nashvillescene.com. Editorial Policy: The Nashville Scene covers news, art and entertainment. In our pages appear divergent views from across the community. Those views do not necessarily represent those of the publishers. Subscriptions: Subscriptions are available at $150 per year for 52 issues. Subscriptions will be posted every Thursday and delivered by third-class mail in usually five to seven days. Please note: Due to the nature of third-class mail and postal regulations, any issue(s) could be delayed by as much as two or three weeks. There will be no refunds issued. Please allow four to six weeks for processing new subscriptions and address changes. Send your check or Visa/MC/AmEx number with expiration date to the above address.
In memory of Jim Ridley, editor 2009-2016
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.
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PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND
CITY LIMITS
JORDAN AND YUSEF HARRIS AT ALKEBULAN IMAGES
37208 RISING
A tale of two North Nashville family businesses BY M. SIMONE BOYD
W
hen I read that the owner of Alkebu-Lan Images bookstore had purchased the T-shirt building on Buchanan Street in December, I felt like I had hit the lottery. “Thank you, Lord,” I whispered. “We got one.” As investors continue to buy property along predominately Black Buchanan Street, almost every transaction turns people who look like me into renters. Investors buy land from Black people, then turn around and rent it to other Black people. But this was different. The father-son duo at Alkebu-Lan was purchasing from the father-daughter duo at L&P Silkscreen — the Perez family had run their T-shirt business out of the building since 1976. And despite the lawsuits and overall wretchedness of 2020, Black people would own land on Buchanan for the foreseeable future.
THERE IS A CLOSENESS between father Yusef and son Jordan Harris that I can sense through the computer screen. They don’t interrupt each other. Each leans in to listen when the other is speaking. The younger Harris followed his father’s path to Morehouse College, then worked as an investment banker in Hong Kong and London. After the loss of two family members, the pair traveled to Tanzania to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Seeking a deeper sense of purpose, Jordan returned to Nashville in 2018 to help his father modernize operations at Alkebu-Lan. “While overseas, I kept comparing my job to my dad’s business,” Jordan says.
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“The sense of purpose and ownership. I realized, I couldn’t achieve the things I wanted in banking.” Jordan says his father is probably underappreciated. Since starting AlkebuLan in 1986, Yusef has mentored and advised hundreds of Black business owners. “It’s so hard to get started,” says Yusef. “If you have an idea, where do you go?” On any given Friday, a pop-up tent can be spotted in Alkebu-Lan’s parking lot. Some might see it as nothing but knockoff handbags, shoes and competition. But the Harrises see it as proof that the neighborhood is fostering the growth of other businesses. Alkebu-Lan distributes products from 10 local vendors and plans to expand. “If we sold everything people ask for, you couldn’t walk around,” says Jordan. Every countertop, shelf and surface in Alkebu-Lan is covered with art, information and products reflecting and celebrating African culture. As a doctoral candidate studying psychology at Vanderbilt and teaching at TSU, Yusef knew Black people needed to see images of themselves that were uplifting. He saw a path to do that through books. While living in London, Jordan recognized an appreciation of Black culture and opened a restaurant with a friend. The restaurant was so successful it led to a partnership with British Airways. But ultimately, the restaurant closed due to rising rent. It’s the kind of story we see frequently across Nashville. “As neighborhoods change, rents rise and businesses have to perform better in order to pay their landlord,” says Jordan. His father nods in agreement, going on to credit the ownership of land with the
longevity of Alkebu-Lan. “If you are going to be brick-and-mortar, you have to be able to control your land,” says the elder Harris. This principle has allowed Alkebu-Lan to define success outside of capitalism and cultivate an environment to help other businesses grow.
I TRIED AND TRIED to reach the Perez family. Life in North Nashville is not for the faint of heart, and there is so much I wanted to learn from them. I had dozens of questions. What was their favorite memory of Buchanan? What was it like working together? Fewer than 50 percent of small businesses make it past the five-year mark. How did L&P Silkscreen make it to 47 years? I met Mr. Perez once. I tried ordering T-shirts, but he told me to come back when his daughter was at the store. He reminded me of my husband’s Nicaraguan grandfather. Despite his silver hair and smile wrinkles, I could tell the decades of working the screen pallets had kept him strong. He definitely would have beaten me at arm wrestling if I’d challenged him. Since the Perez family was unavailable, I collected stories from half a dozen of their longtime neighbors. In 1976, the street was in decline. What had once been a bustling Black, white and Jewish business district was suffering from municipal neglect, white flight and the completion of Interstate 40, which displaced hundreds of Black residents and businesses. Trash wasn’t getting picked up. Grass was overgrown, and businesses were closing. The all-white school, North High, closed — there were whispers of turning it into a juvenile detention facility, but that ultimately didn’t come to pass. Before the interstate, you could call a Black-owned funeral home if you needed a ride to the doctor or hospital. Children walked miles to swim at Hadley Park or the Eldorado Motel without fear of harm. And Black-owned
businesses — dry cleaners, juke joints, record stores and restaurants — thrived with the support of the surrounding community. But all that was lost. In the decades since, North Nashvillians have learned to navigate the dualities of a system built to break us. I’ve heard the thud of a bouncing basketball mixed with the laughter of children, minutes after a drive-by shooting. We hold onto joy. Amid the overdoses, broken promises and school closures, we braid our hair. We have cookouts. We go to work. Dance to Frankie Beverly and Maze. Wash our cars, and love our children. Against all odds, we persist. I guess that’s why Alkebu-Lan’s expansion feels like a triumph. The neighborhood is changing, and I worried that North Nashville wouldn’t be inclusive. But Mr. Yusef or Jordan won’t call the police when they see my son riding his bike down Buchanan. They’ll invite him inside for storytelling. Alkebu-Lan is not just for Black people. It’s for everyone who wants to learn about Black culture. And in 2020, people did that en masse. So much so that the Harris family began looking to lease a warehouse, and this opportunity to buy presented itself. Mr. Perez retired at the end of 2020. In April, Alkebu-Lan will mark 35 years in existence. But these two families have built much more than successful businesses. They, like hundreds of North Nashville families, are building a legacy. EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
METr0P0LITIK
WHAT A WICKED GAME TO PLAY
House Republicans’ attempt to remove a Nashville judge may set off war BY STEVE CAVENDISH
S
omehow the simmering fight between business interests and the Republican base has ended up on the fourth floor of the historic Metro Courthouse in Chancery Court Part III. Last week, state Rep. Tim Rudd (R-Murfreesboro) filed a resolution to have Judge Ellen Hobbs Lyle removed from her Part III bench. (Or more precisely, filed a resolution to establish a committee to consider removing her.) For what? The sin of allowing more people to vote by mail in August’s primary. Lyle’s pre-election ruling, which was partially overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court, said that the fear of contracting COVID-19 was enough justification for getting an absentee ballot. Since more than 11,000 Tennesseans have now died from the virus, those fears seem to have been well-founded. Rudd disagrees. “Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle violated the boundaries between the legislative and judiciary when she attempted to disregard state law and
NASHVILLE SCENE | MARCH 4 – MARCH 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com
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CITY LIMITS implement her own rules, personal opinions and policies that were in direct contradiction of existing state law,” Rudd says in a written statement. “She knew and fully understood the Tennessee General Assembly did not authorize or support mass-mail balloting. The legislature is the only authority in Tennessee that can write laws or hold elections.” Rudd’s grandstanding aside, Lyle’s ruling alone might not have put her in the sights of the House GOP caucus, including Speaker Cameron Sexton. The problem is that she had the gall to threaten secretary of state Tre Hargett and election coordinator Mark Goins with contempt for not complying with the court. And for that, Rudd and company are demanding retribution. But here’s the thing: Lyle is the best judge on any bench in Nashville, and maybe in the entire state. Because of its proximity to the Capitol, chancery court in Nashville hears more complicated litigation and sorts through more arcane governmental disputes than any other state court in Tennessee. Take a poll of serious attorneys — even the ones whom Lyle has ruled against — and they would likely choose to appear in her court over any other. The state Supreme Court even created a special business court docket that funneled complex business disputes into her court beginning in 2015. Why? Because the state wanted to instill confidence in businesses that they would get a fair, competent hearing when tough cases arise. It’s been a huge success. Does Lyle suffer fools well? Absolutely not. But she has earned a reputation for fairness that’s unquestioned. Take Jim Roberts, for example. The gadfly GOP attorney’s cases — including a spate of longshot attempts to stop the soccer stadium — have ended up in Lyle’s court 10 times in the past five years. At a hearing in the fall to decide whether an anti-property tax charter amendment would appear on the ballot in Nashville, Lyle’s contempt for the badly written referendum was barely concealed. She has ruled against Roberts enough to make an outsider wonder if she just doesn’t like the guy. But she also handed Roberts wins in two recent cases against Metro, including one just last week. For all of her toughness, Lyle maintains the ability to decide a case based on its merits. Which brings us back to the war brewing inside the Republican Party. Rudd’s attempt to play to the party’s base has raised the ire of the business interests that have funded the GOP for years. As word of the bill circulated at the end of last week, attorneys and lobbyists started sounding alarm bells. (On Monday, Lyle recused herself from a Metro Nashville Public Schools lawsuit against the state due to Republicans’ efforts to remove her.) “Off the top of my head I can’t imagine a more anti-business thing the General Assembly could do in 2021,” one of the state’s more prominent business lobbyists told the Scene over the weekend on the condition of anonymity. The anger among attorneys was enough for some to float a proposal to fund a dark-money PAC that would go after chancery court judges in the districts of every co-sponsor of the bill. Now, even if the resolution passes the House, the Senate may decide to ignore the matter as a way of keeping the peace. But no matter the outcome, an attempt to punish a chancery judge for insufficient fealty might have inadvertently kicked off a round of Republican-on-Republican fighting like Tennessee hasn’t seen in years. Companies have made noise about anti-LGBTQ legislation hurting the state in the past, and last year’s fight over COVID-19 liability immunity showed hints of a base-versus-business fight. But this one has brought out the knives in a hurry. At some point, the establishment side of the party is going to have to draw blood or risk being made irrelevant. All because a judge said voters shouldn’t have to risk getting sick at the polls. EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
THIS WEEK ON OUR POLITICS BLOG: New Tennessee Democratic Party chairman Hendrell Remus is already facing a major setback as leader of the once-proud party. In an email, Remus informed the party’s executive committee of a “significant financial penalty” following an audit from the Federal Election Commission. The audit focused on the first two years of former chair Mary Mancini’s tenure at the head of the party. Among the findings, the FEC said that the TNDP understated both its collections and disbursements by nearly $150,000 in 2015. Mancini declined to run for reelection late last year, leading to the election of Remus in January. Remus beat out Wade Munday, who was treasurer during the period covered by the FEC audit. … The estimable Betsy Phillips returns to the Pith fold to say that the highprofile pushes by the state’s legislative Republicans to require transgender student-athletes to compete under their sex assigned at birth and to shame collegiate student-athletes who kneel during the playing of the national anthem are attempts to hide their larger moral failings — specifically doing almost nothing to prevent the spread of COVID-19, participating in (or at least tacitly supporting) the Jan. 6 coup at the United States Capitol and, oh yeah, being under the FBI’s microscope. “In other words, this all is a smokescreen to mask how our state government has failed us, morally,” Phillips writes. “To say you’re pro-life, to claim to care about the wellbeing of young people, to demand college students set aside their rights in order to do what you think is right while at the same time doing less than nothing about COVID, letting people die, expressing no concern about the long-term health implications for people who get sick but don’t die, and refusing to demand that people put on a god damn mask. What even are the values of state Republicans?” … Though the motive of Christmas Day bomber Anthony Warner remains frustratingly unclear, a recent New York Times story sheds light on the maelstrom of conspiracy theories and bizarre behavior that consumed him in his final days, including a belief in Sept. 11 trutherism and the existence of reptilian humanoids. … The Social Nash, a young-adult group affiliated with West Nashville’s Zeal Church, caught online flak after posting Instagram shots of a very nondistanced, extremely unmasked event at a coffee shop. Instead of taking the largely good-faith (ba-dum, ching!) criticism to heart, the group instead doubled down, dismissive of the pandemic in a very “you’ve gotta live your life, bro” sorta way. People younger than 40 represent more than 62 percent of Davidson County’s COVID-19 diagnoses thus far. NASHVILLESCENE.COM/PITHINTHEWIND EMAIL: PITH@NASHVILLESCENE.COM TWEET: @PITHINTHEWIND
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A YEAR OF
COVID HOW 12 MONTHS OF THE CORONAVIRUS HAVE AFFECTED NASHVILLE, FROM PUBLIC EDUCATION TO TRANSIT AND BEYOND
A
t the beginning of 2020, most of us probably didn’t even know what an N95 mask was. Since then, roughly 90,000 Nashvillians have contracted the illness known worldwide as COVID-19. That means somewhere in the neighborhood of 13 of every 100 Davidson County residents has tested positive for the virus, with the fatality rate hovering around 0.7 percent. COVID-19 has impacted Nashvillians in countless ways, and its fallout will surely continue to affect us even after the cases and fatalities have finally subsided. In this issue, we explore how the virus has hit Nashville over the past 12 months — from the restaurant and music-venue worlds to public education, transit and beyond.
44+19+1427 47+1+52 15+27+161210
DAVIDSON COUNTY COVID-19 CASES BY RACE
DAVIDSON COUNTY COVID-19 CASES BY SEX
DAVIDSON COUNTY COVID-19 CASES BY AGE
Pending, 7.3%
Age 0-17, 9.7%
Age 18-24, 15.3%
Race unknown, 14.1%
Age 65+, 9.6%
Female, 51.8%
White, 44.4%
Asian, 2%
Male, 47.4%
Age 25-34, 26.8%
Age 55-64, 10.2%
Other, multi-racial 13.5%
Age 45-54, 12.3%
Black, 18.8%
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NASHVILLE SCENE | MARCH 4 – MARCH 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com
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Unknown, 0.9%
Age 35-44, 15.9%
DATA FROM METROPOLITAN GOVERNMENT OF NASHVILLE AND DAVIDSON COUNTY
3/1/21 6:15 PM
More than 11,000 Tennesseans have died from this virus. Is it possible to adequately acknowledge our grief? BY STEVEN HALE
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ashville’s first COVID-19 death was confirmed nearly a year ago — on March 20. The deceased was a 73-year-old-man with “underlying health conditions.” Back then that last bit was often stressed, a comforting caveat to those of us watching the case counts and hospitalization numbers grow. A death, yes, but there were underlying health conditions. It didn’t take many months for certain truths to be made plain. Among them: Many Americans have underlying health conditions — a symptom, you might say, of our society’s underlying conditions. Many of us, if not all of us, know and love someone over the age of 55, someone who lives in that range of the chart where deaths start to increase dramatically. In Nashville, the overwhelming majority of people who have died from COVID-19 are in that age group. But as the reality of this slow-motion mass casualty event — the worst in generations — became real, people we might’ve previously regarded as old started to seem devastatingly young. The lag between when cases are confirmed and when a certain number of those cases result in deaths has hung like a pall over every health department briefing. As of this writing, there are 1,699 active COVID-19 cases in Nashville. We know some of those people will die — the current case fatality rate would suggest that the number will be about 12. Metro puts the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 since the pandemic began at 633; The New York Times’ coronavirus tracker puts the number at 861. Either way, Nashville has done well relative to the rest of the state. Davidson County is among the 10 best counties in Tennessee when it comes to deaths per 100,000 residents. Nashville’s hospitals and morgues weren’t overrun as many feared they could be. But the surge in deaths on top of those that can be expected in a normal period — that is,
“excess deaths,” a term we’re now regrettably familiar with — still caused a strain. Where families might normally have to wait a few days for a loved one’s cremated remains to be returned to them, there were times in the past year when the heartbreaking demand for such services stretched the wait to as long as four weeks. Funerals were forced to Zoom or, if a small service could be held in person, confined by a strict limit on how many people could attend. Any death is a tragedy, a disturbance that falls into life like a rock into water and sends ripples of grief outward to family and friends and colleagues and community. In the pandemic, though, it has felt as if buckets upon buckets of rocks were thrown into the water, each sending its own ripples of grief to collide and overlap with others. Now it feels like there is hardly any place where the water has not been disturbed. In Tennessee, more than 11,400 people have died. That’s more Tennesseans than were killed in World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War combined. In Nashville, the pandemic claimed people we all felt we knew, like John Prine. It claimed others we can now only wish we knew better, like Elizabeth Duff, the first woman ever to serve as a Nashville city bus driver. There are many more in Nashville, in Tennessee and across America, where more than half a million people have died from the virus now. It doesn’t feel like we’ve adequately acknowledged or grieved their loss as a city, a state or a country. Perhaps that’s not really possible, and the best we can do is to know that every number represents a person who was known and loved by many, and to demand serious inquiries into how we could have better protected them. For now, may their memories be a blessing. ■
PHOTO: NASHVILLE.GOV
“ EVERY NUMBER REPRESENTS A PERSON WHO WAS KNOWN AND LOVED BY MANY ”
THE HUMAN COST
MAYOR COOPER GREETS STUDENTS AT INGLEWOOD ELEMENTARY’S FIRST DAY BACK IN THE CLASSROOM, FEB. 9, 2021
BACK TO SCHOOL
A year into the pandemic, challenges continue for MNPS students and staff BY STEPHEN ELLIOTT
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achel Thomas’ daughter has never set foot inside Eakin Elementary School, where she is enrolled in kindergarten. She’s made some new friends via teleconferencing — but she likely won’t sit in a classroom until she reaches first grade in the fall. Her schooling experience to date has been defined by disruption. In March of last year, her Metro-run pre-kindergarten center was shuttered because of the tornado. She briefly returned to class before the building was closed again due to COVID-19. Though Metro Nashville Public Schools are in the process of bringing students back to classrooms this spring, many families have opted to remain virtual for the semester, including the Thomases. “Safety is my first priority always, so I’m thankful they gave us the option to keep kids virtual,” says Thomas. She admits that her family is fortunate to have
two parents who are able to work from home and in a position to supervise their two daughters’ virtual schooling. Still, it’s been a challenge. “There are days we know we both have to be working,” Thomas says. “Sometimes the school stuff gets put a little bit on the backburner. We know we can come back to it at night or the next day. Trying to prioritize what’s most important has been really difficult for us.” For the Thomases’ sixth-grade daughter, who attends Head Middle Magnet School, the “school” part of virtual school has been relatively easy. It’s the social connection she misses. She and her friends have gotten creative, Thomas says, swapping afterschool gatherings for video chats, even after a day full of them. Kelly Harkins’ son Reagan, an eighth-grader at J.T. Moore Middle School, is also forced to get creative to socialize with his friends. Some of those friends will move on to high school later this year, and Reagan will never again share a classroom with them. The Harkinses also opted to remain virtual after consulting with an epidemiologist in the family, and like the Thomases, they acknowledge the privilege in having two parents at home during a year of virtual schooling. In making the decision, Harkins says the family considered both the potential that their son could bring COVID-19 home and the possibility that their son’s absence could leave more space for distancing at the school for students who are struggling with virtual learning more than he is. “He’s very social, and that’s what he misses,” Harkins says. “He’s an only child, so he doesn’t even have
COVID-19 TIMELINE JAN. 21, 2020
Centers for Disease Control confirms the first U.S. case of COVID-19 in Washington state
JAN. 31, 2020
World Health Organization issues a global health emergency as the worldwide death toll tops 200
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FEB. 3, 2020
The Trump administration declares a public health emergency
MARCH 5, 2020
Gov. Bill Lee confirms the first case of COVID-19 in Tennessee — a 44-year-old male from Williamson County
MARCH 8, 2020
Mayor John Cooper confirms the first case of COVID-19 in Davidson County — an adult woman with no travel history
MARCH 11, 2020
Metro Nashville Public Schools announce closure; SEC announces men’s basketball tournament cancellation
MARCH 12, 2020
Gov. Lee declares statewide state of emergency
MARCH 15, 2020
Mayor Cooper closes bars throughout Davidson County and limits restaurant capacity; the city later limits restaurants to carryout only
MARCH 20, 2020
Nashville surpasses 100 cases of COVID-19; the Metro Public Health Department confirms Nashville’s first coronavirus death — a 73-year-old man with underlying health conditions
MARCH 23, 2020
Metro Nashville’s “Safer at Home” order goes into effect, closing all nonessential businesses and urging Nashvillians to stay home
MARCH 24, 2020
Gov. Lee calls in National Guard to aid in expanded testing
nashvillescene.com | MARCH 4 – MARCH 10, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE
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3/1/21 6:15 PM
MARCH 27, 2020
Tennessee surpasses 1,000 cases
APRIL 2, 2020
Gov. Lee issues statewide “stay at home” executive order, effective through April 14; he later extends the order
APRIL 6, 2020
THE WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART Independent venues hold on until the Small Business Administration delivers promised federal relief BY STEPHEN TRAGESER
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fter nine anxiety-inducing months of limbo, independent music venues ended 2020 on a high note. The federal financial assistance they’d been lobbying for since the National Independent Venue Association launched in April was incorporated into the stimulus bill signed into law in December. There was finally a lifeline for an industry in which more than 90 percent of businesses reported they would have to close for good if they didn’t get some relief. The Small Business Administration was authorized to disburse $15 billion in the form of Shuttered Venue Operators Grants to independent music venues and other small businesses that get most of their revenue by charging for admission. Two months have gone by, and none of that aid has been distributed. While some important information about how the program will work has been published, as of press time there’s been no word on when applications for grants will be available, much less when venues will be able to get the money. Meanwhile, the live-entertainment industry in Nashville and around the country remains in the holding pattern it’s been in throughout the pandemic. “I don’t know anyone who was expecting it to take this long,” says Chris Cobb, owner of the historic Music City club Exit/In. (There’s a plan in motion that could possibly make him the owner of the property the club currently rents. See our story in the Feb. 25 Scene.) He’s also a charter member of NIVA and president of Music Venue Alliance Nashville, a local trade group representing 15 independent venues. “It’s no small undertaking for the SBA to grant out $15 billion, which is not something that they typically do anyway —
APRIL 7, 2020
Metro Nashville releases COVID-19 “heatmap” showing a high number of cases in densely populated areas like Edgehill and Antioch; singer John Prine becomes one of Nashville’s first high-profile COVID-19 deaths
Nashville surpasses 1,000 cases 4 – MARCH 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com | MARCH 10 NASHVILLE SCENE
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APRIL 30, 2020
Nashville extends “Safer at Home” order to May 8
MAY 1, 2020
Trousdale Turner Correctional Center and Bledsoe County Correctional Complex develop two of the country’s worst outbreaks
PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND
a sibling to fight with or play with.” Reagan has found social connection in afterschool video game sessions with friends. He also goes on masked walks with a friend from the neighborhood, has cooked recipes alongside peers via video chat and has taken classes outside of school. “He understands why we have chosen this route,” Harkins says. “He’s bummed, but he also understands.” Gov. Bill Lee and Republicans in the state legislature pressured Nashville schools to reopen earlier this year, but many Nashville teachers and school employees were scared to return before they could secure a COVID-19 vaccine. That fear was tempered for some, because many had already contracted the virus, and Metro began vaccinating teachers and school employees in February. Bobbie Cathey has been a library clerk for more than two decades at Haywood Elementary School. She says she contracted COVID-19 in November. “I really don’t even remember three or four days,” she says. “My husband was a great nurse.” Cathey recently got her first of two vaccination shots and is excited to be back at school, where she also helps greet students getting off school buses in the morning. “They are so excited,” Cathey says. “They’re getting off the buses, and they’re so glad to see their friends. It’s really cute to see them together.” Another MNPS employee, L. Honey Hereth, recalls being “extremely worried” about returning to school before getting vaccinated. The Tulip Grove Elementary School paraprofessional has asthma and diabetes, two conditions known to worsen reactions to COVID-19. She contracted the illness earlier this year, before school was back in session. Hereth has largely recovered from a bout that resulted in four or five daily asthma attacks at its peak, but she still has lingering problems, including extreme fatigue. “I’m considered a long-hauler now,” she says. Hereth works one-on-one with special-needs students and says they had a particularly difficult time with virtual schooling. (One of her students is still virtual, while the rest have returned.) “They’re behind,” Hereth says. “And it’s going to show up not just this year, it’s going to show up year after year, I think for the next two or three years.” She applauds MNPS leadership for pushing back on state pressure to reopen, and she says she would have preferred to keep her fourth-grade son at home. “As an employee, I think they’ve done as good a job as they can,” Hereth says. “But as a parent, I don’t think we should have come back when we did. So it’s two sides to one story for me, and I have to tell you, if I could have stayed virtual [with my job], I would have stayed home with my son.” ■
they’re in the business of loaning money, not granting it. I’m certainly cognizant of the fact that it’s a boatload of work, and I appreciate the fact that they want to do it right.” Getting it right is critical. Neither the original Paycheck Protection Program nor the recent update is really designed for businesses like music venues, which can’t survive financially without it being safe to operate at close to full capacity — part of the reason NIVA lobbied for a unique program. For the first two weeks after the SBA begins accepting applications, venues that can demonstrate a revenue loss of 90 percent or more will get priority consideration for SVO grants; then, venues facing a revenue loss of more than 70 percent get their shot, followed by those with losses of 25 percent or more. A total of $2 billion is reserved for businesses with 50 or fewer employees. Though the $15 billion total funding for SVO grants is $5 billion more than was appropriated in the initial NIVA-endorsed Save Our Stages Act, eligibility was expanded to include spaces like independent movie theaters, museums and some zoos. Additional funding may need to be added later in order to cover everyone who’s entitled to aid. Some venues eligible for SVO grants aren’t able to keep waiting. “If you’re waiting on a tank of oxygen, you need it now — you don’t need it sometime in the future,” says Audrey Fix Schaefer, communications director for NIVA as well as for Washington, D.C.’s 9:30 Club. While she echoes Cobb’s gratitude for the SVO program, she also says that some NIVA members have reported receiving
MAY 4, 2020
More than 100 people experiencing homelessness at the Nashville Rescue Mission and temporary Fairgrounds Nashville site test positive for COVID-19
MAY 19, 2020
Every county in Tennessee is confirmed to have had at least one COVID-19 case
eviction notices or have had to shutter permanently for other reasons. Other venues are considering applying for a PPP loan because the money is available relatively quickly — although if they filed a PPP application after Dec. 27, they can’t apply for SVO grants unless they get denied. However venues choose to proceed, the industry needs as many of them as possible to survive. “In Nashville you have such a wonderful collection of artists there that can play locally,” says Schaefer. “But so much of the rest of the country is going to need a more fulsome national reopening for bands to get on a bus and go on tour. Because they can’t just go to one spot or two spots in the country — they need it to be open pretty universally. So most towns are not going to have their venues activated until that happens.” In the meantime, Cobb is planning a series of outdoor concerts that allow for safe social distancing once spring arrives. He hopes that enough of the country will have received a COVID-19 vaccine that it will be safe to host some shows inside the venue in the fall as part of a very slow move back toward normal operation. “You just can’t seat enough people in there … in a pod-type scenario to get close to financially viable,” he says. “So we really are going to have to be at standing room. And I don’t think we’re talking 100 percent capacity by any means. … Maybe if we could get to 50 percent of actual capacity — if we could put 200 to 300 people in there safely, then it’d be financially viable and make sense to do shows again.” ■
MAY 27, 2020
The U.S. surpasses 100,000 total deaths
JUNE 25, 2020
Bonnaroo 2020 — after initially being postponed until September — is canceled, moves to streaming fest
JUNE 26, 2020
Metro Board of Health directs health officials to order Nashville residents to wear face coverings in public
JUNE 27, 2020
Nashville surpasses 100 deaths
3/1/21 7:27 PM
— Kacey Musgraves From her remarks at the Museum’s 2017 exhibit opening of Loretta Lynn: Blue Kentucky Girl
Kacey Musgraves has carved a path to stardom by channeling her own galactic country spirit, proving along the way that it can be done without the benefit of heavy radio support. Her 2018 genre-bending album Golden Hour earned four Grammys and catapulted her to the fore of country music’s ever-expanding reach. To learn more about Musgraves and her life and career, visit the exhibition All of the Colors at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
DOWNTOWN NASHVILLE Visit CountryMusicHallofFame.org to buy tickets. photo:
Brair Burns
nashvillescene.com | MARCH 4 – MARCH 10, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE
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ROUTING INTEREST
Federal aid has kept WeGo afloat during the pandemic, but the agency hopes for increased local funding BY ALEJANDRO RAMIREZ
JULY 29, 2020
DEC. 7, 2020
SEPT. 11, 2020
DEC. 16, 2020
Tennessee surpasses 1,000 deaths Tennessee surpasses 2,000 deaths
PHOTO: DANIEL MEIGS
T
he pandemic has stressed all sorts of institutions and services around the city, and Nashville’s public transit system is no exception. Over the past year, WeGo Public Transit saw ridership numbers fall while at the same time having to implement new COVID-19 safety protocols — like running more buses to prevent crowding. What’s more, the pandemic forced these changes less than a year after service cuts to bus services. Pandemic ridership habits have informed new service changes from WeGo, which are scheduled for April. Those are designed to improve frequency on some bus routes, expand or alter certain lines, and discontinue service on others. “Obviously like most activities, [bus usage has] gone down significantly, although transit ridership certainly hasn’t dropped as much as things like air travel or Uber usage,” WeGo CEO Steve Bland tells the Scene. Bland notes that the majority of public transit users have been essential workers. “When all the rest of us were hunkered down at home, Zooming and Webex-ing, we had 12,000 to 14,000 people a day boarding transit vehicles in Nashville, going to those essential jobs,” Bland says. “And they were the folks keeping the hospitals clean, and stocking the grocery shelves, and a lot of construction workers.” The 2020 annual report from Moving Forward, a transit initiative formed by the Tennessee Chamber of Commerce, found that ridership has been down about 55 percent for most of the pandemic. Even so, the routes that saw the heaviest usage pre-pandemic also saw the most riders since COVID-19’s arrival. About 65 percent of the bus stops on these routes were in low-income neighborhoods. WeGo’s board adopted the ridershipinformed adjustments on Feb. 25. A series of public hearings about the changes reached more than 200 public transit users and received 41 comments. Unsurprisingly, riders
supported the service improvements along certain routes, like Route 52 — the Nolensville Pike line — but were unpleased with reductions and eliminations. The bus routes that currently see heavier usage will receive more support, with either expanded hours or more frequent service. Routes that aren’t seeing as much ridership will be suspended until demand or funding returns. “As time and resources allow [and] as the market starts to come back to some semblance of normal,” says Bland, “then our hope is we’ll be in a financial position to put most, if not all, of what we’re … eliminating back.” Even before the pandemic, WeGo had been dealing with inadequate funding — a shortfall of $8.7 million in 2019 resulted in service cuts. When COVID struck, Metro withdrew $22.8 million in local funding for the public transit agency, which was replaced with federal CARES Act funding. WeGo received a total of $55.1 million in CARES Act funding, some of which went to pandemic safety measures like plastic shielding for bus drivers as well as deep cleanings. Some was used to help absorb lost revenue. But according to Lindsey Gan-
Tennessee surpasses 5,000 deaths
Days after the Pfizer vaccine is approved by the FDA, Nashville surgeon Dr. William Polk receives the first administered dose in SEPT. 19, 2020 Tennessee Gov. Lee removes all business restrictions 12 NASHVILLE SCENE | MARCH 4 – MARCH 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com
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“ RIDERSHIP HAS BEEN DOWN ABOUT 55 PERCENT FOR MOST OF THE PANDEMIC ”
son of transit advocacy organization Walk Bike Nashville, the reliance on CARES Act money is concerning. “The idea of federal funding coming in is that you don’t have to reduce service and that you can match local funds to federal funds so that the system gets a boost,” Ganson says. She adds that waiting for an influx of federal dollars is “not sustainable.” With budget hearings coming up, WeGo reps hope the city looks to not just restore funds eliminated by the one-time cuts at the
DEC. 18, 2020
JAN. 7, 2021
DEC. 20, 2020
JAN. 12, 2021
Tennessee cases hit record high; the state is identified as the worst location in the U.S. for infection rates Gov. Lee limits gatherings to 10 people, refuses to issue mask mandate
Nashville surpasses 500 deaths; city officials announce that they’ll begin vaccinating residents 75 and older by appointment Nashville surpasses 10,000 cases
start of the pandemic, but also increase the budget by a modest amount. The agency’s $51.6 million budget proposal is about 3 percent higher than the $50.1 million Metro slated for the organization at the start of FY2020. At the moment, WeGo anticipates a remaining $9.8 million in unprogrammed CARES Act dollars, which could help plug holes if Metro doesn’t fully restore the budget — or could be used to fund new projects if Metro does come through with funding. In December, the Metro Council approved Mayor John Cooper’s ambitious transit plan, which aims to invest $1.6 billion into transportation projects. A common criticism of the proposal has been a lack of dedicated funding, as Cooper maintained that Nashville could and would pursue federal grants. Shortly after that plan passed, WeGo’s board noted in a statement that, while excited for the plan, “We’ll find ourselves further from our goals if we are asked to bear another year of funding cuts.” “If we want to make a real commitment to transit and a commitment to supporting our essential workers,” says Ganson, “Metro’s commitment to transit should be seen in Metro’s level of funding.” ■
JAN. 30, 2021
Metro Nashville Public Health begins administering COVID-19 vaccinations at Music City Center
FEB. 3, 2021
Tennessee surpasses 10,000 deaths less than two months after hitting the 5,000 mark
FEB. 10, 2021
Meharry Medical College President James Hildreth and Goodlettsville’s Bobby Watts are named to President Biden’s COVID-19 Task Force
FEB. 22, 2021
The U.S. surpasses 500,000 total deaths
3/1/21 7:44 PM
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THE STORE
FEEDING THE COMMUNITY
Local free stores have stepped up to fill important holes in the food supply BY CHRIS CHAMBERLAIN
B
efore WeGo eliminated its downtown circulator buses as part of budget cuts, this valuable service laid bare a frustrating disparity surrounding food insecurity in Nashville. If you were the owner of a $400,000 condo in the Gulch, a free shuttle would stop at your front door a few times an hour, offering to whisk you to the Nashville Farmers’ Market, where you could shop for your organic produce, grass-fed meats and artisanal salsas. But a resident of the nearby public housing projects in Edgehill would have to take four different buses and spend more than an hour to make the same round trip to the market, or really almost anywhere, to buy healthy food. The concept of so-called food deserts has been studied for years, and food insecurity is still a reality for many Nashville neighborhoods — a reality further exacerbated by the complications of COVID-19. Fortunately, several local organizations have stepped into the breach to help fill the gap for folks without easy access to basic food and health supplies with no-cost shopping opportunities. Fellow Scene contributor Megan Seling shared the story behind Nashville Free Store in these pages last year. The Saturday popup at event venue Drkmttr on Dickerson Pike still plays an important role in the community, distributing free toiletries, home cleaning supplies, children’s clothing and name-brand food items to anyone in need. Rather than presenting Nashville Free Store as a charity, founders Molly McCarthy and Bassam Habib offer a place where those who have access to critical resources can share with those who don’t. Nashville Free Store accepts donations in person Friday afternoons from 3 to 6 p.m. and distributes their wares on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. They also accept monetary donations at their website or via Venmo (@Nashville-Freestore) 24/7. Not to be confused with Nashville Free Store is The FreeStore, which primarily serves the Edgehill community through the auspices of the Edgehill Neighborhood Partnership, an organization founded by the Edgehill United Methodist Church. ENP partners with the Nashville Food Project to provide hot
breakfasts for their neighbors on the first and third Saturday of each month, and operates its gratis grocery and supply store on those same days from 9 to 11 a.m. and 4 to 5 p.m. FreeStore coordinator Pat Elkins shares how the organization has expanded its operations to assist with pandemic-specific needs. “Since the pandemic began, the FreeStore shifted to a grab-and-go model, added supplies like sanitizer and masks, and 100 evening meals supplied by Sean Brock’s outreach, Rethink. We are so grateful to our partners, shoppers and volunteers for everyone’s adaptability during this pandemic. The FreeStore has not missed a session since the pandemic began.” The Store — yes, these efforts have exceedingly similar names — is an initiative founded by Brad Paisley and Kimberly Williams-Paisley and inspired by Unity Shoppe, a free store the Paisleys visited in Santa Barbara, Calif. The Store operates as a year-round shopping opportunity for Nashvillians who are referred by a roster of affiliated community agencies such as Safe Haven, the YWCA’s Weaver Domestic Violence Shelter, End Slavery Tennessee, Catholic Charities and others. Walk-ins without a specific referral may also be able to receive assistance during The Store’s operating hours Thursday through Saturday. The Store’s mission revolves around helping people in need during times of crisis while encouraging them to move toward self-sufficiency with regard to food security and nutrition. It offers a dignified environment for shoppers to pick up healthy food products, both perishable and nonperishable. Of course, the pandemic complicated the Paisleys’ admirable mission. The Store’s executive director Courtney Vrablik explains: “The Store opened its doors one week before the shelter-in-place order hit Nashville. We are so grateful to our community partners who worked with us as we rapidly adjusted our operating model to meet these challenges, our volunteers who stepped up to deliver groceries to our elderly neighbors, and our donors who recognized that their support meant food on tables this past year. It is an honor to help Nashville.” During the best of times, need often exceeds supply for many Nashvillians, and organizations like these three have become vital lifelines to help fill that gap. Add in the logistical difficulties presented by a pandemic, and their services become even more difficult to provide, but also more urgently needed. Consider offering your assistance, financial or otherwise, to these efforts, and you’ll know that your dollar is going to help shore up an urgent community need. ■ EMAIL EDITOR@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
THIS WEEK
FRI
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STAIRWAY TO ZEPPELIN
3/5 PLUS THE CONSOULERS
3/6 A SALUTE TO LED ZEPPELIN + TONIGHT’S
7:30
8:00
MIKE FARRIS & THE OUT! FORTUNATE FEW SOLD
7:30
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MON
6:30
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CREATING COMMUNITY THROUGH STORIES AND SONG
3/17
MORGAN WADE
THU
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3/18
THE NIGHT : TRIBUTE TO ROD STEWART
SAT
3/13 3/15
SUN
LILLY WINWOOD W/ LADYCOUCH :
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6:30
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3/7 LIGHTNING 100 NASHVILLE SUNDAY NIGHT 3/8 WED
3/10 CREATING COMMUNITY THROUGH
7:00
3/19
STORIES AND SONG
THU
EMILY WEST
7:00
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T! SIXWIRE AND FRIENDS OLD OU
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MIKE FARRIS (SOLO)
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SUN
3/11 AN INTIMATE EVENING WITH 3/12
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JUST ANNOUNCED
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COMING SOON 3-21 Thad Cockrell : Lightning 100 Nashville Sunday Night 3-26 THE EAGLEMANIACS: The Music of Don Henley and The Eagles TWO SHOWS! 3-27 Rubiks Groove Spring Break Extravaganza TWO SHOWS!
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3/1/21 6:18 PM
Noteworthy y Noteworth Noteworthy Neighbors Neighbors We at the Scene have our picks for our annual People Issue, but we want to hear from YOU! Our Noteworthy Neighbors promotion calls on Nashvillians to highlight someone from their community who has done good work this year in their neighborhood — or beyond. Submit a video sharing their story and we’ll go through the submissions and feature the most inspiring and exceptional stories on our website, on our social media pages and in print.
Know someone who helps run errands or takes out the trash for an elderly neighbor?
Who stepped in to help when the tornado hit East Nashville, or the Christmas Day bombing rocked downtown?
How about a local health care worker who’s gone above and beyond?
Know someone who has volunteered their time to help those impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic?
Share a video telling their story by submitting it on our website (nashvillescene.com/NoteWorthyNeighbors) or share it on Instagram with the hashtag (#NashNoteworthyNeighbors) between March 1 and March 15. Spread the love and positivity of those in your community and help shine a light on the good work they’ve done over the past year! 14
NASHVILLE SCENE | MARCH 4 – MARCH 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com
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
EDITOR’S NOTE: AS A RESPONSE TO THE ONGOING COVID-19 PANDEMIC, WE’VE CHANGED THE FOCUS OF THE CRITICS’ PICKS SECTION TO INCLUDE ACTIVITIES YOU CAN PARTAKE IN WHILE YOU’RE AT HOME.
DANCE CREATING THE AMERICAN WEST IN ART
[DAD ART]
SEE CREATING THE AMERICAN WEST IN ART AT THE FRIST
POETRY
The American West is just as much an aesthetic presence as a geographical one, and this exhibition of nearly 80 paintings and sculptures at the Frist Art Museum is testament to that. Think of Creating the American West in Art as an origin story, culturally speaking, for the tumbleweeds, bison and mesas that inevitably come to mind when you consider the West. The works — which include art from Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, C. M. Russell, Frederic Remington, E. Irving Couse, John Sloan and Maynard Dixon — range in date from 1822 to 1946, and grapple with the nuances of a complex American West. The Frist describes these complexities by citing the West’s “often-challenging history, especially in relation to Indigenous people, and its vibrant cultural and artistic diversity.” The exhibition is organized by the Petrie Institute of Western American Art at the Denver Art Museum, and at 5:30 p.m. this Friday, March 5, the Petrie Institute’s director, Thomas Brent Smith, will present a gallery talk about rethinking the West’s boundaries. Register for the Zoom event at fristartmuseum.org, where you can also make an appointment to visit the Frist in person — timed tickets are required. Through June 27 at the Frist Art Museum, 919 Broadway LAURA HUTSON HUNTER
avoids concealment and obfuscation, and the truth of that person, eccentric, vulnerable, and brilliant, bears itself out in a sound heretofore unheard. The best poems evince such authenticity in language, form, thought, and emotion that lead us
to breathlessness and a lot of sweating, somehow changing the very air around us.” Jackson, who joined the faculty of Vanderbilt University in the fall, asks much of poets, but his own work bears out the form’s potential for transformation.
[A NEW ATTITUDE]
CATCH ATTITUDE PART I AT NASHVILLE BALLET
Nashville Ballet has opened its doors to some truly extraordinary artists from all around the world. But with its upcoming presentation of Attitude, the flavor and focus are decidedly local. The company has reimagined its acclaimed contemporary series as a two-part virtual program for 2021, and the first installment premieres this weekend. Attitude Part I showcases a pair of fan favorites — “Under the Lights” (with choreography by former company dancer and resident choreographer Christopher Stuart and the music by
PHOTO: KARYN KIPLEY PHOTOGRAPHY
ART
“HERD OF BUFFALO,” WILLIAM JACOB HAYS
To say he writes about the ironies of urban renewal, the role of art in enduring suffering, and inhabiting Sun Ra’s consciousness is overly reductive in regard to his broad body of work. The author of five collections, including 2020’s The Absurd Man, Jackson has also been spending his career bringing the poetry of others to light as an editor for The Harvard Review and The Best American Poetry 2019. He’ll read his work as part of the Vanderbilt MFA program’s virtual series. 7 p.m. Thursday, March 4, via Vanderbilt Creative Writing Visiting Writers Series ERICA CICCARONE
[MODERN MAJOR]
ATTEND AN ONLINE READING WITH POET MAJOR JACKSON
“For me,” writes poet Major Jackson in a 2019 essay in The Paris Review, “the best poems are those in which the author
ATTITUDE PART I
nashvillescene.com | MARCH 4 – MARCH 10, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE
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CRITICS’ PICKS the-studio performance and R&B stylings all in one shot. As a testament to capturing soulfulness with the assistance of machines, Nearly Human makes the perfect vehicle for creating the communion of a live concert with the means that are available to us. The show promises an additional hour’s worth of catalog-spanning material, as well as “production elements geared specifically to a Nashville crowd.” 8 p.m. Friday, March 6, via nocapshows.com SABY REYES-KULKARNI MUSIC
Johnny Cash, performed by Nashville duo Sugar + The Hi-Lows), plus “Superstitions” (choreographed by the innovative Jennifer Archibald, with original score by Nashville’s own Cristina Spinei). Audiences can also look forward to Attitude Part II, which runs April 2 through 4 and features Paul Vasterling’s gorgeous Seasons, set to Max Richter’s recomposition of Antonio Vivaldi’s timeless Four Seasons. Single tickets are $20, and you can purchase tickets for both performances for $30. Visit nashvilleballet.com/attitude-2021 for details. March 5-7 via Nashville Ballet
STREAM A HOLD STEADY CONCERT LIVE FROM THE BROOKLYN BOWL
In September 2019 — before the tornado, before the pandemic — hundreds of The Hold Steady fans packed into The Basement East for the Constructive Summer tour. The band stopped in only five cities around the U.S., and one of them was Nashville for this magical three-night run. (The other lucky cities were Seattle, Chicago, Boston and New York.) We danced and sang along to songs new (“Denver Haircut,” “You Did Good Kid”) and old (“Killer Parties,” “Stevie Nix”). It’s one of my most cherished concert memories. To celebrate the Feb. 19 release of the band’s new album Open Door Policy, The Hold Steady is having another multi-night party, but this time it’s not limited to a handful of different cities. The Weekender 2021 will be performed live from the Brooklyn Bowl (the original one in Brooklyn, not Brooklyn Bowl Nashville) on March 5 and 6, with the performance available to watch via livestream. The shows begin at 2 p.m. so the European audience can watch live at a reasonable hour. I too have
TODD RUNDGREN grown weary of livestreams, but The Hold Steady’s members are the kind of magnetic and energetic performers who are capable of inciting dance riots even from thousands of miles away. As during the Constructive Summer tour, each night will have a different set list — and, of course, they’ll also be including new songs from Open Door Policy. If you want to make it a true Hold Steady experience, know this: You can get a 12-pack of spring-loaded confetti poppers for $13 at Party City. 2 p.m. March 5-6 via Brooklyn Bowl MEGAN SELING [CLEAR THINGS UP]
STREAM TODD RUNDGREN’S CLEARLY HUMAN CONCERT
It might seem far-fetched, but legendary singer-songwriter and producer Todd Rundgren came up with the idea to do a
CHARLIE ZAILLIAN [SOMETHING SPECIAL IS BREWING]
CHECK OUT TEA & JUSTICE: A VIRTUAL TEA CEREMONY
There are few things better on a chilly afternoon than curling up with a cozy cup of tea. But have you ever stopped to think about where your tea really comes from? The history behind this beloved beverage is a long and complicated one, often marked by the oppression and exploitation of women. To celebrate International Women’s Day, you’re invited to pour a cuppa and join Thistle Farms’ Tea & Justice, a free virtual tea ceremony. Hosted by Thistle Farms founder and author Becca Stevens, chef and restaurateur Maneet Chauhan, and chef and cookbook author Tanya Holland, the event promises a unique opportunity to not only honor the global communities that grow and harvest our tea, but also to reflect on the systems of poverty, violence and oppression that continue to impact women around the world. There’s plenty of work to be done, my friends. But first, tea. Visit thistlefarms.org/pages/ tea-and-justice for details. 4 p.m. Monday, March 8, via Thistle Farms AMY STUMPFL TV
THE HOLD STEADY
so-called virtual tour before COVID-19 forced the live music industry to retool its infrastructure. That’s actually fairly in line with Rundgren’s history of keeping ahead of the curve when it comes to the relationship between music, technology and the audience. Although hearing the material from his heyday — particularly his 1972 classic Something/Anything? — might spark your nostalgia for the warm tones of ’70s radio, Rundgren has always had his eye on the future. This time, the future lined up with the present: Rundgren’s plan was to play a series of dates from one city, thus making it more feasible to assemble a larger-than-usual band. Appropriately enough, this show — titled Clearly Human — celebrates Rundgren’s 1989 album Nearly Human, which marked the everchanging artist’s embrace of digital recording, live-in-
LISTEN TO THE NEW MOGWAI RECORD, AS THE LOVE CONTINUES
Post-rock pioneers Mogwai’s turn-ofthe-millennium albums Young Team and Come On Die Young are nothing short of canonical, but the Glasgow ensemble has been operating at a so-solid-they’re-takenfor-granted level for a while now. That’s what makes their 10th LP As the Love Continues so gratifying. Like Hum’s Inlet or Yo La Tengo’s Fade, this is the sound of a veteran band rekindling its spark. The Dave Fridmann-produced 11-song collection is a perfect compromise between Mogwai’s pindrop-quiet-to-UNBELIEVABLY-LOUD foundations and the electronic textures bandleader Stuart Braithwaite and his cohorts have slowly but surely incorporated into their trademark wall of sound. The tones are gorgeous, the riffs are huge, and the crescendos deliver the goods. Love isn’t just the best Mogwai record since Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will a decade ago. It’s a future pillar of their discography. Pick up the double LP on Bandcamp Friday — that’s March 5 — for a very reasonable $20.
FOOD & DRINK
[READY STEADY]
MUSIC
MUSIC
AMY STUMPFL
[AS THE BAND CONTINUES]
[SOMBER CLOUDS]
WATCH PAINTING WITH JOHN ON HBO
John Lurie is a polyglot like few others — a musician in the acerbic avant-garde jazz group The Lounge Lizards, a prolific and distinctive painter, an actor in films by the likes of Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch, and the creator of the ironically calming faux-public-television program Fishing With
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NASHVILLE SCENE | MARCH 4 – MARCH 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com
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PAINTING WITH JOHN
TV
[PRESSED FOR CONTENT]
WATCH THE HYDRAULIC PRESS YOUTUBE CHANNEL
Something I did not know until I started mindlessly staring at my phone for hours in the midst of a pandemic-fueled depression: Watching random things get methodically squished, smashed and shattered by a 9,000-pound hydraulic press that can exert 150 tons of force is very soothing. On the Hydraulic Press Channel on YouTube (@hydraulicpresschannel on Instagram and @hpc_official on TikTok) Finnish husbandand-wife duo Lauri and Anni Vuohensilta destroy everything from metal pipes and tools to bowls of Sour Patch Kids and clay sculptures for their millions of followers.
They have a blade attachment that quickly cuts through tall stacks of items like playing cards and a tube attachment that mashes food and forces it through a cylinder to make very gross smoothie-like concoctions, which Anni sometimes eats for some reason. Occasionally, instead of simply destroying something, the duo conducts tests to see how much pressure an object can withstand before it breaks. A real wisdom tooth was able to survive nearly 628 pounds, and the infamously indestructible old Nokia 3310 cell phone withstood almost 6,000 pounds before starting to crack. Whoa. MEGAN SELING ART
John. With guest appearances by iconic personalities like Tom Waits and Willem Dafoe, the short-lived Fishing With John became a cult classic because of its ambient, droll texture. In 2021, Lurie has returned with a new show that’s just as lo-fi, just as esoteric, and just as unexpectedly Zen. Another riff on public-television form, Painting With John positions itself as the anti-The Joy of Painting, a study of Lurie at work in his studio as he delights us with odd musings and poignant childhood reflections, tending to his garden on an unnamed Caribbean island, communing with nature as much as he retreats to the isolation of his visual work. I have to imagine that it might be one of the cheapest shows HBO has ever produced; it’s a quiet diary, dryly funny and slyly profound, a pale blue dot of a television show. Painting With John knows how small it is, and that’s what gives it weight and meaning. Watch it now via HBO Max. NATHAN SMITH
[HEAR THEM ROAR]
SEE KEVIN GUTHRIE’S PORTRAITS AT NICKY’S COAL FIRED
Kevin Guthrie’s portraits are cannily realistic for being scrawled in pencil on the backs of cardboard boxes. To honor Women’s History Month, the prolific artist and native Nashvillian has created a series of portraits of women he admires — from Miss Cleo to Mary Shelley — and they’re all on view in the front foyer at Nicky’s Coal Fired. Viewing is open to the public anytime the restaurant is open, which as of press time is Thursday and Friday from 3 to 8 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. But as are most things in this pandemic, rules are subject to change, so call ahead if you want to make sure. Guthrie titled the series W.O.R.D. (as in “Women of Renowned Distinction”), and a portion of the proceeds will be donated to Planned Parenthood of Middle Tennessee. Come for the art, stay for the pizza. Through March 31 at Nicky’s Coal Fired, 5026 Centennial Blvd. LAURA HUTSON HUNTER
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nashvillescene.com | MARCH 4 – MARCH 10, 2021 | NASHVILLE SCENE
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FOOD AND DRINK
COOPERATION MAKES IT HAPPEN A group of volunteers is making progress on opening the community-run Nashville Food Co-op
PHOTO: ERIC ENGLAND
BY MARGARET LITTMAN
JON LOYD AND ELLERY RICHARDSON
T
he past 12 months have involved a lot of conversations about groceries. Which stores have the basics in stock? What’s the best way to shop safely? Two of the major chains that serve Nashville made national headlines in recent weeks — not for toilet paper shortages, but for politics and economic justice issues. Julie Jenkins Fancelli, daughter of Publix Super Markets founder George W. Jenkins, put roughly $300,000 toward the Jan. 6 Trump rally in Washington, D.C., that preceded that day’s insurgency at the U.S. Capitol. Kroger has made headlines for closing select stores in municipalities (not Nashville) where hazard pay for grocery workers has been mandated. Even long before the pandemic, Nashvillians bickered about the supermarket chains in town — it’s a popular topic on neighborhood Facebook pages. Ellery Richardson has long said Nashville needs an alternative — a community-owned,
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community-run grocery store. She’s been saying it since 2015, to be exact. Richardson is the president of the Nashville Food Co-op, leading the effort to open a food co-op in Music City. She shopped at a co-op in the Vermont town where she attended law school, and when she returned to Nashville, she missed the easy access to high-quality, healthy local foods. She missed the feeling of shopping somewhere managed by folks who had the community’s best interests at heart. After some prodding by her husband, Richardson decided to build a team to make it happen. Starting a co-op is a slow process, but not a futile one. Of the communities that follow the processes set out by the Food Co-op Initiative, there’s an 80 percent success rate. “This model works, which is why we are doing it,” Richardson says. A food co-op is a brick-and-mortar grocery store cooperatively owned by the people who work there, the people who shop there or a combination of both, explains Jacqueline Hannah, the Urbana, Ill.-based assistant director of FCI. FCI knows of
about 150 food co-ops across the country, but Hannah believes there are more than 250, since new, smaller co-ops pop up regularly. A co-op is a one-stop, seven-days-aweek grocery store, with a meat counter and a dairy section, explains Jon Loyd — a musician, piano technician and board member of the Nashville Food Co-op. It’s a place where you can buy laundry detergent and coffee filters and tomatoes. Often, co-ops are also places of joy. Loyd recorded a video walk-through of Knoxville’s Three Rivers Market, which is reportedly the only food co-op currently in the state, and noted — with glee — the bike-repair station out front. Sometimes co-ops have coffee bars, flower CSAs, enthusiastic employee greeters or cooking classes. They often smell like freshground coffee and bulk spices. The Nashville Food Co-op currently has 201 members with a goal of 1,200 total. When it gets to the 600- or 700-member mark, conversations about store location will begin. While some prospective members have said they want to wait until they know where the store will be located before joining, Loyd points out that the store will be where those first members want it to be. “We are looking for the first 1,000 Nashvillians who are really committed to this model,” he says. According to a rough timeline, a store will open in Nashville in 2024. In general, Hannah says, it takes five to seven years from incorporation to opening doors for a new co-op. Some can do it as quickly as three, while others take a decade. She says research suggests Nashville is a “robust opportunity” for a co-op, although there are challenges. The local food movement is fragmented, with many organizations doing similar work independently. Richardson adds that Nashville’s popularity means there’s a lot going on, and it can be hard to get folks’ attention. Nashville’s transient population can be both an advantage and a disadvantage, according to both Richardson and Loyd. It may be hard for someone who doesn’t know if they will live in Nashville in the future to pony up to become a member. But it also means that people who are familiar with the concept in other cities are moving to town. Richardson concedes that marketing is not her strength, and that slowed down her initial launch. In the early years, fellow board members helped with a market analysis and early steps, but they didn’t have the expertise to help explain to the public what a co-op was, why it would benefit the community, and why they needed members before it opens. New board members were recruited with that expertise. Co-ops are organized around whatever mission its members decide on, and may include specifics such as reducing food waste, selling all organic or local produce, advocating for economic justice, or reducing food insecurity. Co-ops do not require shoppers to be members — keeping membership “voluntary and open” is one of the seven cooperative principles under which all co-ops operate. Credit unions and farm cooperative businesses use these same seven principles, but the specifics of how that works vary. Loyd worked two-and-a-half hours a month at the co-op he belonged to in New York. Some give
members a discount each time they shop. Others offer a year-end distribution. Proponents of co-ops note benefits for their communities. They are able to work with local small farmers in a way that farmers markets and large grocery stores can’t. Many farmers report they could grow more food, Richardson says, but they need a year-round place to sell it. Most farmers markets can’t do this, but even at an increased capacity, the farmers don’t grow enough to work with the national chains. There are also environmental benefits to not having to ship food across the country. Co-ops tend to pay their workers more than chain grocery stories ($14.31 an hour versus $13.35), with more employees eligible for benefits. They also have higher sales per square foot ($10.37 versus $8.55). Co-ops recycle more plastic and cardboard and have less food waste, according to a study from the National Cooperative Grocers. Prices tend to be competitive too. While grocery margins are famously slim, the shareholders of a co-op are the people who work there, so there’s no incentive to charge more than is needed, Loyd says. Food co-ops have gone through waves of popularity. In the 1960s and ’70s, many coops were focused on providing natural and health foods. In the past five years, FCI’s Hannah says, “the phone started ringing off the hook” as communities looked for ways to address food insecurity. Four areas in Nashville are considered food deserts (North Nashville, East Nashville, Edgehill and Napier-Sudekum, according to the Metro government), meaning residents don’t have full-service grocery stores near them. Most co-ops in the U.S. are around 10,000 to 15,000 square feet — significantly smaller than the average U.S. grocery store size of 42,000 square feet. The target for the Nashville store is 12,000 square feet — big enough to be a full-service store (similar to a Trader Joe’s or Walgreens), but not a megachain grocery. Hannah says that Nashville’s one-time $250 member fee is in the ballpark of what other co-ops charge, and it can be paid in installments to make the financial commitment easier. “As a founding member, I can have a voice in what is brought to the co-op,” says Jilah Kalil, executive director of the nonprofit Cooking Up and an early Nashville Food Co-op member. “This includes promoting local farms and small businesses, and bringing these products to the co-op on a regular basis. Food access for all, rather than only those who can afford to shop local, is very important to me, as a consumer and as a food educator. I believe the co-op would be a place to bring the community together, to gather around the table and break bread together.” Nationally, roughly 20 to 25 percent of co-op members tend to invest further to raise the funds for construction to get the doors open. The average investment is $3,700. If you’re interested in learning more about becoming a Nashville Food Co-op member, the team is offering regular remote information sessions. Follow them on Facebook (facebook.com/nashvillefoodcoop) or Instagram (@nashfoodcoop) and visit their website (nashvillefood.coop) to stay in the loop. EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
NASHVILLE SCENE | MARCH 4 – MARCH 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com
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ART
CRAWL SPACE: MARCH 2021
beneath it. When Christy peels up the top sheet, it reveals a full-color version of his drawing on the opposite side of the paper. It’s an interestingly indirect way to make a drawing, and it’s a technique that introduces a fair amount of randomness into the mix. I suspect that’s what appeals to Christy, whose aesthetic has always trended away from perfectionist impulses in favor of inexact techniques and unpredictable materials. It’s the same reason that Christy’s live performances at his last Red Arrow show were of the improvisational variety. Christy isn’t making these drawings as much as he’s discovering them. The works in this show feature flowing lines and biomorphic forms — you could be looking at topographical maps or at specimens on microscope slides. Christy’s show is sort of fun, sort of weird, and pretty gorgeous as the inconsistencies in the transfer technique result in surprisingly complex renderings of relatively simple abstract line drawings. Collins’ Cardinal Shift and Christy’s Muscle Spasm will open with an artist reception Saturday, March 6, from 6 to 9 p.m. Both shows run through March 28.
First Saturday openings offer avian watercolors, oil-pastel transfers, painted textile wall sculptures and much more BY JOE NOLAN
EAST NASHVILLE
the puffed-up orange chests of cold-weather robins; black squadrons of starlings lighting on bare branches. These works are full of color and dynamically abstracted. The overall effect is buoyant and joyful, and right on time for those of us who are sensing an oncoming case of spring fever. Sharing the Red Arrow space with Collins is Matt Christy, whose creative practice is multidisciplinary. Painting, poetry, live performance, movies and animation are all included in his overall body of work — Christy and his artistbrother Joe even teamed up to write a novel in 2020. Christy’s works at Red Arrow are oil-pastel transfers, which utilize drawing techniques to create colorful monoprints: First, Christy covers a piece of paper with oil-pastel crayons. He covers that with another blank piece of paper that he makes an abstract drawing on. As he presses his pencil into one side of the paper, the other side adheres to the pastels on the paper
WEDGEWOOD-HOUSTON
Linda King Ferguson’s new show at Channel
artist’s painted textile wall sculptures. These elemental abstracts deploy a muted palette of oranges, pinks and purples in squares and circles and triangles. Some are very minimal acrylic-on-linen paintings, but many are shaped and feature cutout sections and exposed, raw linen. Ferguson does a lot with a little, and this sharp show balances its formalist preoccupations right at the tipping point between painting and sculpture. KT Duffy’s Cataclysm/Catechism opens at Coop on Saturday night. The Chicagobased new-media artist uses installation, sculpture, animation, printing, audio, video and even interactive web-based works to explore the idea that we are increasingly ensconced in microcultures, where every individual has their own separate and unique perspective on the nature of reality. It’s a super timely theme — you were warned about your social media bubbles. Open Gallery is exhibiting a display of work by artist-in-residence Allison Woods. Woods is an interdisciplinary artist, and this show of recent work focuses on the intersection of her fine art and her work as a photojournalist. Zeitgeist Gallery will continue its excellent display of new creations from Alicia Henry.
“SPINNING TRUMPETS,” MATT CHRISTY
“TESSELLATION ZOO FOR ENZO MARI,” PAUL COLLINS
The highlight of the March gallery scene is the pair of exhibits at The Red Arrow Gallery. I recently read a description of Paul Collins’ creative practice in which the word “diaristic” caught my eye — it captures both Collins’ everyday subject matter and observational gaze so precisely. Collins’ point of view is the strongest aspect of his work, giving his paintings, drawings and sculptures conceptual depth while also informing a recognizable style that’s offhand, but always thoughtful and sincere. Again, that description of his art fits so well because his work always reads like notes he’s taken during the day — stuff he saw, things he did. His new series of avian watercolors will look very familiar to Nashvillians who might have gotten a kick out of all the winter bird-watching the recent blizzards brought us. Collins also noticed the chromatic pop of crimson cardinals flitting through the falling white;
to Channel opens Thursday, March 4. Ferguson’s The Waiting Room features the
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Alicia Henry: 2020 and 2021 features the artist’s signature wall-sculpture masks, which are some of the most iconic works being made by any Nashville artist. David Lusk Gallery will continue its display of photos by the legendary Memphis photographer William Eggleston. These snaps of life in the Mississippi Delta circa 1990 capture small town life in big, bold color. The gallery will open two new painting shows by Rana Rochat and Mary Sims on Wednesday, March 17.
y, the tru sted edit ors at th ill highli e Nashv ght top ille stories, a coverag e and Cr rts featu res, food itics’ Pic ks from and deli t h e week’s ver it str issue aight to your inb ox.
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Tinney Contemporary opened a new show of abstract works by Scott Andresen on Wednesday, March 3, but will not host a reception on Saturday night. I want to call Andresen’s show a painting exhibition — it does include stretched canvases colored with hushed tones of muted color. But the gestures that flow and mutate across the surfaces of these works aren’t rendered in textural brushstrokes. Andresen uses transparent silk veils held in place with metallic threads to create these designs. The threads lend their own shiny markings to the overall composition, but they also mend the torn spaces in the veils. These restorative techniques give Beyond Repair its themes of healing during this time
know!
of widespread illness and anxiety. This show is also the first curatorial effort from Tinney Contemporary’s new gallery manager, Joshua Edward Bennett. The show is viewable by appointment. EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
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BOOKS
SECRETS AND LIES J.T. Ellison channels Agatha Christie in the suspense-filled Her Dark Lies
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BY G. ROBERT FRAZIER
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here probably will not be a more intriguing line of text in a crime thriller this year than the one protagonist Claire Hunter delivers in J.T. Ellison’s latest suspense thriller, Her Dark Lies: “I never said I was a good person.” A Nashville artist on the way to becoming the latest wife of eccentric entrepreneur Jack Compton, Claire is eager, almost desperate, to start a new life after a HER DARK LIES BY J.T. ELLISON MIRA BOOKS 416 PAGES, $17.99 ELLISON WILL DISCUSS HER NOVEL ONLINE 6 P.M. MONDAY, MARCH 8, VIA PARNASSUS BOOKS dark past. “With Jack by my side, I feel in control again, strong, capable,” Claire says. “I’m not that destabilized little girl who blamed herself for everyone’s bad moods and sharp words. … His love healed me, smoothed all my broken edges.” Even when she’s told she must sign a prenuptial agreement and exclusively take the Compton name as her own, Claire is all too willing. “This is a family everyone wants a piece of,” she muses. “Internationally known, wealthy, targeted, and as such, understandably private. I will erase Claire Hunter completely, morph into Claire Compton, Mrs. Jackson Compton, and forever more leave that damaged, empty part of myself behind.” Claire slowly lets readers in on her secrets as a series of mysterious and deadly events unfolds leading up to the wedding at the Compton family’s villa on exotic Isle Isola off the Italian coast. The novel begins with a dangerous home invasion at Claire’s house during which she ultimately shoots and kills the intruder. Desperate to avoid a public scandal that could derail the wedding, Jack and Claire maintain a story that one of Jack’s bodyguards pulled the trigger, allowing the couple to continue their travels to the Compton home. But as readers familiar with Ellison’s novels have come to expect, more intrigue quickly ensues. Skeletal remains of what may be Jack’s first wife, Morgan, are found years after a sailing accident, and someone
mars Claire’s wedding gown by scrawling the word “whore” on it. Someone has hacked the Compton family’s computer data — the family business develops technology to spy on the enemies of governments they work for — and is demanding a ransom. A raging storm moves in and knocks out the power to the island. And then the bodies start piling up. Ellison keeps readers on their toes with constantly shifting points of view in alternating chapters. Mostly told from Claire’s first-person perspective, the novel occasionally shifts to third person when following Jack or some of the supporting characters. But most surprising are the frequent first-person accounts from Morgan, who is apparently speaking to readers from beyond the grave. At 400-plus pages, the novel soars by with its intensity and intriguing plot and evokes the sort of experience we’ve come to expect from an Agatha Christie novel. The twisty revelations, building tension and eccentric characters contribute to a fast-paced, unpredictable read. With Her Dark Lies, Ellison, already a bestselling author of more than 20 novels, cements her place alongside Christie for must-read mysteries. For more local book coverage, please visit Chapter16.org, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee. EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
NASHVILLE SCENE | MARCH 4 – MARCH 10, 2021 | nashvillescene.com
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MUSIC
Indie-folk fave Julien Baker reflects on tour life, quarantine life and her third LP Little Oblivions BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN
J
ulien Baker’s 2015 debut Sprained Ankle made the songsmith an instant sensation. Baker was an undergrad at Middle Tennessee State University at the time, writing emotionally charged, Telecaster-andpedalboardLITTLE OBLIVIONS powered tunes OUT VIA MATADOR from her unique RECORDS; STREAMING A PERFORMANCE FROM point of view as a ANALOG AT HUTTON HOTEL queer punk rocker ON THURSDAY, MARCH 25, from a Christian VIA AUDIOTREE family raised in Germantown, Tenn. — a Memphis suburb and a conservative pocket in a county that leans blue. For Baker, Sprained Ankle attracted a congregation of folk, indie, emo and postrock appreciators, striking a particular chord with other young adults from religious backgrounds striving to define spirituality for themselves. She and her band — a mix of Music City and Bluff City players that includes guitarist Mariah Schneider, bassist Calvin Lauber, keyboardist Noah Forbes and drummer Matthew Gilliam — have also endeared themselves to Gen-Xers with Jawbreaker and Death Cab for Cutie covers. In a KEXP session taped recently at Third Man Records, Baker busted out a haunting solo rendition of Soundgarden’s “Fell on Black Days.” Baker signed to esteemed indie label Matador Records for her second LP, 2017’s Turn Out the Lights. In 2018, she also formed boygenius with contemporaries Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers. The trio’s self-titled EP led to a sold-out live debut at the Ryman. With this raft of accomplishments, it’s easy to forget that Baker is only 25. In 2018 and ’19, after touring boygenius and before starting on her third solo album Little Oblivions — released Feb. 26 — she moved to Nashville full-time and finished the English degree she’d put on hold when Sprained Ankle caught on. Outside of class, she spent time with family, rehearsed with her band and demoed new songs. Where Turn Out the Lights was turned around quickly, as second albums often are, this material got to marinate a while before Baker and Lauber headed into Memphis’ Young Avenue Sound to lock in definitive versions. Songwriting-wise, Little Oblivions doesn’t mess with what’s been proven to work. Emotional tours de force like the sweeping opener “Hardline,” soulful “Faith Healer” and spare, piano-driven “Song in E” are quintessential Baker. But the 12-song record has a different energy and tonal language from her others, crackling with a hardedged, unprocessed sound that suits the material and the moment. Even with Baker playing nearly every instrument herself, it’s more band-in-a-room than band-in-a-box.
Read our interview with Baker, conducted the Monday before the release of Little Oblivions as the remnants of the midFebruary ice and snow finally melted away.
Congrats on the release — I hope the snowstorm didn’t wreak too much havoc on your plans. My bandmates and I did have one taping to get to, for a ticketed streaming event. Thankfully we were able to carry our gear through the snow and make it. How’d it go? The thing about livestreaming that’s so jarring for me is having the option to do another take. This set, there were a bunch of mistakes, but I didn’t want to go back and redo them even if theoretically I could. You [can] be so much more of a perfectionist in this context. Are you a perfectionist? If you looked at my room and my laundry you wouldn’t think so [laughs], but with music I’ve always been that way.
Between boygenius and Little Oblivions did you feel any outside pressure to stay touring — even at the risk of your own health and mental health — just to not lose momentum? The pressure was
internal. At the end of 2018, when I was done with the boygenius tour, people on my team — my manager, my booking agent — were like “You should take a break.” I did, and I had a hard time. I didn’t have the inertia of being constantly on tour, and there were just a lot of things I hadn’t coped with. It was evident to everyone way before me that it wasn’t healthy for me to stay touring, but I wanted to keep going because I didn’t know what else to do. I was so mad! I was pissed. I was like: “I tour. I am a musician. Riding around in a van playing music has been the most important thing in my life since I was 16. I don’t know what else to do.” But it ended up being necessary and helpful.
The past year seems to have forced a lot of us to figure out who we are outside our work. Completely. Productivity is a function of anxiety. We have this innate admiration for hard work as a character trait. It feels comfortable to be working on something, to have a task. But the dangerous thing about that is, it starts this backwards reasoning where the task is what you do, why you’re important, your identity. It’s a valuable
thing to reaffirm your worth outside of what you make.
Did the experience of playing and touring with boygenius make you want to move on from the solo-artist vibe? When I came off the road, wasn’t touring and was just a person going to school — trying to get my degree so I would have a skill, because I didn’t know if music could even be my job anymore — I was still making songs. When the stakes of living up to that preconceived notion were removed, I was allowing myself to just make the kind of music I wanted to make. Not to say what I was doing before was disingenuous, but when you have a public self that is parroted back to you all the time, it reinforces the notion of what you are, the space you live in. So I just dropped out of that space. I wasn’t promoting a record, wasn’t touring, wasn’t tweeting about my new tune or the article that got written about me.
It’s almost a revelation, then — that it turned out you still love it so much, the craft of it. Exactly. The thing I’ve been hustling to do for years, what I wanted so bad, it happened. … But
PHOTO: DANIEL MEIGS
SWEET OBLIVION
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MUSIC it turned out when that all went away, I still just enjoy playing an instrument. I don’t want to say it rekindled my love for music, as if I’d ever lost it, but I think it got complicated by other elements [of] being a performing artist. Now, in quarantine, I sit at home and learn new chords on piano, and I love that. I feel empowered making music with less constraints.
Outside music, what’s been some art — film, TV, literature — you’ve enjoyed recently? I read [Viet Thanh Nguyen’s] The Sympathizer. Well, I listened to it. I’ve been doing a lot of running because now I have time; I listen to audiobooks. I got to a point where I was so entrenched in my own music and I’d spent months listening back to mixes, picking apart every detail, that my music brain was just fried. It was comforting to be read to. The Sympathizer is about a double agent, a communist escapee immigrating to the United States. It’s fiction, but it’s about this person who existed in two realms — with two opposing ideologies, with two different groups of people — and what that single individual’s experience was. I think about that a lot, how our ideologies define us. It won a Pulitzer Prize, and I get why.
Did any records by other people influence certain production choices on Little Oblivions? Live in Berlin, by Torres [aka Mackenzie Scott]. I listened to that obsessively when it came out. It made me realize how much that artist had informed my music. I’ve been a fan of hers since her self-titled record. The aggressive, angular sounds on [Little Oblivions] — the idea that ugly sounds could be used in an otherwise beautiful song to give it dissonance and character — were something I first heard modeled by Mackenzie in Torres. She released her album Sprinter when I was touring Sprained Ankle, and I was blown away. It’s a songwriter record, but it has so many little sounds that only happen once, that seem chaotic at first — but the more you listen, the more you see that they were very meticulously placed. Her palette of sounds and willingness to make things uncomfortable were things I admired.
As Phoebe Bridgers’ friend and bandmate, I have to get your take on the SNL guitar smashing. Dude. I don’t understand how it could’ve been seen as anything other than awesome. The people being like, “Won’t anyone think of the guitars?” Seriously? Phoebe calling David Crosby a little bitch might be one of my favorite things that I’ve been alive for. So funny. It’s felt like sort of a social experiment reading the reactions. People being shitty about it … just say you hate women and move on. That might seem extreme, but literally all of the heroes of music who’ve been put in this hall of glory for what true artistic passion is did this same thing. Then Phoebe did it, used it as a tool in a new context of performance, and you don’t like it? Fucking mind-blowing to me. I’ve said enough. [Laughs]
When Carly Rae Jepsen released her single “Julien” in April 2019, you tweeted about working on a song called “Carly” in response. Did that ever materialize? [Laughs] No, but straight up, I’d lose my mind if I ever got to work with Carly Rae Jepsen. I love her. Now that I’ve made a record with drums, maybe the fourth album will be my full-on pop record. EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
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lot of ways” for Gallo. This creatively fruitful period yielded an EP and two LPs — three if you count the Stones-y album Heavy Meta, the follow-up to 2014’s self-released Ronny. Heavy Meta was recorded in the City of Brotherly Love and issued as Gallo’s debut Pop eccentric Ron Gallo for Music City-based New West Records in 2017. closes the book on his Peacemeal, out Friday, is his latest full-length. Nashville chapter with the “I have to admit, I know I got dealt a pretty good hand,” Gallo says. “I moved here, met the people at intimate Peacemeal New West, signed the deal, went right out on tour. I BY CHARLIE ZAILLIAN made a lot of lifelong friends those first few years. But a lot of them moved. And when everyone’s gone all hen I reach Ron Gallo on the phone, the time, friendship can be fleeting.” Being away on tour for most of 2017 and 2018 I learn I’m conducting his unofficial Nashville exit interview. In late 2020, made Gallo’s stints at home increasingly antisocial the chameleonic singer-songwriter- — agoraphobic, even. Running errands around town, he came to dread talking shop with casual bandleader ended a five-year run in Music City by music-scene acquaintances so much he made quietly returning to his native Philadelphia. Chiara two songs about it. There’s the spoken-word “The D’Anzieri, his wife and sometime bandmate, went East Nashville Kroger Conversation,” from 2018’s with him. She hails from Turin in Northern Italy odds-and-sods Really Nice Guys EP, and “Can We and is soon to release Still Be Friends?” a standout from Peacemeal. “Can her debut solo album in PEACEMEAL OUT FRIDAY, MARCH 5, VIA NEW WEST we still be friends,” the latter tune asks, “now that I English as Chickpee. RECORDS can’t help you?” When Gallo, bassist Joe Bisirri and “Back for good, at drummer Dylan Sevey returned home from touring least at the moment,” says Gallo. “Being in the their second New West album Stardust Birthday house all last year, questioning existential crises Party, Gallo found himself struggling on both a — questioning everything — we ultimately decided personal and a musical level. we missed family, missed Philly, and that the “I needed to take a break,” he explains. “I started Northeast was much more suited for an Italian to notice a lot of the friendships I had that I thought relocating across the world.” Gallo, who has family roots in Salerno and Sicily, were genuine, weren’t. I know any place with a music industry is going to have its opportunists, but met D’Anzieri on a 2018 summer tour of Europe that plastic-gentle approach sometimes made me that went through his ancestral homeland. “It was uncomfortable. I just want to hang out, have a human crazy!” he recalls. “I saw this girl across the way — connection — not talk about your business, or how it was almost like slow motion. I ended up talking many tickets you’ve sold.” to her. She spoke a little bit of English. And we’ve Gallo and D’Anzieri married in 2019, and he’d been together ever since.” intended to spend much of that year in Italy relaxing The Nashville chapter “was life-changing in a
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and recharging. Instead, visa issues got him barred from the country for three months. “I was back in Nashville, and it felt surreal,” he remembers. “It was just me, alone, in the house. And that’s when I wrote Peacemeal.” Gallo played nearly every instrument on the 12-song LP, though you do hear some bass, guitar and vocal contributions from D’Anzieri. Equal parts contemporary bedroom psych-pop and optimistic classic hip-hop, its laid-back sound is a total 180 from the full-band Stardust’s shouty post-punk philosophizing. On the 2018 album, Gallo raved zealously on the importance of living life solely in the present moment — past or future be damned — in a manner seemingly devoid of irony or sarcasm. Of course you can never be 100 percent certain about how to take the deadpan Gallo, who calls the late Andy Kaufman “an influence on everything I’ve done so far, especially the live show.” He cites Iggy Pop and Tyler the Creator as musical touchstones: “I’ve always been drawn to weirdos, people who live in their own universe.” On Peacemeal, Gallo delights in blurring the lines between music and comedy, spoken word and performance art, improvised and planned, sincere and satirical, pop songcraft and music-scene punditry. Nearly every song seems parodic or nonsensical on first listen, then burrows itself into your head before you even realize it — usually within the span of three minutes. It’s a direct line to Gallo’s mind as he navigates a transitional time in his life and career. “I’m an overthinker in daily life, but when it comes to music I try to be a first-off, best-off person, keep my head out of it,” says Gallo. “Stream-of-consciousness, breaking the fourth wall with the listener — that’s what I love to hear. So that’s what I try and make: music that feels almost like you’re witnessing someone’s thoughts happening in their head in real time.” EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
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MUSIC
FACE VALUE
Thirdface shreds heavy-music norms on Do It With a Smile BY P.J. KINZER
THE SPIN FORCE MAJEURE BY MEGAN SELING
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he rain poured down in sheets against the roof while I waited for Vera Bloom’s Sunday night livestream from The 5 Spot to begin. I could hear the wind swirling through the trees, trying to force itself through the door. Even with the volume all the way up, my computer speakers struggled to stay above the outside noise. Over the previous hour, Nashville’s emergency system had sent me a text message, a cellphone pop-up alert and an automated phone call to warn me about the impending storm. It was especially eerie knowing that about a year ago, on a night that felt a lot like Sunday night, a tornado outbreak tore across Middle Tennessee. You remember the night of March 2, 2020, and the early hours of March 3; we all remember. On Friday, long before the weekend storm started to roil, the local-rocker-by-way-of-Seattle noted the
PHOTO: DIANA ZADLO
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f your band plays raw, heavy music marked by full-tilt tempos and throat-peeling screams, it can be hard to set yourself apart from more than 40 years of music in that vein. While many of their ultra-fast punk peers stay well DO IT WITH A SMILE OUT within the trails FRIDAY, MARCH 5, VIA blazed by bands like EXPLODING IN SOUND crossover thrash standard-bearers D.R.I., hardcore punks Infest or grindcore progenitors Napalm Death, Nashville’s Thirdface has thoughtfully crafted a sound they can proudly call their own. Abandoning formulaic norms, the Nashville foursome has spent the past several years finding new ways to create music that shows the influence of titans in the genre without regurgitating their work. “I think I’ve heard us described as a metal band before, and that kind of makes me laugh,” says bassist Maddy Madeira, “because we kind of went into this band thinking about punk and hardcore. I think it feels easier to just say, ‘Yeah, it’s like a hardcore punk band,’ even if it kind of has more metallic moments.” There’s a lot going on in the band’s debut LP Do It With a Smile, out Friday. Where musicality isn’t really a priority for a lot of groups in this part of the heavy spectrum, it definitely is for Thirdface. Their outrageous thrash is centered on unorthodox riffs with discernible melodies. While Madeira notes that the whole group — including drummer Shibby Poole (also of Yautja) and vocalist Kathryn Edwards (also a co-founder of venue Drkmttr) — has an interest in a broad spectrum of sounds, she credits guitarist David Reichley with leading the charge to push the boundaries. “He just has such an interesting style that’s really influenced from all different genres,” she says. “Going into writing music
together without putting ourselves in a box — I think leaves a lot of room for cool melodies and weird melodic parts.” Thirdface doesn’t question genre norms with their sound alone — they step over boundaries at every opportunity. While the stereotypical aesthetics of thrash and powerviolence call for illegibly scrawled fonts, horror movie samples or black-andwhite photos of nuclear aftermath, the group throws a curveball. The new album’s artwork and layout were done by Reichley and Edwards, who put together hues of periwinkle and violet on a cover that looks like something from ’80s New York street art. The band’s promo photos were taken in the house where Madeira and Poole live, showing off their rosy-toned hallways,
photos of pups and an impressive collection of VHS tapes. You might expect the LP to be coming out on a label deeply entrenched in the world of DIY hardcore, but Do It With a Smile is being released in partnership with Brooklyn’s Exploding in Sound Records, an imprint best known for bands that draw on old-school indie rock, like fellow Nashville bands Pile and Shell of a Shell. “We stick out like a sore thumb on that label,” Madeira says with a shrug. “But I think that the press photos and the artwork reflect who we are as people — as a group and as individuals — pretty well, because we’re just trying to do our thing, not really trying to be anything or, like, look extra tough.” Ensuring that the album would feel like a finished work that purely belongs to
date on Instagram. “Sunday will have almost been a year exactly since the tornado hit Nashville and guess where I was that night?” she wrote. “Dancing at The 5 Spot for Motown Monday. Little did we know a tornado was coming and about to rip apart buildings literally right around the corner from us. The power went out and the staff stayed very calm and instructed us to get into the middle of the room. WHO LIKES ALL OUR PRETTY SONGS: It was all so surreal. What a year VERA BLOOM this has been… “I can’t wait to make some noise began without a word. With backup from bassist Levi with the band for you and give this year a little karate chop to the jugular.” J. Miller, guitarist Jacob Gann and drummer Brian Indeed, every step we take toward normality feels Chinino, Bloom ripped straight into “Blue,” a song like a victory, a cleansing karate chop to the past from her new self-titled EP. “Blue” sparkles with Liz year’s jugular. Bearing witness to the musicians who Phair vibes and a renewed sense of self, as Bloom are fighting to take back the stages that the tornado sings: “Wrap me in blankets, send me out to sea / and the pandemic stole from them is nothing short Say goodbye to outgrown versions of me / Sweep up of cathartic. my skin shed on the floor / Take away the memories Bloom was clearly ready to exorcise some pent-up I don’t want anymore.” It’s the perfect song to open frustration of her own. At exactly 8 p.m., the show with after surviving a year of challenges.
Thirdface, Poole recorded and mixed all of it above the garage in the backyard. The title of the record comes from a line in the lead single “Villains!,” a nasty three-minute track that morphs from a slog through the sludge to a wretched full-speed run across scorched earth. Madeira explains the song’s focus on the all-too-familiar expectation that workers should accept their working conditions with a grin, forced or not — something that punks and metal bands have been good at screaming about. “It’s a song about wage slavery, and just how much it sucks to work a job that exploits your labor for pennies,” Madeira says. “I think that line from that song specifically is a really good indicator of what we’re about.” EMAIL MUSIC@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
Then came “Bad Decisions,” a boisterous rock song that borrows attitude and swagger from The Donnas and The Runaways. Bloom set it aflame with the kind of guttural yowls that, rightfully, earn the singer comparisons to Courtney Love. She utilized that same vocal prowess on a new song, “Say Goodbye,” a breakup jam that starts out slow and syrupy. She changed the atmosphere in an instant, stomping on a pedal and lunging toward the mic to scream, “You seem to forget I’m a fucking queen!” By the time Bloom & Co. wrapped up the 40-ish-minute set — with the singer sweetly dedicating the last song “Love Like Knives” to her sister — I hadn’t noticed that the squally downpour outside had quieted and the tornado watch was canceled. Bloom was a force all her own. But instead of destroying everything in her path, she helped build us back up with an evening of vigor and resilience. Her return to The 5 Spot was a reminder that not everything that’s been pushed aside in the pandemic is gone forever. And maybe it’ll even be back sooner than later. EMAIL THESPIN@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
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FILM
WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
A new restoration of 1972’s F.T.A. connects past to present BY NATHAN SMITH
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s social media platforms have developed and provided a public outlet for once-private thoughts, bored soldiers in the U.S. military, with restless fingers and time on their hands, have turned to the internet as a F.T.A. R, 97 MINUTES means of expression. AVAILABLE TO STREAM Often this results in FRIDAY, MARCH 5, VIA viral dance videos BELCOURT.ORG set to pop songs that serve as inadvertent propaganda. But just as frequently, social media offers a space for the enlisted to express their frustration with the machine they find themselves employed by and subject to. I recently saw a TikTok filmed by an American infantryman in his barracks — the soldier making it walked around the bunks, asking the members of his platoon the same question: What would they tell their Army recruiter if they could talk to him now? The minute-long video is a compilation of one answer, delivered resolutely and repeatedly, by multiple soldiers: “Fuck you.” Soldiers and veterans speaking out online against the military is just the latest mutation of a very old strain of political activism. The newly restored documentary F.T.A. (alternatively standing for “Free the Army” or “Fuck the Army,” take your pick), directed by Francine Parker, is a vibrant artifact of this repressed and obscured movement. In the popular consciousness, the Vietnam anti-war movement has generally been characterized as middle-class, intellectual, restricted to the college campus. It has been mostly erased from media and excluded from popular textbook histories — aside from, say, scenes of veterans throwing away their
medals in Forrest Gump. But there was an incredibly organized and dedicated antiwar coalition among active-duty troops during the Vietnam War, a true radical insurgency that built solidarity among a multiracial contingency of working-class servicepeople — men and women, enlisted and conscripted. An underground network of newspapers and coffeehouses grew up around military bases during the war, uniting a patchwork collective of troops fed up with fighting for lies and wanting to push back against military service that they felt was, in many ways, a kind of imprisonment. Though this movement may have begun out of a kind of self-interest — exhaustion with the conditions and a desire to just go home — it eventually grew into a deeply committed radical block, linked to a variety of antiimperialist and anti-racist struggles. At home and overseas, actions by GIs varied from consciousness-raising conversation to disobeying orders — like the 43 Black soldiers at Fort Hood who refused to be deployed as riot control to the Democratic National Convention in 1968. In some instances, enlisted men even turned violently against their commanding officers. Though there were sharp consequences for this kind of activity, the front lines in some ways made fertile conditions for leftist organizing, bringing together a diverse body who might have been isolated or alienated from one another along racial, regional or other lines. History classes will never let us forget “cowardly” draft dodgers, but we have forgotten the almost 50,000 heroes who deserted an unjust conflict. Seeking to foster this movement and bring it to the public, actors Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland assembled a self-
described “political vaudeville” troupe in the early 1970s for a tour of sites near American military installations in the Pacific Rim. F.T.A. documents that tour, blending performances, sketches and songs with conversations between soldiers about their convictions, their struggle and the process of political education brought on by witnessing the horrors of war. Unsurprisingly, the film was pulled from distribution a week after its release, and most copies were destroyed. The stage show itself feels fairly dated, a spirited blend of profane, pun-heavy, Cole Porter-style show tunes and comic skits in the vein of the Smother Brothers, something of a deliberate riff on the statesanctioned jingoism of Bob Hope’s gaudy parade of military bases. It’s the context this tour resides within that makes F.T.A. so fascinating and incisive — in their show and their discourse with the troops, Fonda and Sutherland address a whole network of concerns: racism from officers toward infantrymen and against the Vietnamese, the sexism and harassment experienced by women who work for the military, how enlisted men use gallows humor and dark irony to rationalize slaughter, and America’s presence as an occupying force around the world. F.T.A. is most powerful when it pulls out to look at the empire the United States
has carved out in the Pacific Rim. When visiting Okinawa, the F.T.A. company stands in solidarity with the island’s occupied population, and gives a slot in the show to an Okinawan folk group, who sing of generations who have suffered under imperialism: “Japanese invasion, American occupation, nothing has changed.” F.T.A. makes the case that the United States did not declare war on Japan to stem the tide of imperialism, but rather to become an empire itself, donning the mantle once worn by a literal emperor and treating other nations as repositories for arms and laboratories for destruction. Toward the film’s end, the troupe visits Japan, taking special time to highlight one of the most unspeakable acts of war ever committed — the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While looking at photos of mutilated, radiated corpses, one of the musicians in the company says, “This is Vietnam, this is Palestine, this is everywhere the war machine is.” Though the times have changed, the message of F.T.A. is still infuriatingly relevant. This new restoration connects the present to the past just as the film — and the movement it depicts — connected individual men on the front lines of a devastating and unnecessary war to revolutionary struggles around the world. EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
Like so many movies about the incarcerated, Kings is about survival. Our boy Roman has to keep on regaling these convicts (among them is frequent Leos Carax collaborator Denis Lavant as a weirdo with a chicken on his shoulder) until the blood-colored moon over the prison is out of sight and he has made
it to another day. He tells them the mostly fabricated history of Zama King, the revered (and recently murdered) outlaw whose gang Roman was a part of. Roman weaves an epic tale about Zama, which at one point involves two warring members of a royal family duking it out by shape-shifting into various
objects. While Roman keeps the crowd riveted, rival crew leaders are plotting, scheming and, yes, killing in order to get to Blackbeard’s top spot. Even the guards have holed themselves up in a room until all this shit is over. For his second feature, French-Ivorian writer-
KINGS’ GAMBIT Night of the Kings is grim, dim, impressive and fantastical BY CRAIG D. LINDSEY
T
he inmates who populate Night of the Kings apparently really love stories. The film is set in a prison known as La MACA (Maison d’Arrêt et de Correction d’Abidjan) in the economic capital of West NIGHT OF THE KINGS Africa’s Ivory Coast, and R, 93 MINUTES; IN these male convicts take FRENCH AND DYULA WITH storytelling very seriously ENGLISH SUBTITLES — they practically serve AVAILABLE VIA VIDEO ON DEMAND FRIDAY, as repertory players as MARCH 5 a narrator spins a yarn. When a young pickpocket (Bakary Koné) shows up, he’s given the nickname Roman and finds himself having to give these guys a good story for one night. Atop the prison’s food chain is Blackbeard (Steve Tientcheu), La MACA’s resident lord — Dangoro, as he’s called — who has gotten too old and ill to carry on. He’s the one who chooses the new inmate to be the official storyteller before going off to the upper room — this is all part of a tradition that supposedly ends with the storyteller being offed once his story is finished.
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FILM director Philippe Lacôte (Run) gives a rather embellished view of life at La MACA. (In interviews, he has said inmates do enjoy a good story, but they’re not about to kill the guy who tells it.) From the way Lacôte presents it — complete with dim/grim cinematography by Tobie Marier-Robitaille — the harsh, grungy surroundings of La MACA aren’t all that different from the harsh, grungy surroundings everywhere else in Abidjan. (La MACA is basically a slum that just happens to be populated by criminals.) Whether inside or out, they are all trapped and ready to go to war at a moment’s notice. Is it any wonder these guys like escaping with a tall tale?
PEEP SHOW
I must admit, Kings is a movie I admire more than fully embrace. Lacôte is a filmmaker who has gone through great pains (seriously, the dude was attacked by a machete-wielding youth gang a couple winters ago) to show how treacherous and, ultimately, fantastical life in the Ivory Coast can get. Sometimes, both the figurative and literal madness of Night of the Kings can get overwhelming — especially in the chaotic finale. Nevertheless, Night of the Kings has an impressive amount to work with in its 93-minute run time. Much like this movie’s imaginative protagonist, you may find yourself hanging in there, taking it all in, trying not to get wiped out and hoping you’ll live to see another day. EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
rench musician and filmmaker Quentin Dupieux has found steady distribution stateside, with his Keep an Eye Out (released in France in 2018) following last year’s Deerskin, and his Mandibles on KEEP AN EYE OUT the way. He works NR, 73 MINUTES; IN in a tradition of FRENCH WITH ENGLISH absurdist comedy SUBTITLES that can either be AVAILABLE TO STREAM FRIDAY, MARCH 5, VIA hilarious or fall BELCOURT.ORG flat. Unfortunately, Keep an Eye Out plays like middlebrow TV with pretensions to the avant-garde meta notions of Jacques Rivette and Raúl Ruiz. It’s enamored of gamesmanship around the plastic nature of reality. But when its playfulness isn’t very funny and doesn’t reveal any insights, Keep an Eye Out quickly starts to feel utterly pointless — and it’s
in the eyeball by a protractor. Keep an Eye Out conjures up a ’70s that only really existed in TV and movies. Despite Poelvoorde’s long career as a comedic actor in Belgium and France, Americans might know him best as the serial killer in 1992’s Man Bites Dog who charms the audience until his crimes become too real to deny. With brown hair and a thick mustache (amazingly, it’s real), Ludig could’ve been a stunt double for Tom Selleck on Magnum P.I. The film is mostly confined to one set, where the interrogation takes place, and the cinematography and costumes are dominated by the color brown. Dupieux’s direction is fairly minimal and restrained — his storytelling is not. It nestles flashbacks within reveals, reveling in its own ability to mess with the audience’s head. However, when character and plot become arbitrary, something needs to replace them. In Deerskin, Jean Dujardin dug into his character’s bizarre obsession with buying every deerskin jacket in the world with real gusto: His performance never winked at the audience, and as odd as the film was, it had something to say about consumerism.
barely feature-length, reaching the closing credits in about 65 minutes. In the opening scene, a half-naked man stands in as the conductor for an orchestra performing in a park before being chased away by the cops. Fugain (Grégoire Ludig) finds a body covered in blood outside the apartment building where he lives. After reporting the corpse to the police, he’s called in for questioning by Capt. Buron (Benoît Poelvoorde), but the situation keeps getting stranger as they talk all night. Buron hides the death of a man who suffered the bizarre fate of being stabbed
Keep an Eye Out is in love with its narrative at the expense of substance. It invokes the worst aspects of the British TV show Inside No. 9, a darkly comedic single-set program that closes each episode with a gimmicky twist. The ending of Keep an Eye Out suggests that no matter how much artifice this film acknowledges, its characters are still trapped by its story. But it never develops enough gravity for one to care. As Jordan Mintzer wrote for The Hollywood Reporter, “What all this is truly about is anyone’s guess.” EMAIL ARTS@NASHVILLESCENE.COM
Quentin Dupieux’s Keep an Eye Out plays like middlebrow TV BY STEVE ERICKSON
F
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