Confused by the screens

Those of us who grew up with the internet learned quickly about the impermanence and flimsiness of information. The internet, and the various pirating protocols that existed at its birth, made it clear that "going around" the authorities was not only easy but in many cases preferable. Prior to video being available online, documentaries that spun alternative narratives such as Zeitgeist or Loose Change wouldn't have been as accessible.

Old alternative mediums like the pamphlet or late-night radio advertised themselves as more explicitly alternative, but Loose Change sat on YouTube next to the cooking and cat videos. There's a Joe Rogan meme that reads, "Back when I was a kid you didn’t need Joe Rogan. Your best friend had a 27-year-old brother who was a f*****g loser who would smoke pot in a room with blacklight posters and tell you that the Mayans invented cell phones." But again, this person's presentation was such that you understood him to be an alternative.

When you're a twelve-year-old boy who stumbles on Loose Change after watching a video about the F-16, you're forced to confront the question of whether the dominant narrative is the true narrative — in this case: Was 9/11 an inside job? Not only that, but you don't have help. TV is often consumed with company, and it's through this process that you learn how to approach the content. The internet is only twenty years old. By the time the internet popped up, I was ten years old and my parents were forty with zero experience navigating, parsing, and searching regardless of their general competence with computers before the internet.

The computer is a radically different machine than the television. It contains the television and adds an entire layer on top of it, blending interactivity with communication to produce something that has a wholly different effect on its users. As a child who would frequently pirate music, modify video games, and pursue hidden knowledge, I can tell you that on a sufficiently long enough time horizon, the general sense imparted to you by a computer as it delivers information is that very little of it is to be trusted.

Contrast this with the relatively monochrome, well-groomed network television that my parents grew up with and you begin to see how a generation reared on the internet will have far less trust in any given narrative than their forbears who watched Walter Cronkite and Johnny Carson and derived their sense of the media from them.

This might explain why older generations are more likely to fall for hoax stories and fake headlines — something that those under 35 can sniff out more readily. You scan the URL, the text formatting, the image quality, the basic layout of the website, and how quickly it loads. There are many signs for every piece of internet content that will tell you how trustworthy or untrustworthy it is. I've yet to see someone my age repost an Onion story as fact, but instances of Boomers doing so are legion. Growing up scanning and perusing webpage after webpage, you internalize the red flags.

Marshall McLuhan famously declared, "The medium is the message." Luhan's famous declaration is one of those statements you chew on over the years to try and decide if it means anything substantive. What’s obvious is that the medium has changed, and with it, the way news is delivered and the kind of people who deliver it. I think the era of the “view from nowhere” completely detached observer is drawing to a close, and with AI filling in for those who present themselves as unbiased arbiters of the truth, the power of personality and charisma will be all that more important. DAVIS HUNT

🚗 Traffic Calming New speed bumps may be coming to a street near you. The spring 2025 selections for Nashville’s Street Traffic Calming Program were chosen from over 600 submissions. The projects are ranked by priority and include speed cushions, narrowing sections of a street, and traffic circles at intersections.

The projects are selected to provide lower traffic speeds and safer street accommodations for non-drivers while taking into account “vehicular speed, traffic volume, non-driver accommodations, vulnerable user injuries/fatalities, and proximity to parks, schools, libraries, and community centers.” Right now, the Nashville Department of Transportation is taking new applications through March 17.  

💸 Attracting Economic Growth In TN According to the 2024 edition of Rich States, Poor States, Tennessee is ranked 12th in the US for its economic outlook. The Volunteer state’s standing was established by data reflecting “state and local rates and revenues and any effect of federal deductibility.” It’s worth noting that Tennessee has fallen in rank when it comes to Top Marginal Corporate Income Tax Rate over the last 15 years while it has risen in Property Tax Burden. That being said, our state’s Sales Tax Burden has consistently ranked low on the charts.

Meanwhile, changes to Tennessee’s Estate/Inheritance Tax Levied took us from dead last to number one ever since we abolished the inheritance tax at the end of 2015. We’ve also jumped in rank for full-time employment from 2023 to 2024. You can look at the entire data set here.

📚 Fruitless Pushback In Edu Committee A barrage of protesters flooded Tennessee’s Senate Education Committee meeting yesterday. “Education for all” and “immigrants are our future” read the signs held up during a contentious vote on a bill that would allow schools to reject the enrollment applications of illegal immigrants. Ultimately, it cleared the committee by one vote, but that wasn’t the only interesting piece of legislation on the docket. 

You may recall a homeschooling bill by Senator Adam Lowe (R-Calhoun) that garnered some controversy in January. At the time, Lowe promised to protect homeschoolers against government interference. He’s since withdrawn his bill and thrown his weight behind Senator Janice Bowling’s (R-Tullahoma) "Family Right to Educational Emancipation (FREE) Act” as a co-sponsor. 

According to Bowling, the Free Act has already been passed in 11 states. “They require no reporting for homeschoolers,” she explained during yesterday's meeting. The Senate sponsor also clarified that Tennessee’s bill “does not replace any of the current three legal home school options in Tennessee” and “would not be an option for families wishing to utilize Education Freedom Scholarship funds, or for families wishing to participate in any governmental affiliated program.”

Though the legislation was tabled due to a drafting error, it appeared to be widely supported by members on the Senate Education Committee. An amended version is set to be heard sometime next week.

DEVELOPMENT

• Highwoods Properties reveals massive overhaul of SoBro's Symphony Place tower (NBJ)
• Slim & Husky's Pizza Beeria closes downtown location (NBJ)
• Music City Rodeo to debut during spring in Nashville (WSMV)

Our inaugural Illegal Criminal of the Week goes to Karla Guadalupe Armendariz, who hit and killed an old man on Old Hickory Monday night. Armendariz is being held on an ICE detainer, indicating she is in the country illegally and awaiting processing by ICE. (More Info)

✹ REVIEW: THE MONKEY (2025)

“Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” So goes the Imposition of Ashes that marked the less-evangelical devout yesterday. But those who desire a blunter statement on our impermanence this Lenten season need look no further than the tagline of the latest Stephen King adaptation, The Monkey: “Everybody dies.” 

Fresh from the success of Longlegs last summer, director Osgood Perkins has reteamed with indie powerhouse Neon for his latest foray into horror–the story of two brothers struggling to rid themselves of a cursed organ grinder monkey toy that has instigated the demise of innocent victims for generations in ways so joyously demented they make Saw and Final Destination seem like low-tier fanfic.

The Monkey’s appeal lies in its melding of comedy and horror, an astounding balancing act of gallows humor that leaves its images of carnage etched into one’s mind for weeks whether or not they want them there. But Perkins is no gorno huckster. Like Hitchock and Lynch before him, he uses the genre to wrestle with his own place in the Amerian landscape, a space, in Perkins’s case, weighed down by his Psycho star father succumbing to AIDS and his mother, Berry Berenson, dying while aboard American Airlines Flight 11 on 9/11 in the director’s formidable years. 

Though reading The Monkey as a way for Perkins to work out grief seems a little pat, the absurdity of orphanhood by two of the Long 90s most epochal events looms large in his approach to the material. King’s story derives its horror from father-son anxieties, but Perkins has turned its source material’s Freud-meets-Poe approach to evil into a generational saga about personal responsibility in the face of the inevitable end. He might want us to laugh, but he also refuses to absolve his audience of its appetite for violent spectacle. The Monkey may remind us that we will all meet the same fate, but it has a full throated-belief that we may as well do so on our own terms.

The Monkey is now playing in theaters.

THINGS TO DO

View our calendar for the week here and our weekly film rundown here.

📅 Visit our On The Radar list to find upcoming events around Nashville.

🎧 On Spotify: Pamphleteer's Picks, a playlist of our favorite bands in town this week.

👨🏻‍🌾 Check out our Nashville farmer's market guide.

TONIGHT

🪕 A Night of Monroe’s Bluegrass Classics @ Station Inn, 9p, $20, Info
+ Artists include award winning players with The Price Sisters, Po Ramblin’ Boys and Sister Sadie

🎸 Cary Hudson and Lou Shields @ Dee's Lounge, 9p, $5, Info

🎸 Gary Clark Jr. @ Ryman Auditorium, 7p, $44+, Info

🍀 Live Irish Music @ McNamara’s Irish Pub, 6p, Free, Info

🎸 Kelly’s Heroes @ Robert’s Western World, 6:30p, Free, Info

🎸 Open Mic @ Fox & Locke, 6:30p, Free, Info
+ vet community here

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