Issue 17 - July 2, 2015

JULY 2, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

NOT A BAD WEEK, EH?

1 / N.17

V.

Victor Agreda Jr. is the best known tech media personality from Knoxville. Then AOL shut his site down and laid him off.

So what’s he going to do next? ■ BY COURY TURCZYN

NEWS

Knoxvillians Celebrate Marriage Equality

JACK NEELY

Was the South Ever Confederate, Anyway?

MUSIC

Frog & Toad Cover the Outskirts of Jazz

ELEANOR SCOTT

Checking in on the Labor Day Sunflower Project

The Glorious Fourth Knoxville has been celebrating the Fourth of July longer than any other holiday.

The first known celebration of Independence Day in Knoxville was on July 4, 1793, before Tennesssee was even a state, and just 17 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. Knoxville was then capital of the federally administered Southwestern Territory.

In charge was Commander William Rickard, a U.S. soldier who was in charge of the federal garrison at the blockhouse, located where the old courthouse is today. It was a lengthy event, starting with a parade of soldiers at 2:00, and a “federal salute” fired with cannons. The 2:00 time was significant, because that was the traditional time of the ratification. At 4:00, a Fourth of July banquet commenced.

the United States. America was a new place, and the Fourth of July was its own new holiday.

Knoxville was home to one signer of the U.S. Constitution, William Blount, who represented North Carolina at the constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Knoxville was never home to a signer of the Declaration of Independence. By the time Knoxville was founded in 1791, almost half the signers of the Declaration had already died. However, there’s evidence that George Walton, who did sign the Declaration in 1776, representing Georgia, visited Knoxville in 1798.

It’s not clear whether Knoxville celebrated the Fourth in such a public way every single year, but by the 1820s, celebrating the Fourth in Knoxville was a regular thing. In 1851, ironAt the banquet, leaders raised 15 toasts to worker William Martin was killed during honorees including Gov. William Blount, Fourth of July celebrations, when a cannon signer of the Constitution and governor of Elizabeth Kennedy party, July 4, 1895. C.M. McClung exploded downtown, near the what’s now the Southwestern Territory; his superior, Historical Collection, Knox County Public Library Lincoln Memorial University’s law school. He Secretary of War Henry Knox, for whom cmdc.knoxlib.org was the first person buried in Old Gray Knoxville was named; the Marquis de Cemetery (then known, of course, as Gray Lafayette, the popular French soldier who Cemetery). He was buried there almost a year before the new helped with the Revolution; Chief Piomingo and the Chickasaw cemetery was officially dedicated.

Nation, who at the time were cooperating with the United States; and negotiators for Spain and the United States, who had just During the Civil War, the holiday was a quandary for the Confedarranged to assure free navigation of the Mississippi River. A final eracy. After major Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg toast hailed “the friends of freedom, who are this day assembled to coincided with the Fourth of July, 1863, it came to seem a Union celebrate the glorious epoch of our liberty.” holiday, and many Southern whites declined to celebrate the Fourth, even for decades after the war. However, Knoxville always After that, Rickard’s men “fired a feu de joie which, from the celebrated the holiday each year, usually with a big parade. darkness of the evening and the judicious manner in which the company was disposed, produced a pleasing effect; after which During the late 1800s and early 1900s, Knoxvillians often took the there was a display of fireworks, from an elegant colonnade in trolleys to big special events at Chilhowee Park and Fountain City from of Mr. Rickard’s marque.” Feu de joie is French for “fire of joy” Park, to see baseball games and vaudeville acts, but also participate and refers to a continuous rifle salute in which successive shots in picnics, bicycle races, and dances. create the illusion of a continous sound.

It was probably the first holiday ever publicly celebrated in Knoxville. At the time, Thanksgiving was in its infancy as a tradition, not celebrated in most of the country. Christmas was considered an Old World holiday, rarely mentioned in

Since 1984, the city has held some version of its Festival on the Fourth, with fireworks and performances by the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, on World’s Fair Park.

Source: Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection. For more about this week’s festivities, see knoxvilletn.gov/4th/

The Knoxville History Project, a new nonprofit organization devoted to the promotion of and education about the history of Knoxville, presents this page each week to raise awareness of the themes, personalities, and stories of our unique city.

Learn more on www.facebook.com/knoxvillehistoryproject • email jack@knoxhistoryproject.org 2

KNOXVILLE MERCURY July 2, 2015

July 2, 2015 Volume 01 / Issue 17 knoxmercury.com

CONTENTS

“Equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it.” —Frances Wright

14 Confessions of a Digital Worker COVER STORY

As a writer and editor of The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Victor Agreda Jr. guided what was one of the most respected Apple news blogs in tech media, leading a staff of bloggers from his Knoxville home. That ended abruptly in February when its owner, AOL, decided to “simplify” its portfolio of brands by shutting down TUAW. Since then, Agreda has been improvising a freelance career based in his living room. The new vocation he has been striving most to get off the ground: playing video games live on the Internet while people watch. But can he possibly make a living at it? Coury Turczyn asks him just that.

NEWS

Join Our League of Supporters!

12 Unbanned On Friday, supporters of marriage equality gathered at the Tennessee Amphitheater less than nine hours after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage nationwide in Obergefell v. Hodges. The court ruling struck down Tennessee’s 9-year-old ban on gay marriage and ended restrictions in 14 other states, opening the legal door for couples here to be married and allowing recognition for existing marriages like those between Knoxville’s Sophy Jesty and her wife, Valeria Tanco, whose suit was part of decision. McCord Pagan reports.

DEPARTMENTS

OPINION

A&E

4 6

8

20

38

Mercury Meetup: Fountain City Howdy Start Here: New photo series by Bart Ross, Believe It or Knox!, Public Affairs, Quote Factory.

PLUS: Words With … Lisa Horstman ’Bye Finish There: Sacred & Profane by Donna Johnson, Crooked Street Crossword by Ian Blackburn and Jack Neely, Spirit of the Staircase by Matthew Foltz-Gray

10

The Scruffy Citizen Jack Neely disputes the idea that the Confederacy was ever really popular in the South to begin with.

Possum City Eleanor Scott visits preparations for the Labor Day Sunflower Project—which entails planting sunflowers.

21 22 23 24

Publishing a weekly paper turns out to be really expensive and difficult to do.

Won’t you help us get the job done? Find out how at knoxmercury.com/join.

CALENDAR Program Notes: McCord Pagan reports on changes at the venerable Longbranch Saloon. And a Joy of Music School grad returns.

Shelf Life: Chris Barrett surveys the public library’s collection of Beatles videos.

Music: Jack Neely explores the many saxophones of Frog & Toad.

26

Spotlights: Dale Watson and His Lone Stars, Lilly Hiatt

FOOD & DRINK

34

Dirt to Fork Rose Kennedy goes shopping at the new United Grocery Outlet in South Knoxville.

Movies: April Snellings is eventually overcome by Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.

Books: Bryan Charles finds a few things not worth keeping in Stephen King’s Finders Keepers.

July 2, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 3

LETTERS Delivering Fine Journalism Since 2015

MERCURY MEETUP #2: FOUNTAIN CITY

After work on Wednesday, June 24, our small but hardy staff ventured out to the northern reaches of Fountain City to visit the Casual Pint off North Broadway. It was our second Mercury Meetup, our new series of monthly get-togethers in different neighborhoods wherein we rendezvous with readers. We were greeted by some very hospitable residents, including teachers, community leaders, and even former Knoxville Mayor Victor Ashe.

Stories were told and lots of craft beers were consumed. Look for our next Mercury Meetup at Gourmet’s Market in Bearden, July 22 starting at 7 a.m.—yep, it’s a coffee klatch for those who want to chat before going to work. See you then!

—Coury Turczyn, ed.

EDITORIAL EDITOR

Coury Turczyn coury@knoxmercury.com SENIOR EDITOR

Matthew Everett matthew@knoxmercury.com CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Jack Neely jack@knoxhistoryproject.org STAFF WRITER

S. Heather Duncan heather@knoxmercury.com CONTRIBUTORS

Chris Barrett Ian Blackburn Bryan Charles Patrice Cole Eric Dawson George Dodds Lee Gardner Mike Gibson Carey Hodges Nick Huinker Donna Johnson

Rose Kennedy Dennis Perkins Stephanie Piper Ryan Reed Eleanor Scott Alan Sherrod April Snellings Joe Sullivan Kim Trevathan William Warren Chris Wohlwend

EDITORIAL INTERNS

Liv McConnell McCord Pagan Jack Evans

DESIGN ART DIRECTOR

Tricia Bateman tricia@knoxmercury.com GRAPHIC DESIGNERS

Charlie Finch Corey McPherson CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

David Luttrell Shawn Poynter Justin Fee Tyler Oxendine CONTRIBUTING ILLUSTRATORS

Ben Adams Matthew Foltz-Gray

ADVERTISING PUBLISHER & DIRECTOR OF SALES

Charlie Vogel charlie@knoxmercury.com SENIOR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES

Scott Hamstead scott@knoxmercury.com Stacey Pastor stacey@knoxmercury.com

BUSINESS DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS

Jerry Collins jerry@knoxmercury.com

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 706 Walnut St., Suite 404, Knoxville, Tenn. 37902 knoxmercury.com • 865-313-2059 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR & PRESS RELEASES

editor@knoxmercury.com CALENDAR SUBMISSIONS

calendar@knoxmercury.com SALES QUERIES

sales@knoxmercury.com DISTRIBUTION

distribution@knoxmercury.com The Knoxville Mercury is an independent weekly news magazine devoted to informing and connecting Knoxville’s many different communities. It is a taxable, not-for-profit company governed by the Knoxville History Project, a non-profit organization devoted to exploring, disseminating, and celebrating Knoxville’s unique cultural heritage. It publishes 25,000 copies per week, available free of charge, limited to one copy per reader. © 2015 The Knoxville Mercury

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY July 2, 2015

r o t h f is re por ter’s salar y ! y a p p l e H

a d u D y intrepid

Cl

ajournalist

By signing up with the Knoxville Mercury League of Supporters, you’ll help keep independent journalism alive in Knoxville with your donations—and earn some swanky perks.

This year’s inaugural fundraising drive has a specific goal: to bring in-depth investigative reporting back to Knoxville.

To do that, we’re going to hire our first full-time reporter.

Learn more about Clay Duda, his family’s epic journey across the country to Knoxville, and how to donate at:

knoxmercury.com/join OR SEND A CHECK BY MAIL Knoxville Mercury 706 Walnut St., Suite 404 Knoxville, TN 37902 Attn: League of Supporters

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July 2, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 5

Illustration by Ben Adams

HOWDY

Believe It or Knox!

BY Z. HERACLITUS KNOX The Beatles never performed in Knoxville, and the only one of the lads who ever performed here individually was original drummer Pete Best, who did a show at the Bijou Theatre in the 1990s.

However, in the summer of 1974, Paul McCartney spent an evening in a West Knoxville motel BECAUSE HIS CAR BROKE DOWN!

“The Dancing Sisters or Tennessee Ampitheatre Knoxville TN V” by Bart Ross (bartross.com)

QUOTE FACTORY “ While the Supreme Court did not stand up for traditional marriage, this decision does not end the institution.”

—Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey. Which is exactly the same point that proponents of same-sex marriage legalization have been making for years.

PUBLIC AFFAIRS

7/2 KWG OPEN MIC NIGHT THURSDAY

7 p.m. Laurel Theater. Free.

This one’s not for stand-ups, but rather Knoxville’s authors. Take a sneak peek at literary works in progress at the Knoxville Writers Guild’s annual open mic. KWG members get three minutes max each to share what they’ve been working on.

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY July 2, 2015

7/4 FESTIVAL ON THE 4TH SATURDAY

4-10 p.m., World’s Fair Park. Free.

We can absolutely say, without hesitation, that this year’s Fourth of July celebration will be unlike any the city has conducted before. How can this possibly be? One word: 3-D. (Wait, is that really a word?) Yup. The city’s Office of Special Events will be handing out free 3-D glasses (while supplies last) to view the pyrotechnics. Now, you may be wondering how three-dimensional fireworks could be even more three-dimensional with glasses. So are we. We’ll see you there! Fireworks start at 9:40 p.m.

7/8 ACO WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS OF CORNHOLE X TUESDAY

9 a.m., Knoxville Convention Center. Free.

That’s right, Knoxville—we’ve got a WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP, right here in town, for CORNHOLE. (Note: also known as “bean toss.”) The action starts on Wednesday night with a kick-off party and then slides right on through till the ultimate championship competition on Saturday (tickets for that are $8).

Info: americancornhole.com.

Although Knoxville can’t claim to have invented the concept of mild sausages served in a bun, a culinary scholar’s research suggests THE TERM “HOT DOG” WAS FIRST USED IN A KNOXVILLE NEWSPAPER IN 1893! It was, by then, a common snack served by downtown street vendors.

Helen Mundy, the star of the 1927 silent feature Stark Love, filmed in the North Carolina mountains, was discovered by a director in a Gay Street soda fountain counter—10 YEARS BEFORE THE SETTING OF A SIMILAR LEGEND ABOUT LANA TURNER IN HOLLYWOOD, which has since been refuted. Briefly a sensation in New York and Hollywood, dating major actors like William Powell, Mundy was offered other film roles, but married a bandleader and vanished from the limelight, eventually settling for a life of domesticity in Michigan.

7/9 JUILLIARD JAZZ FOR JOY THURSDAY

6:30 p.m., Emporium Center (100 South Gay St.). $25 to $125.

This fundraiser for the Joy of Music School, the local nonprofit that gives free music lessons and instruments to financially disadvantaged kids, is especially poignant: One of the performers is a graduate who went on to win a scholarship to the Juilliard Jazz Studies program led by Wynton Marsalis. Pianist Taber Gable is returning after his first year of studies to give back to the program that gave so much to him. Info: joyofmusicschool.org.

HOWDY

THINKING OF GOING PAPERLESS?

WORDS WITH ...

Photo by David Whittle

Lisa Horstman

BY ROSE KENNEDY Lisa Horstman is the author and illustrator of Sabrina: A Great Smoky Mountains Story, with sales benefitting the Great Smoky Mountain Association.

Horstman created the book with a technique she pioneered that combines painting and handmade puppets. Sabrina is a “special kind of squirrel” who must forge her way after escaping an owl.

Do we have to read the book to find out why Sabrina is so special?

She is special in the way that any baby flying squirrel who lands in a nest of red squirrels is special. She has to find a way to fit in. That’s all I’m sayin’ here, mac.

Have you ever seen a flying squirrel?

I’ve seen a frozen dead one. My editor for the project sent me one so I could see one up close.

Northern flying squirrels are endangered in Appalachia due to climate changes. If you’re lucky, you can see them at night in the upper elevations of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, coasting from tree to tree. In Knoxville, I suppose you’d have a better chance of seeing Southern flying squirrels, but since they’re nocturnal you’d see them mostly at night.

What’s cool about Sabrina the fictional character?

Sabrina is brave, even in the wake of her entire family getting wiped out by an owl. And she doesn’t hold grudges against red squirrels who mock her. And she doesn’t whine about it, either.

Do you have any background in biology or conservation?

was actually kind of reluctant to do this book. My dad was very ill with Alzheimer’s and I was feeling burned out creating children’s books, so the timing felt off. Eventually Steve Kemp, who is publications director at GSMA, talked me into it. Then my dad died in April 2014, and I was faced with creating the art and designing the book while mourning his death. I suppose I poured out all of that anger and sadness into getting the work done. Maybe it helped me get through the aftermath, I don’t know.

What will happen with the money this book raises?

Proceeds go back into the welfare of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. That’s why GSMA is such a fantastic organization—everything they earn goes back into caring for the Smokies.

Have you been asked intriguing questions at Sabrina book signings thus far?

Sometimes I get asked where the restrooms are.

Once a woman asked if I knew where a wastebasket was because she had some scrap paper and didn’t want to throw it on the ground. But I’m also starting to get people who enjoyed my books when they were children, and they’re now buying copies for their kids.

I have about as much background in biology or conservation as a turnip. But this is not a textbook.

It’s a story meant to entertain children while giving them some basic information and getting them interested in their outdoor surroundings. I rely on National Park Service rangers and biologists for the real expert information.

What’s in the works for you?

How long does a book like this take you, the artist?

Union Ave Books (517 Union Ave,) will host a reading and signing of Sabrina July 11 at 11 a.m. Buy the book online at smokiesinformation.org/shop/sabrina-3047 or at select regional booksellers.

A picture book usually takes about nine months to a year to create if you both write and illustrate it. I

I am currently writing and illustrating an epic-sized graphic novel for adults that takes place in 1932.

I’ve been immersing myself in music from the era, and have been collecting 78 rpm records to play while I write or draw the pages. I can’t quite believe I’m doing this. But I am.

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July 2, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 7

SCRUFFY CITIZEN

Some Flag Math Was the South ever Confederate, anyway?

BY JACK NEELY

E

verybody has an opinion about whether the Confederate flag is good or bad. They’re all dug in.

Some are certain it’s racist and the very signature of evil. Others say it’s purely an expression of Southern pride and reverence for ancestors who fought and died a long time ago. Some of them have devoted careers and personal reputations to these propositions. A newspaper column is not going to change any minds.

The Civil War is a big bagful of ironies and paradoxes, and not a recommended study for folks who like to keep things simple. It would be a particular challenge for anyone to survive the 1860s in Knoxville and either idealize one side or demonize the other. It took a later generation, one that didn’t remember the war, to glorify it.

I do want to point out something provable. Whether the Confederate flag is an irredeemably racist and oppressive symbol or not, the Confederacy is not “the South.” It is not “the South now,” certainly. It was not even “the South” in 1861. The conflation of the Confederacy with “the South” began, I suspect, as some tired editor’s attempt to make a headline fit.

People of European and African ancestry have been living in the South for 400 years. The Confederacy lasted for four years, about 1 percent of that time. And even during that 1 percent, a large proportion of the people who lived in the South—perhaps even a majority— were skeptical of the Confederacy.

The Confederacy was a brief experiment in a cobbled-together

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY July 2, 2015

government offering more power to the states than the U.S. Constitution allowed, to judge by its Constitution, and with much firmer protection for the perpetuation of slavery. The Confederacy existed only during a desperate and costly war. You would not expect it to be a very efficient organization, and it was not.

The Confederacy was not universally popular, even in the South. It would be difficult to prove that as much as half the people who lived in the South in 1861 were fond of the Confederacy. Sam Houston, who grew up in East Tennessee and spent his entire life in the South—except when he was in D.C., representing Southern states in Congress—despised the Confederacy and denounced it publicly. David Glasgow Farragut and Gen. William Sanders— whose last names survive in multiple institutions in Knox County—both grew up in the South and fought against the Confederacy. Sanders,

who’d spent most of his life in Kentucky and Mississippi, was killed by Confederate bullets. Several of Knoxville’s fiercest Unionists, Parson W.G. Brownlow, William Rule, and Thomas Humes, were lifelong Southerners.

It might take years to do a thorough study on the subject, but judging by what we know of those who favored secessionism or the Union, here in East Tennessee at least, Confederate sympathies didn’t necessarily suggest Southern roots.

Many of Knoxville’s notable Confederates were immigrants from Switzerland, Germany, or Ireland. John Mitchel, probably Knoxville’s most nationally famous secessionist—editor of The Southern Citizen, which advocated slavery—was an Irish revolutionary Unitarian who’d spent several years in prison in Tasmania and never laid eyes on the South until 1853. J.G.M. Ramsey, the secessionist most influential locally, was from a Pennsylvania family. Father Abram Ryan, Knoxville’s “Poet-Priest of the Confederacy,” grew up in Maryland and Missouri, son of Irish immigrants.

Thousands of New Yorkers, many of whom had never seen the South, were Confederate sympathizers.

Meanwhile, many of Knoxville’s Unionists grew up in multi-generational Tennessee families. Did Southern heritage even play a role in affiliation with the Confederacy? Here in Knoxville, a demographic study might even prove the opposite. Maybe it was the people with the deepest roots here who were most skeptical of the noisy rebel bandwagon.

In any case, in 1861 more than 30 percent of Tennessee’s Southerners voted against secession, against joining the Confederacy. Well over 30,000 Tennesseans took up arms

If all Southerners had been allowed to vote in 1860, would we ever have heard of the Confederacy?

against the Confederacy.

Those were the white males, of course. They’re the ones who could vote and enlist. In fact, all the people I’ve discussed so far were white males.

We don’t often know what women thought. They weren’t allowed to vote, here or in the North. Some women were fierce believers, there’s no question. Locally, Ellen Renshaw House, a 19-year-old Knoxvillian, left a scathing diary about Union occupation, published as A Very Violent Rebel.

And I do know of some cases here in which the husband was a Unionist but the wife was a Confederate. But a lot of the rhetoric of 1861 was about manliness, and it’s hard to know how much of that motive translated to those Southerners lacking a Y chromosome.

We know from letters that a lot of other women were tired of the whole foolishness and praying the war would be over soon.

And we can’t assume that most slaves and free blacks, who made up about 40 percent of the South, thought of themselves as Confederates. South Carolina, for example, was the white-hot core of the secessionist movement, the nucleus of the Confederacy. More than half of South Carolinians in 1860 were African-American. They were Southerners, but they did not get to vote.

If all Southerners had been allowed to vote in 1860, would we ever have heard of the Confederacy?

Considering its existence was bitterly controversial even among white Southern males, I’m thinking not.

There’s something the opposite poles in the flag debate have in common. When they talk about the South, exalting and glorifying the South or ridiculing and berating the South, they’re talking about “the South” as if it’s only white people.

The South is everybody who lives here. And considering its African-American population, it may be a more cosmopolitan region than any other. African-American culture has pervaded and energized and inspired the South, its music, its cuisine, its literature, more thoroughly than that of any other region on the continent.

Blacks may be the largest part of what makes the South the South, and different from all other places. Any symbol that does not acknowledge that fact can’t say much about the South that’s true. ◆

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July 2, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 9

POSSUM CITY

Native Sun Celebrating the heritage and art of sunflowers

BY ELEANOR SCOTT

O

n a bright June morning, Aaron Shugart-Brown clears a flowerbed in the Friendship Garden on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Morgan Street. The community garden is planted with beds of kale and tomatoes, but most visible from the road are the tall stalks of yellow sunflowers. Shugart-Brown is preparing the soil to plant even more sunflowers to be harvested this September for the Labor Day Sunflower Project event, a “participatory public art installation” taking place this year Sept. 7 in the Krutch Park extension.

Shugart-Brown likes the community spirit behind the event. Project organizers encourage people to bring sunflowers from their own gardens to weave onto a chain-link armature set up in the park. The giant circle of flowers will remain on display until Sept. 13. Then the sculpture will be disassembled and participants are invited to a winnowing party at the Birdhouse community center, in which seeds will be collected and packaged for distribution next year.

It’s a celebration of work, community collaboration, and the cycle of the seasons, says project founder Gerry Moll, an artist known for his use of natural materials and open-air installations. At June’s Meadow Lark Festival at Ijams Nature Center, Moll

and collaborators built “Meadowshark,” a 14-foot sculptural creature fashioned from invasive plants.

The Labor Day Sunflower Project began in 2007 with a simple impromptu event. That year Moll grew a big crop of sunflowers with seeds saved from the flowers at his wedding.

For fun, he worked some of the sunflower blooms into a circle on the chain-link fence at Edgewood Park.

The next year, Moll welcomed others to join. Each Labor Day, participation in the project has grown. After a few years the event moved to Krutch Park.

Moll estimates 100 people took part last year, with many more coming to watch the installation process which includes performance art and music.

This year, the Cattywampus Puppet Council is performing.

Moll likes sunflowers because they are strong, vigorous, and common. A single flower head is made up of many small flowers, which he says is a perfect metaphor for the weaving together of individual labors into a single community effort, a fitting Labor Day symbol.

Sunflowers are native to the Americas and were first domesticated and grown as crops by prehistoric American Indians in the Southeastern U.S. All modern sunflowers are descended from these early varieties

It’s a celebration of work, community collaboration, and the cycle of the seasons.

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY July 2, 2015

domesticated in this region. Joshua Bremseth, an early core member of the Sunflower Project, sought out the National Plant Germplasm System, a government organization that preserves plant diversity, and requested the oldest sunflower seeds they would distribute. This week, Moll and others plan to sow seeds of the Seneca sunflower, an Appalachian heirloom, in an isolated field in Knox County, aiding in the continuing existence of a culturally and environmentally important species.

“It’s a sunflower homecoming,” Moll says.

In past years, the project was funded through grants from entities like the Puffin Foundation and the Central Business Improvement District, with some public and private donations. This year it will be funded entirely through local donations and seed sales.

The Sunflower Project often partners with local schools in growing sunflowers and making art. This year, the project is collaborating with the University of Tennessee’s McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture in celebrating the art and history of sunflowers in Tennessee.

The museum is selling Sunflower

Project seeds and has planted a small sunflower garden to accompany an exhibit of botanical photography.

Sunflowers are not just ornamental. Back at the Friendship Garden honeybees, bumble bees, and small native bees swarm the yellow flowers.

Shugart-Brown, soon to complete a masters in landscape architecture at UT, appreciates the role sunflowers play in attracting pollinators to his vegetable garden and providing food for honey bees.

“Tomatoes can’t self-pollinate so it’s helpful to have flowers around,” Shugart-Brown says.

He says sunflowers, which bloom all summer, are especially good for providing a consistent food source for bees and other beneficial insects.

Sunflowers reach maturity about 85 days after planting, so a small window remains open to plant now if you hope to harvest the blooms in time for Labor Day. The Labor Day Sunflower Project has seeds and information at their display at Three Rivers Market. ◆

Aaron Shugart-Brown plants sunflowers in the Fourth and Gill Friendship Garden for the Labor Day Sunflower Project.

Now’s your chance to tell us what you really think–in person!

MEETUPS Join us for coffee & breakfast at our Monthly Mercury Meetup.

Wednesday, July 22, 7am-10am at Gourmet's Market 5107 Kingston Pike, Knoxville, TN 37919 (The District In Bearden)

This is a great opportunity for the business owners and residents of Knoxville to stop by and tell us what’s on your mind! We hope to see you there.

July 2, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 11

“I

UNBANNED

’d like to introduce my husband,” said Jon Coffee, as his new spouse, Keith Swafford, swung his hands up in the air.

The first gay couple to get married in Knox County, Coffee and Swafford thanked the crowd of about 400 at the Tennessee Amphitheater at World’s Fair Park Friday evening for their support in the fight for marriage equality.

“I’m just so damn happy,” Coffee said to another round of cheers.

On Friday, supporters of marriage equality gathered at the amphitheater less than nine hours after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage nationwide in Obergefell v. Hodges. The court ruling struck down Tennessee’s 9-year-old ban on gay marriage and ended restrictions in 14 other states, opening the legal door for couples like Coffee and Swafford to be married and allowing recognition for existing marriages like those between Sophy Jesty and her wife, Valeria Tanco.

Jesty and Tanco were plaintiffs in the Tanco v. Haslam court case that challenged Tennessee to recognize

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Knoxvillians celebrate the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriage; others get cranky

BY MCCORD PAGAN

their marriage. The case was later consolidated with three similar cases and argued before the Supreme Court.

At the celebration, Jesty and Tanco were greeted with a standing ovation by the crowd for their successful legal fight.

“It’s a weight that we didn’t even realize how heavy it was until it was gone,” Jesty said after the celebration.

“I’m not quite sure there are any words for it.

“There’s no one that is going to tell me that I’m not Amelia’s parent anymore,” she added, referring to the couple’s newborn daughter.

Knoxville Mayor Madeline Rogero, one of only two Tennessee mayors to publicly support gay marriage (the other is Nashville Mayor Karl Dean), greeted Tanco and Jesty at the celebration, saying that

her city “is too busy to hate.”

In Knox County, the process of issuing new same-sex marriage licenses was seamless, says Knox County Clerk Foster D. Arnett Jr. Within five minutes of Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slattery’s press conference on Friday, 3 p.m.

EST announcing that the state would comply with the ruling, same-sex marriage licenses were being issued from the Knox County Clerk’s office, he added.

About 20 such licenses were issued Friday alone, but it is unclear how many more have been issued since then.

Arnett says he anticipated the ruling, and had the updated software and paperwork ready for the new couples.

“It wasn’t any big deal,” he says,

“It was very simple.”

On Monday, Rogero announced on her official Facebook page that the city would be giving the Henley Street Bridge a rainbow lighting effect through Tuesday night. (On Wednesday, it was reconfigured red, white, and blue for the Fourth of July. The bridge’s lighting often changes, and specific requests can be made to the Office of Special Events.) The post gathered more than 1,600 likes and more than 500 shares (at presstime), and has more than 80,000 views—the highest numbers of any Facebook post since Rogero took office, according to city communications director Jesse Fox Mayshark.

The post also spurred over 200 comments, most supportive of the city’s gesture, while others declared it “shameful.” And is often the case on Facebook, a disjointed political debate ensued. Brady King suggested, “How about we run confederate flags across the top of the bridge instead of the freaking rainbow?” Meanwhile, Jan Thompson concluded, “The mayor is a liberal democrat who is pandering to the gays. Something she has always

Photo by McCord Pagan Photo courtesy of Joie Mayfield-Stewart

Photo by McCord Pagan

done. To heck with the wishes of the rest of this city.”

No comments were deleted or hidden, Mayshark says: “We respect people’s right to express their opinions, including on the Mayor’s Facebook posts. We only ask that people keep the conversation civil.”

Rogero’s support for LGBT rights has not exactly been a state secret.

She expanded the city’s non-discrimination ordinance for employees to include sexual orientation and gender identity, and added domestic partner benefits. She was also the first mayor to walk in the Knoxville Pride parade, and signed the Mayors Brief in support of the plaintiffs in the Supreme Court case.

“Every one of those actions has been greeted with overwhelmingly positive reactions and support from Knoxville residents,” Mayshark says.

“Ninety percent or more of the reaction in each case has been positive. Support for LGBT rights is broad-based in Knoxville.”

In state government, not so much.

In 2006, Tennessee passed a state constitutional amendment refusing to

recognize same-sex marriage, making Friday a day of validation for those already married in another state whose unions will finally be recognized by the state. Joie Mayfield, who married his husband, John Stewart, in Maryland about two years ago, says his love is no different from any anyone else’s.

“We’re no longer second-class,” he says. “We’re just like everyone else—we just have the same genitalia.”

Mayfield says along with recognition by the government, the tide is turning in public support for marriage equality. While legal recognition of his marriage is important, Mayfield says support by non-gays for marriage equality goes a long way towards feeling accepted by society.

“It’s easy for gay people to look at each other and say, yay, we did it,” he says. “But for a straight person to say, yay, you did it, that’s head over heels exciting.

“There was someone I saw here—I’ve gone to school with him since fourth grade. He’s not gay, but he just came to show support. And that’s so moving, to see validation

from other people.”

The decision means Tennessee couples in gay marriages can now enjoy Social Security benefits, health insurance through their spouse’s job, and tax benefits.

But while marriage equality is now enshrined in law, there is still more work to be done in the fight for LGBT rights, Mayfield says.

“We can still be fired for who we are,” he says. “We’re not a protected class. We can still be denied housing just for who we love.”

Along with protection for transgendered people, bullying is another area in which there is much work left to be done, says Gwen Schablik, chairwoman for the Tennessee Equality Project, the organization that sponsored Friday’s event.

“School should be a safe and welcoming place,” she says. “Forty percent of LGBT youth are harassed because of their sexual orientation, because of their gender identity, or maybe because they have family that is LGBT.” Friday’s ruling by the Supreme Court is a long time coming for

After the Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday, Keith Swafford (top, left) and Jon Coffee were the first same-sex couple to be married in Knoxville. At Friday evening’s marriage equality celebration at the Tennessee Amphitheatre, plaintiffs Sophy Jesty (bottom, left) and her wife Valeria Tanco were congratulated by Knoxville Mayor Madeline Rogero. On Monday night, Rogero had the Henley Street Bridge lit up with rainbow colors.

Mayfield, who says he felt discriminated by Tennessee’s ban on same-sex marriage. When Mayfield and Stewart returned home as a married couple, he says the state treated them as roommates rather than an actual couple.

“When I finally found the person I want to spend the rest of my life [with], for the state to tell me, ‘No, you can’t do that,’ you get angry,” Mayfield says.

However, the decision on Friday that forces Tennessee to recognize Mayfield’s and Stewart’s marriage comes as an immense relief to the couple.

“To hear the government recognize you, that it’s not going to discriminate because of who you love, words can’t express it,” he says. ◆ July 2, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 13

Victor Agreda Jr. is the best known tech media personality from Knoxville. Then AOL shut his site down and laid him off.

So what’s he going to do next? ■ BY COURY TURCZYN

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S

tacked against the walls of Victor Agreda Jr.’s modest ranch house in North Knoxville is a brazen assemblage of physical media—exactly the sort of old fashioned, dust-gathering stuff that most technology experts are supposed to have abandoned years ago. Hard copies of books, movies, and video games crowd shelves and floor space, vying for attention amid an invading army of pop-culture toys peeking out from the hedgerows: Dr. Who, Disney, Star Wars, Star Trek, and a sizable number of Japanese magic tricks manufactured by Tenyo.

Gathered at the base of a flatscreen TV is a compendium of geekdom’s most sacred DVDs, including the Lost box set, the Criterion Collection edition of Brazil, and the 1958 Alec Guinness Technicolor comedy The Horse’s Mouth.

Although streaming these artifacts of entertainment history would make for a tidier living room, it’s clear that Agreda has configured this space as a comfort zone, a three-dimensional expression of his innermost self: proud 41-year-old nerd.

Follow the trail of tchotchkes around the room and it will ultimately lead you to an Apple II, the great invention of Steve Wozniak that unleashed Steve Jobs’ marketing prowess, the combination of which made computer technology accessible to everyday people in a way that still informs the industry today. Agreda’s Bolivian-born engineer father purchased the personal computer in 1978 when he was 6 years old and growing up in Kingston, Tenn. It was the launchpad for his unlikely career in tech media.

Right now, on a Friday afternoon, surrounded by the detritus of his obsessions, it’s show time. Agreda situates himself at his workstation, plugging a headset into his laptop and preparing to go on the air with a microphone before him and a webcam aimed at his impressively coiffed mug.

But the production studio is actually located in Austin, Texas. His interview subject is in New Jersey. And his broadcast will not be carried on a traditional network.

“Hi, this is Victor Agreda Jr. with Coders and this week we’re talking to Justin Esgar about software project management,” he announces in soothing, FM-radio-worthy tones. “But first, here’s a word from our sponsor.”

Coders is not something you can catch on TV, even on one of those satellite channels in the 500s. It’s a production of RCR Wireless News, a

trade-media website for the wireless industry, which describes the show thusly: “Coders is a weekly look at the fundamental computer science driving the telecom networks that keep the world connected. This includes apps, BSS, OSS, APIs and more.” Indeed. But Agreda is genuinely enthusiastic about every arcane detail, and not just because this is part of his work as Knoxville’s one and only tech media star. He loves this stuff.

“We had a fascinating conversation a while back about how hardware is becoming abstracted into software,” he says, his voice progressively accelerating as he becomes more and more excited by the prospect. “If you set up a Mac lab with 20 Macs, one or two are going to behave differently in some way for some reason. So the idea is that now they’ll be able to know all this in software so you won’t have to have an IT guy go, ‘Oh, well, that’s this thing, so we’ve got to switch this bit on that in order for it to talk to this thing.’ You’ll actually have software that’s intelligent, that knows ‘That’s this manufacturer, just reroute for this.’

“It’s really kind of crazy Ultron/ Jarvis-type stuff, but that’s actually what’s coming up right now. Software in general is becoming more intelligent, and the network layer is actually becoming more intelligent. So a big part of what we do is to teach people that the software you’re making actually has a hardware component, and all of these things of merging and coming together and becoming more powerful.”

Technological prognostication— and making it at least somewhat understandable to laypeople—is just one of the skill sets that Agreda has honed for the past decade. As a writer and editor of The Unofficial Apple Weblog, aka TUAW, he guided what was one of the most respected Apple news blogs in tech media, leading a

staff of bloggers from his Knoxville home. That ended abruptly in February when its owner, AOL, decided to “simplify” its portfolio of brands, which includes TechCrunch and The Huffington Post, by shutting down TUAW and video-game site Joystiq. It’s the sort of predictable corporate decision you read about every week on, well, tech blogs as once-world-conquering companies prepare themselves for humble buyouts, in this case by Verizon.

Since then, Agreda has been improvising a freelance career based in his living room that includes writing articles, producing keynote presentations, and hosting streaming talk shows. However, the new vocation he has been striving most to get off the ground for the past several months is decidedly different: playing video games live on the Internet while people watch. (Yeah, that’s a thing now.)

But can he possibly make a living at it?

Agreda is banking on his grasp of digital media, his technical knowledge—and his ability to crack jokes, even about the bleakest parts of his life.

LIVE, FROM KNOXVILLE: It’s Victor Agreda Jr. hosting a livestream talk show named Coders from his living room, surrounded by his ever-growing collection of pop-culture artifacts.

July 2, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 15

T NOT FANBOYS: Victor Agreda Jr. ran AOL’s Apple blog, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, and took a more journalistic, objective approach to its coverage that set it apart from similar sites.

After AOL shut it down, even mainstream media like Fast Company mourned its closing.

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he day Victor Agreda got laid off was not unlike any other work day for him. Which is to say, he was at home, prepping his articles for the day, living the telecommuting dream promised to us since the late ’90s: a job that can be worked at anywhere, far away from any one particular office. For Agreda, this meant cranking out news and opinion daily about the biggest company in the world, Apple.

He had gotten the job by being an exceptionally good online commenter.

In 2004, Agreda was teaching multimedia, Web development, and

game design at ITT Technical Institute in Knoxville. That same year, a New York City-based startup called Weblogs, Inc. had concocted a business model of paying just a bit of money to bloggers who were doing it for free anyway, enlisting the most talented ones to launch several soon-to-be-major sites: Engadget, Joystiq, Autoblog, and TUAW. Agreda ran his own blog, Solution Spheres, about Apple-centric tips and hacks, like making an iPod case out of a milk jug. Once TUAW launched, he immediately became a reader—as well as its highest-rated commenter. (“I looked at it like community moderation—I tried to come in and be the voice of reason.”)

Both his blogging and his commenting got him the attention of editors at Weblogs, and Agreda started writing for Download Squad, a site that launched in late 2005 to review software downloads. (We call them “apps” now.) He started out earning $4 per post. In October of that year, AOL acquired Weblogs, Inc. for $25 million, all cash. It was a smart move for AOL, which desperately needed content to sell ads around— its bread and butter revenue stream, dial-up Internet access, was drying up. (Though it yet remains one of AOL’s most profitable divisions, which says a lot in itself.)

At fi rst, AOL’s ownership was a boon. Agreda got hired, his bilingual abilities serving to help manage Autoblog and Engadget’s Spanish properties. Soon, he was managing around 10 sites, not as the editor-in-chief, but assisting each site’s equivalent, which they called “lead bloggers.” Eventually, his official title became “Programming Manager Level 2.” As more and more sites fell by the wayside, Agreda found himself only working on TUAW and taking on more and more responsibility as the site lost lead bloggers who got full-time job offers elsewhere. About three years ago, he became the de facto editor because, he says, the company couldn’t afford to hire anyone else.

“So I took over as editor-in-chief and tried to set the vision for what we wanted to do,” he says. “TUAW had become a respected organization because we’d been around for a long time and certainly I like to think that over the years we tried to maintain a certain sort of editorial integrity. We

never had anyone get paid to write a review from a developer—there was none of that.”

John Michael Bond, an Atlanta-based writer and editor for TUAW, confi rms Agreda’s adherence to what have now become “old-school” journalistic values, such as verifying facts before posting stories—which may have cost them views. (TUAW peaked at about 3 million unique visitors a month.)

“Victor hates clickbait and rumors that turn out to be false. Editorially, he wanted readers to come to TUAW for information they knew they could count on to be accurate,” Bond says. “Some other publications, especially within the Apple blogging universe, get big traffic from posting hearsay. There were certainly times when he’d tell me to not run with a story unless I could 100 percent back it up, even when our competitors were going full steam ahead.”

Among Apple-focused blogs like Apple Insider and Mac Rumors, TUAW stood apart with a more critical approach that helped it avoid charges of “fanboyism.” In the overpopulated world of tech blogetry, there are Android fans, Apple fans, and (waning yet still adamant) Microsoft fans—and they all regularly overrun the comments sections of technology articles to accuse each other of blind worship to their platform of choice. (The few platform-agnostic commenters attempt to keep the peace to no avail.) This can be goaded along by any perceived bias of the site itself in reporting the latest developments from Cupertino. “ There was defi nitely this attitude of ‘Oh, well if you are fans of Apple, how can you be impartial?’” he says.

“All I can say is, let me point you to the thousands of articles we published yearly that were incredibly critical. If you look, I probably made more than several enemies at Apple with some of the stuff I published. Me personally— stuff that I wrote.”

That includes one of his last few pieces published in January (“Is Apple’s Quality Slipping?”) in which he declared “Apple’s software … appears to have slipped off the cracker.” Such editorial stances were noticed, even in more mainstream media. In Fast Company’s obituary for TUAW, writer Harry McCracken declared the blog to have “long been one of the most dependable sources of

Apple news” and that “not having the site as part of my daily regimen is going to be disorienting.”

That reputation may have also been due to AOL not assuming much editorial control over TUAW. “I used to joke that we were like Tatooine—we were part of the Empire, but we were this far-flung outpost so they really didn’t mess with us very much,” Agreda says.

But that lack of interest extended into even the overall content strategy of the sites that AOL had purchased in order to develop a content strategy.

“I’ll have to say if AOL had listened to the Weblogs group it had acquired over 10 years ago, it probably would have made the transformation it’s making now sooner and faster and better,” Agreda says. “But the problem with that was—and this is the nature of big bureaucracies—the people involved with our acquisition within a year were almost all gone from the company. So we were orphaned.”

Agreda sensed that he might finally see changes—of an unpleasant sort—when management shifts last year resulted in a rather unusual reporting structure for him.

“I knew it was the beginning of the end when I had two bosses on two different coasts,” Agreda says. “And I thought, ‘Okay, here comes the Empire.’ That’s when you see the Star Destroyer in orbit above and you’re like, ‘Hmmm, something’s going on.’”

When one of those bosses left in November and the other one kept pushing off teleconferences with him, his suspicions grew. Finally, he got a phone call from his remaining boss “and that was pretty much it”—TUAW was abruptly shut down Feb. 3. The reason why is pretty simple: AOL couldn’t figure out how to sell ads for it. While it could be argued that TUAW was competing against AOL’s other, bigger tech sites, Engadget and TechCrunch, it had a loyal audience and potential advertisers. The problem was AOL’s sales structure, and the economy of scale it worked on, required big ad buys rather than lots of smaller ones, Agreda says.

“We left millions of dollars on the table. AOL could’ve made a lot of money off of TUAW, they could’ve made a lot of money off of Joystiq before they axed them, but they didn’t have a sales organization that was set up to sell that way,” he says. “They had a sales organization that was set

up to sell for the ’90s, which is when AOL started. It was incongruous with the way the Internet works.”

Imagine being a tech-media expert working for a tech-media company that constantly gets tech media wrong. Then imagine being suddenly relieved of that feeling of powerlessness. For Agreda, it was liberating.

“Honestly, there’s a part of me that’s very relieved to no longer worry about page views, building an audience of billions within minutes— this ridiculousness that every content company thinks that every human being on the planet is going to read you 24 hours a day. Think about it— logically, if you want to have a growth curve, isn’t that the endpoint: every single human being, including fetuses, reading you 24 hours a day and clicking on every single ad? That’s insanity. So, I was kind of like, ‘You know what? No. Not going to do that.’”

So, he pivoted. A hard 180.

T

he first thing you might notice about Victor Agreda Jr. is his hair.

It’s really quite marvelous—a mass of unruly curls that appears ready to swoop off his head at any moment, perhaps restrained only by his sharp widow’s peak part. When he wears a bow tie and black glasses, he looks like a mad professor or irascible pundit—and you know he knows it. If he had a handlebar mustache, he’d probably twirl it just for fun.

On Facebook, he toys with his profile photos as if they are an ongoing public experiment in self-image. He appears as mimes, clowns, and (with the help of various apps) painted portraits. None of this obsessive tweaking is to make him look better than he does, as if often the case on Facebook—in his normal state, he’s actually a handsome fellow. Rather, it demonstrates his willingness to play different roles, even if it’s just within a small square of pixels.

Agreda often makes these same trials on stage as well, in his other life as a local stand-up comedian. If you watch the video of his early performance at the finals of the 2010 Rocky Top Comedy Contest (online at funnyordie.com), you’ll see him testing the limits of propriety, not really sure of where he’ll land. His routine starts with jokes about hairy buttholes, moves on to middle-aged online dating (he’s divorced, but onstage he

insists his penis is still a teenager in “dick years”), and continues to his father’s embarrassing revelation about his conception. The best part may be his big finish, reading from Craigslist’s “missed connections” section, wherein one person posted, “Looking for the guy who did me in Walmart.”

He’s come a long way since then.

“I believe that comedy has a profound influence on humanity,” he says. “If you can make someone laugh, they drop their guard and they might listen a little bit to something that maybe they wouldn’t listen to normally. It has real power.” So he’s been working to make his comedy more personal, more political, more bizarre.

Local freelance writer/consultant Shane Rhyne first met Agreda via social media about five years ago, then got to know him better as they both tackled local comedy rooms. He describes Agreda’s current performance style as being experimental, combining traditional stand-up, stage magic, ventriloquism, and clowning to create a singularly surreal act.

“Victor has a definite vision of what

“I think a lot of Victor’s comedy is built on the idea of making fun of the rules we impose on ourselves.”

—SHANE RHYNE

his crazy onstage world looks like, and he’s loyal to that vision,” Rhyne says, even if it means taking on stand-up comedy itself.

“I think a lot of Victor’s comedy is built on the idea of making fun of the rules we impose on ourselves,” Rhyne says. “Even his inside jokes about comedy are playful jabs at what comedians expect a comedy performance to be. He makes you laugh at his attempts to break the rules and then ask yourself why those rules are so important in the first place.”

One performance in particular intersected both Agreda’s social media and onstage lives, sparked by his infrequent bouts with depression in his real life.

July 2, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 17

Facebook is an unavoidable factor in Agreda’s line of work—as a digital professional, you must build your own personal audience of followers in order to prove your worth to employers. Most of his posts consist of funny updates, industry news, or political statements of the sort that result in unfriending by the less tolerant. But when Agreda descends into one of his infrequent depressive states, he sometimes uses Facebook as a way to vent rather than to seek help through therapy or actual friends. This can result in making public statements he later deeply

The name “Angry Dad Gamer” is based on how Agreda would often behave while playing video games with his children, Weston and Belle.

regrets, one of which spurred an even further descent into darkness.

“Even though it was a vaguebook post, I said some pretty mean stuff about someone that I cared about, and she knew it was about her,” he says.

“No one else would have known. And the worst part about that, too, is people seeing it out of context—it’s kind of like a gladiator moment where I’m feeding this person to the lions and everyone around me has the bloodlust cheer going on. So I deleted all of that, but I 18

KNOXVILLE MERCURY July 2, 2015

did damage to that relationship to this day that has not been repaired.

“That’s one of those things where you realize the power of social media, because you can shame people, you can embarrass people, you can harm people. And that’s because if you have more than three friends on Facebook, you wield a certain amount of power.”

The realization of just how badly he had ruined the relationship sent him into a state of near-total dysfunction—he would just lie in bed all day, unmoving, not wanting to do anything.

He didn’t pursue any freelance work.

He didn’t go out. He felt physically ill.

“There were times where I would feel like I had a body cold—it’s almost like an adrenaline rush, like when you feel like you’re going to die or something. It’s this creeping, under-theskin feeling,” he recalls. “So I knew that wasn’t right, that wasn’t normal.

That, coupled with dark thoughts. So it was one of those things where it’s like, ‘Is this a scratch? No, wait, my hand is missing.’”

On June 6, though, there was to be a farewell show at Pilot Light for Knoxville comedy ringleader Matt Ward, one of Agreda’s best friends in the scene. So he devised a particularly bizarre challenge for himself: He would perform as a mime who was also a ventriloquist. And his puppet would have a mental breakdown because it’s not allowed to talk.

“I was kind of joking in the weeks coming up to that that I could cry on command. That’s how much anger and anxiety and fear and other emotions were in me—I could just release them like that,” he says, snapping his fingers, “and weep tears on command.

I would remain completely emotionless while this puppet is screaming at me.

So my goal was for at the end of the bit to be crying on stage.”

The comedic gambit didn’t work, though. When it came time for the puppet’s breakdown, Agreda no longer had the emotional power to make himself cry in that way. Which lends some credence to the common myth about why comedians become comedians: self-therapy.

(Please note that Agreda is starting to see a therapist now. One of his latest Facebook posts: “I’m super happy with my life. Who doesn’t look back from time to time with a tinge of regret? But then you take inventory and realize, there are no regrets—life is good right now because of every-

thing that led me to this moment.”)

Meanwhile, Rhyne remembers it as being a great performance.

“It was four or five minutes of complete silence on stage, and yet it built in energy as the audience became more and more a part of the absurd scenario,” he recalls. “By the time he was finished, the room was roaring in laughter.”

A

ccording to technology research firm Gartner, global video-game sales will reach $111.1 billion this year. That’s famously more money than the glamorous film industry makes. And that’s where Agreda has decided to steer himself, though toward one rather small but growing subset of the business: actually just playing the games.

Twitch.tv livestreams games that people play on their PCs and consoles. Gamers can put themselves on camera and use a mic to add an ongoing commentary. Users, in turn, can subscribe to feeds they like and chat with the gamers as they play. In 2014, Twitch was estimated to have been the fourth-largest source of peak Internet traffic in the U.S. Consequently, Amazon bought it that same year for nearly $1 billion. This year, Twitch claims 1.5 million broadcasters and 100 million visitors per month. It’s only 4 years old.

You may wonder: Why would anyone want to watch other people play video games?

“I observed this stuff for a while and I thought it was really fascinating, because this is very much like the early days of blogging, where you would as an individual creator put something out there and people would interact with you,” Agreda says. “But it’s live and it’s video games. And it’s really compelling, in some cases. A lot of it was boring—one kid just sitting there, staring at the screen, not talking to anybody. But some of it was really fascinating. I found this one girl who’s 16 years old streaming Grand Theft Auto—she’s just messing around, but everybody who would come in she would shout out. It was this multi-tasking miracle.”

Even famed YouTubers like Captain Sparkles and Markiplier are doing it. So why not him? Agreda came up with a concept: He would make video-game broadcasts that were more like talk shows, but the guests would be playing the games.

Thus, Angry Dad Gamer was born, the tag based on how he would often behave while playing video games with his children, Weston and Belle. He invested in a giant black obelisk of a gaming PC, plus lighting equipment, which he installed in his living room. Then he invited friends and comedians, such as Wil Wright (aka “Lil Iff y”), Ward, or touring comics, to come over and play.

“My original concept was Mystery Science Theater with video games,” he says. “Mystery Science Theater was logistically very hard to do because they would have to watch a two-hour movie to completion, write jokes throughout the movie, and then go back and massage those jokes a couple of times. By the end of it, they were so sick of watching the damn movie, but then they had to do the performance.

“I found that here it’s pretty much impossible. We only have so many comedians, so many artists that can come in and do that process.”

So, he’s expanded his offerings with parodies, reviews, and even board-game playthroughs, cross-posting them on YouTube. But since launching Angry Dad Gamer in May, he’s garnered 90 followers—not anywhere near enough to generate revenue from ads on Twitch. Same goes for his views on YouTube. More successful has been his page on Recurrency, which is a crowdfunding site that utilizes small monthly payments from supporters rather than one lump sum.

“So I haven’t made any money off of YouTube or Twitch,” he admits. “It’s all through Recurrency right now, and it’s not even close to enough to live on.

It’s not even a car payment right now.”

Unless you happen to have a video go viral, or already enjoy online fame, building a sizable audience to monetize on Twitch can be daunting.

It could take another six months or more of nearly nightly gaming for Agreda to earn more followers—an onerous prospect, even for someone who loves video games. Fortunately, Agreda has another new business in the works that he and a friend are establishing in San Francisco, requiring him to live there part-time starting in September. All he can say about it now is that it’s “a legal thing” that’ll be very different from the work he’s been doing for the past decade.

“I won’t be writing a whole lot, I won’t be producing video—but I

PLAYING FOR FUN AND PROFIT: Agreda’s channel on Twitch.tv, Angry Dad Gamer, features friends and comedians playing video games live, plus product reviews and parody videos.

almost became a lawyer. I have high reading comprehension and logic skills and all those good things lawyers need,” Agreda says. “I just hated the paperwork. Literally. A big part of what we’re doing relies on the fact that I spent 10 years building a network of technologists across the world. That’s what we’re going to be leveraging; it’s my network, and it’s my ability to communicate and understand these things.”

It will also help further Angry Dad Gamer—Agreda is planning on setting up a studio at their new flat and inviting developers to play. “One of the things we’re looking at is setting up in San Francisco and actually having people who design the game come and play their game, and comment like a live director’s commentary.”

It’s a great idea—and it might just be the next pivot that’ll make Angry Dad Gamer an even happier man.◆ July 2, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 19

A&E

P rogram Notes

Branching Out

says the event has become one of the bar’s biggest draws.

“We have some Ph.D. students that frequent the comedy night,” Miller says, “And because it’s such an interesting and different thing near campus, we pull in a lot of the foreign exchange students as well.”

Even the musicians have noticed the change in management style.

Josiah Smith, guitarist and vocalist for Lions, has played at the Longbranch roughly 40 times over the past nine years and has seen managers come and go. But he says the new crew has worked harder on creating personal relationships with the bands than any managers in recent memory.

“They’ve just held Longbranch to a standard, which it hasn’t had in a while,” Smith says. “These new guys have just done the right thing and done well by everybody. If you’re trying to be a good person and a good dude and have fun and you have someone else meet you at that same energy, it’s going to turn out well.”

While Watkins is leaving at the end of the summer to start a master’s program at Western Michigan University, Cowan and Garretson, who are also roommates, say they will likely work at the bar into the foresee-

able future.

“I want to open the bar up to students, in particular, because the Longbranch has always been a haven for local Knoxville, and with the Strip construction we’re really going to have to,” Cowan says.

While the Longbranch is turning a corner, the timing is far from perfect. With concrete barriers now lining parts of the Strip as part of the Cumberland Avenue Corridor Project, it is already becoming difficult for consumers to reach some businesses by car. Since the Longbranch is closed during regular business hours when traffic is heaviest, the bar hasn’t been affected as much as other Cumberland Avenue outlets.

Nevertheless, the construction project still worries the managers, but Smith says that as long as venues like the Longbranch maintain their positive relationships with artists and patrons, even construction won’t keep customers away.

“If you’re able to create a place that people feel is the most positive, fun thing they can do, that little hurdle isn’t going to make a big difference,” he says.

—McCord Pagan

It was Huey Lewis, of all people, who turned Taber Gable on to jazz. Specifically, it was saxophonist Stan Getz, who appeared on Lewis’ 1988 album, A Small World. But Gable’s taste might have run in an entirely different direction if he hadn’t been checking out Huey Lewis CDs from his dad’s collection.

“Stan Getz plays a solo on one of those songs. I was like, who’s Stan Getz?” Gable says. “I started doing my homework and found out who he was and then I went back and started getting into bossa nova and finding out who Astrud Gilberto and Carlos Jobim were.”

Gable had been playing piano for several years at that point, but his introduction to jazz intensified his

interest in music. The lessons he wanted, though, proved to be just out of his family’s reach. “I wanted lessons from the best, and they were a little more expensive than I imagined,” he says. So Gable and his family turned to the Joy of Music School, a local nonprofit that provides free music instruction to children who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford it.

Through the school, Gable studied under Donald Brown, the reigning king of Knoxville jazz piano, and later with saxophonist Jerry Coker. (In his spare time, he also took instruction from guitarist Mark Boling at the University of Tennessee.)

After graduating from West High School, Gable attended the University of Hartford on a music scholarship. And now he’s just finished his first year at the prestigious Juilliard School in New York in the Juilliard Jazz Studies program. It’s a rigorous two-year program overseen by Wynton

Marsalis that combines classwork and performance; Gable is the first graduate of the Joy of Music to make it to Juilliard.

Next week, he’ll give back to his old school by performing with a brand-new quartet at a fundraising concert for the Joy of Music School.

Gable and three of his frequent collaborators, all classmates from Hartford and Juilliard, will headline the Juilliard Jazz for Joy show on Thursday, July 9, at 6:30 p.m. at the Emporium Center on the 100 block of Gay Street. Tickets are $25-$125; all proceeds benefit the school.

“I just wanted to say thank you to everybody,” Gable says. “I want to have an umbrella and put everybody I could under it and say thank you for the support—financial support, spiritual support, prayers, whatever.”

—Matthew Everett

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24

A young management team takes the Longbranch Saloon in new directions

S

lightly sweaty twentysomethings talk and smoke on the front porch as they wait for the Longbranch Saloon’s headliner, the local punk band Lions, to come onstage. Between handling drink orders, the bartender, Judd Cowan, a senior at the University of Tennessee, is reading a borrowed copy of Flowers for Algernon.

Since taking over management of the Longbranch in November, Cowan and his friends Ben Garretson and Jake Watkins have been reinventing the venerable Cumberland Avenue bar and music venue. The Longbranch, which had recently been almost exclusively a haven for metalheads, now brings in hip-hop artists, alternative rock bands, and once even hosted a French gypsy jazz band, all in an effort to broaden the bar’s musical range.

“If you walk by the Longbranch one night, and you hear something you don’t like, just know that will probably not be there the next night,”

Watkins says. “There’s consistently shows, but genres change frequently.”

Garretson, who worked as a music booking agent before coming to the Longbranch, is always looking for new talent, frequently going to college parties just to meet up-and-coming bands and asking them to play at the bar.

“Judd and I will be at the Longbranch seven days a week, but we’ll also be out and about, meeting two to three other people every single day,” Garretson says.

By cleaning the building for the first time in years, updating the beer menu, and inviting new and different musicians to the venue, the bar has reworked itself to appeal more to the thousands of college students who live in nearby Fort Sanders and on the University of Tennessee campus.

They’ve even added an open-mic comedy show on Tuesday nights. John Miller, a local comedian and recent UT graduate who runs the open-mic,

Small World JOY OF MUSIC GRAD REPAYS THE SUPPORT THAT GOT HIM TO JUILLIARD

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Shelf Life: The Beatles videos

KNOXVILLE MERCURY July 2, 2015

Music: Frog & Toad

Movies: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Books: Finders Keepers

Shelf Life

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ART • ACTIVISM MUSIC •

Beatle Videomania

©

LOUISVILLE, KY • JULY 17-19, 2015

A guide to the Knox County Public Library’s collection of Beatles videos

BY CHRIS BARRETT A HARD DAY’S NIGHT

Richard Lester’s stylish and innovative feature-length music video introduced the world to the Beatles’ impending fi lm franchise in 1964. It’s a fluff y lark—mostly John, Paul, George, and Ringo on the run with delirious Beatlemaniacs in hot pursuit, pausing to toss off the occasional lip-synced hit. Nevertheless, it survives as a movie about music just as Duck Soup survives as a movie about war. It cemented a style for a band that would ultimately change the world and documented the baseline to which we’d be able to compare the mantras and mutton chops and bed peace and, one might argue, lesser music from solo efforts that followed.

THE BEATLES ANTHOLOGY

The most surprising thing about this television miniseries from 1994 is that it aired on ABC, a major commercial network. The interviews with George, Paul, and Ringo are casual and unhurried; they are permitted to tell long and interesting stories in some fullness. It’s a patient rhythm of editing almost never seen on the networks, and one that is becoming uncommon even on public television.

If you have more than a passing interest in the Beatles and the methods by which they created sounds no one had heard previously, you probably know most of what is revealed here. But the reason you know it is most likely that it was revealed here 20 years ago. John Lennon, fi lmed and recorded in abundance during his lifetime, feels present and participatory. The series manages to avoid that whiff of forensic exhumation in which Ken Burns specializes. Most gratifying are the

numerous uninterrupted live performances and the clarifying memories of producer George Martin.

GEORGE HARRISON: LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD

George Harrison suffers from the fact that we usually encounter him through his music, which is almost always good but too often not great.

This exhaustive biographical treatment by Martin Scorsese demonstrates that Harrison was both more interesting and more wise than his music ever convincingly suggested.

Harrison’s dispassionate but knowing perspective of the history of the Beatles and the rest of 20th-century rock ’n’ roll is cause enough to watch this 208-minute doc. But the project and the watching are ultimately justified by Harrison’s lucid meditations on celebrity and creativity and the dubious benefits of affluence.

FRIDAY, JULY 17

SATURDAY, JULY 18

THE RUTLES: ALL YOU NEED IS CASH

The full-flowering of a parody skit by Eric Idle and Neil Innes, which migrated from British television to Saturday Night Live before being made into this mockumentary feature, the Rutles are silly but serve a purpose. Dirk, Nasty, Stig, and Barry demonstrate that the music of the Beatles was deceptively simple and basic, even while containing a particular refi ned genius that could be mocked and analyzed but never captured or reproduced. George Harrison participated in the making of the fi lm (and makes a cameo as a television reporter), and John Lennon is rumored to have liked it. Mick Jagger and Paul Simon are great sports and seem pleased and eager to poke fun at their own legends. ◆

SUNDAY, JULY 19

/ForecastleFest

@Forecastle

/ForecastleFest

July 2, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 21

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Music

Frog & Toad at the Crown & Goose Jason Thompson covers the outskirts of the jazz idiom

BY JACK NEELY

I

n a city that already has more than its share of world-class jazz saxophonists, Jason Thompson makes his own way. His five-piece band, Frog & Toad’s Dixie Quartet, has been playing free live shows twice a week at the Crown & Goose. They’re about to record their second album. They’re not like anybody else.

Thompson doesn’t play bebop, the mainstay of the American saxman for more than half a century. “We don’t even touch it,” he says. “I love to listen to bebop. But that’s the repertoire they’ve taught in school.” He prefers to do something different.

Frog & Toad can sound more old-fashioned than bebop, with Dixieland and ragtime tunes. But then, in the same set, they’ll sound more modern than bebop, with funk or fusion, or something original he wrote last week.

Thompson doesn’t play tenor or

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY July 2, 2015

alto, the two most familiar saxophones, though he knows them well. If fans of the great funk-rock band Gran Torino don’t recognize Thompson as the tenor saxophonist for that multicultural traveling party that was animating crowds here 15 years ago, it may be because he’s shaved off his dreadlocks.

Sometimes he plays soprano, though his soprano sax is probably different from any you’ve seen or heard. Thompson’s rare King model curves out at the bottom, like an ice-cream scoop. It’s a model made only in the mid-1920s.

His other saxophones get even more attention. You don’t see a baritone sax every day. More startling is his bass saxophone, a monstrosity so big that just to pick it up and play it, you’d have to be in good shape, and not too short. It’s an antique, a 1914 Conn that was once part of a Mum-

mers Parade band in Philadelphia. “I may have the only one in the state of Tennessee,” Thompson says. “It’s definitely the only one I’ve heard in a band.”

It weighs 19 pounds. “That’s three times as heavy as a tenor sax.

But it’s more cumbersome than anything,” says Thompson, laughing as he admits “machismo” is part of its appeal. “It can seem clumsy, tuba-like.

But I really like to show how it can become a different voice.” It sounds as deep as it looks. “A Paul Robeson kind of thing. Or Johnny Hartman.”

Those two classic jazz vocalists were known for their deep bass voices. Thompson brings up a more recent mainstream reference. “I like the Barry Whiteness of it,” he says.

It was the instrument that inspired his repertoire. “I’d just gotten a bass sax, and fell into that Dixieland and early New Orleans kind of sound.

Later, Professor Longhair, that kind of stuff, and gypsy jazz.” Then he started throwing in some bossa nova, some polka, a movie score or two.

“I have the world’s most perfect situation,” says the trained surgical technician, who works only a few days a month. “I play saxophone the majority of my time.”

Born in Ohio, Thompson spent some years in Northern California and Kansas City before moving to Farragut with his parents. Even as a teenage baritone sax player at Farragut High, he was hanging out with Bill Scarlett and Rocky Wynder, local legends among connoisseurs of the sax. “Bill called me ‘Mophead,’ I was so skinny, with these dreadlocks.”

In the University of Tennessee jazz program in the ’90s, Thompson got to study with the one local saxophonist those others looked up to.

“I was one of the last of the students taught by the great Jerry Coker before he retired,” he says. “Jerry’s Kids, we called ourselves. He really took an interest in me—called attention to my shortcomings while complimenting you at the same time.”

Thompson finished a bachelor’s degree through the music program and says he’s just a few hours away

from a graduate degree. “I’m one of those lame people who almost has a master’s.”

One distraction was called Gran Torino. “I gave up a scholarship at UT to go on the road for six years,” he says. “I learned a lot about the saxophone and about the music business.”

That big funk band is enjoying a sort of soft reunion; they played the Bijou last year and they’ll be playing another show here on Sept. 11 at the Standard.

Thompson calls his own group “Frog & Toad.” His deeper sax riffs can sound bullfrogish, and that’s part of it. But Frog & Toad was a series of 1970s children’s books featuring a cheerful frog and a dour toad. Thompson says the pair approximate his longtime collaboration with guitarist Chad Volkers, with whom Thompson had gigged at the late Baker Peters Jazz Club. “I’m the happy-go-lucky one,” Thompson says. Volkers is not.

Other members include keyboardist Jason Day, formerly of the Shortwave Society; drummer Nolan Nevels, who also plays with the Marble City Five; and newest member Dave Knight, a second percussionist who takes a turn on bongos and other offbeat surfaces. He supplies, in Thompson’s words, “authenticity, with an extra splash of color.”

“So our quartet is really a quintet,” laughs Thompson. “Jazz is all about breaking rules.”

They’re about to go into the studio, later this month, at Scott Minor’s well-known Wild Chorus studio. “His equipment is top notch, and he knows how to use it,” Thompson says. Frog & Toad recorded a debut album there three years ago.

“Never has anybody made my baritone sax sound so beautiful,” he declares.

“Dripping with life, like a metal cello.”

Their live shows serve mostly covers, but when Thompson records, he records mainly his own compositions. They’re new, but some wouldn’t be out of place in other eras.

“We don’t play any music that isn’t fun,” he says. That’s his primary genre. “Challenging, that’s great. But if it’s not fun, we’re not gonna play it.” ◆

Movies

Death and the Maiden YA adaptation Me and Earl and the Dying Girl prefers emotional engagement over manipulation

BY APRIL SNELLINGS

P

atience pays dividends in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, the latest film to turn a cancer-stricken girl into an agent of change for a hero who would otherwise be content to just skim the surface of life. If you can get past the concept, or if you’re a fan of the Life-Affirming Cancer-Romance subgenre—I have my own dark secrets, so no judgment here—there’s one more hurdle to clear before Me and Earl hits its stride as a satisfying and wholly entertaining coming-of-age dramedy. The opening scenes are stuffed to the gills with pop-culture references and twee art-house clichés, and you can’t help wondering if you’re in for 105 minutes of wacky characters and swish pans.

The truth is, you are, and it’s actually kind of wonderful. All that pointedly affected quirkiness turns out to be in service of the story when the movie’s protagonists, a sardonic high-school senior named Greg Gaines (Thomas Mann) and his best

buddy, Earl Jackson (RJ Cyler), are revealed to be film buffs who devote most of their spare time to making lo-fi spoofs of such Criterion Collection staples as Rashomon and The 400 Blows. (Greg and Earl’s versions are titled Monorash and The 400 Bros, respectively.)

Greg has devised what he thinks is a foolproof plan to survive high school: He cultivates goodwill with each clique, but carefully avoids belonging to any of them. He’s not a jock or a stoner or a theater dork; he just surfs from group to group and keeps his head down. So committed is Greg to avoiding meaningful interactions that he even refuses to call Earl his friend, instead referring to him as his “co-worker.”

It’s a plan that’s begging for a monkey wrench, which comes in the form of Rachel (Olivia Cooke), a classmate who’s diagnosed with leukemia. Greg’s mom (a scene-stealing Connie Britton) forces him to

spend time with Rachel, who reluctantly consents to Greg’s overtures—not as a cancer victim who needs support, but as a teenager who understands the need to deflect an overbearing parent.

Greg is so uncomfortable with emotional honesty that he brings Earl into the equation to run interference, and the three form relationships that play out in sometimes surprising ways.

What’s not surprising is that Greg and Earl eventually set out to make a film for Rachel, and that the process will challenge Greg’s policy of detachment.

It’s all narrated by Greg, whose voice-over sometimes seems designed to ward off comparisons to recent teen tearjerkers such as The Fault in Our Stars and—okay, mainly The Fault in Our Stars. Time and again, he reassures us that this isn’t the sort of story we think it is, that he and Rachel aren’t falling in love, that Rachel doesn’t die at the end. To call Me and Earl a tearjerker, though, implies a degree of emotional manipulation that it consistently rises above. When the waterworks finally come—and unless you emerged from a pod, fully formed and bent on world domination, they will—they’re effective because, once you get past those heavy-handed first scenes, the movie engages rather than panders.

That’s largely thanks to first-time screenwriter Jesse Andrews, who adapted his own young-adult novel of

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the same title. His script is an endless tangle of film references, but it’s also a gentle, funny, and insightful story about forming relationships so durable that they can survive the many ways we fumble them—a theme that’s as relevant to adult viewers as teenaged ones.

Me and Earl’s best asset, though, is the trio of young actors at its center.

Mann, Cyler, and Cooke give fantastic, nuanced performances as the film’s titular teens, and they get first-rate guidance from director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. (Me and Earl is an unlikely follow-up to his first feature, the 2014 remake of The Town That Dreaded Sundown.)

See Me and Earl if you’re in the mood for a particularly effective coming-of-age yarn, but also see it if you’re an incurable film nerd. Gomez-Rejon and his cast and crew shot 21 film parodies for Me and Earl, and almost all of them are included (though sometimes you have to watch closely to catch them). The titles alone are glorious; the Gaines/Jackson version of the classic chiller Don’t Look Now is called Don’t Look Now Because a Creepy Ass Dwarf Is About to Kill You!! Damn!!!, and the Fitzcarraldo documentary Burden of Dreams becomes Burden of Screams. Even if you’re not won over by Greg’s transformation, you’ll at least be impressed by his damn fine Herzog impression. ◆ July 2, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 23

A&E

Books

The Dead Zone Stephen King’s new detective series gets off to a clumsy start

BY BRYAN CHARLES

S

tephen King continues to produce interesting books—and the occasional very good one, like 2011’s 11/22/63—despite a host of narrative tics and stylistic deficiencies that would sink a writer less blessed with sheer storytelling prowess.

There have been a couple of outright duds in recent years—Wolves of the Calla, the fifth volume of King’s Dark Tower saga, and Doctor Sleep, the ill-advised sequel to The Shining, are among the worst books he’s written— but on balance his imagination and energy are usually enough to power even weaker efforts.

Last year’s Edgar Award-winning Mr. Mercedes and the new Finders

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY July 2, 2015

Keepers, the first two installments in a trilogy featuring retired detective Bill Hodges, suffer from the usual late-period King foibles: clunky dialogue; an overreliance on italics to convey emphasis; characters who too often break into ever-widening grins; pat psychological explanations for villainous behavior (mother issues in both books); a tension-free final showdown followed by a treacly denouement.

King’s authorial voice has for years been hopelessly folksy—breezy, winking, cheerfully profane—but that isn’t the essential problem. The greater issue is that his characters, regardless of age, ethnicity, or

socioeconomic background, tend to think and speak in that same avuncular fashion. So in Finders Keepers (Scribner) you have Holly Gibney, a neurotic computer whiz forever pacing worry circles and biting her lip hard enough to draw blood, suddenly uttering of herself, “Homegirl don’t dance.” The person to whom she says this allows it might be a joke; if so, it’s a profoundly unfunny one.

And here you have another problem: King simply isn’t funny. His most dismal creation is Eddie Dean, from the Dark Tower novels. Dean, an ex-junkie from Brooklyn, is meant to be hip, a street-savvy wiseacre. But his many, many supposedly witty asides—all of them dead on the page—nearly sabotage the final three Dark Tower books.

Something similar occurs in the Hodges series, in the form of Jerome Robinson, a young African-American man who assists Hodges in his investigations. Jerome, Harvard-bound in the first book, enrolled in the second, sometimes speaks— preposterously, unbelievably—in the voice of a kind of alter ego named Tyrone Feelgood Delight. When Jerome, who is prominent in Mr. Mercedes but appears later in Finders Keepers, tells Hodges he found a job moving shipping containers, here’s how he delivers the news: “Dis here black boy goan tote dat barge an’ lift dat bale, Massa Hodges!”

This is after they engage in a two-part greeting, bumping fists as a way of “acknowledging Jerome’s blackness” and shaking hands, “thereby acknowledging [Hodge’s] WASPiness.” Jerome could have been an interesting character, but King’s tin-eared approach to his race, and more crucially his age—at 17, he says things like, “Porn sites are thicker than flies on roadkill. You surf the Net, you can’t help bumping into them”—renders him at best unconvincing, and at worst, maddening.

Finders Keepers revisits a favorite King theme (explored in harrowing depth in his earlier, much-beloved Misery): the deceptively intimate relationship between author and reader. The book begins in 1978,

when a deranged fan invades the home of a Salingeresque recluse who hasn’t published in years and demands an explanation for the direction in which the writer took his most famous character. Also in the house are the writer’s many notebooks and a safe full of cash.

At 14 brisk pages, the break-in is a perfectly composed set piece, and establishes a momentum that carries the book, jumping back and forth in time, through its wonderful first third.

And then Hodges and his mismatched cohort appear, are called into action, and jam the novel up with their badinage and eye-rolling deductive leaps.

As he has throughout his career, King loves the build. But these new books could have benefited from a stricter edit. Around the moment in Finders Keepers when Holly announces she’s checked city tax records on her iPad, then followed that up with a Google search, then read through those results before handing the iPad to Hodges so he can see—all while in a moving car at a moment of high crisis—you’re likely to want to speed things along. ◆

There have been a couple of outright duds in recent years, but on balance Stephen King’s imagination and energy are usually enough to power even weaker efforts.

(AT THESE & OTHER FINE LOCATIONS) MULTIPLE LOCATIONS

Calhoun’s (7 Locations) Community Boxes Downtown (12 Locations) Earth Fare (2 Locations) Food City (18 Locations) Food Lion (2 Locations) Knox County Public Libraries (14 Locations) Kroger (14 Locations) Maryville College (4 Locations) Pellissippi State Community College campuses (8 Locations) Publix (3 Locations) The Casual Pint (7 Locations) University of Tennessee campus (22 locations) University of Tennessee Medical Center (3 locations) YMCA (4 Locations)

DOWNTOWN / FORT SANDERS

17th Street Deli Bank Of America (Box) Barleys Taproom Bistro At The Bijou (Box) Blue Coast Grill Boyd’s Jig And Reel Café 4 Chesapeake’s Clancy’s Tavern Coffee and Chocolates Convention Center (Box) Copper Cellar Crown And Goose (Box) Cru Downtown Grill & Brewery Downtown Wine & Liquor/Sutree’s Earth To Old City East Tennessee History Center Empire Deli Emporium Center First Tennessee Bank Plaza Five Bar Hampton Inn Holly’s 135 Java-Inside Just Ripe Grocery Knoxville Museum of Art Laurel Theatre Lawson McGhee Library (Inside and Box) Lenny’s Lox Salon Mast General Inside Mellow Mushroom Nama Sushi Not Watsons Nothing Too Fancy Oliver Hotel Outdoor Knoxville Adventure Center (Box) Panera Bread Pendergrass Library (UT Ag Campus) Preservation Pub

Public House Remedy Coffee Salon Barnes & Barnes Sapphire Scruffy City Music Hall Soccer Taco Sterchi Lofts (Box) Sunspot Sweet P’s Barbeque & Soul House (Box) Tenn. Supreme Court (Box) The Hill Tomato Head Uncorked Union Books Urban Bar Visit Knoxville Visitors Center YWCA

EAST

Asheville Highway Animal Clinic Chandlers Deli East End Liquor John T. O’conner center Marc Nelson Nostalgia Puleo’s Saw Works Brewing Scotts Place The Muse Knoxville

NORTH

Amber Restaurant Central Taps and Flats (Box) Club XYZ Country Inn And Suites Cork and Bottle Wine Court South Glowing Body Gypsy Hands Healing Arts Harby’s Harvest Towne Wine And Spirits Holly’s Corner Hops and Hollers K-Brew KCDC Lenny’s Little Caesars (Box) Litton’s Lost And Found Records Mid Mod Collective Nixon’s North Corner Sandwich Shop On The Rocks Liquor Panera Bread (Box) Raven Records Retrospect Rita’s Bakery Ruby Tuesday Tennova Health Workout (Box) Three Rivers Market (Box)

Whiskey River Wild Wright’s Cafeteria

Time Warp Tea Room

WEST

640 Liquor Ashes Package Store Beer Market (Box) Best Bagels Big Fatty’s Bike and Trail Black Horse Pub & Brewery Bobs Package Store Brassarie Northshore Brixx Pizza Butler And Bailey (Community Rack) Dead End BBQ Docs El Mez Cal (Box) Executive Fitness Fuddruckers Gourmet’s Market Grayson Hyundai/Subaru Hairpeace Salon Homberg Hard Knox Pizzeria Hemp Monkeys Holly’s Homberg It’s All So Yummy Jerry’s Artarama Longs Drugs Luttrell’s Eyewear Marco’s Pizza McKay Used Books McScrooge’s Liquor (Box) Middlebrook Liquors (Box) Mulligan’s Nama Sushi Bearden Naples Northshore Wine and Liquor Nostalgia Open Chord Brewhouse Orangery Panera Bearden (Box) Pelancho’s Pet Safe Village Plaid Apron Planet Xchange Prestige Cleaners Rik’s Music Savellis (Box) Shrimp Dock Bearden (Box) Stir Fry Subway Sandwich Shop Across From Gallery (Box) Sullivan’s Northshore Sunrise Supermarket Taste of Thai Ted Russell Ford Ted Russell Nissan Toddy’s Liquor Store Tomato Head (Gallery) USI Motors Westwood Antiques

WAY WEST

Blue Ridge Mountain Sports Brixx Pizza Carolina Ale House Cedar Bluff Discount Wine Chuy’s Cool Sports Home of the Icearium Dixie Lee Wine and Liquor Farragut Wine and Spirits Hush Puppies K-9 Center I Love NY Pizza Knoxville Academy of Music (Box) Lane Music Lunch Box Pet Safe Village Provision Center, Mail Annex Sam’s Café Sgt. Pepperoni’s Pizza Shrimp Dock Farragut Smoky Mountain Brewery Turkey Creek Town of Farragut Municipal Center (Community Rack) VitalSigns Wellness

SOUTH + ALCOA/MARYVILLE

Barley’s Maryville Blount County Library Bluetick Brewery Brackin’s Blues Club Dead End Barbeque Disc Exchange Grinder and Grains Café Little River Trading Company Panera Bread Alcoa (Box) Smokey Mountain Harley Davidson (Box) Smoky Mountain Brewery Maryville So Kno Food Coop Southland Books And Cafe Southland Spirits and Wine Stanley’s Greenhouse Sullivan’s Maryville (Box) Sweet P’s Barbeque & Soul House The Market Vienna Coffee House

OAK RIDGE

American Museum of Science and Energy Big Ed’s Pizza (Box) Billy’s Time Out Deli (Box) Clinton Library Doubletree Hotel Hot Bagel Company (Box) Hot Bagel Company (2nd Box) Mr. Ks Used Books (Box) National Fitness Center The Other One Deli

All Locations Subject To Change • Call us at 865-313-2059 to add your location.

July 2, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 25

CALENDAR MUSIC

Thursday, July 2 FREEQUENCY • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 8PM FUTURE THIEVES • Scruffy City Hall • 10PM JACK AND THE BEAR WITH THE DECAMP SISTERS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM JOE’S TRUCK STOP • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE SAM PACE AND THE GILDED GRIT • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

Friday, July 3 RICHARD ARMENTROUT AND THIRD COAST • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 10PM CLYDE’S ON FIRE • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE THE DAMNED ANGELS WITH MASS DRIVER AND THE BAD DUDES • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • Local heavy and sleaze rock.

FROG & TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • Crown and Goose • 8PM • Live jazz featuring a mix of original music, early jazz and more. • FREE • See Music Story on page 22.

GRITS • Brackins Blues Club (Maryville) • 9PM • FREE LILY HIATT • WDVX • 7PM • Royal Blue, the second album

by East Nashville firebrand Lilly Hiatt, is about the majesty of melancholy-or, as she explains it, “accepting the sadder aspects of life and finding some peace in them.” It’s feisty and rough-around-the-edges, full of humor and bite and attitude from a woman who proclaims, “I’d rather throw a punch than bat my eye.” • FREE • See Spotlight.

DEVAN JONES AND THE UPTOWN STOMP • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • FREE KITTY WAMPUS • Rooster’s Sports Bar • 10PM • Classic rock and R&B. KUKULY AND THE GYPSY FUEGO • Bistro at the Bijou • 9PM • Live jazz. • FREE LEBRON LAZENBY AND THE BIG 73 • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM ONE MORE TIME: A TRIBUTE TO DAFT PUNK • The International • 9PM • 18 and up.

SUSAN PRINCE • Susan’s Happy Hour • 8PM • FREE REALM • Longbranch Saloon • 8PM DAVE SLACK TRIO • Pero’s on the Hill • 7PM • Instrumental and vocal jazz standards.

THE WILD THINGS • Preservation Pub • 9PM • British Invasion covers. 21 and up.

YING YANG TWINS • NV Nightclub • 9PM • Atlanta’s party rap duo return for another show at NV. • $5 Saturday, July 4 CYPHER: A HIP-HOP SHOW • The Birdhouse • 9PM • Open mic for the first half of the night, then two featured artists to close out the night. 18 and up. • $5 HIP-HOP FOR THE HOMELAND • Longbranch Saloon • 10PM AARON KIRBY AND THE TENNESSEE JAM BAND • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 10PM LEFT FOOT DAVE AND THE MAGIC HATS • Brackins Blues Club (Maryville) • 9PM • FREE MANN • NV Nightclub • 9PM • Best known for his singles “Buzzin” with 50 Cent and “The Mack” with Snoop Dogg and Iyaz. • $5-$10 HAROLD NAGGE AND ALAN WYATT • Bistro at the Bijou • 26

KNOXVILLE MERCURY July 2, 2015

Thursday, July 2 - Sunday, July 12

9PM • Live jazz. • FREE OAK RIDGE COMMUNITY BAND JULY 4 CONCERT • Alvin K. Bissell Park • 7:30PM • Bring lawn chairs or blankets for outdoors seating and come early to get good seats for both the concert and fireworks. The concert program will feature special guest vocalists as the band performs patriotic, swing, and show tunes. For more information, visit www.orcb.org or call 865-482-3568. • FREE THE RERUNS • Pero’s on the Hill • 7PM • Knoxville’s premier TV band plays your favorite television themes.

ZOSO: THE ULTIMATE LED ZEPPELIN EXPERIENCE WITH FINKELSTEEN • The Shed at Smoky Mountain Harley-Davidson (Maryville) • 6PM • $20 Sunday, July 5 BREAKING BENJAMIN • The International • 8PM • 18 and up. • $35-$70 SHIFFLETT AND HANNAH • Bistro at the Bijou • Noon • Live jazz. • Free DAVE SLACK TRIO • Pero’s on the Hill • 1PM • Live jazz.

TSUNAMIS WITH PSYCHIC BAOS AND OFFING • Pilot Light • 9PM • 18 and up. • $5 Monday, July 6 ARSTIDIR WITH DUNDERHEAD • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE MARBIN • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • Two guys from Israel and two from Chicago playing really fast. Guitar, bass, drums, and a tiny saxophone.

MIGHTY MUSICAL MONDAY • Tennessee Theatre • 12PM • Wurlitzer meister Bill Snyder is joined by a special guest on the first Monday of each month for a music showcase inside Knoxville’s historic Tennessee Theatre. • FREE OPEN CHORD BATTLE OF THE BANDS • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • Come out to support your favorite local band and hear some great live music.

Winner & runner-up will advance to the next round of competition. Judging is based on stage presence, originality, and crowd size. This means the more fans there are to watch a band perform, the better their chances are of advancing to the next round. • $5 Tuesday, July 7 LIZ FRAME AND THE KICKERS WITH THE BRIAN SUTHERLAND BAND • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE JAZZ ON THE SQUARE • Market Square • 8PM • Featuring the Marble City 5. Every Tuesday from May 12-Aug. 25. • FREE IAN THOMAS AND THE BAND OF DRIFTERS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • Thomas draws on a variety of American roots influences, delivering a captivating raw live performance and distinctive sound from his original compositions on guitar, harmonica and kazoo.

Wednesday, July 8 CUTTHROAT SHAMROCK WITH THE PINE BOX BOYS • Scruffy City Hall • 8PM • Sevier County Celtic punk.

FROG & TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • Crown and Goose • 6PM • Live jazz featuring a mix of original music, early jazz and more. • FREE MATT NELSON SOUND • Bistro at the Bijou • 7PM • Live jazz. • FREE TALK SICK BRATS • Pilot Light • 9PM • 18 and up. • $5 DALE WATSON AND HIS LONE-STARS WITH THE PINE BOX BOYS • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring

LILLY HIATT WDVX (301 S. Gay St.) • Friday, July 3 • 7 p.m. • Free • wdvx.com

For starters, yes, Lilly Hiatt is the daughter of roots-rock icon John Hiatt. That doesn’t mean she’s just been trading on her family connections to build her career in Nashville; Hiatt’s second, Royal Blue, released in March on Normaltown Records, is the work of an accomplished singer and songwriter whose talents are plenty apparent, never mind her last name.

Royal Blue is an exhilarating downer of a disc, rooted in heartache but buoyant and free, even a little defiant. As a songwriter, Hiatt—much like her father—mines past decades and a wide range of styles for a straightforward and deceptively simple sound. There are traces of country, classic rock ’n’ roll, folk, Don Henley’s Building the Perfect Beast, and ’90s alternative rock here—if you need comparisons, Neko Case and Amy Rigby come to mind—but Royal Blue is none of those in particular, and no kind of throwback. Royal Blue doesn’t have a single breakthrough track, but there’s no filler, either. It’s a durable, well-crafted, and satisfying effort, full of promise. (Matthew Everett)

29

Spotlight: Dale Watson and His Lone Stars

Thursday, July 2 - Sunday, July 12

local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE • See Spotlight on page 29.

THE WHISKEY GENTRY • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7PM • On this edition of Tennessee Shines, some hell-raisin’, honky-tonkin’ Bluegrass and Country from Whiskey Gentry. • $10 Thursday, July 9 THE HOUSE OF RISING FUNK • Preservation Pub • 10PM JOSIAH AND THE GREATER GOOD WITH CAITLIN MAHONEY • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE JUILLIARD JAZZ FOR JOY • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 6:30PM • The Joy of Music School, a nonprofit organization providing free music lessons and instruments to financially disadvantaged youth, announces Juilliard Jazz for Joy, a unique and inspiring evening of music. An extraordinary former student of an after-school free music program for disadvantaged youth does something that shows his outsized character: He’s giving back. Pianist Taber Gable is a graduate of West High School, with an impressive musical trajectory. First he graduated from Knoxville’s Joy of Music School, having benefited for years from its free lessons and instruments, and its all-volunteer teaching faculty. He immediately won a full music scholarship to the University of Hartford, in Connecticut, graduating in 2014. He was then launched to the pinnacle of musical study, the Juilliard School in New York, winning a scholarship to the Juilliard Jazz Studies program led by Wynton Marsalis. • $25-$125 • See Program Notes on page 20.

SMOOTH SAILOR • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM Friday, July 10 10 STRING SYMPHONY WITH CORNELIA OVERTON • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • FREE BLACK STONE CHERRY WITH BRAD PUCKETT • Old City Courtyard • 7PM • Part of the Smokey Mountain Rumble Festival. • $15-$40 A.A. BONDY • Pilot Light • 9PM • AA Bondy was born Auguste Arthur Bondy in New Roads, Louisiana in 1972. He played the trumpet as a boy. As a teenager he switched to guitar, rode skateboards and found Sonic Youth. From 1997-2003 he went missing as part of a rock’n roll band/ soul-death experiment In 2006 he found a piece of himself in the trees outside of Woodstock, New York and began a slow dance toward better dreams. Since then has released three albums for Fat Possum including 2011’s quietly praised ‘Believers’ He currently lives near the ocean north of Los Angeles. • $12-$15 THE BURNIN’ HERMANS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • An energetic, soulful, groove heavy assortment of tunes, guaranteed to keep the party going for any crowd, seasoned or fresh.

CLAYMATION • The Bistro at the Bijou • 9PM • FREE DECIBELLA WITH MASSEUSE AND THREE STAR REVIVAL • Scruffy City Hall • 10PM DECONBRIO WITH AMONG THE BEASTS, INVIOLATE, AND WEARTH • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 7PM • Local heavy rock. • $8 DUST AND DECAY • Longbranch Saloon • 9PM FROG & TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • Crown and Goose • 8PM • Live jazz featuring a mix of original music, early jazz and more. • FREE THE GEE BEES WITH HARRISON ANVIL • Preservation Pub • 10PM DEVAN JONES AND THE UPTOWN STOMP • Great Smoky Mountains Heritage Center (Townsend) • 7PM • Snappy

CALENDAR

7-piece band plays swingin’ old time jazz and ‘50s-era Chicago blues. • $5 KITTY WAMPUS • Moody’s Neighborhood Bar and Grill • 9PM • Classic rock and R&B. LABRON LAZENBY • Brackins Blues Club (Maryville) • 9PM • FREE MARBLE CITY SHOOTERS • Calhoun’s (Volunteer Landing) • 9PM THE JOHN MYERS BAND • Knoxville Museum of Art • 6PM • The Knoxville music icon performs soul, country, folk, and gospel. Part of KMA’s Alive After Five series. • $10 SUSAN PRINCE • Susan’s Happy Hour • 8PM • FREE DAVE SLACK TRIO • Pero’s on the Hill • 7PM • Instrumental and vocal jazz standards.

SNAILS WITH LUCE WAYNE AND BOLTACTION • The Concourse • 9PM • Presented by Midnight Voyage and WUTK. 18 and up. • $10-$20 GUY SMILEY • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 10PM WILSON WITH THE BARNYARD STOMPERS • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE Saturday, July 11 6-STRING DRAG • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • After 16 years in hibernation, 6 String Drag is back to remind us a few things about real rock ‘n’ roll. In the late ‘90s, the Carolina quartet stood out as pioneers of the nascent alt-country movement. Their exhilarating new recording, Roots Rock ‘N’ Roll, welds Kenny Roby and Rob Keller’s trademark harmonies to surging rhythms. Cut mostly live to tape, the effort is equal parts slap-back swagger and openhearted honesty – a triumphant return that celebrates rock’s first golden age by virtue of the grace, wit and insight found in Roby’s songwriting.

CAPTAIN SUCK AND THE MEDIOCRE BAND • Brackins Blues Club (Maryville) • 9PM • FREE FREEQUENCY • Casual Pint (Northshore) • 7PM THE JAILHOUSE REVIEW • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 10PM KITTY WAMPUS • Concord Park • 6PM • Knox County’s summer concert series, Second Saturday Concerts at The Cove, continues this year with live entertainment for the whole family.

KNOX COUNTY JUG STOMPERS • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • FREE LIONS • Longbranch Saloon • 8PM MOLLY HATCHET WITH ROCK & ROLL FREAK SHOW • Old City Courtyard • 7PM • Part of the Smoky Mountain Rumble. • $7-$30 THE NATTI LOVE JOYS • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • Join us for a night of good vibes from reggae locals the Natti Love Joys.

THE RERUNS • Pero’s on the Hill • 7PM • Knoxville’s premier TV band plays your favorite television themes.

MANDO SAENZ WITH HALEY AND DYLAN RICHARDSON • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE UNKNOWN HINSON WITH TEXAS TONY AND THE TORNADO RAMBLERS • The Shed at Smoky Mountain Harley-Davidson (Maryville) • 6PM • While singing his own hilariously politically incorrect songs, Unknown Hinson plays guitar in a style incendiary enough to have Satan himself reaching for the antiperspirant. But don’t dismiss him as a novelty act. He’s one hell of a talent and has the music to prove it!Looking somewhat like Dracula’s nasty little brother who spent some hard years drinking and working

as a carnival barker for a second-rate freak show, Unknown Hinson translates that vibe to his style of country and western-tinged psychobilly. The band is now touring nationwide, wowing audiences with outrageous and campy, white-trash persona and freewheeling, sleazy tone. • $25 BRIAN WALDSCHLAGER WITH THE NICK KANE TRIO • Preservation Pub • 10PM ADAM WATSON • The Birdhouse • 8PM THE WILL YAGER TRIO • Bistro at the Bijou • 9PM • Live jazz. • FREE YEAR OF OCTOBER • Preservation Pub • 8PM Sunday, July 12 THE BARNYARD STOMPERS • Preservation Pub • 10PM STEPHANIE JACKSON • Fountain City Art Center • 6PM • Stephanie Jackson is an eclectic musician who uses her guitar to express heartfelt melodies from a variety of genres. She has arranged the music of the Beatles, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, and Elton John on her classical guitar. Her repertoire also includes arrangements of jazz, show tunes, the “rat pack”, Spanish/Latin, and blues.

Many of her tunes also feature her 11-string harp guitar.

She has recorded twelve CDs in a variety of genres. Visit www.knoxvilleguitar.org. • $20 PALE ROOT • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 8PM SHIFFLETT AND HANNAH • Bistro at the Bijou • Noon • Live jazz. • Free DAVE SLACK TRIO • Pero’s on the Hill • 1PM • Live jazz.

OPEN MIC AND SONGWRITER NIGHTS

Thursday, July 2 IRISH MUSIC SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15PM • Held on the first and third Thursdays of each month. • FREE BREWHOUSE BLUES JAM • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM Sunday, July 5 NATIVE AMERICAN FLUTE CIRCLE • Ijams Nature Center • 4PM • Meets the first Sunday of the month. All levels welcome. Call Ijams to register 865-577-4717 ext.110.

Tuesday, July 7 PRESERVATION PUB SINGER/SONGWRITER NIGHT • Preservation Pub • 7PM • A weekly open mic.

OLD-TIME JAM SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15PM • Hosted by Sarah Pickle. • FREE Wednesday, July 8 TIME WARP TEA ROOM OLD-TIME JAM • Time Warp Tea Room • 7PM • Regular speed old-time/fiddle jam every Wednesday from 7-9 p.m. at the Time Warp Tea Room. All instruments and skill levels welcome.

OPEN BLUES JAM • Susan’s Happy Hour • 8PM • FREE BRACKINS BLUES JAM • Brackins Blues Club (Maryville) • 9PM • A weekly open session hosted by Tommie John. • FREE Thursday, July 9 SCOTTISH MUSIC SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15PM • Held on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month.

• FREE BREWHOUSE BLUES JAM • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM Friday, July 10 TIME WARP TEA ROOM OPEN SONGWRITER NIGHT • Time July 2, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 27

CALENDAR Warp Tea Room • 7PM • Songwriter Night at Time Warp Tea Room runs on the second and fourth Friday of every month. Show up around 7 p.m. with your instrument in tow and sign up to share a couple of original songs with a community of friends down in Happy Holler. • FREE

DJ AND DANCE NIGHTS

Friday, July 3 TOTAL REQUEST DJ DANCE PARTY • Southbound Bar and Grill • 8PM

Thursday, July 2 - Sunday, July 12

Saturday, July 11 TOTAL REQUEST DJ DANCE PARTY • Southbound Bar and Grill • 8PM Sunday, July 12 S.I.N. • The Concourse • 9 p.m. • A weekly dance night for service-industry workers—get in free with your ABC license or other proof of employment. ($5 for everybody else.) • 18 and up.

CLASSICAL MUSIC

Sunday, July 5 S.I.N. • The Concourse • 9 p.m. • A weekly dance night for service-industry workers—get in free with your ABC license or other proof of employment. ($5 for everybody else.) • 18 and up.

Saturday, July 4 KSO INDEPENDENCE DAY CONCERT • World’s Fair Park • 8PM • This free, family-friendly concert includes patriotic tributes and a spectacular fireworks finale. KSO Resident Conductor James Fellenbaum will conduct the Orchestra in this annual concert as part of the City of Knoxville’s Festival on the Fourth. This concert is free to attend; no tickets are required. Enjoy patriotic tunes such as the Star Spangled Banner, Armed Forces Salute and recognizable tunes including “Rocky Top,” “76 Trombones,” and music from Disney’s Frozen and classics from the Sound of Music with featured vocalist Katy Wolfe, soprano. For more information regarding the KSO or the Independence Day Concert, please call 865-291-3310. • FREE

Friday, July 10 TOTAL REQUEST DJ DANCE PARTY • Southbound Bar and Grill • 8PM

COMEDY AND

Saturday, July 4 TOTAL REQUEST DJ DANCE PARTY • Southbound Bar and Grill • 8PM TEMPLE DANCE NIGHT • The Concourse • 9PM • Knoxville’s long-running goth/alternative/industrial dance night. 18 and up.

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY July 2, 2015

SPOKEN WORD

Friday, July 3 BILLY WAYNE DAVIS WITH ERIN DEWEY LENNOX AND JASPER REDD • Pilot Light • 9:30PM • 18 and up. • $5 SAW WORKS FIRST FRIDAY COMEDY SHOW • Saw Works Brewing Company • 7PM • Featuring John-Michael Bond, Samm Severin, Shane Rhyne and Sean Simoneau. • FREE Sunday, July 5 UPSTAIRS UNDERGROUND COMEDY • Preservation Pub • 8PM • A weekly comedy open mic.

Tuesday, July 7 OPEN MIC STAND-UP COMEDY • Longbranch Saloon • 8PM • Come laugh until you cry at the Longbranch every Tuesday night. Doors open at 8, first comic at 8:30. No cover charge, all are welcome. Aspiring or experienced comics interested in joining in the fun email us at longbranch.info@gmail.com to learn more, or simply come to the show a few minutes early. • FREE EINSTEIN SIMPLIFIED • Scruffy City Hall • 8PM • Knoxville’s long-running improv comedy troupe. • Free Wednesday, July 8 EDDIE IFFT • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • Eddie Ifft – has been called one of the most underrated comics in America by the Onion and has proudly told jokes around the world to sold-out crowds in over 15 countries. Eddie is the host of one of the most successful podcasts in the comedy world called “Talkin’ Sh*t”. In

August of 2014, his Kickstarter campaign to fund “The Bingle Bus” a mobile podcasting studio exceeded his fundraising goal and raised over $60,000, so he can take his popular podcast on the road. 18 and up. • $10 Saturday, July 11 IMPROV COMEDY CLASS • The Birdhouse • 10AM • A weekly improv comedy class. • FREE Sunday, July 12 UPSTAIRS UNDERGROUND COMEDY • Preservation Pub • 8PM • A weekly comedy open mic.

MARK NORMAND • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • Mark Normand is a biting, smart comedian based in New York City. In 2014, Mark was a semi-finalist on NBC’s Last Comic Standing, premiered his Comedy Central Presents: THE HALF HOUR, and his debut “Still Got It” from Comedy Central Productions. 18 and up. • $10

THEATER AND DANCE

Friday, July 10 KNOXVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE: BAMBI, A LIFE IN THE WOODS • Knoxville Children’s Theatre • 7PM • Bambi, a young forest deer, suddenly becomes heir to his father, the Great Prince. After Bambi encounters the new feelings of love, fear, loneliness and independence, he comes to understand that all of Earth’s creatures are guided by a greater force than themselves: all are dependent on each.

July 10-26. • $12 THE WORDPLAYERS: THE SPITFIRE GRILL • Bijou Theatre •

Thursday, July 2 - Sunday, July 12

CALENDAR 7:30PM • The Spitfire Grill depicts the journey of a young woman just released from prison, starting a new life in a rural, economically-depressed town and finding work in Hannah’s Spitfire Grill. Her journey of renewal and forgiveness follows the path of the town toward its own tenuous reawakening. Music and Book by James Valcq Lyrics and Book by Fred Alley Based on the film by Lee David Zlotoff. July 10-12. • $14.50-$21.50 OAK RIDGE PLAYHOUSE: ALL SHOOK UP • Oak Ridge Playhouse • 8PM • The time is 1955. Chad, a guitar-playing roustabout just out of the jailhouse and in need of a mechanic, rides his motorcycle into a square little town in a square little state. There he is intro-duced to Natalie, the town mechanic, who is instantly smitten and promises to fix his bike. Dreaming of love and adventure, she yearns for one true love to take her away, never realizing that her best friend Dennis has a secret crush on her. But before long, the drifter shakes up everything and everyone he meets in this hip-swiveling, lip-curling musical romance that features the music of Elvis Presley and will have you jumpin’ out of your blue suede shoes.

July 10-26.

Saturday, July 11 FOLLIES GIRLS: GRIN AND BARE IT • The Bowery • 9PM • Delight in our dancing dames, badass babes, sassy sweethearts, fiery females and sin sticks. Visit folliesgirls.com. • $10 KNOXVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE: BAMBI, A LIFE IN THE WOODS • Knoxville Children’s Theatre • 1PM and 5PM • July 10-26. • $12 THE WORDPLAYERS: THE SPITFIRE GRILL • Bijou Theatre • 2:30PM and 7:30PM • July 10-12. • $14.50-$21.50 OAK RIDGE PLAYHOUSE: ALL SHOOK UP • Oak Ridge Playhouse • 8PM • July 10-26.

Sunday, July 12 THE WORDPLAYERS: THE SPITFIRE GRILL • Bijou Theatre • 3PM • July 10-12. • $14.50-$21.50 KNOXVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE: BAMBI, A LIFE IN THE WOODS • Knoxville Children’s Theatre • 3PM • July 10-26. • $12

DALE WATSON AND HIS LONE STARS WDVX • Wednesday, July 8 • Noon • Free • wdvx.com

It’s safe to assume that Dale Watson doesn’t care what you think. The 52-year-old hardcore honky-tonk troubadour has made a cult career out of one of the most resolutely uncommercial styles of music in the 21st century: rough-edged Bakersfield country, in the mold of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. He’s done it through hard work and commitment—hundreds of tour dates every year, and an astounding number of albums (more than two dozen) since his 1995 debut, Cheatin’ Heart Attack. But Watson has two secret weapons. One, he’s a world-class classic country songwriter, an outsize talent who’s cranked out dozens of great, nearly great, and very good songs over the last 20 years, with hardly a dud anywhere. He’s as capable of affecting barroom ballads (like “Crocodile Tears,” from his new album Call Me Insane) as he is of ripping trucker anthems (check out the three-volume Truckin’ Sessions series) and clever country songs that are basically about country songs (“The Honkiest Tonkiest Beer Joint in Town,” from way back in 1996, or “Nashville Rash,” from his first album). Two, his backing band, the Lone Stars, can play his old-fashioned honky-tonk with the best of them; on record and live, the Lone Stars hold their own against Owens’ Buckaroos and Haggard’s Strangers. Watson’s easy to overlook, but there’s no good reason to miss him. (This Knoxville performance is a case of the Blue Plate Special at its best—Watson has a day off between Cincinnati and Baltimore, so he’s swinging down especially for WDVX’s lunch-hour series.) (Matthew Everett)

FESTIVALS

Saturday, July 4 MUSEUM OF APPALACHIA JULY 4 CELEBRATION AND ANVIL SHOOT • Museum of Appalachia • 12AM • July 4th will be celebrated in an unusual, dramatic, and traditional fashion at the Museum of Appalachia with historic anvil shoots. In addition, there will be demonstrations of mountain arts and crafts. Bluegrass, old time and folk music will be played and sung on the porches of the cabins and in the old log church, hymn singing and church services will be conducted. The demonstrations and music can be found throughout the 65-acre farm/ village complex. For more information, please contact the Museum of Appalachia at 865-494-7680 or visit www. museumofappalachia.org.

LET FREEDOM RING FOURTH OF JULY CELEBRATION • Marble Springs State Historic Site • 10AM • Please join us at Marble Springs State Historic Site as we celebrate the Fourth of July. Activities include a “Let Freedom Ring” bell ringing ceremony at 2pm, Revolutionary War Stories, and a Raising of a Liberty Pole. This event is in collaboration with the General Henry Knox Chapter Sons of the Revolution and local reenacting community. This event will take place from 10:00 am until 5:00 pm on July 4 and is free to the public, though donations are appreciated.

July 2, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 29

CALENDAR Information found at 865-573-5508Email: info@ marblesprings.netWebsite: www.marblesprings.net • FREE FESTIVAL ON THE 4TH • World’s Fair Park • 4PM • Live music, food vendors, activities for kids, and fireworks. • FREE RED WHITE AND BOOZE PUB CRAWL • The Old City • 9PM • Come celebrate the Fourth of July with us for the Red, White and Booze Pub Crawl in the Historic Old City. 7 Venues for only $5 in advance and $10 day of the event.

Venues include Carleo’s, Wagon Wheel, Southbound, 90 Proof, Hanna’s, NV Nightclub and The Bowery. The event is 21 and up except for NV Nightclub and The Bowery which is 18 and up. • $5-$10 Friday, July 10 SMOKY MOUNTAIN RUMBLE • The Old City • The Smoky Mountain Rumble rolls into Knoxville July 10-12 for a three-day motorcycle rally that guides bikers through epic destinations such as the Devils Triangle, Tail of the Dragon and the Foothills Parkway. The rally “headquarters” will be in Knoxville’s Historic Old City and is open to the public. Whether you are a motorcycle enthusiast or not, the Old City will be a great backdrop for music like Molly Hatchett, Black Stone Cherry and the Brad Puckett Band. Streets will be blocked off so guests can explore the businesses in the Old City. Tickets for the festival are on sale now at www.smokymountainrumble.com and tickets for the concerts can be found at www. carleoentertainment.com.

Saturday, July 11

Thursday, July 2 - Sunday, July 12

SMOKY MOUNTAIN RUMBLE • The Old City • The Smoky Mountain Rumble rolls into Knoxville July 10-12 for a three-day motorcycle rally that guides bikers through epic destinations such as the Devils Triangle, Tail of the Dragon and the Foothills Parkway. The rally “headquarters” will be in Knoxville’s Historic Old City and is open to the public. Whether you are a motorcycle enthusiast or not, the Old City will be a great backdrop for music like Molly Hatchet, Black Stone Cherry and the Brad Puckett Band. Streets will be blocked off so guests can explore the businesses in the Old City. Tickets for the festival are on sale now at www.smokymountainrumble.com and tickets for the concerts can be found at www. carleoentertainment.com.

OUT OF THE ORDINARY FAIR • Blount County Public Library • 1PM • Experience out-of-the-ordinary activities at the library: line dancing, yoga at your desk, honey-making exhibit, creativity techniques, basket making, local history, the new digital signage at the library and more!

These events and activities will occur throughout the library. • FREE

Molly Hatchet, Black Stone Cherry and the Brad Puckett Band. Streets will be blocked off so guests can explore the businesses in the Old City. Tickets for the festival are on sale now at www.smokymountainrumble.com and tickets for the concerts can be found at www. carleoentertainment.com.

Sunday, July 12 SMOKY MOUNTAIN RUMBLE • The Old City • The Smoky Mountain Rumble rolls into Knoxville July 10-12 for a three-day motorcycle rally that guides bikers through epic destinations such as the Devils Triangle, Tail of the Dragon and the Foothills Parkway. The rally “headquarters” will be in Knoxville’s Historic Old City and is open to the public. Whether you are a motorcycle enthusiast or not, the Old City will be a great backdrop for music like

Saturday, July 4 BOYS AND GIRLS CLUB OF TENNESSEE VALLEY DUCK RACE • World’s Fair Park • 2PM • Thousands of rubber ducks go into the pond at World’s Fair Park and race to the finish line in front of the amphitheater for great prizes.

SMOKY MOUNTAIN HIKING CLUB: TWEETSIE TRAIL, SYCAMORE SHOALS STATE HISTORIC AREA • 7:30AM • The Tweetsie Trail is a rails-to-trails project currently under construction on the former ET & WNC (“Tweetsie”)

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SPORTS AND RECREATION

Friday, July 3 KTC FIREBALL MOONLIGHT CLASSIC 5K • University of Tennessee • 9PM • The Fireball Classic on July 3rd is a unique race that has something for everyone. Starting at 9:00 pm, the late evening venue appeals to competitive racers, casual runners, walkers, kids, and those who just want to have a fun evening. Please note that the Firecracker Kids Mile begins at 8 pm. It’s a great Knoxville tradition to begin this most patriotic holiday. Visit ktc.org.

Railroad right of way which when completed will be the longest rails-to-trails project in Tennessee. We will ride the seven mile completed section between Elizabethton and Johnson City possibly going on to the interesting downtown areas of both towns. In addition to biking, we plan to celebrate Independence Day with a tour of the Sycamore Shoals State Historic Area where the Watauga settlers formed the first free and independent government on the continent in 1772. Depending on interest, we may do lunch at Tupelo Honey Café in the former Clinchfield RR Depot in downtown Johnson City, a walking tour of downtown Elizabethton, and a tour of the Carter Mansion – the oldest frame house in Tennessee.

Bike ride around 20 miles rated easy. Meet at the Exit 407 Cracker Barrel, 154 Stadium Drive, Kodak, at 7:30 for breakfast or at 8:15 to leave. Bike rentals are available from Betsy Bikes--423-543-3334--in Elizabethton for $20 for 4 hours.Leaders: Ed & Pam Fleming, edwrdflm@ aol.com TOUR DE ROCKY TOP • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 7:30AM • Back for its 9th edition, TdRT offers 31, 50, and 62 mile fully supported rides, along with an epic century route. King and Queen of the Mountain award jerseys will again be awarded to the first rider up infamous Butterfly Gap on the century route. Sport Tek performance ride shirt, logo socks, logo pint glasses, technical shirt, the usual Barley’s pizza and beer fare, and 2015 Tour de France stage 1 viewing will on the menu once again.

Back for 2015 is the popular Tour de Rocky Top ride jersey and bib shorts from Hincapie apparel, available for purchase to riders who register by May 25. Expected

VMC’s

Fourth Annual Don Sproles Memorial Dinner “Wine and Shine” Presented by: Sugarlands Distilling Company & The Crowne Plaza On July 17, 2015 - The Standard @ 6:00 pm Come join the fun with Volunteer Ministry Center for a Wine and Moonshine tasting event on July 17, 2015 at The Standard - 416 West Jackson Avenue Knoxville, TN with festivities beginning at 6pm. Money raised helps to fund VMC’s two-fold mission of preventing and ending homelessness.

Streaming 24.7.365 at WUTKRADIO.COM or listen on your

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY July 2, 2015

smart phone and iPad app.

Tickets $60.00 each online at www.vmcinc.org or call Nancy Bowen at 865-524-3926 Ext. 223 to purchase yours today.

Thursday, July 2 - Sunday, July 12

participation--450.The 62, 50 and 30 mile courses all feature scenic “East Tennessee rollers” with no climbs exceeding a category 5 classification.The ride finishes with a post race ride party second to none, featuring pizza, beer, and Day 1 of Tour de France viewing at Barley’s. • $35-$60 FREEDOM THIGHS IX • The Birdhouse • 3PM • The People’s Popular Thigh Liberation Front of Knoxville in cooperation with Sluts4Cycling(TM) presets Freedom Thighs (IX) NEIN!!! Things heat up in 2015 when Mad Max goes Magic Mike. Join us as we ride our stallions of steel above and Beyond the Homo Dome down Fury Road. Ride with us as you fly your PRIDE flag, your ‘MERICAN flag, and above all your FREAK flag!!! Best party in Knoxville and we are going to Do It in the Road. #FreedomThighs #ThisClubHasEverything Share and invite wisely. Rain or shine. Ride rolls at 4pm. • FREE Tuesday, July 7 ACO CORNHOLE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS X • Knoxville Convention Center • The best corn hole teams from around the world square off for championships in several categories, including men’s and women’s singles and doubles and junior and senior competitions.

Wednesday, July 8 ACO CORNHOLE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS X • Knoxville Convention Center • The best corn hole teams from around the world square off for championships in several categories, including men’s and women’s singles and doubles and junior and senior competitions.

AMERICAN CORNHOLE ORGANIZATION AMATEUR OPEN COMPETITION • Knoxville Convention Center • 9AM • The American Cornhole Organization (ACO) is kicking off its world championships by inviting teams of local businesses and individuals to participate in an amateur open competition with the chance to win $3,000 in prize money.

The World Slyder Cup will be held Wednesday, July 8, at the Knoxville Convention Center from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. with music, drinks, food and the chance to compete with and watch some of the best cornhole players in the world.

Thursday, July 9 ACO CORNHOLE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS X • Knoxville Convention Center • The best corn hole teams from around the world square off for championships in several categories, including men’s and women’s singles and doubles and junior and senior competitions.

Friday, July 10 ACO CORNHOLE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS X • Knoxville Convention Center • The best corn hole teams from around the world square off for championships in several categories, including men’s and women’s singles and doubles and junior and senior competitions.

SMOKY MOUNTAIN CLASSIC SOFTBALL TOURNAMENT • Sandy Springs Park Maryville) • The Smoky Mountain Classic combines the elements of the finest quality competition with the support of large enthusiastic crowds. It is played in a friendly, hospitable, down-home country fair atmosphere at the doorstep of the beautiful Great Smoky Mountain National Park. The nation’s top teams are showcased at their best as they play for some of the most prestigious awards in the game.

Saturday, July 11 ACO CORNHOLE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS X • Knoxville Convention Center • The best corn hole teams from around the world square off for championships in several categories, including men’s and women’s singles and doubles and junior and senior competitions.

CALENDAR

SMOKY MOUNTAIN CLASSIC SOFTBALL TOURNAMENT • Sandy Springs Park Maryville) • The Smoky Mountain Classic combines the elements of the finest quality competition with the support of large enthusiastic crowds. It is played in a friendly, hospitable, down-home country fair atmosphere at the doorstep of the beautiful Great Smoky Mountain National Park. The nation’s top teams are showcased at their best as they play for some of the most prestigious awards in the game.

AN EVENING FOR CHAMPIONS • Tennessee Theatre • 7PM • Two remarkable charities are coming together for one night to honor an incredible individual, University of Tennessee Women’s Basketball Head Coach Emeritus Pat Summitt. This second annual event will celebrate Pat’s career legacy of eight national women’s college basketball championships and as the winningest basketball coach in NCAA history. ABC Television’s Good Morning America Anchor Robin Roberts, a member of The Pat Summitt Foundation’s Advisory Board, will serve as the evening’s Special Guest Emcee. See more at: http:// patsummitt.org/evening_for_champions.

HARD KNOX ROLLER GIRLS VS. ROLLER GIRLS OF CENTRAL KENTUCKY • Knoxville Civic Coliseum • 5PM Sunday, July 12 SMOKY MOUNTAIN CLASSIC SOFTBALL TOURNAMENT • Sandy Springs Park Maryville) • The Smoky Mountain Classic combines the elements of the finest quality competition with the support of large enthusiastic crowds. It is played in a friendly, hospitable, down-home country fair atmosphere at the doorstep of the beautiful Great Smoky Mountain National Park. The nation’s top teams are showcased at their best as they play for some of the most prestigious awards in the game.

SMOKY MOUNTAIN HIKING CLUB: CHARLIES BUNION • 8AM • This is a classic club hike along an iconic stretch of the Appalachian Trail, and if you haven’t hiked it, now’s your chance! It starts at Newfound Gap parking lot, a high elevation, perfect for July. The first 2.5 miles will be an 1100’ climb with several nice views. We will stop by Ice Water Springs and check out the Club’s rebuilt shelter accomplished a few years back. Soon after the shelter we will arrive at Charlies Bunion, a dramatic outcrop of rock with tremendous views. Hike 8 miles, rated moderate. Meet at Comcast on Asheville Highway at 8:00 AM. Leaders: Rebekah Young, rebekahy27@aol.com STALK YOUR QUARRY TRAIL RACE • Ijams Nature Center • 8:30AM • The five and ten mile courses both start in the parking lot at Ijams Nature Center in South Knoxville and will begin by winding through the lush, wooded hills behind the nature center, then explore exhilarating stretches of new singletrack, including the brand new Barnett Ridge and Ross Marble trails, that await in the Ross Marble Quarry area, then tackle Tharp’s Trace clockwise. With that done, runners cross back over the road and engage more of Ijams’ trail system, including a breathtaking ascent of the Tower Trail, before winding to a halt near the pavillion. The five mile option coincides with the long course, merely turning back sooner (and missing some of the best trails!) Grand Prix points awarded only for the long course. And please bear in mind our propensity for changing courses with little or no notice.A one mile Kids Trail Race will precede the adult race. The course will traverse a clockwise “loop” through the Ijams Nature Center property and offer the youngsters a taste of the fun the grownups will be having thirty minutes later. Only five bucks for so much fun. • $5

FILM SCREENINGS

Monday, July 6 THE BIRDHOUSE WALK-IN THEATER • The Birdhouse • 8:15PM • A weekly free movie screening. • FREE

ART

American Museum of Science and Energy 300 S. Tulane Ave. (Oak Ridge) JUNE 12-SEPT. 13: Nikon Small World Photomicrography Exhibit.

Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts 556 Parkway (Gatlinburg) MAY 18-AUG. 22 Arrowmont 2015 Instructor Exhibition; MAY 22-JULY 2: Festoon: A Solo Exhibition by Kim Winkle Art Market Gallery 422 S. Gay St. JULY 3-31: Paintings by Diana Dee Sarkar and ceramics by Eun-Sook Kim. (an opening reception will be held on Friday, July 3, from 5-9 p.m.)

Downtown Gallery 106 S. Gay St. JULY 3-31: The Land Report Collective exhibit. (An opening reception will be held on Friday, July 3, from 5-9 p.m.)

East Tennessee History Center 601 S. Gay St. APRIL 27-OCT. 18: Memories of the Blue and Gray: The Civil War in East Tennessee at 150

Knoxville’s First Escape Game

Emporium Center for Arts and Culture 100 S. Gay St. JULY 3-31: Hola Hora Latina: Photographs of Cuba; 17th Street Studios: Amalgam Volume 3, a group show featuring art by artists from 17th Street Studios; artwork

by Dawn Hawkins; Jacene England: Emotions; and Organic and Mechanic, mixed-media artwork by Susan V. Adams and Barb Johnson. (An opening reception will be held on Friday, July 3, from 5-9 p.m.)

Envision Art Gallery 4050 Sutherland Ave. THROUGH AUG. 15: • Envision Art Gallery Grand Opening Exhibition, featuring artwork by gallery owner Kay List and Larry S. Cole.

Ewing Gallery 1715 Volunteer Blvd.

JULY 3-31: The Land Report Collective Exhibit Knoxville Museum of Art 1050 World’s Fair Park Drive MAY 8-AUG. 2: Intellectual Property Donor, an exhibit of work by Evan Roth. ONGOING: Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in Tennessee; Currents: Recent Art From East Tennessee and Beyond; and Facets of Modern and Contemporary Glass.

Liz-Beth and Co. 7240 Kingston Pike JUNE 1-JULY 4: 25 Years in the Making, a gallery exhibit of the foremost local and regional art, pottery, sculpture, art glass, wearable art, jewelry, and handcrafted gifts. (An artists’ reception will be held on Friday, June 26, from 5-8 p.m.)

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July 2, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 31

CALENDAR McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture 1327 Circle Park Drive JUNE 5-AUG. 30: Through the Lens: The Botanical Photography of Alan S. Heilman. Ongoing: The Flora and Fauna of Catesby, Mason, and Audubon and Life on the Roman Frontier.

Pellissippi State Community College Bagwell Center for Media and Art 10915 Hardin Valley Road JUNE 22-JULY 31: Letters From Vietnam: International Art Exchange Exhibition, featuring the correspondence and artwork of young people with autism

LECTURES, READINGS, AND BOOK SIGNINGS

Wednesday, July 8 ANN B. ROSS: ETTA MAE’S WORST BAD-LUCK DAY • Union Ave Books • 7PM • Book signing with Ann B. Ross, best-selling author of the Miss Julia series, reading from her newest in paperback, Etta Mae’s Worst Bad-Luck Day. • FREE

FAMILY AND

Thursday, July 2 - Sunday, July 12

KIDS’ EVENTS

Thursday, July 2 WHOLE FOODS GAME NIGHT • Whole Foods • 6PM • Grab you peeps and join us for Game Night in The Rocky! We have everything from Candy Land to Chess! A pint, a pizza, and a board: who could ask for more? • FREE CHESS AT THE LIBRARY • Blount County Public Library • 1PM • Middle and high school students (or any age) are invited to play chess. Tom Jobe coaches most Saturdays in the Teen Central area of the library. On one Saturday of every month, there will be a rated tournament at the Blount County Public Library. • FREE Friday, July 3 S.T.E.A.M. KIDS • Blount County Public Library • 4PM • Every week will be a different adventure, from science experiments to art projects and everything in between.

Materials will be limited and available on a first come, first served basis. For grades K-5. • FREE Tuesday, July 7 LEGO CLUB • Blount County Public Library • 4PM • Kids will complete different themed and timed Lego Challenges, as well as have some time for free building.

The library will provide the Legos, so all you have to bring is your imagination! Lego Club will be in the Children’s Library. • FREE WHOLE FOODS GAME NIGHT • Whole Foods • 6PM • Grab you peeps and join us for Game Night in The Rocky! We have everything from Candy Land to Chess! A pint, a

pizza, and a board: who could ask for more?

Thursday, July 9 WHOLE FOODS GAME NIGHT • Whole Foods • 6PM • Grab you peeps and join us for Game Night in The Rocky! We have everything from Candy Land to Chess! A pint, a pizza, and a board: who could ask for more? • FREE CHESS AT THE LIBRARY • Blount County Public Library • 1PM • Middle and high school students (or any age) are invited to play chess. Tom Jobe coaches most Saturdays in the Teen Central area of the library. On one Saturday of every month, there will be a rated tournament at the Blount County Public Library. • FREE Friday, July 10 S.T.E.A.M. KIDS • Blount County Public Library • 4PM • Every week will be a different adventure, from science experiments to art projects and everything in between.

Materials will be limited and available on a first come, first served basis. For grades K-5. • FREE Saturday, July 11 CHESS AT THE LIBRARY • Blount County Public Library • 10AM • Middle and high school students (or any age) are invited to play chess. Tom Jobe coaches most Saturdays in the Teen Central area of the library. On one Saturday of every month, there will be a rated tournament at the Blount County Public Library. • FREE STORY TIME FOR KIDS • Union Ave Books • 11AM • With artist and children’s book author Lisa Horstman reading from her new book Sabrina: A Great Smoky Mountains Story. • FREE

CLASSES

Thursday, July 2 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted.

BELLY DANCE LEVELS 1 AND 2 • Knox Dance Worx • 8PM • Call (865) 898-2126 or email alexia@alexia-dance.com. • $12 Saturday, July 4 YOGA AT NARROW RIDGE • Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Center • 9AM • For more information contact Mitzi Wood-Von Mizener at 865-497-3603 or community@ narrowridge.org.

Monday, July 6 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 5:30PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted.

GOPRO VIDEO EDITING BASICS • REI • 6PM • Now that you have your GoPro, how do you edit and share your videos?

GoPro Studio video editing software can help you get there. Join us for an inside look at GoPro’s revamped video editing software and get ready to make your videos POP. Bring your laptop with GoPro Studio and video files to edit. • $20-$40 Tuesday, July 7 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted.

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY July 2, 2015

Thursday, July 2 - Sunday, July 12

YOGA WITH SUBAGHJI • The Birdhouse • 5:15PM

gaygroupknoxville.org.

Thursday, July 9 BELLY DANCE LEVELS 1 AND 2 • Knox Dance Worx • 8PM • Call (865) 898-2126 or email alexia@alexia-dance.com. • $12 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted.

ELEVATED CAMPING: HAMMOCKING BASICS • REI • 7PM • Hammocks are a versatile companion for any outdoor adventure, but sometimes levitation has a learning curve.

Join our hammocking experts for some tips and tricks that will have you flying in no time. • FREE

Wednesday, July 8 COMITE POPULAR DE KNOXVILLE • The Birdhouse • 7PM • A weekly meeting of the local immigrant advocacy organization.

Saturday, July 11 YOGA AT NARROW RIDGE • Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Center • 9AM • For more information contact Mitzi Wood-Von Mizener at 865-497-3603 or community@ narrowridge.org.

MARBLE SPRINGS CHAIR-WEAVING WORKSHOP • Marble Springs State Historic Site • 9AM • Marble Springs will be hosting a hands-on chair weaving workshop taught by volunteer Lauralei Kassel. Attendees will learn to “weave” reed onto the chair in a herringbone pattern. The workshop will be held July 11, 2015 beginning at 9:00 AM at Marble Springs, and will take approximately 5 hours.

Attendees will be taking numerous breaks as this activity (although done while sitting) can be tiring to the back, hands and arms. Dress comfortably, and remember you may be getting damp. Attendees should bring drinks and a lunch. It may be hot, so stay hydrated. Lunch break is scheduled at 11:30. Space will be limited to 5 attendees maximum. A $35 non-refundable deposit is due to register, with the remainder due by the day of the workshop. Registration will close on June 19.For reservations call 865-573-5508 or email: info@ marblesprings.net.

MEETINGS

Thursday, July 2 OVEREATERS ANONYMOUS • Recovery at Cokesbury • 5:30PM • What you WON’T find at OA meetings are weigh-ins, packaged meals, dues, fees, “shoulds,” “musts” or judgment. What you WILL find at meetings is: Acceptance of you as you are now, as you were, as you will be. Understanding of the problems you now face — problems almost certainly shared by others in the group.

Communication that comes as the natural result of our mutual understanding and acceptance. Recovery from your illness. Power to enter a new way of life through the acceptance and understanding of yourself, the practice of the Twelve-Step recovery program, the belief in a power greater than yourself, and the support and companionship of the group. • FREE Sunday, July 5 SILENT MEDITATION SUNDAYS • Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Center • 11AM • The gatherings are intended to be inclusive of people of all faiths as well as those who do not align themselves with a particular religious denomination. For more information contact Mitzi Wood-Von Mizener at 865-497-3603 or community@ narrowridge.org. • FREE Monday, July 6 GAY MEN’S DISCUSSION GROUP • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 7:30PM • We hold facilitated discussions on topics and issues relevant to local gay men in a safe and open environment. Visit

Thursday, July 9 OVEREATERS ANONYMOUS • Recovery at Cokesbury • 5:30PM • What you WON’T find at OA meetings are weigh-ins, packaged meals, dues, fees, “shoulds,” “musts” or judgment. What you WILL find at meetings is: Acceptance of you as you are now, as you were, as you will be. Understanding of the problems you now face — problems almost certainly shared by others in the group.

Communication that comes as the natural result of our mutual understanding and acceptance. Recovery from your illness. Power to enter a new way of life through the acceptance and understanding of yourself, the practice of the Twelve-Step recovery program, the belief in a power greater than yourself, and the support and companionship of the group. • FREE Friday, July 10 A MONTH OF MINDFULNESS: MANTRA MEDITATION • McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture • 11:30AM • Join the McClung Museum on Friday, July 10th from 11:30-12:30 for guided meditation led by the Mindfulness and Meditation Club at UT in our Decorative Arts Gallery.

Mantra meditation is where the focus point is a sound/ phrase repeated over and over in one’s mind. We will be using the American Meditation Society’s prep mantra, raj ananda. Mindfulness & Meditation at UT is a secular club sharing different practices to live a mindful lifestyle.

Meditations range from breathing to chanting or qi gong.

Participants can learn more about the club here. This event is part of the museum series: A Month of Mindfulness. • FREE Sunday, July 12 SILENT MEDITATION SUNDAYS • Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Center • 11AM • The gatherings are intended to be inclusive of people of all faiths as well as those who do not align themselves with a particular religious denomination. For more information contact Mitzi Wood-Von Mizener at 865-497-3603 or community@ narrowridge.org. • FREE

local honey and fresh eggs. As the season goes on, they offer the freshest produce possible, including just-picked strawberries, peaches, sweet corn and heirloom tomatoes. • FREE Saturday, July 4 OAK RIDGE FARMERS’ MARKET • Historic Jackson Square • 8AM • MARKET SQUARE FARMERS’ MARKET • Market Square • 9AM • FREE SEYMOUR FARMERS MARKET • Seymour First Baptist Church • 8AM • Tuesday, July 7 EBENEZER ROAD FARMERS’ MARKET • Ebenezer United Methodist Church • 3PM • Wednesday, July 8 MARKET SQUARE FARMERS’ MARKET • Market Square • 11AM • FREE Thursday, July 9 NEW HARVEST PARK FARMERS MARKET • New Harvest Park • 3PM • FREE Friday, July 10 LAKESHORE PARK FARMERS’ MARKET • Lakeshore Park • 3PM • FREE Saturday, July 11 OAK RIDGE FARMERS’ MARKET • Historic Jackson Square • 8AM • SEYMOUR FARMERS MARKET • Seymour First Baptist Church • 8AM MARKET SQUARE FARMERS’ MARKET • Market Square • 9AM • FREE

Send your events to calendar@knoxmercury.com

ETC.

Thursday, July 2 NEW HARVEST PARK FARMERS MARKET • New Harvest Park • 3PM • FREE Friday, July 3 LAKESHORE PARK FARMERS’ MARKET • Lakeshore Park • 3PM • East Tennessee Farmers Association for Retail Marketing (FARM), a nonprofit organization, is pleased to announce the opening of its 39th season of farmers’ markets in East Tennessee, in three convenient locations in Knoxville and Oak Ridge. Established in 1976, FARM is Tennessee’s longest continuously operating farmers’ market organization. “We are proud to offer this service to the Knoxville-Oak Ridge community,” said Steve Colvin, president of East TN FARM. “Our membership typically includes about 70 producer-vendors, offering more than one hundred different Tennessee grown products from April through November.” FARM vendors will offer a wide variety of spring bedding plants, fresh produce, grass-fed and pasture-raised meats, artisan bread and cheese, July 2, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 33

FOOD

D ir t to Fork

Another UGO Era Revisiting an old (and updated) favorite in South Knoxville

BY ROSE KENNEDY

I

am looking at a shiny refrigerator at the United Grocery Outlet that grandly reopened at 4225 Chapman Highway two weeks ago. It’s stuffed with fresh deals like 5 pounds of fresh drumsticks for $1.99 and backed with a window displaying a butcher industriously preparing a huge batch of beef.

But I am seeing discount peanut butter and little containers of applesauce from the days when Wade Slate and I were a new couple and just figured all would be well when we slung my two kids and his three from Virginia together for six weeks in the summer. We didn’t have a vehicle that would hold us all; I remember more than one trip with a few kids sitting behind the passenger seats in his truck as we headed to the Smokies or Chapman Recreation Center pool.

Ah, innocence, ah, idiocy.

We were tight on cash and everyone was all-day-playing-sharksand-minnows hungry, and we haunted the Bargain Barn, as it was known for its first couple of decades, for goodies.

This was probably 20 years after teenager Michael Tullock, Bargain Barn co-founder, famously started with his first grocery outlet working out of his parents’ antique store in Etowah, Tenn.

Just a partial list of my memorable “scores” for those madcap ’90s summers include: 3/$1 superhero shaped Kraft Mac and Cheese, 2/$1 Cheezits, 3/$1 spices, endless iterations of the then-new Gogurts and Lunchables, $1 salsas, off-holiday Funfetti cake mix and icing (we’d be eating Valentine’s cupcakes at the July swim meets, quite happily.) It seems like last year.

I know some of those days

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY July 2, 2015

dragged on and on, with me trying to work out of a home office amid bickering kids, the ants getting into our Funfetti cupcakes and causing hysterics from Wade’s 7-year-old.

And yet we blithely kept going. I remember coffee was really important to us then, a must-buy. How happy I was when Bargain Barn had this pretty tin of Maxwell House “Holiday Blend,” two packs in one for, I don’t know, $1.80? It was awful—apple cider flavor with almost a gardenia aftertaste. Even in our household, it sat on the shelf, month after month.

It’s a favorite family memory of how Wade, who never shopped, hit the Bargain Barn that November. “Got a great deal on coffee, so I got two,” he told me when he got home, “It’s called, let me see, Holiday Blend!”

The corporate charter of Bargain Barn, Inc. still remains, though many of the stores that have now spread to Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, and North Carolina are named United Grocery Outlet.

UGO hasn’t changed in some ways: They don’t take vendor coupons, or advertise name brands. Ours still has a 25-cent soda machine, stocked with RC products, though they no longer have boxes in lieu of bags at the checkout or occasional gospel music booming over the store intercom.

This new location, which at times has housed a Red Food (remember those?), Food City, and a large thrift store, has lots of wonderful enhancements over the former location.

Starting with the fact that all the employees came with from the old location, 10 of them, and they also hired 20 more. The store is three

continued on page 36

July 2, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 35

FOOD times bigger, estimates manager Matt Storm, plenty of room for lots of fresh produce the likes of which I couldn’t have imagined in my Bargain Barn days. Fresh tomatillos, smoothskinned English cucumbers, Cherokee purple tomatoes, baby bella mushrooms—but don’t worry, they are side-by-side with waxy ’60s salad-style cucumbers and bags of super ordinary potatoes. They also sell a staggering number of bargain items for the soul food and country chef, hard to fi nd stuff, like lard and ham hocks and pickled pigs’ feet.

Not everything is an unequivocal great buy ($1.79 for 4.5 oz. Starkist Tuna Creations, for example), but man, do they have bargains. I’ve dragged Wade along but quickly lose sight of him when faced with the

36

KNOXVILLE MERCURY July 2, 2015

D ir t to Fork

abundance: $1.99 peanut butter, some natural, some with dark chocolate; a gallon of pickled cherry peppers for $2.99; $1.69 per pound for fresh ground sausage.

I note with satisfaction that they are selling Halloween Funfetti cake mix, but I resist.

As I’m pulling up to the front, Wade catches up. He’s got coffee, Keurig cups, amusingly named Mountain High brand. It’s Vietnamese dark roast, 12 for $1.99, a steal. There are others that are even cheaper, he notes—a breakfast blend.

“But I’m not buying them,” he says, and for a minute I feel like the kids are waiting outside in the truck.

“We don’t buy any coffee with the word ‘blend’ any more, do we?” ◆

Celebrating Good Fortune • THROUGH COMMUNITY • At Fulin’s, it is our honor to witness community take shape over our tables. As friends laugh, catching up on their news and sharing from each other’s plates. As families break away from the fast food routines and explore new traditions. Over our tables business plans are hatched, neighborhood improvements are discussed, romances bloom, friendships are rekindled, and life is savored. And we at Fulin’s are grateful to play our own role in the moment for you.

Every dish at Fulin’s is prepared to order from fresh and healthy ingredients, providing a meal at the table as unique and specific to your tastes as the conversation that surrounds it.

A good meal should inspire you to step back and take note of all the things that bring joy in your life.

And, in that moment, you can enjoy all your good fortunes, however they have appeared to you: as friends, as family, as community.

In a world of choices for you, we are grateful to be included in your community. In return, we celebrate you as a member of our own community: those who know the value of hand-crafted meals, of a dining experience designed to please all five senses, of a sense of place and community.

Your life and your community is full of good fortune.

Rediscover it with us over a meal and conversation at Fulin’s.

T CEN

PILOT

OUR COMMITMENT TO THE COMMUNITY

RAL

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Bring in this ad and we’ll donate 15% of the cost of your meal to the Central High School band as part of our Fulin Cares philosophy of spreading good fortune.

120 Merchants Dr. • Knoxville, TN

(865) 281-3371 • fulins.com July 2, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 37

’BYE

Spir it of the Staircase

BY MATTHEW FOLTZ-GRAY

38

KNOXVILLE MERCURY July 2, 2015

Sacred & P rofane

No Service Recollections of a man with beautiful legs

BY DONNA JOHNSON

I

don’t recall how I originally came to know George, only that he was a strong presence in my life for years and that with his death there was a space that could not be filled by anyone else. He came to all of my art shows, even though at times he could barely walk and had to shuffle his way every single day to Old City Java.

The first place I remember knowing George was Huntington Place off Sutherland Avenue. I did not live there but had many friends who did. George shared an apartment with a beautiful girl named Rachel, whom I also liked. Rachel spent most of her time arguing with her boyfriend while George nurtured his plants growing next to the steps of their apartment.

And then there were the cats—a plethora of beautiful, ethereal cats, so white they seemed almost translucent—who would only come to George, and whom he fed and talked to daily, sometimes rescuing them when they got trapped underneath the building.

Even at age 75, George was quite good looking, with thick white hair, high sculpted cheekbones, and blue eyes that were pure innocence, which belied George’s true personality.

Though at heart he was a kind man, he was prone to white lies to cover his trail and enhance his charm.

George was a perfect example of a common saying in Alcoholics Anonymous: “The only time an alcoholic lies is when he opens his mouth.” Still, George was charming and sweet, so one quickly forgot his lying nature.

George had raised his children in the throes of his raging alcoholism and consequent womanizing, so that even though he had been in recovery for many years, his family had little to do with him. His son had a beach house in Florida, which George greatly enjoyed, but he was only

invited when his son’s family was on vacation, so that George’s trips were for the most part solitary except for casual acquaintances he met on the beach. Although he must have felt alienated from his family, he never spoke of it.

I often visited George for morning coffee. When I arrived, he would be reading a passage from his large, worn Bible. Sometimes he would read aloud from the Bible to me, after which we would sit in companionable silence, smoking together, sipping our coffee, and watching as the beautiful white cats wove their way around and through George’s calves, which were as shapely as a young coed’s.

George and I moved downtown to Summit Towers around the same time. George moved to the 10th floor, I to the sixth. We would go days without seeing each another, and then one of us would need some coffee, sugar, or any number of other things. George was as careless with money as I was, so we would also run into each other at Broadway pawn shops at the end of the month, then again at the beginning of the month when we went to pick our stuff up. He once, on impulse, paid money down to hold a violin for me but neither of us remembered to go and get it.

Each month George would rent a car for a day, take all of his friends out to lunch, be broke again by the 10th of the month, and then go begging for the rest of the month. Whenever he had his rental car, he would drive me around to pay my bills, and upon seeing a beautiful woman would yell out: “Butt alert!” Which drove me absolutely crazy.

“If you say that one more time I’m going to get out of the car,” I told him, at which point George would throw back his head and laugh uproariously.

Though he often got on my nerves,

as I’m certain I did his, we were longtime friends and I loved him.

One Sunday afternoon I got a call from a mutual friend at Huntington Place saying that the police had picked up George as he was trying to use his downtown keys to get into his old apartment. The police told me he was very confused, not knowing where he was or even who he was. I wondered why they didn’t take him to a hospital instead of to his apartment at Summit Towers. George slept for hours and hours after this incident, and I began telephoning his son to determine where George should go next, for clearly he could no longer live alone.

I visited him as much as I was able at the nursing home in Oak Ridge where he was placed, and each time he pretended to know me, as I, in turn, pretended that he knew me and that everything was all right. Fortunately, he

’BYE

was well-liked by the nursing home staff, for he was still witty and charming.

To my knowledge his family never visited him, but eventually he was moved to Nashville where his grandchildren could visit him. It was only about eight months later that I read that George had died and been buried in a Nashville cemetery. “No services,” the obituary read. I was saddened by this, for George so loved a grand affair where he could dress up and show off a bit, but there it was.

George was buried almost as an afterthought, an annoyance.

But however that may be, if George is in some other realm where he can read or hear about this article, know that it is written to honor you.

For though you had your faults as we all do, you always had a kind heart, beautiful legs, and an exalted spirit, which I greatly miss. ◆

BY IAN BLACKBURN AND JACK NEELY

Crooked Street Crossword across 1 5 8 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 24 25 26 28 30 31 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 42 43 45 48 49 50 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Commercial icon Some prefix Organizational challenges?

Swear Long-running black theater near Central First blank, typically Equine ’do Canyon top Miss Barrymore Jig & Reel order Smokies’ Felix Pena stat.

Fierce want Persuaded City cluster Piedmont ___ Scot. neighbor Ram sign AKC rejects Potash product 1942 film In This ___ Life Like a Weber in summer Answer to captain Pro’s opponent Fish suffix TVA monitor Tidied after mowing Asylum Smelter’s supply Like Kasper Gutman, in classic 1941 film “___ it real!”

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Local star Arching toss Lake to the due north “Knoxville: Summer 1915” site, Highland ___ Frozen island 1990s Broadway hit Semi Medicinal quantity “It all ___ up!”

Like 54 Across Godly homonym of 26 Across

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1 Tibetan teacher 2 Portraits or racetracks 3 1939 classic at the Tennessee Jul. 31–Aug. 2 4 Carry a debt 5 Concur 6 Pop impressionist at the Tennessee Aug. 7 7 James Agee’s sister, or 1932 film 8 Outlast

Coming to the Tennessee

PUZZLE 0117 • JACK NEELY & IAN BLACKBURN • GRID@KNOXWORD.COM

9 Guy Noir creator at the Tennessee Aug. 13 10 1971 sci-fi film, The ___ Man 11 Worked as a seamstress 22 Pretentiously appreciative 23 1933 Loretta Young film, She Had to Say ___ 24 Railroad part 27 Deli option 28 1949 thriller The Third ___ 29 Conditions of ___ 32 Southwestern Indian 33 P.J. Harvey album, ___ of Me 35 1945 horror film, The Monster and The ___

36 Org. for which Robt. Downey Jr. and Brooke Shields are eligible 38 1941 comedy, The Lady ___ 39 Carp eggs 41 Liabilities’ counterweights 43 The Tennessee hosts one three times a year 44 Disclosed 46 Thomas Gray poem 47 1948 Abbott/Costello comedy, The ___ Hangs High 49 South Asian dress 51 “It’s the ___ knees!”

54 U.S. salmonella tester

July 2, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 39

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