A Real Classic Film Series

There's a lot more going on in this town than meets the eye...

I already complained about how predictable the Classic Film Series at the Orpheum inevitably is, but I had no idea until I planted myself in front of my laptop for a good hour of surfing Memphis-related sites that the director of the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Kevin Sharp, is an obsessive classic film buff who has been hosting his favorite movies all year round in a personal film festival at the museum. Coming up this Thursday from 7:00-9:00 p.m.: Alfred Hitchcock's classic Rear Window. And next month: Marilyn Monroe in her iconic role in The Seven Year Itch. Apparently I've already missed Roman Holiday, The Third Man (one of my absolute favorite films of all time, featuring Orson Welles' epic denunciation of placid Switzerland), To Have and Have Not, The Oxbow Incident, Holiday, It Happened One Night, and The Thin Man. It seems that Sharp chooses three films from each decade, beginning in the 1930s, to represent the cinematic vision of that historical moment. A great festival, with many great selections - but woefully under-advertised. I can't believe I only found out about this now! There are no movies listed for October, November, and December, but we can only hope that's because Kevin Sharp is still deciding on the appropriate films to represent the tumultuous 1960s...

Dear Redbirds....

I love Autozone Park; I love minor league baseball; I love barbecue nachos; I absolutely adore that you are owned and operated by a nonprofit foundation. So please don't think me a terrible sourpuss when I observe one unacceptable aspect of the otherwise stellar Redbirds experience:

Your mascot.

I'm not really sure what your mascot is supposed to be, but that's not really a complaint. I went to a college where our mascot was effectively the color green for three years. I'm more concerned about the fact that your mascot runs around the field pretending to read the minds of the baseball players, and then broadcasts farting and belching noises to the stands. Call me a highbrow snob if you must, but really, amplified farts between innings? Can't you just throw Redbirds t-shirts into the audience or something???

I'm just sayin'.

Airplane Blues

I leave Austin in four days. I'm looking forward to sleeping in a real bed again (hallelujah!), seeing my Memphis friends, and having my entire book collection at my disposal. But I will miss my friends in the ATX, so I've been checking airfare between Memphis and Austin for various random weekends. And, seriously, this is depressing:

Via kayak.com, the cheapest airfare I can find for MEM-AUS for the week of my fall break in October, for example, is $424, for a direct flight on Northwest (soon to become Delta, of course). Meanwhile, I could fly from Nashville (BNA)-AUS the very same weeekend, on the very same airline, for $195. And the most outrageous fact: the BNA-AUS flight stops in Memphis. The second leg of the flight is the exact same flight which, by itself, costs $424.

WTF???

Freedom's just another word...

My friend and fellow Austin vacationista, the fieldguidetomemphis, notes that the Los Angeles City Council has recently voted to place a one-year moratorium on the construction of new fast food restaurants in a low-income part of South L.A. There has been a lot of commentary on the decision, much of it quite negative. A case in point is William Saletan in Slate, who finds the moratorium downright un-American, insofar as it interferes with our sacred right to "free choice":

I assumed this idea would go nowhere because we Americans don't like government restrictions on what we eat. You can nag us. You can regulate what our kids eat in school. But you'll get our burgers when you pry them from our cold, dead hands.


How did the L.A. City Council get around this resistance? By spinning the moratorium as a way to create more food choices, not fewer. And by depicting poor people, like children, as less capable of free choice.

Now, there are plenty of critical questions to ask about the moratorium: will it really increase the availability of healthy alternatives in South L.A.? Don't incentives need to be created for affordable, healthy restaurants and grocery stores and food vendors to come to low-income neighborhoods, rather than simply prohibiting additional fast food restaurants? Given that the moratorium only affects the construction of new restaurants, and the landscape of South L.A. is already pockmarked with ubiquitous Jack-in-the-Boxes and Popeyes and Burger Kings, will it have any appreciable impact on the eating habits of residents? But Saletan's outrage at the paternalistic nanny state, regulating the "free choice" of its citizens to eat whatever crap they want to eat, takes a different (and rather more predictable) tack.

Ultimately, I think, Saletan's article speaks to the impoverished conception of "freedom" that conventional American ideology harbors. First, Saletan presumes that only the government is capable of interfering with the freedom of citizens, a typically American presumption that fails to recognize concentrations of private power, socioeconomic and geographic inequalities, and unregulated capitalism itself as potential barriers to individual freedom. The fact that liquor stores, pawn shops, loan sharks, and fast food restaurants systematically pray upon low-income neighborhoods never registers as a possible restriction on the "free choice" of residents, because we are incapable of seeing "private" business development as anything but the highest embodiment of freedom itself - the mythological utopia of the Free Market. Second, "free choice" is identified entirely with consumption. We are free provided the government does not interfere with our role as willing consumers. The ultimate expression of freedom is an American with his wallet open in a convenient store, choosing between six different brands of cereal and five different brands of toilet paper. Ask no questions about why these particular brands represent the full spectrum of choice. Just as we ask no questions about why "free choice" in one's dietary habits in South L.A. (or South Memphis) apparently means the freedom to choose between fifteen different McDonald's and twenty-two different Taco Bells. But there's something rather odd about a conception of freedom which sounds the warning bells of totalitarianism on behalf of the oppressed people of South L.A., where 75% of all restaurants are fast-food outlets, because their ability to eat another Big Mac at a brand new McDonald's may be temporarily suspended. Nobody in South L.A. who wants to eat a Big Mac will have the slightest difficulty finding one, before or after the moratorium takes effect - so whose freedom, really, are we defending? Third, and most revealingly, Saletan's conception of freedom is entirely passive (as befits a definition where freedom = consumption). The "free choice" of South Los Angelenos has nothing to do with shaping their neighborhood according to the desires and visions of residents themselves. It has nothing to do with making conscious decisions about available food options. It certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with residential mobility or the option to get out of South L.A. if one feels trapped there. All it means is that residents should sit back passively while predatory mega-corporations develop their neighborhoods as they see fit, and then enjoy the resulting utopia of free choice as they choose between a Big Mac and a Bacon Ultimate Cheeseburger. God Bless America.

Saletan's paper-thin concept of freedom obviously has ramifications for Memphis. A popular Facebook group has recently emerged to petition Trader Joe's to come to Memphis. In the past, we have been told that Tennessee's archaic laws regarding the sale of liquor in grocery stores would prevent a Trader Joe's from opening in Memphis, or anywhere else in the state of Tennessee. But this turns out to be an inadequate explanation, as Trader Joe's is coming to Nashville. Why would Trader Joe's choose Nashville rather than Memphis as the site of a new TN store? One presumes it has something to do with "market research" - i.e. with a determination that Nashville offers a better demographic pool of future Trader Joe's customers. As we all know by now, Memphis is a spectacularly unhealthy city - the most obese and the most sedentary in the country. But this places us in a Catch 22 when we desire healthier eating options for Memphians - given our demographic profile, healthy restaurants and grocery stores have reason to be wary of Memphis as a potential customer base. So they stay away. And if they stay away, Memphians find the same old choices, and little incentive to change their eating habits. And so the mutual reinforcement continues. I'm not suggesting it's literally impossible to eat healthy food in Memphis. Only that it's more difficult in Memphis than in...well, Austin, for example. And more to the point, that our conventional understanding of freedom, as articulated by William Saletan, doesn't recognize this fact in any way as impeding upon the free choice of Memphians, because the decisions of corporations can only enhance the free choice of individuals, not restrict it, in our free market ideology. Memphis may never get a Trader Joe's, but that's OK, as long as the nanny state dares not prevent another KFC from coming to town.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

If we are to believe the theme song of Cheers, then Memphis is certainly doing one thing right: we have an abundance of bars, and a few cafés, where you can almost always count on finding numerous familiar faces. Before I moved to Memphis, I never had such a regular experience of walking into a bar and recognizing half the clientele. It's something that I really like about life in Memphis; it's a hard place to feel lonely and anonymous. That classic (and cliché) urban experience of falling through the cracks, disappearing into the crowd, becoming a number - I don't feel it in Memphis. I imagine that Austin is similar in this regard, but I'm not here long enough to recognize the regulars at their favorite local haunts, so I've occasionally experienced that familiar old feeling of anonymity and invisibility here.

Meanwhile, I'm reading a book by Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition, about the emphasis placed upon "recognition" as a fundamental precondition of social justice in recent political theory. In this context, recognition refers to an understanding of, and respect for, somebody else's cultural identity. At the root of the demand for recognition are certain assumptions about human nature: that we fundamentally desire a kind of affirmation of who we are from others, that we feel empowered and capable of acting when others see us in the same way that we see ourselves. We want to be known and understood by others; it is not enough simply to know ourselves - or perhaps we can never know ourselves, except through the image that others project onto us. Though the discussion of recognition in political theory is often couched in terms of identity movements, it also tells us something about why the experience of anonymity might be so frightening: to be anonymous is to be unknown and unrecognized. It is to be in a place where nobody knows your name.

And yet....Markell is quite critical of recognition as an ideal in political theory, for quite compelling reasons that I won't belabor here. But it suddenly struck me, as I was sitting in the café reading his book, that if there is something liberating and affirming about the promise of recognition, there is also something terrifying about it. And, the flip side of the coin: just as there is something terrifying about the threat of anonymity, there is also something liberating about it. Recognition is backward-looking - to know who somebody "is" is ultimately to know their past, their back story, their personal narrative. But how many of us dream of escaping from our past? How many of us dream of rewriting our personal narratives, of becoming somebody new, somebody different, somebody without definitive roots? Don't generations of young adults uproot themselves from small towns and stumble into big cities precisely to escape a place where everybody knows their name...and more significantly, where everybody recognizes them, where everybody knows their story? To be known once and for all, to be recognized everywhere - isn't that a kind of prison? Doesn't it make it that much harder to reinvent yourself, to climb out from under the weight and the wreckage of the past?

Which brings me back to Memphis. I am excited to walk back into the P&H, and recognize the same old faces. I am excited to find the same people reading and studying and chatting at Bluff City Coffee. I'm excited to fall back into my old routines: Sunday brunches and Thursdays as Bosco's and afternoons split between Café Eclectic and Bluff City and, perhaps, trivia Tuesdays, after an extended hiatus. But I think I will also miss the anonymity of spending a summer somewhere entirely random, where nobody knows your name and nobody recognizes you, so every time you walk into a new spot, it is filled entirely with the promise (and the danger) of the future, without the weight (and the comfort) of the past. Sometimes I think Memphis scares me in this regard - the thought of staying in Memphis long term - I'm scared of too much recognition, of too many familiar faces, of too many people who know my name...and know too much about me. Perhaps the truth about human beings is not that we crave either recognition or anonymity, but that we are fundamentally conflicted insofar as we crave both, at the very same time.

Melbourne

Wow, it's really striking how much better my pictures of Sydney are... I fear I have not done photographic justice to Melbourne.

Sydney

Escape from Oz

Your humble neighborhood blogger has returned unscathed from the Land Down Under. She was a bit disappointed that people didn't walk upside down from the ceilings there, but otherwise, the voyage was a smashing success. A few random observations:

I have been to Europe several times, so I've certainly endured long airplane rides in the past. But there is something uniquely hellish about flying from Austin to Australia, via Denver and San Francisco. (And back to Austin from Melbourne, via Sydney and Los Angeles.) Both trips literally took 24 hours. When you are sitting on an airplane in the middle of the night, and everybody around you appears to be sleeping, and you feel so claustrophobic that you're about to burst, and you are in the middle of nowhere somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, and you look at your watch and realize you have to sit in that horrible seat for another 9 hours, it induces something close to existential panic. That is the only way I can describe it. Then you begin thinking about everything and everyone in your life, playing over in your head random conversations with friends and strangers and exes and colleagues and postal workers, and you contemplate the Big Questions: love and death and God and sex and art and why your hairdresser can't seem to cut your bangs in a straight line despite the fact that you paid her 80 frickin' dollars for a simple bob. By the time you land, you feel like you've aged about sixteen years, and failed to resolve any philosophical dilemmas in the process. It's a rather deflating experience.

It's also strange to travel so far - across the entire world - and end up in a place that seems so culturally familiar. Somehow, when you've been sitting on various airplanes for so long, you just expect to come out in a totally surreal, foreign world. But there is nothing surreal about Sydney or Melbourne. (The outback, perhaps, but alas, for financial reasons, I couldn't see the outback.) They are both vibrant and fascinating cities, but they feel almost like they could be long lost American cities. Next time I put myself through an existential crucible like that, I want to end up somewhere so bizarre that I can barely figure out how to walk down the street.

That said, Sydney and Melbourne make an interesting study in contrasts. A friend told me that Sydney is to Melbourne as Los Angeles is to San Francisco, and up to a point, the comparison works - Sydney is a very posh, chic, upscale city. It's where the Beautiful People are. The nightlife revolves around big, slick clubs. Everybody seems perpetually dressed up for the catwalk. Melbourne was grittier and edgier, more bohemian, and funkier, full of dank dive bars and eccentric art galleries. By far the most interesting thing about Melbourne was the system of "laneways" - little alleys in the center of the city that connect major streets. In most cities, these would be empty, untrodden spaces, full of litter and dumpsters and the smell of urine. Melbourne turns the laneways into this amazing, subterranean shadow city - full of publicly subsidized street art and secret cafés and bars, hidden away in unexpected corners at the end of a laneway covered in graffiti. It's a great city in which to be a flâneur, because you never know when you will stumble on a lighted door at the end of a dark alley. But the comparison breaks down insofar as Melbourne is far more affordable than either SF or LA, and Sydney has nothing comparing to the monstrous suburban sprawl of LA. It's actually a beautiful city, both in its natural setting and its manmade artifacts; the architecture is exquisite, the coastline is beautiful. And, in many ways, it is a model of smart urban design. And I was fortunate to be in town during the Biennale, a giant international festival of contemporary art that basically takes over the entire city, so we hardly lacked for artsy things to do in Sydney.

In the end, though, I felt a certain...lack...in Australia. It's the same lack I feel in America. It's the lack of history, being in such a young country. A city feels fundamentally different under the weight of centuries, under the weight of fallen empires and patron saints and barbarian invasions and beheaded kings. I gather life in Sydney or Melbourne would be quite easy....but perhaps too easy?

The Land Down Under

At this time tomorrow, I will be on an airplane.

At this time on Saturday, I will be....still on an airplane.

At this time on Sunday, I will be in Australia.

Thus, I'm having a real blogiday. I return in mid-July. And I swear I don't usually travel so compulsively - this trip is the result of my graduation present from my parents two years ago: 100,000 frequent flyer miles. Best present ever.

In honor of the Land Down Under, here is some fine Australian musical nostalgia:


THE GO-BETWEENS:



THE SAINTS:



NICK CAVE AND KYLIE MINOGUE:



And who could forget....MIDNIGHT OIL:

Random Thoughts

I'm not sure what it is about spending the summer in Austin, but it seems to be sapping my ability to write this blog. I just can't think of anything to say. Lately, I confess, I've been more interested in the presidential election than local Memphis issues - no doubt because I'm not in Memphis anyway, and this is a historic presidential election. Nonetheless, I hate to see this place lying dormant and gathering cobwebs for too long, so here's a collection of totally random thoughts I've had recently, some on the subject of cities, some not so much:

• It's hot as sin in Austin. It was hard to believe when we arrived here in May that already the temperature was skyrocketing into the upper 90s - at the time, it was still beautiful in Memphis, in the mid 70s. Now, the upper 90s are a reprieve, and it's frequently in the triple digits. So I thought that exercising outside would be an impossibility. I recall trying to go for an hour-long walk every day last August in Memphis, during the horrendous triple-digit heat wave when it didn't dip below 100 for nearly three straight weeks. I managed to do it, but it's a miracle I never passed out and rolled into the Mississippi River. I would come home and basically just lie on the floor in the crucifixion position with the air conditioner on full blast and pant like a dog. Not an experience I care to revisit. Nonetheless, I've been feeling like a complete sloth lately, so I decided to try going for a walk and see if it was a bad as I recalled - and, miracle of miracles, even though it's been at least 97 every day I've gone, it's really not that bad. Sure, it's hot, but at Town Lake, there are TREES EVERYWHERE casting SHADE over the ground. The sun doesn't beat down on you like the wrath of God. And there are WATER FOUNTAINS at regular intervals, for your drinking (or, I confess, bathing) pleasure. After a few days of walking, I even started (gasp) running, something I never imagined I could do in such blistering weather. Memphis, it's been said before, but it's worth saying again: PLANT SOME FRICKIN' TREES.


• My brilliant friend the field guide to memphis has been on an absolute roll lately, posting one dazzling post after another on the problems - and possible solutions - facing Memphis. My Texas-induced laziness has prevented me from even leaving a comment, but you've got no excuse. Read her last few posts and let her know what you think.


• Heads up: certified eccentric weirdo Crispin Glover is coming to Memphis! Thanks to the good folks at Black Lodge, he'll be screening films and answering questions at the Palace Cinema on August 5th, 6th, and 7th. For my money, Crispin Glover's most memorable moment came in the classic alienated-teenager flick River's Edge, a sadly forgotten little gem from the 80s which should be screened alongside Heathers as part of somebody's "The Kids Are Not All Right" film festival someday.


• Speaking of movies, the Orpheum is once again screening classic films all summer, and once again the list is thoroughly predictable and uninspired. I have no objection to including Casablanca and Gone With the Wind every summer, but if you're going to stray from the beaten path, must you do it with The First Wives' Club and Gladiator? Seriously? Look - I like American movies. My absolute favorite movie of all time, Chinatown, is not just an American film but in many ways a classic film about America. But America is not the only country ever to make movies. Couldn't we just once dare to show a foreign film during the series? Here are two random suggestions: Les Diaboliques and In the Mood for Love. The former, because it's a Hitchcockian thriller with a shocker of an ending that anyone can get sucked into - it's not arty, it's not slow, and there are no long takes on a man lying in bed pondering the universe while he smokes a post-coital cigarette, or whatever it is that we imagine happens in pretentious French films. And the latter, because it's absolutely beautiful and tragic and impossible to forget, but more importantly, because Wong Kar-Wai's latest film, My Blueberry Nights, was filmed partially in Memphis, so we might as well revisit some of his earlier classics.


• Skyrocketing gas prices, as frustrating as they are, might just be a good thing. Whenever I see a story about people in Los Angeles taking mass transit, I know the winds of change are blowing. (Oh god, did I just reference the Scorpions? I'm sorry... I hope you don't have that godawful whistling stuck in your head now too...) L.A., of course, is the poster child for car-dependency and terrible urban planning. Yet when I was there way back in 2002, staying all the way in Long Beach, I took public transportation everywhere. Light rail (yes, there is light rail!) and buses. If it's possible there, surely it's possible anywhere.


• Glenn Greenwald absolutely skewers Obama for his support of the wretched FISA compromise. And he's right: it's inexcusable. It smells like triangulation. And I doubt it's even politically necessary - while this is an issue that has electrified the netroots, so far as I can gather your Average Joe on the street is barely aware of its existence. I understand you simply can't take certain positions as a serious presidential candidate in this sometimes depressingly reactionary country, but this isn't one of those issues. This is just spineless.

All right, enough rambling. I've made my meaningless contribution to the blogosphere for the week. Allow me to leave you with something I never knew existed: Jeff Buckley's cover of Bob Dylan's "If You See Her, Say Hello" - as far as I'm concerned, one of the saddest of sad songs. I had no idea Buckley had covered it:



OK, so it's not as spine-chillingly perfect as his cover of Hallelujah, but it's worth a listen.

Bikers of the World, Unite!

Here is a fact about your humble author, which is sometimes a good thing, and sometimes a not-so-good thing: I am generally game to experience any cultural phenomenon, from the highest of the high-brow to the lowest of the low-brow, at least once. Sometimes this means I find myself in a situation that makes me politically or morally ...queasy, but that's what ironic bemuseument is for, I figure. Call it an anthropological imperative. Or the inevitable result of boredom and restlessness. In any case, it means that occasionally I find myself at the opera one night and a demolition derby the next. Yesterday, thanks to a friend of a friend, I got the $60 entrance fee to the Republic of Texas Biker Rally waived, so we spent the day surrounded by leather bikini-clad women and heavily tattooed, shirtless men....and bikes, bikes, and more bikes:


Now, there is something interesting about biker culture. On the one hand, I totally get it - I get the Hell's Angels and Altamont and tattoos and the open road and rock and roll and outlaw culture and the appeal of a kind of nomadism, a refusal to be pinned down. And I kept thinking I might see Al Jourgensen. (Alas, no Al.) On the other hand, it's completely alien to me: I don't want to wear a leather bikini, I don't want to see an old man with a giant, naked, buxom women tattooed across his entire back, and most of all, I really really don't want to go to an extreme cage-fighting championships....

Oh, crap. Except, like I said, I never say no to the opportunity to witness any cultural phenomenon at least once. So, as fate would have it, there I was, at the Extreme Cage-Fighting Championships at the Republic of Texas Biker Rally. I would estimate the male-female ratio in the room was approximately 80-20, and my friend and I were the only two women I could find anywhere in the place who were entirely unaccompanied by men. To put it mildly, I was slightly out of my element. At first, I was entertained enough with the people-watching and the general spectacle of the whole thing. We stood through a lengthy tribute to the American military, a dubious rendition of the national anthem, tall skinny silicon-enhanced women in bikinis marching around the cage with signs proclaiming "Round One!", and finally, the show began.

We were seated so far away that I could barely even see what was going on. For the most part, all I could see were two men locked in a perpetual and barely-shifting embrace on the floor, occasionally rolling and writhing a bit. Does that sound homoerotic? Well, yeah, that's because it was. However, I'm fairly certain the vast majority of the audience was not there for the homo-eroticism, in which case, I'm at a loss to discern exactly why they were there. The fighters spent so much time motionlessly locked together on the ground, that nothing ever seemed to happen. For all the pre-fight bluster about Roman gladitorial combat, I felt more like I was watching a laboriously slow foreign film. Seriously: I don't get it. We left after two rounds. But at least now I can check "Cage Fighting" off my list of Things To See Before I Die.

Apart from the Cage Fighting, the biker rally offered just another take on a quintessential American pastime: buying crap. I'm not sure why anybody would ever need a hat shaped like a woman's breast, but in case you do need one, they had you covered. Needless to say, pretty much everything you could possibly make into a leather was made into leather and for sale. There was a also a "butt buffer" for sale, whatever that is, but in the spirit of Beavis and Butthead, naturally I felt compelled to point and giggle, because I'm extremely mature and professional. By that point, in the 100 degree Texas heat, even pointing and giggling required a painful expenditure of energy, so we were off....in my friend's boring four-door automobile. All in all, a rather surreal day in my temporary Texan exile.