“All of us grow up in particular realities — a home, family, a clan, a small town, a neighborhood. Depending upon how we’re brought up,
we are either deeply aware of the particular reading of reality into which we are born, or we are peripherally aware of it.” — Chaim Potok
YOU: What the heck is Evelyn Avenue?
BRIAN PERA: Evelyn Avenue is a street in Memphis, Tennessee, located in the “midtown” area. There are tons of trees, old houses, people walking dogs or riding their bikes. Sometimes the dogs crap in your yard. Sometimes their owners have a plastic baggie and they pick it up. There’s a street festival or two every year, and on Halloween everybody sits out in their front yards on lawn chairs. There’s an independent video store down the street. There are no garages, so you’re encouraged to say hello to your neighbors when you get in and out of your car, or to avoid them more creatively.
I met Ryan Parker, one of my most frequent collaborators, on Evelyn Avenue. We lived next door to each other for a while. We made a film together called The Way I See Things, using the street and the surrounding area in numerous scenes and shots. We shot some of it at his house, and edited it there, watching the movie go through its various stages of development as part of our everyday domestic landscape. A little gate joined our back yards. Sometimes we opened it and let my dog terrorize his dogs.
Later, Ryan moved away, but he and most of my collaborators still live pretty close by, and we come in and out of each other's houses regularly, scheming or plotting about new projects. When it came time to build a site I thought a lot about how the internet is a kind of neighborhood, like midtown, with people coming and going and weird, temporary to lasting relationships, links, and alliances. I wanted to create something online which is like a specific geographic gathering place, with an architecture you recognize the moment you arrive, something that speaks to specific times and places, and familiar faces milling around, along with the sense that, when you step inside, those people have gathered to do interesting things. The way we live life now is a jumbled, sometimes amazing, sometimes crazy-making mixture of online, disconnected connection and real time down the street interaction. Evelyn Avenue, for me, acknowledges the way those spheres work in tandem, the way my yard and Ryan’s yard were connected and flowed into each other.
YOU: What does Evelyn Avenue do?
BRIAN PERA: Evelyn Avenue produces several film series. Among these are Woman’s Picture and the eponymously titled Evelyn Avenue. We release some of these on DVD. All of them are posted on the site at one point or another. We publish an occasional magazine about the stuff we like. When we see somebody interesting in the neighborhood, we sit them down to talk, and record it, and post the conversation, so you’re sitting there too. We collaborate with perfumer Andy Tauer on a perfume line called Tableau de Parfums, which takes inspiration from the characters in Woman’s Picture, women based on people I grew up around. We keep a blog about everything from movies to perfume.
YOU: Who is Evelyn Avenue?
BRIAN PERA: People come and go. The Evelyn Avenue series documents some of these arrivals and departures.
Some of our principal collaborators are:
Savannah Bearden — filmmaker, performer
Jessica Jones — musician, artist
Mark Jones — filmmaker
Catherine Keenan — producer
Eileen Meyer — filmmaker, editor
Ryan Parker — filmmaker, editor, performer
Andy Tauer — perfumer
Regular drop-in’s and drive-by’s:
Peter Budd — filmmaker
Bard Cole — writer, performer
Jeannette Comans-West — performer
Angela Dee — performer, filmmaker, editor
Melissa Dunn — artist
Elisa Gabbert — writer
Kim Howard — performer
Michael Hunkele — sound, performer
Jonathan Kirkscey — musician, composer
Amy Lavere — musician, performer
Jack Mason — writer
April Novak — performer
Paul Taylor — musician, composer
Cheryl Wolder — musician, performer
Friends who live out of town and visit periodically:
Calpernia Addams — performer, musician, filmmaker, writer
Ann Magnuson — performer, musician, writer
Paul Provenza — comedian, performer, filmmaker, writer
YOU: How do I get to you on the real Evelyn Avenue, if I want to come over and hang out?
BRIAN PERA: That would be awkward. Please contact us on the site.