Profs and Pints - Nashville

Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “A Campy Summer Evening,” on a distinct style and its history, politics, and pleasures, with Stephanie A. Graves, lecturer in English at Middle Tennessee State University and scholar of film, television, and media.

[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/campy-summer-evening ]

When something is called “campy,” what does that mean? What exactly is camp style, and why does it remain so culturally provocative?

Throw on something outlandish and come to Nashville’s Fait La Force taproom to hear answers delivered by Stephanie Graves, whose past talks have earned her a loyal following among Profs and Pints fans.

She’ll look at camp in film, television, fashion, music, and popular culture, moving from Oscar Wilde to Trixie Mattel, from classic Hollywood melodrama to contemporary internet memes.

In defining camp, she’ll describe its association with excess, drama, irony, and artifice. She’ll discuss how it’s evoked in the play with gender and sexuality in Rocky Horror Picture Show, in the visual excess and exaggerated style of Pee Wee’s Playhouse, and in art as varied as Wilde’s plays and Lady Gaga’s concerts.

We’ll look at how camp thrives in the spaces where “good” and “bad” taste and “high” and “low” art collapse into one another, such as in John Waters’s Hairspray and Pink Flamingos, in RuPaul’s Drag Race, and in the films of Baz Luhrmann. More than just an aesthetic of flamboyance or kitsch, camp emphasizes stylization, performance, and spectacle in ways that deliberately provoke cultural norms of respectability and decorum.

You’ll learn how the tenets of camp were widely popularized by writer Susan Sontag in her influential 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” In reality, however, camp’s history stretches back much further, emerging from queer subcultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and flourishing in spaces where humor, performance, parody, and coded self-expression became tools of survival for marginalized communities. It was carried forward in the glamour of old Hollywood stars, the theatricality of disco and drag culture, the hyper-femininity of contemporary pop icons, and in the pleasures of cult films and television.

We’ll consider why camp continues to resonate—and why exaggeration, artifice, and “bad taste” still carries surprising cultural power. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image by Canva.

Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Understanding Urban Legends,” an exploration of the tales we tell to terrify each other, with Cory Thomas Hutcheson, folklorist, lecturer at Middle Tennessee State University, and author of New World Witchery: A Trove of North American Folk Magic.

[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/nashville-urban-legends .]

The call is coming from inside Fait La Force! Or if it were, anyway, it would summon you to sit at one of the beloved taproom’s tables for a summertime treat: A talk about that modern folktales that get circulated around campfires, on school playgrounds, and in the dark corners of the internet.

Folklorist Cory Thomas Hutcheson, whose reputation for giving excellent talks has earned him a following among Nashville’s Profs and Pints fans, will give you a deeper understanding and appreciation of urban legends—also called contemporary legends—than you have ever had before.

You’ll recognize something hauntingly familiar as he talks about a hook-handed killer terrorizing teenage lovers out for a drive, or the person who woke up in a tub full of ice possessing one less kidney, or a shadowy figure shown by an ongoing trucker’s headlights to be in the backseat of a car.

But he’ll also lead you deeper into such lore, discussing where such tales come from and the deeper meanings that drive them and keep them alive via word-of-mouth or their online circulation on subreddits.

You’ll gain an understanding of how these stories connect to bigger issues in the culture around us.

You’ll see how anxieties about disease and contagion became stories about food contamination or about vicious ghosts wearing medical masks, and how both teen and adult fears about teens growing up too fast became tales of amorous adolescents pursued by sadistic killers.

You’ll also learn a bit about how these tales change over time with different tellings and tellers, and whether troubling facts lurk within any such fictional accounts. You'll encounter murderous bathroom ghosts, traverse the haunting liminal-space lore that inspired the new hit film Backrooms, and meet the infamous Slenderman.

Just make sure you check your backseat before you start driving home. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: A hatchet purported to have been wielded by Virginia’s notorious Bunnyman. (Photo by KeeferC / Wikimedia Commons.)