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New Exhibit at the Kranzberg Considers Dangers of Doom Scrolling | Arts Stories & Interviews | St. Louis

Published

2 years ago

June 9, 2023

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click to enlarge Scout Hudson “Confluence Over Time” is part of Doom Scroll.

Vincent Stemmler, a Kranzberg Arts Foundation’s artist in residence since 2021, doesn’t want to tell a story of redemption. Stemmler’s art isn’t meant to elicit an idealized emotion, nor is it meant to fit into any one simple descriptor.

Instead, their upcoming exhibit, Doom Scroll, depicts a clustered, collective conscious fidgeting and frothing, sweltered by ceaseless social anxiety and, as said by Stemmler, “the feeling that everything is fucked.”

That mixed-media show at the Kranzberg Arts Center (501 North Grand Boulevard, (314) 549-9990, kranzbergartsfoundation.org/the-kranzberg/) opens today with a reception from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.

The exhibit’s name derives from the act of doom scrolling, a practice in which an individual will be inundated with negative, anxiety-inducing content on social media.
click to enlarge Scout Hudson The show includes works made from materials found in Stemmler’s life.

“It’s interesting the way that social media works and doom scrolling works,” Stemmler says. “A lot of times when people are doom scrolling, they’re consuming information that is very poignant and real and painful to look at. I don’t know if this brings awareness that makes people more present or if it makes them less present. And for me, it tends to have both effects.”

Doom Scroll is about the danger of perspective. The show presents the three phases within the cycle of doom; first, a call-out of those wrongly writing history, second, an epitaph of those who have been misrepresented and lastly, a testimony of those caught powerlessly observing.

“Very seldomly is what really happened actually represented and taught to people. It creates this environment of distrust,” Stemmler says. “How can we trust the world around us when we’ve been sold lies upon lies upon lies?”

Doom Scroll is composed of two bodies of work, each reflecting both inward and outward. The first body features depictions of the artist’s most personal places, an intimate assemblage of Stemmler’s St. Louis — a city struck by entropy and grief. The other is a manifestation of spiraling thoughts that tells a narrative of an unabated anxiety’s razing both the individual and society. Displayed together, the two bodies of work evoke a feeling of festering and inescapable doom in the viewer.

“I had intended on doing a show that was about these really personal spaces, doing a lot of introspection and self-reflection through the work,” Stemmler says. “But as I started to develop this body of work, other ideas started coming out of it.” The show incorporates themes of death, memory and volatility, as Stemmler’s art merges together the issues they believe are innate to a capitalistic, neo-colonial society.

Stemmler’s work is anthropological because each piece is an artifact of both self and city, using materials that range from trash to plants from their everyday life, making the exhibit itself a living documentation. In a piece titled “Confluence Over Time,” live grass surrounds battered two-liters underneath a digitally altered amalgam of photographs taken at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers at Columbia Bottoms Conservation Area.

“A lot of times, [art depicts] this very romanticized idea of the landscape. I was more interested in conveying something real,” Stemmler says. “Looking at the contemporary landscape, you can’t see a landscape that doesn’t have trash.”

A theme of environmental justice weaves throughout the gallery yet is often entangled with the principles of hierarchy and death. In “Lovejoy,” Stemmler edited a photograph of the Elijah P. Lovejoy Monument, located in Alton, Illinois, saturating the sky with a blaring red hue. The piece mirrors the worsening air quality of the St. Louis metro area with the story of Lovejoy, a abolitionist writer who fled St. Louis in 1837 after his printing press was destroyed by slavery advocates. Shortly after relocating, Lovejoy was murdered by a pro-slavery mob. Stemmler believes the history of Lovejoy is too often left untold. click to enlarge Scout Hudson “Lovejoy” considers the story of Elijah P. Lovejoy.

Following Lovejoy, the show expands on the mutability of memory by examining the age-old axiom that “history is written by the victors.” In the piece “al-Quds,” Stemmler arranged a shelf of found objects from Jerusalem. Stemmler, who grew up in a multicultural home with Lebanese roots, feels the creation of this piece was an opportunity for them to reckon with their heritage. At the same time, they reexamined their Arab heritage and Christian upbringing in the larger context of the Israel-Palestine conflict. They note this process led to questions rather than conclusions, yet they wished more people would pursue a similar reflection.

All of these themes culminate in perhaps the most striking and most personal piece in the gallery: “False Memories at the Funerary Chapel.” Stemmler’s mother died when they were young, and they have carried a vivid memory of her funeral for much of their adult life. At the beginning of the Kranzberg residency, Stemmler returned to the funeral home where their mother’s service was held. In their memory, the image of a white, ceramic tiled archway and a fake shade tree near a fountain lingered for decades. When originally planning “Doom Scroll,” Stemmler envisioned a depiction of the tree representing resilience, an embodiment of a hopeful tenacity found even in the gravest of places. click to enlarge Scout Hudson “False Memories at the Funerary Chapel” is about Stemmler confronting their own false memories.

However, upon returning to the funerary chapel, the funeral home director of 30 years informed Stemmler that neither the fake tree nor the white tiling ever existed. At this moment, Stemmler was confronted with their own experience with false memory and, concurrently, realized a show about resilience would be inauthentic.

Stemmler began to question how false memories act as a coping mechanism, and how this can happen beyond the parameters of an individual’s mind. In this questioning, Stemmler found the crux of their show — the dilapidated Rivers, the exile of Lovejoy and their own misremembering of personal history, all contributing to larger themes of subjectivity and anguish.

Looming above the gallery are two signs, both taken by Stemmler from the streets of St. Louis: “$30 PER MONTH BURIAL INSURANCE”and “DIRECT CREMATION $600.” Below them, rest a pile of signage reading “GUN SHOW.” The signs cast a harrowing bleakness over the gallery, but for many St. Louis residents, these signs are not an unfamiliar sight. click to enlarge Scout Hudson The show incorporates found signs.

“These ideas are sold to us, and it’s like this wool pulled over our eyes,” Stemmler says. They often ponder the purpose of the signage. Many of the signs are placed in neighborhoods with histories of violence and police brutality. They wonder: Are the signs intended for residents or those just passing through? Are they intended to be reactive or proactive?The spiral of question of intentionality can be paralyzing for Stemmler. Yet, these questions are unavoidable as they are often cyclical. In “Doom Scroll,” the signs physically mimic the constant inundation of fear-based content seen on social media.

“Bringing in these different objects is evidence of what’s happening,” Stemmler says. “There’s this kind of loop.” For Stemmler, the objects uphold the burden of truth — they are proof of a society crumbling under impending doom.

In the back corner of the gallery rests a self portrait of a dead Stemmler. Delicate, decaying branches cage the artist’s partially decomposed body. The painting is muddled, as swathes of red, blue and green emanate from Stemmler’s body. Even in death, they exhibit an inescapable swarm of emotion.

The masterwork of Stemmler’s gallery is their depiction of intersectional and coinciding themes. While ostensibly separate, the theme of each piece connects it to the next, crafting a grim cohesion within the gallery. The pieces speak to each other, connected by the shared language of violence and identity.

“The theme of intersectionality, for me, is really more of an idea of holisticness and how these things are actually all tied together, ” says Stemmler. “Even though they don’t necessarily look like it, at the root, they really, really are.”

Doom Scroll will be open Saturdays from noon to 4 p.m. until July 20. Stemmler will deliver an artist’s talk at 1 p.m. on June 17. For more information, visit kranzbergartsfoundation.org/doomscroll/.

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Five Fun Facts About Busch Stadium You Didn’t Know

Published

10 months ago

July 30, 2024

Natural Bridge

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When baseball fans roll into St. Louis, Busch Stadium often tops their must-see list. But this iconic ballpark has more hidden gems beyond baseball — and even beyond its souvenir shops and good hotdogs. Here’s a lineup of interesting facts that’ll make you the MVP in Busch Stadium trivia.

From Ballpark to Brewing Brand Deal

A 1900 postcard showing the Oyster House of Tony Faust, founder of the brewing firm | Courtesy Anheuser-Busch.

Busch Stadium has a past that’s more refreshing than a cold beer. Before becoming the shrine of Cardinals baseball, it was a multipurpose park called Sportsman”s Park in 1953. Anheuser-Busch, the brewing giant that owned the Cardinals for a time, purchased the stadium and called it Busch Stadium.

Talk about brewing a partnership with a home run!

Museum for Baseball Maniacs

One can explore unique stadium models, step into the broadcast booth to relive Cardinals’ historic moments and hold authentic bats from team legends in this Museum | Courtesy Cardinals Nation

The St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame and Museum is an 8,000-square-foot tribute to baseball’s rich history. Opening on the Cardinals’ 2014 Opening Day, this shrine charts the team’s stories from its 1882 beginnings when it was still called the American Association Browns. Here, you can revel in the team’s 11 World Series Championships and 19 pennants. And if you’re feeling adventurous, watch the game from the museum’s roof—the Hoffmann Brothers Rooftop—complete with a full-service bar and an all-you-can-eat menu. It’s like VIP seating, but with more hot dogs.

Even the Fans Break World Records

Busch Stadium is more than a ballpark; it’s a record-breaking arena.

In one memorable event, Nathan’s Famous set a Guinness World Record for the most selfies taken simultaneously—4,296, to be exact. Just imagine trying to squeeze all those selfies into a single frame!

Not to be outdone, Edward Jones and the Alzheimer’s Association formed the largest human image of a brain on the field in 2018. With 1,202 people, the image was like a giant, multi-colored brain freeze.

1,202 people gathered in centerfield at Busch Stadium to form a multi-coloured brain image | Screenshot from Guinness World Records.

The MLB Park in Your Backyard

Are you an avid Cardinals fan, thinking about living near the stadium? The cost of living in the area might be in your favor.

A 2017 study by Estately.com shows that media prices for homes around Busch Stadium is the fourth least expensive among around 26 major MLB stadiums. When San Francisco Giants fans have to pay up $1,197,000 that year for the same convenience of catching a game at a walking distance, Cardinal fans can snag real estate at only $184,900. If that’s not a walk-off win of a deal, we’re not sure what is.

Big Cleats to Fill as Busch Stadium Eyes Expansion

Those wanting to invest in property near Busch Stadium better get it while it’s still affordable. Rumor has it Busch Stadium could soon expand. That rumor has been going around for three decades since talks to raise public money allegedly started. We’ll believe it when we see it.

According to Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt III, plans are likely to mirror recent projects for the Milwaukee Brewers and Baltimore Orioles, with price tags hovering around $500 to $600 million. But the real investment is still up for debates pending a concrete cost-benefit analysis on the stadium’s surrounding area.

So the next time you kick back with a cold beer and catch a game at Busch Stadium, be in awe of the fact there’s more to the place than what meets the batter’s eye. Pitch these interesting facts at trivia night or to your Hinge date who’s new in town. Who knows – you might just win a home run beer.

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Nashville Police Officer Arrested for Appearing in Adult Video

Published

11 months ago

June 14, 2024

Natural Bridge

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A Nashville police officer, Sean Herman, 33, has been arrested and charged with two counts of felony official misconduct after allegedly appearing in an adult video on OnlyFans while on duty. Herman was fired one day after detectives became aware of the video last month.

The video, titled “Can’t believe he didn’t arrest me,” shows Herman, participating in a mock traffic stop while in uniform, groping a woman’s breasts, and grabbing his genitals through his pants. The officer’s face is not visible, but his cruiser, patrol car, and Metro Nashville Police Department patch on his shoulder are clearly visible.

The Metro Nashville Police Department launched an investigation immediately upon discovering the video. The internal investigation determined Herman to be the officer appearing in the video. He was fired on May 9 and arrested on June 14, with a bond set at $3,000.

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Jane Smiley’s New Novel, Lucky, Draws on Her Charmed St. Louis Childhood

Published

1 year ago

May 22, 2024

Natural Bridge

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Like any good St. Louisan, Jane Smiley has an opinion on the high school question.

“If you ask somebody in St. Louis, ‘Where did you go to high school’ — because each school is so unique, you do get a sense of what their life was like and where they live,” says the John Burroughs graduate. “Where are you from? What do you like? And, you know, the answer is always interesting.”

That’s pretty much what Jodie Rattler, the main character of Smiley’s latest novel, Lucky, thinks.

“School, in St. Louis, is a big question, especially high school,” Rattler muses toward the start of the story. “… My theory about this is not that the person who asks wants to judge you for your socioeconomic position, rather that he or she wants to imagine your neighborhood, since there are so many, and they are all different.”

This parallel thought pattern is even less of a coincidence than the author/subject relationship implies. Lucky, which Alfred A. Knopf published last month, is nominally the story of Jodie, a folk musician gone fairly big who hails from our fair town. But the book is more than just its plot: It’s an ode to St. Louis and an exploration of the life Jane Smiley might have lived — if only a few things were different.

The trail to Lucky started in 2019, when Smiley returned here for her 50th high school reunion and agreed to a local interview. The radio host asked why she’d never set a novel in St. Louis.

“I thought, ‘Boy, why haven’t I done that?'” Smiley remembers. “And so then I thought, ‘Well, maybe I should think about it.’ And I decided since I love music, and St. Louis is a great music town, that I would maybe do an alternative biography of myself if I had been a musician, and of course I would say where she went to [high] school. So that’s what got me started. And the more I got into it, the more I enjoyed it.” click to enlarge DEREK SHAPTON Jane Smiley rocketed to literary stardom after winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for A Thousand Acres. She now has more than 25 books to her name.

The Life Jane Smiley Didn’t Live

Jane Smiley has always felt really lucky.

First, there was her background: She grew up with a “very easygoing and fun family.” Growing up in Webster Groves, she enjoyed wandering through the adjacent neighborhoods and exploring how spaces that were so close together could have such different vibes.

Then there was her career, which kicked into gear when she was 42 with the publication of A Thousand Acres, a retelling of King Lear set on a farm in Iowa. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1991 and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1992. It became a movie and, two years ago, an opera. Since then, she’s been steadily publishing and now has more than 25 books to her name.

“I was lucky in the way that my career got started,” Smiley says. “It was lucky in a way that it continued. I was lucky to win the Pulitzer. And I really enjoyed that. I said, ‘OK, I want to write about someone who’s lucky, but I don’t want it to be me. Because I want to contemplate the idea of luck, and see how maybe it works for somebody else.'”

click to enlarge

Both the book, and Jodie’s good luck, start at Cahokia Downs in 1955. Jodie’s Uncle Drew, a father stand-in, takes her to the racetrack and has her select the numbers on a bet that turns his last $6 into $5,986. She gets $86 of the winnings in a roll of $2 bills.

Smiley, a horse lover throughout her life, used to love looking at the horses at the racetrack before she understood how “corrupt it is at work.” (She also reminisces about pony rides at the corner of Brentwood and Manchester across from St. Mary Magdalen Church and riding her horse at Otis Brown Stables.)

Unlike Smiley, Jodie is not a horse person. And at first, Jodie feels somewhat disconnected from her luck — it’s something other people tell her that she possesses. She’s lucky to live where she does. She’s lucky that her mom doesn’t make her clear her plate, that her uncle has a big house, that she gets into John Burroughs. Later, she begins to carry those bills around as a talisman.

“[I] made a vow never to spend that roll of two-dollar bills — that was where the luck lived,” Jodie thinks after a narrow miss with a tornado.

It’s John Burroughs that changes Jodie’s life, just as it did Smiley’s. But instead of falling in love with books in high school and becoming a writer, Jodie falls into music. She eventually gets into songwriting, penning tunes as a sophomore at Penn State that launch her career.

One of Jodie’s songs should instantly resonate for St. Louis readers.

“The third one was about an accident I heard had happened in St. Louis,” Jodie recalls in the book, “a car going off the bridge over the River des Peres, which may have once been a river but was now a sewer. My challenge was to make sense of the story while sticking in a bunch of odd St. Louis street names — Skinker, of course, DeBaliviere, Bompart, Chouteau, Vandeventer. The chorus was about Big Bend. The song made me cry, but I never sang it to anyone but myself.”

Throughout the book are Jodie’s lyrics, alongside the events that inspire them. Writing them was a new experience for Smiley, who found herself picking up a banjo gifted by an ex and strumming the few songs she’d managed to learn, as well as revisiting the popular music of the novel’s time — the Beatles (George is Smiley’s favorite), Janis Joplin and the Traveling Wilburys, along with Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and Peter, Paul and Mary — basically “all the folk singers.”

“I really love music, and I do wish I’d managed to practice, which I was always a failure at,” Smiley says. “… I liked that they made up their own lyrics, and they made their own music, and I was impressed by that.”

Both Smiley and Jodie grew up in households replete with record players and music. It’s one of their great commonalities.

A great difference between the two? That would be sex. At one point, Jodie compares her body count, which she calls the “Jodie Club,” with a lover — 25 (rounded up, Jodie notes) to his 150.

“That was a lot of fun,” says Smiley. “She learns a lot from having those affairs, and she enjoys it. She’s careful. And I like the fact that she never gets married, and she doesn’t really have any regrets about that.” (Smiley has been married four times.) “In some sense, her musical career has made her want to explore those kinds of issues of love and connection and sex and the way guys are.”

You can tell Smiley had a good time writing this. After Jodie loses her virginity, she thinks, “The erection had turned into a rather cute thing that flopped to one side.”

“Oh, it was fun,” Smiley confirms. “Sometimes I would say, ‘OK, what can I have Jodie do next? What’s something completely different than what I did when I was her age?’ And then I’d have to think about that and try and come up with something that was actually interesting. I knew that she couldn’t do all the things that I had done, and she had to be kind of a different person than I was. And so I made her a little more independent, and a little more determined.”

click to enlarge VIA THE SCHOOL YEARBOOK Jane Smiley’s high school yearbook photo. In Lucky, Jodie recalls of a classmate, “The gawky girl had stuck her head into a basketball basket, taken hold of the rim, and her caption was, ‘They always have the tall girls guard the basket.'”

Lucky follows Jodie from childhood to into her late 60s. At several points in the novel, she crosses paths with a Burroughs classmate, identified only as the “gawky girl.” Jodie takes note of her former classmate, but she’s not recognized.

Toward the end, Jodie walks into Left Bank Books and sees the gawky girl’s name on the cover of a novel.

“Out of curiosity, I read a few things about the gawky girl. Apparently she really had been to Greenland, and the Pulitzer novel was based on King Lear, which I thought was weird, but I did remember that when we read King Lear in senior English, I hadn’t liked it,” Jodie thinks. “… I remembered walking past her in the front hall of the school, maybe a ways down from the front door. She was standing there smiling, her glasses sliding down her nose, and one of the guys in our class, one of the outgoing ones, not one of the math nerds that abounded, stopped and looked at her, and said, ‘You know, I would date you if you weren’t so tall.'”

Sound familiar? Does it help to know Smiley is 6’2″?

The doppelgangers meet face to face after their 50th Burroughs’ reunion at the Fox and Hounds bar at the Cheshire. To go into what happens next — it’s too much of a spoiler.

“In every book, there’s always a surprise,” Smiley says. click to enlarge ZACHARY LINHARES Smiley enjoys St. Louis place names, and DeBaliviere is one of many in the novel.

Jodie Rattler’s St. Louis

Lucky is a smorgasbord of familiar names and places for St. Louis readers, and picking them out will be a big part of the joy of the book for locals.

“I love many things about St. Louis — not exactly the humidity, but lots of other things,” Smiley says. “One of the things I love is how weird the street names are. So I had to put her in that house on Skinker, and I had to refer to a few other places that are kind of weird. I couldn’t fit them all in.

“But I love the way that those street names and St. Louis are a real mix, and some of them are true French street names. Some of them are true English street names. Like Grav-wah or Grav-whoy” — here she deploys first the French and then the St. Louis version of “Gravois” — “whatever you want to call it, and Clark. It’s just really interesting to look around there and sense all of the different cultures that lived there and went through there.”

Jodie grows up in a house on Skinker near Big Bend. It’s “a pale golden color, with the tile roof and the little balcony,” Smiley writes. Jodie walks through Forest Park and eats at Schneithorst’s. Her mother works at the Muny; she shops at Famous Barr. Her grandfather prefers the “golf course near our house on Skinker,” which must be the Forest Park course. Jodie goes to Cardinals games, the Saint Louis Zoo and Grant’s Farm. She visits and thinks about St. Louis’ parks such as Tilles and Babler. Even the county jail in Clayton gets a mention.

Of course, Chuck Berry shows up several times, first mentioned for getting “in trouble for doing something that I wouldn’t understand.” Later, as Jodie drives by his home, she drops some shade on the county along the way: “Aunt Louise knew where Phyllis Schlafly’s house was, so I drove past there — another reason not to choose Ladue,” she writes.

Jodie and the man who invented rock & roll later meet face-to-face briefly at a festival near San Jose, California. “My favorite parts were getting to walk up to Chuck Berry and say, ‘I’m from St. Louis, too. Skinker!’ and having him reply, ‘Cards, baby!’ and know that no one nearby knew what in the world we were talking about,” Jodie recalls.

Lucky feels like a bit of a members-only club, and here the club is St. Louis. There is barely a page that is without some kind of reference — to the point where one might wonder if non-locals can even keep up. (Though they should rest assured: It’s a good read.)

“I write more or less to do what I want to do, and so I wrote about the things that interested me,” Smiley says. And more than 50 years after she graduated high school and left Webster Groves for Iowa and (briefly) Iceland and California, where she lives today, St. Louis, clearly, qualifies.

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