Money Without a Man

"For my part, I prefer a man without money to money without a man."

Cicero

The Scene has been running a series of articles analyzing the patchwork of zoning ordinances that overlay the city. Its most recent installment examines the “only apartment building in Belle Meade” and studies the decisions that allowed the neighborhood to maintain its exclusivity: preventing the dilution of housing stock through self-incorporation and the imposition of a zoning regime that prevented the construction of more apartment buildings.

Belle Meade pre-empted the destruction that might’ve followed from Nashville’s annexation of the suburb by establishing itself as a city—as is their right. For an example of a neighborhood that wasn’t so fortunate, look to Dallas’s Swiss Avenue.

“Some of the homeowners began taking in roomers,” writes Jon Caswell in A Guide to the Older Neighborhoods of Dallas, “which led the way for those houses to be converted into apartments. By the 1950s and 1960s the city zoned the area for high-rise development, precipitating more speculation and deterioration.” The decline of Swiss Avenue was only halted when residents formed the Historic Preservation League in 1972 and successfully worked through the city to rezone the area as a historic district.

Today, when you drive through Swiss Avenue, the old houses still remain, but there’s also a surfeit of bland apartment complexes. A haunting feeling pervades this once vital and bustling part of town; it is well past its prime and, as I suppose must happen at one point or another to any area, has since become basically indistinguishable neighborhood within the makeup of the city.

One of the common complaints about Nashville is that its public spaces are anemic. But Belle Meade, for its part, has stewarded the city's largest and most popular public park, Warner Parks. I run the trails there multiple times a week as do many others. It's a pristine place.

Affluent Nashville neighborhoods such as Belle Meade, Forest Hills, and Oak Hill are easy targets for those full of ressentiment. Today’s political culture gives them full permission to malign the areas as much as possible, mostly because they are white, rich, and established. It's true they are punching up, but their criticisms boil down to "eat the rich."

I’ve never understood those who are angry at the rich and, instead of using the well-to-do’s status as motivation to up their own station or improve themselves, seek to take their money through the machinery of the state. Not only is it one of the lowest, most base political impulses. History is replete with cautionary tales about why uncritically internalizing these emotions is a bad idea. DAVIS HUNT

🍃 Mother Nature Is Healing “Cleaner air is coming,” promised Mayor O’Connell this Tuesday while announcing a $4.7 million federal grant to upgrade and install EV chargers around Nashville. Part of the “Electrify MUSIC City Project,” the funding will go toward forty-three new Level 2 chargers and DC Fast Chargers, providing Nashville with seventy-eight dual-port chargers across the county.

The money will also be used to refurbish existing chargers—a subtle reminder of past failures. Five years ago, when Congress introduced America’s Transportation Infrastructure Act, studies showed that Tennesseans barely used the newly installed charging stations. As of 2023, there were less than 6,000 registered BEV and PHEV vehicles in Davidson County. Meanwhile, charging station utilization across the country only hovers around 14 percent. As Nashvillians encounter abandoned chargers throughout the city, the Biden administration has also been chastised for dragging their feet in awarding the $7.5B in funding for EV initiatives across the country. MEGAN PODSIEDLIK

💸 Show Me The (ARPA) Money Over the course of the pandemic, Nashville received just under $260M in ARPA funds to alleviate the impact of COVID-19. Though it’s still unclear what happened to the ten million earmarked for assorted projects after a botched participatory budgeting process last fall—by the way, $600,000 was spent in marketing alone—the Banner has reported that Metro is divvying up the remaining dollars.

According to the latest report, affordable housing initiatives received the lion’s share of the funding, with just over $96 million. Wraparound services for the homeless received just over $48 million, while nearly $23 million went to small business and economic recovery and just under $18 million went to nonprofits focused on workforce assistance and job training. You can check out the full report here. MEGAN PODSIEDLIK

🔫 Welcome To The Gun Show After strong-arming Memphis officials, state GOP leaders prevented three gun-related questions from appearing on the Shelby County ballot in November. On Monday, Secretary of State Tre Hargett warned the county’s election commission that he would not approve the ballot if it contained the gun control referenda. Lt. Governor McNally and Speaker Cameron Sexton later backed him up, threatening to withhold state funding if city officials placed the measures on the ticket.

The next day, Linda Phillips, Shelby’s Administrator of Elections, heeded Tennessee Election Coordinator Mark Goins’ warning that the questions violated state law and pulled the language from the ballot. “If the City of Memphis decides to challenge this interpretation, we will respect the final decision made by the courts,” she said in a statement. MEGAN PODSIEDLIK

DEVELOPMENT

• Virginia firm drops $88 million on Bellvue apartment complex (NBJ)
• NYC-based menswear brand to open first Nashville location (NBJ)
• September start eyed for Midtown tower project (Post)

✹ REVIEW: BETWEEN THE TEMPLES (2024)

It may be an exaggeration to proclaim that the Jews created contemporary American humor. Still, much less enduring hilarity would have ensued over the last seven decades without the likes of Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, The Coen Brothers, or Nichols and May. Despite such a pedigree, Jewish comedy has also remained resolutely secular—all punchlines involving sitting shiva delivered with a palpable ironic detachment or the type of transgressive bluster that made Philip Roth the country’s preeminent American novelist for anyone over 40. 

So, that a movie like Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples would become the toast of Sundance in 2024 seems decidedly out of step with both our current moment and the comedic legacy on which it stands. A wry dramedy about a cantor (Jason Schwartzman) serving at an upstate New York synagogue who learns to live again after the death of his wife when his septuagenarian elementary school music teacher (Carol Kane) decides she wants a late-life bat mitzvah, Silver’s film parts with the counterculture Hollywood classics like The Graduate and Harold and Maude that directly inspired it by directly grappling with the faith. Not since the Coens’ A Serious Man in 2009 has a film so steeped in the minutiae of Judaism encroached into the world of the indie movie. But unlike the film that marked the Coens’ most personal and affecting effort, Between the Temples isn’t a period throwback. It’s a movie that resolutely makes a case for the relevance of the faith in the Northeast’s Blue milieu. 

At every beat, Silver’s film threatens to succumb to the schmaltz that has ruined so many twee indies in the age of streaming. But a decade of making micro budget features firmly outside the Hollywood ecosystem has given his work a confident DIY resonance that conforms to hipster rom-com convention only to subvert it. Best known for her roles in the classic sitcom Taxi and, more recently, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Kane turns in an astounding empathetic portrait of an aging hippie everyone else dismisses as yet another old coot. Though the film is set mostly in living rooms and beige offices, Silver’s collaboration with Sean Price Williams allows the cinematographer’s trademark invasive closeups to make the affair both observational and intimate—a feat that shows why Williams’s directorial debut, The Sweet East, and music video work with Sabrina Carpenter are revitalizing stale genres. 

Between the Temples is neither an anthropological exercise nor a conversion narrative. It’s a deliberately messy interrogation of belief and the hunger for something beyond ourselves that proves the comedic legacy of the chosen people is on more than firm footing.

Between the Temples 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 and yearly festival guide.

TONIGHT

🪕 The Borrowed Mules @ Station Inn, 9p, $20, Info

🎸 Musicians Corner @ Centennial Park, 5p, Free, Info
+ feat. Lucinda Williams, Hovvdy, Phillip-Michael Scales and more

🎸 Terri Clark @ Ryman Auditorium, 7:30p, $35+, 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

📰 Check out the full newsletter archive here.

High School Football Anthropology

What we can learn about a high school based on what offense they run

PorterThe Pamphleteer

This Week in Streaming (August 27th)

Our recommendations to counteract the endless scrolling.

Jerod Ra’Del HollyfieldThe Pamphleteer

The Poetic License of Justin Jones

🖋️ Justin Jones plays fast and loose with the law · BlueOval City Blues · Borderlands Review · Much more!

The PamphleteerThe Pamphleteer

Choose How You Lose

Ben Cunningham of Tennessee Tax Revolt takes the transit referendum to task

Megan Lee PodsiedlikThe Pamphleteer