Culture

[HISTORICAL RECORDS]

Written by JENNA JONES

Jane Bergman used to go to shows in Gaslight Square, an entertainment district in St. Louis in the 1950s and ’60s. She describes the belly dancers, the bands and moving from one room playing Russian music to the next playing classical music. Bergman recaps her memories as she stands in front of a Gaslight Square display in the St. Louis Sound exhibit at the Missouri History Museum.

The exhibit explores various aspects of the music scene in St. Louis, with highlights of the city’s musical history from Tina Turner to radio shows to instruments to the Riverport riot. Andrew Wanko, a public historian at the museum, spent nearly four years crafting the exhibit with his team.

“We essentially wanted it to be a well-crafted album,” Wanko explains. “You’ve got some greatest hits, some deeper cuts, some novelty tunes. We wanted that sort of richness of experience, rather than trying to cram every single St. Louis musician there ever was in.”

Wanko says the museum wants to give people an introduction to St. Louis’ significance as a music city so viewers can go out and “sort of explore more on their own.”

The exhibit couldn’t have covered every artist or band, and Wanko notes he had to leave out some of his favorite acts. Instead, he says that the museum is telling “the stories that we can tell really well, and just admit that there’s so much more.”

“Which, that’s a really good problem to have,” he adds.

As Wanko walks around the exhibit, he points to some of the 200 artifacts the museum has collected for St. Louis Sound, some owned and some borrowed. The museum begins with a look at how people have listened to music over the years, including record players, iPods and even the first recording on tinfoil, which may have St. Louis journalist Thomas Mason’s voice on it.

But there’s more than just artifacts. Illustrations done by Chiara Andriole are prominent throughout the exhibit, serving as landmarks for different figures.

There are millions of photos of Tina Turner, Wanko explains, but only one grainy photo of ragtime singer Scott Joplin. Both were important to their genres and for their contributions to St. Louis’ music history, so the illustrations were used to put the artists on an equal playing field.

“We use those illustrations as a way to kind of bring that older music to life and put it on par with some of the more recent stuff that has more visual material surrounding it,” Wanko says.

Touring the exhibit, Bergman and her daughter Barbie Skinner stop often to take in the sights. There’s a dress that belonged to Turner, collections of radios dating from before the FM frequency band existed, the old Mississippi Nights sign and other pieces of St. Louis music history.

Memories are scribbled into a notebook outside the Mississippi Nights sign as Wanko flips through the book, looking for his favorite page.

“Right here, the first entry is my favorite,” Wanko says. “Rich and Mary Frame were the owners of Mississippi Nights, and the first entry we have is Mary Frame writing, ‘I met my husband here.’”

Other scrawlings detail nights at the now-closed venue, tales of drinking beers, working the shows and multiple entries of guests being “pretty sure” they lost their hearing at a concert.

As you turn corners, music plays throughout the exhibit, with Nelly’s “Country Grammar” causing Skinner and Bergman to stop and dance.

Just next to the wall where Nelly’s music video is showing, a black box sits for those who are hearing impaired to feel the vibrations of the music. Accommodations are placed throughout the exhibit, including audio descriptions of images for those who may not be able to see the displays.

Interactive displays also come into play here. Screens decorate walls and displays, allowing for more information on places such as Gaslight Square or for viewers to learn if they would actually like jazz music back when it was created.

“It is an interesting way to get people to look at the wider context of different musical genres and sort of put themselves back in that particular time,” Wanko says.

Back at the beginning of the exhibit, a QR code allows guests to dive into a playlist of St. Louis music. There is old-timey blues, jazz and the “St. Louis Bounce’’ music by Nelly, Chingy and J-Kwon. Multiple QR codes are spread throughout as a way to tune in to a given era .

As Skinner and Bergman exit the exhibit, they discuss their plans to bring their friends and family members back. The sounds of “Country Grammar” echo as they walk out, and the two are still dancing along to the beat.

The St. Louis Sound exhibit is open until January 22, 2023. The museum is also hosting several events in conjunction with the exhibit that can be viewed at mohistory.org. n

[BARS]

Written by CHERYL BAEHR

Abeloved community gathering place for St. Louis artists is getting a new home in Grand Center: Sophie’s Artist Lounge will be relocating from its current spot inside the .ZACK building to the newly announced 3333 development. The revamped Sophie’s is scheduled to open to the public on Friday, October 1.

Since opening in 2017, Sophie’s has provided a venue for St. Louisarea artists to connect with one another and their audiences over drinks and snacks. In its new home inside the 3333 building, the lounge will build upon that foundation with a new bar menu described in a release announcing the revamp as “creative cocktail focused with a sommelier curated wine and bubbles list as well as locally focused beers, seltzers and N/A beverages.” In addition to beverages, Sophie’s will offer complimentary bar snacks and music by local and national DJs. The venue will be open from 5 p.m. until 1:30 a.m. Wednesday through Saturday and will also be available for events. Parties of four to 20 are encouraged to reserve lounge sections with a catered food spread, bottle and carafe cocktail service.

The reimagined Sophie’s is one of the several arts-focused entities announced for the 3333 development, which is spearheaded by the Kranzberg Arts Foundation; other tenants that will be located in the building include the St. Louis Fashion Fund, the Shakespeare Festival of St. Louis, Open Studio, Mike Martin Media, Convene Event Space, Mark Buckheit Framing and Paige Avenue Photography. Additionally, the 36,000-squarefoot building will have an art studio and set-building space for Kranzberg Arts Foundation artists.

“We are thrilled to add 3333 to the growing family of Kranzberg Arts Foundation spaces as we continue to invest in St. Louis’ arts economy,” says Chris Hansen, executive director of the Kranzberg Arts Foundation, in the release announcing the project. “The Arts and artists are a critical part of our region’s overall economic success and with the right venues and tools, will continue to grow. Now, more than ever, the arts are alive in St. Louis.” n

Written by DANNY WICENTOWSKI

There came a moment early in the writing of Part Time, while the script was still growing beyond its first dozen pages, when Stryker Spurlock decided that the plot should be more than an extended gag about spontaneous teleportation.

Spurlock, one of the key creators behind the live comedy sketch series Fatal Bus Accident, has created something deeply strange in his first feature film. Part Time premiered at the Arkadin Cinema earlier this summer, and has its next screening set for Saturday, October 9, as part of the Webster Film Series.

Shot mostly in Maryland Heights over a period of five years, Part Time is not your traditional slacker comedy. Its lack of mirth is all the more pointed as its cast is almost entirely stocked with familiar faces from St. Louis’ standup comedy scene. Instead, the film’s humor is the abysmally dark variety, a journey into the worming, unmoored existence of its young protagonist, Casey (Casey Paulsen), an aimless book-shop employee whose supernatural tendencies might actually be the most manageable problems in his life.

In an interview, Spurlock says he had started writing the film in August of 2016, shortly after meeting Paulsen at a local comedy show.

“I started writing this little script, and it was going to be ten minutes, and it was going to be about Casey being a layabout kid who doesn’t do anything, doesn’t talk to anybody. And then he discovers he can levitate,” he recalls. “The joke of the short was going to be he only levitated about an inch off the ground against his will, and it does not aid his life in any way. It’s just a hindrance.”

It’s the sort of absurd, self-negating premise that would feel right at home in a script for Fatal Bus Accident, which concluded its fifteen-show run in 2019. By then, however, Spurlock says he was “fed up doing comedy, and I wanted to play with something else.”

That sense of creative restlessness comes through in Part Time, where that “something else” is largely delivered through Paulsen’s performance as Casey, a role which Spurlock says came to life during the shooting.

In short, Casey is not OK. Long scenes show him trudging through Maryland Heights and suburban north county, or going through the motions of his workday where his detachment is all the more apparent among his wisecracking coworkers. He is a gray rock, absorbing the concern and attempts at support from his family and friends, and returning only a dull glow of some unspeakable suppression waiting to explode.

And then there’s how Casey eats — with violence, he chugs energy drinks, devours candy bars and demolishes a tub of ice cream. Although Spurlock credits Paulsen for infusing these otherwise mundane scenes with the energy of a drowning man, it is Spurlock’s camera that forces the audience to watch him eat the whole thing, bite by bite, over the course of a minutes-long unbroken shot.

But Part Time isn’t entirely attached to the main character’s postmodern turmoil or interrogating what part-time work means for someone who is going to pieces before your eyes.

Without giving too much away, Casey starts teleporting, and here

Part Time becomes something almost approximating comedy. These scenes absolutely fly off the rails with the performances of the The Lord (Christian Lawrence) and The Lady (Meredith Hopping). Their tantrums, demands and childlike domineering make Part Time a riveting and unexpected experience — you never know when Casey will turn around and find himself in a Victorian mansion facing two scenery-chewing socialites who never seem to be satisfied.

What does it all mean? Spurlock leaves the film intentionally muddied, though several narrative threads offer compelling glimpses into what Casey is going through, and where the film’s climax leaves him.

That’s more than Spurlock first intended. During the early stages of writing the script, he says he wanted the film “to be a complete brick wall where there’s there’s no way of understanding what happened.”

Instead, it seems he strategically knocked a few bricks loose, leaving just enough room for the audience to peek through.

“I didn’t go into this thinking about the audience; I only kind of wanted to make something that I thought would be sick to look at. And I accomplished that mission,” he says. “But I think there are two things I enjoy the most: When people are really delighted by it, and it really resonates with them, they can kind of see themselves in Casey.

“And then,” he continues, “I also enjoyed when some people were kind of unsettled by it. Like, if they left the movie kind of uncomfortable about their own life, I think that would be really cool.”

Part Time will screen Saturday, October 9, at the Winifred Moore Auditorium (470 East Lockwood, Webster Groves). For ticketing information about the event, visit the Webster Film Series website, at webster.edu film-series. n